Cassuto Design is a boutique design studio in Union Square, Manhattan, founded and led by Michelle Cassuto. For more than 23 years it has served as the outsourced creative department for demanding, time-sensitive financial-services clients such as hedge funds and private banks, producing the high-pressure, deadline-driven design and production work those firms rely on. It is a close-knit, deeply loyal team, several of whom had been with Michelle for eight, nineteen, even twenty years.
For most of its life the studio grew the way it always had: reactively. Michelle hired as needed, usually when her production lead flagged that the team was stretched, and she sat at the center of nearly every decision. When a support hire moved on in early 2024, she reached what she openly called her breaking point, working across the whole week, unable to take even two days off without returning to a pile of files to review.
Rather than simply backfill the departing role, she decided to redesign the entire office, and on a trusted industry referral brought in wattsnextpx.
Every decision, every client email and every file routed back through Michelle. The team turned up to be told what to do, and she could not step back to the three-day week she wanted without work piling up in her absence.
Twenty-three years of hire-as-needed had left responsibilities overlapping and unexamined. Design and production duties ran together, and no one had mapped the gaps, the duplication, or how work actually flowed and handed off between people.
The studio ran with no defined roles, no KPIs and no reviews. One-to-ones and lunch-and-learns had lapsed after COVID and never returned, so the team had no consistent way to know what success looked like or how they were tracking.
Hiring and structure had always been reactive rather than designed. With a role about to turn over, Michelle had no organizational plan to tell her who to hire next, what that person should own, or how the team should be shaped for the next stage.
Build a future-state organizational plan and replace vague task lists with Outcome Profiles, built using the Three Big Rocks method, that make each role's outcomes and KPIs explicit, and separate design from production.
Define the studio's Vision, Mission and Values to align the team and anchor how it makes decisions when the founder is not in the room.
Design an Employee Experience Ecosystem covering integration, regular one-to-ones, performance conversations and a performance-management framework, so performance is managed by structure, not by Michelle chasing it.
Improve team communication and flow through Extended DISC, and coach Michelle to lead strategically and delegate, so the team owns its work and she can step back.
Take the People ROI Check — a two-minute diagnostic that scores your return per person across five levers and shows where value compounds, leaks, or bloats.
Take the People ROI Check