When you should hire someone instead of hiring us
We are an agency, so treat this with appropriate suspicion. We still think there are clear cases where hiring your own person beats hiring us, and pretending otherwise would cost us more than saying it.
What you are actually buying in each case
In-house buys you availability and context. Someone who is in the building, knows the crews, hears the phone, and whose only client is you. What you are not buying is breadth — one person has done what one person has done.
Outsourced buys you pattern recognition and specialist depth: someone who has run this in twenty markets and knows which levers moved. What you are not buying is presence. We are not in the building and we do not hear the phone.
Framed that way, the choice is not about cost. It is about whether your problem is knowing what to do or having someone to do it.
Hire in-house when
- The strategy is settled and the work is execution. If you know which channels work and the job is running them daily, an in-house person is cheaper and faster than any retainer.
- The volume of small tasks is the bottleneck. Photos from job sites, review requests, social posts, updating pages. That work needs presence, not expertise, and paying agency rates for it is poor value.
- You are large enough to keep them busy and senior enough to manage them. A marketing hire with no one able to judge their work is an expensive way to get activity without results.
- Your market is unusual enough that outside pattern-matching misleads. It happens. A rural market with three competitors does not behave like a metro.
Outsource when
- You do not yet know what works. Paying someone to learn on your budget is the most expensive education available. This is the case where breadth genuinely wins.
- You need infrastructure built once, well. Tracking, attribution, account structure, landing pages. Build-heavy, then maintenance-light — a bad fit for a permanent salary.
- You cannot hire the person you need. Someone who can do positioning, paid media, conversion and analytics well is expensive and rarely available in a mid-size market. Three mediocre versions cost more.
- You want to be able to stop. Ending a contract is a conversation. Ending an employment is a different thing entirely.
The hybrid nobody proposes, and the honest arithmetic
The arrangement that works most often is neither: an outside team builds and proves the system, an in-house person runs it. You pay specialist rates for the phase that needs specialists, and salary for the phase that needs presence.
If you want to compare costs properly, compare like for like. A salary is not the cost of an employee — add payroll taxes, benefits, software licences, training, and the management time to supervise them. Then divide the annual total by twelve and put it next to a retainer.
Do that arithmetic before either conversation. It frequently changes the answer, and it sometimes changes it away from us.