Agency, employee, or do it yourself

The three options, honestly described

Stripped of the sales language, you are choosing how to buy three separate things: expertise, execution time, and accountability. The three routes bundle them differently.

Doing it yourself buys execution time from the person whose time is worth most in the business, at the cost of everything else that person was going to do that week. It is free in cash and expensive in attention. It works when the owner genuinely enjoys it and has capacity, which is rarer than owners think in month three.

Hiring buys execution time and loyalty, and buys expertise only if you pay for a level of experience that most trade firms cannot justify for one role. A junior marketer is a pair of hands who will need direction from someone who knows the answer, and in most trade businesses nobody in the building does.

An agency buys expertise and a share of several specialists, at the cost of them not sitting in your office, not knowing your customers on day one, and having other clients. It is rented capability. It is also the only one of the three you can stop in thirty days.

The true cost of an employee

The salary is roughly two thirds of it. Here is the calculation with the assumptions stated, because the assumptions are where these comparisons usually cheat. Adjust every figure to your own situation, and note that employer National Insurance and pension minimums are set by legislation that changes, so check the current rates rather than trusting a table on a website.

Two adjustments make it worse and one makes it better. Worse: statutory holiday plus typical sickness means you are paying for roughly forty-six or forty-seven working weeks, so the effective monthly cost of delivered work is higher than that line suggests. Worse again: a single junior person is a single point of failure, and when they leave, the knowledge leaves with them unless somebody documented it.

Better: an employee is entirely yours. Forty hours a week on your business, in your building, absorbing how your customers speak and what your trade actually involves. Nobody at an agency will ever know your firm the way an employee does after eighteen months.

The break-even a retainer has to beat

The comparison people make is salary against fee, which is wrong twice. Use this instead, and do it with your own numbers rather than ours. We are not going to quote our own fee on a page arguing about value; ask on a call and you will get a figure for your actual scope.

• Step one. Total the fully loaded annual employment cost as above and divide by twelve. In the illustration, about £3,370 a month.
• Step two. Subtract the value of the hours you would still have to spend directing that person. A junior needs briefing, reviewing and managing. Two hours a week of owner time is not nothing.
• Step three. Add the tools an agency brings and an employee would need buying. Reporting, call tracking, competitor research, testing tools.
• Step four. Compare that monthly figure with the retainer in front of you, and then ask the question that actually matters: which one produces more quoted work per pound. Cost is the easy half of the comparison.

Ad spend belongs in neither column, because it is the same money either way and it should go directly to the platform on your own card. Any arrangement where the agency buys the media and bills you a marked-up figure changes this calculation in a direction you cannot see, which is covered on how to choose an agency.

What each option actually gets you

When doing it yourself is right

More often than agencies admit. Do it yourself if all of these are true.

• Your monthly ad budget is small. Below a few hundred pounds of spend, management of any kind consumes a share of the total that cannot justify itself. Get to a level worth managing first.
• You have the hours and you will actually use them. A couple of properly focused hours a week beats an agency you never speak to. The failure mode is not incompetence, it is abandonment in month three.
• The basics are undone. A completed Google Business Profile, a review routine, answering the phone quickly and a site that says what you do and where. All four are free or nearly free, all four outperform a clever campaign layered on top of their absence, and none of them need an agency. The methodology page and the glossary exist partly so an owner can do this themselves.

Be honest with yourself about the hidden cost, though, because it is not the subscription fees. It is that the hours come out of quoting, chasing money and running jobs, and those hours have a known value in your business. If an evening spent inside an ad account displaces an evening of quoting, price the displacement before deciding it was free. The owners for whom self-management genuinely works tend to be the ones who enjoy it enough to do it on a Sunday rather than the ones who resent it by week six.

There is also a competence floor that is lower than agencies imply and higher than software vendors imply. A careful owner can run a tight local search campaign, keep negatives updated and read a search terms report. What tends to go wrong unsupervised is tracking, which is invisible when it breaks, and structure, where a single campaign covering a £400 job and a £9,000 job quietly spends the month on the cheap half. If you are going to self-manage, those are the two things worth paying someone to set up once, even if you run it yourself afterwards.

When hiring is right

Hiring becomes the better structure once the volume of work justifies a person rather than a service, and that threshold is usually about content and coordination rather than about advertising.

If you are producing photography and video from sites weekly, running social accounts, handling a review routine, updating a large site, sending email to a customer database and coordinating three trades’ worth of enquiry handling, that is a job. Nobody external can be on your sites every week.

Hiring is also right when marketing is genuinely core to how you compete rather than a supporting function, when you have someone able to manage the role properly, and when the fully loaded cost is comfortably affordable against your gross profit rather than something you are stretching for. Hiring a marketer as a stretch, with no one able to direct them, is the most common version of this decision going wrong. Consider a specialist retainer for the advertising and an employee for everything that needs to happen on site.

When an agency is the wrong call

Including us. Do not hire an agency in these situations.

• You cannot answer the enquiries you already get. Fix follow-up first. More enquiries into a leaking process is money set on fire, and automating the follow-up usually returns more than new campaigns would.
• You want to hand it over and never think about it again. The accounts that work have an owner who reads the report and tells us which enquiries were rubbish. That takes half an hour a month. If even that is unavailable, the arrangement will disappoint both sides.
• Your average job value is very low and your close rate is poor. Gross profit per enquiry has to cover the enquiry plus the management. Sometimes it cannot, and no amount of skill changes that arithmetic.
• You need someone on site with a camera. That is a hire, or a freelancer, not a retainer.
• You are already at capacity. If you are turning work away, better estimating, better pricing or another crew will earn more than advertising will.

The hybrid most firms end up with

The arrangement that suits most trade businesses over about ten people is not one of the three. It is a split.

Specialists handle the technical channels where being wrong is expensive and being right needs constant attention: paid search, organic, tracking and reporting. Someone internal, often not a marketer at all, handles what only an insider can do: photographs from site, asking every customer for a review, answering enquiries in ten minutes rather than two days, keeping the diary honest.

That split works because it puts each task where it costs least. It also means neither party can hide. The agency owns numbers it can be judged on, and the internal side owns response speed and proof, which is usually where the larger gains are anyway. If you want the arithmetic run against your own figures, start there, and if the answer is that you should hire rather than retain, you will hear that.

Common questions

Related

• What a £500 website really costs you
• How to choose a marketing agency, and what to ask before y
• How we build campaigns
• Benchmarks and sources
• Results we can prove
• All comparisons