How Coffee ’n Clothes Scaled from 7 to 20 with an Executive Assistant + Marketing Ops Team from Oceans Talent

Item: Oceans Talent
Author: Ryan Glick

7 to 20

full-time team growth

500+

qualified leads sourced per month

3 to 4

additional Oceans operators added since

Industry

Agency

Company size

Startup

Role

Executive assistants

Published

July 27, 2026

Introduction

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Coffee ’n Clothes (CNC) started in 2014 as an Instagram page blending fashion and coffee, and grew into an end-to-end experiential marketing company producing immersive brand activations for clients like Dolce & Gabbana, Uber Eats, L’Oréal, Mattel, and Nike. Recognized by AdWeek, Forbes, Inc., and Business of Fashion, and named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies in 2025, CNC runs a distributed team across the US, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Germany, and France.

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Founder and CEO Ryan Glick partnered with Oceans Talent in 2023 with one goal: spend the least possible time on communication and execution, and the most on sales, vision, and the company’s move from a national to an international footprint. That meant the operational layer of the company had to be owned by someone else, end to end.

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The Challenge: A Founder Running the Machine Alone

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CNC runs a rolling backlog of 30 to 50 named-brand activations in flight at any time, on a team Ryan has grown from 7 full-time staff to roughly 20, supported by a pool of 60 to 70 freelancers. Three obstacles stood between him and the founder role he actually wanted:

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Execution gravity. The calendar, the inbox, the outbound, the pipeline, the budgets, and the freelancer logistics all routed through Ryan. A founder running 30 to 50 live activations cannot also run the machine underneath them.
The process lived in one head. For years, CNC’s operations existed in Ryan’s head and a stack of Google Sheets. Nothing was documented, transferable, or delegable.
The trust bar. Handing this off only works if the person can make judgment calls without checking in. Task-level help wouldn’t move the needle; CNC needed embedded ownership.

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[PULL QUOTE — to be sourced from Ryan Glick, Founder & CEO. Ideal angle: what changed in his week once execution and communication left his plate.]

Ryan Glick

Founder & CEO

Integration & Results

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Mishaal, Executive Assistant+ (embedded since August 2023). Mishaal sits inside Ryan’s calendar, inbox, Apollo pipeline, HubSpot deal stack, Ramp expenses, and Google Workspace admin. He built CNC’s processes from the ground up, deliberately around Google Sheets, the tool Ryan actually uses, then layered AI and automation on top where it held up. His scope, three years in:

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The revenue engine. 1,500 to 2,000 outbound emails a week across 13 inboxes, sent by hand after A/B testing proved manual sends outperform full automation on response rate [insert measured lift — CNC has this data]; 500+ new qualified leads sourced monthly through Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and HubSpot on an L1/L2/L3 scoring system, with the bottom tier now AI-automated; ongoing hygiene on lead lists running to tens of thousands of contacts, including removal of roughly 250 restricted brands before every send cycle.
Ryan’s operating layer. Full calendar ownership, weekly Ramp reconciliation, and invoicing, plus leading RFIs involving L’Oréal, Meta, and Unilever as the coordinator across finance, accounts, strategy, resourcing, and production.
The infrastructure underneath. The inbox and Google Voice infrastructure the lead-gen team runs on, interim tech support until CNC hired a dedicated tech team, and CNC’s initial freelancer contracting process (built with Isura, now owned by the resourcing team).

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Isura, Marketing Operations Specialist (embedded since February 2025). Isura runs the engine that fills the pipeline:

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Outbound production. 1,500 to 2,000-plus L1 and L2 emails in a single week, off 33,000-record lead lists built in Apollo and Sales Navigator, prospecting rotating verticals (food and beverage, fashion, sleep, designer, pet) and whale accounts including Airbnb, Chevrolet, NFL, Riot Games, Taco Bell, and Uber.
The case-study engine. Owned end to end: one case study built from every project, a minimum of five per month, structured Problem / Solution / Impact and pushed to the client list as they ship.
Social and the founder’s voice. Both CNC channels run on content calendars he maintains, and he has run Ryan’s personal LinkedIn outreach as a standing workstream since April 2026.

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[OPERATOR QUOTE — to be sourced from Mishaal or Isura. Ideal angle: owning the work end to end, mirroring the New Seas operator quote.]

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Conclusion

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One operator for almost three years. A second for eighteen months. Between them, Mishaal and Isura hold Ryan’s calendar, outbound, pipeline, budgets, marketing, case-study engine, and public LinkedIn voice, and CNC has added 3 to 4 more Oceans Talent operators since. Ryan got the founder role he was after: out of execution, focused on sales, vision, and the move from national to international, while the team grew from 7 to roughly 20.

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This is what delegating at the ownership level looks like in practice: Oceans Talent operators are accepted at a roughly 1% rate, matched in about two weeks, and managed continuously after placement, so the trust bar CNC needed was built in, not hoped for.

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Ryan Glick

Founder & CEO

Coffee ’n Clothes

Mishaal

Executive Assistant+

Isura

Marketing Operations Specialist