Dave Makerewich built Maven by rejecting the traditional functional agency model and redesigning his firm around pods that own outcomes, clients, and economics. What emerged was an operating system that reduced founder dependency, clarified accountability, and created a repeatable leadership pipeline. In this episode, Greg walks through how Dave applied the pod structure in practice and why it became the foundation for scalable growth.
What you’ll get from this session:
• How organizing around outcomes changes behavior and performance
• Why pushing P&L responsibility down creates stronger leaders
• The conditions required for a pod structure to actually work
Why it matters:
• Many boutique firms stall because everything routes back to the founder
• Functional org charts often hide accountability instead of creating it
• The pod structure offers a practical path to scale without chaos
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, this show is dedicated exclusively to founders of boutique professional services firms who are trying to grow, scale, and someday sell their firms. So if you market, sell, and deliver expertise for a living, this is for you. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about organizational design, and in particular, a certain type of org design called the pod structure. And with me, I have a long, member of Collective 54 who’s going to be our role model. He’s well-respected, well-liked, his name is, the name of his firm is called Makeritch? Did I say that correctly? I always mispronounce the name of your firm. It’s MakerWich, correct? Sorry. Too many M’s, I get confused. But I know you as Dave. Nice to see you, yes. Alright, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today, organizational design and the pod structure. So, Dave. And since I botched your introduction, I’m going to give you a chance to make a more clear introduction than one that I just gave you, and I’ve got a long list of questions I want to ask you, so please introduce yourself to the audience.
Dave Makerewich: Sorry, the firm is Maven, my last name is Makerewich. Close. Sorry. I know. I know. It’s all good. Yes, hi. Thanks, Greg, for having me back on. So, my name’s Dave Makerewich, I’m the founder of Maven. Maven is an agency partner that delivers strategically aligned marketing materials faster for brand managers at leading pharmaceutical companies. We do this by leveraging our brand maven team approach, which is fundamental to the pod structure of what we’re going to talk about today. And yeah, that’s what we do. We’re located in Canada. We focus on pharmaceutical marketing in Canada, and that’s our niche and our ICP.
Greg Alexander: Okay, perfect. So let’s jump into the first thing. So first, let’s define what a pod is, and let’s talk about the anatomy of a pod, please.
Dave Makerewich: So, to talk about the pod, I just want to step back and maybe just briefly introduce kind of this traditional agency model approach, because I think if you’re going to talk about the pod, it’s good to know, well, how is that any different or similar to how it’s traditionally done? Is that fair?
Greg Alexander: Yes, that’s a great way to set it up.
Dave Makerewich: So I think in most marketing and advertising firms, at least in the area that we specialize in, in pharmaceuticals, the traditional agency model is very much based around functions. You’ve got groups of people who own different functions, work is passed between these different teams of functions, and that is… it’s kind of the way that it’s always been done. It’s easy to sort of train into those, it’s very clearly defined. The way that we do it is a little bit different, in that the way that we organize our people are not around function primarily, but around outcomes. So, our pods are representative of small teams of people, which are account-facing people, and instead of owning particular functions, they own, essentially, the book of business. So, all of the business that we have with our clients, they would own a subset of that business, and essentially own the outcomes of all of the work that we do with them. Is that, let me stop there, Greg, and you can ask a clarifying question.
Greg Alexander: Well, that’s perfect. That’s a great way to set it up by contrasting it with the traditional approach. That’s the reason why I wanted to have you on to talk about this, because when you and I were speaking on another conversation, this came up, and I thought it was a very innovative way of organizing a professional services firm, in your case, a marketing agency. So I get the setup of it. Let’s talk about the economics of the pod. So, as I understand it, these are almost like mini-businesses, where you’ve pushed down the economic responsibility to the pod leader, is that correct?
