Five internal digital managers in 24 months and five new opinions about what was “broken,” while the targets never moved. This is what that revolving door cost one business, what it taught me as an external consultant and what any company can do to stop it happening to them. Insert the “I’m tired boss” meme.
The numbers behind the revolving door
Over those two years, the business went through:
- 5 internal digital managers
- 3 agency reviews, two of which ended in a switch
- 2 reporting dashboard rebuilds, with a third “in progress” when I left
- 1 website redesign, which changed the URL structure and cut organic traffic by roughly a third for four months
- 1 CRM migration, which broke lead attribution for most of a quarter
Roughly 11 months of campaign learning were reset. In a 24-month period, the account spent almost half its time relearning what it already knew. The results followed: blended ROAS fell from 5.2 to a low of 3.1 and had only recovered to 4.6 after I got my little sweeper in my hands again to clean up the mess, revenue finished about 18% below where it started, conversion rate stayed flat, which sounds acceptable until you remember the market around us was improving.
The transition bill came to around eur 140,000: 60,000 for the website, 45,000 for the CRM migration and 35,000 in agency onboarding, audits and duplicated retainers. None of it bought growth, it bought the right to start again.
The same story at Manchester United
Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, Manchester United have spent more than a decade searching for the right manager. David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim and Michael Carrick have all had their chance. Carrick’s latest departure and Mauricio Pochettino’s appointment add another chapter to a seemingly endless search for stability and honestly this is when I came up with this article to address similar patterns. Each appointment brings a new philosophy and another promise of a fresh start, yet changing the person in charge does not fix the organisation around them. I watched the same dynamic play out in a business with a much smaller budget and a much shorter attention span. Hey, United, care to hire me?
The raging desire to make your mark
Almost every handover followed the same pattern, the people taking over the digital function were highly self-driven and wanted an immediate impact and do not get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with ambition. Organisations need managers who take ownership and challenge established practice, however the problem begins when proving personal value becomes more important than understanding the operation they have inherited. The sequence was always familiar, a new manager arrives, spots things they would have done differently and reshapes the environment around their preferences. Suppliers are questioned, strategies revisited, processes redesigned. Sadly digital marketing makes this especially easy, because switching agencies, restructuring campaigns or commissioning a new website all create visible signs of activity and within months there is plenty to present as progress.
But activity is not commercial progress, a new agency does not automatically deliver a better return on ad spend or different ppc strategy does not guarantee more paid revenue and replacing a solution that works because someone else put it there is rarely a business case. The distinction that mattered most was between improving an operation and making it your own. The first requires understanding the existing setup, the second is an expensive exercise in personal branding, with the organisation paying that bill.
My favourite: the Google/Meta ads strategy reset
Google and Meta ads are where new managers most love to reinvent the wheel, because everything in the account can be rebuilt. Manager number three arrived in January, by week six, he had reviewed the account structure and decided it was “not granular enough.” The campaigns were stable, bidding was settled and ROAS had held at 5.2 for nearly a year. The plan was to break everything into tight, single-theme ad groups, switch to “cleaner” conversion goals and move to a new bidding strategy. I presented the history, we had run that exact structure eighteen months earlier and moved away from it because smart bidding was starving on thin data and the account had become a nightmare to maintain. I showed the numbers, the response was polite, firm and unmoved: “I’d like to see it done properly.” My ass.
But yeah, who the f am I to question a new prodigy, so we did it. Learning phases reset across the board and ROAS fell to 3.1 within six weeks, the explanation was always that the account was “still settling” and it took four months to climb back to 4.8. Then manager number four arrived and reviewed the account and guess what? Her first recommendation was to consolidate the campaigns into broader, themed groups so the algorithm had more data to learn from, so it “evolved” into exactly the structure we had started with.
The AI deck
By manager number three, the strategy presentations had a distinct look: twenty-two slides, a “Digital Transformation Roadmap” (yes, each word capitalized like this) in the title and phrases like “unlock synergies across the funnel.” The deck talked about “our customers” without naming one and it recommended a TikTok strategy for a business with a one-month sales cycle. It cited a “47% uplift” that traced back to a vendor’s blog post and when I asked which part of the plan came from the account data, the answer was a pause and “it’s a framework.” Yupp, probably I’m not listeining enough.
