Agency Vs In House: What Every Brand Needs To Know transcript

you have heard about the agency Carousel you might have been on it where you hire agency after agency and just waste and lose money and waste and lose time not moving your brand forward bad agency experiences are so common and that leads a lot of people to think they should in-house their ad spend and I'm not sure that's the right answer either because it's really hard to find great talent there's all kinds of ways to think about this issue of agency versus in-house I was recently on a panel about this exact topic and I've got thoughts on how to sort it out when should you hire an agency should you hire an agency at all should you inhouse your ad spend I'm and to answer the question for you today right I was just on a panel uh at at Commerce Round Table the Sunland conference down in San Diego and that got me thinking a lot about this question the the the prompt for the panel was do agencies suck um and it's such a common concern I mean just like outside of the panel I I've heard so many operators tell the story of just like agency after agency after agency and not being able to find forward movement for their brand it's so frustrating you hear about other brands growing their ad spend growing their business things going well and you can't figure out why it's not going well for you and so people sometimes get this idea that agencies are just bad um everybody's heard of these agencies experiences where they get really bad service the sales calls are awesome you get so excited but then you get put with some super junior employee who doesn't know what they're doing you know that's a really common problem people feel like they're getting gouged on pricing for a agencies they're not getting enough attention all of these different issues come up when people hire and bring on ad agencies and so like I said it leads to sort of um a range of reactions including the sense of maybe you just shouldn't hire an agency maybe you should in-house it and the logic oftentimes goes like in-housing is cheaper in-housing also gets people who are dedicated full-time to your brand instead of like this is another common agency problem that people feel like they they're not getting any attention because the uh the agency team that they're working with has 17 clients or whatever you know and they actually think that agencies are just sort of like evil like they're out to just steal your money for their bottom line you know and so they they think inous is the answer um and you know dedicated full-time person but then there's all kinds of problems with inh housing spend too what happens when you hire a really talented in-house employee but then as things start going well they immediately want more money what happens when that person gets poached by another uh brand or agency or whatever or they're doing all kinds of freelancing on the side because they realize that if they're good there's just all kinds of money to make so all of these issues come up with both and so I want to tell you today how I think about this really important issue of whether or not you should hire an agency and and before you get too far ahead of yourself and think Andrew you run an agency like you're just talking your book here I actually am not going to this is a preview tell you that the answer is to hire an agency necessarily I think agencies are a great idea there's a really good place for them I think it's hard to hire them well and I'm going to explain how I think about that as well but you know I run a boutique agency like I have five clients I'm not trying to add more clients you might have heard me say that before so this is not me just trying to drum up business for my agency I'm perfectly fine when people want to do other approaches including hiring other agencies besides me or in housing I've helped Brands I've literally help Brands fire me and hire an in-house replacement at time I think if it's the right fit for the brand there will be plenty of work for me I'm not really worried about it I'm going to try and be as objective as possible I've also come at this you should know from every angle and I think that's an important bit of of clarification here I started as a media buyer in- house handling Facebook ads and Google ads for um Kao uh back this is you know nine years ago now something like that so I was fully inhouse there I was also doing other kinds of AD buys including some Direct Media buys at the time and working on the marketing in general then I went from nomon thread Collective with Taylor holiday where I was an an ad strategist uh was actually the first ad strategist at CTC besides Taylor so he actually split the clients into two he took half I took half and we uh got to work and then eventually became the head of growth there so I saw the agency from an executive position as well uh from there CTC launched 4x400 its own aggregator so I was sort of back on the brand side though working with multiple Brands which eventually ran at 4400 and then from there went freelance and now I have a team and an agency and that's what I've been doing for the last few years so I've really seen this from all sides and um and can totally see perspective on all of it and so I'm going to walk you through how to think about this question as best as I can of what is the right way to approach an agency versus not and I I do think that um that there are some really important guidelines for you to think through and the first of those is to think about the timing of your spend the timing of of your spend is really really important in the timing of when to hire an agency people really underrate this as they think through this issue the thing you need to really be thinking about here is are you actually at a place where it makes sense to hire an agency and so I what I would say is um there is simply no agency or in-house solution that makes sense for most brands if you're spending less than 50 Grand a month now I'm thinking of meta ads in particular here I think with Google ads that number comes down some because there's some more