448. In-house vs. Out-of-house
When to think about working with external agencies (or becoming one yourself)
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’m co-founding a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content, and we’d love to hear from you, anytime. Come say hello.
In-house vs. out-of-house
For 15 years, I have seen what it’s like to be an in-house operator.
For eight weeks, I have been someone whom in-house operators hire. (Come check us out!)
So when it comes to the in-house vs. external debates around hiring, team-building, resource management, and even career paths, I can speak to both sides, albeit with a pretty lopsided ratio of experience.
Nevertheless, it does remain one of the top questions I get asked:
When (and why) should you hire a full-time person for a role versus using an external expert, agency, or freelancer?
And I feel like the new era of this question is: When should I leave the full-time operator role to become one of those external persons?
Let’s dig into both.
When you should hire vs. when you should outsource
The advantages of outsourcing are:
Flexible resource that you can scale up and scale down as needed
Not a fixed cost. Variable (it can go away as soon as the contract ends)
Instant expertise
Instant impact — you don’t have to wait 8 weeks to run a full hiring process
Less risky if you aren’t sure about the way your needs may change
Agencies in particular: benefit of economies of scale. For instance, you could have an entire design team at your disposal in a day
Advisors in particular: benefit of the best of the best without paying HUGE $$ to hire someone full-time to do the work with you
But there are plenty of reasons why in-house makes sense, too.
They know your stuff better than anyone else
You can move super fast because they are in the weeds every day and able to react nimbly to changes
They build institutional knowledge and a history of learnings
They know the customer super well
Here is my rule of thumb that served me well as I built marketing teams for the past 15 years …
Outsource the foundations, don’t outsource the execution.
Consult with experts on your strategies. Hire leaders in the areas that are core to your business. Work with agencies on production-level output — mass content, production design, etc.
I really like what Emily Kramer has to say about it in the MKT1 newsletter:
In particular, this graphic of should-you-shouldn’t-you is incredibly helpful and clear:
When you should go solo vs. stay in-house
Like any career decision, it’s important to understand what your values are, what motivates you, what fulfills you, what drives you, and how you want your life to feel in the future. Jobs take up such a huge amount of our daily hours — you can’t have the life you want if you don’t have a job that allows you to live the way you want.
That being said, if I were to boil it down to one decision point, it would be this:
What are you most fulfilled by? And where can you do the most of that work possible?
For instance, there was a time when I was most fulfilled by the idea of scale. I loved that the work I did impacted millions of people. Therefore, I needed an in-house company with a reach of millions of people in order to keep that purpose going.
Now, I feel fulfilled by giving back to others and championing the type of work (brand work, creative work) that I believe in. There aren’t as many in-house places that let me do that in the way that I want. So I decided to go and build that world myself.
(To be honest, another big question is: when can I financially feel good about going solo? If it helps for financial modeling, a lot of freelancers can demand $150+ or more for strategic advising and $5,000 or more per project.)
Some things to be aware of if you go solo:
It can be lonely. You don’t have the consistency of a team to engage with every day for an extended period of time.
Having a co-founder helps a lot! Not only does it aid in the loneliness, it also is nice to have someone to sharein the strategy, the ideas, the feedback, and the risk.
It can be nerve-wracking. You are more susceptible to the whim of shorter-term contracts, so you may be tempted to build your own personal pipeline of leads
You got to figure out a bunch of your own admin. Like health insurance, blech
But of course, the benefits of doing things yourself is that you get full control of what you do and how you do it!
If you’re thinking of taking the plung, drop me a note in case there are any questions I can answer or fears I can relate with.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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