After running AdTribe for six years and managing over $100M in ad spend, I learned how hard it is to build and keep a world-class media buying team.

Finding great talent takes months.
Training takes even longer.
And the wrong hire can cost you clients and profit fast.

So I built the service I wish existed back then — Haven.

Haven is a white-label media buying partner that helps marketing agencies scale without hiring.

For $799 per account, you get a complete senior-level growth team:

✅ Media buyer
✅ Creative designer
✅ Video editor
✅ Developer
✅ Performance strategist

No hiring. No overhead. No training headaches.

Today, more than 20 agencies partner with us to handle their paid media.

A few of them said it best:

Olivia Kean, CEO at Fusion Hub
👉 “It’s allowed me to focus on the things I love, knowing they’re crushing it on their end.”

Kory Baraba, CEO at Grow Fast
👉 “We’ve worked with 4–5 different media buyers from Haven, and they’ve all been amazing.”

See more client stories here: https://www.hirewithhaven.com/clients

If you run a marketing agency and want to scale fulfillment without adding headcount,
connect with me or reach out at dmitry@hirewithhaven.com

Dmitry Fesenko

Looking for a TikTok Shop agency.

I just had a call with a $15M CPG brand. They need help with:

→ TikTok Shop setup
→ Affiliate management
→ Magento integration

Anyone in my network have an agency they'd recommend? I will make an intro

Drop a name in the comments or DM me.

UPDATE: Got hundreds of responses. Going through every comment and DM. Will respond to everyone. Thank you all.

CEO at Haven | Hire world-class media buyers for 65% less than in the US | $100M+ in managed ad spend

Took a few weeks off. First break in months.

No Slack. No LinkedIn. No client calls.

Just rest.

Honestly? It felt weird. Almost guilty.

But I came back to our busiest January ever.

→ onboarding 2 new agency partners for white-label offer
→ signed 3 new clients for media buyer placement offer

Not bad for week one.

Looking back, 2025 was really about laying the groundwork.

Building the team. Launching a new offer that's more profitable and easier to sell.

2026 is when we scale.

The break gave me some clarity too. I've been running at 100% for years. Two agencies. Teams across time zones. Always on.  

Turns out stepping away for a bit doesn't break everything. Who knew 😅

Anyway, here's what we're going after this year:

→ Scale placements to 3-4/month
→ Add 10 agency partners
→ Build creative department from scratch
→ Launch AI copilot for media buyers

Feeling good about this one.

What's your biggest goal for 2026?

Our Head of Paid Media just left to serve in the Ukrainian Army.

Andrii was my first hire. I trained him personally. Over the years, he became the backbone of our delivery.

When I heard the news, my first reaction was panic.

We're screwed.

But after the emotions settled, I realized something:

If a business can't operate without one person, it's not a business. 

That moment forced me to rethink how we build Haven going forward:  

→ who we hire next 
→ how we structure leadership 
→ how knowledge is distributed instead of living in one person’s head

The good news: Andrii helped raise incredibly strong team leads. I trust them to maintain the quality standards we care so much about.

Will the next few months be uncomfortable? Absolutely.

I'll need to step back into fulfillment more than I'd like.

But I'm confident we'll come out of this with a stronger, more resilient company than before.

Building an agency that lasts means building one that doesn't depend on any single person. 

Including me.

What's the most underrated skill in media buyers?

It's not platform knowledge.
It's not creative strategy.
It's not attention to detail.

It's enthusiasm.

We recently hired a junior media buyer.

Every call, he's smiling. Every monthly recap, he shows up with a full presentation, pumped to share results. Last week he built a dashboard no one asked for, just because he wanted to understand the data better.

He makes it incredibly easy to work with him. And because of that, everyone wants to help him get better.

Skills can be taught. Platforms change every year anyway.

But energy and curiosity compound.

A highly enthusiastic junior will often outperform a grumpy expert over time.

Not because they know more. But because people actually want to work with them.

Next time you're hiring, don't just check the resume.

Check the energy.

5 years ago, we got hacked.  

Over $20k of client money was stolen (fkn casino affiliates).

At the time, our agency was doing $20k/month in revenue. So, needless to say, this was devastating.

It took 6 months to get the money back from Meta.  

Luckily, none of our clients left. We worked for free for 3 months to make it right.