Dave Makerewich: Yeah, that is correct. I think… I think the pod is comprised of a number of individuals, each with a different level of expertise, and within that, you would have a senior person that manages both the financial health of the book of business, so all of the brands that that pod is overseeing, they’re responsible for managing the financial health of that, the client relationships, the client satisfaction, as well, importantly, of the team satisfaction and the team growth and development within the pod. So they’re really responsible for both those subsets. One, making sure that the clients are happy, that we’re doing good work for them, that it’s profitable work, and also, too, making sure that the people within the pod are happy, growing, feel supported, and feeling like they’re continuing to grow and develop.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so our point of view at Collective 54 is we always try to help members deliver greater visibility into unit economics. So most members come to us, and they’re measuring profitability just at the firm level. We then asked them to measure it at the client level. We then ask them to measure it at the project level. And we then ask them to measure it at the individual level. In other words, who and what is creating EBITDA, and how, exactly. So when you talk about the economics of the pod, are you measuring the pod at a profitability level, in addition to all those other things, like client-side and employee sad, I get all that, and that’s very important. But strictly from a margin perspective, how far down in the org are you pushing that? I think that’s what would be most interesting to our listeners.
Dave Makerewich: Yeah, it’s a great question, and the answer is yes. So, there’s… in any pod structure that we have, the way that we operate, again, we’ve got four levels of experience. So, the most junior individual in the pod, they’re just there, they’re trying to figure out the entire end-to-end process, they’re supporting a lot of the administrative functions, they’re doing the most junior tasks. Once they move from that level up to a project manager, that project manager is managing individual projects and is financially accountable for the profitability at the project level. So all of the projects that they are managing in isolation. They’re accountable for ensuring that those projects are, you know, maintaining the project profitability. Once they move up to the next level, which at Maven we call a brand maven, the brand maven is responsible not only for the client relationship for that particular brand, but also how the profitability rolls up to the brand level. So the interesting nuance, which again is important for the type of work that we do in pharmaceutical marketing and advertising, is that the typical engagement with our clients is… it usually happens at, like, a very large portfolio level. So, we have a client, you know, let’s just say it’s Drug X, and we work with this brand manager who is responsible for drug X. We’re not working with that brand manager on just a single project. There is a huge portfolio of projects that we are doing. So one, the relationship itself is always based on a large portfolio of work. It’s never a one-to-one project basis. So that relationship is important, and obviously managing profitability at the project level is important. The second piece is that these relationships are recurring. While they’re not always contractually recurring, in a practically speaking sense, it takes a very long time for you to get onboarded as an agency into pharma marketing, and once you do, there is a bit of a moat that is created that makes it harder for other agencies to come in. So essentially, like, once you get the business, it’s yours to mess up. If you’re gonna lose the business, it’s because you messed up, and they’re gonna go elsewhere. So to get back to the point, the junior person manages the project profitability, the more senior person to that manages the profitability at the client level, at each individual brand level, and then the senior person is managing it at the portfolio level. So they’re looking across all of the client relationships, all of the brands, and making sure that they’re meeting the financial targets that they have at a pod level. Does that answer your question?
Greg Alexander: It does, and it’s fantastic, and congrats to you guys, because that’s advanced, very advanced. Many of our members have a hard time even calculating gross margin and EBITDA margin, let alone down to the client, down to the project level, down to the individual level, and you’re there. And, you know, I don’t… I don’t want to state things publicly, but, you know, you have healthy margins, and you’re a healthy business, and I think that’s part of it, because of the way that you’re managing your business. Okay, let’s pivot to the thing that really jumped out at me. Most entrepreneurs like yourself become the founder bottleneck. Meaning.
Dave Makerewich: There’s a lot of founder magic that makes the firm work.
Greg Alexander: And Dave, you’re a super talented guy, and you have a lot of magic, but you’ve been able to solve the founded bottleneck issue through the pod structure. You know, you’ve replicated yourself, you have a talent supply chain, you’re developing leaders, you have high potential people that have been with you for a long time, that want to stay with you for a long time, because there’s a very clear career path. Tell us how the pod structure helped you solve the founder bottleneck and build this talent factory.
