I want to flag upfront — this isn't a chapter from someone with a 50-person team. I haven't moved into hiring C-suite executives. I haven't built a 100-person org. I had a CFO for a brief stretch, I have an executive VA now, plus the operational team that runs the brands day-to-day. That's it. Lean by design.
What I have done is figure out how to outsource correctly so I can run multiple brands and still have time to do this case study. The principles in this module are what got me from one-man-band to having a team that runs without me. They're not theoretical. They're directly from the books I read, the operators I pay to talk to, and what I've seen work and not work across the brands I've operated.
The order of this module: the foundational rules first (the 70% rule, constraint theory, how to think about hiring at all), then the SOP framework (the document that makes hiring worth it), then individual sub-pages for hiring each role.
The 70% Outsource Rule
This is from a book called Great CEOs Are Lazy — which you should read. Authors are smarter than me. Take the principles.
The rule:
If someone can do something 70% as good as you can do it, and outsourcing it removes that constraint from you, outsource it.
That's it. Simple. The 70% bar matters because if you wait for "100% as good as me," nobody will ever clear it and you'll do everything yourself forever. 70% gets the work done at acceptable quality and frees up the most valuable resource you have — your time and attention.
Examples of tasks that meet the 70% bar for most operators:
- Image editor
- Video editor
- Ad uploader
- Customer support
- Most administrative work
- Most content production work
Most operators read this rule and immediately push back: "But I have to know how to do this myself." No, you don't. You have to know what good looks like. You don't have to be the one producing it.
Think about customer support specifically. You can answer customer support emails. It takes you 30 minutes a day. But that 30 minutes compresses your brain — the rest of the day you're stressed about the email you had to answer about the customer who forgot they bought a subscription. You've reduced your capacity to drive revenue of the business just because you didn't want to give someone $100/week to handle it.
If you're scaling, that compression bottlenecks the entire business. You stay stuck at the level you're at, constantly, just because you wouldn't give someone $100/week.
That math doesn't make sense. Hire the support person.
The water hose
Here's how I visualize this. Imagine your business as a water hose. You're at the spigot. The water coming out of the hose is money — your revenue.
Most operators think the way to grow is to crank the spigot harder. Work more hours. Push more output. More effort = more water out the other end.
That's wrong. The output is constrained by kinks in the hose — bottlenecks anywhere along the way. If a kink pops up halfway through the hose and you're at the spigot cranking harder, the water output decreases. Or stays the same. Or barely budges.
The fix isn't more spigot. The fix is to identify and unkink the bottleneck.
For most operators, the kink is them. They're the bottleneck. They're spending time on tasks that someone else could do at 70% quality, and the high-revenue tasks (creating ads, hiring talent, building brand strategy, talking to customers) are getting compressed into the leftover hours.
Find your highest-revenue task. Find what's preventing you from spending more time on it. Unkink that bottleneck.
If the bottleneck is "I'm doing too many low-value tasks myself," the unblock is hiring. Find someone who does each task at 70%, hire them, free up your hours.
If the bottleneck is "I can't afford to hire anyone yet," then you keep doing it yourself until you can afford to. The 70% rule still applies — it just means you outsource later. You can't outsource what you can't afford. You need to make money first.
When NOT to outsource
The 70% rule has limits. Don't outsource things where:
- You can't find someone 70% as good. Some roles are hard to fill at quality. If you're a creative strategist and you can't find another creative strategist who hits 70%, you keep doing it yourself.
- You can't train someone up to 70%. If a role requires brand-specific judgment that takes months to teach, you might be better off keeping it in-house with you for now.
- The cost of outsourcing exceeds the revenue you free up. If hiring someone for $X/month means you have $X less to spend on ads or product, and the hours you free up don't generate >$X in additional revenue, the math doesn't work yet.
Most operators err on the side of NOT hiring when they should. A few err on the side of hiring everything immediately and burning cash. The rule is: hire when the math says hire. Don't hire because hiring feels productive.
What an SOP actually is
An SOP is the operating system. Three things, that's it:
- What to do.
- How to do it.
- What gets you fired.
That's the whole SOP. Most operators overthink this and end up with 40-page documents that nobody reads. Don't do that.
A good SOP is short enough that a new hire can read it in 30 minutes and start working. It's specific enough that the hire doesn't need to ask follow-up questions on day-to-day execution. And the "what gets you fired" section is brutally clear so there's no ambiguity about consequences for sloppy work.
How to build an SOP with AI
This is the actual workflow I use to build SOPs from scratch. Takes 30 minutes for V1.
Step 1: Voice memo to AI.
Open a transcription tool — I use Whisper. Talk for 5 minutes about the role. "I need to hire an image editor. They're going to do X. The challenge is Y. I need them to use these tools. The thing I'm worried about is Z." Just brain-dump everything you know and care about for the role.
Step 2: AI builds V1.
