This page is not an agency pitching against agencies. It is the comparison I would want if I were the one buying, including the cases where hiring an agency is clearly the right call and hiring me is not. Paid search is the only thing I do, and that specialisation is the whole argument on one side of this.
Agency pricing is not inflated out of greed. It is inflated because the model has more people in it, and every one of them has to be covered by the same invoice you sign.
Most agencies separate the person who manages the relationship from the person who touches the account. That is a real job and it costs real money, and it is the first thing you stop paying for when you work with someone directly.
New business, pitching, proposals and the team that produces them are funded out of existing client fees. You are contributing to the pursuit of the next client alongside the work on your own account.
The experienced person is usually in the pitch and across a large number of accounts afterwards. The daily work often sits with someone earlier in their career. That is not dishonest, it is how the economics have to work at scale, but it is worth knowing what you bought.
Offices, tooling, recruitment, management layers, utilisation targets. All legitimate, all funded from the same fee, and none of it visible in the reporting you receive.
None of this is an argument that agencies are bad. It is an argument that you should know what proportion of your fee buys senior hours in your account, and then decide whether that ratio is what you wanted.
A comparison that always concludes in favour of the person who wrote it is worth nothing. These are the situations where I would tell you to go to an agency, and I have.
Paid search, paid social, programmatic, creative production and analytics running in parallel is more than one person can do properly. If that is your scope, you need a team, and pretending otherwise would cost you a year.
Larger organisations often need a supplier with insurance, references, redundancy and a contract their legal team recognises. That is a legitimate requirement and a single consultant frequently cannot satisfy it.
Some accounts need several people every day. If yours does, one person is a bottleneck no matter how good they are, and you will feel it within a quarter.
An individual gets ill, takes holiday and eventually moves on. An agency absorbs that. If your account cannot tolerate a gap, that continuity is worth paying for.
If you already have a strong internal strategist and what you lack is execution volume, an agency pod is a better fit than another senior opinion in the room.
Some organisations genuinely prefer a single accountable vendor across everything, with the trade-offs that brings. That is a valid structural preference, not a mistake.
If you read that list and recognised your situation, take it seriously. I would rather lose the enquiry than take on an account I am the wrong shape for.
The argument for working directly with a specialist is narrow and specific. It is not that it is always better. It is that for a certain shape of account it is obviously better.
I do not also do SEO, social, web design and email. Fourteen years pointed at one discipline compounds differently than fourteen years spread across six, and in an auction-based channel that depth is where the money is.
There is no handoff from the person you met to the person who executes, because they are the same person. Nothing gets lost in a briefing document.
The same budget buys substantially more attention from an experienced practitioner when it is not also funding an account management layer and a sales function.
A change that needs a strategist, an account manager and a client call to approve takes a week. A change that needs one person who understands the account takes an afternoon.
What I charge is on the site rather than quoted after a discovery call calibrated to what your budget looks like. You can decide whether it fits before you speak to me.
No twelve month lock-in and no penalty for stopping. If the work is not producing, the correct outcome is that you stop paying for it.
Specialisation is the actual differentiator here, not price. The lower cost is a consequence of the model having fewer people in it, and it would be a poor reason to choose on its own.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Usually, and the reason is structural rather than greedy. An agency fee carries an account manager, a sales function, offices, recruitment and the margin that keeps all of it running. A consultant fee carries one person. The useful question is not which invoice is smaller, it is how many hours of senior attention each one buys you per month.
Capacity, breadth and cover. An agency can absorb a sudden tripling of scope, staff several channels at once, and keep the account running when someone is ill or leaves. A single consultant cannot do any of those three things, and any consultant who tells you otherwise is selling.
When you need several channels staffed properly at the same time, when your procurement process requires a company with insurance, references and redundancy, when the workload genuinely needs more than one full-time person, or when your internal team needs execution hands rather than direction. Those are real reasons and they are not rare.
Ask who will actually be in the account day to day, then ask to meet them rather than the person pitching. Ask what happens to your account in month four. Ask for the reporting they would send you, not a sample deck. The answers separate agencies quickly, and the same questions work on consultants.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.