Episode Details

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Have you ever hired your way into a problem? Have you promoted your best people into management roles and watched them struggle, not because they lacked talent, but because nobody asked whether that was actually the job they wanted?

Today's featured guest grew her agency team to nearly 200 people before making the deliberate decision to scale back to around 75. She did it not because the business was failing, but because she had learned the hard way that headcount is not leverage.

In this episode, she walks through what each stage of that growth actually cost, how she thinks about the difference between a manager and an executive, and why going all in on one service in 2017 was the scariest and most important decision she made for her agency.

Hope Horner is the co-founder and CEO of Lemonlight, a video content agency based in California that produces commercials and primarily works with enterprise clients. She started the company in 2014 in her bedroom with two co-founders, betting that affordable, accessible video content would become essential for brands who had been priced out of the market. She was right. Lemonlight grew to nearly 200 employees before a deliberate rightsizing brought the team to around 75.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

• The difference that going all in on one niche made

• The mistake fast-growing agencies make

• Distinction between manager and executive

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Why Going All In on One Thing Was the Decision That Changed Everything

In 2017, Lemonlight was doing what a lot of agencies do: offering paid advertising, web design, social media, and video production, because saying yes to everything felt safer than narrowing down. Hope and her co-founders made the call to turn all of that off almost overnight and go all in on video.

This decision cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue at the time. It also

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