Jim Louderback: Want To Grow Your Creator Business? Get a COO

As the creator economy matures, the business structures of individual content creators are starting to look a lot like those of conventional startups with formalized rolls for positions like CEO, CFO and even HR.

The starting point is that every creator is building a media business and that by delegating responsibility to employees the creator can capitalize on the chance to generate more revenue than they could manage alone.

The key to helping creators scale their business is to hire a Chief Operating Officer (COO), according to Jim Louderback, editor and publisher of Inside the Creator Economy. He outlines his argument to host Matt Estes of The Creator video series.

“I think it fundamentally comes down to how do you scale your business as a creator, right? You can take it only so far as an individual with maybe a couple of part time people working with you.”

At the same time, he said, “The revenue options have multiplied. There are a lot of opportunities to do things outside of the platforms to create revenue, whether it’s books, or merchandise, or courses. And the number of people taking advantage of it have multiplied.”

Because more and more creators and influencers are sitting at the center of the marketing funnel, the question is how do you take advantage of that and build a bigger business?

Louderback also points to another dynamic which is the lifecycle of a creator. Like elite athletes, there may only be a sweet spot of a few years where the creator can maximize their potential with an audience.

“Five to seven years, maybe, for a YouTuber. For TikTok it might be more like one to three years. But whatever it is, as a creator with some success, you’re thinking, how long can I last? And what do I do afterwards? Can I build something that exists without me having to be at the center of it all the time?”

He argues that, if creators are not already doing so, they should be casting around for a COO to help structure their business and move it forward.

“When you realize that you need to scale and you can’t do it all yourself, you have to ask yourself the hard questions. What are the things that you like doing? And what are the things you don’t like doing? What are the things that you’re comfortable delegating and what are the things you’re not comfortable delegating? Can you find people that fit those roles that you trust?”

Louderback acknowledges that most creators are “lone wolves, outdoor lions in the middle of the savanna” who find it “really hard to open up and bring people in that they trust.”

Nonetheless, Louderback urges creators to think of themselves as CEOs of their own startup.

“As a CEO your job is to hire the right people to make sure you have enough funding, to keep the company going and to set the direction of the business. That’s the job as a CEO whether of a traditional tech startup, or as CEO of a creator organization.”

He advises CEOs to look at all the aspects of a classic business and how it applies to them. That means thinking about marketing, sales, finance, production and HR, your workspace infrastructure, and your technology infrastructure.

“Put them all on a board and think about how much time and percent of your work week [this takes] and think to yourself, if I had somebody else doing this, what more could I do? And how much more revenue could I bring in? And then think about your vision for where you want to go as a creator business? Where you want to be in three years and five years and 10 years? And think, do you think you’re gonna get there with what you have? And if the answers to all of those points to ‘I need help,’ then that’s when you probably need to bring in somebody in an operational role to manage those things for you.”

The operational leader of the company essentially needs to make sure that they are expanding the CEO’s ability to get the job done. The COO role can evolve with the business, growing from a fractional role to a full-time position or even multi-person team.

Of course, the best operators won’t come cheap and it will probably mean a creator giving away equity in their business. Louderback maintains this will be worth it when creator’s realize the increased revenue and value that a COO brings that would otherwise be left on the table.

“It’s a bridge to get over because in the end, it’s not an equity in you it’s an equity in the business,” he said. “Having a strong operational partner for a creator is going to give you much better likelihood of success [to millions of dollars in annual revenue]. It’s a very untapped opportunity and there is a lot of wealth being created.”

He predicts billion dollar companies emerging in the Creator economy with creators as the leads or as the focus of those companies.

“I think we will see financial structures and capital put to work to help build these billion dollar companies.”