The Agency Hiring Roadmap I Wish I Had When I Started

This video is going to talk about who you should hire as your agency grows and when. And I know this is a valuable question because I get this about 10 to 20 times per week from agency owners who I consult with and who ask me for advice. If you don't know who I am. My name is Matthew Larson. I have grown and sold three marketing agencies in the past 12 years and I currently consult with about 550 agency owners every single month. So in the video ahead, I'm going to go over step by step, who I think you should hire, when you should hire them, and what benchmarks to tie it to. Because in my experience, a lot of this is going to be benchmark based as opposed to get to a certain revenue level and then you do this. So let's get right into it. The first thing and the very first hire that I think we need to make is going to be a virtual assistant or just a regular assistant. And you're going to want to do that as soon as you're bills are basically able to be taken care of. So as soon as you can pay for your food, as soon as you can pay for your rent, as soon as you can pay for your insurance and whatever you need to do, then you hire a VA to basically buy back 10 to 20 hours per week doing repetitive tasks that you probably shouldn't do yourself. This has to do with like uploading wins, you know, scheduling tweets, doing all of that kind of admin work that you as an agency owner really should not be doing. By the time you get to your VA and the time you hire someone to be your director of marketing, you're probably going to need somewhere between two and three hires there. So after you've hired your va, basically what you're going to be doing is you're going to be hiring a new person every time you're at 70% capacity. So if you could do basically what would that be? If you could do 10 clients yourself, as soon as you basically have seven clients, that is when you're going to want to start hiring someone because you don't want to rush that at all. I have my own hiring process that I'll talk about in a different video perhaps, but you keep repeating this process usually until you get two to three hires. So if you can do 10 and some one of your employees can do 10, then as soon as you have 14 clients, you would hire the next person. And this is a very good balance between you being able to grow and get new clients and getting an early start without getting the hire too early, where you're kind of just wasting time and revenue. So the first one is the VA and then the hires, and then once you get to about $50,000 in MRR recurring revenue, that is when you're going to want to hire your director of operations. So this on the list is actually going to be one of two hires that is actually revenue specific. And I like to do it at $50,000 mrr, not revenue, because we need mrr because it's predictable. Because at that stage you can afford someone to basically pay $10,000 per month, 120k per year, who is going to be managing all of your employees and completely get you, the founder, out of operations so you can do marketing and sales. Most people kind of stumble at this point because they just can't think and they don't want to give up enough margin to actually do this. Because your profit and your take home is going to go down temporarily, but it's going to go up faster and higher than you thought possible. Once your more time is spent on marketing and sales, the next hire you're going to make is a sales rep. And you're going to want to do that. As soon as you start consistently booking about 25 calls per week before you hire the sales rep, you're going to be taking all those calls and it's going to be about five calls per day. I don't like to give myself or my sales reps more than five calls per day because they're very mentally taxing. If you do more than five calls per day, you're not really going to have any time to do your cold email, your content, your paid ads, and all the other stuff that you need, need to do. And when you hire this person, you're not just going to want to, okay, transfer all of those calls to them. What you're really going to want to do is you're going to want to take about. You're going to want to keep taking those 25 calls yourself. And you're going to want to, because your marketing efforts and your paid ads and your content, your outreach are going to be scaling up. You're going to get more than 25 calls. So for the first month, I would say, let's say you get 32 calls, you're going to take 25, they're going to take seven. The next month you get 40 calls. Now you take 25 and they take 15. And then once you basically get to that magic number of about 40 to 50 calls between the two of you, that's when you start hiring the next person. And then once you hire two sales reps, you'll be out of sales or kind of completely, but we'll get back to that later in the video. The next person you want to hire is an appointment setter. Once you have cold email running and basically you need someone to sit there in your inbox and reply as fast as possible and, or you're getting at least 10 leads per week and that's application or calls. That's not really opt ins, whichever ones happens first is when you want to hire this appointment setter. The next thing you want to do in my opinion, and this might be controversial to some people, but you want to get a thumbnail person and an editor after you have posted 100 YouTube videos. So I always recommend at the start you post one video every single day and just have bullet points to talk off of and just try to make every video better than the last. And, and you need to do this journey and you do this part because if you're relying too heavily on script and editing, you're not actually in most cases developing the skill of actually making videos that people want to watch. So for the first a hundred videos, seven per day, it's going to take you, you know, what would that be? 12, 10, 12, 13? It's about 14 to 15 weeks, you're going to be posting a video every day. You're now out of your operations and you have all of this time on your hands and you're able to do that. And once you're done do that, then start scripting, then