A creative agency founder asked me a question that, on the surface, seemed simple: "How many people should I hire?"
Behind that question was a tangle of anxiety. BU heads were asking for more headcount. Teams were reporting burnout. Attrition was creeping up. Every hire felt like a gamble — too many, and margins collapse; too few, and delivery quality suffers and people leave anyway.
The founder was approving headcount requests one at a time, based on whoever made the most convincing case. There was no framework. No model. No way to know whether the current team was too lean, too bloated, or perfectly sized but poorly configured.
The Problem with "We Need More People"
"My team is overworked" is the most common headcount justification in any growing business. And it's almost always true — but it's never sufficient.
The question isn't whether people are busy. The question is whether the team composition is right. A creative agency with too many account managers and not enough creatives will feel overworked — not because headcount is low, but because the work is bottlenecked at the wrong point. A consulting firm with senior consultants doing junior-level task work will feel understaffed — not because they need more seniors, but because they need to hire at a different level.
Headcount is a blunt instrument. Team composition is the sharp one.
Finding the Ratio
For the agency, I took a different approach. Instead of evaluating headcount requests one by one, I pulled four years of payroll data and cross-referenced it with revenue by business unit.
The analysis revealed something the founders hadn't seen before: a clear pattern in the relationship between team composition and financial performance. When business units maintained a specific ratio of Accounts (Sales/Account Management) : Creatives : Video : Strategists : Admin, two things happened simultaneously — operational throughput was maximised and profit margins hit their peak.
Deviate from the ratio in either direction and the results degraded. Too many creatives relative to accounts, and utilisation dropped because there weren't enough account managers feeding work into the system. Too many accounts relative to creatives, and delivery bottlenecked, quality suffered, and overtime costs spiked.
The ratio wasn't something we invented. It was something the data revealed — a naturally occurring equilibrium that the business had hit during its best-performing quarters and drifted away from during its worst.
From Ratio to Hiring Framework
Once you know the ratio, hiring decisions transform from gut-feel negotiations into a structured conversation:
Revenue targets set the top. If the business is targeting SGD X in revenue next year, and the data shows that each Account team typically manages SGD Y in billings, you can calculate the number of account managers needed.
The ratio sets the rest. From the number of accounts, the optimal creative, video, strategist, and admin headcount follows directly. Each function is sized relative to the others, not in isolation.
Deviations are flagged and justified. If a BU head wants to hire outside the ratio, the conversation shifts from "I need more people" to "I need to explain why my business unit requires a different composition." Sometimes the answer is valid — a new service line, a different client mix, a temporary project surge. But now the decision is grounded in data, not pressure.
The Broader Principle
This isn't unique to creative agencies. Every service business has an underlying team composition that correlates with peak performance — even if nobody has ever measured it.
For a professional services firm, it might be the ratio of partners to managers to associates. For a restaurant group, it might be front-of-house to kitchen staff per revenue band. For a preschool, it's the teacher-to-aide ratio per classroom capacity tier.
The data to find it almost always exists in your payroll and revenue records. It just hasn't been connected.
The Question
If someone asked you today, "What's the optimal team composition for your business at your current revenue level?" — could you answer with a number?
Not a feeling. Not "we're about right." A number. A ratio you've tested against your own data.
If you can't, every headcount decision you make is a coin flip dressed up as a judgment call. And in a business where payroll is typically 30-50% of revenue, that's an expensive coin to be flipping.