Why Outsourcing Your Marketing May Be A Bad Idea

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. Today I want to talk about why and how outsourcing marketing can actually tank your growth. I wanna kick this off by saying I have a little bit of a regret and I'm gonna try to make this story as general as possible to protect the person that I'm speaking with. But there was a time in my past as a coach where I helped a former client build out a program to help business owners CEOs hire marketing directors. Now, there's lots of terms here. We could call it, you know, fractional cmo, we could call it marketing directors. Those are the two most common names. And it's true that there is a strong pain point in the market because these visionary CEO type people really get tired of the constant grind of marketing and so they want to outsource their marketing and they want to just find, find that special someone who can think like a marketer, who has high level strategy, who can talk in the visionary language, but can also, like, execute. And so there's. There definitely is a problem. There's a gap in the market. So she made this program. But over time I realized that I regretted it because it's not really my belief that it's a good idea or easy or a good strategy to outsource your marketing too early in your company. And I have, you know, a company with Kathy Olson funnel, gorgeous. We do about $4 million a year, and I can tell you we have not outsourced our marketing one single bit. I also remember the days when I was VP of ClickFunnels and part of my job. This was the beginning of Russell handing off marketing fully. And that's why I was there. I was the cmo, if you will. I was the person that was taking, you know, Russell's baby and running with it. But again, the company was at like a hundred million dollars a year or something crazy like that. So somewhere between $4 million a year and a hundred million dollars a year, Russell got the nerve to hand off marketing to someone like a CMO visionary, you know, technician combo, if you will. So I'm over here thinking to myself, I have all these business owners who are at 500k a year or a million a year, or 2 million a year. And they're trying to outsource their marketing and they're looking for that CMO or that marketing director. And so programs like this exist to try to fill that gap. But I fundamentally don't believe that it's a good idea. So I'm carrying a little regret about supporting that in that way. So if I don't agree with that, then let's talk about what I do think and what I, what I think works. If you are a business owner and you're really struggling, you wish you could hand off the marketing in your company, but you are, you know, $5 million a year or under, this message is for you. Okay, so let's talk about why so many people rush to outsource their marketing. This is super common. And I think there's an impulse to scale quickly, right? People want to scale quickly and so they think, okay, I gotta, I gotta get people on board, I gotta do CEO things, so I have to like, hand off this marketing. And that's where agencies and fractional CMOs and those types of programs kind of come in. The idea is sometimes born out of, well, they know more than me, so they can do it better than me. And they may have better marketing skills than you do, for sure. But your perspective or your passion or your worldview that got you into this business is not easily replicated. And so it's like, well, crap, I don't know how to do ads, so I got to just hire this agency and they're going to do everything. But what you're doing is you're sort of handing off this worldview, this perspective, to people that really aren't capable of, of carrying it. And the other reason why founders rush to outsource marketing is because it's hard and it's, it's grindy. Like it's just day in and day out, you know, what are we going to do for search traffic and what are we going to do for ads and what are we going to do on our funnels and what are we going to do for email marketing and what are we going to do on TikTok and Instagram? There's a lot of content and this kind of boils down the nature of marketing. In 2025, a lot of owners are like, I didn't think I was signing up to be a media company. But we all are kind of media companies when we choose to go into business. And so those are the main reasons is like, they want to scale Fast. They think that somebody else knows more than them, which may be true about the skill, but not necessarily about the worldview, the perspective or the passion or, you know, it's just a grind, and they want to get it off their plate. The bad news is that I think that marketing should be the last thing you outsource, the absolute last thing. And I don't know at what benchmark you need to be to outsource your marketing, but, you know, Russell was doing it around a hundred million. I am not doing it at 4 million. So, you know, you can kind of pick your number. So you're like, okay, well, this is bad news. It is, but there's also good news. And so I want to talk about the good news. I want to talk about, well, what do I do if I'm in this situation where I'm not really big enough to fully, you know, outsource my perspective, my passion? I can't build a whole marketing department, but I am not good at marketing. I don't understand marketing strategy. It's such a grind. So first I would say that you need a marketing coach, and that is really important. And I'm not just saying that because I'm a coach. I'm saying that because I consistently find that business owners who happily take on the CMO hat and have a coach or consultant guiding them do better than people who just outsource it. