Agency, Freelancer, or In-House: What a Trades Business Should Actually Hire

You are running a trades business, the phone is quieter than it was, and you have decided to do something about marketing. Now you have three doors and everybody selling you one of them says the other two are a mistake.

Here is the honest comparison, including the case against each.

The real question underneath

Before comparing prices, work out which of these you actually need. They are not the same job and most owners conflate them.

A plan. Somebody to work out what to do and in what order. This is judgment work and it is the scarcest of the three.

A pair of hands. Somebody to do the specific task you have already decided on. Post to social, run the ads, build the pages.

An owner. Somebody accountable for whether the phone rings, who will notice when something stops working and fix it without being asked.

Most disappointment in this industry comes from buying one and expecting another. Owners hire a freelancer to post on Facebook and then wonder why the leads did not come. The freelancer did exactly what was asked. Nobody was doing the thinking.

The freelancer

Roughly $500 to $1,500 a month, or $50 to $100 an hour for competent Canadian work.

Where it works. You know precisely what you need, it is narrow and it is ongoing. You want the Google Ads managed. You want four posts a week. You want someone to rebuild the site and hand it over. A good freelancer doing one thing well is excellent value, and you are not paying for anyone's office.

Where it falls apart. Nobody is holding the plan. You are the strategist by default, which means the quality of the result depends on the quality of your instructions. There is also a single point of failure: freelancers get busy, take on a bigger client, go on holiday, or simply stop replying. If your lead flow depends on one person's inbox, you have a fragile arrangement.

Suits: a trades business under roughly $500,000 in revenue with one clear gap to fill, and an owner willing to do the thinking.

The agency

Roughly $1,500 to $5,000 a month for a genuine retainer.

Where it works. You want somebody else to own the outcome. A decent agency brings the plan, the hands and the accountability in one arrangement, plus continuity when one person is away. They have seen your problem before at other trades businesses, which is worth real money because you are not funding their education.

Where it falls apart. Two ways, both common. The first is the cheap retainer, somewhere under about $1,500, where the fee cannot support real attention, so you get templated work and a monthly report that measures activity rather than jobs booked. The second is scope drift, where the exciting first ninety days settle into the same four tasks repeating forever while the fee stays the same.

The defence against both is the same. Insist that reporting ties to booked jobs, not impressions or traffic. If nobody can tell you how many enquiries came from the work last month, that is your answer.

Suits: a trades business from roughly $500,000 up to a few million in revenue, where the owner's time is worth more than the retainer and the constraint is attention rather than money.

In-house

A marketing coordinator in Ontario costs roughly $50,000 to $70,000 a year, so call it $5,000 to $7,000 a month once you count payroll costs, equipment and the software they will need.

Where it works. Marketing is genuinely a full-time job for you. You have enough volume, enough locations or enough services that somebody could fill five days a week and still have a backlog. They learn your business deeply, they are in the building, and they can chase the van photos and the job site videos that nobody external can get.

Where it falls apart. Most trades businesses hire in-house too early, and it goes wrong in a predictable way. You hire one person and expect them to be a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, an ads specialist and a web developer. Nobody is all five. You will get one or two of those well and the rest done poorly, and you will not know which is which because you cannot evaluate the work.

There is also the management cost nobody budgets for. A junior marketer with no senior marketer above them needs direction from you, weekly, forever.

Suits: past roughly $2 million in revenue, or any size where the owner genuinely wants to build the capability internally and will invest the management time.

The combination most people land on

For what it is worth, the arrangement that works most often for a growing trades business is not a pure version of any of the three.

It is somebody external owning the plan and the technical foundations, plus somebody internal owning the raw material. Your team is on job sites every day. They have the before and after photos, the unusual jobs, the tricky install that makes a good story. No external partner can manufacture that, and it is the content that actually distinguishes you from every other electrician with a stock photo of a breaker panel.

Getting your foreman to send four photos a week to one number is worth more than another $500 of retainer.

Before you hire anyone

Two things to sort out first, because they determine whether any of this works.

Know what a job is worth to you. Average job value, how often a customer comes back, what a maintenance agreement is worth over its life. Without that you cannot judge whether $2,000 a month is expensive or cheap, and you will make the decision on gut feel.

Fix the leak before you buy more water. If calls go to voicemail during the day, if nobody can book you outside business hours, if your quotes take four days, more leads will not help. They will arrive, wait, and go to whoever answered. Missed calls are usually the biggest hole and the cheapest to plug.

Common questions

Should a small trades business hire a marketing agency?

Usually not below about $500,000 in revenue, because the retainer takes too big a bite and the foundations are often cheap enough to handle yourself. Below that, a complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews and a site that loads fast will outperform a thin retainer.

How much does a marketing agency cost for a plumbing or HVAC company?

Genuine retainers run roughly $1,500 to $5,000 a month in Ontario, plus a one-time website build usually somewhere between $3,000 and $12,000. Be wary below about $1,500 a month, where the fee rarely supports enough attention to produce anything.

Is it cheaper to hire someone in-house?

Only at volume. A coordinator costs roughly $5,000 to $7,000 a month all in, which is more than most agency retainers, and one person cannot cover strategy, design, ads and web development. In-house gets cheaper per unit of work once there is enough work to fill the week.

What should I ask an agency before signing?

Ask who owns the website and the domain when you leave, what specifically gets done each month as a list rather than a category, and what the reporting measures. If the reporting stops at traffic and impressions rather than booked jobs, keep looking.

Can I just do it myself?

The foundations, yes, and they matter most. Claiming and completing your Google Business Profile, asking every happy customer for a review and keeping your details consistent will take you further than most paid arrangements. The honest question is whether you will still be doing it in month eight when work picks up.