5 Team Roles That Are Secretly Putting Your Agency at Risk

Here's an uncomfortable truth about running a creative agency: the wrong team structure can sink your business faster than losing your biggest client. And the most dangerous part? These risks often hide in plain sight, disguised as "the way things have always been done."

After working with thousands of agencies, we've identified five team roles that consistently create hidden vulnerabilities. Some of these might surprise you—they're often positions that feel essential until you realize they're actually holding your agency back.

1. The Lone Creative Genius

Every agency has one: that incredibly talented designer, developer, or strategist who seems to touch every major project. Clients specifically request them. The team relies on their expertise. They're the first person everyone turns to when things get complicated.

And they're your biggest liability.

When one person holds a disproportionate amount of institutional knowledge, client relationships, or creative capability, you've built a single point of failure into your business. What happens when they:

• Get sick for two weeks during a critical deadline?
• Decide to start their own agency (taking clients with them)?
• Burn out from carrying too much weight?
• Get poached by a competitor offering 40% more?

The fix: Document everything. Create systems and processes that capture your star player's methods. Pair them with junior team members who can learn their approach. Build redundancy into your capabilities so no single departure can derail your operations.

2. The Dedicated Office Manager

This might be controversial, but hear me out: if your agency has fewer than 25 people and you have a full-time office manager or administrative assistant, you're probably wasting money.

"But someone needs to answer the phones!" Do they? In 2024?

Modern agencies don't need a human gatekeeper. Here's what actually works:

• Client communication: Direct relationships between clients and their account leads. Clients prefer reaching their actual team, not going through a switchboard.
• Phone systems: Modern VoIP solutions route calls intelligently without human intervention.
• Scheduling: Tools like Calendly eliminate back-and-forth email coordination.
• Office supplies: Amazon Subscribe & Save handles recurring needs automatically.
• Travel booking: Team members can book their own travel in minutes.

That $50,000+ salary could fund a senior designer, a marketing budget, or go straight to your bottom line. Administrative overhead made sense when coordination required phone trees and paper filing systems. It doesn't anymore.

3. The Institutional Memory Keeper

You know this person. They've been at the agency for 12 years. They know why the filing system is organized that way. They remember the original rationale behind every client agreement quirk. They're the only one who knows how to process that one client's invoices because "they have a special arrangement from 2019."

This institutional knowledge feels invaluable—until you realize it's actually a symptom of poor documentation and outdated processes.

When critical business knowledge exists only in someone's head, you've created two problems:

1. Succession risk: When they leave (and everyone eventually leaves), that knowledge walks out the door.
2. Scaling barriers: You can't grow efficiently when processes require tribal knowledge to execute.

The fix: Conduct a knowledge audit. Identify every process that lives in someone's head and document it systematically. Better yet, use this as an opportunity to modernize—many of those "special arrangements" probably shouldn't exist anymore anyway.

4. The Manual Bookkeeper

If someone at your agency is manually categorizing expenses, reconciling accounts by hand, or spending hours preparing financial reports, you're paying for work that software does better, faster, and cheaper.

Modern accounting platforms use machine learning to automatically categorize transactions with accuracy that improves over time. They connect directly to your bank accounts and credit cards. They generate reports instantly. They flag anomalies automatically.

A human bookkeeper doing manual data entry isn't just expensive—they're more error-prone than the alternative. And in a business where margins matter, financial accuracy isn't optional.

The fix: Invest in proper financial software and integrate it with your agency management tools. Use your accountant for strategic advice and tax planning, not data entry. The hours you save can go toward billable work or business development.

5. The Credential-Based Manager

This is perhaps the most insidious risk on the list: the person hired to "manage" based on their resume rather than their ability to lead creative people.

Creative agencies are not corporate environments. The command-and-control management style that works at a Fortune 500 company will actively destroy an agency's culture. Creative people don't respond to authority derived from job titles—they respond to leaders who inspire them.

Signs you have a credential-based manager problem:

• Team members do the minimum required rather than bringing their best ideas
• Creative decisions get escalated unnecessarily
• Talented people start leaving for "better opportunities"
• The work becomes safe and predictable instead of bold
• Meetings multiply while output decreases

What agencies need aren't managers—they need leaders. People who have done the work themselves and earned respect through demonstrated excellence. People who remove obstacles rather than create bureaucracy. People who make their team want to do great work, not just comply with requirements.

Building a Resilient Agency

The common thread through all five of these risks is dependency—on specific people, on outdated processes, on organizational structures that made sense a decade ago but don't anymore.

Resilient agencies are built on:

• Systems over superstars: Document processes so knowledge is organizational, not personal
• Automation over administration: Use technology for repetitive tasks
• Leadership over management: Hire people who inspire, not just supervise
• Flexibility over tradition: Regularly question "the way we've always done it"

Think of your agency like a pyramid. Every stone needs to support the ones above it. When you have roles that create structural weaknesses—single points of failure, unnecessary overhead, undocumented dependencies—you're building on an unstable foundation.

Take Action This Week

Don't let this article be something you read and forget. Here's what to do right now:

1. Audit your dependencies: List every team member and ask, "What would break if they left tomorrow?"
2. Question your overhead: For each non-billable role, ask, "Could technology or process changes eliminate this?"
3. Document one critical process: Pick the most important undocumented workflow and write it down this week.
4. Evaluate your leaders: Are the people managing your creative team actually inspiring them?

The agencies that thrive long-term aren't necessarily the ones with the best talent or the biggest clients. They're the ones built on foundations strong enough to weather any storm—including the departure of any single person.

Your agency's structure is either an asset or a liability. Make sure you know which one you're building.