When I started my company in 2022, I assumed the hard part would be finding clients.
That’s what everyone tells you. Get the clients, and everything else follows. So, I spent the first stretch doing what most founders do — chasing work, taking meetings, saying yes to things I probably shouldn’t have said yes to.
The clients came. And that’s when I found out the hard part was something else entirely.
The Work Behind The Work
In my industry — influencer marketing and talent management — the visible product is a campaign. A brand wants to reach an audience, creators make content, the content performs, or it doesn’t. That’s the part people see.
What they don’t see is everything holding it up. Contracts. Payment terms. Usage rights. Deliverable schedules. Who owns the footage six months later. What happens when a creator misses a deadline, or a brand changes the brief after content is shot, or a payment gets stuck in a client’s accounts payable system for sixty days while the creator who did the work is waiting.
None of that is glamorous. None of it shows up in a case study. And all of it will sink you if you don’t build it.
I learned this the way most founders learn things: by getting it wrong first. Early on, I was running the operational layer out of my own head — remembering who was owed what, tracking deliverables in scattered notes, handling every escalation personally because I was the only one who knew the full picture. It worked at five campaigns. It did not work at 50.
Systems Are What Let You Say Yes
The moment things changed was when I stopped treating operations as overhead and started treating it as the actual product.
Here’s the reasoning. If a brand can’t tell the difference between two agencies’ creative instincts — and often they can’t, because taste is subjective — they will choose based on which one is easier to work with. Which one answers faster. Which one doesn’t create problems. Which one they don’t have to chase.
That’s not a creative advantage. That’s an operational one. And unlike taste, it’s buildable.
So we built it. Clear ownership for every function that touches a campaign. Someone responsible for talent relationships, someone for brand outreach, someone for creative, someone for the platform-specific work. Not because we needed the headcount, but because “everyone handles it” means nobody does, and the gaps only show up under pressure.
Four years in, we’ve run over 300 campaigns. The systems are the only reason that number is possible. Not the creative, not the network — the boring infrastructure underneath.
Hire for the Gap, Not the Title
The other thing I got wrong early: I hired for roles I recognized instead of roles we needed.
It’s a natural mistake. You look at what agencies are supposed to have — account managers, creative directors, strategists — and you fill those slots. But those titles come from a version of the industry that’s 20 years old. The gaps in a modern business often don’t have standard names.
At one point, we realized a specific platform was generating real results for our creators and getting almost no attention from anyone in our category. Every competitor treated it as an afterthought. The obvious move was to treat it as an afterthought too, since that’s what the market was doing.
We hired a dedicated lead for it instead.
That role doesn’t exist at most agencies our size. It probably looks like an odd allocation of a small team’s budget. But it came from watching what was actually working rather than what was supposed to be working, and it’s become one of the more defensible things about how we operate.
The general lesson: your org chart should reflect your business, not the industry’s template. If you’re copying someone else’s structure, you’re solving someone else’s problems.
What “Your Reputation Is Our Responsibility” Actually Costs
We tell clients we treat their reputation as our own. Most agencies say some version of this, and most of the time it’s just copy.
For us, it has teeth because of a structural choice — we also directly represent creators. We’re on both sides of the deal.
That sounds like an advantage, and commercially it is. We know what brands will pay and what creators will accept, because we’re in both conversations. But it means we can’t push risk onto the other party. If we put a creator in a bad brand fit, we damage someone we represent. If we recommend the wrong creator to a brand, we damage a client relationship. There’s no version where only one side eats the costs.
I’d recommend that structure to other founders, but not as a growth hack. It’s a constraint. It forces you to turn down deals that would be easy money if you only had one side to answer to. The upside is that it makes the thing you say about caring actually true, and clients can tell the difference between a promise and a structure.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting Now
Build the unglamorous layer before you need it. You will not have time to build systems while you’re drowning in the work those systems were supposed to handle. Build them at 20% capacity, not 90%.
Pay people on time, especially the ones with no leverage. In my industry, that’s creators, many of whom are young and have no idea what a normal payment term looks like. In yours, it’s someone else. Word travels in small industries, and it travels faster about how you treat people than about the quality of your work.
Don’t confuse the visible product with the actual product. The campaign is the visible product. The reliability is what they’re buying.
Take the hire nobody else is making. The market is efficient about obvious roles and deeply inefficient about non-obvious ones. That’s where the leverage is.
None of this is the advice I wanted when I started. I wanted to hear about growth and deals and momentum. But four years in, the thing I’m most confident about is that the companies that last aren’t the ones with the best pitch. They’re the ones that still work when the founder isn’t in the room.
Luis Torres Pinett is the founder and CEO of Pin Media Studios, an influencer marketing and talent management company founded in 2022. He writes about operations, creator economics, and building service businesses.