How WordAgents Recovered 40 Executive Hours Per Week
A full operational overhaul that unlocked $500K+ in annual capacity and removed the founders from daily firefighting.
A full operational overhaul that unlocked $500K+ in annual capacity and removed the founders from daily firefighting.
WordAgents is a full-service content writing operation for marketing agencies, SEO teams, and affiliate marketers. Clients include JD Power, Toptal, and Digital Trends.
Scale is their competitive advantage. It was also their biggest problem.
Vincent D'Eletto, CEO, and Tommy Joiner, CMO, had built a successful content operation. But they'd hit a wall.
Processes weren't documented. There was no project management system. Employee roles weren't clearly defined. More and more work fell to Vin and Tommy—at the expense of everything else.
"We were taking the business from a lifestyle business to a more corporate environment that can grow. We were operating out of spreadsheets, a lot of broken systems, so we needed someone to help streamline everything from a process standpoint."
— Vincent D'Eletto, CEO
Managing a team of 300+ contractors made it worse. The model that worked early on wasn't scaling.
"When you start out hiring freelancers and paying them on a per-word rate, that model works for a period of time. As you scale, the churn becomes so unmanageable that the model doesn't work anymore."
— Tommy Joiner, CMO
They thought they needed someone for a few hours a week to optimize operations.
They got something bigger.
What started as a few hours a week became 15 hours a week for 11 months—not because of scope creep, but because the real problems went deeper than anyone initially realized.
"Nanci was really good at not letting Tommy or I sit on our assumptions. If we made an assumption about a fix, she pushed back and made sure we were confident about our guess, and she would push to make sure we dug in and had the right information."
— Vincent D'Eletto, CEO
Continuous recruitment of freelance writers is integral to WordAgents' growth. But there was no clear data on tracking recruits, understanding turnover impact, or even handling time-off requests.
Nanci researched, vetted, and implemented Bamboo HR as the central system—then led training across the company. Vin removed himself from HR entirely, recovering hours each week for strategic work.
WordAgents was losing money simply because they couldn't distribute projects fast enough. The manual assignment system couldn't scale and often matched writers with work outside their expertise.
The operations team built a self-serve marketplace with Nanci's support. Writers and editors could claim work suited to them. The bottleneck broke. Millions of additional words per month became possible.
WordAgents had goals, but no systematic way to track progress or align the team around what mattered.
Nanci implemented a quarterly OKR framework. Every team member could see how their work connected to company objectives. Accountability became embedded in the culture.
Most operational knowledge lived in people's heads. Onboarding took weeks. Small mistakes cascaded.
Nanci documented core processes—recruitment, editorial workflow, client onboarding—and trained the team to maintain them. The business became less dependent on individual knowledge and more resilient to turnover.
11 months of focused operational work delivered compounding results:
But the biggest shift wasn't in the systems. It was in how the founders worked—and what the business could now become.
The operational foundation Nanci built positioned WordAgents to scale toward $5M+ in annual revenue. The systems, processes, and team structure could now support growth the founders had only imagined before.
"Nanci helped us get out of the day-to-day chaos and focus on what actually moves the business forward. We're not firefighting anymore—we're building."
— Vincent D'Eletto, CEO
If you're stuck being the bottleneck in your own business, let's talk. Book a 30-minute discovery call and we'll figure out what's holding you back.
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