From 82 people to 8 agents

I spent years building Get Levrg into an 82-person agency. Every role was a person: researchers, writers, editors, strategists, analysts. The output was real, but so was the overhead — payroll, coordination, the meetings about the meetings.

Then I sold it and went all-in on AI. The first thing I did was rebuild the workflows I used to need a team for — as systems, with agents. A research agent. A drafting agent. An editor. An orchestrator to tie them together. Same output, a fraction of the cost, none of the busywork.

The lesson isn't “fire everyone.” It's that a lot of team-scale work was never really about headcount — it was about structure. Most of what a marketing team does is a process. Processes can be built. And once you've built one, it runs at the speed of software, not the speed of a standup.

That's the whole thesis of how I work now: I think like the operator who ran the business, and I build like the person who can ship the system. Same playbook, executed by agents.