Building Your In-House Paid Ads Team vs. Hiring an Agency: A Founder's Decision Framework

Let's be honest. The decision to hire an agency or build your own in-house paid ads team is one of those founder headaches that never quite goes away. You read a blog post championing the agility of an in-house team, then you take a sales call with an agency that promises the world. It feels like a choice between total control and total mystery, between a hefty salary on your payroll and a hefty retainer leaving your bank account. The truth is, you're asking the wrong question. It’s not about which is universally ‘better’. It’s about which is right for your business, at your specific stage of growth, right now. Most founders get this wrong, and it costs them dearly. They either hire a junior marketer and set them (and thousands of pounds in ad spend) on fire, or they sign a 12-month contract with a slick agency that outsources their work and delivers nothing but vanity metrics. The real decision isn't about cost; it's about speed, expertise, and mitigating the catastrophic risk of getting it wrong.

Why Does Hiring In-House Feel Like the 'Right' Move?

There's a powerful gravity pulling founders towards hiring in-house. It's a seductive idea, wrapped in comforting business logic. The arguments are always the same, and on the surface, they make perfect sense. "I want someone who lives and breathes our brand," you tell yourself. "Someone who is 100% dedicated to our growth, not splitting their time between ten different clients." You imagine them sitting in on product meetings, absorbing the company culture by osmosis, becoming a true evangelist who can translate your vision into clicks and conversions. It feels like an investment in your own team, in your own intellectual property.

Then there's the cost argument. You do some quick back-of-the-napkin maths. A junior marketer's salary versus an agency's retainer. "In the long run," you conclude, "it'll be cheaper to have our own person. We'll own the expertise." It seems like the responsible, mature decision for a growing company. You're building an asset, not just renting a service. You're taking control of a critical business function instead of leaving it in the hands of outsiders who could disappear tomorrow.

This entire line of thinking is a trap. It's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern paid advertising actually entails. The idea of a single "paid ads person" is a dangerous fantasy. It's like wanting to build a house and thinking you can just hire a "builder." Do they do the electrics? The plumbing? The architectural plans? The interior design? Of course not. Paid advertising is no different. It’s not one job; it's five. You need a strategist, a data analyst, a platform-specific media buyer (the skills for Google Ads are vastly different from LinkedIn Ads), a compelling copywriter, and often a designer or video editor. The belief that one person, especially a junior one, can master all these disciplines is the first and most expensive mistake most founders make. They aren't hiring a growth engine; they're hiring a single point of failure.

So, You Hired a 'Paid Ads Manager'. What Could Go Wrong?

Let's play this out. You've ignored the warnings and hired your first in-house "Paid Ads Manager." You couldn't afford a true, battle-tested expert with a decade of experience and a track record of scaling accounts – those people cost £80k-£100k+ and are rarely looking for jobs at small startups. So, you've hired someone with 2-3 years of experience. They seem keen, they talked a good game about ROAS in the interview, and their CV mentioned they "managed" a budget at their last job.

Here’s the grim reality of their first six months. Their experience is likely limited to one platform, probably Meta ads, and one type of campaign, probably boosting posts or running basic traffic campaigns. They've never built a complex B2B lead generation funnel on LinkedIn. They've never had to untangle a Google Ads account with thousands of keywords bleeding money. They don't know how to write direct-response copy that actually sells. They think A/B testing is changing the colour of a button.

Who manages them? Who vets their strategy? You, the founder? You're busy running the actual company. So they are left to their own devices. Their first move is often to default to what they know. I remember auditing an account for a UK tech startup. They’d hired a ‘growth marketer’ who had spent £50,000 of their seed funding on Meta brand awareness campaigns because that's what he'd done at his previous, much larger company. The campaign got millions of impressions and a ton of likes from countries they couldn't even sell to. It generated precisely zero software trials. The entire exercise was a catastrophic waste of money because the hire lacked the strategic oversight to know that for an early-stage B2B SaaS, awareness is a useless vanity metric. They needed leads, and the reason so many paid ads campaigns fail is a complete misalignment between the campaign objective and the business's actual needs.

Every experiment they run, every mistake they make, is a lesson learned with your cash. They'll spend the first three months just trying to figure out the platforms, the next three trying to understand your customer, and the six after that trying to get a single campaign to break even. Meanwhile, they're pulled into all-hands meetings, asked to help with the company newsletter, and tasked with updating the main social media accounts. Their "100% dedication" quickly becomes 20% dedication to ads and 80% to internal busywork. After a year, you've spent their salary plus a significant ad budget and have little more than a handful of expensive, low-quality leads to show for it.

