Before you choose between an agency and a hire, work out whether the thing your revenue depends on belongs to you, or to somebody else.
Founders can spend months on this decision, framed as a straight choice. Hire a team, or hire an agency. Both are ways of getting the work done, and neither one settles what you end up owning at the end of it.
The question underneath is whether growth is an asset the business owns, or an activity it rents by the month.
What rented growth costs
Rented growth lives somewhere else. In an account you don’t hold the password to, in a head that’s leaving in April, in a process nobody ever wrote down. It works, sometimes very well, right up until the arrangement ends. Then you discover you were buying output and never acquired the capability.
Owned growth is a way of working that stays with you. Documented well enough to hand to somebody new. The account in your name. The lesson from every bad month written down somewhere you’ll find it again.
- Rented: the results arrive, the know-how leaves with whoever produced them.
- Owned: the system and the lessons stay in the business, whoever runs it.
- Both: built as your asset, operated by people who do this daily.
What the in-house hire really gives you
A good hire gives you attention that belongs to you. They sit in your meetings, learn your market properly, and care about the outcome in a way a supplier structurally cannot.
What they usually cannot give you is breadth. Acquisition is several trades — media buying, copy, tracking, follow-up, analysis — and one person is rarely strong at more than two of them. So you hire for the gap that hurts most today, and the rest of the chain stays roughly where it was. Worse, everything they learn accumulates in one person, which means your growth capability can hand in its notice.
That is the risk nobody prices in at interview. A hire concentrates the knowledge; whether it also concentrates the vulnerability depends entirely on whether anything gets written down while they are still there.
What the agency really gives you
An agency gives you breadth immediately, and people who have seen the same problem across many companies. That pattern-recognition is genuinely valuable and it is the thing you cannot hire quickly.
What they often do not give you is the asset. When the arrangement ends, the accounts, the audiences, the tracking and the reasoning behind two years of decisions can all leave with them — not out of malice, but because nobody specified that they should stay. And a supplier who wins on retention has no particular incentive to make themselves replaceable.
Both of these are workable. The failure is choosing between them on cost per month and never asking the ownership question at all.
The questions that decide it
The choice gets much easier once you stop comparing monthly fees and start asking what you will hold in two years. Four questions do most of the work, and they apply to a hire and a supplier equally.
- Whose name is on the ad accounts, the analytics and the domain?
- If this person or firm left in a month, what would I still have — and could a competent replacement read it and continue?
- Where does the reasoning live? A record of what was tried, what it cost and what happened is worth more than the results themselves.
- Am I buying output, or a capability I will still have when the invoice stops?
Ask those before you sign anything, and ask them again at the first review. Any arrangement that answers them badly is a rental, whatever it says on the contract.
What ownership actually looks like
Less romantic than it sounds. Ad accounts in your name. Your data in your systems. A written account of what you tried, what it cost and what happened. The ability to replace whoever runs it inside a fortnight without losing a quarter.
In practice that is a handful of unglamorous habits. Accounts created under your own billing and administrator access from day one, with anyone else added as a user. A single place where decisions get logged as they are made, in enough detail that the reasoning survives the person. Tracking that runs on your infrastructure rather than a supplier’s, so the history stays when the relationship changes. And a written definition of who you are for, because that is the input every other part of the chain depends on.
None of that stops you hiring help. It only means the help is running your engine rather than lending you theirs. It also costs almost nothing to arrange at the start and is genuinely painful to retrofit two years in, which is the whole reason to decide it now rather than later.
Own the thing your revenue depends on. Rent the hours if you need to. Never rent the engine itself.
If you want to see what that engine would look like in your business, the fit check is where I start.