Dont get me wrong, AI is a great tool and I use it too, but it makes a confident-looking plan so cheap to produce that the thinking can be skipped entirely. A deck that sounds smart and knows nothing about the business is worse than no deck, because someone will try to implement it.
The AI restructure
The account version of this cost real money. Manager number four exported the account, pasted it into Claude and asked how to restructure it. The answer came back instantly and neatly formatted: new campaign tiers, new naming conventions, new audience layers. It didn’t know our best-converting product was seasonal, it didn’t know two campaigns existed because of a stock constraint, or that one “messy” ad group held a bid strategy that had taken months to get right, the AI recommendations without additional context saw an untidy account and proposed to tidy it. Thanks, really. Tidy is not the same as profitable. A restructure should start from questions the data can answer: what is working, why and what would we lose by touching it? A chatbot can’t answer them, because it only knows what you pasted in.
Not understanding the business first
This was the root of nearly everything else and this what annoys me the most. New managers arrived with firm opinions about the digital operation before they understood the company it served.
- They didn’t know the margins by product, so they celebrated ROAS on the lowest-margin lines.
- They didn’t know the sales cycle, so they judged campaigns on a 14-day window.
- They didn’t know which customers were actually profitable, so they chased volume.
- They hadn’t spoken to sales, customer service or finance, yet were certain they knew where the leads were going wrong.
Digital doesn’t run in isolation, a paid search strategy that ignores the buying process, pricing, seasonality and sales capacity is a guess. The first 2 months should be spent learning how the money is made, but instead, we got a “quick audit” in week one every time. What’s the reason behind the rush, guys?
The small things that wear you down
Just some habits, because the list is long:
- The quick-win obsession. Every new manager wanted something visible within 30 days, whether or not anything needed fixing. A new report, a renamed campaign and fresh ad copy looked like progress and moved nothing.
- Benchmark worship. “The industry average conversion rate is 3.2%, so we’re underperforming.” Whose industry, which traffic sources, measured how? A benchmark from a blog post is not a diagnosis, but it makes a good slide.
- Chasing the new feature. Whenever Google launched something, it became the priority and the working structure became “legacy.” The new feature is sometimes great, but it usually isn’t ready for a business with our data volume.
- Copying competitors. “Why aren’t we doing what they’re doing?” Because we can see their ads, not their results.
- Jargon in place of substance. Meetings full of “alignment” and “going forward” that ended without a single decision or owner.
- Dashboards with a signature. Every manager wanted their own reporting. Nobody asked whether the old one answered the business’s questions. It usually did. It just didn’t carry their name.
The exhaustion of constantly starting over, over and… over
The hardest part of those two years wasn’t the workload, actually it was rebuilding relationships and re-explaining decisions again and again. Every new manager meant another introduction, another assessment of the operation and another round of debate about what should change. I kept reopening topics that had already been discussed, tested or settled with their predecessors. There is a real difference between challenging an operation after understanding it and arriving with a fixed idea of how everything should work. Meanwhile the business expected uninterrupted performance, campaigns had to run, budgets had to be managed and targets stayed in place. Operational responsibility did not disappear because someone new held the title. Meanwhile as the only trusted person on the board, I’m standing there in the pouring rain, but hey, that’s what I was paid for, right?
Eventually I became more selective about which battles to fight, I could explain the history, present the numbers and outline the consequences. If someone still chose a different direction, that was their call, there is a limit to how much energy you can spend convincing someone who has already decided. Adaptability is part of being an external consultant and being a senior with more than 10 years experience. Repeatedly justifying your professional existence to each new stakeholder is something else entirely.
I work for the business, not for an individual manager
As an external consultant, I build close relationships with internal stakeholders, meaning I learn how they like to operate and settle into a rhythm that makes collaboration efficient, but depending on one relationship leaves you exposed when that person leaves. I learned to look beyond my immediate contact and understand the wider organisation: its commercial objectives, its stakeholders and the people across different functions. That made each transition easier and it protected my independence. My job was neither to defend the previous manager’s decisions nor to endorse the new manager’s ideas automatically, it was to offer expertise and recommendations based on what was best for the business. Sometimes the new manager had a better idea, but most of the times they wanted to revisit something already tested and rejected. Either way, the assessment had to be objective rather than loyal to past decisions.
