Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Growing a professional services business often starts the same way: scrappy teams, generalists wearing multiple hats, and a lot of momentum driven by energy rather than structure. In this episode of The Handbook, Harv sits down with Alex Bodini, CEO of Spin Brands, to unpack how Spin evolved from a grassroots social media shop into a multi-entity group of 100+ people. Rather than waiting for a crisis to force change, Alex and his co-founder made a conscious decision to professionalize the business so they could attract bigger clients, better talent, and more ambitious opportunities.

The work we produce gets all the attention. But the real question is: what’s happening behind the scenes that makes that work possible? In this episode of The Handbook, Harv sits down with creative operations expert Nicky Russell, co-founder of WDC, We Deliver Change, and chair of the Creative Operations Summit in London. Together they explore the discipline of creative ops – the systems, culture, and leadership required to help creative teams do their best work.

As AI tools get more powerful, a fair question keeps coming up –– If AI can connect everything, do you still need a PSA? With AI agents, MCP, and a bit of low-code creativity, it can feel like you could stitch together your own operating stack. That assumption misses an important distinction –– AI is an accelerator. It’s not infrastructure. For professional services businesses, reliability, structure, and trust come from having a clear system of record underneath it all. That’s what makes automation sustainable, reporting credible, and decisions defensible.

AI is quickly becoming the control center for operations teams. MCP is the next step – letting AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, securely connect to your systems and actually take action, not just respond to prompts. But there’s a catch. AI doesn’t fix messy operations. If your information is scattered across tools, spreadsheets, and workarounds, AI just amplifies the mess. The real value shows up when there’s a clear system of record underneath it all.