So last month my company did millions in top-line revenue, and after building this 100-person team to get here, I've actually realized that every single hire that I've made actually fits into one of three buckets. Someone to get the clients, someone to keep the clients, and then someone to keep the other two people out of jail. That is it. Everything else is just detail underneath one of those three things. And so today I'm breaking down exactly how my 100-person team is structured across those three buckets, when to build the buckets out, in what order, how to do it all profitably, so you end up making more money.

Because in just the last few months we actually cut head count in half in one of those departments, doubled it in another, had the highest income months for both us and our employees, making way more profit, and then also paying out the highest commission months ever in company history. And I just want to show you exactly what it looks like to actually be able to implement this. I also want to mention this isn't marketing specific or to one type of business.

Like yes, we run a marketing agency, but this works in all businesses, service, product companies, whatever. Because you need sales people to get people to pay you. You need fulfillment or product teams to be able to keep those customers happy, and then you need ops to have everyone else stay in line. And at the very beginning these three people can actually hold it all together, and we started out exactly like that.

So my wife and I got the leads, I fulfilled on them, and then my COO kept everything else from going sideways. And now we just have 100 people doing all of those same three things. About 60 of them are focused on getting clients, 27 work in fulfillment, keeping those clients happy, and 13 are in operations supporting the other two departments just to keep everything running super clean. So, same three buckets, just a lot more people in all of them now.

And here's how we built out each one. So first, the bucket that is most important is getting clients, and that breaks into two teams for us specifically, which is marketing and sales closers and SDRs. And since we run a marketing company, most of the marketing is actually handled in-house instead of outsourced to agencies. We have 13 people in this department. UGC creators who handle the ads, media buyers running campaigns on specific platforms, a team that writes scripts, films, edits content like what you're watching right now.

And together, this entire department is responsible for generating thousands of sales calls every single month exclusively through paid and organic social media content. And back when we first started, because of my experience making content for the largest companies in the world, companies like Amazon, PayPal, Venmo, Robinhood, my wife and I did all of our marketing, our sales. And it actually worked really well because we had no issue whatsoever getting the leads.

However, we did have to work pretty hard to actually be able to sell those leads, which we'll talk about next. But really, the entire company was built around us, my wife and I, because we had this very narrow skill set of marketing on social media. Meaning every other skill we hired out to someone else. And this is how I recommend most people to build out their business at the start. Find out which one of these three things you are, the person to get the leads, to keep the leads, or to keep other people in line, and then hire out the missing parts to support your existing skill set.

So, the marketing team, which was my wife and I's talents, filled the pipeline and teed up the leads to the sales team, which then converts it. Now, the actual sales team now is two departments split up between closers, so account executives, and SDRs. The closers are on video calls all day focused on one thing, which is just converting qualified leads that are on their calendar into revenue. And then supporting them are the SDRs, the sales development reps, whose job it is to handle outreach, get those leads onto the calendar, pre-qualify appointments so closers are always working at full capacity just sell.

But at the start, the sales team, which is really robust now, was also just me. I spent two months selling before I felt like I understood the process well enough to be able to hire out parts of the role. So, I couldn't just hire someone on day one to sell for a brand new company with a brand new sales process cuz I legitimately did not even know what a good outcome looked like. Like I wouldn't have been able to hire a sales rep because I couldn't tell them how many sales they were expected to make, or or the sales process should look like, or what prospects they would be talking to, or like even how much money they would make, right?

It didn't make sense. So, I had to start by doing it myself and establishing these expectations before hiring it out. Building out KPIs for the role. And so, when I started, I was actually doing 15-minute appointment setting calls myself. My calendar was slammed. It's these orange little appointments that were taking up most of my time. And then the closing calls were the longer half-hour or 45-minute calls, which are great.

Meaning I was spending 10 hours a day plus 6 days a week selling, doing pre-call work before the calls got on my calendar, post-call follow-up after these calls were on my calendar, and basically spending every other waking moment not selling delivering on clients' results, because I was also delivering on client results. And then I also had to work with the ops team to make sure everything was running smoothly. And I will admit, you do juggle a lot as a CEO of a startup, but if you are a CEO that is still selling right now, a sales development rep might just be the best next hire.

