The CEO of OnlyFans has a rule on how to rake in big bucks with a tiny team: don’t hire middle managers.
Keily Blair, OnlyFans’ chief executive, spoke with Jeff Berman, the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, during the November Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon.
Blair said in the interview that OnlyFans, a subscription-based content platform founded in 2016, has only 42 full-time employees.
Berman chimed in, saying that it was “very powerful” that the company was making $7 billion in annual revenue with such a lean team. Blair said she was proud of her team, which she called a “pretty efficient bunch.”
The key to this, she said, was to eliminate middle management roles in the company.
“So we hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience,” she said.
“And we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager in my experience,” Blair added.
She said that leaders in big companies are often judged by the number of people reporting to them, a concept she did not agree with.
“We’ve said to our teams, ‘You can be a team of one and deliver exceptional results, and that will be so valued,'” she said. She added that there is no “manager track” for her staff’s career progression in the company, and every OnlyFans employee is an individual contributor.
OnlyFans, which initially started as a platform for creators to earn money from paywalled content, has become synonymous with adult, NSFW content. Blair, who became the company’s CEO in 2023 after years of work as a lawyer, said in the interview that OnlyFans has 400 million users globally and 4 million content creators.
OnlyFans’ middle-managerless workforce aligns with the broader trend of Big Tech firms eliminating this layer of staff. In recent years, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Intel, and Google have all reduced the head count of middle managers, opting for a flatter hierarchy in the name of efficiency.
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