technical aspects to Google ads Etc and also Google ads agencies tend to be a little more affordable they're also less creative intense intensive um email agencies are sort of a different deal so I'm really thinking about growth ads really focused on meta Etc um and so we'll kind of limit the conversation there because I think that's also where the point of people's frustrations are if you're spending less than 50 Grand a month on meta ads basically doesn't make sense to hire an agency people sometimes come to me wanting to do that there's occasionally a spot where your Brand's economics are so good and the potential for the brand is so good that an agency would take you on at an early stage sub 50 Grand and could feel like um they they could deliver a service where maybe they won't make money right away but they'll make money over the longer term and it can be a fit you know for for something in a in that situation I've certainly done that before and in fact there's ways in which I really like that phase of business but in general I think it's a really bad idea and here's why it's because of what I just alluded to which is does the agency make money on you this is a counterintuitive thing about thinking through the agency question which is that you actually want the agency to make a margin on your bill and that's because if they don't you are not valuable to them um it's actually very similar to hiring an employee in this respect if you underpay an employee you are not that valuable to your employee and they will go look for other places to use their time and effort I wa I've watched this happen repeatedly in fact when I was on this panel with uh at at this sunlan conference in in San Diego I talked to um to Nate Lagos who had been to a couple different places and at one point he left a CMO job because he was getting drastically underpaid so as he could tell and he was right he was getting drastically underpaid and so the the the brand was making a lot of money on his really high quality work but Nate was not and so he just left and that was probably a terrible decision for that brand because Nate is really talented and so the same Dynamic applied in the in-house employee side as it would for an agency you actually want the agency to make money on your spend because that's how the the agency creates value for themselves and that is really good for you because if they if you are valuable to the agency then the agency is going to give you really good care and the problem at being sub 50 Grand and AD spend is that there's simply not enough money left over for both parties to make money if you think about this a percentage of spend kind of model like I set a minimum where I just won't take a client that's going to pay me less than five grand per month and frankly I won't take a client that I think is going to sit at five grand a month for a while I'd only take that client um for a little bit uh if I really thought I could grow them like I mentioned earlier but in general if you paying less than Grand per month just think about how much margin is left over how much resourcing you know how much people cost how much employees cost like if that's if that's what the billable is uh at The Meta side they can just only give you so many hours before it becomes impossible for them to uh make a margin on somebody's time in the business and that's what they are doing that's what the agency business is they're marking up somebody's time to make a margin now they're doing a lot of other things too but that's fundamentally how the margin works in the business and so at that level of spend it's just really hard on top of that at that level of spend you sometimes can learn really slowly what works you need somebody who's probably thinking really hard about what creative is going to work you need to have gotten some additional W's on the board and a lot of times that's not going to happen with an external agency unless again there's this really sort of unique situation on top of all of that what I believe is that one of the most important things that you need to do to to have good agency relationships is to be able to speak intelligently to them I hear this story all the time operator is working with an agency the agency tells them okay we just got to test X we got to just test y we just got to Z and the agency knows more about the platform than the operator does and so they keep saying these things and the agency just the operator kind of goes okay my agency is telling me we got to keep doing this and nothing is working that they're doing but they say we got to keep testing got to keep spending and six months later they've burned a bunch of money they haven't gotten anywhere and nobody has has um happy with it and the agency gets fired and the operator feels like this this sucks like I I didn't get anywhere in my business that story happens all the time and the reason that happens like if you operator listening to this and you're feeling in the dark about what your agency is doing you feel like you don't understand how they're thinking about their media buying they're creative anything like that it's because you don't know enough about the platform and you need to know something about the platform listen if you're running an e-commerce business of retail Goods it is incumbent on you to understand how Facebook ads works you must dedicate yourself some amount of time to understanding what the best practices are what you're looking for you do not have to operate at yourself first forever but you need to know and there's a really simple reason why which is that it's very likely that your Facebook ads are either the second largest or maybe even the largest single line item of cost on your p&l the only one that would usually compete with it is cogs okay the actual product cost itself but sometimes Facebook ads is actually meaningfully more than cogs for for Brands and if it is the largest or second largest cost on your p&l you as the operator of the business need to understand where your money is going you need to know what's happening it also means that small differences