If you want to build your online education business to seven figures and beyond, you need to build a team.
There’s no way around that.
But team building has a way of fooling you. From the outside, it looks like a tidy, sequential job. You hire one person. Then the next. Then the next. And one day you wake up with a team, as if by magic.
That’s not how it goes.
For people like me, and probably you, who started off as a solo creator doing everything themselves with no background in business, the hard part isn’t the hiring at all. It’s the pile of psychological hurdles that trip you up on the way.
I see it constantly. The entrepreneurs I know struggle with the mindset around building a team far more than the mechanics of hiring itself.
So let me walk you through the journey as I see it.
At one end, you’re a solo creator, right back at the start, doing everything yourself. At the far end, you have a seven-figure business run entirely by a team, where you only have to work a couple of days a month.
That’s the gap we want to cross. It’s the journey I went on with StoryLearning.
And a lot has to happen in your head before you’re ready to make it.
These are the five fears you’ll meet along the way, in roughly the order they show up. Know the signs, and they lose most of their power.
1. “I Should Be Busier”
The first one catches almost everybody off guard.
You make your first hires. One, two, three, four people. You hire well, you hand over your busy work, you give them real ownership. Which means you now have free time.
Sounds like the dream, doesn’t it?
Except your brain doesn’t see it that way. Your brain pipes up and says: hang on… you’ve just stopped doing the thing that made you successful in the first place.
And what made you successful?
Relentless activity. Those first three, four, five years, you were hustling hard. Working every hour available to make the business go. That’s an attitude. A mindset. And your brain has quietly filed it under “the reason we survived.”
So when your plate suddenly empties, your brain reads it as a threat. It tells you something’s wrong. You should be busier.
The first job here is simply to notice what’s happening. That’s it. Awareness.
Because the danger, when your time finally opens up, is that you go meddling in all the work you just hired people to do. Don’t. That’s the worst thing you can do with the freedom you fought for.
Instead, channel that pent-up energy into two things.
The first is strategy. Actual time spent thinking about where the business is going.
The second is front-end demand generation. As the founder, you’re usually the one person uniquely able to do this: content marketing, advertising, the stuff that drums up buzz and brings new people into the business.
Put your excess energy into those two, and it’s almost always a good thing. You’re bringing in new leads, and the team takes care of them.
That’s the trade. You stop being the doer. You become the person who points the ship and fills the top of the funnel.
2. “Why Would They Even Work for Me?”
This one can hit even after you’ve hired good people. Maybe especially then.
You look around at all these talented people on your team, and a strange thought creeps in. Why are they working for me? Why don’t they just go off and start their own business?
So understand this.
99% of people do not want to be you.
They don’t want to be an entrepreneur. They don’t want to take the risks. They simply want a job that pays fairly, working with people they like, doing something they enjoy.
That’s it. That’s what most people want.
And this, by the way, is one of the reasons performance-related pay and financial incentives often don’t do what you’d expect them to. Because deep down, most people aren’t really motivated by money, or prestige, or the thrill of building something.
They want a nice life.
The sooner you get over this particular hurdle, the better. It changes how you lead. It changes how you think about paying people. And it quietly removes a fear that was never based on anything real.
3. “Can I Actually Afford This?”
As your team gets fuller, a new worry moves in. Can I afford this?
It’s a fair question. People are expensive. A team is expensive. That’s just true.
But it’s critical you approach it with a long-term view, because if you don’t, you’ll start to sabotage yourself. You’ll fire people you shouldn’t. Or you won’t make the hires you need, because you’re spooked by the expense.
It’s so easy to stare at the immediate costs landing every month and lose sight of where the business is actually heading.
So let me show you the shape of it.
Picture the financial journey from solopreneur to a business doing, say, three million in revenue. Revenue never climbs in a neat straight line, of course. But that’s not the part that matters here. The part that matters is your expenses.
As a beginner, as a solopreneur, your expenses are very, very low. So you keep almost all of the profit.
Then you start growing a team. And the team is exactly what lets you climb to those higher levels of revenue. But your expenses climb with it. Around the one million mark, you might find you’re barely making much profit at all.
This is the point where the fear screams loudest.
