Growing a Team
16 articles
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Redefine your Ops
Ops isn't a set of systems, it's a set of responsibilities. The depth of your Ops is how many of them the business handles rather than you.
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Board meetings for people who don't do board meetings
Your first board meetings will be messy and slow. That's the point: the bloated board meeting is where you and your future leaders learn how the business works.
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An expected bonus isn't a bonus
An expected bonus stops working as a bonus. How to actually incentivise an agency team: commission, profit share, ad hoc rewards, training and equity.
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The hire that won't pay for themselves
The quick maths you do before hiring - new revenue vs new salary - misses on-costs, management overhead, and the margin contribution a hire needs to make. Here's why that instinct gets less reliable as your agency grows.
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Why small agencies should hire in the Goldilocks Zone
The highest-ROI hires for small agencies are people with just enough experience who are on the cusp of becoming authoritative, they bring passion and loyalty in exchange for mentorship and opportunity.
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Your best people aren't unicorns
Treating your best employees as irreplaceable unicorns keeps you relying on luck; breaking down what actually makes them great gives you a repeatable way to find more of them.
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Why three-month probation periods don't work (and what to do instead)
The standard three-month probation period is an inherited convention that delays critical hiring decisions; a structured 4-week onboarding framework gives you evidence-based confidence far sooner.
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The places SOPs won't reach: why standard operating procedures have limits
Standard operating procedures can only handle the predictable parts of agency work; the real value lies in the complex, non-linear problem-solving that can't be documented, and scaling means finding people who can do that too.
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Your first hire: the two C's you can't ignore
Before making your first hire, strengthen two fundamentals, cash position and client commitments, to turn a high-risk leap into a calculated strategic move.
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Beware your final form
A fully optimised agency with perfect processes and stable retainers sounds like the dream, but that 'final form' is actually a ceiling, and you need to deliberately build in space for evolution to keep growing.
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Frameworks are useless. Here's mine.
Sustainable agency growth is not a straight line but a flywheel, reputation, client attraction, delivery, and proof of results compound on each other, and your job is to find where your loop is weak.
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The power you didn't ask for: how agency founders can lead without alienating their team
As a founder, every opinion you share lands like a decision, recognising the power dynamic you didn't ask for and pairing it with empathy is essential to building a team that trusts you enough to push back.
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Bad hires are inevitable. Here's the thing you can actually fix.
Every agency founder will make a bad hire, the real damage comes from letting self-blame, false fairness, and fear of rocking the boat delay the decision to act on it.
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Don't get stuck in the valley of low profit
Agency profitability follows a predictable curve, small founder-led agencies and large structured ones both thrive, but the messy middle is a valley of rising costs, harder sales, and squeezed margins that demands intentional navigation.
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Why agency founders resist essential business practices (and why you shouldn't)
Agency founders often resist fundamental business practices like line management and sales, mistaking avoidance for innovation. Knowing the difference between genuine innovation and uncomfortable avoidance is critical to sustainable growth.
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How many hats are you wearing?
Agency founders wear every hat by default, but choosing which roles to hand off, and which to keep, shapes your culture, your growth, and your sanity.