in performance in that one line item of cost actually make a really big impact on your total p&l a 10% Improvement on your Opex or let's say a 10% Improvement in your software costs is a really different thing in your business than a 10% employment on your first or second biggest cost uh in your business right um it's just a larger dollar amount and so it has a much bigger impact and therefore you need to understand it and the way to protect yourself from losing a lot of money and time is to deeply understand it so sub 50 Grand what I recommend to everybody is to learn it yourself run it yourself at least for a while or at least be very close to it understand deeply the best practices in how meta ADS works listen to my podcast go sign up for admission there is an admission ad read in this like use my offer for it and the I tell people that all the time I very joyfully have an affiliate relationship with admission precisely for this reason because there is a lot of garbage meta ads content out there there's a lot it is misleading and is not going to help you and admission is in my view the best information presented in the best way with the best support from both community and coaching not going to be labor it anymore I just told you you should go sign up for admission go do it through the show notes so you can get a free coaching call from that team when you are setting up your meta ads get the very best meta ads principles the best Playbook learn it through courses get access to a community there as well as other operators in the same boat as you and then at the same time get coaching help via the team from Common Thread Collective incredible opportunity with a 30-day money back guarantees there's really no risk to you at all go get into that Community right now don't wait do what it takes to set aside time to get the knowledge you need to manage the team really well and do it through my link so you get your first coaching call for free or if you sign up for a year you get four coaching calls for free which is awesome it's a really awesome service I think it will set your business up for success in the long term go follow the link in my show notes go join admission today so if you're are sub 50 Grand especially you should be in there taking courses learning from Taylor holiday and others because it will help you so much to understand how to do that it's G to be much cheaper than any agency is and it's going to also do something so crucial which is train you in core Financial media buying and creative principles so that when you go to actually hire and manage an agency and I think there's a day when you probably will or an in-house uh uh operator for it whether it's an agency or an in-house solution for this problem when you go to manage that person you will have a much better understanding of how to talk through the issues what you're looking for what makes good practice and then that way you can manage people better doesn't mean you have to look over the shoulder the whole time just means that you can be on the same page about the overall strategy so sub 50 Grand the answer is don't hire an agency don't even in-house it learn it yourself if you're an operator of a bootstrap e-commerce business you need to understand it don't Pawn that off on somebody else understand it yourself take the time learn it and do it so what about when you get past that 50 Grand a month kind of stage what what should you do then okay now this is where it gets a little bit more complicated because now your business is growing you've got some resources you're thinking about should I handle things myself and so let me give you a few principles for how I think about um agencies versus in-housing and just in general what you're looking for here okay principle number one above everything else the most important thing it's related exactly to what I just told you like just think about what the implication I just told you is number one the goal is hire The Playbook hire The Playbook as I've said before and as Taylor holiday said too the worst piece of advice that gets repeated every day on Twitter is uh every brand is is different test everything that is wrong every brand is not different in some of these ways you should not test everything what you should do instead is plant your feet firmly on the solid foundation of a really good e-commerce Playbook and you should let your business grow based off of that and when you are hiring an agency above everything else you're not shopping for talent you're not shopping for cost that's something people do a lot you're not shopping for like flashy creative what you're shopping for is a Playbook and that means to things um what you're shopping for is first the right Playbook at the level of what they articulate okay so they need to the agency that you're hiring or the in-house person that you're hiring in both cases needs to be able to articulate to you A playbook that represents the best possible practices okay and again like I would look at something like admission as a place to learn those things um because and for me here's what that means right it means creative volume matters a lot it means um conceptual Clarity at the creative level it means your ad buying approach is related specifically to the economics of your business that you understand that the ad spend is driven by economic factors by Financial factors in your business so your unit economics are producing your ad spend strategy that includes things like margin Tam LTV all that stuff is going into how you think about what products to advertise and crucially how much like what your Rass Target should be and what your goal should be what your forecast should be probably at this point your agency or your in-house solution should be giving you a clear cohort-based forecast of your ad spend like I I think there's we're just at a point now where that should be a non-negotiable if they're not giving you a cohort forecast you should not hire them that is just at this point a really important part of how a DDC business grows and a great agency and there are plenty of