From Fire Drills to Strategic Control: Shamrock Foods
TL;DR
- Client: Shamrock Foods - major foodservice distributor across the Southwest
- Problem: Content chaos with no intake process, no prioritization, and no way to scale. The marketing team was drowning in reactive requests from every direction, with no structure to say no or sequence work strategically.
- Solution: Content strategy + operations playbook centered on customer journey and internal collaboration
- Shift: Moving from reactive order-taking and constant fire drills to proactive planning with clear priorities and measurable impact.
- Impact: Working content engine built on strategy instead of stress, reduced bottlenecks and rewrites, clearer agency collaboration, and marketing team positioned to lead instead of just catch up.
The Challenge
Shamrock's marketing team was doing a little bit of everything and getting crushed by it.
Product promos were constant. Sales enablement one-sheets got top billing. Social posts, email content, expo assets, and brand requests all hit the calendar at once. "Strategy" mostly meant "what's due this week?"
The team was fielding urgent requests from every direction - sales, product, brand, operations, leadership - but without a system to prioritize, sequence, or say no. They were stuck in reactive mode, operating like an internal agency without the structure to protect their time or focus their efforts on work that actually moved the business forward.
The symptoms showing up:
- Endless one-off requests with no intake structure
- Zero campaign-level coordination across teams
- Fire drills every week with last-minute "urgent" content needs
- Bottlenecks in review processes causing rewrites and delays
- Marketing team spending more time managing requests than managing strategy
- Underutilized internal expertise (chefs, nutritionists, sales consultants) that could be content gold
- Agency partnership hampered by unclear priorities and constant direction changes
- Content that was either hyper-tactical product sheets or off-brand fluff, rarely both
Content was getting created. But it wasn't moving the business forward. The team knew they needed structure but didn't know where to start without making the chaos worse.
Emily GEorge
SVP, Foodservice Marketing
Shamrock foods
“I don’t know how many presentations I’ve sat through where I had to mentally edit the whole thing because they didn’t get our world. This? You get it. You understand our business. I feel like this is usable now.”
The Shift
What made this work worth doing: Shamrock needed to put marketing back in control of the content machine they'd been duct-taping together for years. They needed both strategic clarity on what content to create and operational structure to actually create, review, publish, and measure it.
The belief that had to change: "We have to say yes to every request to keep stakeholders happy" → "Strategic no's enable better yes's that actually drive business results."
The barriers they faced: No intake process meant every request felt equally urgent. No prioritization framework meant the loudest voice won. Review bottlenecks and expo season compressed timelines. A full-service agency that wanted to do better work but kept getting whipsawed by changing priorities and unclear direction.
The Work
- Stakeholder discovery and process mapping
Interviewed marketing, customer experience, brand, content teams, and their agency to understand the full scope of the mess. Surfaced the patterns creating chaos: lack of intake structure, total absence of campaign coordination, underused internal stories and expertise, and content that missed the mark on either brand or tactical execution. - Customer journey content strategy
Aligned content to the full customer journey from discovery through loyalty instead of just responding to internal requests. Defined key customer segments (1-2 unit operators, 3-19 unit restaurants) and what they actually needed to hear at each stage. Built content pillars grounded in Shamrock's real differentiators: food expertise, consultative support, customer wins, and local market stories. - Intake and governance system
Created a structured intake and prioritization process so marketing could manage requests instead of drowning in them. Built a framework to evaluate requests against business objectives and customer needs, giving the team permission to say no with data backing them up. - Operations playbook
Delivered clear recommendations on roles, workflow, and how to manage internal contributors (especially turning chefs and consultants into content creators). Built content production guidance around Shamrock's actual constraints - review bottlenecks, expo season demands, shifting priorities. Provided crawl/walk/run roadmap so the team could scale without drowning. - Measurement framework
Shifted from vanity metrics to customer-journey KPIs. Defined what to measure at each stage - awareness, engagement, decision, loyalty - and connected content performance to marketing's impact on growth and retention, not just clicks and impressions. - Agency collaboration structure
Built clearer processes for working with their full-service agency, reducing rework through better briefs, tighter alignment on priorities, and structured feedback loops. This saved time and unlocked better results by giving the agency the direction they needed to do their best work. - "Aha" moment: When the team realized they were treating sales like a demanding client instead of a strategic channel. Reframing sales as a distribution partner rather than just another stakeholder changed how they prioritized sales enablement content and what they expected from those assets.
Karin Glick
Sr. Marketing Manager, Customer Experience
Shamrock Foods
“Yes, it was a firehose. But exactly what I hoped for. Now I just want to know: where do we start?”
The Outcome
- What's different now:
Marketing has a system to manage priorities, requests, and expectations instead of just absorbing whatever hits their desk. They can say no with confidence because they have frameworks showing why certain requests don't serve strategic goals or customer needs.
The review bottlenecks and constant rewrites decreased significantly because everyone understands the process and their role in it. Internal experts like chefs and nutritionists are becoming content creators, not just interview subjects, giving Shamrock authentic content their competitors can't copy. - Decisions enabled:
The team can now prioritize work based on business impact and customer journey stage instead of whoever yells loudest. They know which content to create as evergreen assets versus one-off tactical pieces. They have a roadmap for scaling content production without hiring an army or burning out the existing team.
The agency partnership transformed because Shamrock can now give clear, consistent direction instead of constantly changing priorities mid-flight. This means better creative work, fewer revisions, and faster execution. - Internal wins:
Fewer fire drills. Marketing is working to stop being reactive order-takers and start leading strategic planning. Cross-functional teams understand the intake process and how to work within it rather than bypass it with "urgent" requests.
The team has clarity on how content connects to business objectives and customer needs. They're measuring what actually matters, not vanity metrics that don't connect to revenue or retention.
The Takeaway
For other organizations:
If your marketing team is drowning in requests and operating like an internal agency without the structure to say no, the problem isn't that you need more people or better tools. You need strategic clarity on what content actually serves customers and business goals, plus an operational structure to protect your team's time and focus their efforts where it matters.
Who's probably in the same stuck place:
Marketing teams in mid-to-large organizations where every department treats them like an order-taking service. Teams with agency partnerships that aren't delivering because priorities keep shifting. Organizations where "content strategy" means "whatever's due this week" and fire drills are the norm, not the exception.
What this case proves:
You can't "strategy" your way out of operational chaos, and you can't operationalize your way to strategic clarity. You need both. Content teams need permission and frameworks to say strategic no's so they can deliver better yes's. And you need to treat your internal experts and external agency partners like the strategic assets they are, instead of task completers.