In this presentation, the founder of a $7 million‑per‑year marketing agency walks through the systems that enable a 47‑person team to operate efficiently. He first outlines the agency’s departmental layout—sales & marketing, operations (web, SEO, content, social, paid ads), account management, and admin/finance—showing how an accountability chart maps responsibilities. He then explains the hiring roadmap, emphasizing the need to remove the founder from operations first, followed by account management (around 17 client accounts), administrative support, and finally sales, while tying each hire to revenue milestones (startup <$10k/mo, struggle $10‑30k/mo, scale $30‑50k/mo). The video details a rigorous hiring process: crafting job descriptions, posting on platforms, using video applications for client‑facing roles, test projects for technical roles, and personality assessments to match cultural fit. Onboarding is treated as a “world‑class” experience, including welcome boxes with branded gear. For day‑to‑day management, the agency runs fully remote, leveraging Zoom, Slack, and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) with weekly Level‑10 meetings, daily stand‑ups, and monthly all‑hands, each with defined agendas (wins, stucks, scorecards, IDS). The speaker concludes by offering free agency acceleration sessions and a complimentary course for agencies aiming to reach seven‑figure revenue.
Chapters
My marketing agency currently does about $7 million per year in revenue, and we've got a team of 47 full-time employees. Now, we're only able to manage a team of this size because we have certain systems and processes in place that allow everything to run smoothly. And whether you're just hiring your first couple of employees in your agency, or you've already got a larger team but you're looking to make things more efficient and reduce the time it takes to manage, then this video is for you. Because I'll break down exactly how we hire A-players, how my team is structured, and all the systems we have in place to effectively manage the entire organization. Let's get into it. Let's start start with team structure because at this stage in the game we've got 47 full-time employees. You have to understand how you structure the accountability chart, also referred to as an organizational chart, in order to see where those people sit and how those people sit. Right now, basically we've got several departments. We've got sales and marketing, right, which is the marketing of our own agency. We've got operations, which within operations in our agency, since we provide full service, right, we've got web development, SEO, content, social, paid ads, and ongoing client management. And there's divisions and employees underneath each of those. Then we've got account management, which is the team that actually manages the client relationships. We've got a structure now where there's an onboarding director that handles all the new clients when they come in, and then account managers that handle between 30 to 35 accounts at any given time to retain the relationship, to show things where they're headed. And then we have also got admin and finance, right? Which is the paying the bills, booking travel, all of that fun stuff. That's the, the big picture organizational chart. Happy to share our organizational chart with you. But usually the order in which you hire for these roles, as you think about growing and scaling your agency, first thing you should remove yourself from is operations. The doing of the work, the building the websites, the writing the content, the doing the SEO. If you're still doing that, that's going to prevent you from being able to focus on sales, business development, and on creative freedom. So first thing to remove yourself from typically is operations. Second is usually account management. Uh, usually what I find is that about 17 clients, if you're still running a solo agency and you're doing the sales, you're doing the marketing, you're doing the fulfillment, you're doing account management. When you get to 17 accounts, you will start to bottleneck. If, especially if you want to actually check in with those clients, show the value that you're bringing to the table, keep them engaged. And so you have to decide, do I keep this small or do I start to build a team? And around 17 accounts is when you need to make sure you go on and hire that account management person or that account management team. So we've got operations, then we've got account management. Third is usually gonna be more administrative support. So if you're still sending emails, setting up funnels, setting up webinars, doing things to market and promote yourself, booking travel, paying bills, you need an administrative assistant, right? If you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant, and that, that's going to help free up some time within your business. And then usually the fourth position that you, you place would be sales, right? If you're still taking sales calls at some level, at some point, that's a beautiful place to remove yourself from. Because once you've got operations and you've got account management and you've got administrative support and somebody taking the sales calls, you truly have an autonomous business where every aspect of landing clients, delivering the results, retaining those clients is taken care of. And, you know, as you grow and as you scale, you're going to want to plot out an organizational chart, accountability chart if you follow EOS. Get clear, what are those key functions within the business? Who sits in those seats today? And do some type of time and energy audit to figure out where your strengths are, to figure out what you do best, so that you can figure out what that next hire would be. Calculate your buyback rate, figure out how much you're making within the business to see what you can afford in terms of placing for those positions. So that's the, that's the organizational structure. The next thing is hiring, right? We have to make sure we've got a great process to attract the right talent, to make the right decisions, and to put the right people in place that are going to hold the standard without breaking the bank. In the startup phase between $0 and $10,000 a month in recurring monthly revenue, it's probably gonna be you and a couple of freelancers, right? You don't have a lot of financial resources to build a team to put all of those pieces of the puzzle in place. So you're gonna have to wear a lot of hats and get creative with VAs and/or freelancers. Now, once you cross over to the stability phase, struggle phase within the business, when you're kind of between $10,000 and $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue, ideally you're gonna get at least 2 full-time employees to help with service delivery, maybe a, a director of operations and somebody that's more of a doer. Now, once you get past that struggle phase within the business, you move to what we call scale, and that's where you've got between $30,000 and $50,000 a month of recurring revenue and you're starting to build the team, right? You start to put the infrastructure in place. Usually at that level, it's