When should an agency outsource instead of hiring full time? It’s a question many founders consider when growth is top priority. Just as often, the question arrives right after a brand new hire.
Picture it in your own agency. You’ve noticed growth beginning to stall and the pipeline feels thin. As the founder, you are stretched across delivery, escalations and sales. The obvious fix may seem to be a senior salesperson, so you put an offer out. After months, you find yourself still in the weeds, only now with a much heftier salary to carry.
This was a topic of focus when we welcomed Sam Wood as an expert guest speaker on one of our live webinars. Sam built an eight-figure agency and now coaches other owners across New Zealand and Australia, seeing this scenario play out time and time again.
During the session, he explained that an effective agency hiring strategy starts long before you post the job ad. It starts with the current founder’s role. Learn directly from Sam by watching the full session on YouTube:
Designing Your Way Out Of The Weeds
What is the best agency hiring strategy for a growing agency?
For scaling a digital marketing agency, you, as the founder, should hire based on the gap between the role you want and the role you’re doing, not against what feels most urgent.
Sam’s reasoning for this is simple: “Most ceilings are structural.” The structure that works at five or 10 people stops working at 20 or 30, and a founder who sits at the centre of it all becomes the bottleneck.
To find the gap, Sam suggests tracking your time for two to three weeks and sorting it into approximately six buckets with zero judgement. Take note of how many hours you’re spending on each segment, with your buckets looking something like this:
- Delivery
- Escalations
- Admin
- Sales
- Strategy
- Operations
Once you have an honest review of where you’re spending most of your time, you can start restructuring things to reflect what your position should look like. From Sam’s experience, the highest-leverage areas of a founder’s work typically spread across these categories:
- Vision and direction (strategy)
- External relationships
- New business
- Marketing
- Team leadership
- Operations*
- Product*
Operations largely depend on the size and structure of your agency. Most of these tasks can be delegated, but having some sense of control is often beneficial. Product depends on how passionate you are about your offering.
For example, if you own a copywriting agency and you’re passionate about the product itself, then designing your role to be hands-on is the way to go.
Why does hiring a senior salesperson rarely fix agency growth?
Sam’s reasoning for why hiring a senior salesperson rarely fixes stunted agency growth comes down to treating a structural or marketing gap as a sales gap.
He reported seeing the hire attempted more than 15 times, at an average cost of $200,000 to $300,000, and says it has never been worth it. “Hiring in a senior salesperson to solve a growth problem is the wrong move.”
His alternative is to invest in marketing first. He backs it up by stating that about 95% of an agency’s target market probably isn’t looking to buy at any given time. Ads alone reach only the 5% who are, while marketing builds awareness with everyone else. This way, your agency is already known when they are ready to take action.
Next, bring a salesperson up from within. Sam recommends looking for someone earlier in their career who reads the financial press, enjoys how businesses make money and has handled client-facing conflict, perhaps in hospitality or a call centre. Train them over 18 to 24 months while they shadow you. It takes longer, but Sam says it works almost every time.
Which hires make the biggest difference when scaling a digital marketing agency?
When it comes to the highest impact hires to support agency scalability, Sam points to five common role buckets. These usually show themselves as gaps once you’ve defined your current role versus the idealised version of your role.
- Operational leadership: An ops manager, office manager or admin lead who, in Sam’s words, owns “all the work behind the work”.
- Client service leadership: An account director or head of client service who takes escalations and acts as senior sponsor. Sam’s team targeted 20% year-on-year growth from existing clients through this role.
- Project management: A project manager who cares about on-time, on-budget delivery. This involves a different mindset from account management.
- Marketing: Often a fractional role. Sam calls his own part-time marketer one of his biggest-impact hires.
- Sales support: A commercially minded team member grown from within.
Around 10 people, Sam also suggests considering a general manager as a flexible role built around those gaps that acts as the agency’s operational glue.
Not sure which hire your agency needs next?
How can agencies balance in-house staff and outsourced resources?
When balancing in-house staff and outsourced resources, it’s best to keep all roles responsible for accountability, client relationships and culture in-house. Conversely, outsource specialist or variable capacity that doesn’t need to carry any of those responsibilities.
Outsourced resources also work best when someone in-house is in charge of them. When Sam brought a part-time marketer into his own agency, the PR agency on retainer reported directly to this individual. This ensured that Sam only had one person to ask if something wasn’t delivered.
The same principle applies to white label digital marketing services. A partner runs the execution and delivery in the background, while your agency keeps the client relationship and the strategy in-house.
When should an agency outsource instead of hiring full time?
The best time for a digital agency to outsource is when demand is variable, the skill is specialist or the role doesn’t need to own a client relationship. Alternatively, it’s best to hire full time when the role requires accountability.
When workloads grow faster than available budgets, outsourcing provides critical capacity before you commit to a full-time salary. It’s an essential strategy when scaling a digital marketing agency. A fractional role offers a middle ground.
For instance, Sam considers bringing on a senior marketer for two and a half days a week at roughly half the cost of a full-time role to be a top hiring choice for teams of 10 to 20 people. If you’re still unsure of the best solution for your needs, return to your time audit. If the gap is a task and nothing more, outsource it. If it’s ownership, a hire is your best move.
What should your next agency hire be?
Your next agency hire should be the one that closes the largest gap in your role as founder, and you’ll need a clear strategy to pinpoint where that lies.
Remember, an effective agency hiring strategy begins with auditing your time, defining your ideal founder role, and identifying whether individual capacity or a new team member best fills each gap. For those scaling a digital marketing agency, leveraging white label digital marketing services will provide flexible fulfilment without committing to a full-time payroll, allowing you to hire intentionally instead of reactively.
Want to keep learning from industry leaders like Sam Wood? Join the Globital Agency Growth podcast community to unlock early access to new, value-packed episodes and invitations to roundtable discussions with other agency founders.