start making thumbnails, then do titles. So that kind of wraps up the early stages of what I would say are your initial hires. So to recap, a VA, as soon as we have time and money for our expenses, as soon as we kind of hit 70% capacity, we're going to start wanting to hire a fulfillment team. And you know, once you hire the first person, you can have more capacity than the second person, more capacity than the third person, more capacity. And usually this will get you to about $50,000 in terms of MRR monthly recurring revenue. At that point you want to hire your director of operations and get yourself out of the business operations completely. When you have all of that free time, you're going to spend it on paid ads, content, outreach, promotion, partnerships, all that kind of stuff. You're going to be able to generate a lot more sales calls. And as soon as you're consistently booking about 25 sales calls per week, that's when you start doing your sales reps and hiring those. Then you're also going to be having all this time to do YouTube videos. I'd recommend just talking and talking and talking and building YouTube videos for a laser specific audience every single day for 14 to 15 weeks. So you get a hundred videos as fast as possible and that's when you get your editor and your thumbnail. The next phase of the business is kind of to get yourself out of all of the operations, as much as possible out of the operations and more into the CEO and owner role. So you basically need to make two very specific hires in this phase and to give you kind of a revenue range. It's not really revenue specific, but this is going to be in the 50 to 200k per month range. So what you want to do is once you have ads that are profitable that you found out the funnel, you found out the creatives, it's working, it's booking calls yourself. Once you have a cold outreach system that actually works with the appointment setter and the sales reps closing. And once you have all of this content posted on a regular basis, that is when you hire your director of marketing. Most people get this completely backwards and they hire the director of marketing to basically do this. Those things are really a C suite, a founder role to some degree. You can't expect someone who is even, you know, three to five years experience to come in cold. Figure out your ad funnel, record all the ads, figure out your cold email copy and offer, figure out your content schedule, what works best, all the workflows. They can manage that, they can grow that, they can scale that. But that is something that you have to do as the founder and you shouldn't be hiring that director of marketing until you have gotten those three key results. Paid ads are profitable in booking calls, cold emails, working booking calls, and content is being posted regularly on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook and all of that kind of stuff. The next hire is the director of sales. And you're going to want to do that once you have four people on your sales team. And this will completely get you out of sales. So if we do that, 25 calls per week per sales rep, and we basically are hiring at 70% capacity. Once we've basically repeated that process four times and we have four sales reps probably doing, you know, about a hundred calls per week, seventy to a hundred, that is when we need to hire the director of sales and that person's going to be coaching our sales reps. Call recordings, taking some calls themselves, recruiting new salespeople, and just basically managing and trying to optimize our sales process. And that will basically, at this stage, we are completely out of operations, we're completely out of our marketing, and we're completely out of our sales. And then as a CEO or the founder of the business, we are kind of in that CEO/Founder role where we have time to basically make systems, further, promote the business, film YouTube videos and just focus on growth kind of uninterrupted. Then by the time that, in my opinion, you cross the $3 million per year mark, you are going to basically between the time you get your director of sales and you get your director of marketing and you have your director of operation, but between the time that that is true, you have all those people and you get to 3 million, you really need to get the CFO, the COO, the CMO, and the CRO, which is the chief revenue officer roles 100% dialed in. And those are roles that I would consider to be above all of the directors that we've done so far. You can either promote that director, but then you'll need to replace them, or you can hire someone above them. When you're hiring these people, I normally try to hire someone who has done three times as big as I have. So if I'm at 3 million per year, let's say I'm trying to hire people who have done that at a $9 million per year agency, anything less, they're kind of maybe don't know enough to help you get where you want to go. And any higher than that is they're kind of too far out of, or too far like out of touch with the problems and the situations you're at right now. If you hired someone who was a COO at a hundred million dollar per year agency for your $3 million per year agency, just wouldn't really make much sense to them. They'd actually probably be less effective than someone who just left a 9 to 10 million dollars pure agency just because their daily tasks, their experience, their problems or solutions are just too big for what you're trying to go. And then when you get to that 10 million a year mark, you look for someone at 30 million per year and then that 30 million, that 90 to 100 million a year or so on. I've never really got to the 90 or 100 million or even the $30 million per year agency mark yet. The most I've ever got was just over 10. So I don't really know but that's what I imagined I would do, so that's really it. In terms of hiring, it's mostly based on objectives as opposed to actual, you know, revenue levels. There are some revenue levels where you have to do and you're really not going to get past that $3 million per year mark without a real team. But I hope this video was valuable, and I will see you in the next one.