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When to hire an agency vs. keep paid media in-house
We turn down work we're not right for. Here's the honest framework we use to decide whether a company should hire an agency or just hire an in-house operator.
We get this question in almost every first call: should we bring this in-house or stay with an agency? The honest answer is “it depends” — but the dependencies are more predictable than most people think.
When in-house wins
- You spend under $100K/year and the work is narrow (one channel, one region, one product).
- You have one stable person who can own it for two years.
- Your margin is thin enough that agency fees would break the unit economics.
When an agency wins
- You’re running two or more channels at real scale and need one operating model across all of them.
- You want access to senior operators without paying senior-operator salaries full-time.
- Your business has seasonality or bursts that make a fixed in-house team overbuilt most of the year.
The honest test
Ask yourself: if my paid media lead left tomorrow, how long would it take to replace them? If the answer is “three months, minimum,” you’re carrying single-operator risk. An agency is insurance against that. If the answer is “we’d survive,” and the spend is narrow, keep it in-house.
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