Do I need a team for my agency or can I run it solo?

#113 · The EXACT Loom Video Strategy That Made Me Over $250,000

Do I need a team for my agency or can I run it solo?

You can absolutely run an agency solo. I ran my agency and my info‑product business alone for a long time. Most people think they need to hire once they hit about $5,000 a month in revenue, but hiring that early often leads to budget constraints, training issues, and lower retention. If you hire at $5,000 revenue and pay someone $3,000, you’re left with $2,000 profit, and the hire will never be as efficient as you. Instead of scaling by adding people, consider shifting your business model to productized services—simple, repeatable deliverables that you can sell multiple times a month. This lets you increase revenue without the overhead of a team.

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Should freelancers start a one-person agency for branding and sellability advantages?

Yes, freelancers should start a one-person agency for branding and sellability reasons. A freelance outfit earning $200k can't be sold because the business relies entirely on you. Forming a company gives you the opportunity to sell it later, even if it's a one-person entity, because you can use the company as a branding vehicle and open the door to equity-building steps. While branding yourself as an individual (e.g., 'I'm Nick Zerbe') can lead to faster growth because clients prefer working with a human, creating an agency separates the corporate worker-bee job from freelance work and makes the transition to a full agency easier when you hire help. In short, the advantage is primarily equity-based: building an asset, investing time, energy, money, and risk, then selling it to capture capital gains and avoid high taxes.

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How can I shift the way my business operates to increase the total ceiling revenue I can achieve as a solo freelancer?

Instead of selling custom builds or one‑off projects, switch to productized services. Create a simple, repeatable deliverable—like a basic CRM setup—so you don’t have to go through a lengthy scoping phase, learn new platforms, or do extensive revisions. You can price it lower (e.g., $2,000) and deliver more of them each month. Five $2,000 projects equal $10,000, which is double what you’d make from a single $5,000 project. The trade‑off is higher leverage: you either keep the old model and grow slowly, or you redesign your business to run on repeatable, smaller projects. That’s how many freelancers and solo agencies now hit $20‑$40k months.

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Is it achievable to scale an agency from $20K monthly profit to $1M revenue in 5-6 months while maintaining 75% margins?

If you're already at $20K monthly profit, the math works out perfectly to reach $1M revenue. Assuming $25K monthly revenue, you'd need to triple it to $75K/month to hit $1M annual run rate, which gets you close to $900K. You're doing a good job, but remember growth isn't linear—you'll hit fulfillment bottlenecks, need to dial back, improve fulfillment, then find new channels, possibly hire. As an opportunity, you should join my Make Money with Mike program for more one-on-one time; it includes a $25K/month agency program that could help. If you're already at $20K-$25K profit, you're pretty close.

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How do you manage a $170,000 a month business?

I’ve built a strong team and leveraged systems. I started as a solo‑entrepreneur, scaling up to about $120K on my own, then realized a one‑person model was unsustainable. I shifted to a hybrid approach: about 80% of my time on agency work and 20% on R&D, personal branding, and YouTube. By delegating video outlines, editing, and other tasks to a community manager and a virtual assistant, I’ve reduced the daily workload from 3‑4 hours to roughly one hour while still growing revenue across agency retainer work, referrals, and info products.

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