Dave Makerewich: Yeah, I think, I think we kind of backed into it, backwards. Like, the way… just the natural way, and so, I guess the, you know, the background piece of why we even went down this road, it wasn’t… it wasn’t created, or we didn’t create the pod structure because we said, there’s this pod structure and we want to follow this method. We… we simply started with the problem, and the problem in pharmaceutical marketing is that the client experience is broken. There are a lot of challenges of how the traditional agency model works, and a lot of challenges that those creates in this type of relationship. And so, naturally, when we were in the early years of growing Maven, this pod structure was kind of the natural result of that, to say, like, if we’re going to provide the highest level of client experience and solve for all of these challenges, and build trust, be a true partner, not a service provider, and, you know, do things in a way that is going to establish ourselves as a partner that people want to stick with year over year, over year over year. The pod structure was the natural way to do that. And so, you know. All of the things that are necessary, for, you know, to reduce the founder bottleneck. You’ve got to have teams understand pricing and how to have difficult pricing conversations. You’ve got to have teams able to not only do work, but coach and mentor other people how to do work. You have to have teams who are proactive and can move things along and to trailblaze, you know, their own way. Like, all of these things that were the original magic that I was bringing to the table as a single, you know, solopreneur. As I was onboarding people and growing the system, it was kind of a natural outcome to say, I’ve got to teach these other teams of people to do these things, because, you know, I can’t scale. There’s not enough hours in the day for me to do all these things. And so I think it became very obvious early on that the sooner I spent and refocused my energy and time coaching and developing individuals to have these types of high-level strategic conversations, you know, pricing conversations, all of the things that we need to do, the sooner we’re going to be able to scale and just grow more business. So, I’ll stop there and see if that gives you the answer you’re looking for.
Greg Alexander: It’s a brilliant scalability approach, you know, and it’s… it’s very rare in the use case of the boutique pro surf firm. I mean, if you think about giant companies and their business unit model. Let’s think, I don’t know, maybe Google. Google’s got self-driving cars in Waymo. They’ve got, of course, the search business. They’ve got Android. You know, they’ve now got Gemini. You know, they have all these business units, and each one of those business units is run like a separate business with its own P&L and a general manager. That’s a very common approach inside of large corporations for the obvious reasons. I mean, how do you manage something that diverse and that huge? But I very rarely see it in professional services, but it makes a ton of sense. I mean, it’s like a natural, almost building block approach to scalability, so I love it. Let’s conclude with this. So, people that are listening to this, that say, hmm, maybe I want to try this. I want to stop, stop passing work function to function. And I want to stand up parts. When you look back on it now. What were some of the obstacles to getting this implemented in the early days?
Dave Makerewich: I think one of the biggest and hardest things and the most time-consuming things to do, but once we did it was the absolute game-changer, was having a very clear and well-defined document that outlined roles and responsibilities. Like, a big picture that says, this is… you know, if you’re gonna own the outcome, what is the end-to-end process? What are all of the outcomes that need to happen along the way? And having that very clearly well-defined, makes it a lot easier to implement, to say, where should people be spending their time? Like, our… our approach is that, you know, the most competent junior individual should be the one that’s doing each sort of task in the grand scheme of things. But I think, you know, I didn’t know that at the beginning, and when we started, we got to a place, and there was confusion, and there was… you know, people felt like they were stagnating, and they weren’t growing and developing, and, you know, one or two people left, and we were saying, well, what’s going on here? And it really took us to step back to say, like, we’ve got to really invest the time and the energy to clearly outline this, so people not only know what needs to happen, but who needs to do what, and how to do it. Like, I like your analogy of the building block approach, because I think that is very much this. You are essentially creating building blocks on everything that needs to be done, who needs to do what, where people should be spending their time, how to do those things, what the outcomes are, what good looks like. That’s a huge part of it in order to do it successfully.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, and if you think about it, professional services firms, what are they? They’re collections of people. So, organizational design, in the context of a pro-serve firm, is a mission-critical task, maybe even more so than a traditional business, because, you know, the raw ingredients, the inventory, are the people in the people’s time. So if that doesn’t… if that’s not organized correctly, it can become obstacles to scalability in this pod structure. It’s a very creative way of doing that. Alright, so we’re gonna end it here, Dave. We try to keep these things to 15 minutes and reserve the rest for the private member Q&A session, which we’ll have in an upcoming week here, but I just wanted to give the audience a couple calls to action. So, if you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you think you might want to be, because you can learn from people like Dave, who have figured out how to scale their firms, go to Collective54.com, fill out an application, we’ll get in contact with you. If you are a member, and org design is a problem for you, and you’re curious to learn more about the pod structure, attend the private member Q&A, and Dave will be our role model, and you can ask your questions directly of him. But Dave, on behalf of the membership, you are always contributing to our collective body of knowledge. You did so again here today. It’s great to have you in the community, and thanks for making a contribution. Okay, until next time, I appreciate you all, working me into your busy schedules and listening to Dave and I today, and I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.