In-House, Agency or Freelancer?

Every growing business reaches this question, usually at the point where doing it themselves has started costing more than it saves.

The three options fail in completely different ways, and matching the option to the size of the job matters more than which is better in the abstract.

What a hire actually costs

Start here, because the salary is the small part.

On top of it: employer contributions and payroll costs, software and subscriptions, a laptop, recruitment, and the time you spend managing somebody. Toolbox Tribe's cost of an employee calculator puts a real number on it, and the real number surprises people.

Then the question nobody asks: is there a full-time job here?

For a business turning over a couple of million with one trade and one market, often there is not. What you get is a capable person with two days of real work and three days of making work up, which is expensive and miserable for them.

Where it does work: multiple locations or divisions, a constant flow of content and campaigns, a business where marketing is the engine rather than a support function. At that point an in-house person who knows the business beats anybody external who has to be briefed.

There is a second trap in hiring, which is that one person is rarely good at all of it. Search, ads, writing, design and analytics are different skills, and the person who is genuinely strong at three of them is expensive and in demand. Hiring one and expecting all five is how businesses end up with a competent social media presence and no pipeline.

What an agency actually buys

A team, cover, and a range of skills no single person has. Somebody who does ads, somebody who does content, somebody who does the technical side.

The two things worth knowing:

Who does the work. The person in the pitch is frequently not the person on the account. This is not automatically bad, and you should know before you sign rather than after.

What happens when you leave. Plenty of agencies run client ads inside their own account and host sites on their own infrastructure. Leaving then means starting from nothing: no history, no learning, no site. Ask whether the accounts are in your name.

Agencies suit businesses with enough budget to be a priority client and enough complexity to need several skills. The failure mode is being a small account in a large agency, where you get a junior and a template.

What a freelancer actually buys

One person's attention, usually the person you spoke to, usually cheaper because there is no office behind them.

The failure modes are specific: they go on holiday, they get ill, they take on a bigger client, they are strong at one thing and vague about the rest. There is no cover and no bench.

Freelancers suit businesses that want a known person doing the work and can live without redundancy. Which is most small and medium trade businesses, honestly, as long as the relationship is not so critical that a fortnight's absence breaks something.

The questions that apply to all three

Whoever you choose, four things decide whether you can leave cleanly, and all four are easier to settle at the start than later.

1. Whose name is the domain in? Yours, always, with no exceptions.
2. Whose Google Ads account is it? Yours, with your billing on it, and you have access rather than only reports.
3. Whose Google Business Profile and analytics are they? Yours, with somebody else added as a manager.
4. Where does the website live, and can it be moved?

A supplier who has no difficulty with any of those is telling you something about how they expect the relationship to go. One who hesitates is telling you something else.

How to actually choose

Three questions, in order.

1. Is there a full-time job? If no, do not hire. The maths does not work and the person will leave.

2. Do you need several skills at once, or one skill done well? Several points at an agency. One points at a freelancer or a specialist.

3. How much do you want to manage? An agency and a freelancer both still need managing, less than an employee but more than nothing. If the honest answer is that nobody will manage it, buy less and buy it from somebody who tells you what they are doing without being chased.

The arrangement that usually works at this size

For a business between one and a few million turnover: somebody external doing the specialist work, somebody internal who owns it as part of a broader role, and clear agreement about who does what.

Not a hire, not a large agency. The person who knows the business is in the business, and the person who knows the specialism is not pretending to be a department.

That is the shape the services here are built around, and it is also why I will say when a business has outgrown it. A business that genuinely needs a marketing department should not be buying one person, and I would rather tell you that than take the fee.