My client built a 25 person growth team in an untraditional way
It outperformed and led to a big exit.
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Every week I talk to 10 or 15 heads of growth. Most of them are stuck in the same spot right now.
The goals they’ve been handed are the most aggressive of their careers. The budgets are some of the tightest. Their headcount’s frozen but they’re being told to increase output using AI. And they’re staring at a roadmap they have no realistic way to execute on.
So they do what most A-players do.
They take on more themselves, get deeper in the weeds, and try to fix everything. And in the process, become the bottleneck.
I had a former client who did something completely different.
He inherited a big job with a hard constraint
His name is Philip. And when we first met, he was the head of growth at a Series A startup called Rupa Health.
He’d just been handed the job.
The previous head of growth, his manager, had left, and Philip got tapped to take over the entire growth + marketing function. His background was running media and content. Suddenly he owned the entire growth engine.
And it was a lot to own.
The company was doing 8 figures in revenue. He inherited an 11-person team. A growth budget around $7 million a year. He was also the youngest person on the team, now managing people who used to be his peers.
And he had one constraint that’s going to sound familiar:
he couldn’t add full-time headcount.
New full-time hires were hard to get approved. The bar was high and the process was slow. But contractors were the opposite. A $2,000 to $3,000 a month contractor sailed through with barely a question.
So that’s the direction he got nudged. He built out a large team of effective contractors instead.
The team most of the company didn’t know about
He’d run this playbook before.
Years earlier he ran a small content agency with 13 video editors in the Philippines cutting his clips. When he joined Rupa, he brought his 5 best with him.
Then it snowballed. His boss would ask, “can you find someone to do X?” Philip would post a job, run a quick test project, and hire. Over and over.
Until one day he gave a presentation to the company that included a line nobody saw coming: “we’ve got 20 people overseas who help us do basically everything.”
Most of the company had no idea.
They handled SEO, landing pages, design and creative, content, and customer support, plus a layer of VAs and EAs across the whole team.
A Series A company, running like one several times its size.
Here’s how he made it work, and what you can actually steal from it.
He’d found a different playbook
The usual worry with an overseas team is the management overhead. The training, the meetings, the hand-holding, the constant check-ins.
Philip ran into almost none of that.
His playbook came down to two things.
First, he paid for output. Most of the work had a clear deliverable attached. He’d write a tight brief, set the bar, and judge the result. No daily syncs, no babysitting.
Second, he vetted on proof of work. Every new hire did a small paid homework assignment first, and he watched what they actually produced. “Hire someone for 48 hours,” he says, “and you know if they’re good.”
Proof of work beats the resume, the interview, and the polished portfolio every time. It’s the single biggest predictor he’s found.
He got specific about what “great” looked like
The standard he set is what made the whole system run.
Every contractor wrote a 30/60/90 day plan. What they’d do, what success looked like, and what exceptional looked like in their role.
A lot of these folks had never worked somewhere that told them what good actually meant. Give people a clear picture of excellent, plus a way to check their own work against it, and you don’t have to hover.
What I actually helped him with
I can’t take credit for any of the overseas stuff. That was all Philip. He’s the most resourceful growth leader I’ve ever worked with.
What he and I worked on was the other half of the problem: pointing all that horsepower at the right targets.
When Philip took over, the strategy was “paint the wall.” IE, do everything, everywhere. Some of it worked great. A lot of it had no measurable return.
So we worked on strategy, prioritization, and focus.
Killing the good ideas to protect the great ones. He had a huge team and still couldn’t do everything, which is its own lesson.
We also reframed his metric.
He’d been holding himself accountable to GMV, a number he didn’t actually control. His teams real job was signups. Impressions to signups was the one thing he owned, so that became the north star.
Then every person on that team got pointed at it.
The hires gave him capacity. The focus increased their impact.
Why direct beat the agency every time
Philip’s a former agency owner, and has strong opinions about why direct contractors beat agencies.
An agency has to stack clients to make margin. One person might carry 5 to 7 accounts. They know clients churn in a few months, so they spread everyone thin and ration effort toward whoever’s most at risk of leaving. You get two good months, then a worse one.
I lived this in-house and hated it. The person who sells you is somebody great. The person who actually does your work is junior and brand new to the seat.
With a direct contractor, the incentives line up. If they do bad work, they lose the gig.
It worked
In October 2024, Rupa got acquired by Fullscript.
That 25-person growth team was a huge part of how a small company punched that way above its weight.
And Philip liked the model so much he turned it into his own company, Hire Overseas, helping other teams run the same play. (If you actually want to do this, that’s a solid place to start. He knows this playbook better than anyone else.)
The constraint did him a favor
The reason I think this story is so fascinating is the constraint.
Philip couldn’t hire. On paper, that’s a tough spot to be when you’re trying to hit more aggressive goals. But in practice, it pushed him into a more resourceful model that probably beat the traditional one he’d have built with a fat headcount budget.
Most of the growth leaders I talk to are sitting on that same constraint right now. Frozen headcount, rising goals, a roadmap they can’t staff.
You can add real capacity without a single full-time hire. Contractors who deliver on output. Held to a clear bar. Pointed at the one metric you actually own. That’s how Philip built a 25-person team with no new full-time headcount. And it’s part of how a small company ended up getting acquired.
There’s more than one way to build a team.
This came out of my full conversation with Philip on the Growing Forward podcast. If you want the whole story (including the part where I yelled at him on our first call, and the $4,000 in CVS gift cards), the episode link is below.
Philip and I worked together while he was building all of this. If you're a growth leader facing your own challenges: a team to build, hard calls to make, goals that outrun your budget, that's what I coach on 1:1. Grab a time at deliveringvalue.co/coaching