OTTAWA — Just over a year ago, Jeff Hunt was managing a tidy major-junior hockey business. Outside of the coaching staff, the Ottawa 67’s had 16 employees. As sole owner of the team, Hunt attended almost every operational meeting and was in on every business decision, big or small.

Today, as a partner in the Ottawa Sports & Entertainment Group, Hunt’s world is dramatically different. As OSEG prepares for the launch of two new professional sports franchises — the CFL REDBLACKS and the NASL Fury — and the opening of a new stadium at Lansdowne Park next spring, the company employs about 60 people at two office locations, with plans for a staff of close to 150 next year.

“I’m running into people I don’t even recognize,” Hunt says.

The additions to the team are happening quickly. At a staff meeting a few weeks ago, 23 new people were introduced, all of them hired since the previous gathering. In the past week, Hunt says, he has met two new employees for the first time in the washroom.

“I said, ‘Hi, are you new here? Welcome aboard.’ And they responded, ‘Thank you. Who are you?’” Hunt says. “So I told them, ‘Oh, I’m one of the owners of the company and the president of the hockey and football teams.’”

The energy within OSEG is like a rapidly growing high-tech company about to take its product to market. In the company’s sales and marketing department, a bell rings and staff applaud whenever a sale is closed.

Many of the new staff are working on all three of OSEG’s teams. Part of the benefit of owning multiple franchises is that experienced specialists on everything from social media to game-day operations can be hired. In the small front office of the 67’s, each employee pitched in wherever they were needed across the business.

But it’s not just the staffing levels that have changed for Hunt. “Everything is different for me,” he says. “My world has been turned upside down.”

A big transition has been letting go of many parts of the business he once oversaw personally.

“I’m used to being the owner in the store, like in a mom-and-pop operation,” he says. “I was intimately involved in every operational decision. Now I’m just a part of the puzzle.”

As just one example, Hunt says, he recently saw a 67’s ad for the first time when he noticed it in his copy of the Citizen. Normally he would have been involved in everything from deciding on the approach to approving the copy.

“It’s hard to walk by a meeting room and see something being discussed and not be a part of it,” he says. “I’ve got to resist the temptation sometimes to stick my nose in and just let them do their jobs.”

After running the 67’s on his own for 15 years, and his own business before that, Hunt now has business partners — Roger Greenberg, John Ruddy, Bill Shenkman and John Pugh — for the first time in his life.

“I’m not speaking as Jeff Hunt, owner of the 67’s anymore,” he says. “I can’t just say anything I want. I have to remember I have partners I have to talk to first.”