The Marketing Department of One: How To Out-Market Companies 10x Your Size
Let’s be honest: most agencies are world-class at marketing their clients' brands but hopeless at marketing their own. But give just one AI-powered wizard the keys, and you can grow exponentially.
Agencies and consultancies are notoriously bad at two things:
1. Marketing themselves to generate a steady flow on new business (including differentiating themselves and their offering).
2. Designing their business for leverage and scale (profitable growth).
This article will show you how to combat both problems (for the full solution, you need a complete operating system, like SimpleOS™ which we built for creative businesses).
Let’s start with some stats (don’t yawn, this is important):
An important metric and indicator of profitability, strategic advantage and efficiency is RPE (Revenue Per Employee). To give you a ballpark idea:
7‑figure agencies average around $150,000 RPE.
8‑figure agencies reach around $225,000 RPE
What This Means for Creative Agency and Consultancy Owners
If your agency is under $100,000 RPE, you're operating in shaky ground—unlikely profitable and vulnerable to margin erosion. At that level, the “Marketing Department of One” idea becomes much more than clever—it becomes essential for survival.
If your agency is hitting $150K–$200K per employee, you’re in solid territory—but consider how AI augmentation and sharper workflows could push you toward the $225K+ sweet spot, while keeping the team lean and nimble.
Reported average (IBISWorld)~$140K
Having run agencies and consultancies for much of my life, I know just how stressful it gets when you hit the lower thresholds. Thin margins, weak profitability is like the plague. You must avoid it at all cost.
What affects RPE, you might ask?
Lots of factors, most of all the business model, focus, level of standardisation of a company. When I productized the core services of my brick-and-mortar brand consultancy, (long before AI), I was making over $300k per employee and made a 45% net profit margin on my business. I’ve since helped hundreds of agency owners do similar things, yet most still operate a business model from the 1990’s.
Let’s look at what is going on in other, more leveraged industries for comparison (and a bit of shocking jealousy).
The Great Flattening Hits Agencies
Right now, across industries, entire departments are being flattened — not in the "cost-cutting, sad layoff" way, but in the pancaking way: compressing an entire department into one AI-armed human who can do the work of 20 people from the old world.
WhatsApp at $345M per employee.
Midjourney at $5M per employee.
Spotify at $2,4M per employee.
Cursor’s 20-person team doing $100M ARR in a year.
Meanwhile, many agencies are still burning billable hours in 90-minute internal meetings about next week’s Instagram carousel.
Of course these comparisons are not fair, as digital businesses rely on different business models with low to no customisation, most sell algorithms where creative agencies don’t.
But what if there was a middle ground?
And what if you started by integrating AI fully into your marketing?
The Coordination Tax Is Killing You
Every unnecessary meeting, approval loop, and handoff is a tax on speed, creativity, and profit.
The average knowledge worker spends 21 hours a week in meetings and inbox ping-pong. For agencies, it’s probably higher — because we love “collaboration” almost as much as we love overthinking.
The antidote:
A Marketing Department of One who replaces the meeting maze with an AI-powered production line that never sleeps.
Meet Your $2M Employee
Here’s the play: one person who can plan, write, design, edit, post, analyze, and optimize — at the speed of thought — because they’ve built a stack of AI and automation tools that would make an old-school CMO weep into their leather-bound Moleskine.
All you need to get started, even if you are a small agency or consultancy, or even a solpreneur, is to get skilled at using, leveraging, and combining a few AI tool.
Sure, you’ve heard this before, but are you doing it? Or are you one of 70% of agencies that have not yet adapted to the AI world (and that are falling behind)?
The Stack That Replaces 20 People:
Strategy & Research: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Miro, Notion
Writing & SEO: Jasper, SurferSEO, Grammarly
Design & Visuals: Canva, Figma, Midjourney, Photoshop
Video: Descript, CapCut, Runway
Distribution: Buffer, Publer, Zapier
Analytics: GA4, Fathom, Shield Analytics
Repurposing: Opus Clip, Repurpose.io, Quillbot
Result?
What used to take a copywriter, a designer, a social media manager, a strategist, and a production coordinator… is now one strategic creative with the right tech stack.
Why Agencies Should Care
Because this isn’t about replacing people with robots — it’s about compounding human creativity with leverage.
The truth is, most small to mid-sized agencies may never hit $1M per employee, but they can triple output per person and double profit margins if they stop paying the coordination tax.
It’s not downsizing.
It’s rightsizing.
One exceptional person + AI is better than ten decent people + endless meetings.
The Future Is Lean, Fast, and Profitable
The agencies that survive the next five years will:
Get leverage — more output, fewer bottlenecks.
Kill the coordination tax — reduce meetings, increase shipping.
Market themselves like they market clients — consistently, creatively, at scale.
Your choice:
Keep running a 1990s playbook in a 2030s world…
Or find your $2M-per-year “Marketing Department of One” and watch your margins grow while everyone else is still stuck in Monday.com hell.
At Original Minds®, we have built a complete operating system for agencies, consultancies, as well as a version for solopreneurs (consultants and freelancers). We call it SimpleOS™, and it’s built around designing your business around three simplified processes (with a strong foundation and a management layer):
1. A process and system for generating more leads in a leveraged way (AI).
2. A process and system for converting leads into clients.
3. A process and system for delivering value and retaining clients at a profit.
If you are interested, EMAIL US and we’re happy to share more.
Tobias
Founder // Original Minds