Push through it, and hire well, and something happens. Your expenses flatten out. Meanwhile your revenue keeps rising. And that gap opens up a brand new wedge of profit above you.
But the real prize isn’t the money. It’s that now the team runs the business. You can step away. You become a true business owner: you own the thing that makes the revenue and the profit, but the thing doesn’t need you to run.
That’s how you buy your freedom.
So when you’re standing in that expensive middle, watching the costs pile up, don’t let that be the whole picture. Your job is to build a team that can carry the business up and keep it growing, until that new profit wedge opens.
Fixate only on the money going out right now, and you’ll find a way to sabotage the whole thing. Look at the long game instead.
4. “What if They Quit and Leave a Hole?”
Now you’re doing everything right. The business is growing. You’ve got the team, the revenue, the profit.
And then a fresh fear taps you on the shoulder. What if they quit? What if these people I’ve hired just turn around and walk away?
The best way to answer this is to look at which roles you hire, and in what order.
Most org charts break down into three main sections: finance, operations, and marketing. Those are the crucial parts that keep a business running. (In education businesses, I’d add a fourth: product.)
But as a solopreneur, you’re never hiring all of those people at once. Maybe not at all until you’re well into the seven-figure range.
So here’s the path I’ve always taken, and the one I steer people towards where I can.
Early on, instead of hiring an operations person, some professional manager on a big salary, look for a right hand.
This is someone who shares your ethos. Who loves the business. Who’s genuinely into what you do, wants to be part of the journey, shares your mission. Ideally you bring this person on fairly early.
You, a right hand, and a handful of contractors or freelancers can usually carry you all the way to seven figures.
And here’s why the right hand matters so much. If they work out, they become the person who runs the entire operation at scale. They’re the one who helps you build out the rest of the team: your head of finance (which, frankly, you don’t really need until seven figures anyway), your head of marketing, and someone to manage product.
At that stage, your operational lead runs the business day to day. They hire and line-manage the heads of finance, product, and marketing.
And that’s what buys you out of the business.
You might still do bits and pieces. Demand generation, YouTube, being the face of the whole thing. But the work that has to happen every single day, keeping the finances straight, keeping the product sharp, bringing new people in, all of that is handled.
Now come back to the fear. What if they quit?
Say your head of marketing walks and leaves a gaping hole. In this structure, it isn’t you who has to drop everything and fill it. It’s your operational lead who runs the recruitment process to find the replacement.
That’s a stable structure. One that can weather just about any storm, and leaves you free to spend your time pretty much however you like.
And honestly, that’s what most educators I meet are actually after. Not some hyper-scaled machine doing tens of millions. Just a very profitable business that funds the life they want to live.
This is the structure that gets you there. Whether it takes you five years or ten, and ten is a perfectly normal timeframe for this.
5. The One Word That Makes a Lean Team Work: Ownership
Line up all these fears, all these mindset struggles, and most of them point at the same question.
How do I stay the course? How do I survive the journey without letting any of this knock me off track?
Because there are a handful of ways to succeed. And a million ways to die.
So keep the long-term vision front and centre. That’s the whole game.
The business is a team of people working together. Which is why I don’t tend to go hunting for A-players, the industry professionals who arrive with the big salaries and the performance incentives and all the rest of it.
What I’ve always done instead is build a team from my own audience. People who already know me. Who love the business. Who share the same passions I do.
And the people I look for all have one word in common.
My entire hiring philosophy fits into that one word: ownership.
At every stage, in every role, whether they’re working on product, marketing, operations, or finance, I’m looking for people who take real pride in their work. People wired to take ownership of everything they touch.
Because you can run a business like this with a very lean team, as long as your people take ownership.
When things go wrong, and they always do, people who take ownership become a firewall between you and the problems. They catch them. They handle them. They don’t wait for you.
That’s the business we’re building. The one that runs itself.
And once you’ve made peace with these five fears, that business stops being a fantasy and starts being a plan.
There are really only three or four business models I see established educators use to reach that two or three million mark. If you want to see how each one works, and which might fit you, that’s the natural next thing to dig into.
And if you’d like a hand crossing this gap yourself, this is exactly the kind of work I do with people one to one. You can find that over at ollyrichards.co/mentorship.
