Before You Hire Anyone Else

You've fired an agency. Or you're about to.

The work was fine. The invoices weren't. Eleven rounds of revisions, a change order every pivot, and somewhere around month four you realized nobody in the relationship could say what your brand actually is.

They were waiting on you for that.

Here's what no one says at the pitch meeting: agencies make output. They don't make decisions. And what stuck brands are missing is almost never output.

The field guide:

• Hire an agency when the decisions are made and you need volume. Campaigns, content, production at scale. A great agency is a force multiplier for a brand that knows what it is.

• Hire freelancers when you need hands. A designer, an editor, a builder. Same condition applies.

• Hire a fractional CMO when growth mechanics are the gap. Channels, funnels, forecasting. They run the machine.

• Hire an advisor when the sentence underneath it all is undecided. When the site, the ads, and the founder each describe a different company. When output keeps arriving and nothing compounds.

Four different jobs. Founders buy them in the wrong order every day: output first, decisions never. The receipts pile up as brand refreshes that changed the fonts and kept the confusion.

Two questions to ask anyone you're about to hire:

One: what happens when my thinking changes mid-project? If the answer involves a change order, you're buying a process, not a partner. Your thinking will change. That's not scope creep, that's building a company.

Two: how does this end? Good engagements close. A finish line, a decision made, a thing you own. Be suspicious of anything designed to renew itself.

And if you can't say your brand's one encapsulating sentence yet, that's the first hire. The sentence comes first. Smallest engagement on this list, and the one that makes every other hire work.

Not sure which you need?
That's a two-sentence email: SEND IT