Kyle Hunt | Agency Operations Expert

I told a $1.2M agency owner to scrap his AI rollout the night before launch. He thought I was crazy. He had new AI system ready to go. Strategy roadmaps, content templates, task logging in ClickUp. Planned to present it all in a team meeting the next morning. I asked him one question. "Have you talked to anyone on your team about this yet?" He hadn't. Ouch. This is how it would go... your team hears "new AI that makes things more efficient" and translates it to "they're figuring out how to do this without me." They'll never say that out loud. They'll nod along in the meeting, then quietly find workarounds until the whole thing fades away. Especially with remote and offshore teams where job security anxiety runs even higher. So I gave him the exact framing I use. "I'm not trying to replace you. I want to make you as productive as possible so you can make more money and I can make more money." Then tie the process change to something real for them. Profit share on efficiency gains, bonuses for capacity improvements, less time on grunt work they already hate. Present that benefit first, process second. The other piece... have 1-on-1 conversations with your leads before the group rollout. He talked to his three leads that week. By the time he presented to the full team, those leads were already advocating for the change instead of silently resisting it. Every failed rollout I've seen died because the owner skipped the human conversation and jumped straight to the system. Change Management 101 - your team needs to know why the change helps them, not just you.

You're tracking the wrong marketing KPIs... and then you're losing millions because of bad decisions. Here are the top 13 marketing KPIs every brand owner NEEDS to make good decisions (you probably don’t know number 7!):

A $1.4M creative agency owner built internal AI workflows for every stage of creative production. His team was still misspelling client names and sending off-brand creative. He came to me convinced the AI workflows needed more refinement. More templates. More guardrails. I looked at the output and asked a different question. "Can the team produce clean work without any tools at all?" The answer was no. Tools are force multipliers. A multiplier applied to strong talent produces exceptional work faster. The same multiplier applied to weak talent produces bad work faster. Before the AI workflows, his team was slowly creating mediocre deliverables. After the workflows, they were quickly creating mediocre deliverables. The founder was reviewing more output than ever and catching more errors than before he built the systems. He had a talent problem that tools were scaling. I've talked to agency owners who genuinely believe better tools (and AI) mean you can hire weaker people. I think the opposite is true. Better tools mean you need stronger people, because the gap between good and bad gets wider, not narrower. A skilled media buyer with great workflows will run circles around three average ones with the same setup. Hire the right people first. Then give them tools to 10x their output. Not the other way around.

I scaled my own e-commerce brand from $0 to $27.6 million in 12 months. Here are the 5 necessary beliefs you will 100% need to do the same:

ClickUp ($4B) is the only project management system I've seen that can actually answer "how many hours of work does each person on your team have this week?" That's pretty crazy. I've reviewed PM setups with all the big guys - Asana, Monday, Notion, Trello, etc. Asking the workload question in any of those is a 45-minute fire drill: pull task lists, manually estimate, build a spreadsheet, hope the team logged hours. In ClickUp, it's one click in their native "Workload" dashboard. Which matters because workload is the single most important variable in an agency P&L. Every hiring decision sits on top of it. Every capacity conversation depends on it. Every "are we burning out our best people" red flag should be visible at a glance. Without it, agency owners guess. They overhire because revenue is up. They burn out their A-players because nobody saw the work concentrating on one person. They onboard a new client and realize there isn't actually room for them. It's such a simple feature, but incredibly valuable. If your PM tool can't tell you who has 60 hours of work this week and who has 12, you're flying blind on the most important number in your business.

