This one is a seat swap. Mandy recorded this conversation as a guest on The Marketing Chatroom, hosted by Kayla Bryant, General Manager at Two Trees PPC, and the two shows released it as a dual episode. Kayla lives the agency side every day. Mandy has sat in-house, on an agency bench, and in the fractional seat. Between them, the full resourcing picture gets mapped: agency, in-house, contractors, and fractional, and how AI is rewriting the math on each. Big thanks to Kayla for a sharp, generous conversation. The recap below walks the framework step by step.
When should you hire a marketing agency instead of making an in-house hire?
Bring in an agency for large-scale projects and for deep expertise you need less than full-time, and hire in-house when the work is core and constant. Mandy's rule has two triggers. The first is the big project: a rebrand, a website build, a full go-to-market tech-stack integration, work that rewards people who have run the play many times before. The second is senior specialisms like SEO and PR, where a focused agency stays more current than one internal person could and where forty hours a week is more than the job needs.
"If you don't need someone full-time, or if you need very deep expertise in an evolving space, or if a large project would either crush your team or benefit enormously from people who've done it before, those are the right moments to bring in outside help."
What do large-scale projects cost your in-house team?
More than the invoice shows, because big projects pull strong people off the work you hired them to do. Capability in-house is not the same as capacity, and this is the hidden cost Mandy sees leaders miss most often. In her words, large projects can be "a serious drain on your internal team," pulling people away from their core responsibilities and dragging down the results you would otherwise expect from them. The rebrand gets done, the pipeline numbers sag, and the two rarely get connected. Treating a major project as a resourcing decision in its own right, rather than an add-on to the existing team's plate, is the same discipline as placing deliberate strategic bets in the annual plan.
When does the contractor route beat an agency for a small team?
Contractors win when you already have the network, and an agency wins when you would be hiring strangers four times over. Mandy went the contractor route at her startup because she knew her favorite designer and her favorite social person by name, and she is clear that without that network she would have evaluated it very differently. A marketing director with one to three people, the profile Kayla says makes up much of her client base, inherits the interviewing, onboarding, and replacing for a designer, a social person, an email person, and a web person separately. Kayla positions her agency squarely against that burden: for a cost similar to one salary, a client gets design, paid social, search, video support, and SEO through one partner. That is her positioning rather than a market rate, and it frames the real trade well: one relationship to manage, or many.
Why do small-budget agency engagements turn into a marketing checklist?
Because the budget and the expectations were scoped separately, and activity fills the gap results were supposed to own. Mandy sees it most with smaller companies: a modest monthly spend paired with full-suite expectations across social, SEO, web, and email. Neither side set out to underdeliver, and she is careful to say it is not the agency's fault or the client's fault. It is a scoping failure.
"In those situations I often find it turns into a marketing checklist, doing things to check them off rather than driving real results."
Kayla's answer at Two Trees PPC is to fix the mismatch before the contract exists: sample keywords and sample audiences pulled before signing, an alignment session on goals, KPIs, and everything the client has tried before, and a strategy built from that history. She is candid that this is not the norm in the agency world, and it is exactly the scoping work that keeps a retainer from turning into a checklist.
How should you evaluate an agency partner?
Screen on three factors: specialization, AI adoption, and what the partnership will feel like day to day. On the first, Mandy is direct: she does not believe an agency can do everything amazingly, and the wins she has seen came from shops specialized by company size, by industry, or by one deep discipline.
"The most success I've seen has been with agencies that are highly specialized, whether that's digital for small companies, a particular industry, or one deep area like SEO."
The second factor is AI, covered in the next section. The third is partnership posture. Will they embed as part of your team, act as a strategic advisor, pick up the phone when you call? Or will the relationship run on two rounds of approval and hard deadlines? Those structures exist to protect agency margins, and Mandy acknowledges the reason while naming the cost: they can make the relationship harder than working with an in-house hire or a fractional leader.
How is AI changing what agencies are worth?
Clients can now self-serve much of what they used to pay agencies for, so the value has to move to what they cannot get themselves. Competitive research, data pulls, and reports that once justified a retainer now come out of a ChatGPT session. Mandy is living this from the inside: she builds marketing strategies for the agency whose bench she sits on, and she is reworking that product around what clients can now do on their own.
"A lot of what people used to go to agencies for, they're learning to do themselves with AI. So the value proposition has to evolve."
She wants the agencies she hires using AI to make themselves more efficient, less bloated, and less expensive, sharpening the work rather than just speeding it up. And the ceiling keeps moving: she points to a CMO who ran an entire rebrand with a few contractors and mostly AI in under six weeks. It is the same shift Heidi Darling maps in her conversation on staying valuable in the AI era: when clients can self-serve the output, the value moves up a level, and so should you.
Where does fractional leadership fit in the resourcing mix?
Fractional gives you senior strategy without the full-time seat, and it works best as the layer that decides how everything else gets resourced. Mandy speaks from all three chairs here. She spent the first 12 years of her career in-house, joined an agency bench as a consultant when she left, and now runs a fractional CMO practice across several accounts at once. The underpriced benefit of that model, in her words: "You're inadvertently getting the benefit of all of that cross-client learning." A fractional leader arrives having watched how many different companies operate, which is the same orchestration muscle Matt Heinz argues the CMO role is growing into: less about headcount owned, more about resources conducted.
Resourcing is one subsystem of the larger build, the operating system a marketing leader runs the whole function on, and the agency, contractor, and fractional calls get easier once that system is in place. Mandy closes the conversation where she started it: AI has added a whole new dimension, and there is still real value in agencies, contractors, and in-house teams. The interesting work is deciding which one, for which job, right now.