What Are You Actually Buying When You Hire an Agency?

When you shift your perspective from "hiring a person" to "buying a result," the value of a good agency becomes clear. You're not just outsourcing tasks; you're plugging a fully-formed, high-performance growth department directly into your business. That monthly retainer doesn't just pay for one person's time; it gives you access to an entire ecosystem of expertise.

A Team of Specialists: For less than the cost of one mid-level in-house hire, you get a dedicated team. There's the Account Strategist, who lives and breathes this stuff and sets the high-level direction. There's the media buyer who is an absolute nerd about Google Ads bidding strategies. There's another media buyer who spends all day in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and knows every targeting hack. There's the copywriter who knows how to craft messages that agitate a pain point and drive action. There's the data analyst who can build a dashboard that shows you exactly what's working and what isn't. You are hiring a collective brain, not a single employee.

Cross-Pollinated Expertise: Your in-house person only knows what's happening within your four walls. A good agency, on the other hand, is a hub of real-time market intelligence. They see what's working right now across dozens of different client accounts. They might discover a new video ad format that's crushing it for an e-commerce client and realise it could be adapted for your B2B SaaS campaign. They see bidding strategies that work in hyper-competitive niches and can apply those learnings to your account. This cross-pollination is an incredible advantage that is impossible to replicate in-house. They have already made the expensive mistakes with someone else's money, and you get the benefit of that experience from day one.

Speed and Process: A new hire needs months to ramp up. A good agency can have profitable campaigns live in weeks. Why? Because they have proven, repeatable processes for everything. They have onboarding checklists, research frameworks, campaign build templates, and reporting dashboards ready to go. They aren't starting from scratch; they are executing a playbook that they've refined over hundreds of campaigns. They know exactly how to go from zero to a fully operational, multi-channel advertising machine. For founders, speed is everything, and an agency is built for it. They can take you through a proven system, a paid ads scaling playbook that moves from the first conversion to predictable growth, rather than fumbling in the dark.

Brutal Accountability: An agency's survival depends entirely on its ability to deliver a positive return on investment. There is no hiding. If the numbers don't stack up, you fire them. This creates a level of focus and accountability that is difficult to replicate with an employee. Their job isn't to fit into the company culture or attend meetings; their one and only job is to make your ads profitable. They are incentivised to tell you the hard truths, to challenge your assumptions, and to relentlessly optimise for business outcomes, not vanity metrics. They have to constantly prove their worth, and this pressure is what drives results and lets you unmask the true ROI of your advertising, not just the clicks and impressions.

But Aren't All Agencies Just Smoke and Mirrors?

Of course, not all agencies are created equal. For every high-performance team of experts, there are five mediocre shops that are great at sales and terrible at execution. The fear of getting locked into a contract with a bad agency is real, and it’s why so many founders default to the perceived safety of an in-house hire. You have to know how to spot the difference between a genuine partner and a glorified reseller of clicks.

The first red flag is the Bait and Switch. You'll have an impressive sales call with a senior director or the agency founder, who wows you with their strategic insights. You sign the contract, and on day one you're handed off to a junior account manager who is fresh out of university and juggling 20 other clients. You must insist on speaking with the actual people who will be managing your account before you sign anything.

The second is a Lack of Transparency. Bad agencies love vanity metrics. They'll send you glossy PDF reports filled with charts showing soaring impressions, reach, and click-through rates. It all looks great, but it tells you nothing about the health of your business. A good agency talks about Cost Per Lead (CPL), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). They connect their work directly to your revenue. If an agency can't or won't have that conversation, run away.

Another major warning sign is the Cookie-Cutter Strategy. They have one "secret formula" that they apply to every single client, regardless of their industry, customer, or offer. They don't take the time to deeply understand your business. You can spot this in the proposal phase. If their proposal feels generic and could apply to any company, they haven't done their homework. A real partner will come to the table with specific, tailored ideas for your business.

And finally, beware of anyone who Guarantees Results. "We guarantee a 10x ROAS in 90 days!" is the mating call of the charlatan. No one can promise specific results in paid advertising. There are too many variables. An expert can promise a rigorous process, transparent communication, and a strategy based on proven principles. They'll show you detailed case studies of past successes, not make impossible promises about your future.

