A digital agency CEO leads a company-wide reorganization

The problem

Digital agency Cellar Door built a profitable business with talented people, but they faced a recurring crisis: Roughly once or twice a year, a project would suddenly hit a wall. What made it mystifying was the silence leading up to it. Week after week, when Chris Tietzel, CEO and founder, asked the team how things were going, he’d hear, “We’re good. Yeah, we’re good.”

Then, one to two months before delivery, the project would blow up, and the entire team would have to drop everything, pull people from other projects, and run in emergency mode to try to salvage the project timeline — all while the project’s profit margins disappeared.

It happened consistently enough that Chris knew something systemic was broken, but he couldn’t see what.

The discovery

Chris took the MCode Assessment, and as he went through it, something clicked differently than with other assessments he’d tried. He immediately knew his leadership team needed to experience it too. After the entire leadership team took the assessment and came together in a team training session, they realized this problem wasn’t personality-based. It was motivational.

Different team members are wired to think, communicate, and work in fundamentally different ways. Put those same people in project meetings over and over, and you get predictable friction — people not raising concerns early because they communicated differently, or concerns getting lost because people were motivated to solve problems in opposite directions.

The leadership team’s reaction was unanimous: “Every person in this company needs to take this.”

The implementation

Chris scheduled the entire company to take the MCode Assessment. Then he sat down with every single person, for a one-on-one debrief to discuss their results.

But before those conversations, Chris and his MCode Coach made a prediction: Based on what Chris now understood about MCode’s 8 Motivational Dimensions, who did he think represented each profile?

Chris nailed it 85% of the time.

The remaining 15% — the ones he got wrong — were the real revelations. Those one-on-one conversations went in completely different directions than he expected. He’d walk in thinking he understood what moved someone, and walk out with a completely different picture of what actually energized them.

The agency reorganization

Armed with this clarity, Chris made a bold decision to reorganize the entire company around motivational balance instead of functional roles.

Cellar Door’s old structure was typical for agencies, grouping each discipline under one lead — all designers together, all developers together, and all requirements people together. But Chris said, “I’m going to build teams where I worry less about roles, and more about their motivational makeup.”

He built balanced teams where different motivational wiring complemented rather than clashed.

The results

Two things happened immediately:

1. Recurring project blow-ups stopped.
   Teams that were motivationally balanced raised their hands early when something was going to be an issue. They found their voice in a way they hadn’t before. Communication improved. Problems surfaced before they became crises.
2. The reorganization revealed that a couple of people just didn’t fit.
   They were talented people whose motivational wiring didn’t align with what the reorganized teams needed. Both the agency and those individuals agreed it was time to part ways. It happened in a positive, respectful way that benefited everyone.

Chris and his leadership team will tell you that the MCode Assessment is fundamentally different from any personality assessment they’ve ever used. It helped them reorganize the company, which led to improved profitability and better communication and engagement throughout the team.

But if you spend time with them — with Chris or anyone on the team — you hear something deeper underneath all of that: “I wish I’d gotten this sooner. Seeing myself in this light, understanding what I really bring to the table and what I don’t. That’s been so powerful.”