When should a firm stop outsourcing marketing altogether?

The belief goes that an agency is the cautious choice for a firm of twenty, because hiring is for companies with a marketing department. The arithmetic does not support it as a rule. A made-up UK practice paying a marketer a salary of £40,000 pays about £46,300 a year once employer National Insurance and the minimum pension are added, and the rates are published by gov.uk. Whether that is cheaper than a retainer depends on the retainer and on how much of the week the work fills, and nobody selling a retainer will walk a partner through the sum. We lose a fee if the answer is no agency, so we will.

The case for buying nothing

An agency earns its place when it supplies skill or capacity the firm lacks, so the first question is whether the firm lacks either. A partner at a UK accountancy practice whose new clients come through introductions from existing ones is not short of marketing skill. She is short of nothing, and a retainer converts a working referral pipeline into a monthly cost. The map below turns that into six questions, answered in order. It ends at buying nothing as often as at hiring.

Question 2 comes before the staffing questions because a firm that does not own its accounts cannot move work anywhere. The order for fixing that is in our guide to whether a paid audit is worth it, whose first three checks cost a partner an afternoon and settle ownership before any money moves.

What a hire actually costs

The salary is the smallest figure that matters, because employer National Insurance and the minimum pension sit on top of it. For 2026 to 2027, gov.uk publishes a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year above which an employer pays National Insurance at 15%. The minimum employer pension contribution is 3% of earnings within a set band. Neither is a surprise to a UK practice with staff, but both are routinely left out of the comparison with a fee.

Those hours and that salary are invented to show the method. Put the firm's own enquiry volume and its own quotes in their place. The result is a price per useful hour, which can be set against any agency fee on the same basis.

What a single person cannot do

One employee is one skill set, one holiday calendar and one point of failure. A hire who writes well may not set up tracking, and a partner who has no marketing background will struggle to tell. When the person is off sick the work stops. These are real costs, and the decision map handles them at question 6 by keeping a specialist for the skill the hire lacks. That is a narrow job, and a narrower engagement is cheaper than a retainer.

It also explains why the sequence matters. A firm that moves everything at once finds the gaps in public. A firm that moves the owned assets first and the judgement calls last finds them while the agency is still there to cover.

The map applied to a made-up practice

Run the questions on one firm and the answer is rarely the one the firm expected. Take a UK accountancy practice of twenty-two people, invented for this example. Most new clients arrive through introductions, but the partners feel they ought to be doing more. Question 1 gets a half-yes: referrals fill most of the capacity, though not all of it. Question 2 passes, because the practice owns its domain and accounts. Question 3 is where it stops being comfortable. The work the agency currently does comes to about a day a week, so a full-time hire would be underused, and a part-time role or a fixed project fits better than either a retainer or a salary.

Nothing in that result is a recommendation to buy an agency, and nothing in it is a recommendation to hire. It is a recommendation to size the arrangement to the work, which a seller of retainers has no reason to say. The partners then have a number to bring to a supplier: one day a week and owned accounts, with a named partner for the hour a week of review.

What an agency still does better

An agency is the better tool for a short, specialised job and for the weeks when the firm has nobody spare. A website rebuild and a campaign for a single new service both have a start and an end. Paying a salary for work that finishes is the mirror of paying a retainer for work that never fills a week. A supplier also brings cover when one person is away, which a single hire cannot. We say this plainly because a page that argued only one side would not be worth a partner's time.

How to leave without losing anything

Treat the new employee as the next agency and brief them the same way. The method in briefing a new agency on what the last one did works for a person as well as a supplier: a written account of what was done, why and where the records are. Ask the outgoing agency for exports while it is still being paid, since goodwill fades quickly once a notice period starts. Then give each piece an end date, so the arrangement finishes and does not fade.

What to check ninety days after the move

A move in house is only finished when the firm can show the same enquiry log it had before. Set the three monthly reports from before the change beside the enquiry log that reception keeps, and do the same for the first three months afterwards. If enquiries held up and the partner's weekly hour is still happening, the move worked. If the log fell and nobody noticed for six weeks, the cause is usually a missing handover and not the person. Go back to the written account of what the agency did and look for the task that nobody picked up.

Keep the end dates you set for the agency's remaining work, and review them when they arrive. A firm that has stopped outsourcing marketing altogether has also stopped paying for cover, so a gap of one person's absence is worth planning for in advance.

When not to bring it in house

Do not hire when the work is thin or when nobody can manage it. A UK firm that needs a new website this quarter and little else should buy a project, not a salary. A firm with no partner able to spend an hour a week on the person will pay for a role that drifts, and a hire who is never reviewed is a retainer with worse reporting. If the real difficulty is a bad supplier, fix that first; replacing the supplier with a person does not repair a missing brief.

None of this is an argument for outsourcing. It is an argument for asking the six questions before anyone is paid. For how we introduce one specialist when a firm does need one, see how it works, and for the firms we serve, see accountancy practices, recruitment agencies, tax advisory and financial advice firms.