And that was actually my very next hire. So, I offloaded most of these calls, these 15-minute orange ones, to an appointment setter, and then I only started doing hour-long closing calls in month two of the business. And at this point, I had hundreds of setting calls of experience, right? I did the volume required, and so I could tell them what to expect and what kind of KPIs they should be held to. And then they, being able to do their job, would just tee me up to get the resulting qualified sales calls, which is where I spent most of my time.

But then eventually, I also got to the point where even the closing took up too much of my time, which meant I was lucky enough, enough to finally have enough volume to hire a full-time closer, because I could fill their calendar as well. And at that point, I had done the work enough myself that I understood what good looked like both in the SDR and the closing role, and I had a repeatable process locked in. So, I fully stepped out of the sales department and just started staffing reps.

So, first more closers, then more SDRs to support them, and then we kind of flip between the two depending on where the bottleneck was. And that's is common theme across all these departments. So, currently we have about 20 closers and 24 SDRs supporting them. The new SDRs start on the lowest quality leads, which are aged leads in our pipeline, and they work their way up to cancel the no-show prospects, which are slightly warmer, higher intent leads, and then with top performers eventually taking on kind of a receptionist role, handling only the fresh inbound leads that are the most qualified, the easiest to talk to, but also the highest value leads, meaning there's a a lot of risk there if they don't do their job really well.

So, we reserve that for the top performers. And then once our team grew past 10 reps or so on the sales side, the management actually became a big deal. So, passing on best practices, new rep onboarding, all of that was taking up too much of my time as the sales manager. So, we promoted our most experienced closer at the time to team lead. He runs weekly meetings, supports new reps at onboarding when they get into the team, and then keeps the standards really high for everyone.

Now, here's how we structure compensation to make the entire department ruthlessly competitive, and more importantly create an environment where the best reps get the best opportunities, meaning they make you the most money, set high standards, and the worst reps get pressure to either get better really fast or get off the team and stop wasting leads altogether. And this is specific to the sales department because every single department gets compensated differently depending on their strengths and their abilities, and it's very important for us to be able to create an environment where we can not only attract the best talent, but also keep them very well compensated and run the entire department efficiently.

So, on the sales side we run a stair-step model that is tied directly to monthly quotas. There are kind of three tiers: under 250,000 in gross revenue, 250 to 500 gross revenue, and 500,000 plus gross revenue. So, the more revenue a rep closes, the higher their compensation percentage per deal. Meaning, if they get over 250, suddenly all the deals that they made earlier that month get a big bump in commission. And then when they cross 500, another massive bump on commission for all of the previous deals that they did that month.

And at the top end, these people are working like 70 plus hours a week. You know, they're they're getting the best leads, so they're taking home like 40, 70,000 a month in commissions. It's a crazy amount of compensation. And what we've noticed from those best performers is that they are the best performers, meaning they are the most efficient with each lead, meaning despite paying them more per sale, feeling like I'm losing money to the the biggest guys, I actually also make more money for each lead they are given.

They are more efficient. And likewise, the reps that have the lowest monthly gross revenue get the least compensation per deal, which both saves us in cost and allows them to be very motivated to either get good really fast or get the heck off the team and stop burning leads. And because of this efficiency, paying the best guys the most and the worst guys the least, the entire sales compensation structure, including management, SDRs, everything, costs us just a little over 5% of our top line revenue, which if you have no context is half the industry average.

And yet we keep that top talent despite paying less as a company because the team is still earning multiple six figures, closing in on seven for some of these reps, and it still only costs us 5 cents on the dollar that we bring in. And let me tell you, making a job posting with the top-end income opportunity approaching seven figures, you can attract a completely different caliber of candidate, making the entire department way more competitive and way more efficient over time just due to the structure of how we compensate these reps.

