How This Founder 4x'd his design team for 1/4 the Cost

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Read time: 3 minutes

4 months ago I was speaking with the founder of a digital marketing agency. They’d grown from 15 to 50 people in 5 months…100% bootstrapped.

But the demands on their design team were becoming unmanageable…not to mention the cost.

Here’s how he cut his design costs by 80% and created 4x the design capacity.

In today's email we discuss:

• The 4-for-1 Strategy: How get 4x the amount of resources for the cost of 1 local hire.

• When to hire? A quick framework you can use to determine when you should hire globally.

CASE STUDY

How This Founder 4x'd his design team for 1/4 the Cost

A few months ago I received this email from a founder.

They needed to expand their design capacity without compromising quality or breaking the bank.

The problem was that they were growing so quickly that they needed A LOT more capacity, but their margins with the costs of their local talent were getting hammered.

The founder told me “this has to work”.

It may not be reflected in this email, but standards were high. All candidates needed the following:

• 100% fluent in English

• 2+ years of experience with US-based marketing agencies

• 1+ year experience US-based high-growth eCom brands

• Work EST hours

• and be aggressive self-starters

The Solution: We’re building out a decentralized team where costs were optimized and relevant experience was maximized.

• 4 - highly skilled graphic designers hired (primarily Philippines) at $1,800/month each

• 1 - Email Marketing Specialist (Philippines) at $2,000/month

• 2 - Media Buyers with high spend experience at 100,000+ per month in marketing budget (all in Brazil) at $2,500/month

• 1 - Executive Assistant (South Africa) at $1,300/month

The Result: They saved ~70-80% across their design team.

So what now?

We’re repeating this model across other areas of the business to give them even more leverage (Operations, Finance, Sales Ops, Web Development/Engineering).

See you next week!