A Founder's Guide To Hiring An Agency

We've all heard horror stories of brand and agency relationships going south in the DTC space. Whether it's a lack of alignment or clear expectations on strategy, or simply lack of competency on the part of the agency fulfilling the service, choosing an agency that is compatible with your brand's growth plan is one of the most important decisions you as a founder or operator can make.

Not all agencies are made equal. Knowing which type of agency partner is right for your business and at what point in your business is the key skill. In our recent conversation, Liam and I chatted through some of the challenges that DTC brand founders and operators face when hiring an agency. We boiled them down into this guide to help other founders and operators think through their next hire, whether it be agency or in-house.

How Should Brands Go About Hiring An Agency? 

Choosing an agency goes way beyond pretty pitch decks. In our experience, a lot of agencies can talk the talk, but very few can actually deliver on what they promise in the sales process. This often leads to sour outcomes for both the agency and the brand from the start.

The biggest mistake we see? Founders hiring without first being clear on what problem they actually need to solve. If you don't know the role an agency is supposed to play, you're setting up the relationship to fail before it starts.

Before hiring an agency, here is a checklist that every founder or brand operator should follow: 

1. Identify the blind spots in your current strategy.

Sometimes this is easier said than done. To borrow the famous quote: 

"There are known-knowns , known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns." 

Most of us often operate on most days within the first two realms of known-knowns and known-unknowns. For example, we know where we're strong versus where we lack certain expertise, and therefore we operationalize around that basic framework. 

However, it's often in that third realm where we create the most surface area for error and structural blind spots in our own business. This is often the domain of problems that we don't know we'll encounter yet, and therefore have not been operationalized yet inside of the business.

Some problems are not as obvious as others, so a good first place to start is by gathering a wide range of feedback from different agency options.

2. Audit your internal competency.

This is often a great starting point for understanding how an agency can fit into your current strategy. This is also where a third-party audit can be very insightful to reveal what is not obvious from an insider perspective.

As you think about hiring an agency, ask yourself the following three questions: 

1. What area of my business do I understand the most? 
2. What area of my business do I understand the least?
3. What area of my business do I or my team spend the most amount of time in?

From there, you as the founder or operator can start to decide where you can either a) buy back your time b) buy new expertise to uncover gaps in your current strategy or c) ideally both.

The best agency partnerships will offer both in spades.

3. Look for industry-wide learnings from your agency partners.

The most underrated feature of any agency is the real-time operational insight into the most up-to-date and performant strategies across the industry.

As a DTC brand leader, you and your team will know your brand and your customers better than anyone else. And while that same focus and tunnel-vision is what allows you to win more customers over and create a better experience for them, it's also the thing that creates structural blind spots in how you scale. It's like the old saying goes, "what got you here won't get you there." 

The best agency partners embody this idea by applying broad, operational insight from what is working across the industry to tackle specific problems the brand may be facing. This combines the bespoke nature of strategic guidance with real insights into what is actually working across the market.

4. Understand what type of agency partner you are engaging with.

The term "agency" is often used very broadly across our industry. Agencies take many different shapes which can lead to meaningfully different results and impact in terms of the engagement.

The most common bifurcation in the DTC space is the single point experts to the all-in-one shops. Both have their place, but both come with tradeoffs.

• Single-point experts excel when you know exactly what you are missing. Maybe you're confident in your internal strategy, but you need a specialist to own a specific slice. A good example of this is email agencies. However, while these can be very effective teams, the structure of the team and the engagement often lacks cohesion with your overall business strategy. Since the engagement is often narrow in scope, the ability for that team to impact business-wide outcomes is often very limited.
• All-in-one or full-stack agencies on the other hand can be incredibly effective when you're trying to maximize the impact of your agency relationship. These types of partners often deliver the best financial result for the brand, while also ensuring speed, consistency, and integrated thinking are built into the execution. However, finding a team that is competent across a wider range of coordinated services is a much harder task. The risks are higher, therefore the bar must be higher; vetting for these types of partners is and should be more difficult, but the payoff in service quality will often be worthwhile.

When To Hire vs When To Fire?

Bringing on an agency too early (or sometimes too late) can cost you more than just cash. It can burn time, demoralize your team, and stall momentum when you need it most.

Here’s a rule of thumb we’ve seen play out across dozens of brands:

• Hire when you’re entering a new phase of growth and need leverage. This can be either with bandwidth, capability, or perspective.
• Fire (or don’t hire at all) when you don’t have clarity on what problem you’re solving.

Warning: Proceed with caution in both scenarios. Don't inflate your costs on revenue expectations that are not based in financial data, and don't cut necessary marketing or operational functions blindly to optimize for cost. Both can hurt your business, and it can take months or years (yes, sometimes years) to recover from a growth or cashflow perspective.

A few signs it’s the right time to hire:

• You're spending 60–80% of your time inside a function that is systematic but necessary in nature (such as email marketing, CRO, app management, landing pages, development, etc).
• You’re consistently hitting a ceiling in performance or output.
• You have a clear hypothesis or strategy but need experienced hands to run it.

