WME Cuts 30 Staffers In Restructuring Move

WME's building in Beverly Hills. AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

During a new round of belt-tightening across Hollywood, major talent agency WME is cutting about 30 staffers across a range of divisions, about 3 percent of staff.

Leaders Christian Muirhead and Richard Weitz unveiled the news in a memo to employees on Wednesday, saying that the goal was partly to reduce bureaucracy at the sprawling, Beverly Hills-based firm that has 1,100 staffers.

The agency embarked on its latest chapter in March of last year as part of private equity firm Silver Lake’s $25 billion move to take WME’s publicly traded parent company Endeavor private. As part of that move, Endeavor was broken up into pieces and WME (which added “Group” to its title) became the core part of that representation business, which competes with firms like Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency as part of the Big 3 Hollywood talent firms.

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The move by Muirhead and Weitz to couch the cuts to staffers in terms of “reducing layers, increasing responsibilities, and removing bureaucracy” fits the current C-suite mood among blue-chip companies across the U.S. When Amazon conducted layoffs of 14,000 employees in January, its chief human resources exec used nearly the same phrase (“reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy”) as the WME leaders. Several other tech companies have framed restructuring moves in similar ways.

The full WME Group memo from Weitz and Muirhead to employees is below.

Subject: Update Our industry is undergoing profound change — from consolidation and shifting economics to new technology and evolving client needs. At the same time, new platforms are creating more opportunities than ever for talent and creators to reach audiences around the world. Since going private nearly one year ago, we’ve been working diligently to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing responsibilities, and removing bureaucracy, in a singular effort to stay out in front. As such, today we have made the difficult decision to reduce a number of roles across the agency. We expect conversations with impacted individuals to be complete by the end of this week. WME is committed to supporting our colleagues during this transition. Looking ahead, we’re focused on shaping the agency for the future by building on our scale and experience and capitalizing on our industry-best capabilities and client strategy. Thank you for continuing to show up for one another and for our clients. We appreciate your professionalism and commitment.

More to come.