Hiring an Agency or Hiring In House

You have a number in your head already. It is what you would pay somebody to come in and run marketing, and you have probably added payroll taxes, a laptop, a desk and the weeks before they are useful. Next to that number is a proposal from an agency with a monthly fee at the bottom.

The two numbers are close enough that the decision starts to feel like a price comparison. It is not one. You are choosing between two different shapes of the same job, and the cheaper one is only cheaper if it is the one that fits.

What am I actually choosing between?

One person's skill set, or several people's with less of each person.

That is the whole trade and everything else is detail. A hire gives you somebody in the building all day who thinks only about your company. An agency gives you people who each do one part of the work well and who are never in your office at four in the afternoon when you want to talk something through.

What does marketing a trade business actually take?

Five things, and they do not overlap much.

A website that loads fast and turns a visitor into a phone call. Search work, meaning the pages, the words on them, and the technical side that decides whether Google can read the site at all. A Google Business Profile kept accurate, because that listing is often what a homeowner sees before your website. Paid campaigns when they are warranted, a separate craft with its own way of wasting money. And somebody reading all of it afterward and saying whether any of it produced a call.

Those are five jobs. In a large company they are five people.

So can one hire really not do all of it?

He can do one or two of them well. The other three he will learn on your time.

That is not a knock on the person. Everybody learns on somebody's time, including everybody at every agency. The question is whether you want to buy that education, and whether you can grade it. If you do not know what good search work looks like, you cannot tell a hire who is doing it from one who is busy. You find out months later, from the phone.

The other side of that is fair too. You cannot grade an agency either, which is why the only thing worth judging on is what arrived, not what was described to you.

When is hiring in house the better answer?

Three cases, and they are common enough that you should check yourself against them first.

The first is size. If you are big enough to keep somebody genuinely busy every day, an agency starts to look like a premium paid for capacity you already have. Forty hours a week on your business alone is a lot of attention.

The second is a business whose marketing is mostly one channel. If your work comes overwhelmingly from one place, and you know that from your own booking records rather than from a feeling, you do not need five skill sets. You need one, deeply, on tap. That is a hire.

The third is ownership of the knowledge. Some owners want the understanding of how their marketing works living inside the company, in a person down the hall who will still be there in three years. That is legitimate, and an agency cannot give it to you. Weigh it against the fact that people leave, and it walks out with him when he does.

What do I give up by using an agency instead?

Depth of presence, and the knowledge staying with you.

An agency is not in your Monday meeting. It does not overhear what your service manager said about which jobs are actually profitable. It has to be told, deliberately, and that is a habit you have to build.

And when the relationship ends, the understanding of your market and your customers leaves with it. You keep the website, the pages and the assets. You do not keep the person who knew why they were built that way.

What does an agency cost against a salary?

Ours starts at $5,000 for a full website, then $1,000 a month for management, which covers the website, SEO and online reputation management. The higher tier, where we run the whole marketing portfolio rather than one channel, starts at $4,000 a month.

Those are starting figures, and they are here because this is one of the few decisions where you need them to do the arithmetic. Put your own salary number next to them. You know what you would pay to get somebody good in your market, and what they cost you loaded. Nobody has to invent an average for you.

What the arithmetic will not tell you is the part that matters most. At the low end you are buying a narrower service than a full time person, and at the high end a wider one.

Can I keep my current website and just hire you to run it?

No, and it is worth explaining why rather than leaving it as a policy.

Management is only for sites we built. We do not take over a site somebody else made, because we cannot stand behind work we cannot see inside. A site we did not build has decisions in it we did not make, for reasons nobody wrote down, and every month we would be maintaining a machine while guessing at how half of it works. If it underperformed, we could not tell you whether that was the site or our work on it.

If that rules us out for you, it rules us out honestly, and you now know one real question to ask any agency that says yes.

What does the higher tier actually do that the monthly one does not?

It decides where the money goes, rather than executing in one channel.

Which channels are worth opening, what to do when one that was working stops, what the budget should be doing across all of it. It also sets up the handoff from marketing into your own CRM and sales process, so a lead that arrives at eleven at night is in a system by morning instead of in somebody's text messages. We do not do the selling. That is your crew and your close rate.

This is where the in house comparison stops being clean. That work is closer to a marketing director than a coordinator, and the salary for it is not the number you had in your head at the top of this page.

Should I just switch agencies when I want to try something different?

If you are thinking of us as a supplier you swap out when you want to try a different ads shop, we are the wrong fit. That is the in house question again in different words.

An agency you change every few months is a hire who quits every few months. Each time, the understanding of your market resets and somebody learns your business again on your budget. If what you want is a vendor you can rotate, hire in house and rotate vendors underneath your own person. That is a coherent plan. It is just the other one.

How will I know whether either choice worked?

By calls and inquiries on record, with brand searches and rank checking robots taken out first.

Rankings are not the deliverable. A rank report can look excellent while nothing rings, because rank checking software checks from a desktop and never taps a phone number. Somebody searching your company name and landing on your site is not new business either. Take both out, count what is left, and you have the only number that answers the question you asked at the start.

Hold your hire to that. Hold us to it too.

Where does this start?

With an honest look at which of the three in house cases you fall into.

If none of them fit, and you run a home services or trade business in Southern California, our contractor marketing agency page lays out exactly what we do at each tier and what it costs.

Call or text us. If the answer is that you should hire somebody, we will tell you that.