How I transformed Ansira's strategy practice from an agency services function into a scalable consulting-grade advisory practice competing with major consultancies.
Client Profile
Ansira Partners
PE-backed CX & Loyalty Agency ($250M+ Rev)
Prepared By
Amanda Schlumpf
Strategic Growth & Transformation Executive
Nearly 6 years as SVP, Head of Strategy & Experience Design / Innovation Practice — leading a 40+ person cross-disciplinary consulting practice.
Built the practice from a services delivery function into a differentiated strategic advisory offering. Designed and launched proprietary frameworks, secured Forrester Loyalty Wave positioning, grew pipeline substantially, and managed simultaneous multi-client delivery across global enterprise brands.
Ansira had depth and delivery capability — but no credentialized consulting practice to compete upstream with McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte for experience transformation engagements.
Engagements over-indexed in build/implementation and run-ops. Winning at the bottom of the funnel, missing strategy upstream.
Top-line advisory revenue was flat. The most profitable and defensible work was going to consulting firms instead.
No standardized methodology for advisory engagements. Each client got a custom approach.
Speed-to-value was long. Win rates on proposals were low. No repeatable IP to anchor positioning.
No external positioning or analyst credibility anchoring the advisory offer.
Long sales cycles and low conversion on competitive opportunities. Clients weren't aware of Ansira's transformation capabilities.
Agency teams were organized around channels and delivery — not around client business problems.
The go-to-market was disconnected from what senior client stakeholders actually needed: business problem diagnosis.
Four interconnected initiatives to transform an agency services function into a credentialized, scalable consulting practice.
Agencies lose consulting engagements because they lack credentialized methodology. By building these four actionable frameworks, we gave clients a consistent, repeatable way to engage us at the strategy layer.
Examine your full-service design with need state analyses and experience assessments to pinpoint opportunities for enhancements and innovative solution design.
Identify conversion gaps and revenue opportunities across the full funnel, then develop an enhanced activation plan to test and scale performance amplifiers.
Design the optimal enablement solution for your transformation journey through digital platforms that deliver exceptional CX and drive operational synergies.
Evaluate existing ABM maturity and provide a custom solution design and activation plan to ensure an integrated and unified pre- and post-sales experience.
The practice ran 40+ simultaneous client engagements over 6 years across a diverse roster of global consumer brands, leveraging the new operating model to deliver consistent, consulting-grade outputs.
Led CRM strategy, roadmap, and loyalty program design for a 9M+ member loyalty program. Diagnosed critical engagement gaps and designed data-driven lifecycle interventions to drive activation and LTV at scale.
Led rapid solutioning of ghost kitchen concept during COVID. Aligned IT, marketing, and ops to launch a new CXM business model at speed — under extreme time pressure and organizational uncertainty.
Won and led a $297K innovation engagement for retail and shopper innovation. Delivered concept testing, shopper research, and proof-of-concept development with a cross-functional pod.
Delivered scaled performance marketing, CRM, and customer experience programs combining strategy, technology enablement, and agency management simultaneously across Anheuser-Busch, Lululemon, Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven, Panera Bread, and Dave & Buster's.
Building a consulting practice inside an agency requires solving an identity problem before a capabilities problem.
Agencies lose consulting engagements to major firms not because they lack capability, but because they lack credentialized methodology. The IP (like our Readiness Assessment) created the entry point and gave clients a repeatable way to engage us at the strategy layer.
The Forrester Loyalty Wave wasn't a vanity award. It shifted who was in the room when clients were selecting partners. External credibility changes the conversation from 'can you do this?' to 'how would you approach this?'
Moving from bespoke teams to a repeatable pod structure (strategy, design, data working simultaneously) was the operational change that made multi-client scale possible. Delivery quality became consistent because the model was designed for parallelism.
The Takeaway: Practice transformation is not about adding more talented people. It's about redesigning the operating model — the methodology, the team structure, the market positioning, and the go-to-market — so that the practice consistently wins and delivers at the consultancy tier, not the agency tier.