Hello, and welcome to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Entrepreneurs often talk about the moment they realize their businesses have outgrown a one-person operation and when it's time to bring in operational support. That journey can be especially fraught nowadays with creator economy companies, that rely on an individual personality and operate lean.

For creator Courtney Johnson, the realization that she was too short-handed came in 2023, a year into building her business. Her content on brand building had amassed roughly 10,000 followers across social platforms but, behind the scenes, she was overwhelmed by a constant stream of emails, partner account management tasks, and administrative work. The activity pulled her away from the very engine driving her growth: classic storytelling.

As Inc.’s Annabel Burba reports, Johnson forced herself to delegate, and in so doing was able to stay in her “zone of genius” focusing on high-impact creative work. While everyone knows that sustainable growth depends as much on strong systems and making the right early hire, actually taking the leap is often mentally difficult. But as Johnson learned, getting it right can lead to success—in her case, consistent $30,000-revenue months.

In this story, you’ll discover:

Why the right first hire can dramatically accelerate a business
How delegation helps entrepreneurs avoid burnout while directly driving revenue
What separates creators who stay stuck in operations from those who successfully scale

The Exact Hire That Took This Creator From Burnout to $30,000 Months

Three content creators explain when they knew to hire their first employee and how it turbo-charged their businesses.

BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

One year into her career as a content creator in 2023, Courtney Johnson had about 100,000 followers across social media platforms. They followed her for personal branding advice, but she felt she was spending all of her time responding to emails. “I realized I needed to hire someone else so I could stay in my zone of genius, which is creating content,” she says.

Her first move was to sit down and make a list of everything she needed support with: negotiating with brands, managing brand deals, and creating email sequences for digital coaching offerings like a LinkedIn brand-building course. Then, unsure of what kind of role could fulfill all of those needs, she tried Googling the list. When that failed, she posted it on LinkedIn instead.

The next morning, Johnson got a message from Bailey Gojmerac. “What you need is an operations manager, and I would love to come in and support you,” she recalls the former senior e-commerce operations associate saying. Johnson hired her a few hours later, agreeing to pay $2,500 per month for two days of work each week.

It turned out to be a good investment. “Immediately, I started making more money,” Johnson says, “because I was able to focus on building my audience and connecting with my audience without having to worry about the monetization side of it.” She went from earning about $15,000 per month through her digital offerings to about $30,000.

Gojmerac now serves as the chief operating officer of Johnson’s content creation and consulting business, working four days a week for about $8,000 per month. Since making her first hire, Johnson—who currently has about 500,000 followers—started working with a social media agency, a virtual assistant, a brand agency, and “a few support coaches,” and says she makes six figures through digital offerings each month.

Not every creator has the same needs, according to Varun Rana, a former software engineer who gained about 170,000 followers across platforms by poking fun at the tech industry. “There’s creators who want to post once a month and make their money doing freelance work. There’s creators who want to post every day and do a lot of brand deals. There’s creators that want to sell courses,” he says, adding that “everyone’s playing a different game.”

Rana made his first two hires in early 2025 after seeing an influx of brand partnership opportunities. Looking for a way to reinvest those earnings into his business, he brought on a virtual assistant and a content strategist. They didn’t make much of a “material impact” on his business, however, and Rana says he “wasn’t really feeling good about it either.”

Realizing that his virtual assistant was doing things he could still handle himself—like responding to emails and managing his calendar—and his content strategist was taking work that he enjoyed off his plate, Rana went back to running his business solo for a few months.

Then, that fall, the creator had an even bigger spike in brand deals. Feeling stressed and overwhelmed, he decided to bring in outside help again.

This time around, Rana hired a fractional chief of staff with whom he had a mutual connection and tasked him with handling “the business side” of his day-to-day by setting up Slack, managing projects, talking to his accountant, and bringing on another virtual assistant.

To determine pay, Rana asked each employee to share their own rates. “I’m very pro-solopreneur and pro-freelancer,” he says, declining to share the exact numbers with Inc. but characterizing them as “very fair.” Working with these two staff members, who each work five to ten hours per week, for about six months has “completely changed the trajectory of my business,” the creator says. He credits them with enabling him to dream bigger and keep the fall brand deal momentum going.

Creator economy-focused content creator Gigi Robinson, who has about 220,000 followers across platforms, tweaked her hiring approach throughout the years as well. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 2020 and deciding to go all in on social media, Robinson hired a part-time intern in 2021. At the time, she was juggling several creative projects including a live audio podcast and says she realized her bandwidth was becoming a bottleneck.

One hire quickly snowballed into several. By 2022, Robinson reports that she had a team of nine interns, including one that handled podcast production, one that handled copywriting, and one that handled video editing.

Eventually, that became too much, since she would often find herself waiting for five-figure brand deal payments to come in while still needing to make payroll on a regular basis. From January 2024 to May 2025, she ran her business alone, utilizing AI tools for some tasks like copywriting.

Today, she has three part-time employees—one of whom is a recent graduate—that ensure she posts new content on each of her 21 personal social media accounts every day while balancing a busy speaking schedule. And although her business expenses are now significantly higher, Robinson reports that she’s currently on-track to 2x or 3x her business this year. “I’ve already contracted more than I net took home in 2025 in 2026 Q1,” she adds.

The creator typically offers interns the choice of working to earn college credit or getting paid their state’s minimum wage. One of her current team members is based in Utah, however, where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, so she initially bumped their pay up to New York’s minimum, $16 per hour, and due to performance now pays them more than $20 per hour. They work 10 to 20 hours per week.

When asked what her advice is for other creators looking to make their first hire, Robinson says she recommends using an AI chatbot to determine the weak spots in your business. “Really time track for like a week or a month,” she says, asking yourself, “What’s a revenue-generating opportunity? What can I delegate to someone else so that I can do more revenue-generating opportunities for myself?”

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