Richard Baker.
Operations at Critical Marketing. The person making sure the systems that run our agency actually run. Based in South Georgia.
Richard Baker leads operations at Critical Marketing. He owns the systems and processes that let a small senior team punch above its weight: client onboarding, project management, financial operations, internal tooling rollout, and the day-to-day rhythm of agency work. Where Dean handles the strategic "why" and Tristan handles the executional "what," Richard handles the operational "how."
What I do.
An agency lives or dies on operations. Strategy without execution is theater. Execution without operations is chaos. My job is making sure the executional capacity Tristan brings and the strategic direction Dean sets actually meets clients in the form of reliable, repeatable, professional work.
Day-to-day, that means:
- Client onboarding workflows — the first 30 days of every engagement
- Project management across the active client roster
- Financial operations — invoicing, QuickBooks reconciliation, recurring revenue tracking
- Internal tooling decisions — what we build vs buy vs ignore
- Hiring and contractor coordination when client load exceeds in-house capacity
- The week-over-week rhythm: every client knows what is happening on their account, when their next deliverable ships, and where things stand financially
How operations shapes the work.
Most agencies underinvest in operations because operations does not produce campaigns. It does not produce videos. It does not produce billable hours in a way that is easy to talk about on a sales call. So most agencies starve it.
The result is the agency reputation problem most of our clients have lived: campaigns delivered late, invoices that do not match what was scoped, account managers who change every quarter, the constant low-grade chaos that makes working with an agency feel like work you should not have to do.
We built operations to fix that. Every engagement has a documented scope. Every invoice references a documented deliverable. Every Monday a written audit report ships. Every quarter a written strategy review. The systems do the carrying so the senior people can do the thinking.
Let's talk.
Tell us about the business. We respond within one business day.