agencies that do this now provides that as standard practice a a subpar agency does not so that's the financial side of things and then the media buying ought to be based in manual bids some combination of bid caps cost back cost caps trass targets I have some really specific ways I do it they should not be running separate testing campaigns that's like a massive cost in your business um I I would say like I just would not be hiring somebody based on that and and what is happening here right is that I am articulating the way that I run my brand spend I believe these are correct principles the way that CTC runs theirs the way my friends at kinship run theirs you know and there's a reason I keep relationships with only a couple of these Brands doing a couple of these things because I really believe these principles will help you a lot if you want intros by the way if you're listening to or watching this and you you're interested in what I'm saying you want an intro to somebody at one of these places I'm happy to send it so make sure just reach out to me podcast ajg.com tell me your situation I'll tell you who I think the right fit is for you based on size and all those things I'm more than happy to try to help you set up that relationship okay so um so do reach out to me or Andrew J Ferris on Twitter those will both be great this is the thing though the The Playbook is what you're hiring for now here's the thing the theoretical articulation of that Playbook is different than the operational execution of the Playbook and this is the actually actually the harder thing to sus out when you are hiring an agency I get that they have the right ideas and lots of agencies and agency sales people are good at articulating the ideas what you should be looking for is how confident can I be that those ideas actually get operationalized into my ad account how confident can I be that the person running my ad account understands and can do those and there's a couple of ways to do this the first is to ask really specifically about the details of the process that the uh agency will take you through or again the the plans the detailed plans that an in-house solution will take you to take you through how much detail can they give you and how this is going to get operationalized in the business what's the timeline um how many ads are they going to give you if they if if that's part of the question they may not have an exact number of those they may have an exact number there's a really big difference between Stills and videos like why are they going to do that what like anything you can do to Artic to to ass this out one thing I think you can try and do is actually talk to the person that would be managing your specific account so if you can get an actually a phone call with uh a team member who is going to be your strategist that can give you a sense of things because what you want to know is that actually if that team member gets promoted if they get hired somewhere else uh if they leave that no matter you're not actually shopping just for talent you're shopping for that Playbook right and so um this is how you save yourself from having the junior employee who doesn't really know what they're doing and it also is how you save yourself from and you just hold them to what they what they articulate right and I would ask this question as aggressively as possible in the interview process oh but so sorry I'm I'm getting ahead of myself you want to make sure that if the person gets poached or if there's just like a really Junior person on your ad account that that person who's working on your ad account is uh is somebody who can who can actually articulate as well the Playbook that the salesperson is articulated to you and another question you could ask is like how long has the person who is going to work on my account been working at this agency the longer that timeline the better you should feel about it right um because the more they will have had reps internalizing what you're what you're what they're saying they can do for you and if it's not very long find out what the how they got there and why you should trust them anyway Etc and then get referrals get on call with somebody who's worked with that person who's who's going to work on your team um and and find out like how is it to work with them what can you say about it like take the time do the work needed to hire and make sure again that Playbook is actually going to get operationalized and this is this is another challenge with this whole thing which is that hiring is actually very hard and people often want to move too fast because they just want to solve their problem and that's not going to work you're going to need to actually ask around I always say like I like to talk to somebody this is actually an old piece of advice from Taylor as well make sure you talk to somebody who fired the agency at some point you can even another question you could ask is what's your client retention rate like how many of your clients stick around through any opt out period how many of your clients not only stick around through the opt out period but like how long is the average timeline that a client has been working with you do those ask those questions all of those are getting at the same thing how well is the Playbook being operationalized and what this begins to get at is one of the reasons agencies can and often are a better solution than inhouse Solutions than in-house Solutions are um because it's very very very unlikely that an in-house individual is going to have the level of operational detail that I'm suggesting you ask for from an agency but that's because an in-house person probably especially in smaller you know even midsize e-commerce businesses had a lot of jobs they may be a an operational Wizard and that's their core skill set is that they've operationalized this stuff and they know exactly how to do it but actually an agency if you think of what they do their whole existence should be trying to operationalize A playbook that is what an agency is an agency develops A playbook based on a wide range of context