From Founder Bottleneck to Paid Media Leader: Arcady Media's Key Hire

Snapshot:

Business: Performance Marketing Agency (Arcady Media)

Roles Hired: Paid Media Lead

Objective: Find an experienced operator capable of owning the entire paid media function — from creative strategy and funnels to media buying and QA — allowing the founder to step out of day-to-day execution.

Outcome: One highly specialized Paid Media Lead hired in approximately 4–5 weeks, filling a difficult-to-source role and removing the founder as the operational bottleneck.

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The Problem:

Arcady's founder was doing everything: the ads, the creative strategy, the media buying, the funnels, even QA on the ad videos. To keep growing, he needed to replace himself — hand the entire paid function to someone who could not only own it end to end, but improve it. It wasn't enough to be a good media buyer; this person had to run the full funnel with real, verified spend behind them, and a track record of growing agencies specifically — not e-commerce brands, not B2B lead-gen, but agencies, across sales, creative strategy, media buying, and QA on video editors. That exact combination is rare, which is why it had stayed on the founder's plate.

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The Strategy:

Because the role demanded a specific, verified background, we didn't post and hope, we mapped the space for operators who'd owned full-funnel paid for agencies and could prove real spend and real results. We screened hard for the full range: someone who could set creative direction, run the buying, build the funnels, and QA the creative, while communicating like an operator who's grown an agency before. The right person turned out to be in Toronto, the exact same city as Arcady and was perfectly aligned to the job description.

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The Result:

We placed a Paid Media Lead in Toronto with verified spend and a real agency-growth track record — someone who could take the entire paid function off the founder's plate and own it end to end. That freed him from being the bottleneck on his own agency's paid media, so he could step back from execution and focus on growth instead of running every ad himself.

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Why It Works

At Zabota, we don't just fill vacancies — we identify proven operators for roles where experience can't be substituted.

For Arcady Media, we targeted candidates with verified agency-growth backgrounds who had already owned the entire paid media function, including strategy, media buying, funnel optimization, and creative oversight. The result was a successful placement for a hard-to-fill leadership role, enabling the founder to transition from daily execution to scaling the business.