Whereas a linear commission structure, which is really common, you make a fixed amount every deal, no matter what, no matter how many deals you make, no matter what position you are on the team, that kills this dynamic entirely. So, if everyone on the sales team earned the same commission and works the same pool of leads, the environment for competitiveness really goes flat. And most companies fall into this trap because they pay a fixed commission per deal where the lowest performer hits like four or five thousand bucks a month, they pay their rent, and then they just mentally check out for the rest of the month, burning the entire rest of month's worth of leads that you still pay for whether they close them or not.

And so this tier jump eliminates that ceiling for performance and really makes it un-capped. Like there's always a financial reason to keep pushing cuz the next guy, the next level is always worth chasing and competing for. And then practically, what we found at the top end, the guys doing over 500,000 a month in deals, they're the kind of rep that, you know, closes a million a month in deals, right? They're not going to stop at 500,000.

They just want to kill. There's no amount of money that would be good enough for that kind of person. That is the exact type of person you want to put in that kind of position, right at the top. And if I can give any kind of advice on a naturally high churn department, like a sales department, it's just lean into the high churn environment. Treat it as your advantage. Create an environment where if people come and go regardless like they do in sales, have the best rise to the top and be the worst ones that churn out of your department every single month.

Now, the second bucket is keeping the clients. So, fulfillment or depending on your industry, product. And delivery here for us in an agency feels way less exciting than sales. So, generally, it gets way less attention. But losing clients to bad fulfillment will kill a growing business arguably faster than a slow to sales team ever will because once the sale is made, right? You actually have commission that's paid out.

You bear all of the risk of fulfilling on that client or having them charge back, which could leave a bad review online, which costs the commission you already paid out, and you don't get any money from it. It could be even more expensive than what you would have made from the client in itself, not just because of lost revenue, but because of lost reputation for your business. So, you want to pay really close attention to your fulfillment team.

This is where most business owners under invest, especially in the internet space. And it's really popular uh even in the agency space to hire like near shore delivery or they hire a VA who doesn't even speak English, right? They save money with a remote hire instead of saving money through better systems and getting someone in the same country as the clients. And in most cases, the clients will often suffer because of that more than it's actually worth to the business owner.

There's just no way to measure it. And so, by contrast, we have six and multi six-figure OTEs in this role. And just like the sales role, our team often takes home more per month than the business owners that they start working with. So, it's the kind of person that we have in this position that our clients trust on day one because they know they're in good hands. The person they are talking to is often smarter than them and they've fixed the issue that the business owner is facing hundreds of times over.

That is an incredible position of leverage to operate from. And this leads to higher retention with clients, which makes us more than we ever would have saved by hiring near shore to VAs that don't even know how to speak English. And so, other than that, fulfillment really mirrors the sales structure. It is highly commission based and based on the total work completed. We also have senior account managers that are higher compensated, newer account managers that are ramping and get special attention.

And really for the top account managers, they just manage a full book of clients, run regular strategy calls, they're responsive in all the client accounts, and they kind of keep everything organized and documented. It's almost like a project manager role. But, behind them is a massive production team. So, we have various technicians, specialists, coordinators working behind the scenes to just do editing and content build-outs and managing ads, all the stuff.

And the day-to-day output that sets these account managers up for success actually happens from the production team. These are the guys that are delivering results, and it's like these are the project managers taking all the credits and being client-facing. So, and you can think about it as like every other large organization and how they run their client-facing departments. So, if you've ever been in big four accounting or corporate law or investment banking industries, they've all figured out the same exact thing.

There's someone really smart, really professional-looking that is client-facing leading the engagement, right? Lawyer in the big suit. And then dozens, if not hundreds, of supporting roles behind them in the back office doing all the work and making the deliverables just appear for the client before the deadline. Now, here's how we keep this entire structure profitable because it is a little different than the sales team.

