In-House or Outside

The question underneath

Owners usually ask this as a cost question. It is really a work question. Marketing at a local service business is a list of recurring chores, and the honest first step is to write the list down: review requests after every job, the Google listing kept current, photos taken and posted, a page written when a new town or service is added, the tracking numbers checked monthly, vendor reports read, the report to the owner assembled. None of it is hard, and all of it stops the week nobody owns it.

The list, with the hours it takes each month at a shop with three to eight trucks, as an operating standard rather than a measurement:

• Review requests after every closed job: 2 hours
• Google listing checked and photos added: 1 hour
• One new town or service page written: 3 hours
• Tracking numbers and form submissions checked: 1 hour
• Vendor reports read and the vendor call held: 2 hours
• The owner’s one-page report assembled: 1 hour

Ten hours a month. That is the job before anyone adds strategy to it, and it is the reason the first hire is rarely a full-time position on its own.

What a first marketing hire actually does

The job is usually sold as strategy and is actually operations. A good first hire spends most of the week on the chores above. Some of it goes to managing whoever is doing the website or the mailers, and a small part to thinking about next quarter. The person who can do all three well is rare, and not entry level.

What it costs the company is more than the salary. Payroll taxes, benefits, a computer, the software the person will ask for, the owner’s time training someone who has never seen a job site, and the six months before the work is visible in the numbers.

What an outside vendor actually does

An agency or freelancer sells the execution half of the list, at a fraction of the cost of a full person, without the management overhead of an employee. What it does not do is own the result, sit in the Monday meeting, or notice that the phone stopped ringing on Tuesday. Accountability stays with the owner. That is fine if the owner has the hour a month for it, and a problem if he does not.

The signs that decide it

• Hire in-house when the chore list already takes someone in the office a day a week, when a second location or a new trade is coming, or when the owner is the one doing it at ten at night.
• Stay outside when sales are under a few million, when the work is mostly one channel, or when nobody in the building could manage a marketing employee’s week.
• Do neither yet when the four numbers from the cost-of-marketing sheet do not exist, because neither a hire nor a vendor can be judged without them.

The middle option nobody mentions

Between an employee and an agency there is a fourth path: a person from the office who takes the chore list as a named part of their job, with the vendors reporting to them and one hour a month with the owner. It costs nothing new, it produces the accountability an agency cannot, and it is the arrangement most shops between two and ten million actually run once they stop looking for a unicorn.