Small company/agency environment chaos or genuine oddity?

Looking for an outside opinion here as a first-time poster on this sub (and to get it off my chest). I have just over a decade of experience working in marketing and comms for companies on the larger side. Lots of details left out, but it still ended up long. My apologies.

I originally joined my current Japanese org as an overseas part-time, multilingual consultant. After leading a few projects that went well, they sponsored my move to Japan and asked me to build and lead their global initiatives as they were planning on growing.

The company is a small (10-12 employees) marketing agency that has existed for around 15 years, but never scaled. There are unclear roles, no real functions, and everyone operates like freelancers under one company name. Revenue was treated as everyone's KPI regardless of role.

When I joined full-time, I was given a global team manager title and responsibilities to match.

Initially, things went well. I built the global service structure, workflows, team functions, and processes from scratch. Revenue started coming in, and we were building momentum in consumer tech and entertainment. But at the same time, the domestic side of the business started struggling (JP economy + marketing being increasingly seen as 'unneeded' within the market due to AI). Domestic sales and retention dropped sharply, org began running into losses, CEO decided a major restructure was needed.

They hired a CGO (Chief Growth Officer) to restructure the company.

The CGO runs his own brand marketing company, where he is currently the only employee, for 8 years. He claims to have previously worked with Gucci and Louis Vuitton to successfully grow their brands, but I have not been able to verify this through public company information.

On his first day, the CEO introduces the CGO as her close personal friend of seven years.

What surprised me was how much the company culture changed practically overnight after that. The CEO's personality and approach seemed to shift entirely.

Previously, she was accessible and involved in open discussions. After the CGO joined, decisions and discussions increasingly routed through him instead. Employees were told not to go to the CEO for anything and to go through the CGO instead, but the 'best way to do it' is to ask AI first.

The company direction also changed dramatically from here.

• Heavy reliance on AI-generated materials, strategy, and planning with no adjustments to prioritize speed.
• A move away from our existing creative, social-first marketing positioning into concepts like BPaaS and SaaS, despite us not actually having a software product and no engineers to make one. When I flagged this with CEO/CGO , they asserted that it was better to 'capture the opportunity first and figure out how to execute later'.
• Where we previously had 2 service pillars, we now have maybe 4(?) with no clarification save for "we want to shift towards becoming a consultancy because that's where the money is".
• Questions during company meetings being redirected to 'ask me that privately on Slack later' rather than addressed openly.

The materials being presented left me uncertain. They felt like they lacked the practical grounding and depth I would expect from such major organisational changes (how are you going to turn 5-6 social media specialists into expert go-to-market consultants by EOY?) Public responses to feedback in Slack also appeared heavily AI-generated in both Japanese and English, and no questions were allowed when the materials were being presented.

Within about two weeks, my role/title changed four times, eventually settling on a senior strategist role below where I had originally been sitting. Then, they moved brand ownership and the website away from me (we were about 1 month from going live) and to the CGO, with the intention of changing both these elements again completely through to February 2027.

This was frustrating. I had repeatedly noted in evaluations that brand was where I wanted to continue growing into, as I'd been seeing measurable success in this area. Before the restructure, I personally rebuilt the company's brand image, created new external materials and presentations, and redesigned their outdated website to suit a global-facing position. I also secured a handful of partnerships based on these materials (including a large PR collaboration happening at Tokyo Game Show this year).

I'm disappointed, because I believed in the vision of this org enough to move countries for it.

Now, after seeing 8+ months of hard work torn down in weeks, I'm looking for other roles (or, worst case scenario, looking to move back home). The instability and lack of clarity have become exhausting. Maybe I'm wrong about where this direction will lead, but based on what I have seen so far, this has all left me with a very bad feeling.

Has anyone experienced something like this before? Are repeated changes in direction and positioning just expected small-company/agency environment chaos, or is this as horribly odd as it feels? Will it stabilize? Should I wait and see?

As someone with limited small agency experience, I'd love to hear other perspectives.