going to be you plus let's just call it 5 to 10 employees, which are going to be some delivery and some account management. The people actually talking to the clients and managing the relationships. And so you want to figure out what that hiring process is going to look like as the revenue grows, as the business continues to expand. Now, of course, this assumes you've got proper pricing, there's a healthy profit margin, you can afford to invest in buying back your time and in kind of taking things for your clients and for yourself to the next level. With that in place, the next thing you want to think about is what your hiring process is going to look like and how you can figure out who the right people are. And so from a hiring perspective, you know, usually what you're going to do is you're going to have the role that you need to hire for. You're going to create the requirements, like what do we need that person to do, and you're going to put a job description in place. Hey, here's exactly what we need. And then a job posting where you can go out and post on Indeed, on LinkedIn, on your personal Facebook profile to try and get candidates that would be interested in that type of role. Resumes come in and you want to be thinking about how do you vet? Because usually if you post a good job and you post it in the right place, you put a little bit of financial resources from it, you're going to get inundated with response, right? And unless you've got a process to shortlist and to vet, it's going to be overwhelming. Depending upon the role, like if you're looking for somebody to do account management specifically, for those types of roles, I like a video-based application process where they need to record a video talking about themselves, talking about why they're interested in your role, talking about, you know, why they'd be a great account manager for your organization. By putting that screening process in place where they have to record a video, you're going to eliminate some of the noise. You're going to get people that actually paid attention and you'll be able to get a sense. How do they communicate? How do they show up on camera? That type of thing works well for sales. You're going to do more operation-specific. If you need people to do websites, SEO, content development, most of those lend themselves more to proving that they can do the work versus, you know, letting them talk about how well they do the work. And so, you know, when it comes to those types of roles, reply back to candidates right away and say, I'd like to do a test project, offer them some small money, and actually do some work with them to see if they're capable of doing the job, to see how they communicate with you, to see whether they need to, you know, drive you nuts with a million questions, or whether they can come up with a solution and come up with a workable product that would fit your needs. I'm a big fan of using also personality assessments and making sure, you know, account managers managers have a certain personality profile that you're looking for versus sales versus operations. Taking those personality tests in advance or administering them in advance, like, those can really help you take what you think is a great candidate, match it against a certain criteria, and make a much better buying decision. You want to make sure that you've got a process to onboard team members. Just like you, you go out of your way to create a world-class experience for clients when they sign up, you need to have a world-class process to onboard a team member. When do they start? What are their expectations? Make sure You've got all of that thought out in advance. One thing that we like to do for our local team as well as our international team is give them a welcome box. We actually send a new client welcome box. We do the same for our team members. So a customized box, we put some branded shirts in there, we put some branded notebooks in there, and it just creates a sense of, okay, I've just been hired by this company, I've had a great hiring process, and I'm excited to plug in and hit the ground running. The third is actually how we manage the team and how we engage with the team. Our organization is all virtual at this point. We have some people in the United States. We have some people international. We communicate typically via Zoom sessions with the team, individual one-to-ones with the team leaders, and on Slack. Like, those are the main communication tools that we use. And we run a process called EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System, which means we've got an accountability chart with who's in charge, who are the leaders within each area within the organization, a team that kind of operates. So if there's a director of operations, then there's a team of people that are doing websites and SEO and pay-per-click and social management. Those people roll up to that operations director. The leader of the SEO team might have a whole team of SEO people underneath them. And so we do level 10 meetings every single week. That's with our leadership team where we come together and there's a very specific agenda where we're going to share wins, we're going to share stucks, we're going to review our scorecards, on track or off track, and we're going to IDS— identify, discuss, and solve. And that's how things continue to move forward within the business. I personally plug in to that level 10 with meeting with our leaders of those departments. Each one of those department heads do a level 10 with their team that solves problems within the organization and moves things forward on a very consistent basis. Now, in addition to that, we have daily standup huddles where the whole, the whole team logs in within that team and they come together and they spend a couple of minutes just to make sure they're plugged in. Make sure they're clear for the day, make sure they've got nothing that's slowing them down or getting them stuck. And we have an all-hands meeting where the entire company comes together once a month, you know, to kind of check in, to share the wins, to share the stucks, and to train and develop the team within the organization. And that's exactly how we hire and manage a team of 47 employees in my $7 million a year agency. Now, we've used this as well as our many other proven frameworks for client acquisition, service delivery, and client retention to help 138 agencies grow to 7 figures and beyond. And if you're currently doing 6 figures or multiple figures in your agency and you're looking to hit that $7 million mark using strategies that actually work right now, then I have something for you. We're currently offering free agency acceleration sessions where we'll deep dive into your business, identify the biggest bottlenecks, and give you a roadmap on how you can scale. To schedule your call, just click the first link in the description, and I can't wait to give you some clarity and value. And if you wanna learn how our full process works for scaling agencies to 7 figures, I've recently recorded a free course where I go over everything, and you can check it out now, totally free, right here. Talk to you soon.