While they are commission-based, we have some people in here that are actually salaried for more stable roles. So, account managers get a base per client, plus performance bonuses depending on different milestones that they reach. And then the ones that take the most clients, put in the most hours, also usually end up being the ones with the most practice, delivering the highest quality results for our clients, and so they get comps more.

And transparently with account managers specifically, same with sales, we've never had success with part-time account managers. The ones that work the most are usually the ones that are the best at working, so we structure the comp to incentivize working more, 40 hours plus. And then just like in sales, it helps to have at least one account manager that is making crazy money just to show new hires what is possible in the role for the person who really wants to do the most and overachieve.

Helps in hiring, helps in ramping, helps in demonstrating to the team that like it's not just a structural issue with the company, like that kind of compensation at the top end is possible, and here's exactly how you do it, model the best guy. Makes it very easy to lead. And the whole structure works to have our account managers become at a very high market rate relative to agency services, specifically social media marketing companies.

We are at the top of performance because we have a natural incentive for them to take on a whole bunch more work and either get really good or not make enough money for it to justify sticking around long-term. And because the entire department is a profit center, meaning it makes us more money if we have good talent in there through client referrals, so clients coming on without a customer acquisition cost, clients retaining longer-term, meaning increasing their LTV, we actually have all of their incentives highly correlated to performance.

So, not just taking on a bunch of clients and like hoping that the client does something right, but actually driving results, getting client wins, case studies, testimonials, reviews on review sites, and just generally being able to drive performance for the clients, how long you're able to keep the client. All of those metrics that make us more money, they get compensated more for at the same time. However, while that is true with account managers, it's not exclusively true with the production team.

And this is where we get into more cost centers, which we'll talk a lot about more on the ops side. Here we have editors who are actually on salary, meaning they're not paid more or less depending on the total number of videos they turn around. But, for example, they're held to high standards for quality, meaning I don't want you to turn around 30 videos in a day if all of them require a whole bunch of revision requests.

I would prefer fewer videos that don't require any kind of revision requests, meaning they're good to go right off the line. And it's something that's a little bit more difficult to KPI, which is really common when you get into more cost centers in your business. You don't necessarily have the ability to align their best productivity to companies' best productivity, in which you have to create some salaried roles where the compensation is more determined right out the gate, and then just hire better.

We'll talk a little bit about this more when we talk about the ops side, but just for context, we started out by having this department a lot more fixed with fewer incentives for performance. And we actually changed the compensation structure dramatically few months back to align for incentives for performance, especially at the top end here with the account managers. And actually, we cut this entire fulfillment department down to half the staff in the last four months, and we took gross profit from 15% to five total, and ended up comping some of the top reps even more than before.

Meaning, we didn't just decrease their salaries, we decreased costs and then increased their compensation, which is textbook efficiency gain by moving them more towards commission-based compensation, and then really cutting team to be as efficient as possible. So, lower team total cost relative to the revenue that they manage by moving the less efficient reps off the team and having the comp structure a little bit more aligned to what we have on the sales side, which is heavily based on rewarding the best reps with the most amount of income we could possibly give them.

And so, while I do have evidence that a commission-based role, being paid on performance, is amazing, and it's very easy to apply to the sales team. And it saved us a lot of money when applying to the fulfillment team. It is actually almost impossible to do for the operations team. So, I wanted to explain how we get around this. The last department, which is responsible for keeping the other two departments out of jail.

This is the function that no one talks about enough because most of the times, it is extremely difficult and complex to KPI these roles, but it is the department that makes or breaks literally everything else. And of the other million dollar per month businesses that I see in our space specifically like people online, this is the department they lack the most. Almost all of us internet business people are so quick to talk about sales or fulfillment automation.

But the real businesses in this world, the big businesses, the ones that do proper accounting, customer service, legal, HR, all the stuff that's less cool, this is what makes them so successful. So, if this is you, your most important hires here are probably going to be people that come from those traditional businesses, not other dudes on your Instagram. Organizations that are actually run by real adults, not teenagers on the internet.