A few signs it's not the right time:

• You’re hiring out of FOMO or artificial "pressure".
• You think an agency or new hire will “solve” your growth, but haven’t built out the growth framework in-house.
• You are not generating sufficient contribution margin to cover to increase in Opex and/or do not have a financially viable growth path to scale where hiring an agency (or anyone) is feasible. This is often true for brands that are low 7-figures in annual revenue with low to break-even contribution margin.

Agency Costs: Why In-Housing Isn't Your Silver Bullet

After one or two failed agency experiences, many founders default to the tempting "only build in-house" mentality. And sometimes that’s absolutely the right move. You cannot expect to scale a business of any sort without an incredibly talented and capable in-house team.

However, more often than not, this mentality is a knee-jerk reaction that ignores the true cost of internalizing a function.

Let’s use email marketing again as an example: 

Doing email and SMS well in-house isn’t just hiring a Klaviyo specialist. It’s hiring:

• A strategist who understands customer lifecycle, segmentation, offer mechanics, technical platform implementation, and relationship to full-funnel marketing efforts.
• A designer and copywriter who know how to design high-converting emails without sacrificing brand.
• A coordinator to manage calendars, testing, and QA.

And someone has to manage all of them.

Now apply that math to paid media or creative. You’re not hiring one unicorn, you’re building a team of highly specialized and highly paid experts that carry a multi-six-figure annual cost with no incremental value added back to the channel. So unless you're a nine-figure brand, chances are you can't justify the Opex increase to build those verticals out the way they need to be built. And even if you can afford it, you still miss out on the knowledge base that comes from applying winning strategies across an entire portfolio when you work with an agency.

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Common Mistakes That DTC Founders and Operators Should Avoid

Treat agencies like partners or internal hires, not silos that exist outside of your organization. For an agency relationship to be successful, you want the people doing the work to be set up for success. This is true for both agencies and in-house hires.

Too often, agencies are brought in and expected to perform in a vacuum with no context or true framework for collaboration. Then when results don’t materialize, the assumption is that the agency is to blame. More often, the problem stems from a lack of alignment and integration between the agency and the brand.

As you think about your next agency (or in-house hire for that matter), here are a few questions to ask yourself before doing so:

1. Hiring without clear objectives.

“Growth” is not a strategy. Neither is “fix our email” or “scale our ads.” Before you hire, articulate the business problem you're trying to solve. Is it LTV growth? Efficiency at scale? Creative fatigue? Hiring a partner without aligning on what good looks like is a recipe for churn.

2. Expecting an agency or one person to act as a silver bullet.

An agency is not a miracle cure. If your margins are upside down, your product doesn’t have repeat potential, or you’re fundamentally unclear on product and customer acquisition strategy, there's very few agencies in the world that have a shot at fixing that. Agencies are amplifiers. They take what’s working and help you scale it reliably and cost-effectively.

3. Under-communicating.

Set a cadence. Be clear on priorities. Keep the loop tight. Just like an in-house team, agencies perform better when they’re given real-time insight into what’s happening across the business, from inventory to product dev to CX feedback loops.

4. Chasing case studies over fit.

We get it: “$5M in 5 months” sounds great. But context matters. What was the product? The AOV? The channel mix? The paid budget? Focus on how the agency thinks, not just what their best client did. Smart operators hire based on alignment and process, not screenshots or flashy decks.

Did the conversation speak to all aspects of your business? Does the agency deeply understand the challenges you are facing as a business? Do the proposed solutions make sense in the context of what's been shared in the audit process? Do you see this relationship as something that can work for years not months/weeks? 

5. Trying to in-house everything too early.

As we covered earlier, building an internal team is expensive, slow, and comes with high opportunity cost. Hire when there’s a clear strategic need. Don’t let one bad agency experience force you into over-indexing on control at the expense of growth.

A strong in-house team is essential; but don't over hire on promising projections and choke cashflow for the sake of "keeping it in house". Most brands make this error early on, and only some are lucky enough to turn the tide (often through an equally difficult and painful restructuring process). If you're lucky as the operator it happens early enough that you business is still in tact, and not so late that you're firing talent to stabilize costs and cashflow.

It's unfortunate, but people never think this can happen to their business, but when it does it's almost always a big blow to morale, and a step back for the company as a whole.

Final Thoughts: Choosing The Right Agency

Building a high-growth DTC brand is hard. The deeper you scale into eight figures, the higher the stakes—and the more nuanced the decisions. Hiring an agency isn’t about finding a savior or just offloading some responsibility. It’s about unlocking leverage in a long-term partnership.

The right agency relationship can:

• Accelerate execution while buying back your and your team's time
• Plug operational gaps with real subject matter expertise
• Help you avoid costly mistakes before they happen
• Bring you strategic insight from across the industry, not just your own four walls

But none of that happens by default. It requires clarity, alignment, and a shared understanding of the outcomes you’re trying to drive.

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