Should You Hire a Marketing Agency or Keep It In-House?

The Question Every Business Owner Asks Me

Should I hire a marketing agency or should I build an in-house team? I've been in the business of marketing for over 10 years. I've serviced thousands of businesses and worked with many brands. So let me give you my honest opinion on this, from a guy who owns an agency and still tells people not to hire one.

I have a company called Attention Grabbing Media. We're an Inc. 5000 marketing agency that services incredible brands. Seven, eight, nine figure brands. And here's the truth most agency owners won't tell you: if you're just getting started, you are not ready to hire a team like us. There's one exception, and I'll get to it. But for most startups, the answer is in-house.

And in-house might mean you, your wife, your kids, and maybe somebody else. It might be one or two employees serving double duty as marketing staff. That's fine. That's how it starts.

When You Go In-House: No Capital, Breaking Even, or Losing Money

If you're a startup without a lot of capital, you go in-house. If you don't have gold brick bars stored under your mattress, you're going to build an in-house team, potentially with just yourself.

If you're breaking even, same answer. You're selling products or services, barely keeping up with your bills and expenses, not really putting any money in your pocket? You go in-house.

And if you're losing money every month, hear me clearly: you don't come to an agency to save you. The agency is not interested in saving your business. They're interested in helping you grow, expand, and take things to the next level. We're not in the business of saving businesses, because marketing is not an overnight thing. Marketing takes time. If you come to an agency like ours and say, 'I need this to work next week or I close down the business,' we're not going to be able to save you. You have to keep building, keep creating, keep going through the bootstrap process before you bring in an agency.

Marketing Is Not a Casino Slot Machine

In my book Marketing Magic, there's a section on mastering client relationships, and one point is all about expectations. To set the right expectations, I tell clients something like this: here's what I've done in the past, and here's what it took to reach the goal. But just so you know, I expect your company to be willing to pay for our services for a year before things start to take off.

Marketing is never going to be like a casino slot where you put in a coin and, if you're lucky, get a lot of money back. It doesn't work like that. It is very likely that you will fail several times along the way of succeeding. They call it failing forward. You fail, you keep moving forward.

Think about baseball. Hall of Fame players fail 70% of the time. Only three out of 10 times do they get on base, and that's a successful baseball player. Marketing is the same way. You have to be willing to try a lot of things until you find the things that work. It's never overnight. So if you're impatient, or you're a control freak who can't let others work on your business, or you're a genius who already knows everything about marketing, keep it in-house. I've got nothing to teach you.

When You Hire an Agency: Profit, Scale, and the Capital Exception

Now the other side. When do you hire an agency? Are you making money in your business? Do you want to scale? You want more people to see your products, buy your products, invest in your services, and you don't know exactly how to get there? You already have a business that works, it's profitable, your return on investment is positive. When you're making a hundred grand in sales and profiting maybe $20,000, you're making money. In that case, why not go to a team of people that know what you don't know?

It's very important to always recognize there are things you don't know yet. The moment you start feeling that you know it all, that you have nothing else to learn, that's the moment you go downhill. Agencies specialize in the subject of marketing and they do it day in and day out. There are pros and cons on both sides: you won't control an agency fully, you don't have the same access. But the knowledge they have goes beyond whatever your in-house team has.

Here's the exception I promised. Let's say you're a startup but you have capital, an investor, a partnership where the money is there and the goal is to grow fast. Then you definitely want an agency. I'm launching a brand of supplements for dogs right now. Brand new business. Do I qualify as a startup? Yes. But you know what I have? A lot of capital to invest in growing it. That's the difference. A startup without capital does it all itself. A startup backed by capital and successful entrepreneurs? An agency is the way to go.

And one final point: if you want experts, you want an agency. An in-house marketing team is specialized in marketing, and that's good. But how many of them have built their own brands to massive expansion? Not many. The good agencies have deep knowledge of how to build big brands because that's what they do every single day.

Going In-House? Let AI Make You Good Enough

If you decide to bring it all in-house, then you have to work at improving your marketing skill. And the technology today, in 2025 and beyond, is so incredible that it can make you good in the subject of marketing fast.

Quick example. I went to ChatGPT and asked: can you give me five marketing strategies, based on Manuel Suarez principles, for social media that I can apply to my business today, step by step? And it delivered. Strategy one: content that educates and engages. Create high-value educational content that speaks directly to your audience's pain points. If you're in the health niche, share short videos with quick tips on nutrition, fitness, or wellness. Post on a regular schedule and engage with the comments. You get the idea.

These tools will make you an expert right now, or at least a good enough expert to get the marketing going. Until when? Until you're ready to invest in an agency. Because you're making more money, because you want to scale, because you have more capital, and above all, because you know that you don't know it all.