Agency owners: book a free 30-minute operations diagnostic. We’ll identify the bottleneck limiting your time, capacity, or growth and determine the operational plan to fix it.

The team that got you to $1M won't get you to $10M

A few days ago, I talked about overcoming the talent gap and the difficulty of scoring A-level talent early in the business. 

But once the operation is scalable, this hurdle becomes a lot less challenging. 

When your agency crosses the $5-10 million threshold, your primary focus should be upgrading talent.

I've worked with over 1,250 agency owners, and the one thing I almost never see is the same core team at $1 million and $10 million. 

It just doesn't happen. And the reason is pretty simple: 

You can't afford the talent at $1M that you can at $10M. 

Somewhere past $5 million, your agency has more clients, more complex operations, and higher expectations. The people who helped you get here may not have the skills or experience to take you to the next level.

The best operators start treating talent like a pipeline at this stage. Most agencies will hire a full-time recruiter whose only job is to headhunt and recruit amazing talent. They build a continuous recruiting process designed to attract exceptional talent before they desperately need it.

This is why the first three installments of this series matter so much–because hiring A-level talent at scale is possible because, by now, the operation is fully optimized. 

Once you've optimized onboarding, reduced churn, and built systems that maximize your team's efficiency, you should have a much more profitable operation.

Meaning, a 15%-20% net margin agency should be at 30%-35% net margin (before it invests the excess cash in talent). Those aren't guaranteed margins, but they're the kind of targets I want agency owners thinking about.

Better margins → better talent. Better talent → less churn. Less churn → more predictable revenue. 

It's a compounding cycle, and it's one of the biggest differences between agencies that plateau at seven figures and those that continue scaling.

Is your agency's operation holding you back from hiring better talent? Book a free 30-minute operations diagnostic. I'll help you identify where operational inefficiencies are eating into your margins and what needs to change to support your next stage of growth.

Book a free 30-minute operations diagnostic. We’ll identify the bottleneck limiting your time, capacity, or growth and determine the operational plan to fix it.

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