I told a $2.4M agency owner to fire 4 of his 20 clients. He thought I was crazy. You see, we just built out his per-client profitability for the first time last month. Revenue looked fine on the surface. Twenty clients, growing book of business, team was busy. But he'd never connected his time tracking data to individual client revenue and team costs. Every retainer felt predictable because the price was the same each month. The hours each client actually consumed... not so predictable. We ran the math client by client. Four of his twenty clients had negative gross margin. He was literally paying to service them (this is pretty normal btw, most agencies I audit have 10-20% of clients at close to or negative gross margin). The retainer stayed flat. The delivery hours didn't. Scope crept, revisions piled up, high-touch clients burned twice the hours of his best accounts. Nobody flagged it because nobody was measuring it. I told him to fire all four. He pushed back, worried about the revenue drop. But letting go of four money-losing clients would recover 10% of gross margin immediately (and also 10% of profit). Retainer pricing creates a false sense of predictability. Delivery costs swing wildly per client, and without a system connecting your PM data to your financials, you won't see it until it's a crisis. A one-time audit helps. But the real fix is building the data layer so per-client profitability is visible every month... not just when someone like me walks in and runs the numbers.

Want to 10x your e-comm brand in the next 12 months? No, this isn't a get rich quick scheme. Here are the 5 strategies that helped me scale my own brand from $0 to $27 million in 12 months, and the action steps to start today. A thread:

A $1.3M/yr email agency owner asked me what other agencies are doing with their copywriters. Are they cutting the role? Going all-AI? Merging it into strategists? He was trying to solve his org chart by benchmarking competitors. I get why. It feels like the fastest path to an answer. But every agency has different margins and capacity constraints. Copying someone else's structure means inheriting their tradeoffs without knowing if those tradeoffs fit your economics. So instead of polling other agencies, we opened a spreadsheet. We modeled his pod economics across three configurations and ran each one at 100%, 80%, and 60% capacity utilization. Removing the copywriter saved salary but dropped client capacity from roughly 10 to roughly 8 per pod. The savings looked good on paper until you modeled the revenue ceiling it created. Adding a pod lead increased fixed cost. But it unlocked 2 more clients per pod and hit 67% gross margin at full capacity. The model also made something else obvious... compressing roles and keeping them separate optimize for different things. Merging strategist and copywriter reduces headcount and complexity. Keeping them separate preserves capacity for more clients. The spreadsheet tells you which tradeoff matches where you're actually trying to go. His revenue had been stalling at the same ceiling every quarter. After reviewing the spreadsheet, he could see the problem was structural. The pod couldn't hold more clients in its current configuration, and no amount of pipeline was going to fix that. Every role change shifts the capacity-to-cost ratio of the entire pod. Without modeling it first, you're making $50K decisions on gut feel.

We need another strategist. We are just too overloaded. That's what a $2M/yr agency owner's team told him. Three days of time tracking said they didn't. They'd been pushing for the hire for weeks. The strategist was "too busy," everyone felt maxed out, and the founder was ready to approve it. I asked him to run time tracking for three days before signing anything. The strategist was consistently under capacity. Had room for at least two more clients. The real problem was two layers up. Two senior account managers were keeping strategy tasks on their own plates instead of pushing them down. Partly because the strategist had told them he was slammed, partly because they didn't fully trust the handoff. So they just... did his work for him. One of those AMs was spending 50% of her time on a single client because she never delegated the strategy work down. Everyone looked overwhelmed, but the work was just sitting in the wrong hands. The fix cost nothing. A delegation conversation and redistributing existing work. Done in a week instead of a $85K salary commitment. I see this all the time in agencies without time data. The team genuinely believes they need the hire. They're not lying. But without numbers, the most stressed-looking person drives headcount decisions. And the founder approves it because saying no feels reckless. Before you approve your next hire, ask whether it's actually a people problem or a distribution problem.

