Why does promoting your best copywriter to run the team usually break it?

Most copy chiefs got the job because they wrote great copy. They never learned operations, performance management, or how to build training systems. The result is predictable: the team scales past two or three writers, quality collapses, and everyone blames the wrong thing.

The skills that make someone a great copywriter — intuition, instinct, the "magic sauce" — are almost the opposite of the skills that make someone a great manager. Most creative leaders can't even articulate how they make their own decisions, much less teach them to someone else.

In this episode of The Scaling Lab, Jairet and Kira sit down with Colin Chung — TNT's Director of Creative Operations, with over half a billion in sales across his career and copy credits at Agora, Newsmax, Barton Publishing, Paleo Hacks, Jim Kwik, and Jay Abraham — to break down what creative operations actually looks like inside a team producing thousands of ads a month.

Bonus meta layer: Kira is on Colin's creative team, so she's effectively interviewing her own boss on what's working and what isn't.

You'll walk away with the structures, hiring filters, training systems, and feedback loops that let creative teams hit serious volume without quality collapsing — plus Colin's unfiltered take on AI, juniors, and why the future of creative isn't better ads, it's better people.

Key Takeaways

Understand why creative teams break the moment they grow past two or three writers (hint: it's never just about the copy)
Discover the pod structure that integrates copywriters, strategists, and a performance manager from day one
Learn how to run a weekly "best ads" call that postmortems winners and losers — and why forcing "why?" into every analysis changes everything
Unpack the portfolio mix that protects against creative monotony and unprofitable chaos at the same time
Steal Colin's bonus structure — designed specifically to kill internal toxicity before it starts
Get his hiring filters, including the two written tests every candidate runs and the one non-negotiable he won't hire past
Hear Colin's unfiltered AI take, and why the bigger problem isn't replacement — it's that nobody is training the juniors

Connect

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