But here's what came out of it:

We wrote two documents that we still use today.

1. "When FB account got hacked" protocol

→ How to identify which profile was compromised 
→ How to lock it down immediately 
→ How to contact Meta support 
→ How to protect the ad accounts 
→ Red flags to watch for before it happens

2. "How to keep your Business Manager safe" checklist

→ 2FA for everyone with access 
→ Regular audits of who has access 
→ Security checkup for all personal FB accounts 
→ Alerts for unrecognized logins 
→ Review apps and browser plugins regularly

We've used these internally ever since. Never got hacked again.  

Mistakes are unavoidable, but making the same mistake twice is a choice.

If you're running ads for clients, you need this.  

Comment "protocol" and I will send these two docs your way.

Slack is killing your media buyers' output.

Not the workload. The constant interruption.

I had a call with an 8-figure agency owner last week. He shared a simple system that changed how I think about client communication.

His media buyers used to be glued to Slack all day. Context switching between campaigns and client requests. It was destroying their focus.

So he implemented time blocks.

Here's how it works:

→ 9 AM: First communication window (30 min)
→ 12 PM: Second window (30 min)
→ 5 PM: Final window (30 min)

During those blocks, they clear every Slack channel. Outside those windows? Deep work only.

But here's what makes it actually work.

Clients know about it from day one.

During onboarding: "This is Ali. He's running your ads. Here are his response times: 9 AM, 12 PM, and 5 PM EST. If you message outside these times, he'll respond at the next block."

They frame it as a benefit: "We do this so Ali can focus on actually working on your campaigns, instead of multitasking all day."

Most clients are fine with a 2-3 hour response time. The problem is never the wait. It's the uncertainty about if or when they'll hear back.

Clear expectations beat fast responses.

We'll be rolling this out soon at Haven across all 90+ accounts. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

What systems do you use to protect deep work time?

What's the fastest way to have $1M in your bank account?  

I'm not talking about equity or paper gains. I mean cash you can actually spend.

Start an agency.

You don't need investors, a 7-year exit plan, or to pray for an acquisition.

Just clients paying you every month.

Now look, if you're the Elon Musk type who wants to build life-changing technology and is willing to suffer for 10-20 years without seeing real money, by all means do it. The world needs people working on groundbreaking stuff.

This post isn't for you.

This is for people who want to make good money, play golf on Fridays, pick up their kids from school, and actually enjoy the life they're building.

Most agencies never get to $1M, though. Here's why:  

→ Wrong clients (needy, low budget, bad fit) 
→ Wrong partners (or trying to do it all solo) 
→ Burnout from chasing every dollar

But if you pick your clients wisely and surround yourself with the right partners (like Haven ), agency life is beautiful.

Think about it.

What other model pays you to learn new skills and apply them to real companies with real budgets?

We get to do the sexiest parts of business:

→ Build strategies 
→ Run ads (spending other people's money) 
→ Be creative

Tech founders grind for years hoping for an exit.

Ecom founders are equity rich but always cash poor. Inventory eats everything.

Agency owners deposit cash every month. Cash they can actually spend on upgrading their life.

I will choose agency every time.  

Prove me wrong.

A few years ago I was visiting Vancouver for a few days.

One of our agency partners was organizing a small dinner for agency owners.

I joined without any expectations.

That dinner became one of the highest ROI decisions I've ever made.

First

One of the agency owners there, Gabby, became one of my closest friends. Later, she became a client.

Second

Another owner introduced me to a few friends who were way ahead of me in business.

Every time I meet them, my thinking expands. Problems feel smaller. Possibilities feel bigger.

Third

An agency owner I didn't even talk to that night just booked a call to hire media buyers from us.

Three outcomes from one dinner I almost skipped.

We spend so much time optimizing funnels, running ads, and writing content.  

All of that matters.  

But the best opportunities I've ever had didn't come from impressions or clicks.  

They came from showing up in person and shaking hands.  

The more rooms you walk into, the more doors open later.

Brent started his agency a few months ago.

He signed his first medspa client and asked us to run their ads.

One month later, here’s what he said:

👉 "Amazing work team. I'm seriously so proud of the results we're already getting, and it's only going to get better."

This is why we do what we do.

The best media buyers don't want to work for you.

