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Agency or in house: what each one really costs

The comparison most owners run is a monthly retainer against a salary, and it is wrong in both directions. A hire costs considerably more than the salary line. An agency buys far less of your business context than a hire ever will. Price per month is the least interesting number in this decision.

The cost of a hire is not the salary

Add payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, the recruiting cost, the ramp, the management time, and the software. Software is the line people forget. A marketing seat needs rank tracking, a design tool, a scheduler, an email platform and usually a call tracking line, and every one of them bills per seat whether that seat is productive yet or not.

We are not going to publish a fully loaded figure for your market. We do not know your market, and an invented number would be the least useful thing on this page. Add the lines that apply to you. The total moves a long way from the offer letter.

The other side is simpler because we publish it. We do SEO on websites we build. If you already have a site, we build you a new one, and it is inside the $2,500 a month retainer rather than billed on top of it.

Stay past month 2 and the included website is yours outright. Cancel before that and it is invoiced at $2,500, instead of the remaining months. The tool stack sits inside the retainer as well, which is the part a salary comparison usually leaves out of the salary column.

What a hire gives you that no agency can

Context. Somebody in your building hears the phone calls, knows which jobs are actually profitable, knows which crew is behind this week, and knows the customer who is about to leave. None of that arrives by osmosis on a weekly call. It is the biggest advantage an in house marketer has and it compounds every month they stay.

Permanence. Train a person and the skill stays in the business. Pay a retainer and the capability leaves when the retainer does. You keep the assets, which matters, but you do not keep the practice.

Load. If marketing in your business is a full time job, daily content, inbound to answer, inventory moving hourly, then it needs a full time person. A retainer that costs less than a salary costs less because it is less time. That is not a trick. It is hours.

So if you can hire the right person and keep them busy, hire them. We will say that on the call. A retainer quietly funding a job you should have filled is bad for you and it does not last long enough to be good for us.

Where the in house hire breaks

One generalist marketing manager in a small company has the same arithmetic problem a freelancer has, plus one extra difficulty: nobody to ask. No second opinion on a tracking setup, no peer review on a technical decision, nobody who saw the same problem in a different industry last quarter.

The second difficulty is the stack. Your hire has to choose it, buy it, learn it and defend it, and the learning happens on your payroll. The third is churn. A marketing manager who gets good becomes expensive somewhere else, and then you start again.

The shape that works most often is neither pure option. Hire the person who knows your business and let them own what needs your context. Buy the specialist execution and the tooling from outside. Then make sure the two are not quietly doing the same job.

A split that holds up

In house should own the offer, the pricing, the customer conversations, the brand voice and the follow up, because all five need information that only exists in your building. Outside should own search, the build, ad structure, tracking and reporting, because all five need a specialist and a stack that is already paid for.

Where the split fails is the handoff. Write down who approves copy, who owns each ad account, and who is on the hook for the number. Two parties holding the same job is worse than either option on its own.

How we are structured against a hire

90 day initial term, then month to month at the same price. The industry asks for 6 to 12 months. A salary carries no term you control and no notice period you set, which cuts both ways: in practice it is far more commitment than a retainer, and far more valuable if the person is right.

There are no deposits and nothing is billed separately mid month. The figure you agree is the figure on the invoice, which is the only fair way to compare a retainer against a payroll line that does not move.

The agency vs in house marketing decision is about load and context, not price per month. Count the hours the work actually needs. If it is a full week, hire. If it is specialist work in bursts, buy it. If it is both, do both, and write the boundary down before either side starts.