from a lot of different ad account accounts or from a lot of different businesses and therefore they can cut through the noise of every every ad account is different every business is different test everything because they see every different ad account every different brand and they know what is true and what is not true about that statement and they can give context to data and they can give ideas of what works and what doesn't work theoretically that is what makes an agency great they have so much more access to information than any individual possibly could and there's just no way to make up for that and what what they should be able to do with that information is turn it into insights and playbooks that then get operationalized through the business and then they should spend a lot of time refining their processes to make sure that happens and works correctly that is the product that they're working on right that that is the agency product above everything else is that set of services and so they should be all the time figuring out where are the gaps where is what the CEO believes not making it down to the strategist on the ad account how do we solve that problem is it software is there another Google sheet is there a deck that needs to get made is there a process built into a Sono or notion or something like you know and just constantly filling in those gaps to where that can be and if they can be doing that all the time they can end up generating a really really good playbook that does get operationalized really well and really really good agencies spend lots of time making sure that they are have the best ideas and then making sure those ideas actually get operationalized so that's the thing you should look for and that is a real advantage that agencies have over in-house Solutions people undervalue this agencies are much better situated to develop playbooks than individuals are they really are this is actually part of why I am not building a bigger agency because I know how much work it takes to build that Playbook and I recognize uh that it's a huge job that will take a long time with constant refining and requires an operational skill set that I don't think is my core skill set and therefore I am not going to try to do that because I just don't think I could make an agency service that great that's the reason that I think about it now this gets to what I think is the potential solution either way which is that actually within some basic constraints of that Playbook the best argument for hiring an in-house person is you might find somebody who is just awesome at their job and frankly the bet I make with my clients is that I have a good playbook that I mostly run clearly is in my head and operationalized through my own words and through my own actions and then uh with a with my small team gets operationalized well enough because with a small team it's much easier than with a larger team so I have a Playbook and then I can go and and build that out myself and my hope is that my experience and knowledge in the space can make it so that I can be um a really valuable contributor to somebody's brand at the level of basically individual talent and this is what I think is possibly true here is that there is a time to hire individual people I mentioned Nate Legos earlier who was on this panel with me what I said to Nate and his job as a CMO of original grain really awesome watch company in the mid Aid figures is that Nate is an extremely excellent marketer he's really really good and so they're really light on agencies but I'm not telling him you need to go shop for agencies now I actually think a great agency managed by a great cm would in fact probably multiply their efforts and may even be a better solution than what they're doing but I'm not so worried about that because Nate himself is so talented so there's one way of looking at this which is if you have access to incredible talent I don't really care if it's in an agency or an inous solution go hire incredible talent and get them to work on your business in some ways that's what business is is finding the most talented people you possibly can and getting them to work on your thing and uh and so that is the sort of counterargument to everything I said about the Playbook there is a time when that level of talent and 100% of their time and focus and interest being on one business that can outweigh a lot of those things now I think a lot of times even that really talented person can be helped by a better Playbook and that's where again like I said sometimes the solution is actually to do both if you're watching or listening to this episode this far in you probably are running meta ads and you should be tracking your ads with a pixel installation from Billy b. a billy is what I use for my clients it is an incredible tool it is the most affordable tool on the market of which I am aware and on top of that it has the best event match quality with 100% serers side tracking uh and it is just really awesome within a couple clicks you will have a new pixel installed uh via Billy and you will get the best event match quality which means meta is getting the best and fullest data set from your uh website from your store being sent back to meta that means meta in the dashboard is going to report to you the most information possible and also have the most data to uh to optimize against which has meant for me when I've tested this with my clients then in head-to-head tests Billy has outperformed other pixel installs just over and over that's included uh the the native Shopify meta pixel integration as well as other thirdparty tools it's also more affordable you can start with Billy for um $1 for the first month and actually after that like you need a couple more purchases driven by Billy for the tool to be worth it to you relative to almost anything else that I've seen out there it is really affordable it is really awesome it is really easy to install you do not need a developer which is another thing that I love uh because pixel installs can be huge laborious processes and in fact it can be a onstop