Freelancer to Agency: #9 Who to Hire to Help You Grow Your Agency

Let's talk about the first three hires you need to make.

Hi there! 👋 

Welcome to the next edition of the Freelancer to Agency series, where you’re learning all the steps you need to take to move from freelancing to running your own marketing agency. 

Today, I want to talk to you about making your first hires to grow your agency. 

So, let’s jump right in.

Hire people to do “the work” 

The first hires will be people who will handle most of the content execution.

Starting out, you will likely be the person who reviews everything before it goes out to the client, but you will need to start building out a team (probably freelancers at first to keep your costs variable) to do the “actual work.” 

For example, if you’re a content marketing agency focused on written content, you will have to hire content writers and copywriters to write the content. If you’re running a short-form video agency (something that’s become very popular recently), you will need to hire people to record and edit videos. 

Whatever your agency does, you will need to hire (and train!) people to create the content you will deliver to your clients. 

Hire an operations person

Once you have a team that will handle content execution, you will need someone to help you manage the operational side of the business. 

This could be an admin assistant starting out, but the role will eventually morph into an operations management role covering anything from creating company presentations to writing SOPs and hiring and onboarding new staff. 

If you’re focused on delivering results for your client while growing your agency, you will need someone who handles all the paperwork, admin tasks, and everything else you don’t want to spend too much time on. 

Hire a business development person 

Once you have a team that handles content creation and an operations person to handle the admin side of the business, you will need someone to get you more customers. 

Initially, sales and marketing will fall on your lap. 

After all, it’s your agency and you want to make sure you get the type of clients you want to be working with. But you can’t really grow your agency efficiently if you’re also the one who handles sales outreach as well as marketing your agency. 


The business development person (or people) could come in different forms. For example, you could hire a sales assistant who builds a database of target customers and reaches out to them on your agency’s behalf using a cold email or DM sales script. 

Alternatively, you could hire a marketing expert who creates a sales funnel to get you inbound leads for your agency. 

When it comes to business development, there are different avenues you can explore, and you will likely use more than one way to get new customers. So, whatever customer acquisition avenues you choose, you will hire for those. 

More hires to come 📈

Hiring for the three positions mentioned above will help you take your agency to the next level, but you will soon find yourself hiring for more positions as your company grows.  

Talk to you next week!

Alex

Follow me on TikTok if you haven’t already done so!

@alex.lielacher

The perfect candidate at Rise Up! #businesstiktok #fyp #contentmarketing