It’s easy to look at hiring as progress. Bringing on new headcount signals real commitment and is a great way to reassure leadership that the company is investing in growth. In fact, for a lot of organizations, creating an in-house marketing team feels like the next responsible step once growth is the main priority.
But here’s the thing: timing matters way more than intent.
Jumping the gun and building an in-house team too early is actually one of the most common, and most expensive, mistakes growing companies make. It’s not that internal teams can’t get the job done; it’s that they are usually asked to solve problems that haven’t been clearly defined yet.
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Why Hiring Feels Like the Right Move
Hiring an internal team feels good because it promises control. You get people who understand the business, live and breathe the culture, and are available full-time. Logically, that seems like the most efficient way to move forward.
But in reality, early-stage growth usually isn’t struggling because of a lack of effort. It’s struggling from a lack of clarity.
Before bringing people on, most organizations haven’t nailed down some basic questions:
- Who is our most valuable customer
- Why do they choose us
- What slows deals down
- Which channels actually drive revenue
If you don’t have those answers, new hires end up having to experiment inside a live business. That kind of experimentation is slow, costly, and often goes completely unnoticed by leadership.
The Real Cost of an Early Hire
Your salary budget is just the start of the cost. Deloitte notes that an employee’s total cost can actually be 1.25 to 1.4 times their base salary when you factor in recruiting, onboarding, management time, and the necessary tools.
That expense gets even worse when the actual role isn’t clearly defined.
It takes an average of three to four months just to hire a senior marketing role, according to LinkedIn workforce data. Then, research from Gartner suggests it often takes an additional six to nine months for those new hires to get up to full productivity.
Doing the math, a single early hire can essentially delay any meaningful impact by nearly a year.
And growth doesn’t wait during that time. The business keeps moving, often without the necessary systems or insight needed to support it.
Specialists Before Strategy
Another super common trap? Hiring specialists before you’ve even established a solid strategy.
You might hire a performance marketer before the funnel is defined. You might hire a content lead before your messaging is clear. Or you might hire a CRM manager before revenue operations are even set up.
The payoff? Activity, but zero direction.
McKinsey research shows that companies that prioritize strategy alignment before scaling execution are far more likely to outperform their competitors. If you put execution first, teams tend to optimize tactics instead of focusing on actual outcomes.
The result is early hires churning out work that looks productive, but that doesn’t actually compound or build on itself.
Why Early Teams Stall Growth
It’s easy to see why internal teams struggle early on.
- They don’t have benchmarks.
- They lack pattern recognition.
- They are solving problems for the first time.
This isn’t a sign that they’re underperforming; it just means they are learning in isolation.
On the flip side, external partners bring what we call “pattern memory”. They’ve seen similar challenges across various industries, growth stages, and markets. That experience is huge and dramatically compresses learning cycles and helps you avoid costly false starts.
That’s exactly why many high-growth companies hold off on building full internal teams until they know for sure what works.
The Cost of Getting the Sequence Wrong
When companies hire too early, three predictable and painful things usually happen.
- Leadership loses patience. Since the team is still figuring things out, results take way longer than anticipated.
- The wrong conclusions are drawn. When performance starts to lag, the natural assumption is that the hire was wrong, not that the role itself was premature.
- Growth stalls. Your momentum slows down while the organization tries to fix the people instead of fixing the systems.
The Harvard Business Review points out that many execution failures actually come down to sequencing problems rather than a lack of talent. In other words, teams are added before the operating model is actually ready to support them.
A Better Path to Scale
The highest-performing organizations usually sequence their growth a little differently. They start by diagnosing constraints. They test channels and messaging. They identify what’s actually creating momentum. Then they hire people to own and scale what works.
This way, hiring is about amplification, not expensive experimentation.
The benefit? This approach reduces risk, shortens the ramp time for new hires, and ensures that success is measurable right from the jump.
Why Agencies Often Play a Critical Role Early
This is exactly why agencies often get a bad rap. They aren’t just a replacement for hiring, they are actually a smart way to reduce uncertainty before you commit to a fixed cost.
By bringing on external partners early, organizations can:
- Accelerate learning
- Validate strategy
- Identify the right roles to hire
- Reduce the cost of delay
By the time you start your internal hiring process, your business will know exactly what it needs and why.
Timing Is the Real Advantage
Look, the issue isn’t hiring internally. The issue is hiring before you have clarity.
The most expensive team isn’t necessarily the biggest; it’s the one you built before the business fully understood how it actually grows.
If you get the sequence right, hiring stops being a drag on growth and becomes a powerful growth lever.