Escaping the agency cycle: Building your in-house dream team

Grifters! They’re everywhere!

Marketing Agencies.

They really want to work with you. They tell you all the right things. They want a long-term partnership. They want to make a win-win situation. Your success is their success!

And then you’re in, and they’re only human - so you want them to be successful. You bottle up some of the mild red flags you spotted. You might not even pry too far into someones experience just in case you embarrass them when it turns out they have none.

But then a few expensive months later, they sorely disappoint you. They suck at communicating. They aren’t proactive. They underdeliver with mediocre quality. Or they pull the bait and switch and shaft you with the mediocre B-team that is also serving 100 other clients.  

Maybe you “see how it goes” and hope they’ll miraculously start exceeding your expectations. Then you feel like a mug, and you grumble and wonder why you aren’t trying to build this agency’s capability in-house. You have the cringey hard conversation about leaving a contract early. 

Then you do it yourself for a bit. Groan at the prospect of trying to hire for this imaginary unicorn role, and start scouting for agencies again. And the cycle repeats itself.

Hiring and building a team in-house is the single most rewarding part of my job as a business owner. And I implore you to solve your immediate needs internally first. Only go to an agency if it is absolutely unreasonable to try and build an entire film production team, or a specialist animation team. 

But for leg-work stuff like marketing, performance creative, copywriting, yada yada - invest in these core competencies in your team! And don’t lean on just one person. Encourage the whole team to upskill in these areas. 

Treat your team like a starting 11 of a football (soccer) game. Everyone should have core competencies in being able to pass and shoot the ball. But you may get people better at defending than attacking.

I try and work backwards from making someone the best in the world in a particular area. Such as throw-ins, or free kicks. I’ll invest the shit out of them. All the courses. All the books. Whatever it takes. As long as they want to.

Not a bad analogy, but I won’t push it any further for now lol.

And that skill combined with tacit and unique knowledge of your brand and business? Absolutely priceless. You can NEVER buy that from an agency.

This post is more of a letter to myself (if you couldn’t tell). I’m building a legendary team and I love it - but it’s also not easy. I’ve made mistakes. 

In a way, I’m building my own agency, and there’s only one client: Pip Decks. Thinking of it like this helps a lot. Maybe it’ll help you too.

Cheerio, Charles.