shop replacement for Google tag manager so ga4 can be installed on one click of a button Google ads with enhanced conversions of the click of a button basically um we're talking less than five minute installs on all these with no developers so go get 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A you'll get Billy today but here there is another place where many people get tripped up which is that they refuse to pay that person a lot of money there are some Brands some operators that just hate the idea of paying a CMO or whatever a huge salary plus bonus plus Equity Etc and that's what's it's going to take one thing you need to recognize in this is that the supply and demand Dynamics uh work such that it is going to be expensive to hire great growth talent and the reason why is very simple think about the demand side every business in e-commerce wants great growth Talent they all want to grow their businesses profitably that's why they started their businesses and so if there is somebody out there especially if that person is actively building their Network which they ought to be because they're looking out for their for their own human bottom line for their personal bottom line their fames bottom line whatever they're going to have plenty of demand for them and the supply is limited relative to the demand uh of for growth Talent like there just are only so many people who are that good there's relatively limited Supply there's a huge amount of demand and of course when there's lots of demand and very little Supply well the price goes up for the things that are in demand and that is going to happen for you and the mistake people make is they try they think they're protecting their bottom line by not paying those people or agencies either one what they are worth and let me tell you something do not shop on price in this case because highly talented people can be huge value adds to your business even at a high price the example um that I have heard other people give and that I think is a simple way of thinking about this if you're any kind of a baseball fan or you just know who sh Otani is the daughters just paid sh Otani $700 million to play for their baseball team for 10 years and there's some details in the contract and blah blah blah if you know the details of that doesn't matter the point is they paid him a huge amount of money to be great at baseball for them and the thing is the Dodgers are going to make a lot of money on that deal because he is a global Superstar who is incredible at baseball and they will make a lot of money and the the way the Dodgers could make money could make more money there was by paying this guy the most money right and that same Dynamic works out in your business if there is somebody who is a high enough level of talent you should um break the bank to hire them because they are going to have a Major Impact you've got to get over the idea that all you see is a cost on your business if they can really help you grow your business you should be willing to pay it including at the agency level you should be happy to write that check if they have that skill set now at some point the cost gets so high that the market Works back against that person right if an agency is charging you $70,000 a month to run your meta ads and uh do your media buying it's very likely that there is uh there is there are Market forces that work that you could go higher for half of that save $400,000 a year $500,000 a year whatever that is and and end up being in a better spot overall and still get really good growth services for 30 some odd Grand a month right that's still a pretty big check toite uh so at some point the cost does get too high but it's pretty far out there and in general you should be happy for the individual on your team or for the agency to be making that money at some level the whole question of agency versus in house is dumb hire the best person that you possibly can now the best person again could be defined in fact by The Playbook part of the thing that makes them great is their ability to operationalize A playbook it's uh that's that's a core part of it um but there like I said there's some ways in which agencies can be better at that this does get to the upsides and downsides of In-House the upside of an agency if the upside is their ability to operationalize A playbook to have access to this knowledge the downside is yes that your strategist is going to have five clients right or whatever and that's how the agency makes money and so they're not going to be thinking about your brand all the time and the UPS if the downside of in-housing is that the person has a less developed Playbook um but the upside is that they have this huge amount of talent and they can think about your business all the time that would be the upside part of it that they are going to take this Talent level and even with a less maybe if you think about the Playbook as leverage and then the effort level as leverage as as Force there's two different things there right if the Playbook is a way to um to create leverage against your growth right then less force with really good leverage uh would end up creating uh more total energy or whatever right if I'm getting the physics right on the other hand slightly less leverage on the on the on the Playbook but more Force via uh an employee who's spending 100% of their time thinking about your business applied against that leverage could actually still create more power okay so that's that's the basic uh that's the basic trade-off that you're trying to work out that combination of operationalized Playbook and talent and uh how you service that in most cases actually will be fairly clear if you actually go look for those specific things but occasionally it can be hard to sort that out um and that's where you you know have to think more specifically and carefully about your business and the individuals involved let's also talk about the downsides of each um the downsides of in-housing that people forget about a lot um is that people leave you know people always worry about this with agencies right that