How To Scale Ecommerce Without Constantly Adding Headcount #596

Dave Thompson, founder of Run Remote and Hometime, has built and operated businesses across ecommerce, marketplaces and venture studios, and what stood out wasn’t a tactic, it was a mindset. He kept coming back to one word: leverage. Designing businesses so they scale through systems, distributed teams and smart tooling, not just headcount. 

In this Playbook, we revisit Dave’s philosophy and connect it with lessons from Alice Williams (Ovira), Damien Smith (Boozebud) and Serene Lim (Gellae). All very different operators, all solving the same problem: how to grow without just throwing more people at it.

In Today’s Playbook:

• Why hiring is often a reflex, and what to question before you post the job ad
• How Dave Thompson designs businesses around leverage, not headcount
• Why distributed teams and modern tools create capital efficiency at scale
• How Ovira restructured roles to remove handoffs and speed up decision-making
• Why shared tech architecture prevents duplicated teams as you grow
• How Gellae uses automation to remove repetitive work without killing creativity

Connect with Dave Thompson
Explore Run Remote and Hometime
RunRemote’s main episode
Ovira’s episode
BoozBud’s episode
Gellae’s episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Marketplaces in Australia aren't just emerging or a nice side piece to D2C anymore. They're established, they're complex, and they are moving fast. Amazon continues to accelerate, TikTok shop is looming, and for most brands, managing a marketplace properly has become a full-time job. Forecasting, content, ads, logistics, compliance, it's a lot and it requires specialist knowledge. That's where Patent can help. Patent don't just advise on marketplaces, they actually buy your product and then sell it on global marketplaces as your partner. That means they have real skin in the game. They only win if you win. Simple as that. Through their marketplace accelerator model, Patent handles everything from inventory forecasting and listing creation through to advertising, fulfillment, and international expansion. So if marketplaces feel overwhelming, or you know you should be doing more, but you just don't have the time, the team, or the energy, contact Patten to help you make the most of the marketplace opportunity. Learn more at au.patten.com. There's this assumption in e-commerce that I reckon a lot of us don't even realize we're making. When things get busy or we're scaling or complexity creeps in, stuff starts breaking or we get stretched so far, and the default response is I need to hire more people. And don't get me wrong, as an ex-recruiter at times, one of my business ventures, sometimes that is the right move. But a lot of the times it's just a default response. We know we've got a lot more options on the table now than ever. Today's playbook actually came together after a conversation with Dave Thompson, who is the founder of Run Remote and Home Time, where we got talking about leverage, capital efficiency, and how modern businesses are being built very differently to even five or ten years ago. Dave has built and operated businesses across e-commerce, marketplaces, and venture studios. And what stood out to me in that chat wasn't a specific tactic, it was his mindset. He kept coming back to this idea of designing businesses so they scale without constantly adding people. Using distributed teams, using better systems, using the ridiculous number of tools now available to us, whether that be SaaS or AI, he's able to get more output from smaller high-quality teams. And he's got the success to prove from it, as we heard from his home time adventures. He really has created a business system for growth. The more I thought about it, the more I realize we've actually covered this idea from a few different angles on Ad Descartes. So in this playbook, we're revisiting a handful of past episodes that all land on the same underlying lesson that growth doesn't have to mean headcount by default. We're going to start with Dave because his episode really sets the foundation. Then we'll bring in Alice Williams from Ovira on role design, Damien Smith from Boozebud and Paramount Lika on shared systems, Serene Lim from Jell A on automating distribution, all very different operators, but the same goal, being able to build e-commerce businesses that scale through leverage, not just more people.

SPEAKER_00: 3:20

I mean, I think as an example, like having distributed teams is something that I'm passionate about. So even back at home time, it was like, let's not have like a huge HQ and like have a hundred people arrive at the front office, right? The concept was all about like how do you leverage all the tools and technology to maximize productivity as well as capital efficiency. So distributed teams are something that I've been very passionate about for a long time in terms of like how do you find the best remote talent across the world. Obviously, you know, you're solving for cost arbitrage, but more importantly, if you can kind of narrow the gap in terms of quality threshold and get as close a comparison to like an onshore equivalent, that's really, really quite interesting, right? So I think remote and distributed teams and also like empowering the best teams is one, then it's obviously like leveraging, yeah, all the kind of awesome tools that are made available to us these days, right? So like I think we're just in an awesome time in terms of entrepreneurship where there's so many great, you know, SaaS tools as well as no-cools, as well as you can hire someone from anywhere in the world and there's platforms that facilitate how they get paid, and you know, you can do that compliantly. So it's certainly, I guess if you cast your mind back to how entrepreneurship might have been back in the day, I think we're in a pretty envious position. And then it's really just like trying to capitalize on those trends, right? And then use them to your advantage in terms of like modern business building and doing so in an accelerated way, but like more importantly, capital efficient and I guess productive way.

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

From a tech perspective, are you a builder? Do you ever build your custom tech or are you just whatever's off the shelf we take and we use?

SPEAKER_00: 4:50

You know, I I've been having lots of great conversations with uh Mr. Andrew Ford about vibe coding on the weekends. So you know, we we do that for fun. He's a complete nerd. He's actually uh he's he's quite a clever nerd. I will give him a few.

SPEAKER_01: 5:01

He's an incredibly clever nerd. I love we always talk about how much he fiddles and plays, and I'm like, how do you have time for all this? He's just endlessly curious.

