The external support that helped (and didn't) build my business.

As a business owner, I always wanted to try and find a way to do things in-house.

Which is weird, considering that I spent my days telling other business owners that they should use my agency instead of doing things in-house.

But, at various stages of our business growth, we needed help. Experienced help. And that experienced help wasn't cheap, which made me a bit more open to not doing it in-house!

When I look back, there was some external help that we couldn't have lived without. I would argue that we probably wouldn't have got the big exit we did without it. But also some of the external help was just EBITDA down the drain.

I thought I'd share my hindsight, in case it helps you with your own wrestle between in-house and outsource.

Bookkeeper - helped

I would compare the moment of realisation when I hired a bookkeeper to the one you get when you hire a cleaner for the first time. I can't believe I've been doing that myself for so long!

When we got to £10k/m or so, I hired a bookkeeper for a couple of hours a week to manage our accounts, invoices, credit control etc. Game changer. Things that took me 10 minutes and pages of Google search results, took them 30 seconds.

The cost was tiny, but the time saving was huge.

If you're doing your own books, and you can afford a small extra expense each month then do it!

One thing to note though, I think there was real value to me doing it myself for the first 6 months. It was painful, but meant that I really understood the numbers and how the business worked.

Fractional CFO - helped

As we hit the next stage of growth, around £50k/m we needed to start making decisions that were above even my Google-searching ability. Issuing shares, opening international entities, R&D claims etc.

For sure we couldn't afford a CFO, but it turns out we couldn't afford to not have a fractional one.

The cost was around £2,500 a month. But it enabled us to do things that we would have assumed weren't possible. I wouldn't know where to start opening a legal entity in Hong Kong, so I wouldn't have. He told us no problem. I wouldn't have known where to start raising investment. He introduced us to the investors.

He stayed with us all the way from £50k/m to exit. And his monthly fee meant that we never had to fork out £100k+ for a full time alternative.

Advisor/mentor - helped

I wanted to grow my business and sell it.

But at the time I was running a very small agency. The delta between where I was, compared to where I'd need to get to was unrealistic.

But as soon as I got a mentor, who had just scaled and sold his own agency, it became not just realistic, but likely. In my head anyway.

Suddenly I was being told by someone that had just done it, that it can happen.

That belief pushed me to make it happen, but without it I don't think I'd have even tried.

HR service - helped

At the start I hired people and didn't really consider what could go wrong. And then before you know it I had 20 employees and lots of things going wrong.

I found an HR company that charged a small retainer but had a helpline that let us check things we weren't sure of, or ask about ways to unwind ourselves out of potential problems.

We didn't have to use the helpline that often, but knowing it was there gave us the confidence to hire and know that we were doing things by the book. The small monthly retainer also meant we could hold off making a full time HR hire until we were 50+ people.

M&A advisor - helped

A lot more expensive than all of the above put together, but priceless in terms of what they delivered.

Once we had found a buyer for the business, I engaged an M&A advisor that ran the sale process from our side. It's a very tiring and stressful few months, but they handled the day-to-day negotiations and allowed me to just focus on the fun bits.

If you're approaching a sale make sure you find yourself an advisor that will keep you sane!

Marketing agencies - didn't help

I'll start by saying that we worked with some great marketing agencies. They weren't the problem, we were.

We hired agencies to execute on things that we thought we needed. But instead we should have just hired someone to tell us what the marketing strategy should have been.

Marketing and tech were the two areas where I tried to save money by making inexperienced hires. In both cases, that money saving cost me a small fortune.

The agencies we used got great results, but ultimately it was for things we didn't really need. In both cases it was for things we thought we should need based on the size we had grown to, but really we should have just doubled down on the things that has worked up until then.

Recruitment agency - didn't help

When I speak to agency owners now they can't believe that I headhunted 95% of all the key hires for my agency myself.

It was very time consuming and took up many of my evenings, but in an agency business there is nothing more important than your team. Your team is your product after all.

We had a very high success rate with £50k+ hires, with very few not working out.

But on a couple of occasions I gave in to pressure and used an external recruiter to bring in some senior hires. In both cases, the employees left before their 1 year anniversary and we were left with a big invoice to pay.

I'm not against recruitment agencies at all, but when you're building the nucleus of your senior team, I think it pays to be very involved in the process.

Translation agency - disaster

As we started to expand our clients business across more European countries, it became essential to offer translation services. But we didn't want to have to hire a big team of people initially so we identified a translation agency who could do the work for us quickly and for what seemed like a low cost.

The problem was that the commercial model in translation (cost per word) was very different to our own retainer model. We had clients that were paying us small monthly fees but their content was very long. So the translation costs quickly mounted up.

It lead to 'Dark September' which I won't go into right now (because I wrote a whole blog about it here).

We had to quickly build an in-house team and take back control of costs.

Remote hiring agency - disaster

And finally, we needed to hire someone that was based in Italy, but we didn't have a legal entity in Italy.

No problem, I had just been served an ad on Linkedin for a company that lets you hire people anywhere in the world.

We had a contract with the company and the company had a contract with the employee. Risk free I thought. But in reality, the terms we agreed with the hiring agency just backed off the same terms from the employment contract. So we might as well have had a direct contract with the employee.

Things went sour and lets leave it at that. Safe to say I won't be doing it again!