When Should I Consider Hiring An Agency?
By Gerald
July 29, 2021
When you are faced with the decision to spend money on your business, like hiring an agency, can often be more challenging than you might think.
Is it worth it? What happens if you fail? Can you afford it? How do you even implement your ideas?
There are a LOT of really scary questions you end up asking yourself, which can cause a LOT of doubt. Are you feeling those pangs of stress just reading about it? It’s ok, but before you really start to worry … relax.
I’m going to share with some thoughts with you that should make the decision a whole lot easier and by the end of this article you should be able to decide whether or not hiring a Digital Marketing/Advertising Agency is worth it for you.
Do You Need an Agency?
Practically speaking, not everyone needs the help of a full-blown Agency. While a good Agency CAN provide value to any type of business, the timing of when you hire an agency is important.
For example: Let’s pretend I’m brand new to Entrepreneurship. Last night I decided to start my very first business. The guy on Youtube told me starting a business was “easy”, so why not?
So I do some Googling and decide to spend my savings on hiring Vince and his team hear at The BBS Agency to build me a really nice website and get me all set up to make tons of money…
They would build me an amazing website and definitely provide stellar support (which they do for all of their clients), spending all of my money on a website probably isn’t very practical at this point unless I have a plan do something with it. Hiring someone to build a website first might be putting the cart before the horse.
There NEEDS to be some sort of potential business in place UTILIZING the website. You need to have an idea of HOW you are going to use the tools you have.
A better investment of my time and money in the above scenario would be to create an actual business plan first, and then hire The BBS Agency to create a website to help me execute that plan.
In other words, a high-quality website and a Marketing Agency to run it is an investment. You still need to put effort and have a plan for your business to make the investment pay off.
A nice website or a solid marketing plan isn’t going to magically solve all of your problems – they just make solving your problems easier.
The Employee Mentality vs the Entrepreneur Mentality
Once you have a plan, your next step is to execute your plan yourself or to invest in an agency to help you execute that plan.
As someone who was raised by really “old school” parents, I was taught to overvalue money. My parents are pretty smart people, but they could never fathom the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a website, consulting, and advertising.
That’s just not how they were taught to do things.
Their generation wasn’t taught that it’s okay to spend money on building something that will generate wealth in the long-term. They were taught to look at the face-value of a dollar vs a product and to only buy what they absolutely need.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, if you’re an employee. But when you are entrepreneur trying to build a business, things are fundamentally different.
How to Justify the Investment
When I first started building Custom Consul (A Business Incubator project I founded), I looked at everything like “Well, if I need a website, then I better learn how to build one!”.
While this approach has been perfectly fine, I REALLY should have thought about the time commitment more, and considered outsourcing the work.
Doing everything yourself feels good, but in reality it can often create unnecessary challenges as you try to scale your business.
There are a few major problems with doing things yourself:
- Learning takes Time
There are a lot of skills involved in starting, running, and growing a business. You simply won’t have the time, or the capacity, to become proficient at all of them.I’ve been learning all of these skills (Web Development, Marketing, Advertising, etc.) extremely diligently for the last year and a half, and I’m JUST getting to the point where my skills are actually usable. Overall, it wasn’t worth the time investment. I should have sought help sooner and outsourced some of the work. - You’re only one person
No matter how good you are at all of the tasks your business requires; you only have 24 hours in a day. Do you really want to spend all of them working? - Some tasks are more important than others
Let’s face it, those Facebook posts you work so hard on probably aren’t getting much traction and they take up too much of your time. And that’s assuming you haven’t gone down the rabbit hole or been drawn into an hour-long debate about politics…Your time is a very valuable and limited commodity. There are a LOT of things you can be doing that will have a more significant impact on your bottom line.
When you break it down, the amount of time you have (or don’t have) is a recurring theme. Bottom line, you simply don’t have the time to do everything yourself because there are a LOT of things to do.
How to View Investments
As I mentioned earlier, I started off with an extremely limiting mindset and a tendency to avoid spending money. Especially large amounts of money.
So what made that change?
I started to see the light when I started collaborating with Virtual Work Wife, a local Automation Marketing Agency.
Michelle, the Owner of Virtual Work Wife, taught me a few things about how to approach the issue of spending money wisely. Through our connection with The BBS Agency and our clients she was able to show me that spending money isn’t the problem…
Spending money on useful services or products is GREAT in fact. As long as you can get more value out of what we’re buying than we paid for it.
For example: If I spend money on a new iPhone and use it to shop on Amazon all day; chances are I’m going to go broke pretty quickly.
However, if I were to buy the same iPhone, and use it to start networking on Clubhouse; that’s a totally different dynamic. One that entirely changes whether or not the iPhone was “worth it”.
The point is… whether something is “worth it” or not depends on what you do with it.
So are you ready to hire an Agency? Ask yourself the following:
- Do you have a plan for your business, but fear you don’t have enough time to do it all?
- Will having a team build and/or manage your site save you time and/or money?
- Could the time you are spending on your DIY (Do It Yourself) website be better used working on your business or or acquiring new clients?
- Do you worry that your DIY efforts on your website or marketing automation are setup wrong?
- Will your level of frustration or overwhelm be greatly reduced by having someone else help do the work; and would it free you up to do more of what you love in your business?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it’s time to consider hiring an agency like The BBS Agency or Virtual Work Wife.