Here's what most agency owners get wrong:

They try to hire great talent before they're ready for it.

Top media buyers want to work on interesting accounts. They want variety, challenge, and growth.

If you only have 3 clients and they're all low-budget headaches, you're not going to attract A-players. You'll get whoever says yes.

So what do you do before you have 10+ solid accounts?

→ Do the work yourself
→ Use contractors
→ Partner with a white-label team like Haven

Don't force a full-time hire when you don't have the client base to support it.

Once you have:

→ 10+ decent-sized clients
→ A pipeline strong enough that losing 5 won't break you

Then start thinking about bringing someone in-house.

Because the worst position to be in? Paying a six-figure salary while your media buyer sits at 50% capacity because you lost a few accounts.

Build the business great talent wants to join first.

The right people will follow.

Agency owners don't need more promises.

They need proof.

Here's what our partners said this week 👇

Ask 5 agencies what a "media buyer" does.  

You'll get 5 different answers.

At some agencies, media buyers manage millions in ad spend without touching a single creative.

At others, they're basically creative strategists — spending 90% of their time on new ads (like ours).

At others, they're client-facing growth strategists who own the entire funnel.

Same title. Completely different jobs.

After placing dozens of media buyers, here's what I've noticed:

The bigger the client, the more specialized the role needs to be.

Enterprise brands want someone who does one thing extremely well. Smaller brands want someone who can do it all — not just run ads, but actually grow the business.

Neither is wrong. 

But if you're unclear on which one you need, you'll hire the wrong person. 

And that's an expensive mistake.

At Haven, before we even sign a contract for placement, we run an extensive intake form to get 100% clear on who we're looking for.

Some of the questions we ask:

→ Does the media buyer need to be on client calls? 
→ What platforms do they need to be expert in? 
→ What industries or niches? 
→ Do they touch creatives or not?
→ How much ad spend will they manage monthly?

The clearer we get upfront, the better the match.

P.S. If you're hiring media buyers in Q1, we have a few spots left.

🚀 December 2025 results at Haven (our biggest month ever)

Ad spend: $1.7M
Revenue: $4.2M
Leads generated: 85,692

Top-performing niches:
→ Apparel & Accessories ($1.9M in rev)
→ Home & Lifestyle ($680K in rev)
→ Food & Beverage ($520K in rev)

Platform breakdown:
→ Meta: 54%
→ Google: 44%
→ Pinterest, LinkedIn, Taboola: 2%

December highlights:
✅ 83% of accounts hit or exceeded targets
✅ Closed 3 media buyer placement contracts
✅ Built a first version of our AI media buying copilot
✅ Hired a new pod leader 
✅ Wrapped up the year with 87 active accounts

But the biggest win? We've assembled a killer team of media buyers.

Took 7 years to build this crew for Haven and Adtribe.  

Now we do it for other agencies too.  

P.S. If you need media buyers who actually deliver, DM me.

The most boring client we ever had made us the most money.

I'm talking about a network of men's health clinics.

→ One offer
→ Same creatives
→ Just different locations

One media buyer managed 30-40 accounts by copy-pasting campaigns.

Boring as hell, but we were printing cash. Both the agency and the media buyer (we pay a % of revenue generated).

Now compare that to a 7-figure DTC brand.

→ New creatives every week
→ Constant testing 
→ Strategy calls
→ Slack messages at all hours

You give it ten times the effort, and results still aren't guaranteed.

Is it more interesting to work on a challenging DTC account than running Meta lead forms for a local business? Absolutely.

But here's the thing. Every exciting project comes with a hidden cost: your time.

You overinvest. You obsess over details. You give it way more than the retainer covers. And it kills your margins.

Agencies making real money aren't chasing the coolest brands. They're running the same boring playbook over and over again.

So ask yourself: 

Are you building a fun business or a profitable one?

Because in my experience, it's really hard to do both.

We just moved every account we’ve ever worked with into Airtable.

All of them.

621 accounts over 7 years. 

That's 621 onboardings.
621 founders. 
621 different business models and niches.

Some stayed for months. Some for years. Some came back twice.

Every single one taught us something.  

What works. What doesn't. What kills accounts. What scales them.  

You can't fake 7 years of reps.

P.S. If you're an agency owner looking for media buyers who've seen it all, DM me.

Marketing is just the game of impressions.

