Most advice tells you to grow. Add people, add revenue, keep climbing. David Kieran did exactly that with Zoma, took the team past 20, and discovered something nobody warns you about. The bigger team made the business worse.
So he scaled it back on purpose. That decision is the most useful part of our conversation on the Exit Ready podcast, because almost every agency hits the same wall.
David started Marketing For Me from his attic in Dundalk in 2016, going door to door selling websites when other digital marketers would not leave their laptops. He rebranded to Zoma in 2021 with two partners, and the agency grew fast. Three people became six within months, then kept climbing.
Then he hit the zone.
What the 10-person danger zone is
There is a stage every growing agency reaches where it is too big to run like a small team and not structured enough to run like a real company. David named it plainly.
“When you get over 10 full-time staff, people always tell you that’s the dangerous time to be in business. You can really fall between two bar stools at that stage.”
Below ten people, the founder can hold the whole thing in their head. Everyone reports to you, you see every project, and the business runs on your energy. Past ten, that stops working. The founder becomes the bottleneck, decisions queue up behind one person, and the quality and the margin both start to wobble. You have outgrown the way you run the business, but you have not yet built the way you need to run it.
Growing through it the wrong way makes things worse
The instinct in the danger zone is to push harder and hire more. David did, and he was refreshingly honest about the result.
“We took the jump up to 18, 20 staff, but we were nowhere near as productive and as profitable as we were in previous years when we made that jump.”
More people, more revenue, and less profit and output per head than when the team was smaller. That is the danger zone doing its work. Every new hire raises the floor you have to clear to break even, and if the structure underneath them is not there, the extra bodies add cost and chaos faster than they add capacity.
“We were never ready for the growth that we took so quickly.”
The fix was to scale back, then build the layer
This is the move most founders will not make, because shrinking feels like failure. David treated it as a reset.
“We actually scaled back a bit. We redefined our team and structure and built our leadership team out to allow us to take our next growth journey.”
He stopped chasing headcount and built the thing the headcount needed: a leadership layer. People who own areas of the business so that decisions stop converging on the founder. That is the structural piece that turns a big team from a liability back into an asset, and it is exactly what lets you remove yourself from delivery without the wheels coming off.
The pattern is the one I see again and again. The agencies that scale past the danger zone are not the ones that hire fastest. They are the ones that build the structure first, then grow into it. Get that order wrong and you buy yourself the low-profit, high-stress version of growth, which is the worst of both.
The part that makes scaling survivable: retention
There is a second half to David’s story that matters just as much. The danger zone is brutal when people keep leaving, because you spend all your time rehiring and retraining instead of building. Zoma made itself a place people do not leave.
“We invest a lot in people when they join Zoma to make sure they’re really upskilled. It’s important they stay with us after that initial investment. We’ve got a very high retention rate.”
Zoma is in Dundalk, between Dublin and Belfast, not in a major city, which on paper is a hiring disadvantage. David turned it into the opposite by making the agency an employer people seek out: real investment in wellbeing, multiple best-place-to-work awards, and an alternative to a three-hour daily commute into Dublin.
“Because we’re such an attractive place to work, people are reaching out to us. We’ve had no difficulty hiring and we have a very high retention rate.”
When your best people stay, every bit of training compounds instead of walking out the door. Retention is what makes the structure you build actually hold.
What to take from this
If you are sitting between ten and twenty people and the profit does not match the size, you are in the danger zone. The way through is not another hire.
Look at where every decision still lands. If the answer is you, that is the constraint. Build a leadership layer that genuinely owns areas of the work. Be honest about whether your last few hires made you more profitable or just busier, and if the structure is not there yet, do what David did and steady the business before you grow it again. And protect the team you have, because growth on top of churn is just a faster treadmill.
Scaling an agency comes down to building the structure that lets a bigger team actually work, not to adding people as fast as you can.
Go deeper: Hear the full conversation with David on Exit Ready episode 006, then read how to scale a creative agency from zero and how to build a leadership team in your agency.