How to Build an Agency from Scratch and Scale a Team from 0 to 200 Employees

It seems logical to begin hiring more people when a business is growing rapidly. However, it’s immensely important to consider employees’ areas of responsibility as well as challenges and obstacles faced by the business before rushing into recruitment.

Over time, my experience has shown that increasing headcount does not, by itself, solve management problems.

We built WakeApp in stages. We began by searching for a strong core team. Then, we formed individual departments, and later redesigned the operating model to accommodate new markets and increasing workloads. Throughout this process however, we had to start from scratch several times, change our approach to recruitment, provide further training to our managers, and move away from manual management tasks.

I am Eduard Lebedev, founder of WakeApp, and I would like to explain which decisions helped us move from the first key roles to a large-scale operating structure.

How We Built Teams from Scratch

Before entering the agency business, I operated advertising stands in shopping centres, ran a mobile development studio and worked on a user acquisition service.

I noticed the same pattern in every one of my past occupations: as long as everything depends on one employee, the business may grow dynamically, but it remains extremely fragile.

This is normal during the early stages. You need to understand the product, the target audience, the acquisition and communication channels, and the real unit economics of each transaction.

Problems only become visible later when the number of tasks increases and the manager no longer has enough attention for everyone.

Where a Team Begins

I have always assessed the first employees on more than their professional skills.

For our agency, it was important to understand whether a specialist could take responsibility for an ambiguous task, bring it to completion, and identify where information was missing.

I started by looking at which activities were repeated every week:

  • Who receives and processes the brief?
  • Who presents and defends the media plan?
  • Who is responsible for client communication and project status?
  • Who monitors the finances?

These recurring activities form the initial operating map that the business will use to solve its problems.

Why an Agency Does Not Grow Simply by Hiring “More People”

Alt: Eduard Lebedev, WakeApp agency team

When an agency grows by simply hiring more and more people, the main areas of responsibility are usually covered by sales, production, client service, and finance.

However, job titles themselves are secondary. The most important thing is to agree on where one person’s area of responsibility ends and another person’s begins. This is when a complete organisational structure begins to emerge – when the director no longer knows every small detail but understands:

  • who is responsible for making a decision
  • what data the decision is based on
  • when the result is expected.

This is how we rebuilt our departments from the ground up, and we sometimes did this more than once.

When a company has many different business areas, they need to be separated:

  • management must be distinguished from operational delivery
  • sales must be separated from account management
  • professional expertise must be separated from administrative routine.

While this transition can be painful, it reduces the amount of founder involvement required.

Another important principle is not to confuse a job title with a function. Sometimes one experienced employee can perform several roles, but this does not mean that the arrangement should remain permanent.

At WakeApp, we documented each function, its expected outcome and its owner so that the area could later be transferred to another person without losing the underlying logic.

Recruitment: What Really Matters?

The labour market clearly demonstrates why rushing to fill vacancies can be dangerous, and why hiring is not enough. According to Vedomosti, 76% of the companies surveyed planned to retain employees by increasing salaries and compensation, 46% intended to invest in training, and 42% planned to offer flexible hours or remote working arrangements.

HeadHunter also notes that isolated bonuses do not resolve systemic organisational problems.

What the Labour Market Shows: Hiring Is Not Enough—Retention Matters More

Alt: Eduard Lebedev on business management

Rushed Recruitment Is Almost Always a Mistake

When a business plan is at risk, there is a strong temptation to hire a promising candidate quickly and close the gap. I have seen similar situations. However, an urgent hire can ultimately be very expensive when you consider:

  • a long onboarding period
  • conflicting expectations
  • increased pressure on the manager
  • the need to restart the recruitment process a few months later.

For this reason, I look beyond the candidate’s CV and focus on three main qualities.

Long-Term Potential

What can the candidate contribute over the long term?

Cultural Alignment

How quickly and naturally will the person be able to integrate into the team?

Ability and Willingness to Learn

The ability to develop and continuously improve one’s skills is always extremely valuable.

While I do not believe that an excessively long recruitment process is an ideal strategy, delaying a decision can also be harmful. However, this approach helps us determine in advance which qualities are essential, which skills can be developed later, and where making a compromise would be too risky.

Why Team Growth Often Leads to Chaos

As experts cited by RBC Trends have noted, micromanagement suppresses initiative and slows organisational development. I’ve observed this in practice: the more direct reports a manager has, the more expensive manual control becomes.

Three Common Growth Failures: Missing Rules, Bottlenecks, and Delayed Control

Alt: Agency management and growth without chaos

Growth Without Processes

When processes are not documented this leads specialists to begin creating and formalising their own way of working.

Although everyone may appear busy, the company gradually accumulates:

  • different reporting standards
  • different definitions of reliability
  • different answers to the same customer question.

I have repeatedly observed situations where employees exchange messages, begin arranging calls and urgently requesting clarification without any concrete progress being made. In this situation, the most important step is to remove unnecessary complexity and document three things:

  • the required input information
  • the deadline
  • the person responsible for the result.

