Agency, freelancer or consultant? A plain guide to choosing the right help
Three types of outside help, what each one is built to do, and how to work out which one your business needs. No jargon.
Marketing people are very good at making marketing sound complicated. Full service. Always on. Brand architecture. Funnel optimisation. You sit through the meeting nodding, and afterwards you could not explain to your business partner what you have just been sold.
You do not need any of that. You want more people through the door, more product out the gate, and to stop spending money you cannot trace to a result.
So here is the plain version. You have three types of outside help available: a freelancer, an agency, or a consultant. They are built to do completely different jobs, and most operators I meet cannot clearly separate them. That is how businesses end up buying the wrong one at the wrong time, which after twenty years in food, wine, hospitality and tourism is the most expensive mistake I see.
I am a consultant, so I will be upfront about where I sit. I have set out how freelancers and agencies work too, because a good share of the time one of those is the right answer, and knowing which is which will save you money before you spend it.
The freelancer
A specialist you bring in to do a specific job, to a specific brief.
They can be brilliant. The best social media people, email writers, ad specialists and designers I know work for themselves. Understand the deal, though: a freelancer's job is to deliver your brief. Not to write it, not to question it, not to tell you whether it was the right brief in the first place.
Here is where it comes unstuck. Your wine club numbers have been flat for two years, so you decide the emails are the problem and hire a freelance copywriter. The emails are lovely. Six months on, the numbers are still flat. The copywriter was fine. But nobody was joining the club in the first place, or the offer was weak, or the sign-up process at the cellar door was broken. Better emails were never going to fix any of that.
Right choice when: you know precisely what you need and you want a skilled pair of hands to do it well.
The agency
If a freelancer is one specialist, an agency is the full kitchen brigade. Social, ads, PR, design, content, strategy, all under one roof. The pitch is impressive: a deck, case studies, ideas for your brand, a plan for your budget.
I have sat in those rooms on both sides, writing the pitches inside agencies and later paying the retainer as a client. So let me be honest about the model. The pitch is built to sell the agency's services. Not a criticism, just how the business works. Agencies have teams to keep busy and costs to cover, so the conversation gets shaped around what they are good at rather than what you need most. It is like asking your distributor rep which chardonnay to put on the list. They might know the category well and they give you genuinely useful advice but the solution will still come from their portfolio.
The best agencies do outstanding work, and they do it best when the client arrives already clear. A firm direction, a specific brief, someone internal who can hold them to account. Without that you are buying activity, and activity and growth are not the same thing. I have watched businesses spend a year and serious money on a retainer, then struggle to answer one question: what grew?
Right choice when: you have a clear plan and you need the firepower to execute it.
The consultant
Picture a restaurant that used to be full every Friday and Saturday and is now sitting at seventy percent. You have refreshed the socials, run some ads, done a feature in the local paper. Nothing has moved.
The instinct is to keep trying things. But what you need first is someone to work out what is going on. Is it the food, the service, the pricing? Has your regular base aged out without a next generation coming through? Is something in the booking process quietly losing people? You do not know, because you are inside it and busy running the place.
That is the work! Look at everything from the outside, ask the questions nobody internally is asking, then hand back a clear read on what is happening and what to change.
An example. I sat down with a wine business that wanted to grow direct-to-consumer sales significantly. Good ambition. But as we talked I was looking at their label, and the design, beautiful as it was, spoke to a sixty-five year old collector or an export buyer. It was never going to land with the customer they wanted online. I told them inside the first thirty minutes. Not comfortable feedback, and the most valuable thing I could have given them, because the alternative was months of spend pushing against their own brand.
The work should keep paying after I leave. Workshops so the whole team is pointed the same way. Coaching for the person carrying marketing. Often a hand in choosing which freelancers to bring in and what to brief them on. Once you are clear, hiring becomes a different experience: you can write a proper brief, you know what good looks like, and you can hold people to account.
Get the diagnosis right first. Then bring in the people to execute.
Right choice when: growth is stuck, the cause is unclear, or the team is not aligned.
Three questions that will tell you which one you need
Could you write the brief right now?
A real brief sounds like this: "Run our Facebook and Instagram advertising for three months. The goal is more cellar door tasting bookings. Budget is X. Audience is wine lovers within two hours of the region, aged thirty-five to sixty." If what you would write is closer to "we need to do more marketing", that is a symptom, not a brief.
Is your growth stuck in a way you cannot explain?
Not a quiet couple of months. Genuinely stuck. You are investing, working hard, doing things, and the numbers will not move, and when you try to say precisely why, you cannot put your finger on it. That points at the diagnosis, not the execution.
Does your whole team know what they are working toward?
If you asked your cellar door manager, your marketing coordinator and your head chef to name the top three priorities for the year, would you get the same three answers? A team working hard in slightly different directions is one of the biggest drains on a small business, and one of the hardest to see from the inside.
Short answer. Know what you need and want it done? Freelancer or agency. Not sure what you need, growth is stuck, or the team is pulling apart? Start with a consultant.
WHERE TO START
If your marketing has been going in circles, the odds are the people you hired were perfectly good. What went wrong is the match between what your business needed and what you hired for. Very fixable.
The Growth Readiness Diagnostic takes about seven minutes and asks what I would ask before working with any business, across strategy, team and marketing. You finish it with a clear picture of where the gaps are.
And if you have read all this thinking "not this year, we are just trying to get through", read this next: What is it costing you to do nothing? It is the more useful question when money is tight.
Cheers to your growth!
Holly
I have sat in every seat at this table: agency side at Reymond Communications and Icon Agency, client side as PR Manager at Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, then nearly four years as Head of Marketing and Wine Club at All Saints Estate, running a team of nine with my name against the sales number.