Train your team or hire an agency? A founder's decision framework

Should you train your team or hire an agency? The short answer: it depends on whether your bottleneck is capability or capacity. Train if your team can run modern search but doesn't know how yet. Hire if your team is solid but can't do one more thing this quarter. Most founders confuse the two, and pay for the wrong solution.

Here's a decision framework I use with founders every week.

Start with the actual bottleneck

The mistake almost everyone makes is to start with the solution ("we need an SEO agency") instead of the constraint ("we're not showing up in AI answers for our category, and nobody on our team has the time to fix it").

Once you frame it as the constraint, two questions answer almost everything:

• Does anyone on your team know how to do this well?
• Does anyone on your team have the time to do it well?

The two-by-two writes itself. No skill + no time = an agency or an embedded team. No skill + has time = training. Has skill + no time = a senior advisory retainer plus a contractor for execution. Has skill + has time = you probably don't need outside help, you need to write a brief.

The three honest paths

1. Training, if the capability is what's missing

Training fits when you've got a content lead or marketing manager who's smart, motivated, and has bandwidth, but doesn't know what "good" looks like in modern search.

It's the cheapest path in the long run because the skill stays in your company. It's not the cheapest path this quarter, you're paying for someone to learn, which means slower output until the curve bends.

It doesn't fit when nobody has the bandwidth to absorb training. Cohorts that compete with day-to-day firefighting get cancelled by week three.

If this is you, the training page walks through formats, single workshops, structured cohorts, ongoing coaching.

2. Consultancy, if the direction is what's missing

Consultancy fits when your team has the skill and the time to execute, but is pointed at the wrong work, or doesn't know what to do next.

This is the most common situation at Series A. You have a marketing manager. They know how to ship content. But they're writing the wrong content, or the right content in the wrong order, because there's no senior brain telling them what the bet should be.

A four-week audit plus a roadmap fixes that. After the audit, you either execute on your own (most do) or keep me in an advisory retainer where I review the weekly work and call the bigger judgement calls.

It doesn't fit if you don't have anyone to execute the roadmap. Direction without execution is a document.

3. In-house agency, if both capability and capacity are missing

In-house agency fits when you need senior people and execution capacity, and you don't want to (or can't yet) recruit them yourselves.

It's not a traditional agency relationship, there's no separate "we" and "you." The team embeds inside your company, joins your stand-ups, uses your tools, and is accountable to your OKRs. You get the function without the hiring cycle, scaled to your stage.

There's also a "build mode" where instead of embedding indefinitely, we help you recruit and train your own search team and operate alongside them for the first 6–9 months until they're standing alone. Founders who eventually want a real in-house function but can't recruit one cold tend to land here.

It doesn't fit when your need is genuinely shallow, a quarter of advisory and you'll be fine. Don't over-buy.

The three questions that actually decide it

After dozens of these conversations, three questions sort 90% of founders to the right path:

• "Can your marketing lead name three changes they'd make to your site to be cited in AI search?" If yes, they have the capability, you probably need direction (consultancy) or just execution help. If no, you need training, or a team that already has the skill.
• "What percentage of your marketing lead's week is reactive?" Above 70% → no bandwidth for training. They need someone else to run this, not learn it.
• "Will you be hiring an in-house search role in the next 12 months?" If yes → train them now, hire them later. If no → embed or retain.

What I'd suggest you actually do

If you've never had a senior outside brain look at your search practice, start with a free 30-minute call before buying anything. Half the value is figuring out you need something simpler than you thought. The other half is figuring out you need something less open-ended than you thought.

I don't run discovery calls that turn into three more discovery calls. You'll leave with one concrete next step you can act on this week, even if the next step is "do nothing for two quarters."

Book a call here.