Absolutely. Of course how many people you can control depends on the nature of their work and and your mutual communication. Say I bet one could control directly more, say, sanitary workers, than software developers.
Why? On, say an bigger open source project, what is the ratio of "management" to contributors like? If people understand their goals and have the right incentives and autonomy, very little management is necessary.
On the other hand low skill workers need much more managing, both to make sure they do they job and to coordinate their work. Surely not as much management as modern tech thinks it needs, but the army heuristic of 10 people on a crew seems much more applicable here. If you're paying someone to empty garbage or whatever, you're almost certainly not paying them to think, or care much about their work, so that has to be supplied separately.
That's just my opinion, what did you mean in your comment?