How Story of the Season doubled sales three years running by building a team beyond the US
Sales more than doubled at Story of the Season every year for three consecutive years. The company went from serving 50–70 schools to over 450. Behind that growth was a versatile team spanning new markets — designers who became marketers, people who grew as fast as the business did.
Building that kind of team across borders required infrastructure that could keep up. Multiplier’s global employment platform gave Founder, Chris Herman the foundation to hire the right people, support them properly, and keep his attention on the business he was scaling.
Building that kind of team across borders required infrastructure that could keep up. Multiplier’s global employment platform gave Founder, Chris Herman the foundation to hire the right people, support them properly, and keep his attention on the business he was scaling.
450+
schools served
13
offshore team members
Company
Story of the Season
Headquarters
United States
Founded
2017
Industry
Sports Media / EdTech
Company Size
~20 employees
Products
Employer of Record (EOR)
THE CHALLENGE
- To serve more schools, the team needed to grow globally, but the legal and compliance burden of hiring across borders wasn’t something a sub-20-person company could absorb.
THE SOLUTION
- Story of the Season built a global team through Multiplier’s EOR — compliance handled in-house, with a dedicated point of contact who kept things moving from day one.
THE RESULT
- Story of the Season went from serving 50–70 schools to over 450.
A product built on people
Chris Herman started Story of the Season because he couldn’t remember his own athletic career. As a high school and college football player in the US, he had scattered photos, newspaper clippings, and a few magazine pages he’d ripped out. No single place to hold it all.
Story of the Season is now a digital media platform that produces game day programs, weekly digital magazines, and end-of-season yearbooks for high school athletic programs across the country. Content goes out to parents, players, alumni, and fans. At the end of the season, everything gets compiled into a print and digital yearbook athletes can keep.
The product runs on human labor. Graphic designers build each publication. Account managers run each relationship. To serve more schools, Story of the Season needed more people – and the talent wasn’t all in one place.
The challenge of building beyond the US
Hiring internationally was overwhelming for a company of fewer than 20 people, doing it properly — employment contracts, local compliance, payroll across multiple countries — wasn’t something Chris could manage on top of running the business.
“Business owners like me want to focus on working on their business. Multiplier allows us to focus on growth.”
Chris Herman,
Founder, Story of the Season
He started researching EOR providers from a cafe in New York in December 2023 and chose Multiplier, drawn in by a product walkthrough and a platform built for a company at his stage. “Multiplier helps us focus on growing our business,” he describes, “Compliance is completely taken care of.”
From 70 schools to 450 — and counting
Three years ago, Story of the Season served between 50 and 70 schools. Today it’s over 450, with sales more than doubling every year to get there. For a company built on human labor — every publication designed by hand, every school relationship managed personally — that kind of growth only happens if the people are there to support it.
They were. And they grew into more than anyone planned. GJ joined as a graphic designer and now works directly with coaches on Recruiting Profiles, a new software product for high school sports teams. Don and Kat, also hired as designers, moved into marketing — Don running campaigns, Kat producing all of the company’s video content. “These people are so versatile,” Chris says. “We’re able to give them bigger and bigger roles where they can make bigger and bigger impact.”
The next target is 2,000 schools. More global hires in customer service, AI-assisted production, and a software product in Recruiting Profiles that scales beyond yearbooks.
Chris is still focused on the business, not the compliance. That part remains taken care of as his point of contact, Valeria, handles questions quickly, sometimes over WhatsApp. For a company built on people, that’s exactly how it should be.