This is the department of A+ students, people that have degrees, multiple degrees, that come with experience working in a thousand plus employee companies. Now, for example, our first hire here, actually our COO, came from Silicon Valley and had plenty of experience at larger companies way larger than ours. Our current director of ops had a previous career in tech, gaming, managing large customer service floors, and it gives them a lot of experience for what good under her department should look like.

These roles are hard to KPI and quantify otherwise. She knows what's good simply because she's seen it hundreds of times before. And you need this kind of experience specifically in your ops team to be able to hold everyone to really high standards without KPIs because what works to determine comp and performance in the sales and fulfillment buckets does not work for these op roles. Because for sales you can track their inputs, right?

Like you can look at leads, you can look at outputs, sales, and compare apples to apples across reps. But you probably won't be hiring a team of 10 lawyers or team of 10 accountants anytime soon. And so, it's hard to KPI an individual in that role to almost anything. And even if you do, it's like, do you want them winning more cases? Of course. How many cases should they win? As many as they can, right? It's like, imagine if you only had one sales rep and never could go hire a second one.

It'd be impossible to set realistic KPIs. Just like for accounting, do you want them making as many journal entries as possible showing that they did work today? Or do you actually want them making fewer to keep the books really simple and efficient? Which do you KPI? Probably neither. And so, these roles that are traditionally salaried are not commission-based in the first place because it doesn't make any sense. You have to have a higher level of confidence for when hiring someone because they will cost you money every single month whether they're performing or not.

Unlike a sales rep who only gets paid on commission. But, if you are able to find the right person and overpay at least one person of an extremely high caliber, it actually becomes this snowball effect to where they also want to work with the really high caliber people. And they shun low-skill people in tangential departments. For example, like if a director of ops often deals with HR and legal, but the HR person isn't doing their job, they will make it known that the HR person needs to go.

And the legal person will make it known that the HR person needs to go. And this is actually the case with us where we didn't have very many quantifiable KPIs behind the HR role. We put a few in place, but it's just so difficult to track. But, because our ops team was so good and they knew that HR hire was not a good fit, we were able to get sign-off on like five other people in the department. And I felt really comfortable letting that person go having almost no insight into their actual performance simply because I trusted the other entire rest of the team in the department.

And then, including the 10-year people in that department in hiring decisions also let us find the amazing head of people we have now who replaced the previous HR rep who's very well respected by everyone on the team now because they operate at a very high level and it's very clear to everyone that they are successful. And because the hire, promote, fire process isn't as objective in the ops department, you need to have greater consideration for how the team operates as a whole unit instead of being able to look at each individual hire as interchangeable as you would on the sales team.

This is not a department that benefits from high structural churn, and you shouldn't have it here, whereas it plays to your benefit on the sales side to have lots of people coming in and always being able to find newer and better people, which also makes the hiring process for the ops team a lot slower. You have to be much more confident in your decision because having high churn in this department is unrealistic. It generally doesn't lead to good team morale overall.

But this department is actually very important because you could have the best team to sell clients and then the best team to deliver on results. But eventually you get big enough as a company that you will have difficult clients, and you'll have to deal with disputes, contract enforcement, accounting issues, collections. All of this stuff is just as important for making money. And this actually reminds me of a quote from Brandon Turner who helped start the biggest real estate podcast in the world.

He said something to the effect of, "You aren't a big real estate investor until you get sued." Implying that no matter how big you think you are, no matter how successful you are in the real estate game or the the business game, until you're getting sued, you are just getting started. And it's not a question of if you get sued, right? If If you get big enough, it's a question of when you start operating at a high enough level that people start trying to come after your assets.

And so you could think of this department as the glue of the company, making sure nothing falls through the cracks between the departments, that everyone has what they need to do their jobs, that the business stays compliant as you grow and as you scale. The functions actually need to be even more specialized over time. So what started as my COO doing just about everything, eventually the person doing your bookkeeping shouldn't also be your legal point of contact, right?

