Helping agency owners get out of client work and hand over media buying/account management to a team member is one of the most important transition points required to scale an agency sustainably. So many people get stuck here and have so many limiting beliefs and mental roadblocks that cause them to self-sabotage following through with this transition. It goes back to the first person you ever delegated to. For almost everyone, that's a VA doing something repetitive. And with that role, you do have to make it grandma-proof. Click by click, screenshot every step, leave nothing to interpretation, because the whole point is that the person doesn't need to make decisions. That's correct for that role. The problem is you learn the wrong lesson from it. Then you go to hire a media buyer and your instinct fires the same way. So you spend weeks building an elaborate SOP that teaches someone how to media buy. Sit with what you're actually doing there. You're making yourself the bottleneck for the brainpower in your own business. If your decision-making is the ceiling on theirs, what exactly are you paying them for? You want a media buyer who's better at media buying than you are. I'll be honest about my own path here. I came up learning the strategy myself. I spent a lot of time in the trenches getting good at it, and I wrote all my SOPs from scratch because I'd personally worked out how to get results in my market. I kind of wish I hadn't spent as much time on that as I did. Media buying isn't that hard of a skill to develop. There are plenty of people out there who already know how to do it. If you're early and trying to scale quickly, all that time you're pouring into over-engineering the SOP should be going into talent acquisition instead. So here's how I'd actually filter out applications to hire an A-Plan Media Buyer for your agency. 1) Objective qualifiers in the application. Not "tell me about yourself." Yes or no and numbers only: Have you run campaigns for this specific industry, in this specific location, before?