Strategic Briefing || Earthworks Organizational Restructuring Proposal

Presented to Executive Leadership — June 2020 [REDACTED]

The following represents the prescriptive follow-up to the May 2020 diagnostic assessment. Where the first briefing defined what the market required, this briefing defines what the organization must become to meet those requirements. These recommendations emerged from direct observation of internal operations, stakeholder interviews across all departments, and conversations with top dealers and channel partners. Specific personnel references, financial projections, and vendor relationships have been redacted from this public corpus version.

The Central Insight

Two weeks after the initial briefing, conditions had deteriorated further rather than stabilizing. This was not a failure of analysis — it was confirmation that the pace of organizational change needed to accelerate, not wait for market clarity.

The most important reframe from this period: the organizational structure itself was the primary competitive liability.

Not the technology. Not the market. Not the disruption. The structure.

A company with world-class product was organized in a way that made it structurally impossible to execute at the speed the market required. The sales function was oriented toward transactions rather than relationships. The marketing function was oriented toward output rather than support. The fulfillment function was treated as operational overhead rather than strategic infrastructure.

The following restructuring proposal addresses all three.

The Foundational Shift: From Sales to Service

The concept of a "Sales Department" must be retired.

In its place: a Service Department that functions as the public face of the company across every platform where customers exist.

This is not semantic reframing. It is a fundamental reorientation of how the company creates value and earns loyalty.

A sales department asks: what can we close today? A service department asks: what does this customer need, and how do we make their experience with us so frictionless that they become permanent advocates?

The difference compounds over time. Sales transactions are linear — one deal, one outcome. Service relationships are exponential — one customer well served generates word-of-mouth that no advertising budget can replicate.

The Service Department must be:

• Available on every platform customers use (multichannel by design, not by accident)
• Built on scripts and systems, not individual personalities (scalable, not dependent on star performers)
• Capable of resolving field issues, facilitating returns, upselling appropriately, and communicating market intelligence upstream
• Designed for self-service with clear escalation pathways

The goal is a service infrastructure that answers questions before they become problems, resolves problems before they become complaints, and turns complaints into loyalty events.

Elevating Fulfillment to Strategic Infrastructure

The fulfillment function has historically been treated as a lower-level operational role. This is the wrong frame.

In a company reorganized around service and online sales, fulfillment is the central indicator of organizational health.

The proposed restructuring elevates the Processing Manager to the management board — not as a symbolic gesture but as a structural recognition that the speed and accuracy of product movement is the primary customer experience variable.

A customer who orders and receives quickly, accurately, and without friction becomes an advocate. A customer who encounters delays, errors, or confusion in fulfillment becomes a detractor — regardless of how good the product is.

The Processing Manager under this structure is measured not by volume but by friction removed from the system quarter over quarter. They have the authority to make the changes required to achieve that outcome.

Repositioning Marketing as Support

Marketing in most organizations operates as a lead function — generating campaigns, driving awareness, pursuing coverage. This model consumes resources in ways that are difficult to measure and even more difficult to attribute to revenue outcomes.

The proposed restructuring repositions marketing as a support function — creating assets that enable the Service Department and the channel partners to do their jobs better.

This requires, as a foundation, a complete global standardization of collateral across all platforms:

• Brand guidelines (the visual and verbal standards that signal who the company is)
• Online retail presence standards (how the company appears where customers actually buy)
• Email marketing infrastructure (templates, segments, calendar)
• PR framework (which publications, which relationships, which stories)
• New product introduction guidelines (how launches are executed, not improvised)

Once standards are established and content is loaded across all customer touchpoints, marketing shifts to ongoing maintenance — creating assets that support sales commitments and channel relationships rather than generating speculative awareness campaigns.

The governing question for every marketing action becomes: does this make it easier for our customers to choose us and easier for our channel partners to sell us?

If the answer is not clearly yes, it does not get resourced.

The New Organizational Reality

The restructuring creates clarity about which functions are essential, which can be streamlined, and which should be eliminated or externalized.

Functions to add or elevate:

• VP of Sales and Marketing (oversight of Service, Marketing, and Fulfillment — reports directly to COO, sits on management board)
• Processing Manager (management board member, measured by friction reduction)
• Service Agents (script and macro-driven, highly self-directed, the first hires set the tone for the entire function)
• Direct content creator / email marketer (can be external until the right candidate is identified)

Functions to restructure or externalize:

• [REDACTED based on personnel sensitivity]

The Principle Underneath the Structure

Every structural recommendation in this briefing is an expression of one principle: organizations compete on coordination, not just on products.

The company with the best microphone technology in the category was losing ground not because the technology was wrong but because the coordination was broken. Departments were not aligned. Incentives were not coordinated. The customer experience was fragmented across touchpoints that each operated independently.

The restructuring proposal is not about headcount. It is about alignment. When Service, Fulfillment, and Marketing operate as a coordinated system with shared definitions of success — when everyone is on script — the technology gets to do what it was always capable of doing.

That is when the product wins the awards it deserves. That is when the brand becomes what the engineers always believed it could be. That is when the word-of-mouth compounds into market transformation.

The structure must be built to let the product perform.

[Financial projections, specific vendor recommendations, and personnel transition plans are contained in the supplementary documentation provided under separate cover. All such details have been redacted from this public corpus version.]

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