Who does the work: in-house, freelance or agency — and what each costs you in hours

The article beside this one sorts the five spends sold as digital marketing and gives an order: start with the smallest invoice, do not rent your accounts, look at where you are losing.

It never asks the question most owners ask first, and which decides everything else: who does this work. Hire somebody, use a freelance, retain an agency, or carry on doing it yourself in the evening.

That is not a question of price. Three quotes compared line by line do not compare, because the three are not buying the same thing: one buys attendance, one buys deliverables, one buys continuity. What you pay on top, in all three cases, is your own hours — and nobody invoices those.

This article says what each arrangement can reach and what it cannot, what a salary does not contain, the point that actually decides, and why we publish no costed comparison.

Comparisons present three. There are four, and the fourth is the commonest, so it deserves describing like the others rather than being treated as an absence.

Yourself: no monetary cost, high hourly cost, uneven quality because it follows your week. It is the only arrangement where knowledge of the trade is perfect, which is not nothing: nobody will describe your products better than you.

An employee: there every day, learns your trade, available for the daily tasks. In exchange you must find them work all year, manage them, and have somebody able to judge what they produce — that last point is section 8 and it is the real obstacle.

A freelance: flexible, specialised, no long commitment. They hold occasional and periodic work very well and daily work very badly, because they have other clients and your urgency is not theirs.

A supplier: several people, therefore continuity — holidays, illness and departures are their problem and not yours — and an outside view. In exchange they know your trade less well, cost more per hour, and have to be fed material, which consumes your hours.

When hiring is feasible, the comparison is nearly always between a monthly salary and a monthly quote. The two numbers are not comparable, and it is worth knowing what is missing on the salary side.

Missing first is what adds mechanically: contributions, the workstation, equipment, software and subscriptions, and the space. These are known, they can be calculated, and they raise the line by a proportion every business already knows for its own staff.

Missing next is what cannot be calculated: the time to recruit, the period during which the person learns your trade and produces little, and the risk of them leaving after a year taking what they learned. That last point is not theoretical in a market where trained people are scarce and sought after.

Missing finally is continuity, and that is the most concrete difference from a supplier. An employee who takes three weeks’ leave, or falls ill in the week of a campaign, stops the function. A team of several people does not stop, and that is a large part of what a supplier costs.

None of this says do not hire. It says the honest comparison puts a monthly quote against the salary plus everything around it — and, before that, the question in section 8: is there anybody at your end able to judge what this person will produce.

All the arrangements are alike in one respect nobody examines before signing: somebody at your end has to be able to say whether what is produced is good. Without that, none of the four works, and the most expensive fails as reliably as the cheapest.

It does not require being of the trade. Judging local marketing work is knowing how to answer three questions: does this describe exactly what we sell, does it address the people who buy from us, would I show it to a customer without correcting it. Those three need no technical skill and eliminate most of what causes problems.

What it does require is regular time and a named person. An approval that drifts for three weeks costs more than mediocre work, because it blocks everything downstream and discourages the supplier from bringing proposals.

It is also why hiring most often fails. Somebody is taken on to fill a gap in competence, and then nobody can evaluate their work — so they are judged on visible activity rather than on results, and a year later nobody still knows whether the role is useful.

The practical consequence is a rule of order: name the person who will approve before choosing the arrangement. If that person cannot give it an hour a week, the only viable arrangement is the one needing fewest approvals — that is, a narrower scope rather than a more expensive supplier.

We write the task list with you, with its frequencies, and we mark the ones that have to stay daily. It is short, it takes one meeting, and it is what makes everything after it decidable rather than a comparison of quotes.

We then take the periodic lines — the writing, the visuals, the campaigns, the reports — and hold them, with the accounts in your name, the source files deposited with you and a named person on your side to approve.

We refuse to present ourselves as cheaper than hiring. It is not comparable, and a figure produced by us on that point would be one of the three parties’ figures, which the previous section explains. We will tell you what we invoice; the other half of the comparison is yours.

We refuse to promise continuous availability. We answer in working hours and we write that into the contract rather than letting anybody believe otherwise, because the daily task — answering messages within the hour — is the one a supplier holds badly and the one with the most commercial effect. When that is your main need, the right answer is somebody at your end, and we say so even when it means a smaller contract.

And we refuse to start when nobody at your end is named to approve. We will propose a narrower scope rather than a larger budget, because work nobody reviews produces volume rather than customers — and six months of volume costs more than it returns, to you and to us alike.