One client. Five years. The operating model behind 16 business units.

A portfolio growing faster than its operating model

AMC Networks was expanding its free ad-supported and ad-supported streaming portfolio quickly, adding channels, content categories and distribution partners across a broad set of business units. The strategy was working. The machinery underneath it had not been rebuilt to match.

Coordination was consuming the capacity meant for execution

Execution across the portfolio was fragmented. Teams were not communicating cohesively, reporting was outdated and inconsistently maintained, and there was no unified meeting structure across the work. Budget management was inconsistent. Campaigns were slipping.

The tooling had also stopped matching the scale of the work. Operational tracking ran largely through Excel, which had been adequate for a smaller portfolio and had quietly become a bottleneck for this one.

The practical cost was where people spent their time. Teams were reconciling information, chasing status across groups, and reacting to problems, rather than moving campaigns forward.

The problem was not the meetings or the spreadsheet

The visible symptoms invited point solutions. Too many meetings, so run fewer. An outdated tool, so replace the tool. Campaigns slipping, so add status reporting.

There was no operating system connecting planning, reporting, coordination, budget and execution.

Each of those existed in some form and none of them talked to the others. That diagnosis mattered because of what it predicted: fixing any single symptom would hold for a while and then decay, because the next addition to the portfolio would arrive without a defined way to absorb it. The organization did not need a better tool. It needed a way of operating that new work could plug into.

Built the operating infrastructure, in that order

• Stood up a single source of truth for status, risk and decisions, so the question "where does this stand" had one answer instead of several.
• Moved operational tracking off Excel and onto Airtable, which made that source of truth usable at portfolio scale rather than theoretical.
• Established a standardized meeting cadence and governance rhythm across the 16 business units and 12 partners, with each forum owning a defined set of decisions.
• Built the review structure that gave executives one view of the portfolio instead of assembled fragments.
• Brought consistency to budget management across the work.
• Introduced early risk and dependency escalation, so leadership saw problems while they were still cheap to fix.

Then put AI inside the reporting itself

Once the cadence existed, the expensive part was no longer gathering status. It was turning status into something an executive could act on, which was still manual and still slow.

I built AI-assisted reporting into that workflow using ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, converting raw status into decision-ready leadership narratives and compressing the executive-prep time around each review.

This was work inside a large media organization, not a personal experiment. It is the same instinct that later produced the operating system I run today: the value is not in the model, it is in redesigning the workflow the model sits inside.

How to absorb new partners without a new process each time

A significant part of the role was working with the executive team and the deal teams on the operational rollout of partner additions and the integration of new content sectors into the FAST portfolio, including national news, sports and digital-native content partners.

The judgment call sat one level underneath. Each new partner and each new sector could have been onboarded its own way, which is the path of least resistance and the reason fragmented organizations stay fragmented. I chose instead to define how additions would be incorporated into the existing operating model, so that the portfolio absorbed new work through one process rather than accumulating a separate one for every deal.

That decision is the reason the operating model survived the growth instead of being outgrown by it.

Cadence is infrastructure, not administration

I would establish the unified reporting source, the standardized cadence, the operating structure and the early escalation mechanisms considerably earlier in the engagement.

The experience changed how I think about that work. Reporting and cadence are easy to treat as administrative layers you add once execution problems become visible. They are not. They are part of the operating infrastructure itself, and putting them in early is what makes risk visible while leadership still has good options. Every month you wait, the intervention gets more expensive and the problems get further along before anyone sees them.

That is the belief I have carried into everything I have built since.