Need help managing 20 creative agencies? There's a consultancy for that

Fred&Co is headquartered in New York and Schuster hopes to launch offices in both Asia and Europe within a year. The company is already capable of executing adaptation and production work in Asia, however—particularly in Singapore and India where Schuster has been based in the past. 

Based on his experience as a creative director and global CEO of two global creative production networks, Schuster hopes to help both brands and their agencies operate as efficiently as possible, not only from a creative production standpoint, but also in terms of talent and agency-mix.

"Both agencies and clients are struggling to keep up with changes in the industry," observed Schuster. "A recent survey found that many clients are dealing with 10 to 20 plus increasingly specialised agencies and they need to manage and evaluate the calibre of these companies. This is where Fred&Co comes in to look at either the talent on agency or client side and the processes."

While Schuster has no intention of managing the pitch process, he believes his expertise would be useful in selecting the agency mix, holding client-agency workshops and determining the ideal distribution of work between agencies. 

Schuster also aims to draw on his background in production to help both parties produce the best content possible in a cost-effective manner via his network of personal contacts and official partners. 

"The predominant area I've worked in is craft offshoring," he said. "I have a firm belief that you can outsource creative development work to lower-cost markets as easily as you would with production and execution." 

In bridging the agency and client sides, Schuster also hopes to help creative agencies restructure teams to better embrace a content-development approach to creativity rather than the traditional top-down process. The consultancy aims to achieve this by providing business and sales focus training and streamlining talent structures.