Institutional knowledge has commercial value
Staying involved through several transitions gives you a historical perspective that newcomers lack. You know which agencies were tested, which campaigns underperformed, which investments paid off and why certain processes exist. Where a new manager sees an outdated setup, you may see the compromises that produced it. This matters especially in commercial operations, where decisions are tightly interconnected. Replacing a paid media agency can affect campaign continuity, tracking, account ownership, creative production and historical performance data, changing a CRM can have consequences far beyond the technology, without that context, organisations repeat old mistakes or pay to solve problems they have already solved.
That is why documenting decisions and the commercial reasoning behind them is so valuable. Why was a supplier chosen? Which alternatives were tested? What returns were expected? What happened last time? These answers vanish when internal responsibilities change and a consultant who can supply them provides organisational memory that would otherwise be rebuilt with every appointment.
The real problem isn’t the managers
It’s tempting to blame the five managers and some of the blame is deserved, but five managers in two years is not a personnel problem, it’s a symptom. Someone hired those five people and some set expectations that made rebuilding look like progress and also someone ran an operation so dependent on whoever held the job that every handover became a reset. The question nobody asked was why the business couldn’t hold onto a digital lead, and why nothing in the operation survived their departure.
Manchester United is the same lesson at a larger scale. At some point the question stops being “is this the right manager?” and becomes “what is it about this club that keeps producing the same outcome?” The squad, the recruitment, the structure above the touchline and the lack of a consistent plan all outlast any single appointment, and so do the problems they create. If a new manager can tear up a working strategy in six weeks, with no one required to justify it and no documented reason it existed, the manager isn’t the weak point, but structure is.
Know when to adapt and when to walk away
Not every change deserves resistance, sometimes a new perspective is exactly what an organisation needs, and good consultants reassess their own recommendations, but there comes a point where constant change undermines the conditions needed to deliver results. If priorities shift before initiatives get a fair chance, the organisation accumulates activity without the commercial return. A consultant can advise, challenge and execute but cannot compensate indefinitely for an organisation that keeps changing direction without owning the consequences. Independence also means recognising the limits of an engagement, like you can take responsibility for the quality of your own work, but not for decisions you don’t control.
What I recommend to do in a mess like this
Pick your own role first, please.
If you’re a consultant:
- Listen before recommending: In the first meeting with a new manager, ask what they want to change and why before offering your own view.
- Bring the decision history on day one: Show what was tested, what failed, what it cost and what it returned, so proposals are judged against evidence rather than instinct.
- Put the cost of change on paper: A one-page note covering the expected learning-phase impact, recovery timeline and downside risk turns a reset into a conscious decision.
- Agree what success looks like in writing: If the targets don’t change, the justification for rebuilding should be specific.
- Know your exit criteria: Decide in advance how many resets you’ll absorb before reassessing the engagement.
If you’re running the business:
- Keep a decision log. Record every major supplier, structure and tool choice with the reason, the alternatives and the expected return.
- Own your accounts. Ad accounts, analytics, tracking and CRM access should belong to the company, never to an individual or an agency.
- Set a change threshold. Any rebuild of a working campaign structure, agency or platform should require a written business case and sign-off from above the digital lead.
- Give new managers a settling period. Sixty-ninety days to learn the operation before restructuring it protects the business from the legacy project.
- Treat turnover as a warning. If your digital lead has changed more than twice in two years, the problem probably isn’t them.
Managers come and go, the business still needs to perform
Looking back, I wouldn’t call those two years simply a difficult engagement, they were a practical lesson in organisational continuity and in how the ambitions of individual managers can compete with the interests of the businesses they serve. A new manager can bring valuable experience, fresh thinking and welcome energy, but changing everything is not the same as improving everything. Those years taught me to value continuity without resisting change, to challenge decisions without becoming personally invested in them and to tell genuine commercial improvement apart from activity designed to build a personal legacy.
Managers may change, strategies may evolve and organisations may restructure, but the business still needs to perform.
