How should I bring on my first employee? Should I pay a salary, use increments or profit‑share bonuses? How many hours do people work in your business? When should you hire the first hire and what should you expect?
After hiring around 40-50 people for my agency, I've realized I prefer to hire last. The common advice to delegate everything comes from a time when technology couldn't handle much of the work, but today technology gives us leverage, so you can realistically wait until you're making around $50k/month before your first hire instead of $15-20k. Hiring early is often just a band-aid for deeper problems—if you're under $25k/month the issue is usually your systems, not a lack of manpower. Focus on building systems that reduce the work needed to fulfill: automate repetitive tasks like onboarding emails, scheduling calls, and problem-solving via email; design productized offers that take half the effort to deliver (e.g., a form that auto-generates a campaign, scrapes leads, and follows up); create scalable sales flows (a discovery/closing call batched together, a proposal, and automated follow-ups that stop when a deal isn't worth the effort). Make client management discrete—set a daily 8 a.m. five-minute template update instead of letting clients interrupt you on WhatsApp all day. Hiring early means giving up a large share of profit (e.g., a $5k salary is half of your profit at 50% margins) plus management costs and risk; it's better to wait until revenue is higher so the hire is a smaller fraction of margin. I pay a flat salary plus a clear, trackable bonus—staff log it themselves and add it to their invoice—avoiding profit-share or rev-share because they misalign incentives and add overhead. Finally, I only care about deliverables: if someone is intelligent and ambitious they can build their own systems to finish work in fewer hours, and as long as the output is good I don't track hours.
The very first step is to quantify how much time you spend delivering the deliverables for your $10,000/month client. Recognize that with a single client you’re essentially a contractor, not running a true agency. Break down your deliverables line by line. Then determine how much revenue the business generates from your time and aim to receive 15‑25 % of that revenue as your compensation. For example, if the business makes $100,000/month from your work, you should be paid $15,000‑$25,000/month. This reflects you as an operator of the stack. Make this clear by tracking your time (use a clock app or similar). Once you have that baseline, you can focus on productizing and raising prices without hurting results. Recognize that your results come from the sheer amount of work you’re doing, not from a superior business model; you’re essentially squeezing a wet towel. Hard work can outweigh strategy, so you need to follow through on your awareness. To raise prices without losing results, either demand more money for the value you provide or increase the value you deliver for the same price. Avoid jumping to solutions like a content inbound playbook before understanding constraints. Instead, take a constraints‑based approach: inventory all the time you spend on each step, all deliverables you own, and the revenue you generate for the client. Identify the tightest bottleneck and solve it. Do not try to fix delivery bottlenecks by hiring; hiring is merely a band‑aid that ignores the underlying business‑model issue. Instead, restructure how you deliver services so you can handle far more than $10,000/month without burning out—there are examples of people making $20,000‑$30,000/month while working far less than eight hours a day. This is fundamentally a business‑model problem; you must solve the model itself.
Yeah, so for big builds, don't just do it all in one shot; avoid big all-encompassing systems because scope creep usually leads to a situation where you haven't clearly defined what you’ll do for the client, which is impossible to specify ahead of time, causing the client to expect something you didn’t agree to for payment, breeding resentment and harming the relationship. Instead, start with a small starter project that’s tightly scoped and agreed upon by both sides, then vibe each other out to learn what the client likes and demonstrate your aptitude—this lets you pitch more later and gives you insight into their business before committing to a massive scope. If you’re doing this for a company and need to send 10,000 depersonalized emails, think logically: using Make, first you get the leads (one op), then you iterate through the leads (n ops), generate icebreakers (another n ops), and optionally upload to Instantly (another n ops) or bulk‑upload to Google Sheets (effectively one op). Roughly, that’s about three n ops, or two n ops if you use the bulk‑upload shortcut. For 10,000 records that works out to roughly 20,000 operations, give or take. As for the Make plan, the $34‑per‑month Core plan gives you 40,000 ops, plenty of headroom; you don’t need the Pro plan unless you want better error handling, in which case the Pro plan is $62. You can start with Core and upgrade later, paying only the difference. On a personal note, I’m about twenty minutes into this video and feeling locked in; I’ve gotten more done today than in the past week because I’ve committed to stop daily posting on my main channel. My growth has slowed—my first‑24‑hour view‑to‑subscriber ratio dropped from about 15% (≈15,000 views on 100k subs) to around 5% (≈5,000 views). Comments suggest this is because my niche‑specific content has saturated its audience, and broadening the topic would attract less‑interested viewers. Elrico noted that my recent videos repeat earlier material, which may also be hurting growth, and suggested exploring other tools besides Make, like voice agents and live builds. Parker joked about throwing me on while cooking to start a riot over quitting daily, and shared ideas such as adding an automation bucket for publicly traded codes to save Coinbase money, using customer‑support headcount as an input for percentage assessments, and targeting big logos to pull in the right audience. My daily updates channel now has about 5,600 subscribers, while the main channel sits at 110,750. I’m checking follower‑count tools like Trend Hero, though I’m not sure about the daily‑limit metric. Reflecting on all this feedback, I’ve decided to stop posting daily and instead pursue a multifaceted strategy: focus on what makes me unique—my calm, low‑production‑value, high‑signal‑to‑noise conversational content—and develop a new, less‑replicable format. With my team, we’ve decided to pursue the “complete and utter uncopyable thing”: building a business with this stuff in front of everybody, doing it extraordinarily well by spending time generating leads, selling them, securing proposals, onboarding clients, fulfilling projects, and growing the company. Nobody else can replicate that live business‑building demonstration. My earlier live video of starting and selling an AI service in ten hours went viral precisely because it proved I can generate leads on camera; it’s a litmus test for knowing how to do this.
