The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

The Agency World Is Different Today, So You Need To Think About Your Agency Differently Too

Working with contractors, freelancers and part-time people isn’t novel. It’s been an agency staffing model for years and years. Almost every agency has at least a couple of people who help out in a pinch or do specialized tasks to act as support for agency owners. Some agencies are made up of entirely contractors.  

But what might be a trend is looking at the agency as a combination of full-time and part-time team members who work together every day. What might be different is thinking about your part-time and contractors as equals to your full-time team members. What should be different is taking full advantage of smart people who simply want to be contractors.

Hiring, team building, and resource management is such a hot topic for inbound marketing agency owners there are over 10 different blog articles on this site alone that address related topics. With all that, what we’ve learned about staffing an inbound marketing agency has changed dramatically over the past 12 months and I’m wondering if these articles are even relevant anymore.

We’re all in uncharted waters here, so it’s not surprising that what worked last January might not be working today. We’ve changed our approach to building our team and we’ve changed the way we deliver services. It seemed like a good time to share that with all of you.

Earlier this month I spoke at Inbound 2015, HubSpot’s annual love fest for everyone who knows anything about Inbound. One of the topics I spoke about is hiring people for your inbound agency. Today, I’ll spend a bit more time talking about how important it is to hire and how hiring (or not hiring) might actually be holding you back.

If you read anything about running a small business or entrepreneurialism, one of the first things you lean is about boot strapping and making it hurt before you add expenses to your business. It makes sense on paper, but maybe not so much in the real world.

It sounds irresistible. You don’t have to hire a single person. You don’t have to pay any taxes, healthcare or benefits.

You get people to help you do your work, deliver your client engagements, build your inbound marketing agency and all you have to do is select them from a pool and pay them a fair fee for their contribution. If you like them you continue, if you don’t you never have to speak with them again. If only it was that easy.

I know plenty of agency owners who don’t have a single employee, they freelance out everything. I also know for them, it works. It works primarily because they’re running a “lifestyle” business. They don’t want employees, they want to leave at 3PM to watch their child’s softball game and they want to take 8 weeks of vacation every single year. I applaud their focus, resolve and their ability to create the perfect business for their personal goals.