No middle managers? OnlyFans may have drawn inspiration from big tech’s management shake-up

Streaming and content platform OnlyFans' CEO Keily Blair has offered insight into how the 42-employee strong company makes $7 billion in annual revenue, calling the team “a pretty efficient bunch”, Business Insider reported.

Speaking on the Masters of Scale podcast, Blair said she was proud of her team, adding that the secret to achieving high revenue generated on average per employee is the absence of middle managers.

No middle managers? Here's why OnlyFans CEO believes this works…

Explaining the decision, Blair said that the company hires at the two extremes with one criterion in mind. “We hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience,” she shared.

What about middle management? “We do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody's ever had a really good middle manager in my experience,” she added.

Blair further added that she does not agree with the opinion that leaders in big companies need to have bigger teams reporting to them. “We've said to our teams, ‘You can be a team of one and deliver exceptional results, and that will be so valued’,” she said on the podcast. For the employees Blair said there is no “manager track” only individual contribution.

Inspiration from big tech's management shake-up?

Notably, ever since the layoff spree in late 2023, a high number of the cut employees are middle managers. Amazon, Google, Intel, Meta and Microsoft have all eliminated a large number of such roles to reduce layers of hierarchy.

In April, it was reported that Microsoft focused on reducing the “PM ratio” on some teams—referring to the ratio of product or program managers to engineers, as per the Wall Street Journal. Reports said it required team managers to meet specific budget targets and maintain a defined team-based ratio.

Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he is aiming to increase the ratio of workers to managers, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff that the company had culled managerial roles by 10% in its cost-cutting drive, the WSJ report added. United Parcel Service and Citigroup have also cut thousands of supervisor jobs since 2023.

OnlyFans' 42 employees generate $37.6 million per head!

The UK-based platform reportedly generates the highest revenue per employee, beating out tech giants such as Apple, Meta, Google, Nvidia and Microsoft combined. According to data from Barchart, OnlyFans' 42 employees generated a whopping $37.6 million each in revenue on average.

For comparison, chipmaker Nvidia's employees recorded $3.6 million in revenues each on average; followed by Apple ($2.4 million per head); Meta ($2.2 million revenue each); Google ($1.9 million per head); and OpenAI and Microsoft ($1.1 million each).

However, these tech companies employ in the thousands and in terms of total revenue, they do outpace OnlyFans by a large margin.