Retainers replace unpredictable hourly billing with a recurring, prepaid service model. For example, if you previously billed 20 hours at $50/hour ($1,000), a retainer might lock in those 20 hours at a discounted rate of $45/hour ($900) paid upfront. This gives you guaranteed income and lets you schedule work knowing exactly how many hours each client will need each month, eliminating the feast‑or‑famine swings of hourly work. The real power of a retainer lies in what you bundle with the core service. Instead of selling just the automation build, you add items that make the offer a no‑brainer for the client: a regular strategy call (e.g., a 45‑minute weekly meeting); unlimited maintenance: you fix any API glitches, server outages, or platform issues at no extra charge; an availability guarantee, such as promising to respond on Slack within 15 minutes between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Monday‑through‑Friday; emergency Q&A or training sessions where the client can ask “How do I update this?” and get immediate help; and access to any resources or tools you’ve built for them. These extras increase the client’s perceived value and satisfaction, improve retention, and generate referrals, while they don’t scale linearly with your time — so you can serve more clients without a proportional increase in workload. From a utilization standpoint, clients often use fewer hours than they pay for (e.g., 18 of the 20 contracted hours). You still receive the full retainer payment, meaning your effective hourly rate remains at your baseline ($50/hour) while you enjoy predictable income. Over a six‑month period, a $1,000‑per‑month retainer yields $6,000 lifetime value; after subtracting acquisition costs (say $150 per client), your net profit jumps from $850 on a one‑time $1,000 deal to $5,850 — a margin increase from roughly 85 % to 97.5 %. Working with repeat clients also lets you understand their business deeper, deliver more nuanced solutions, and earn more referrals. Finally, because you’re building automation systems, the value you deliver isn’t tied to your personal time: a system like my cold‑email setup that generated 23 leads last month continues to produce results even when I’m not actively working on it, adding another layer of leverage to the retainer model.
If you’re earning $2,500 per year, you’re essentially being robbed in broad daylight; but if you’re making $2,000 per month ($24k per year), you’re on the lower end yet not necessarily being exploited. To think about your situation, imagine you’re paid $25,000 per year while generating $500,000 in value for the YouTuber—that’s about 5% of the value you create. Most people receive only 1–2% of the value they generate, while strong salespeople earn 15–20% through commissions. My advice for contractor‑partner roles like yours is to aim for 10–15% of the value you deliver, which translates to roughly a 10× return on investment for the client. If the client is smart, they’ll happily pay you $1 to make $10 for them. The mistake many people make is realizing they’re underpaid and then demanding more money outright—a losing approach that comes across as a loss‑based demand and triggers ego or risk‑aversion in business owners. Instead, frame the conversation around growth: remind the client of the results you’ve already delivered (e.g., over $3 million generated together), share your vision for scaling to $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million, and propose a concrete roadmap (start with X, then Y, then Z). Emphasize that you want to take on more responsibility because you believe you can execute better than others, and assure them you won’t take any of their time. Then, at the close, add that you want skin in the game—more upside when things go well, and a corresponding adjustment when they don’t. Present this structure directly to the client. Because you’re leading with growth and a clear path to multiply their business, the likelihood of them agreeing to partner on a new initiative is vastly higher than if you simply complained about pay. In short, if you’re only making a few thousand dollars a year, you are being underpaid; but if you’re earning tens of thousands per month, you’re in a reasonable position. My overall approach to every job or partnership discussion is to focus on mutual growth, not to threaten to walk away unless paid more—that’s blackmail and damages trust. Successful business owners refuse to negotiate with that kind of pressure. When you approach from a desire to grow the pie together, you’ll achieve far better outcomes.