Your next hire should follow your agency strategy. “We need another account mana
By Simon Ellicott · October 16, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Your next hire should follow your agency strategy.
“We need another account manager.”
Maybe you do, but what do you need that person to change?
Take on more accounts?
Lead commercial conversations?
Strengthen 1P expertise?
Improve delivery consistency?
Remove decisions from the founder's desk?
Those are different jobs.
Yet they can end up bundled into one vacancy labelled “experienced Amazon account manager”.
The candidate arrives.
They are good at execution.
The founder expected strategic leadership.
The team expected operational support.
The clients expected a senior adviser.
Nobody hired badly on purpose.
They hired against different versions of the role.
Before writing the job description, decide what the agency needs to become better at.
A 3P account-management business may need someone who can reliably run a defined portfolio.
A 1P consultancy may need deeper experience in trading terms, negotiations and commercial planning.
An agency developing its leadership team may need someone who can coach others, allocate resources and make decisions independently.
Amazon experience matters, the type of experience matters more than the label.
Then check what already exists in the team.
Is the capability missing?
Or is someone capable of doing the work already buried in tasks that could be reassigned, simplified or automated?
Sometimes the next step is recruitment.
Sometimes it is development, a specialist partner or a better allocation of responsibility.
If you do recruit, make the role concrete.
Which outcomes will they own?
Which decisions can they make?
What work will leave someone else's desk?
What support will they receive?
Can the agency's fees sustain the role?
A senior hire cannot reduce founder dependence if every decision still needs founder approval.
A strategist cannot improve commercial advice without access to the client's economics.
And another operator will struggle if the workload has no clear boundaries.
The hire needs an operating model that allows them to succeed.
Recruitment should strengthen the agency you have chosen to build.
If your next hire succeeds, what will be different about the business six months later?