Finding the right partner requires due diligence. You need to do more than just look at their website. The process of hiring a paid ads expert is a critical business decision, and you should treat it as such. Scrutinise their case studies – are they detailed and specific? Do they have experience in your niche, or a similar one? Get on a call and grill them. Ask them what their strategy would be for your first 90 days. Ask them what metrics they would focus on. Ask them to be brutally honest about the challenges they foresee. A good agency will welcome these tough questions; a bad one will get defensive.

When Does it Make Sense to Bring it In-House? The Hybrid Approach

The decision isn't a permanent one. The optimal setup evolves as your company grows and your ad spend scales. The most successful companies I've seen don't treat this as a binary choice but as a phased journey.

Stage 1: Early Growth (Ad spend < £20k/month)
At this stage, hiring a full-time, competent ads manager is financial insanity. Their fully-loaded cost (salary, taxes, benefits, software) would likely exceed your entire ad budget. The risk of hiring the wrong person and burning through your limited capital is immense. Here, an agency is almost always the correct answer. Your primary goal is to find a profitable customer acquisition channel as quickly as possible. You need speed, you need expertise, and you need to de-risk the process. An agency provides all three. They can leverage their experience to find what works, establishing a baseline of performance and a framework for real growth that you can build upon.

Stage 2: Scaling (Ad spend £20k - £100k/month)
This is where things get interesting. You have validated channels, and your ad spend is becoming a significant line item. The economics of a full-time hire start to look more appealing. However, jumping to a fully in-house team is still premature. This is the perfect time for a Hybrid Model. You keep the specialist agency to manage the high-level strategy and the most complex campaigns (like Google Search or LinkedIn). Then, you hire a more junior in-house 'Marketing Coordinator'.

This person's job is not to be an ads expert. Their job is to be the bridge between your company and the agency. They sit in on the weekly calls, they feed the agency a constant stream of raw materials for ads (like customer testimonials, behind-the-scenes videos, and product updates), and they absorb the agency's expertise. They can handle lower-stakes tasks like managing the organic social media or email newsletter, while learning about high-performance marketing from the pros. This model gives you the best of both worlds: world-class strategic execution from the agency, and a dedicated internal resource who deeply understands the brand, all without the enormous risk and expense of hiring a senior ads director before you're ready for one.

Stage 3: Enterprise (Ad spend > £100k/month)
Once your ad spend is consistently in the six figures per month, the financial argument for building an in-house team becomes undeniable. At this scale, the cost savings can be substantial. You can now afford to hire a true Head of Performance or Director of Growth – a genuine expert with a £100k+ salary who has done this before. Their first job is to build a team of specialists underneath them: a dedicated search expert, a social ads expert, a data analyst, etc. The volume of work and the need for deep integration with the product and sales teams now justifies the overhead. Even at this stage, many large companies retain a specialist agency for a few key reasons: to keep a fresh, external perspective, to run experimental campaigns on new platforms, or to provide strategic oversight and challenge the in-house team's assumptions.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To make this decision less abstract, I've broken down the key factors into a straightforward framework. Be brutally honest with yourself about where your company stands on each of these points.

So, what should you do next?

Stop romanticising the idea of an in-house hero. The question isn't "agency vs. in-house." The question is "when?" For 95% of founders and businesses, the fastest, safest, and most effective path to profitable growth is to start with a specialist agency. This isn't just outsourcing a task; it's a strategic decision to buy speed and expertise while ruthlessly minimising risk. You let them find the profitable channels, build the foundational systems, and prove what works. You learn from them. Then, and only then, when the scale and complexity demand it, do you consider bringing that function in-house, likely using the hybrid model as a stepping stone.

Making the wrong choice here can set your growth back by a year and burn a hole in your funding. The real difference between a DIY approach and hiring an expert consultant is the cost of the mistakes you don't have to make. An agency has already made them. Your first in-house hire is about to make them all, for the first time, on your dime.

If you're wrestling with this decision, or you've already hired someone and the results aren't what you'd hoped for, it might be time for an honest, external opinion. An expert can look at your business, your goals, and your current setup and give you a straight answer about the best path forward. We offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we do exactly that. We'll audit your campaigns and give you a clear, actionable plan. It's the kind of clarity that can save you tens of thousands in wasted spend and months of frustration.