Most agency founders kick off the same way. They do everything themselves. Sales, delivery, admin, invoicing, client calls at 9pm on a Tuesday. And honestly, it works for a bit. But it doesn’t scale, and eventually you’ll need to bring people in. The thing is, the order you hire in matters way more than most people think.
Bring in the wrong role too early and you’ll burn cash on someone with nothing to do. Leave the right role too late and you become the bottleneck holding your own business back. So here are the five hires that tend to separate agencies that grow from the ones that get stuck.
Hire One: A Delivery Person Who Can Run With It
Your first hire shouldn’t be a salesperson. It should be someone who can pick up client work and deliver it to a high standard without you looking over their shoulder every five minutes.
If you’re running a marketing agency, that could be a senior content producer or a paid media specialist. If it’s a web agency, you’re probably looking at a developer. The job title will change depending on what you sell, but the idea is always the same: get yourself out of day-to-day delivery so you can focus on winning clients and keeping them happy.
The big mistake here is going too junior. A grad or intern will cost less upfront, sure, but they’ll need training and oversight you simply don’t have time for right now. Your first hire needs to be someone who can take a brief, run with it, and get it signed off without you being involved at every step.
Hire Two: A Second Pair of Hands on Delivery
Before you even think about sales or operations, double down on delivery. One person handling all the client work will burn out quickly, especially as you bring on more accounts. Your second hire should fill a gap the first one leaves, whether that’s a different skill set or just handling overflow when things get busy.
This is also when client management starts to get real. With two people delivering work, you’ll need clearer briefs, better handovers, and some basic way to track who’s doing what. Even a shared spreadsheet will do the job for now. Just don’t wait until things start falling through the cracks to sort it out.
Hire Three: An Operations or Admin Hire
This is the one most founders put off for too long. By the time you’ve got two delivery staff and a growing list of clients, admin tasks are eating into everyone’s time. Proposals, contracts, invoicing, chasing payments, onboarding new clients, keeping records in order.
An operations hire doesn’t have to be full-time straight away. A part-time office manager or virtual assistant can handle most of it. The point is to stop your delivery team burning hours on non-billable work. This is also when your systems need to catch up. A proper CRM software for agencies will make a real difference here, because trying to track client details, contracts, and follow-ups across inboxes and sticky notes just stops working once you’ve got more than a handful of accounts.
Hire Four: A Dedicated Salesperson or Business Developer
Only now, with delivery and operations sorted, should you think about bringing in someone focused on new business. A lot of founders want to hire a salesperson early because revenue feels urgent. But if you can’t deliver what they sell, you’ll just create a backlog and end up damaging client relationships.
A good business developer at this stage will take prospecting and lead nurturing off your plate. You’ll probably still close the deals yourself for a while, but having someone consistently filling the pipeline is what turns an agency from project-based work into something with real momentum behind it.
Hire Five: A Senior or Specialist Who Opens a New Lane
Your fifth hire should either expand what the agency can offer or go deeper in a specific area. That could be a strategist, a designer, a data analyst, or maybe a channel specialist. The exact role depends on where your clients keep asking for more and where you see the biggest opportunity to grow.
This hire is about moving from “we do a bit of everything” to “we do this thing really well.” Agencies that stay generalists for too long usually end up competing on price. A specialist hire lets you compete on value instead, and that changes everything.
The Sequencing Mistakes That Trip Agencies Up
The most common one is hiring for sales before delivery can keep up. You end up overpromising, underdelivering, and losing clients you worked hard to win. The second mistake is skipping the ops hire altogether. Without someone managing the admin side of things, your senior people will spend half their time on work that doesn’t actually bring in any money.
Then there’s hiring too many juniors too fast. Three inexperienced hires will cost you more in management time than one experienced person who can just get on with the job. Every early role you fill should take something off your plate, not add to it.
At the end of the day, there’s no single template that works for every agency. A design studio will have different priorities to a PR firm. But the general rule holds: delivery first, then operations, then sales, then specialism. Get that order right and each hire will fund the next one. Get it wrong and you’ll spend all your time putting out fires instead of growing the business.
