Operations leadership for marketing organizations
Great marketing needs an operating system.
Kinnective provides fractional operations leadership and advisory for marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams. I help marketing leaders build the systems, workflows, ownership, and operating rhythms that turn strategy into consistent execution.
Diagnose
what’s breaking
Prioritize
what matters
Build
systems that run
The Built to Run philosophy
Good operations should outlast the person who built them.
Every engagement is designed to end well. That means documented processes, named owners, and an operating rhythm your team keeps running long after the last working session — not a dependency on an outside advisor.
Documented, not tribal
If it only lives in someone’s head, it isn’t a system yet.
Owned, not assigned
Every process has a person accountable for it by name.
Right-sized
Built for the team and budget you have today, not a hypothetical one.
Handed off
The engagement ends with your team running it confidently.
I understand the work well enough to redesign how the work gets done.
Marketing leadership, client services, media, analytics, systems, reporting, and operations — the functions marketing organizations actually run on.
More about EliseWays to work together
Two engagement models.
01 · Ongoing · 3–6 month blocks
Fractional Operations Leadership
Senior operations leadership for a marketing agency or in-house team — operating model, priorities, capacity, and accountability — without adding a full-time COO.
Learn more02 · Defined project · 4–8 weeks
Operations Advisory & Systems Strategy
A structured diagnosis of one operating problem — campaign workflow, client delivery, capacity, reporting, or martech — with a prioritized roadmap your team owns.
Learn moreCommon operating problems
The drag marketing teams learn to live with.
Each one has a business consequence: leaked margin, lost capacity, missed launch dates, account risk found too late. If two or three feel uncomfortably familiar, that's usually a good signal a conversation is worth having.
- Too many approvalsSenior leaders become the bottleneck for routine work.
- Broken handoffsStrategy, creative, media, analytics, account teams, and leadership lose time translating work between one another.
- Invisible capacityTeams commit to more work without knowing where the pressure will land.
- Manual reportingExpensive marketing talent spends its time assembling information instead of interpreting it.
- Tool sprawlNew platforms get added without fixing the process underneath them.
- Inconsistent executionEvery campaign, client, or launch gets managed differently depending on who owns it.
- Hero-dependent operationsHigh performers compensate for weak systems until growth makes the model unsustainable.
- Late risk signalsAccount and delivery risk surfaces at renewal instead of while there's still time to fix it.
Selected outcomes
Operating changes with numbers attached.
$750K
Annualized expense reduction identified and implemented in approximately 90 days.
25%
Improvement in lead-to-client conversion.
80%
Reduction in operational launch errors while throughput increased.
Selected outcomes from Elise Connors' in-house leadership and consulting career.
Why marketing
I know the work because I spent 18 years inside it.
Agency and in-house. Digital marketing, media, client services, analytics, CRM and systems, reporting, and team leadership. That background isn't a service list — it's why I can look at how your team works and see where the operating model is making the work harder than it needs to be.
The problems I became best at solving were often not marketing problems. They were operating problems inside marketing organizations.
More about EliseWho I help
Marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams.
Kinnective fits best with marketing leaders who are honest about what isn't working and ready to make changes that stick.
Operator note
Elise consistently found new ways to improve our ways of working through new tools and processes... She specifically took on a wholesale reporting revamp... that both saved time and improved the quality of our reports.
Next step
Let’s talk about what needs to work better.
A 30-minute Operations Fit Call to share what feels messy, and hear how Kinnective could help.
Request an Operations Fit Call