andydataguy
DATA & DECISIONS . Agency Operations . 2020

Solar Portfolio Intelligence

50+ Accounts, Centralized Performance Brain

Andy Houston author chipBY ANDY HOUSTON
A wall of printed landmark postcards, one per market, running past both edges of the frame. A stamp lands on one card and the brightness spreads card to card across the whole rack50+ ACCOUNTS · ONE BRAINONE MARKET LEARNS · ALL OF THEM DO50+ ACCOUNTS · ONE BRAIN
50+
accounts
Faster
ramp time
↑
agency margin
Playbooks
extracted

Context

Agency managing paid media for dozens of solar clients across different regions, offers, and sales teams.

Problem

Each account was treated as a separate snowflake. Wins in one market rarely made it into others. Analysts were reinventing the wheel instead of learning from a shared brain.

Every account was its own snowflake, so a win died where it was born

Dozens of accounts, each managed on its own, each buyer rediscovering what somebody two desks away already knew. When one market found something that worked, nothing carried it anywhere. The rack is the same one the hero lights up, shown before there was anything joining it together.

A rack of dim postcards sitting crooked in their wire slots, with no line running along the base. One card at the far corner is bright and nothing around it has changedNO SHARED LINE · EVERY ACCOUNT ITS OWN SNOWFLAKE

Approach

Centralized performance data and patterns across 50+ accounts. Built a lightweight "portfolio intelligence" layer that tracked offers, creatives, audiences, and funnel structures and how they performed across contexts. Turned those findings into concrete playbooks for launches and rescues.

Triggers wrote the work and a spool handed it to whoever was free

Deviation on an account fires a trigger, the trigger writes its own ticket from a catalogue of roughly eighty task types, and a randomised queue deals it to whichever of the six buyers is available. Nobody owns an account, so nobody being away stalls anything. Step through the four beats.

An account drifts. A trigger watching for deviation notices before any person does.ONE ACCOUNT DRIFTSTRIGGERTICKETSPOOLSIX BUYERS · NO ACCOUNT OWNERS

An account drifts. A trigger watching for deviation notices before any person does.

One pipe, one warehouse, one sheet the owner could actually read

Every account's numbers ran into one warehouse and came back out as a single sheet the owner could read. Drawn as the machinery it behaves like: a wall of slots emptying down one chute, a sorting house, and a reading desk. In the real stack that was Supermetrics pulling each account into BigQuery, with Data Studio as the report on the end of it.

A wall of pigeonhole slots empties down one chute into a sorting house, and a single broad sheet comes out the far side onto a reading deskCOLLECTIONevery account, every dayWAREHOUSEone place, one shapeREADING DESKthe portfolio on one sheet

Stack

  • Ad platform exports
  • Spreadsheets and BI
  • Shared documentation
  • Testing protocols

Result

50+
accounts unified

New solar clients ramped faster, and struggling accounts were rescued using proven patterns instead of guesswork. The agency margin and perceived expertise both improved.

A place the viewer recognised moved markets the product shot could not

Two cards, presented identically, one variable between them. The generic product creative stalls; the same offer wearing a local landmark moves. One account running this test learns something about one market. Running it across the whole portfolio at once is what turned it into a playbook, and that is the part a single account could never have proven.

Two mid-century travel postcards lying side by side on linen, both with blank caption bands. The left card shows a grey, sun-faded array of solar panels. The right card shows a lone water tower silhouetted against a large warm sun, printed bright and high contrast.
50+ · ACCOUNTS UNIFIED

A portfolio nobody could see, reduced to one sheet somebody can hand across a table. Ramp times improved and the record puts no figure on the improvement, so no figure is drawn.

A single broad printed sheet held in front of a dim wall of postcards, with the light of the wall passing across the paper once50+ON ONE SHEETRAMP IMPROVED · NO RAMP FIGURE RECORDED, SO NONE IS DRAWN

Impact

Shifted the agency from "we run ads" to "we run a proven operating system for solar growth." Account managers had a stronger foundation and a clearer escalation path when things wobbled.

Lessons

When you manage many similar accounts, your real product is the portfolio brain. If you don't build it, you waste compounding insight.

Why this matters to you

Relevant to any multi-client agency or network where the same type of campaign is run dozens of times.

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