No middle managers? OnlyFans may have drawn inspiration from big tech’s management shake-up
Keily Blair, CEO of streaming and content platform OnlyFans, called the team “a pretty productive group,” offering insight into how the 42-employee strong company generates $7 billion in annual revenue, Business Insider reported.
Speaking on the Masters of Scale podcast, Blair stated that he was proud of his team and said that the secret to achieving high average income per employee was the absence of middle level managers.
No middle managers? Here’s why OnlyFans CEO believes it works…
Explaining the decision, Blair said that the company made recruitments at both ends with a single criterion. “We recruit incredibly senior talent, and then we recruit incredibly hungry junior talent, and when we hire, we look for attitude and talent rather than experience,” he shared.
What about middle management? “We don’t have this kind of squidgy middle manager layer out there, because in my experience no one has ever had a really good middle manager,” he added.
Blair also added that he disagrees with the idea that leaders at large companies should have larger teams reporting to them. “We told our teams, ‘You can be a one-person team and deliver extraordinary results, it will be very valuable,'” he said on the podcast. Blair said there was no such thing as “management staff” for employees, only individual contribution.
Inspired by big tech’s management change?
It is noteworthy that, especially since the layoff spree at the end of 2023, the majority of laid-off employees are middle managers. Amazon, Google, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft have eliminated many such roles to reduce layers of hierarchy.
In April, Microsoft was reportedly focused on reducing the “PM ratio” in some teams, referring to the ratio of product or program managers to engineers, according to the Wall Street Journal. It requires team managers to meet specific budget targets and maintain a defined team-based ratio, the reports said.
Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he was aiming to increase the employee-to-manager ratio, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff the company was cutting management roles by 10% as part of a cost-cutting drive, according to a WSJ report. United Parcel Service and Citigroup have also laid off thousands of executives since 2023.
OnlyFans’ 42 employees earn $37.6 million per person!
The UK-based platform reportedly generates the highest revenue per employee, leaving behind technology giants such as Apple, Meta, Google, Nvidia and Microsoft. According to Barchart’s data, OnlyFans’ 42 employees earned a whopping average income of $37.6 million each.
By comparison, chipmaker Nvidia’s employees earned an average income of $3.6 million each; followed by Apple ($2.4 million per capita); Meta ($2.2 million in revenue each); Google ($1.9 million per person); and OpenAI and Microsoft ($1.1 million each).
But these tech companies employ thousands of people and beat OnlyFans by a large margin in terms of total revenue.
