How We Helped League Twenty Two Scale From Reactive Hiring to Strategic Talent Readiness

TDJ built a custom Airtable solution to help the ops team track roles, assignments, and project staffing across big brand clients. Timeline: January 15 – April 15

To keep our clients' info safe, we don't share a full demo. Instead, this case study walks you through the different stages of our project and includes feedback from the team.

Client Overview

League Twenty Two is a creative experiential marketing agency known for producing culturally-centered campaigns and activations for brands like Nike, Essence, and CultureCon. With 7–8 full-time W2 employees and 10–15 contractors, they were growing fast and needed more structure in place to manage their operations effectively.

Kenley, the Senior Operations Manager, followed The Digital Jane and reached out after her recent promotion. She was looking for support in refining their internal systems, especially talent management.

The Challenge

League Twenty Two was at an inflection point. With high-profile clients like Nike and Essence, demand was growing, but their operations couldn't keep pace.

Every new project required scrambling to screen and onboard 10-15 contractors. The ops team was spending 2-3 hours per freelancer, pulling information from spreadsheets, email threads, and memory. Critical details were falling through the cracks.

The bottleneck wasn't talent availability. It was infrastructure. Without a scalable way to manage their freelance pipeline, the team couldn't confidently take on new work.

As Kenley (Senior Operations Manager) put it: "We were missing very integral things that could have potentially allowed us not to pick them."

Phase One: Diagnose the Root Cause

Timeline: 4–6 Weeks

Focus: Discovery, Team Clarity, and Operational Readiness

Before we touched any tools, we needed to understand how the team works. We conducted workflow discovery sessions with each team member, mapping their day-to-day work and identifying where confusion, duplication, and gaps existed.

What we found:

• Role ownership between the ops manager and coordinator wasn't clearly defined

• 13 core processes existed but weren't documented; they lived in people's heads

• The Airtable base they'd started building wasn't being used because it didn't match their actual workflows

The insight: This wasn't a tool problem. It was a clarity problem. Without defined ownership and documented processes, no system would stick.

Impact:

• Realigned job descriptions to reflect actual work

• Gave the coordinator confidence to take ownership: "I feel pretty secure in my role now... I'm understanding how I can take more ownership and take things off of Kenley's plate."

• Created a roadmap for what needed to be built and why

Phase Two: Implementation & Documentation

Timeline: 10–12 Weeks

Focus: System Setup, Process Development, and SOPs

With clarity in place, we built the operational backbone they needed to manage talent at scale.

We designed two custom Airtable bases:

1. Ops/Admin Matrix: Centralized expense tracking and task management

2. Talent Management Base: A fully automated system for screening, onboarding, and assigning freelancers

But the bases were just the vehicle. The real value was in the infrastructure design:

• Automated workflows replaced manual handoffs

• Filters and views surfaced the right talent at the right time

• Calendar integrations gave leadership visibility into project staffing

Every workflow was documented with SOPs and training videos so the team could own and evolve the systems independently.

Impact:

• "You just condensed like four hours of Audrey's work into like 10 minutes." (Kenley)

• Freelancer screening went from chaotic to systematic

• The team could now manage 10-15 contractors per project without bottlenecks.

Phase Three: Training & Handoff

Timeline: 4 Weeks

Focus: Training, Handoff, and Support

The final phase wasn't about handoff. It was about building internal capacity.

We trained the ops team to not just use the systems, but to own them. They walked leadership through the new workflows with confidence and clarity.

Impact:

• Leadership recognized the transformation: "This is real good. Y'all taught her very well." (Nigel)

• The ops team went from reactive to proactive: "When projects come, we have an army of folks ready to go." (Kenley)

• The agency could now scale confidently

The Transformation

Before:

• Ops team spent 2-3 hours onboarding each contractor

• Hiring was reactive, scrambling to find talent when projects came in

• Leadership couldn't confidently take on new work without worrying about bottlenecks

• Critical information lived in spreadsheets, email, and people's heads

After:

• Freelancer onboarding takes 10 minutes

• Talent pipeline is proactive with vetted contractors ready before projects arrive

• Leadership can scale client work without scaling operational burden

• All processes are documented, centralized, and sustainable

The real impact: League Twenty Two now has the operational infrastructure to support their growth ambitions. They're no longer limited by internal capacity. They're ready to scale.

By the Numbers

• 14 custom boards delivered

• 7 documented processes

• 4 SOPs for core workflows

• 2 system audits and rebuilds

What This Taught Us

Operations isn't about tools. It's about clarity, ownership, and readiness.

The best systems don't just save time. They unlock capacity. When teams know who owns what, have documented processes, and can surface information when they need it, they move from firefighting to strategic execution. That's the difference between operational support and operational leadership.

“Thank you so much. We really appreciate this process, and we know that it’s going to be extremely helpful for streamlining all of our incoming talent. It’s nice to have this consistent flow happening in the background, so when projects come, we have an army of folks ready to go.” — Kenley

Interested in transforming how your team works?

Learn more about Foundation First or book a discovery call.