And they shouldn't also be handling customer support and doing the hiring and then also managing the tech stack. You need to specialize, split these into dedicated roles. So for us, for example, a controller, director of ops, HR, general counsel. And suddenly every single person in these roles is significantly better than what you had before because you get someone who's a true expert specifically in that function. And this is also where the business starts to feel really easy, if I'm being honest.

I know it sounds counterintuitive cuz like more people, more complexity, right? More departments to oversee. But for the first time ever, when you get to this point, you are no longer the smartest person in every room in your own company. You have experts that you hire with a decade more of experience than you ever had in every single role. There's someone who knows payroll better than you, someone who handles legal issues better than you, someone who handles customer complaints better than you ever had the patience for.

And that's when you can actually lead and as a CEO make strategic decisions for the company instead of just managing this day-to-day. Now that I've broken down the three different functions here, the most important thing to understand is when to hire within each one because they don't always need attention at the same time. There's an order to it, right? And you should consider what bucket you fall into first and then fill the rest in this order.

So, to start out, you need to hire for clients acquisition, which is marketing and sales for us. Marketing, if you have split departments instead of full cycle sales, you should do marketing first because to sell anything on the sales side, first you need a pipeline. So, you need leads, you need some kind of awareness, some kind of consistent motion to be generating interests for prospects. If the top of the funnel is dry, nothing is going to run downstream, right?

And then you have sales. So, once the pipeline is there, you build out the sales function to convert it. You add sales reps, tighten the process, and start turning interest in the market into revenue for your business. After marketing, after sales, then you have fulfillment. So, every time sales had a really big month, delivery for us got stretched. And that's kind of just the cause and effect. More clients means more work and if you haven't staffed enough for the work side, the quality slips.

So, after every sales push, generally we would focus on fulfillment either efficiencies in the department or staff more people until we felt really confident we could handle the new volume of new clients without dropping the ball on existing clients. And then after that, you focus on ops. So, once marketing, sales, fulfillment are all running at a high level, eventually you're going to notice that the operational level has to catch up a few months later.

As customer support tickets come through, things like, "Oh, can you update my billing?" or "I got this contract question." or "There's a client dispute." or tracking data for every single client on the back end, right? All the stuff that ops does to make sure that everyone is running well. And while traditionally, roles like this are seen as cost centers, a place where money just always seems to leave and never come back, if you set up the ops department correctly as a whole, it will lead to more profit for your business.

Either by retaining and not losing clients or by winning back what you otherwise would have lost by not having proper coverage across the other two departments. For example, a recent hire here was our lawyer who had previously we had her on retainer for over a year helping with things here and there and now we just have her full-time salaried with W-2, incredible health care, all the works. And let me tell you, nothing gives you more peace of mind than having a lawyer on salary.

It is like that thing in the movies when the rich kid would say like, "My dad's lawyer is going to hear about this." But you are the kid that's rich and the dad and the lawyer is in your DMs for anything that comes up. It's like you feel so content. Like I'm ready for that bully on the playground now to come test me because I will make a profit center out of them. And then as soon as you can afford this kind of next big payroll, lawyer, director of tech, accountant, HR, you can fill that gap and make the entire business easier to run for yourself.

An example of this and how I learned it the hard way is actually from a problem we're working through kind of still right now, which is we try to scale the 5 million bucks a month in top line revenue and when we pushed it, we thought we could get there just by increasing the marketing spend and having enough sales reps to receive it. Marketing worked great. Sales team crushed it. There were plenty of reps. And so even though we did close 5 million dollars in contract value in a single month, the fulfillment team actually was not prepared for that many new client onboardings at once, which ended up resulting in almost 2 million dollars in refunds from clients that decided to use their 7-day money-back guarantee because the fulfillment team wasn't fast enough to be able to deliver on results within the first 7-day period of us working with those clients.

We have a interesting client onboarding process where we go out and like really demonstrate what we can do before we ask clients to commit. So it's part of the sales process that we we able to deliver on. Very stupid, lost us 2 million bucks. I know I'm an idiot. And so right now, we're focused on tightening that fulfillment process up, specifically how we onboard new clients, what happens in that first 7 days. So that next time we push for 5 million per month again, which we'll do very soon, we have the capacity for it, marketing knows how to do it, sales is locked and loaded.

