When the agency is the right answer
An agency is the right hire when the job needs more hands than one person has. That is a real category and it is not a small one.
- You need a large volume of content produced on a schedule, in several languages or across many brands.
- You need coverage: someone answering at 2am, someone covering leave, a bench behind the person on your account.
- You want an account manager, a weekly status call and a deck. Some organisations need those to get a decision made.
- You need several disciplines at once and cannot coordinate them yourself.
If that is you, hire the agency. The rest of this page is about the other case.
When one person is the right answer
A solo consultant is the right hire when you want the person who finds the problem, sizes it and builds the fix to be the same person. Nothing gets lost in a handover between the person who sold the job and the person who does it. There is no handover.
I work alone by choice. I am an actuary by training with eight years of shipping production software. I have built three products from a blank file to production on my own: Bet Better, Zyro and Scoutr. I say that so you can check that one person can carry the whole job.
The questions that settle it
Ask both kinds of vendor the same four things. Write the answers down.
- Who does the work. Ask for names. If the person on the call is not the person building, ask to meet the person building.
- Who owns the accounts. Domain, hosting, analytics, Search Console. The answer should be you, from day one, in your name and on your billing.
- What happens if they leave. A written handover, code in your repository, and a named person who can pick it up.
- What they will not sell you. A vendor with no disqualifying answer is selling everything to everyone.
What working with me looks like from your side
The first call is twenty minutes and free. After that it is one 45-minute call a week if you want it and a Monday email if you do not. On a build, about 90 minutes of your time in week one and under four hours across the whole job.
Every account is yours from day one. On my last build the hosting account was opened in the client's name before any work started. He is never tied to one developer, including me. Code goes in your repository from the first commit. The handover document is written as the work goes. A named developer I have briefed can pick it up.
Every price is on the pricing page. If you want an agency, a team and a weekly status call, that is not what this is. I would rather say so here than on the invoice.
The risk on each side
The risk with an agency is the handover between the person who sold the job and the person who does it.
The risk with a solo consultant is that there is one of them. The answer is the handover, the repository and the named developer above. Refuse to hire anyone solo who cannot show you all three.