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Listen to this week’s podcast episode, Ep.243: Freelancer to Founder; Leadership Lessons from Leading for the First Time, with Benas Leonavicius, click here to listen!

Moving from a solopreneur or freelancer to a founder growing a team requires abandoning your previous ways of working, along with a bunch of myths about work, leadership and more; it also involves finding the right balance between another bunch of competing forces. Drawing on today’s podcast conversation with Benas Leonavicius, this week we’re reflecting on why distributed teams thrive on clear vision rather than unguided freedom.

Whenever I speak with solo operators contemplating the leap into founding a business, there's a predictable anxiety about what that transition actually requires. Most imagine that building a team (or an agency like Benas is) means signing an expensive office lease, hiring dozens of employees, returning to the 9-to-5 grind and losing themselves in corporate overheads. It's no surprise so many capable freelancers prefer to stay in the solo operator groove, even when they’re hitting a hard ceiling on their time and income.

When I recorded this week’s podcast with Benas, founder of the personal branding agency Avium, we explored what happens when you dismantle those old assumptions. Benas spent over a decade as a freelance SEO specialist before making the leap to build a distributed team serving keynote speakers, authors and world-class experts. He’s also a first-time founder, so he’s right in the middle of that new leader journey that I’m really interested in, and which prompted the creation of Leading with Integrity in the first place.

His experience provides an honest, real-time look at stepping into leadership for the first time, navigating remote team dynamics, pushing past your own assumptions, learning the right lessons and understanding that real leadership isn't about the extremes of micromanagement vs total autonomy; it's about setting clear direction and trusting people to get the job done.

Benas didn't set out to become a lifelong freelancer (does anyone…? Let me know if you did…). Raised in Lithuania with an entrepreneurial father, his original career plan was conventional: finish university, land a job at a major tech company like Google or Apple and consider starting a business in his thirties. Fresh out of university at twenty-three, he took a job as an SEO manager at a marketing agency.

The experience was short-lived; eager to prove his value, Benas threw himself into client work, pushing for faster turnarounds and demanding more output from the broader team. But instead of being seen as proactive his intense pace created friction and chaos among colleagues; just two months into the role, before his probation period even ended, he was fired.

While the sudden exit was a shock, it served as an immediate catalyst too as, frustrated by sluggish agency life and feeling unappreciated, Benas turned his university side-hustle into a full-time freelancing career. He spent the next decade building expertise in search engine optimization while enjoying self-employed autonomy. Yet eventually, the inherent limitations of solo freelancing became impossible to ignore, and this is the familiar part of the story… if he took a holiday or fell ill, the business ground to a halt; he needed a model that could scale beyond his individual hours.

For years, Benas resisted building an agency because, in his mind, an agency meant physical premises, a team of thirty or forty people, a grueling managerial grind. He spent time chasing side projects from YouTube channels, to newsletters, to affiliate sites; hoping to find another way to scale.

The turning point came at a mastermind event in London hosted by creator Ali Abdaal. Meeting founders generating substantial revenue with lean, remote teams of five to seven people completely restructured Benas’s mental model. Now, he realized an agency didn't require expensive office space or a bloated headcount; it ‘simply’ required a focused niche, reliable systems and a small group of talented people working remotely.

Having achieved remarkable results for a keynote speaker client through SEO, Benas looked at expanding that value. He recognized that public speakers and authors needed more than website rankings, they needed visibility across LinkedIn and placements on relevant podcasts. By combining SEO, LinkedIn growth and podcast booking into a single personal branding offer, Avium was born. He started hiring team members, building a distributed team across Lithuania, the UK, Romania and Argentina.

Stepping into leadership brings unexpected psychological adjustments, most founders launch businesses because they crave personal autonomy and dislike being micromanaged. Naturally, when hiring their first employees, they assume those team members want similar total freedom, to execute tasks however they see fit, plan their own work, etc.

Benas quickly discovered this is a mistake… While total unguided freedom sounds attractive to a founder, it often leaves employees feeling anxious, isolated, uncertain about expectations. People don't want a single revenue KPI tossed over the fence; they need clear boundaries, structured guidance and a compelling vision of where the company is heading.

Leadership requires recognizing that team members aren't clones of yourself (and why that’s a GOOD thing). That they need safety and clarity to perform at their best and how striking the right balance means offering the operational space for people to exercise agency while still providing the explicit structure required to keep everyone on the same page.

To avoid micromanagement, Benas shifted how he approaches recruitment. Rather than rushing through hiring or selecting candidates based solely on technical resumes, he began treating recruitment as one of the most critical investments in the business.

When building a small team, technical skills can be taught, but personal alignment and working style often can’t (or if they can, it’s waaaay more difficult). By prioritising personality, curiosity, ‘vibe’ and cultural fit during hiring, you build a foundation of trust before work begins. One of his early hires was a digital business manager tasked simply with extracting the processes inside Benas's head and building structured systems; trusting her capability allowed him to step back from the daily mechanics and focus on growth.

This realisation identifies a much overlooked leverage point in growing companies: recruitment and HR. In many corporate environments, HR is relegated to administrative compliance or handling dismissals/playing the ‘bad cop’. In reality, the person controlling hiring dictates the cultural development of the entire business: who gets brought through the door shapes team dynamics, work ethics, how things are done and the operational standards for years to come. So, as Benas says, it’s something a lot more businesses would benefit from taking more seriously!

Stepping from solo operator to leader isn't about collecting titles, renting the flash office or building an empire.

What it really means is accepting that your primary responsibility is no longer just doing the work, but enabling others to succeed through clear direction and genuine trust.

As you evaluate your own operations this week, ask yourself where your team needs clearer boundaries, where they might benefit from more autonomy and a little freedom, what your own behaviours are saying about the overall culture; and then think about some small steps you might take to address those gaps.

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Here’s the links to the full episode with Benas, you can also find it on your preferred podcasting platform: https://smartlink.ausha.co/leading-with-integrity/ep-243-freelancer-to-founder-leadership-lessons-from-leading-for-the-first-time-with-benas-leonavicius-leadership

And if you prefer video then you’ll find it on YouTube too: https://youtu.be/FNwlwUjbvo0

Next week I’ll be talking a bit more about culture as well as employment law, trust, leadership in crisis and the subtle exclusions of the workplace, with my next guest: Natalie Holder.

And in the meantime: THANK YOU for reading, listening, supporting Leading with Integrity. There’s no show or newsletter, no future of leadership without each and every one of you.

Be a Leader Not a Boss,

- David

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m David Hatch and I’m here to help you lead more like a Jedi and less like a Sith.

If you’re a new manager or first-time leader in a tech, expertise or specialist driven workplace and you’re feeling lonely, stuck, overwhelmed, or simply ready for your next chapter in leadership, the Integrity Leaders Community offers conversations, courses, resources and support to help you grow one step at a time. If you have a healthy love of sci-fi and want to learn more about leadership, then this is the community for you! Solopreneurs also welcome. 😉