If you run a small B2B service business — an accountancy practice, an architecture studio, an IT consultancy, a coaching firm — you have probably wrestled with the same marketing decision more than once. Hire someone, or pay an agency. Most owners we speak to assume those are the two options. They are not. There is a third, and for businesses under fifteen people, it is structurally better than either of the first two. The reason most owners miss it is that nobody is selling it to them.
Here is the honest comparison.
Option one: hire a marketing manager
The instinct, for most owners, is to hire someone. The thinking is reasonable: marketing is too important to outsource, you want it inside the business, and a full-time person can build something proper over time.
The numbers tell a harder story. A competent marketing manager in Ireland or the UK currently lands somewhere between €45,000 and €60,000 in salary. With employer's PRSI, pension contribution, equipment, training, and the hidden cost of recruitment, the all-in cost is closer to €60,000 to €80,000 a year. For a service business doing €500,000 in annual revenue, that is twelve to sixteen percent of top-line gone before they have produced a single piece of work.
And the work itself is rarely what owners imagined. A marketing manager at this scale is a generalist by necessity — they write copy, manage the website, run social, brief designers, occasionally do paid ads, and report to you on it all. The good ones are very good. But you have to know how to manage them, set their direction, judge their output, and hold them to a standard. If you have never done that for a marketing function before, you discover you cannot do it well, and the manager either drifts into doing whatever is most comfortable for them, or leaves within eighteen months because they have nobody senior to learn from.
Hiring a marketing manager works at scale. Below about twenty-five employees and €1.5m revenue, it usually doesn't.
Option two: use an agency or contractor stack
The alternative most owners settle into is some combination of contractors and agencies. A web developer on a maintenance retainer. A social media manager doing five posts a week. A designer for occasional materials. Maybe a fractional marketing director two days a month. Maybe a Google Ads specialist on top.
Add it up and the costs are usually €2,500 to €5,000 a month, or €30,000 to €60,000 a year. Roughly the same as a full-time hire, with a different shape — variable cost rather than fixed salary, no employment risk, more flexibility.
The problem is structural and quiet. Agencies and contractors do not, by design, have your vision. They have a brief. The brief is usually written by you in five minutes between client meetings, and the work that comes back reflects exactly that input — competent, generic, and missing whatever it was that made you think your business was worth doing in the first place. Agencies are also incentivised to produce volume, not signal. If you pay a social agency for five posts a week, you will get five posts a week, regardless of whether five posts a week is what your business actually needs.
The deeper problem is that nothing compounds. Three years into an agency relationship, you have spent €100,000+ and you do not own anything. The website still belongs to the developer. The CRM is set up on the agency's account. The content is stored on someone else's drive. If the agency raises their rates or you decide to move on, you start again from approximately zero.
The third option: build it in-house, lightly
The option that almost no-one talks about — because there is no agency selling it and no recruiter placing for it — is to build a small, owned marketing function inside your business, run by you and one existing person, supported by a stack of modern software tools and AI assistance.
Here is what that actually looks like at a practical level.
| Cost component | Marketing manager | Agency / contractor stack | In-house, lightly built |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual cost (typical) | €60,000–€80,000 | €30,000–€60,000 | €1,200–€2,500 in software + existing-staff time |
| Owns the work | Yes | No (mostly) | Yes |
| Embeds your vision | Eventually, with senior management | Rarely | By definition |
| Compounds over time | Yes, if they stay | No | Yes |
| Time required from owner | Hiring + management | Briefing + review | 30–60 minutes a week of review |
| Risk if it doesn't work | Employment cost | Cancellation fees | Walk away — you keep what you built |
The objection that comes up immediately is the one about time. If the owner is doing it, where does the time come from? It is a fair objection and it is the question that determines whether this option is realistic for any given business. The answer is twofold.
First, the operator time — the actual hands-on work — is not the owner's. It belongs to whoever in the business is best placed to absorb it: an existing office manager, an operations or finance person, sometimes a junior hire who does this alongside other duties. Two to four hours a week of operator time is enough to keep a small B2B marketing function running once it is set up.
Second, the owner's time is review and judgement, not production. Half an hour a week looking at what the operator has drafted, sharpening the angle, approving the direction. This is the time owners are already spending on marketing decisions, just usually fragmented across calls with agencies who do not understand the business.
The thing that makes this newly possible — and is the reason the option exists in 2026 in a way it didn't in 2016 — is that AI handles the parts of marketing that used to require specialist labour. Drafting first versions of posts. Sharpening website copy. Generating outreach templates. Producing first-pass designs. The operator does not need to be a writer or a designer or a developer. They need good judgement and the willingness to learn how to direct an AI assistant well. That is a much wider talent pool than "competent marketing generalist."
When the third option is wrong
This is not the answer for every business and we should be honest about where it isn't.
If you are over twenty-five employees and growing fast, hire a marketing manager. The volume of work and the strategic complexity will exceed what an in-house light setup can carry, and you have the revenue to absorb the cost.
If your marketing depends on capabilities that are genuinely specialist — heavy paid acquisition, complex SEO at scale, conversion-rate optimisation across multiple funnels — you need agency expertise for at least those parts. The light in-house function works best for content, brand, owned-channel marketing, lead nurturing and CRM operations. It does not replace specialist execution where you genuinely need it.
If you do not have anyone in the business who can plausibly absorb the operator role, and you cannot hire one for around €30,000–€40,000, the option does not work. Not every business has the right person. The right person is not necessarily the most senior; it is the one with good judgement and the patience to learn a new craft over twelve weeks.
Why nobody is selling this to you
The reason this option is structurally underweighted in the market is straightforward. Recruiters earn nothing from it. Agencies lose business if it works. Software vendors sell tools but do not teach the operating model. The people best placed to teach it — operators who have actually built a small marketing function this way — are mostly running their own businesses and not advertising the fact.
Which is also, honestly, why we built Own Your Marketing. We run our own marketing this way. We pay roughly €100 a month in tools and produce all our own content, our own website, our own CRM, our own outreach. We thought it was worth teaching the model to other small B2B service business owners who had reached the limit of what agencies and contractors could give them, and who were not yet at the scale where a full-time hire made sense.
How to think about the choice
If you are a small B2B service business owner reading this with the same marketing decision in front of you, the framework that helps is this. Ask yourself which of these three statements is closest to your situation.
"We are growing past the point where I can do this in evenings." You are heading toward a marketing manager hire, but probably not yet. The light in-house option is the bridge between doing it yourself and being able to afford a senior marketing leader. Build the function in-house first; hire to run it later.
"We are spending €30,000+ a year on agencies and contractors and I cannot point to what we have built." The third option is for you. The money you are spending now would, if redirected into software and a small amount of internal time, build something you would still own in three years.
"We do not currently do any marketing and we are not sure where to start." Do not hire a manager. Do not sign with an agency. Build a small in-house function around the time and people you already have, with the right supporting tools. Eight to twelve weeks in, you will have something working. Eighteen months in, you will have something you would not recognise as the same business.
Where we come in
At LearnFrame, we run Own Your Marketing — a twelve-week programme that takes a small B2B service business owner and one operator from "we don't really do marketing" to "we have a working marketing function inside the business." The programme is built around the time owners and operators already have, with AI doing the heavy lifting and the human bringing the judgement.
The founder cohort is currently open, with three places at €3,500–€4,500. Once those are filled, the full programme runs at €7,500.