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is, is we need to think of marketing as a pie. And instead of handing the entire pie over to an agency or a fractional cmo, what we're going to do is we're going to cut that pie up into little slices, and we're going to hand out slices one at a time. So let's talk about this in the context of, you know, a real life problem. So let's say you're growing your company and you are noticing that you don't have enough new clients coming in the door. Okay, you're a coaching, coaching company. Let's say you don't have enough clients. The instinct to just hire an agency to do all the marketing you've now shut down because you've listened to this podcast episode and you're like, okay, Julie knows what she's talking about. I'm not just gonna outsource everything. So what do you do? Well, you either become a marketer yourself or you hire a marketing coach who can kind of help you. And in that case, you guys are partners, right? You. You're the visionary. You have the perspective, the passion, the expertise. The marketing coach has all that marketing strategy together. You build a plan, right? So in, let's say in this case, you hire me and we're building a webinar funnel. We decide, okay, this is how we're going to generate new leads for the, for client acquisition. So we build the webinar. At this moment in time. If you do not have the skills to build a webinar, the marketing coach and you can figure out what do you have to do and what can be outsourced. Because at that point we're outsourcing skill, not necessarily strategy. So if you, you know, don't know how to build a funnel, maybe you can hire a designer or you can hire a funnel builder. And so then when the funnel is built, maybe you don't know how to do ads, so you can hire an ads person. The key part about this is that the more you kind of set up and, and strategically organize yourself, the easier it is to hand off to somebody. And we're going to hand off a tiny slice of that pie. So maybe you're gon hire an ads person first you're going to say, okay, here's the ad account, here's the funnel, go ahead, try to get, you know, 50 people to opt in a day or whatever. Let's say you're doing that webinar once a week and you're doing it live and you're consistently getting an 8% conversion rate. Okay, that's great. It's validated. You can get 8%. What does that mean? Well, if you hire a salesperson to do the webinar for you, you can now say to them, hey, I want you to do this webinar once a month and I need you to get to an 8% conversion rate and then I'll give you more. And so that's a easy way to hand off that execution, hand off that skill, and then measure that skill. And at this point you'll quickly be able to see when something isn't working. It's so hard to see when you have an agency just doing everything. And so this is the tiny pie slice concept is you and your coach build and validate one channel, one funnel, one campaign, bring in the skill based people you need to manage the parts that you can't do and then you can train people to kind of replace the, you know, the part that you're doing. Right. So let's say you're doing the live presentation, or you're doing the private dms, or you're doing the sales calls or you're doing the emails now you can start to delegate that stuff off. And so it becomes very easy to diagnose failures. And it, you avoid that, that blind, that blind handoff. Right. So if I were to put this in steps number one, own your vision and make sure that you, that's the last thing that you delegate out because this is something that only you can do and that means getting a partner that can help you with marketing. And yes, you could find a full business partner that's a marketer, but that's us. Pretty expensive. It's a lot more expensive to give someone 50 equity in your company than it is to pay a couple thousand dollars a month for a marketing coach to guide you. Right. It's, it's really not, it, it's not even a toss up here on what's a more financially lucrative idea then number two is to validate before you delegate. So you build that campaign or that structure with a marketing coach, get it validated, get it going. And then we're going to go to step three, which is the tiny pie slice mentality where we bring in people that are running these little pieces that we know already work. We're not asking them to reinvent the wheel, we're not asking them to be the brain of the organization, we're asking them to execute and then we can tell if there's failure at the execution level. And step four is to accept the fact that the marketing strategy brain child of your business is going to have to be in you. It's probably the last thing that you're going to delegate out somewhere on the journey from 4 million to 100 million. So this is my, my belief. I've seen it in big companies, I've seen it in my own company and I've also seen a lot of train wrecks, a lot of wasted dollars in time in smaller companies that tried to outsource too fast. So hopefully that helps. I'll talk to you soon.

And there you have it, folks. Another dose of million Dollar grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped and ready to face your own entrepreneur journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, Harness your grit and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie and this has been Million Dollar Grit.