Short YouTube clip by Phil Risher arguing that bringing marketing fully in-house is often more expensive and less effective than partnering with specialized agencies. Uses a case study of an $11 million HVAC contractor who, after moving marketing in-house at ~$7M revenue, spent $300–400k/year on internal hires and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands by switching to a hybrid model: one internal marketing coordinator plus external agencies.
Chapters
You at all in house is the most expensive lie that you're telling yourself. I had a prospect call with a $11 million H vac contractor. Once he got to 7 million, he said, I'm going to take it all in house. I'm going to hire a videographer, hire an SEO person, I'm going to hire a developer. And he ultimately ended up spending about 3 or $400,000 a year to try to get all this stuff done in this business. First thing that was an issue was that he had to try to train these people every single year on everything that's changing in the business. Two, he had all these experts in his business that they weren't doing something every single day, every single minute for his business. And on top of that, he had to manage all these people when he didn't even know what he. He ultimately figured out that he's spending three or four hundred thousand dollars a year on people that are experts, that really aren't experts. And what he would prefer to do is work with agencies for their expert team that know what they're doing, that stay on top of everything and are constantly educated and performance based, and then have one person internal who's like a marketing liaison or coordinator, make sure that everything's working, track performance, work with the agency, make sure that it's all executing. He ultimately ended up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing this because he could hire someone for 70, $80,000 internally and then work with an agency for like 50 to $100,000 that actually knew what they were doing to help him. Execut lesson here is, when you get to that 7 or 10 million dollar mark, you tend to want to try to pull everything in house. The problem is that you're going to get bloated and you're going to try to do all this in house when there's experts that are constantly being educated, that are external, that cost a lot less, that will help you grow your business. And all you need is one person internal that's a coordinator that can help facilitate your ideas and also with your partners or vendors.
