5 Essential Job Roles for a $1m+ Agency

What's good y'all! John here, you know the vibes! In today's video, I'm talking about five essential roles every agency needs to scale past 1 million. Let's do this! 

So here it is y'all. Here is the breakdown of our team. We handle between 12 to 16 projects at once. Keep in mind that each project could be at a different level or different step in our five-step process. So we could be just onboarding them and we're working through the brand discovery or maybe we got info back and we're working on a sitemap. or maybe a project is wrapping up in QA or quality assurance and we're getting ready to go live.

So all those projects can be a different steps. So here are the specific roles that we have at our 13 person team and how we break that down and delegate to our team members. So one at the top you have me as management. My main role is to create amazing content like this. Hire amazing folks, empower them and delegate all of the things that I do on a daily basis. So when I started the agency I was doing design, I was doing development, writing HTML, writing CSS. Essentially doing all the work.

I always applaud that because I think it's important to be able to know and understand how to do the work but the nuance and more specifics and details I hire people better than me that are designers, that are developers and I charge accordingly so I can pay them well and be able to get the job done in the long term. So my main role right now as the founder is to create content to go out and sell and then of course manage and delegate to the team.

1. Client Manager

Then we have our client manager Jay. That's my right-hand man. He essentially manages all of our clients. He mitigates expectations, he sends out weekly emails, he keeps clients abreast of what's going on and he delegates things to our design and development team which I'll talk to a little bit later on. Him and I have three meetings a week Monday, Wednesday and Friday usually just to review projects. Talk about what needs to be completed, talk about what was done and talk about any things that he needs from a leadership perspective that I can delegate to him.

2. Operations Manager

Then we have our operations manager, Gerri. She does operations/media mainly because she manages my other business Black Illustrations which maybe takes 5 to 7 hours a week to manage. On the other side she manages social media for myself, our agency and Pigeons Mission, a game that I'm working on with my son. 

3. Quality Assurance Specialist

Then we have our quality assurance specialist, her name is Pat. She is focused on a few specific things. One, she does all of our sitemaps. All of our sitemaps are based on brand discovery and assets that we've created. And then she does the sitemaps, those are her main priorities and she does QA or quality assurance. She goes through with a fine-tooth comb on each one of our websites. Checks them on different breakpoints using tools like browser stack and really gets everything that's needed to the development team to make updates. So her role is two fold, she does the sitemaps and she does all the quality assurance on all of our client websites.

4. Developers

Then we have our Webflow developers which we actually have four. Sorry I can't count on staff right now. And we just hired another one that's really amazing. So we technically have five. We have one is our lead developer who actually helps me recruit and find other amazing developers. One thing I recommend when it comes to development is you start to build up your development team and you see one individual that's just really great that excels really well.

You can put them in a leadership role. Have them work on the larger bigger projects and then what you can do when you looking to hire more developers you can run them past that individual. Saying ‘Hey! I have these three candidates. Based on the work that they've done which one do you think is the best?’. It's a really really great cheat code to get high quality folks. We just hired a new developer that's an amazing referral from our main Dev pages. So those developers I recommend having developers work on one to two projects max.

Mainly because you don't want them to be switching from different projects and other developers working on this and other developers working on that. You want to have one developer dedicated to a project that sees it all the way through. Even though we use a system like client first through webflow to organize and structure a lot of our projects. You want to make sure that one developer is working on a project just for familiarity with the entire project as a whole. Just makes it a lot easier long term. That's the developer side.

5. Designers

Then on designers. We have three designers on our team. One of those designers is a pixel designer that's for our project that we're working on the actually the project I'm working on with my son which is a sides scrolling video game. So he's focused there. Our other designers, their main I say goals are two things and some of them a couple of them can do both, some of them can only do one or the other. Doing brand guideline or brand design which is logo, color palette, all that good stuff. And then High Fidelity designs for websites. Now in most cases you're going to find a designer that excels at one.

In some cases and rare cases you'll find a designer that can do both logo branding and web design which is phenomenal. We have a couple team members like that but the rest we divvy up work as needed. For designers you can push a little bit more work on them. They can handle maybe two, three projects max, nothing more than three. If you're getting more than three and starting to increase that number just continue to hire as needed.

So that's it, designer, developer. And that's pretty much the main kind of five roles. So you have client manager, you have ops manager, you have quality assurance specialist, you have designer,  which could be hybrid or separate and then you have developer. With these five roles y'all you can scale astronomically. With so many tools coming out, especially leveraging AI you can do a lot with a small team. 

Hope that was helpful. Thank you all for checking out the video make sure you subscribe. And if you have any questions drop them below I will see y'all next week, peace!