We are literally just bottlenecked by fulfillment. Once we can do that, we can actually fulfill on the increased workload, we will get there. And then we'll probably need some more help on the op side a couple months later for any kind of clients that need more support. And so that's the cycle. That's the pattern that we have found in our business. And sometimes you can see it coming, sometimes you can only learn by watching something break, like setting up marketing, setting up sales, not having enough on fulfillment, you lose 2 million bucks, and then you go fix it next month.

But either way, the signals are pretty clear once you recognize the pattern and the flow in which you need to hire. And if you think about this structure, it'll only ever be one of three things: to get the clients, to keep the clients, or to keep the other two out of jail. Like if your revenue is low, go to marketing and sales, go get clients. If the clients are coming in, but then they're churning out or they're not succeeding, they're not having a good time, fulfillment is the bottleneck.

And then if you're good on sales, good at delivery, but then a lot of business owners, they generally just feel overwhelmed by like a million tiny things coming from every single direction. Feels like everyone needs something from you, the business owner, all at once, all the time, right? You ever felt that? If things are falling through the cracks, that's ops that needs reinforcement. And the goal here is just to move from one to the other one at a time, just like you climb a ladder, right?

First the right hand, then the left hand, then the legs, then the right hand, left hand, legs. And once you find that rhythm, scaling becomes extremely predictable and much more manageable. And I hope this video explained what that process should feel like, so you can just be more aware of it in your own business and not need to have as many things break to learn the same lessons that I did. But before we wrap up, I just want to be really clear about something.

In this structure and for most businesses, the biggest bottleneck is the marketing department. The biggest bottleneck for the entire business is how much money you make in, cuz Cuz you had more money, these problems would be easier to solve. Marketing feeds everything else. Cuz without leads, your sales people have nothing to close. Without sales, your fulfillment team has no clients to serve. Without revenue, you can't even afford to hire these specialty roles to hold the business together and make your job easier.

And this entire video actually glossed over the marketing team, mostly because my marketing team is run by our in-house team and it comes very second nature to us. It doesn't feel like a chore to explain. But when it comes to building yours, there are really only three options. The first one is to just hire freelancers overseas. It's the cheapest route. They'll do some marketing for you and you can find people who, you know, honestly have solid work behind them.

But you'll probably have to go through dozens, if not interview hundreds of candidates. Like that's what we do. We know what it takes to find killers in the marketing space, to find someone who's a really, really good person. And that's if you know exactly what you're looking for, right? Like we do marketing at a high level. We know exactly who we need to staff. If you've never done it before at a high level yourself, it means you're probably going to waste a lot of time and likely have little to show for the effort.

Option two is to build an in-house team. And that's how the biggest businesses operate and that's actually what we do now with our in-house team. When I need a new media buyer, I go out and buy one for a few hundred thousand bucks a year and they come with a decade of experience. If I need head of content, no problem. I'm going to make his entire family relocate to the middle of Alaska, shell out six figures for a salary and put him on the best health insurance plan HR could find just so he can make fun of me in the edit. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, you think that's funny?

Now, if you want to do it at that level, I'll be honest, it is a big investment, but it offers the highest ROI because you have them in-house full-time. And yeah, you will have to be running a big enough operation to justify them having full-time work because the best talent isn't going to come in and work for someone part-time for part-time pay. It's difficult and expensive overall. And then option three is just hire a team that does your marketing for you and trains your in-house team at the same time if you have one.

And that approach is what we've taken with thousands of business owners that don't have 50,000 a month for an internal team like we have. And we ended up just handling the execution for those clients while setting them up to grow independently. So they're not reliant on a single person or an agency in the future, but they can also get started marketing at a high level for a fraction of the cost. And if you want to see how we would build out the social media marketing systems for your business, click the link in the description of this video and we'll walk you through the whole thing.