The Agency Scaling Blueprint: How to Hire Your First 5 Team Members

Your Ego Will Kill Your Growth. Your Team Will Build Your Empire

Over the last five years, I’ve spoken with thousands of agency owners and creators. In every single case, the defining line between explosive success and frustrating stagnation comes down to one thing: the quality of their talent.

Imagine Real Madrid trying to win the championship with only one player. It’s impossible. A team will always outperform an individual, and the team's performance is a direct result of the players on the field.

OFM is no different.

The days of being a solopreneur in this space are over. A few years ago, you could sign a creator, hire a few VAs for chatting, and make a lot of money. But in 2025, the landscape has changed. There are too many moving parts, too many competitors, and the platforms are too sophisticated at deflecting your marketing efforts.

If you want to capture real market share and build a valuable agency, you have no choice: you must build a team of A-grade players.

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The Leader's Paradox: Why You Must Be the Worst Person on Your Team

If you are the best person at any given task in your agency, that is a critical failure point. Your ego, and the mindset of “I have to do it myself because I do it best,” will be the anchor that drags your business to the bottom.

That might be true right now, but it's only true because you haven’t hired and trained an expert to do it better.

I back myself as an incredibly competent person, but within our agency, there are people who are better at chatting, better at operations, and better at traffic. That is the reality of successful leadership. Your team must excel in their specific roles so you can graduate to your true role: growing the business.

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Buying Back Your Time: The First Step to True Scale

The primary benefit of hiring a great team is buying back your most valuable asset: time. This concept, detailed in Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time, has been a game-changer for our agency.

The process is simple. You identify the low-value, time-consuming tasks that are dragging you down and hire someone to take them over. This forces you to create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and build structure, which inevitably leads to more efficient systems.

This single act frees up your mental and calendar bandwidth to focus on the high-value activities that actually move the needle—signing bigger creators, developing new strategies, and building your brand.

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The Fading Stigma: Your Unfair Hiring Advantage

In 2021, hiring corporate talent was impossible. The moment you mentioned the industry, seasoned CMOs, CTOs, and COOs would run for the hills. The space was too taboo.

That is no longer the case.

The stigma is fading. The creator economy is now recognised as a legitimate, high-growth industry. This is your single greatest advantage. You can now attract experienced professionals who see the opportunity and are intrigued by the challenge. They bring with them corporate-level systems, processes, and a minimum standard of excellence that will elevate your entire operation.

You no longer have to make it up as you go. You can hire people who have been there, done that, and can help you bypass the painful trial-and-error period that early agencies had to endure.

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Culture is Key: The Local vs. Overseas Dilemma

This is the strategic choice every scaling agency owner must make.

• Overseas Team: Hiring VAs from the Philippines is significantly cheaper. For a simple agency with a straightforward strategy, this can be a viable option. However, you will constantly battle time zone differences, potential language barriers, and data connection issues. Critically, you will never build a strong, collaborative company culture.
• Local Team: Hiring an in-house, local team is 5x more expensive. But the return on investment is not measured in direct, per-hour revenue. It’s measured in the indirect, long-term benefits that you cannot quantify:
  • The innovation that happens during a spontaneous whiteboard session.
  • The accountability and motivation that comes from working together in person.
  • The impenetrable service quality you can deliver to creators.

The Hiring Playbook: Your First 5 Hires in Order

This is the roadmap. Presuming you are starting as a solopreneur, here is the exact order in which you should build your team to ensure stable, scalable growth.

1. Hire #1: The Chatter. Your first hire must be a chatter. Initially, this should be a team of you and them. This allows you to deeply understand the psychology of your accounts while freeing you up from being available 24/7. Long-term, they will replace you entirely once you’ve built out the SOPs.
2. Hire #2: The Traffic Specialist. Traffic is the lifeblood of any OFM agency. Without it, nothing else matters. You can have the best creator and the best chatters, but if you aren’t driving new subscribers, the account will stagnate. Bring in someone to focus exclusively on this early on. It is a non-negotiable.
3. Hire #3 & #4: The Marketing Team. As you sign more creators, you need to build out your marketing support. For every 2-3 creators you onboard, add an additional marketing team member. Their role is to provide ideation, content planning, and basic deliverables to ensure your service quality remains high.
4. Hire #5: The Operations Manager. As you grow, you will be crushed by administrative tasks: contracts, invoicing, team scheduling, etc. Bringing in an ops manager to handle these basics is essential. They will create the internal structure that allows you to continue scaling without everything falling apart.

Pro-Tip: Your next hires should be a Creator Recruiter (they will pay for themselves by signing just one creator every few months) and a Finance Admin (they will save you money through efficient expense and tax planning).

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Building an A-grade agency requires an A-grade team. Hire slow, fire fast, and never settle for anything less than the best. It is the single biggest contributing factor to your long-term success.