Hey everyone 👋 Finally at a point in my agency where I have a solid client base running Meta ads and I'm starting to hit a wall with capacity. I'm torn between two hires and would love some input from people who've been here: Option A — Freelance Ad Creative Specialist Someone who can take raw footage I provide and/or use ai tools to produce high converting ad creatives (video + static) for my clients every two weeks. This is eating up a lot of my time right now and keeping me from focusing on growth. Option B — Junior Media Buyer / Ads Manager Someone to take on a few of my ad accounts so I can step back from day to day campaign management and focus on client acquisition. My instinct is to start with the creative person first since that's my biggest bottleneck right now .. Main question: Where are you finding good people for either of these roles? I want someone who actually understands Meta and direct response, not just a general video editor or VA. Any insight would be huge. Thanks 🙏

Guys i have a media buyer in my team who have managed more than $20 million in Facebook ads in local lead generation niche. He's looking for some more projects to work on! He's a beast, if anyone wants to hire, please let me know

When I first ran paid ads for my agency back in 2021, every still image creative had to either be built by me in Canva or sent to a graphic designer at $20 to $50 a pop. Testing a batch of, say, 22 to 24 creatives could cost you close to $1,500 before you drop a penny on ads. Right now I'm spending $900 a day on my low ticket funnel and some of my best performing creatives are still images that came out of one workflow. A few agency owners we've shown it to have pulled their cheapest cost per leads ever from the same process. The best part is that the ads were created entirely by AI and cost maybe 10 to 20 cents in credits each per creative. The actual tools are simple. Claude writes the image prompt, Higgsfield produces the image. The part that makes it work is what you do before you prompt anything. Most people open an AI tool and type "give me 12 ad concepts for a roofing lead gen offer" and let it rip. What comes back is generic because the strategy was generic. The image is only ever as good as the thinking you feed it. So instead I steal formats that are already proven. I go into the ads library of the biggest B2B advertisers I can find, sort by impressions, and look for still image formats they keep running. If a format shows up over and over near the top, it's working. From doing this for a client last week across four niches (roofing, tree services, siding, tint and PPF) I landed on four formats: A phone mockup where the notifications on the screen are the client's dream outcome. For a roofer that's a $40,000 deposit hitting the bank and a text saying "new roof restoration quote." A fake news article layout with the client avatar in their work environment and a headline that matches the hooks from the video scripts. A whiteboard sketch comparing the old way against the new way, with a little diorama of a finished job sitting in front of it. Bold text on a red background. Stupidly simple and it's one of Cole Gordon's top performers. Four formats, four niches, sixteen ads. Each format is deliberately nothing like the others, and that matters. If your first batch is four colour variations of the same layout, you're not testing anything.

I'm looking to hire a new ad manager. They don't need to be client-facing. I want them to handle the technical work, such as code implementation, account setups, and ongoing technical management. The last time I hired an ad manager, I used OnlineJobs.ph, but I'm thinking of trying something else this time. What has worked for you?

Helping agency owners get out of client work and hand over media buying/account management to a team member is one of the most important transition points required to scale an agency sustainably. So many people get stuck here and have so many limiting beliefs and mental roadblocks that cause them to self-sabotage following through with this transition. It goes back to the first person you ever delegated to. For almost everyone, that's a VA doing something repetitive. And with that role, you do have to make it grandma-proof. Click by click, screenshot every step, leave nothing to interpretation, because the whole point is that the person doesn't need to make decisions. That's correct for that role. The problem is you learn the wrong lesson from it. Then you go to hire a media buyer and your instinct fires the same way. So you spend weeks building an elaborate SOP that teaches someone how to media buy. Sit with what you're actually doing there. You're making yourself the bottleneck for the brainpower in your own business. If your decision-making is the ceiling on theirs, what exactly are you paying them for? You want a media buyer who's better at media buying than you are. I'll be honest about my own path here. I came up learning the strategy myself. I spent a lot of time in the trenches getting good at it, and I wrote all my SOPs from scratch because I'd personally worked out how to get results in my market. I kind of wish I hadn't spent as much time on that as I did. Media buying isn't that hard of a skill to develop. There are plenty of people out there who already know how to do it. If you're early and trying to scale quickly, all that time you're pouring into over-engineering the SOP should be going into talent acquisition instead. So here's how I'd actually filter out applications to hire an A-Plan Media Buyer for your agency. 1) Objective qualifiers in the application. Not "tell me about yourself." Yes or no and numbers only: Have you run campaigns for this specific industry, in this specific location, before?