Businesses that serve the most impressions to the right people win the market.

That's it.

Every tactic, every hack, every "secret strategy" is just a way to get more eyeballs on your offer and make more of them buy.

SEO? Impressions.
Paid ads? Impressions.
LinkedIn content? Impressions.
Email/SMS? Impressions.
Influencer marketing? Impressions.

The channel doesn't matter. The math is the same.

More people see your offer → more people buy.

Shopify recently released 150+ updates.

One of them will change how people shop online.

It's called Agentic Storefronts.

This feature allows brands to sell products directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot.

Think about what this means.

People are already asking ChatGPT "what's the best running shoe for flat feet" instead of Googling it.  

Now they can buy right there in the conversation without leaving the chat.

No ads. No landing pages.

For the last 20 years, ecommerce worked like this:

Search → click → website → convince → buy.

Now it’s becoming:

Ask → decide → buy.

Your storefront is no longer just a website.

My prediction: websites will become almost like a business card. Most commerce will happen directly in chats or on social.

Two things brands can do right now:  

→ optimize your product catalog mapping so AI agents know how to present your products in searches 

→ use the Knowledge Base app to add answers to your most frequent questions

The new era of commerce is already here.  

Brands that adapt fast win. The rest get left behind.

I started a newsletter with zero strategy.

No content calendar. No lead magnet. No "10x your agency" promises.

Just me every week sharing what's actually happening in my life: agency stuff, travel stories, random thoughts.

Last week I wrote about my trip to Vietnam and how we're rebuilding our internal systems to run Haven more like an ecom platform than a traditional agency.

I treat it more like writing updates to my friends. 

And agency owners are liking it 👇

→ "I just opened your latest email and it blew my mind"
→ "It's very informative, please keep them coming"
→ "I'm really inspired by your recent newsletter"

My last newsletter had 46.2% open rate.

Not bad for something with "zero strategy."

If you want to hear what's going on behind the scenes at Haven, the good and the ugly of running an agency, subscribe.

Link in comments.

One change saved our team 10 hours a week.

The last few months at Haven have been busy. We signed a few new partners, and our team is now doing 3–5 account audits every week.

Great problem to have. But it created a new one.

Our team leads were spending hours on Slack every day. Partner requests, audit coordination, invoicing follow-ups. The back-and-forth was eating into actual work time.

That's not sustainable.

So we're making a shift.

My long-term vision for Haven is to operate more like a platform than a traditional agency. Less Slack chaos, more deep work that actually moves the needle.

First process we're fixing: audits.

Before:

→ Partner messages us on Slack
→ We gather context and access
→ Team leads coordinate the work
→ Someone has to remember to send an invoice

It worked, but coordination was taking longer than the audits themselves.

So we automated the entire intake process.

Here's how it works now: 

→ Partner submits a simple form 
→ Chooses platform, adds context, pays upfront 
→ System auto-notifies the team on Slack 
→ Task gets created in Asana automatically

I estimate this one change alone will save our team leads 10 hours per week, which is huge.

That's time they can spend on strategy and results instead of chasing invoices.

Audits are just the start. Onboarding new accounts is next 💪

Which tequila shot got you drunk?

My client asked me why attribution is so hard. Since she's not technical, I gave her this analogy (not my idea):

Imagine you're at a bar with friends doing tequila shots.

You get wasted.

So the question is: which shot got you drunk?

→ The last one? That's last-click attribution.
→ The decision to do shots in the first place? That's first-click.
→ Every shot contributed equally? That's linear attribution.

Same thing with marketing.

There are tools that claim to solve this, but here's my honest take:

Consumer behavior is too complex. Knowing exactly which ad made someone buy is almost impossible.

Someone sees your Meta ad Monday. Googles you Wednesday. Clicks an email Friday. Buys Saturday after a friend mentions your brand.

Which one gets credit?

The real answer: stop chasing perfect attribution.

Instead, use a combination of:

→ Blended ROAS (MER) across all channels
→ Post-purchase surveys
→ Multi-touch attribution tools (Triple Whale, Northbeam)

Even then, data won’t give you the full answer.

Experience and judgment still make the final call.

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I teach students using the company platform in Business and Conversational English, English proficiency test preparation, employment/immigration interview preparation as well as grammar and language skills.

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