Hire, or bring somebody in
The right answer depends on one thing, and it is not cost per hour. It is whether the work ends.
Hire when the work never ends and depends on knowing your business. Bring in an outside team when the work has a finish line, needs skills you will not need again next year, or has to start before a hire could realistically arrive.
Compare the year, not the hour
An hourly comparison always makes hiring look cheap, because a salary divided by working hours ignores everything around the salary: recruitment, equipment, benefits, management time, holidays, and the months where there is not enough work to fill the week.
It also ignores the reverse. An outside team costs more per hour and nothing per hour when you are not using it. On work that comes in bursts, that difference decides the question on its own.
- Recruitment, and the months of vacancy before somebody starts
- Equipment, licences and benefits
- The manager's time, which is a senior salary spent in fragments
- The weeks where there is not a full week of work
Hire when the work never ends
Systems that run your operation need somebody who knows why a rule exists, remembers the decision from eighteen months ago, and can be interrupted. That is a job, not a project, and buying it by the hour from outside is expensive in a way that does not show up on any invoice.
The tell is the question backlog. If the list of small changes is never empty and each one requires context, you are describing a role.
Bring somebody in when the work has an end
A migration, a rebuild, a new channel, a specialist piece of work you will not repeat: these have a finish line, and hiring against them leaves you with a role you no longer need six months later.
There is also a timing case. A hire realistically takes two to three months to source and another two to be useful. If the work has to start this month, hiring is not the faster path even when it is the cheaper one.
- Never ends, needs business context, interrupted daily: hire
- Has a finish line, needs a skill you will not need again: bring in a team
- Has to start this month: bring in a team, and hire behind it if the work turns out to be permanent
- Not enough work for a full week, every week: do not hire yet
The hybrid that usually works
One person inside who owns the system and the decisions, with outside capacity for the peaks and the specialisms. The inside person is the one who cannot be replaced by a contract, because they carry the context.
The failure version of this is one internal person managing three suppliers and writing no code. That is a coordination job dressed as a technical one, and it burns the person who took it.
The cost neither option quotes
Both models need management. A hire needs a manager who can judge the work, and an outside team needs somebody with authority to make decisions in your business quickly. If nobody in the building can do either, both options underperform for the same reason.
Before choosing, name the person who will hold this. If the name is unclear, that is the first hire, whichever way the rest of the decision goes.
What to take from this
- 01The question is whether the work ends, not what an hour costs
- 02Permanent, context-heavy, interrupt-driven work is a role
- 03Fixed-end and specialist work is a contract
- 04Both models fail without one named person with authority to decide
Ask the question directly
- Can one hire replace an agency entirely?
- Rarely at first. One person cannot cover design, build, infrastructure and marketing at the level each needs, so the honest version is a hire who owns the system plus outside help on the parts they do not cover.
- How do we keep knowledge in the building when we outsource?
- Write it into the agreement: documentation in your own repository, your accounts, and a handover session recorded. Knowledge transfer that is not a deliverable does not happen.
- Is a junior hire plus an agency a reasonable start?
- It works when somebody senior is genuinely reviewing the work. A junior supervised by a supplier that also invoices for the work is not a check on anything.
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