Keily Blair, the CEO of OnlyFans since July 2023, says that if there is one thing she cannot abide, it’s “that squidgy layer of middle management” that large companies frequently develop. She actively refuses to hire middle managers, she said on stage at the MEO arena at Web Summit in Lisbon on Thursday.
Of course, Blair has the luxury of having only 42 employees, so living without project managers and office administrators is easier than it was at her previous employers, which include the law firm Orrick and the accounting giant PwC.
“We do not have that squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager in my experience,” Blair said. “And so, for us, we were like, actually, let’s get rid of that model. Let’s keep things very lean. Let’s scale up teams when we need to for projects,” by using outside freelancers first before hiring full-time roles.
Hiring at OnlyFans has an outsized effect on the company’s operating expense leverage, Blair said, because it generates $7 billion in gross revenue from its 400 million users annually and $1.41 billion in net revenue. That works out at around $37 million per staff head, Blair said, citing the company’s internal metrics. Adding even a single staffer dramatically drives down that average.
So Blair hires only very senior people or very junior staff.
Each hire matters
“Every hire is very important. You’ve got to make sure you keep the revenue back up to make sure it matches that. For us, it’s a structural decision about how we run the business. 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,” Blair told Masters of Scale host Jeff Berman.
“And so, for us, we were like, actually, let’s get rid of that [middle management] model. Let’s keep things very lean. Let’s scale up teams when we need to for projects.”
Getting a job at OnlyFans is difficult, to say the least. Blair doesn’t hire people who just want a job or think OnlyFans is going to be fun.
“It’s incredibly important for me to understand that the person who I’m looking at hiring—because we only have 42 full-time employees—really believes the mission, can articulate the mission back to me, understand why they want to work here, not just because it’s cool, and we have awesome merch, but because they believe in what we’re doing, and they understand the story.”