like a strategist is going to be in your account for six months or a year then they're going to get promoted or taken somewhere else that same thing happens with in housing for the reason I just said really talented growth people make a ton of money and they will go take more opportunities okay so inous people leave and if they haven't left behind a really clean operational Playbook you can actually go pretty far backwards there's also a huge um cost to replacing that person and this is this is an underrated cost side of in-housing not only the salary but also the replacement costs of that person right whether you're using whether it's your time whether it's your energy whether it's uh a head hunting firm anything like that that can be a huge deal second that person is very likely expensive and this is really underrated by people as I mentioned the Dynamics work so that highly talented growth people are expensive in general but what what people often don't think about is that like you know they they see the agency bill and they really worry about it but when you start with a salary and then you burden it with u medical taxes like um 401K anything like that plus you add bonus options Plus for those people a lot of times they can have an equity stake in the business which I think is a good cost to pay it actually often is more expensive to in-house a team than it is to hire an agency and people sort of don't do the full math of what the total costs are on all of this and again especially with the time involved with with hiring or not and then there's also a thing where like especially in lower levels in-housing is uh often leads to people who twidle their thumbs uh if you have a person who's an in-house media buyer they're never going to tell you that they don't have enough work to fill the day they're just never going to tell you that right so you have to figure out oh this person is underworked or whatever it is and I'm not getting enough out of them that depends on what level you're hiring at but uh that there can be there can be sort of a drain on your business because you start hiring people who aren't actually doing that much or creating that much value and they are never going to be the ones to tell you about that right you have to go sus that out that can be really hard what about the agency downsides there's the lack of consistency that can be really really hard it's really hard to operationalize A playbook well um again this is this is why I have a couple of agency recommendations but not that many because I just I'm just not confident enough that the the the product that they say they can deliver um is that consistent the ones that I keep and that I keep affiliate relationships with are ones where I'm really confident in the product they're going to deliver at the end of the day the idea uh that you get passed around from team member to team member that can be a really big frustration with agencies um and sometimes just the fact that they're external can mean they're yes less invested in you than somebody who's internal to the team those are all real issues they also are a little less flexible in some ways I think that's actually an advantage for agencies you want an agency like I said to have a Playbook and that means by definition they're going to run their plays but sometimes there are things that you need specifically or some advice you need or whatever where an agency person just it's out of the scope of work for them to um get involved with a certain whatever you know and so that can be a really big problem where you want somebody's brain on other parts of your business and it's really hard to get your agency team involved there because it's outside of your scope so all those are challenging so in the end what I think is hire the best Playbook this notion that agencies are bad or wrong or something is just wrong I think it's just really hard to hire the right one and hire the right people what you need to do is learn the very best principles possible and then apply that through your organization whether you're in housing or whether you're using an agency look for that Playbook look for people who are going to operationalize it and then get access to the very best talent possible whether it's through an agency or an individual through the lens of that Playbook mixed with some level of talent and effort if you can do that really well you can have actually great agency experiences and so much of that starts by starting at the beginning and learning those things yourself and that's what you should go do but I have an incredible episode coming very soon with Jack Ruben Third Time guest founder of per and fig about when is it time to do Channel expansion uh outside of just meta ads make sure you subscribe wherever you're watching listening to this so that you can get that episode it's going to be really good they saw like I I think he said 300% spend growth by adding other channels while maintaining their efficiency um so I'm really eager to talk to him I actually have not had that conversation yet but Jack uh is a brilliant operator I've worked with closely seen the inside of his business and he's going to talk about that moment of going from meta ads to adding other channels that's a really confusing and challenging and hard thing so I think it's going to be really helpful episode so don't miss out on that as I said please email me podcast a jf.com or reach out on Twitter at Andrew J Ferris um if you want to follow up on this if you have questions if you have ideas if you want to know more about admission if you want to understand why I care about the things I do or even you want a little hand holding on an agency recommendation I'd love to do that understand your situation understand where you're at and tell you what I think is the right option for you based on the relationships that I have and the knowledge that I have I'm really more than happy to and of course everything I'm doing is at AJF growth.com you can follow up there don't forget my sponsors ADM Mission and Billy thank you so much and I will talk to you next time oh