Guides · Side by side
Hire a shop, hire a person, hire by the job, or do it yourself.
An honest look at the four ways to staff this work. What each is truly good at, what each costs you, and the one question that settles it.
The short answer
The real question is not who you hire. It is whether you are buying a build or buying someone to run it. A build is a burst of skilled work with a clear end. That fits a shop or a hired hand. Running it is steady work that needs to know your buyers. That fits your own person, in time. Most folks get the order wrong before they get the pick wrong.
The question under the question
"Should we hire a shop or hire our own person?" is a staffing question standing in for a scoping question. Before you can answer it, you need to know which of two very different jobs you are filling.
A build has an end. Set the offer, build the page, wire the tracking, write the notes, prove the ad works. It needs wide skill from someone who has done it at many shops. And then it is done. Running it never ends. Watch the ads, make new art, keep the data clean, make the weekly call. It needs to know your buyers, your margins, and your slow months.
Wide skill costs a lot to hire and little to rent. Knowing your buyers costs little to grow and a lot to rent. That gap, more than cost, should drive your pick.
The four ways, told straight
Each one is right for someone. None is right for everyone. And how each one fails tells you as much as what it is good at.
- A shop like ours
- Best at builds, and at ad spots you have never used. You rent wide skill, a trained eye, and a whole team, not one person. It fails when you use it forever in place of your own folks. No one outside your shop will ever know your buyers the way you do.
- Your own hire
- Best at running a set-up that already works. They learn more each month and keep what they know. It fails when you hire first. One person gets asked to be planner, ad buyer, artist, writer, and numbers person all at once.
- A hired hand by the job
- Best at one clear slice. The ads, the emails, the tracking. The cheapest way to buy one skill. It fails when that slice has to line up with four others and no one owns the seams.
- Do it yourself
- Best at the very start, when what you lack is knowing what your buyers answer to. It is worth real money. Owners who have run their own forms and follow-up buy better later. It fails on time, and it fails quietly. The cost is the months it did not run.
How they stack up on what counts
Cost is what everyone compares, and it settles the least. These four matter more.
- How fast you see a result
- Fastest with a shop or a hired hand who has run that ad spot before. Slowest with your own hire. Just finding them can take three months before work starts.
- How well they know your buyers
- Best with your own folks and with you. An outside team can learn your market well. They will never know your buyers the way your own team does.
- How many skills you get
- Widest with a shop. Narrowest with one hired hand. Your own hire covers whatever skills that one person has, which is rarely all of them.
- What you keep at the end
- This is the one folks miss. Your own hire keeps it all. With outside help you keep only what was built in your logins, your CRM, and your notes. That is a contract question, not a nice-person question.
The order that usually works
There is an order that dodges both big mistakes. It avoids hiring one person into a set-up no one has proved. And it avoids paying outsiders forever while owning nothing. It runs in three moves.
First, buy the build from outside, with your name on every piece written in from day one. Second, let them run it long enough to prove the ads work and to write down a set-up anyone could repeat. Third, hire your own person to run what is now a known set-up, and keep outside help only for short bursts. A new ad spot, a rebuild, a fresh offer.
That is how we work. We build and run the set-up. You keep the logins, the data, and the steps. And your team keeps the sales talk, which they were always going to be better at than we would be.
Key takeaways
- Decide if the work is a build or a run before you pick who does it.
- Wide skill is cheap to rent and dear to hire. Knowing your buyers is cheap to grow and cannot be rented.
- Hiring one person into a set-up no one has proved is the most common costly mistake.
- What you keep at the end is a contract term, not good will. Settle who owns what up front.
- Build it outside, prove it, write it down, then run it in house.