Dependence on Individual Employees

The most dangerous warning sign is the phrase: “Only one specific person knows how this works.”

As long as that expert remains available, the entire operation may appear stable. However, a holiday, illness, or resignation immediately reveals that the system cannot function without that individual.

“We have been through situations like this several times, and each time we reached the same conclusion: you cannot build a sustainable business around one person. This is harmful in the long term because it conceals weaknesses and creates the illusion that there is no need to change the rules.”

— Eduard Lebedev, Founder of WakeApp

Lack of Operational Control

Without transparent performance indicators, a manager can only notice a problem after it has become serious. When everything begins to go wrong, the manager starts intervening in individual details, checking every action and putting pressure on deadlines. This creates a vicious cycle: the more manual control is introduced, the less independent the next management level becomes.

Crises as Opportunities to Rebuild

A crisis is often perceived as a threat, and this reaction is understandable. Demand declines, platform rules change, user acquisition becomes more expensive, and clients become more cautious when making decisions. However, for an entrepreneur, a crisis is also a diagnostic opportunity. It shows:

  • where the project was operating through inertia
  • where unnecessary complexity had accumulated
  • where roles and responsibilities lacked clarity.

Between 2023 and 2026, we encountered significant changes in advertising algorithms. Approaches that had delivered results for years began to perform differently. I do not consider such developments to be a personal failure. However, managers are responsible for recognising the new reality, rebuilding processes, removing unnecessary activities, and not waiting for the market to resolve the problem on its own.

A useful question during this type of restructuring is:

Which activities could we stop doing tomorrow without negatively affecting the customer?

The answers often reveal:

  • unnecessary approval stages
  • reports created only for the sake of reporting
  • duplicate meetings
  • tasks that were once useful but have long since lost their purpose.

Sometimes the correct decision is to change the process itself:

  • the product
  • the SLA
  • reporting procedures
  • areas of responsibility
  • the format of communication with the client.

This is why we rebuilt our sales departments and operating units more than once. We did it not to make the organisational chart look more attractive, but to make the business more resilient.

Which Management Decisions Remain Effective Over Time?

The most sustainable actions are not necessarily the most impressive or the most visible. They are the ones that can be repeated consistently, like

  • a clear meeting protocol
  • a well-structured brief
  • a standard format for conclusions
  • an internal knowledge base
  • a manager’s right to disagree and support their position with specific data.

What Stops Working?

Micromanagement is usually the first thing to stop working. A manager may be able to carry key projects through personal energy, but they cannot remain the editor, salesperson, analyst, arbitrator, and final decision-maker forever.

Management based purely on personal impressions also becomes ineffective. When there are many possible choices, intuition remains valuable but it must be tested against data, feedback and quality of execution. Without this validation, managers end up debating impressions rather than actual performance.

“At a mature stage, the most important thing is to protect your attention. It should not be wasted on every small correction or disagreement over wording.”

— Eduard Lebedev, Founder of WakeApp

A manager should focus on areas where the economics of the business, client risk, or service quality are changing. Everything else should move through a predefined and documented process.

What Becomes Embedded in the Organisation?

I consider industry recognition as an external indication that a company has succeeded in building repeatable results. Having processes such as clear operating rules, delegation, regular analysis of mistakes and internal development of future managers are always stable, effective processes to maintain.

For example, WakeApp’s inclusion in international industry rankings such as the AppsFlyer Performance Index and Mobile Marketing Agencies rankings was not simply the result of luck. It reflected specific practices that the team and its leaders had established and continued to repeat consistently.

European Gaming publication visualising agency positions in the AppsFlyer Performance Index XIII

Alt: WakeApp company growth and employees

I see a direct connection here: the more clearly a company documents how its work should be performed, the easier it becomes to manage change. New acquisition channels, attribution rules, privacy requirements, and competition for skilled professionals are not going to disappear.

Scale as a System, Not a Headcount

A large company may look impressive from the outside, but size alone guarantees nothing in terms of efficiency. An organisation can employ hundreds of people and still remain dependent on manual control. Alternatively, a company can operate sustainably when responsibilities are clear and knowledge is not lost between departments.

In the long term, the company that succeeds is not the one that expands its headcount most aggressively. It is the one that knows how to:

  • transfer responsibility
  • maintain quality
  • rebuild its operating model without panic.

“Scale is not about how many people you employ. It is about building a system that can operate without you.”

I believe this is how we should look at scaling; this is the path that connects recruitment, periods of crisis, operational discipline and professional recognition within the industry.

My final conclusion is straightforward: genuine expansion begins when every organisational level understands its area of responsibility and can act without constantly requesting approval from senior management. Being able to understand your business and its areas of responsibility, your team processes, and looking at your employees’ strengths, and having the insight and drive to scale is true organisational maturity.