How do you build a performance creative team for a DTC brand? Start with the most experienced hire you can afford, a director-level player-coach for nine-figure brands, a senior agency-trained strategist for smaller ones, and let them build the team top-down, using freelancers to fill gaps while full-time roles get approved. Match output goals to headcount, because ad volume is determined by team size, and vet every candidate with a paid assessment that tests both craft and how they use AI. Building a performance creative team starts with hiring the most experienced brain you can afford, a director-level player-coach, then filling in strategists, editors, designers, and a creator manager around them. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Joanna Wallace, who founded the creative department at HexClad and served as VP of Creative Strategy at Birddogs, to map out exactly who to hire, in what order, what they cost, and how to test them before you commit millions in ad spend to their strategy.

We discuss:

• Why going cheap on your first creative hire is the most expensive mistake in DTC
• What a creative strategy director actually costs in 2026 (It’s not what you think) and why
• Why your ad volume is determined by your team size, full stop
• Why agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires
• How to run paid assessments that expose AI-generated word salad
• The coordinator role: the smartest entry point into creative strategy

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Connect with Joanna Wallace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannasloamewallace/ Joanna’s creative strategist evaluation template: To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com. This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn’t. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Scalability School is the podcast for DTC media buyers and e-commerce operators who want to scale profitably — hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

• 00:00 How to build a performance creative team for a DTC brand
• 02:02 The #1 hiring mistake: going cheap on your first creative hire
• 03:04 What a creative strategy director costs in 2026
• 05:06 Player-coach: what the director does in the first six months
• 09:10 Why ad volume is determined by team size
• 13:13 The hiring order for seven-figure brands
• 18:18 Why agency experience beats brand-side experience
• 21:21 What nine-figure creative teams do differently
• 25:24 Sharing creative learnings across the whole company
• 31:27 Where to find great creative strategists
• 37:36 How to evaluate candidates with paid assessments
• 41:38 How to break into creative strategy (the coordinator route)
• 47:43 How to keep a creative team from burning out