Smaller Teams, Bigger Revenue: Why You Shouldn't Build an In-House Media Team at 7 Figures

A homewares brand doing roughly A$4M a year came to us a few months back with a hiring plan already half-built. The founder had a recruiter lined up, two job specs written, and a number in his head: a media buyer, a creative lead, a content person, a junior, and someone to "own retention". Five hires, a head of growth to sit on top of them within the year, and a fit-out for desks he didn't have yet.

He wasn't being reckless. He'd hit a ceiling, ads felt like the constraint, and the advice he kept hearing was that real brands bring it in-house. So he was about to spend the better part of A$500k a year to fix a problem he hadn't actually diagnosed yet.

Here's my take, and it's not the popular one: at 7 figures, headcount is the most expensive way you can buy a solution to a marketing problem. Not the safest. Not the most controlled. The most expensive. And I'd argue it's usually the wrong move until you're a fair way past where this founder was sitting.

What a head of growth actually costs you

Let's do the maths properly, because "just hire someone" hides the real number.

A capable senior media buyer in a decent market isn't a A$80k hire. By the time you add super, tooling, the recruiter's fee, the ramp time while they learn your account, and the management attention they pull off you, you're closer to A$140k all-in for one seat that one person fills. Build the team the homewares founder wanted and you're staring down half a million a year in fixed cost before a single extra sale lands.

Now the part nobody warns you about. That cost is fixed and it's brittle. Your best media buyer takes the better offer eighteen months in, because brands can always outbid you for your own talent, and you're back to a job spec and a three-month hole in your account. I watched an agency operator describe exactly this pattern: great people come up through the team, a brand swoops them for 50k or 100k more, and you're constantly rebuilding. A brand can pay more for that person than you can, because the brand is monetising a product and you're monetising a salary. The maths runs against you.

Compare that to a number you can actually move up and down with the business. A good agency relationship at your stage might run A$8k to A$15k a month. That's a line you can scale back in a soft quarter without making anyone redundant, and scale up the month a campaign starts working, without a recruiter in sight.

The lean org chart that out-runs ten people

Here's the bit that should genuinely annoy you if you've just spent six figures building a department.

Some of the leanest org charts I see are out-performing in-house teams three times their size. The shape is almost boringly simple: the founder owns the vision and the offer, an agency runs the growth engine, and one or two in-house creators feed it raw material. That's the whole org chart for the marketing function at a lot of brands doing serious revenue.

And it scales further up than you'd think. Look at the brands posting eight-figure months in health and wellness right now. Some of them run the entire back office, ops, fulfilment, the lot, on a single operations person, with a couple of external creative partners handling the volume. Everyone else on the team is the growth engine. Not headcount for the sake of an org chart that looks impressive in a board deck. People who directly make the thing that makes money.

The logic is the same one the big operators talk about openly: the future is smaller teams doing more revenue. One of the founders of a roughly A$700M cookware brand put it plainly, that he can't imagine a world where they ever have a thousand employees, because what would you do with them at that revenue. They run the whole thing on about a hundred corporate staff. If a A$700M brand is deliberately staying lean, the instinct to staff up at A$4M deserves a hard second look.

What you're really buying when you stay lean isn't just lower cost. It's the ability for a small group of people to all know what's going on and move fast, instead of a comms web where the email team and the inventory team haven't spoken in a fortnight. Headcount doesn't only cost money. It costs coordination.

Why your CFO's instinct misreads the agency line

There's a predictable moment that scares founders into in-housing, and it's worth naming so you can see it coming.

The agency fee creeps up as you scale, and somewhere around A$30k to A$50k a month a switch flips in the finance brain. The CFO, or you doing the CFO's job at 2am, looks at that number and thinks: how many people could I hire for that? It feels like a tax. The work could be brilliant, the account could be flying, and the instinct still fires, because all the finance lens sees is a big monthly outflow with no name badge attached.

I get the reaction. But I think it's the wrong read most of the time.

That A$40k a month isn't a tax, it's a whole marketing function you don't have to build, manage, insure, or rebuild when someone quits. The honest comparison isn't "agency fee versus zero". It's "agency fee versus the fully-loaded cost of the five people, the tools, the management drag, and the rebuild risk it replaces". Run that comparison properly and the agency line usually looks cheap, not expensive, right up until a real threshold.

The mistake is treating the decision as a cost-cutting exercise when it's actually a question about where your time and risk should sit.

What AI quietly changed about the back office

A couple of years ago the standard argument for in-housing was simpler: you need bodies to run the operational grind, the customer service queue, the email sends, the reporting, the admin glue. So you hired.

That argument is weaker now, and it's worth being honest about why. A lot of the operational load that used to justify three or four hires can sit on one person plus the right tools. The brands running eight-figure months on a single ops head aren't doing it through heroics, they're doing it because customer service, reporting, and a chunk of the email and admin work can be automated or AI-assisted to a point that simply wasn't possible in 2022.

So the shape of the smart hire has shifted. Spend your scarce headcount on the people who create growth, the creative, the offer, the angle, the thing the algorithm has never seen before, and let software and a tight agency relationship carry the operational weight. The role that's genuinely hard to outsource is taste and creative judgement. That's where a seat is worth it. A media buyer pulling levers in an ad account, increasingly, is not the seat I'd spend first.

When in-housing actually starts to make sense

I'm not anti-in-house. I'm anti-in-house-too-early. There's a real threshold, and it's worth knowing where it sits so you don't trigger it by accident.

In-housing starts to earn its keep when a few things are true at once. Your spend is large and steady enough that a full-time buyer is cheaper than a percentage-style fee, not just emotionally cheaper but actually cheaper on the maths. The work has become genuinely continuous and specialised to your brand, not spiky. And, this is the one founders skip, you have the management capacity to lead a creative and growth team well, because an in-house team you can't direct is just expensive confusion.

For most brands that lands well into eight figures, not at A$4M. And even then the smartest setups I see aren't fully in-house or fully outsourced. They keep the creative engine and brand judgement close, and they keep a growth partner for the parts that benefit from seeing across many accounts. It's a blend, decided on purpose, not a flag you plant for the story it tells.

The homewares founder, for what it's worth, didn't make the five hires. He brought on one content person, kept the agency, and put the other four salaries back into spend and product. Revenue kept climbing. The org chart stayed boring. That was the point.

Where to from here

If you're staring at a hiring plan right now because ads feel like the ceiling, I'd ask one question before you sign anything: do you actually know the constraint is people, or does it just feel like the kind of problem you solve with people?

That's the diagnosis worth getting right before you commit to half a million in fixed cost. If you'd like a clear-eyed look at whether your next dollar belongs in headcount, in spend, or in fixing something in the account you can't see from the inside, that's exactly the kind of thing a Signal/Noise Audit is built to surface. No obligation, no pitch, just a straight read on where your money is best spent next.