Drop the transcript into Claude with a prompt like: "Build me an SOP for this role. Three sections: what to do, how to do it, what gets you fired. Keep it tight." Claude will produce a V1 in under a minute.
Step 3: Stress test V1 mentally.
Read it as if you were the new hire. Where are you confused? Where are you missing context? Where would you have to ask a question? Mark each gap.
Step 4: Stress test V1 physically.
Hand it to the actual hire. Watch how they execute. Where do they break? Where do they ask questions? Each question they ask is a gap in the SOP.
Step 5: Iterate.
For every question they ask, update the SOP so the next hire doesn't have to ask it. SOPs are V1 → V5 → V6 → V12 over time. You're constantly exposing them to new situations and updating them based on what breaks.
My customer support SOP isn't what I was using a month ago. I exported the existing one, dropped it back into Claude, said "this is for a subscription brand, deepen it for these subscription-specific scenarios," cleaned up the output, mental-stress-tested it, and now it's getting physical-stress-tested by my support VA. After a couple weeks I'll know what else needs updating.
Each iteration removes a gap. The endgame is an SOP so good that the hire never asks you a question. If they're still asking you questions, the SOP isn't good enough. You shouldn't have to talk to your hires every day.
Learning from your hires
Counterintuitive sauce: when a new hire comes on, ask them how they would approach the role.
Sometimes they have a better way than what's in your SOP. They've worked at three other ecom brands and have a specific workflow that's faster than yours. They learned a trick at their last gig that your team doesn't know about.
Compare what they'd do against what you have. If theirs is better, test it. If yours is better, train them on yours. Either way, you're improving the system.
This is the real benefit of hiring people who've worked at higher levels of the same role elsewhere — they bring institutional knowledge. Don't waste that by forcing them into your existing template.
The hiring philosophy that actually matters
Beyond the tactical 70% rule, here's what's saved me from bad hires:
Don't hire people you dislike. If you have a gut feeling that someone is going to be annoying to work with, that feeling is data. Trust it. The cost of working with someone you don't like every day, even if they're skilled, exceeds the value they bring.
Don't hire UGC creators because they're hot. I've done this. I'll be honest. I've hired creators based on looks and not skills. Don't do it. They didn't perform, they cost me money, I had to fire them. Skills first. Personality fit second. Looks aren't a hiring criterion.
The single evaluation question: Do they make me more money than they lose me? If the answer is yes, keep them and figure out how to get more out of them. If the answer is no, fire them — fast. The cost of keeping a bad hire compounds quickly. They take up management time, they slow the team down, they take time away from finding and training a good one.
This sounds harsh. Hiring is harsh. You're not running a charity. You're building a business that exists to print money. Hires that don't help do that have to go.
My actual team — the transparency layer
Quick honesty section because I see too many people pretend they have 50-person organizations when they have 5.
I've been intentionally lean. Across my brands, I run mostly with VAs in specific roles + a small core team. I had a CFO for a brief stretch when I was scaling one brand. I have an executive VA now who handles a lot of the operational stuff so I can focus on strategy and content. Outside of that — no big org chart.
I haven't hired senior executives, full-time C-suite roles, or anything close to a traditional ecom team structure with directors and VPs.
Why this matters: the principles in this module work for that level of team. If you're trying to build a 200-person organization with HR departments and complex org charts, this isn't the right resource for you — you should read books written by founders who've done that. What I can teach is how to run multiple 7- and 8-figure brands lean, with a small team that operates on tight SOPs and where every hire makes you measurably more money than they cost you.
Recommended reading + listening
These are the resources that shaped how I think about teams:
Books:
- Great CEOs Are Lazy — the foundation of the 70% rule and constraint theory. Read this one first.
- The E-Myth Revisited — I haven't fully read it yet, but every operator I respect has recommended it. Same vein as Great CEOs Are Lazy — about systems and replacing yourself.
Podcasts:
- Founders (David Senra) — biographies of great founders broken down. Listen on long drives.
- Operators — DTC operators talking shop. Real-world tactical level.
- The IKONIK founder's podcast
Other:
- Pay people to talk to you. I've reached out to operators on Twitter, paid them for a call, learned more in 60 minutes than from months of grinding. If you have a personal brand, sometimes operators will just talk to you for free. Use that.
The sub-pages of this module
This module breaks down into 6 sub-pages, each covering a specific role on my actual team and how I hire and operate it. The order roughly reflects which roles to hire first as you scale, but every operator's situation is different — read whichever roles are most relevant to where you're at.
- The Customer Support SOP — the first role most operators should hire and the system that runs it
- Hiring UGC Creators — the volume content production hire that prints B-roll
- Hiring an Influencer VA (IFVA) — the operator who runs the Module 1 affiliate community system, hire day one
- Hiring Video Editors — sniper-mode creative production
- Hiring Image Editors — machine-gun-mode creative production
- Hiring a Media Buyer — finally lets you get out of the daily Meta bug rage
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