Every once in a while, you hear a stat that makes you stop and question everything.
I just heard one.
I sat down with Courtney Toll, co-founder and CEO of Nori, and she told me her brand is doing mid-eight figures in revenue with a four-person internal team.
(She was at three people until August).
This isn't a fluke. It’s a masterclass in leverage, operational design, and a brilliant outsourcing framework.
I had to understand how this was possible. Here are the hard-earned lessons from one of the most efficient operators in the game.
1. Her #1 Rule for Hiring Agencies
How do you run an 8-figure brand with four people? You don't. You have a "huge village" of external experts. But Courtney's filter for who to hire is what's brilliant.
Her #1 red flag? "An agency that says that they can do it all is typically a red flag for me".
Instead of hiring a generalist, she hires hyper-specialists. Her Amazon agency, for example, "specializes in just Amazon. They don't touch other things" .
Here’s the math: That one specialized agency replaces what she estimates would be three full-time internal hires (a media buyer, a logistics manager, and an account manager).
It costs her "a fraction of what it would cost to bring them in-house". That's pure leverage.
2. How She De-Risks Every Full-Time Hire
She doesn't outsource everything. When her external finance team couldn't keep up with real-time inventory planning, she knew she had to hire . Their monthly recommendations were "completely outdated".
But she didn't just post a job on LinkedIn. She ran a genius "try-before-you-buy" process:
She found her ideal Director of Operations.
She hired her in a freelance capacity for four months, meeting just once a week.
By the time she offered the full-time W-2 role, the new hire was already "intimately familiar with the company" and Courtney was 100% certain it was the right fit.
She completely eliminated the #1 risk of a bad, expensive hire.
3. The "Halo" Strategy That Won Target
This is the most actionable growth strategy she shared. When Nori launched in Target, they didn't just dump money into retail media. They ran a "Halo" campaign.
First, they hired a Target broker (not a marketing agency) to handle the brutal logistics and "different language" of chargebacks.
Then, they created "Target-centric creatives" and ran them on Meta... but pointed the ads to their own DTC site.
Why?
The social proof of "now in Target" gave the ads "much, much higher conversion values" on their DTC site .
This created a blended "halo" where scaling Meta ads lifted all channels. When Meta spend went up, Target and Amazon sales followed.
4. The Pitch That Actually Worked
How do you raise a Series A with a 4-person team?
The story was just the facts. It was brutally simple and undeniable:
Innovated in a "sleepy category" with true IP.
Doubled revenue every single year to mid-eight-figures .
Did it all with a 3-4 person team.
Her punchline to VCs: "find us another consumer company that's doing this".
Even with that "impossible" story, she admits the raise was still "so difficult". Her biggest takeaway? They ultimately prioritized finding the "right partners" over squeezing out the highest possible valuation.
This is the kind of hustle that wins. By the way, when she first started, she got her first founder advice by cold-emailing Emily Weiss of Glossier and the co-founder of Square Payments. And they both said yes.
A huge thanks to Courtney for the masterclass. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
Check out Nori