I've scaled many companies I own to 7 or 8 figures. Constant learning and growth is a key theme to my succcess. Here is the 18 books I will read this quarter to grow smarter: A mini-thread 👇

Four clients were costing one agency $450K in gross margin per year. The owner had no idea because he'd never run a client-level P&L. This was a $1.8M PR agency running 36.1% blended gross margin. The owner assumed it was a general pricing or efficiency problem. Something felt off across the board. Then we broke margin down by client. Four accounts were doing all the damage. One was running at negative 44% gross margin. Another at negative 26%. One was basically break-even. The last was at 15.7%. The rest of the book was healthy. The blended number had been hiding the real story for over a year. And the owner knew these clients weren't great. But the team had bandwidth, and some revenue felt better than no revenue. So they stayed. That logic is backwards. Keeping a negative 44% margin client is literally paying your team to lose you money. Every hour spent on that account is an hour not spent on a client generating 50%+ margin. The fix wasn't complicated. We ran a decision tree on each underwater account. Two got repriced. Two got replaced with new clients at 50%+ gross margin. Result was 36.1% to 45.6% gross margin. Roughly $450K. No new hires. No new clients beyond the replacements. This is super common - three or four accounts drag your agencyy down. Usually legacy clients on old pricing, early clients on friends-and-family rates, or accounts where services got bolted on without repricing the retainer. So here's your sign to run a P&L by client.

There's a loud camp in the agency world that says "give creatives space and get out of the way." Cool advice if you're making a Disney movie. Not so good if you're trying to make performance creative at scale. The agencies that follow that advice have the highest revision rates, the most founder involvement, and the worst margins on creative work. Too much freedom doesn't make people more creative. It makes them guess. Every deliverable starts from scratch because nobody knows what "good" looks like, and no process is still a process... it's just a bad one. One agency owner I work with was struggling with UGC deliverables. Briefs went out to creators, output came back wrong every time. He assumed it was talent. When I pulled his brief templates, there was almost nothing there. A few bullet points and "make it feel authentic." His creators had nothing to build from. We put together a framework of defined content types his team could work within. Think "here are 10 formats that convert, pick one and build from it." Suddenly the same creators were producing better work with fewer rounds of feedback. That's what constraints actually do. When you give people a defined structure to work inside, they get more creative... not less. They stop guessing and start riffing on something concrete. When I audit agencies sitting at 50%+ revision rates, roughly 80% of the time it traces back to briefing, not talent. They're cycling through contractors and creatives when the real fix is a better template. If your creative team can't complete a deliverable without messaging someone for clarification, that's a briefing problem.

One of my clients grew 7x in 16 months. They sell one service. UGC creative agency. Started with $3-4K/month packages. Every few months the founder would come to me with a new idea. AI offers. Paid media management. Content strategy retainers. Each time it felt like the obvious next move. I kept pulling him back. Instead of adding services, we pulled four levers that were already available to him. Better lead gen to fill the pipeline. Moving up-market to brands with real budgets. Raising package sizes from $3-4K to $20K/month. And adding pods to handle the volume without the founder touching delivery. One service, one delivery system, one set of SOPs, one hiring profile. Packages went up 5x and capacity scaled with pods, not with complexity. When you add a second service, you don't just add revenue. You add a second set of SOPs, a second QA process, a second hiring profile, and a second category of client fires landing on your desk. Add a third and a fourth, and now the founder is watching seven things instead of one. I ran a full-service agency. We scaled it to 8-figures. It worked. But honestly, if I could do it again, I'd pick single-service every time. The operational overhead of managing multiple delivery systems compounds in ways you don't see until you're drowning in it. The agencies I work with that scale fastest just do one thing better, for bigger clients, at higher prices, with more pods running the same playbook. If you're under $3M and thinking about adding a service line, look at your current service first. Better leads, bigger packages, more pods. Exhaust those before you multiply your problems.

