Most weeks, I write about ad creative, email flows, or how to think about offers. Tactical stuff. The kind of thing you can put to work going into the new work week.
This week, I want to pull back the curtain on New Edition itself.
I get asked all the time how New Edition is structured. How many people are on the team? Are they full-time or fractional? What do we outsource? When did I make my first hire?
They’re great questions, so I’m going to answer them, transparently, today.
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👋 Hey, I’m Brandon Blum. I’m the Founder and Managing Partner at New Edition - a Brooklyn-based creative agency for emerging consumer brands like GreenFi, Happier Grocery, Alice Mushrooms and many more.
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THE CORE TEAM, TODAY
There are five of us right now (sort of).
Me, the founder. I run sales, strategy, and the day-to-day of every client account. I lead client calls, write the creative briefs, set the creative direction, and stay close to the work as it ships. On any given day, I’m pitching new business, setting up a client’s ad account, planning for an upcoming speaking engagement, or working with a batch of creators on a content campaign. It depends.
Our video editor (on retainer). He’s the engine behind every video ad we make right now,; every short-form social cut, every UGC ad, etc. If you’ve watched something we’ve put out for a client this year, he probably touched it.
Our graphic designer (on retainer). She handles every static asset that goes out the door — infographics, ad creative, etc. The kind of work that makes a small brand look like a much bigger one.
Then we have two part-time roles that sit on the Founders Basketball side of the business:
A part-time Brand Partnerships Manager who handles outreach to consumer brands for our monthly runs in New York, Boston, Indianapolis, and (soon) LA. This role, effectively, develops pipeline for New Edition, bringing brands like Gruns, Sourmilk, Vita Coco and many more into our orbit.
A part-time Corporate Partnerships Manager who works on the bigger sponsorship side — getting category partners (HR platforms, fintech, media) into the Founders Basketball ecosystem.
And finally, a bench of creative contractors we tap into on a project-by-project basis. UGC creators, photographers, videographers, podcast producers. When a scope calls for something we don’t do in-house, we plug them in.
That’s it. That’s the whole operation today.
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WHERE THE BOTTLENECK IS
Here’s the honest part: I’m a huge bottleneck in this business right now.
I’m in the weeds on everything. Every client call, every brief, every video cut, and every new project.
That works fine when you have four to six clients. It has not been working as I try to scale to eight to ten.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on a lot of calls trying to figure out where the leverage is. I considered a fractional chief of staff. I considered a VA. I considered a full-time hire on the ops side.
After a lot of those conversations, I’ve landed on two fractional roles that I think will make the biggest impact, fastest. Both are designed to convert into full-time seats as we double our monthly billings.
ROLE #1: FRACTIONAL HEAD OF SALES & MARKETING
The first role is someone to own the top of the funnel.
Right now, almost every lead that comes into New Edition comes through me — referrals, my LinkedIn content, this newsletter, or speaking engagements.
That’s worked well, but it’s a single point of failure. If I get heads-down on client work for two weeks, the pipeline dries up.
What I need is someone to help with existing channels and build out new ones. More targeted outreach. New referral sources, pulling more leverage out of Founders Basketball as a referral engine.
ROLE #2: FRACTIONAL HEAD OF ACCOUNTS & CREATIVE
The second role is the one that solves my bottleneck on existing accounts.
This person owns the day-to-day of client work. They lead client calls, manage Slack channels, brief our designer and editor, run our Notion board, and translate messy client feedback into clean creative direction. They’re the connective tissue between clients and our creative team.
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WHY I’M SHARING ALL OF THIS
A few reasons.
I think more business owners should be open about how their operations actually work. There’s a lot of “we’re a team of 12 senior strategists” branding out there that’s really one founder and a Slack channel of contractors. I’d rather just tell you what’s true.
I think a lot of agency founders are stuck in the same place I was six months ago — being the bottleneck on every account, knowing they need to hire, but not sure where to start. If sharing how I’m thinking about it helps even one of you make a better decision, it was worth writing.
I’m hiring. So if you read this and got energized about either of these two roles, I’d love to hear from you.
I’m taking a page out of the playbook I run for the brands we work with. Authenticity. The content that performs best for our clients isn’t the polished, over-produced stuff. It’s the honest stuff. The behind-the-scenes stuff. The “here’s how we actually do it” stuff. If I’m going to preach that to clients all day, I should probably practice it myself.
IN SUMMARY
I want to be a value-add for you. Maybe you’ll meet an investor through me, maybe I’ll help open up the top of your funnel. Maybe it’s just a few nuggets from this newsletter every now and then.
And I genuinely think this is a topic a lot of you will find interesting.
If you have questions about how we work, how we hire, how we price, or how we structure scopes — hit reply and ask. Or shoot me a note at [email protected]. I read them all.
Until next week ✌️
