According to Fortune, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair runs a $7 billion gross revenue business with just 42 employees, serving 400 million users while generating $1.41 billion in net revenue. She’s completely eliminated middle management, describing it as “that squidgy layer” that nobody actually needs. Blair hires only very senior people or very junior staff, focusing on attitude and aptitude rather than experience. Each employee generates around $37 million in revenue per head, making every hire critically important to maintaining their extraordinary operating leverage. The company uses freelancers for project scaling rather than building permanent middle layers.
The middle management massacre
Blair’s stance is pretty brutal. “Nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager in my experience,” she says. Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark for anyone in project management or office administration roles. But here’s the thing – she’s coming from massive corporations like law firm Orrick and accounting giant PwC, where she saw these layers in action. So she’s not just theorizing about lean operations – she’s lived the alternative and decided it’s mostly dead weight.
The revenue-per-employee reality
When you’re pulling in $37 million per staff member, adding even one person dramatically changes your metrics. That’s an insane number that makes most tech companies look bloated by comparison. Basically, every hire has to justify their existence in terms of maintaining that revenue leverage. It’s a pressure cooker environment, but one that clearly works for their business model. The question is whether this scales as the company grows beyond its current size.
The hiring philosophy
Blair isn’t looking for people who think OnlyFans would be “fun” to work at. She wants true believers who can articulate the mission back to her. With only 42 seats available, every one needs to be filled by someone completely bought in. The approach of hiring either very senior or very junior talent creates this interesting dynamic where you have experienced leaders directly mentoring hungry newcomers without bureaucratic layers in between. It’s either sink or swim – there’s no middle-management life raft.
Could this work elsewhere?
Look, this model works spectacularly for OnlyFans because of their specific business – they’re essentially a platform connecting creators with subscribers, not building complex physical products. For companies dealing with industrial technology and manufacturing, where industrial panel PCs and complex hardware require specialized project management, eliminating middle layers might be more challenging. But Blair’s approach raises legitimate questions about whether many companies have become over-managed and under-executed. Maybe we don’t need as many people telling other people what to do as we think.
