At $100k a month, your team should be built around fulfillment pods. A pod is a small team that does the work you sell without you, and you duplicate it as you add clients. That frees you to focus on sales and marketing.
For an e-com email agency, that's strategy, designs, and the emails that go out.
For an ads agency, that's creatives and media buying.
Hiring a project manager or an executive assistant because your calendar is full doesn't take you out of that work. It adds payroll without replacing the seats that actually deliver. The ONLY hires you should be making are for fulfillment.
What does an e-com email pod look like?
An e-com email pod has four seats: a Klaviyo tech, an e-com email designer, a copywriter, and an account manager/strategist. All of these roles are a specialized part of what you're doing when you fulfill your service for a client. You break these into roles so each team member can do this specialization for multiple clients. When you first start out, you're doing all of these roles as just the founder.
01
Klaviyo tech
Splicing, retention modeling, and segmentation. It's tedious, not hard, once you're at 10–15 clients.
02
E-com email designer
Someone who only does e-com email, not B2B or newsletters.
03
Copywriter
Writes the emails.
04
Account manager / strategist
The most important seat. They own client calls, high-level strategy, and campaign calendars.
One full pod is a mini agency inside your agency. Depending on the agency type, about 10–12 clients can be assigned to a single pod. $5k a month from each client is roughly $50k from that pod.
When you're ready for more clients, you take the high-level strategy and client calls for the next three or four clients yourself. You don't go back into Klaviyo or design. Then you hire the next pod and move those clients into it.
01
Take 3–4 new clients
You handle strategy and client calls.
02
Hire the next pod
You don't return to Klaviyo or design.
03
Transfer clients
The new pod takes over fulfillment.
Build once. Duplicate to scale
$50k
$100k
$250k
$300k
You scale by duplicating pods. The pod you build under about $50k a month is the same structure you run at $100k, $250k, and $300k. You get one pod working, then duplicate it as you get more clients.
What does an ads agency pod look like?
An ads pod has four seats: a static ads designer, a video editor, a media buyer, and a creative strategist. If you sell media buying and creatives, under about $50k you're usually still doing creative strategy, media buying, and client calls yourself. Design and video editing should already be part-time or contractor work, since those are lower-risk hires.
The pod works like an assembly line, in this order:
01
Static ads designer
02
Video editor
03
Media buyer
04
Creative strategist
The creative strategist is the most important person in an ads agency. They write the ads that sell, and since Meta is creative-heavy they have a lot to do.
Who manages the pods at four pods?
At about four pods, promote a senior account manager to manage them. Don't hire an ops manager, an EA, or a director of ops.
Promote your best account manager if they've earned it, or hire a strong one, into a senior AM or head of delivery seat. They keep one to three of your most important clients and spend most of their time on the pods:
Profitability
Answering AMs
Getting problems solved on time
KPI plans
Growth plans
Making sure people feel heard
That person is a mini CEO doing the managing you can't do while you're selling. A middle manager who only manages makes less sense now that AI covers a lot of the reporting.
Who talks to clients in an ads pod?
The media buyer usually talks to clients, in addition to their media buying duties, but it depends on the volume of deliverables. Sometimes it’s the creative strategist managing client communications.
At around 50 ads per client per month, your creative strategist can't manage the client comms and pump out a ton of ads, so the media buyer is usually the better person for account management and technical questions.
Adding a CSM who isn't an expert turns every answer into a game of telephone.
01
The CSM gets a question from a client.
02
They go check with the creative strategists, who check with the media buyer.
03
Then they talk back to the CSM, and then they tell the client.
To answer a question, you need to get several people involved instead of just having one person who knows what they're talking about communicating with the clients. Hiring a CSM just adds payroll, and the client gets slower and worse answers.
At three or four pods, promote a creative strategist or media buyer to head of paid over the pods. It's the same job as on the email side: profitability, coaching, KPIs, growth, and keeping random questions off your desk so you can run sales and marketing.
Should you hire a PM, CSM, or EA under $100k a month?
No. A project manager, a customer success manager, or an executive assistant is hard to justify even at $100k a month if fulfillment still depends on you.
Take yourself out of fulfillment with self-contained pods instead. Then your job becomes sales and marketing, which is where you have the most leverage.
Hire The Seats That Are Hard To Find
If you're building your team and can't find the key seats, like a creative strategist, an account manager, or an email strategist.
We find those people so fulfillment runs without you.
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