Multi-role leadership engagement

Creator management agency, 50+ people

Outcome

Full leadership and senior management bench placed in one engagement

Client context

The agency had scaled past 50 people on founder energy alone. The founder was doing six jobs personally: head of ops, head of growth, head of content, head of sales, recruiter, and chief firefighter. Revenue was growing fast, but operational complexity was outpacing the founder's bandwidth. Every important decision still routed through one person, and the team was starting to feel the cost of that bottleneck on delivery quality and on speed of execution. The agency needed a real leadership and senior management bench so the founder could step out of every meeting and let the business run. The market they operate in is creator-led content monetisation, which requires people who understand the workflow, the platforms, and the production cadence at a deep level. Generic agency operators do not fit. The bench had to be built quickly and discreetly, without disrupting the existing team or signalling change to clients.

The challenge

Standard recruiters do not understand creator-led businesses. Most candidates from traditional marketing agencies cannot translate the operating model, the tempo, or the commercial dynamics. The roles needed were specific and they did not share a candidate pool. The agency needed a COO who could run the entire operational layer, a Growth Manager who understands creator monetisation, a Content Director who can ship at the cadence the business demands, a Sales Director who can build a high-touch B2C sales motion, a Chat Sales Manager who understands the conversational sales operation, and a team of social media and traffic managers who can run paid and organic at scale. Discretion mattered because most strong candidates were sitting inside competitor agencies. Speed mattered because the founder was already at the limit. Quality could not slip on any role, because a weak hire in any one seat would force the founder back into firefighting mode.

Search strategy

This was a multi-month leadership engagement, not a single search. Mihai ran every scorecard personally and led every intake. We mapped the market for each role independently because the candidate pools do not overlap and the assessment signals are different for each seat. For the COO and the Growth Manager, we sourced from competitor agencies and from adjacent niches with similar operational complexity, looking for operators who had already lived through a 50 to 150 headcount transition. For the Content Director and Sales Director, we sourced from creator-adjacent businesses that had scaled production and high-touch sales, where shipped portfolio and conversion data were verifiable. For the Chat Sales Manager and the specialist team of social media and traffic managers, we sourced from inside the niche itself, where the operational knowledge is unique and largely unwritten. Every shortlist went through a structured Topgrading-style assessment, including reference checks with former managers, not just nominated references. Discretion was built into every step. No candidate was approached without confirming their interest in confidential terms first.

Result

Within 90 days the agency had a complete leadership bench in place. The COO took over the entire operational layer and gave the founder back the daily standup, the staffing decisions, and the cross-team coordination work. The Growth Manager rebuilt the acquisition funnel and gave the leadership team a real growth model for the first time. The Content Director shipped a 2x improvement in production throughput inside the first quarter, with no drop in creative quality. The Sales Director restructured the conversational sales motion and tightened the handoff between top of funnel and closing. The Chat Sales Manager standardised the chat operation across the team, which had previously lived in the heads of three senior operators. The specialist social media and traffic managers absorbed the paid and organic work the founder had been doing personally. The founder got back time to focus on strategic decisions and creator partnerships, instead of running every team meeting. The agency was set up for the next stage of growth without the operational bottleneck that had been holding it back.

“This was a full leadership engagement that other recruiters would not have touched. Discreet, fast, and the quality of every hire was high enough that we did not have to redo any of them in the first six months.”

Founder · Founder, creator management agency