How we run €24M with a team of 6 (and why it works)

Summary

• 1€24M revenue with 6 FTE - on track for €35M in 2026
• 2Fulfillment fully outsourced - focus on what drives growth
• 3Own brands: ETQ Amsterdam en TOV Essentials
• 4AI and automation as force multiplier - not as hype
• 5Everything we learn we apply directly for clients

The problem

What if I told you we run €24 million in revenue with 6 people? No big team. No clunky organization. No 20 meetings per week. Just a lean setup - that works. Most companies grow by hiring more people. More layers. More management. More overhead. And somewhere along the way, focus gets lost. We do it differently. We built and scaled ETQ Amsterdam and TOV Essentials to €24M revenue in 2025. On track for €35M in 2026, based on Q1 run rate. No guarantee - but this is how the numbers look right now. Our strength isn't in more people. Our strength is in focus.

Sound familiar?

This is what we see at almost every brand before we start:

• Your team grows, but revenue per FTE drops
• You have more meetings than output
• Fulfillment and logistics eat up your focus
• You don't know exactly where your money goes
• Growth feels heavy instead of scalable
• You invest more in overhead than in growth

You're running between €1M and €10M. This is your situation.

You've got product-market fit. You're generating revenue. But somewhere there's a ceiling. You feel it, but you can't quite name it.

• Your ads run, but ROAS drops when scaling
• You've hired people, but margin per FTE is dropping
• You do a lot, but there's no system behind it
• You know there's more potential, but you don't know where to start

This is exactly where most brands get stuck. Not from lack of ambition, but from lack of system.

What goes wrong

• Hiring more people as the solution for every problem
• Keeping fulfillment in-house because 'we want to do it ourselves'
• Not building systems - everything manual
• Losing focus through too many tasks per person
• Investing in overhead instead of inventory and growth
• Ignoring AI or using AI without purpose
• Seeing content as output instead of a system

Why almost nobody can do this alone

You can read this and think: makes sense, I'll do it. But reality is different. Most brands don't fail from lack of knowledge. They fail from lack of execution. Consistently. Every week. Without distraction.

• No consistency - it starts strong but fizzles after 4 weeks
• Wrong priorities - focus on vanity metrics instead of margin
• No system - everything is ad hoc, nothing is repeatable
• No feedback loop - you don't know what works and why

What this means for you

Many companies are stuck in the same pattern. Too many people. Too many layers. Too much inefficiency. The result: high costs, less speed, less profit. More people doesn't automatically mean more growth. This doesn't mean it works for everyone. But if you want to scale, you need to look critically at where your time and money goes.

• Your team grows but your margin drops
• Fulfillment costs more time than marketing
• You have no systems - everything is manual
• You invest in overhead instead of growth
• You want to scale but it keeps feeling heavier
• You want a partner that does it themselves - not just advises

Closing note

This isn't a trick - it's how we grow structurally.

Growth is rarely linear. Not every month is growth, but every month brings insight and improvement. We work with a select number of brands so we can stay focused on what truly works.