When I was COO at an 8-figure agency, I created "Monday Meetings" and batched six hours of internal meetings into one day. All of the leaders of the agency on the calls - it cost us a day and a half of productive work every single week. I thought I was being smart. All the productivity advice says batch similar work together. Protect your deep work days. Keep meetings contained. And honestly, that works great if you're a solopreneur managing your own output or Alex Hermozi with no direct reports. But in an agency, when you batch yourself into six hours of unavailability on the busiest day of the week, you don't just lose your own time, you freeze everyone else's work too. Monday is when clients are submitting requests, teams need direction, and fires are starting. Our entire leadership team was locked in a Zoom until 4pm and nobody could reach us. Then came the catch-up. Slack messages had stacked up all day. Client requests sat untouched. People couldn't move forward without a decision from someone who'd been unavailable for six hours. The catch-up alone took another 24 hours. So we had a day and a half of work that was shot. Every single week. To fix this, we leveled the meetings across the week. Two calls per day across Tuesday through Thursday instead of eight on one day. Internal meetings moved to end-of-day slots so mornings stayed open for priority work and availability. Work started flowing continuously instead of in bursts followed by catch-up spirals. The team stopped losing momentum every Monday and Tuesday. So test the advice you get before making it canon in your agency.

A lot of agency owners come to me after following the "focus on one thing" Hermozi advice. They almost always focused on sales and lead gen. And they almost always have the same problem. Revenue climbed. Pipeline was full. Everything looked great on paper. Then the agency started falling apart. Clients weren't getting onboarded properly, quality dropped because the team was stretched, and the founder got pulled back into every client fire because there was no infrastructure to absorb the growth. I respect where this advice comes from. It works for product businesses where you build once and sell infinitely. But agencies deliver through people every single month. Every new client requires proportional capacity. You can't decouple growth from fulfillment. The constraint in an agency shifts constantly... pipeline one quarter, hiring the next, then delivery quality, then retention. If you're only watching one of those, you're always six months behind on the next crisis. What actually works is four pillars running at the same time. Offer, sales, ops, talent. Not equal effort. One priority per pillar, with clear ownership. Your ops priority this quarter might just be documenting your onboarding process. Your talent priority might be writing one role description with real KPIs. Lightweight, focused progress on each front so nothing collapses while you grow. The agencies I've seen break through to $5M aren't the ones who went all-in on one thing. They're the ones who made sure every pillar had someone watching it, even when it wasn't the top priority. If you're about to turn up lead gen, pressure-test your delivery first. Sign three new clients in your head and ask what breaks. That's the pillar that needs attention before you scale.

A $140k/mo email agency was running 2-3 revision rounds on every deliverable. When I dug in, the copywriter had been given a single sentence as context... then everyone was surprised when the output missed. I was on a call with this agency last month. The owner was frustrated with copywriter quality. "We keep getting stuff back that doesn't match what the client wants." I asked him to open ClickUp and show me the last 10 tasks assigned to copywriters. Almost every one had a single sentence. Sometimes two. The strategist held all the client context, campaign history, and offer knowledge in their head. They were passing along barely anything and expecting the copywriter to fill in the gaps. The copywriter was guessing. And every wrong guess turned into a 30-60 minute revision cycle. The brief set the copywriter up to fail before they typed a word. We built a brief template that the strategist fills out before any task gets assigned. It covers send context, target customer profile, historical learnings from past sends, offer details, brand guardrails, compliance requirements, and messaging hierarchy. Takes about 15 minutes when the upstream research already exists. Fifteen minutes of briefing versus 2-3 rounds of revisions that eat hours per deliverable. Agencies skip it because briefing feels like overhead... but the revision cycles cost way more than the brief ever would. The brief also created something they never had before. A clean accountability line. If the output doesn't match the brief, that's a talent conversation. If there was no real brief to begin with, that's a systems failure you built. Open your last 10 copywriter tasks in your PM tool. Look at what context was actually provided. I'd bet it explains most of your revision history.

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Inside The Nativ Scale Framework: → Pod Structure Blueprint → Capacity Calculator (know EXACTLY when to hire next) → FTE vs Contractor ROI Model → 4 KPIs that predict problems before clients complain → Strategic pricing framework that 2X'd his rate

I've helped 20+ agencies scale past $1M ARR. The ones who get there fastest? They stop hiring their way out of problems. 🧵