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

I wish I was probably better at it. I could could definitely be more advanced. But um, yeah, certainly very fascinated by that world and yeah, forever listening to kind of all the the latest and greatest nuke podcasts and you know, AI deep dives and all that kind of stuff. And I think like experimentation is key. I think we're obviously in this really fast-paced world where AI is moving every single day. There seems to be like a new announcement and a new kind of model, etc. And I don't believe that anyone's uh pro at it. Obviously, there might be some people that claim to be, but it's actually a bit of a level playing field where it's this like a fascinating new technology and everyone's kind of at the starting point, and it's really about like how do you allocate your time to then yeah, experiment and learn and upskill as much as possible. And I think it's super important for everyone to be kind of investing their time into that because yeah, it just makes things way more efficient and you can obviously get way more leverage. Like that's actually a concept I think about a lot, which is leverage. So it's like, okay, how do you how do you get things happening without like overinvesting your time? Is there ways that you can like set up systems and processes and design such that things can happen in the background with maximum leverage?

SPEAKER_01: 6:11

And a lot of it is a mindset shift, isn't it? And we talked a lot with James Johnson from Shopify around this, and he was like, there's one simple principle. Every time you do something, just ask, could AI do this better? Kind of stuff. And yes, it may take you five times longer this time, but if you crack it, and most of the times you will crack it, it will revolutionize and create a moat around your business.

SPEAKER_00: 6:32

Most definitely. 100%. Something that I think about at like the venture studio level is definitely back to like having those really core competency, like talent experts within the core team to be able to then like build, you know, multiple prototypes or multiple products. So you always want to have, well, I think in this day and age, you definitely want to have product people, but product people or like technical people probably look different to what they might have back in the day. So back in the day, it's obviously having like the best software engineer can actually add leverage and like you know increase productivity. Whereas now it's like, okay, well, we need like absolute like AI experts, someone who's gonna be, you know, vibe coding over the weekend, and they're just rarely just gonna throw themselves all of that in terms of how to get maximum output from all the tools that we have at our disposal.

SPEAKER_01: 7:16

It's wild to listen to how Dave thinks about building companies in the first place. He talks about distributed teams, not having massive HQ and being really intentional around how you're using tools and technology to maximize productivity and capital efficiency. Dave's point was that we're all in a pretty unique moment. You can hire great people anywhere in the world. You've got SaaS tools, no code tools, AI tools, all of this stuff that simply didn't exist before. And if you design the business properly, a small, high-quality team can punch way above its weight. What I really liked is that he didn't frame this as cost cutting, even though that might be under the surface. But he sees the bigger opportunity in narrowing the quality gap and then designing systems so work happens in the background without constant input and admit, constant human error. He kept coming back to the idea of leverage. How do you set things up so you're not personally overinvesting your time every time something needs to happen? How do you build systems and processes that just run? And to me, that is the mindset shift. Instead of asking, who do we need to do this? Start asking, what do we have to change? So we're not necessarily reliant on one person. How can the system help us? Because once you start designing for leverage first, headcount becomes a choice and not necessarily a reflex. At Ovira, Alice Williams didn't just keep hiring specialists as the business grew. She actually stepped back and looked at how the work was flowing. Instead of having performance marketing over here and creative over there, she collapsed them into a single growth role, one person who owns the outcome end-to-end. And that might sound small, but in a day-to-day schedule, that means that no one's waiting on briefs. There's no back and forth explaining why something worked or didn't, and there weren't huge gaps between insights and actions. The lesson here isn't to merge roles everywhere. It's that if work keeps slowing down, don't assume that you just need more people to keep the engine running. Sometimes you may have chopped the responsibility up too much and added more people into the mix that don't need to be there. So before you hire, look at where the ownership is blurred. That's often where the leverage is hiding. Another great example of leverage at a systems level came from Damien Smith at Boozebud. Damien runs multiple brands, but instead of treating each one like a completely separate operation, his team runs on the same Shopify code base. So when they build something, let's say a feature, an improvement, or a fix, they build it once and then roll it out everywhere. That decision sounds technical, but it has massive people implications. Because every time you don't standardize, you're basically committing to future hires just to maintain that complexity. And oftentimes that complexity comes from old business rules that don't get questioned when we're building new stuff. So remember, if you're at a situation where your tech is forcing you to duplicate effort as you grow, take a step back and look at why it's so complicated and try and standardize as much as you can before expanding hours or even headcount. And for the last bit of this playbook, I want to bring in Serene Lim, the founder of Jel A, which is a DIY gel nails brand that's challenging a long-standing industry. What I liked about Serene's story is that she didn't just assume the answer was hiring more people as things got busier. She actually stopped and looked at why the team felt stretched. And what she realized was that a big chunk of the workload wasn't creative at all. It was repetitive distribution, posting the same content in different places, repurposing, scheduling, moving things around. They weren't actually creating anything new. So instead of hiring, she systemized it. Automation took care of the posting, the repurposing, the scheduling, which meant that the team could keep up without adding headcount. In fact, they could get more creative. And this is the bit that really matters. Automation isn't about replacing thinking. That's usually where it all goes wrong if you try and do that. Good automation is about removing work that doesn't need to require judgment. And we know now that there are so many more tools that can help us with that. And if there are tools that aren't out there that serve your purpose, it's never been easier to create tools that do. If someone's job is mostly copying, pasting, resizing, re-uploading content, that's not a resourcing issue. That's a workflow issue. So if there's one thing that I'd take away from this playbook, it's this scaling e-commerce without constantly adding headcount isn't about working people harder. It's about designing the business better. Dave showed us that yes, he uses remote workers, but at the core of it, he's designed a business system that allows a business to scale without relying on headcount. Alice showed us that better role design can replace multiple hires with one high impact role. Damien showed us that shared systems and standardization across systems stop teams being duplicated as brands grow. Serene showed that automation should remove repetition, but not creativity. Growth doesn't automatically need bigger teams, but it does need more leverage. And that usually starts with asking better questions, not just posting another job ad. I hope that has helped.