Agency, freelancer or hire?
The honest maths.

Let's start with the numbers everyone dances around, because once they're on the table the whole decision gets easier. What follows are honest UK going rates. Your town and sector will nudge them, but not by enough to change the conclusions.

A capable marketing executive or manager, someone who can genuinely run things rather than just post things, costs £28,000 to £40,000 a year depending on seniority and where you are. But the salary is only where it starts. Add employer's National Insurance and pension, holiday and sickness cover, a laptop, and the software stack every marketer needs, and the true cost runs 20 to 30 percent above the headline. Then there's the cost nobody budgets: recruitment itself, and the three to six months before a new hire is genuinely producing.

What you get for it is real: someone embedded in your business full time, absorbing your culture, always there. What you also get, and this is the part the recruitment ad doesn't mention, is a capability ceiling. One person cannot be a strategist, designer, copywriter, media buyer, SEO specialist and video editor. They'll be genuinely good at two of those, adequate at two more, and quietly Googling the rest. That's not a criticism of them. It's arithmetic.

Good freelancers charge £200 to £400 a day, and the good ones are worth it: senior skills, no employment overheads, start next week, stop whenever. For a single well-defined discipline, your social media two days a week, a website build, a brand project, a freelancer is often the right answer, and we'd tell you so.

The structural weaknesses show up over time. You become one of several clients competing for their calendar, and their best availability goes to whoever pays most reliably. When they're on holiday, ill, or land a big contract, your marketing simply pauses. And the moment you need a second discipline, you're recruiting again, then acting as the project manager who joins freelancer A's work to freelancer B's, in the evenings, which is the job you were trying to give away.

Agency retainers for small and mid-sized businesses run anywhere from a few hundred pounds to several thousand a month, and here's the honest version of what that buys: access to multiple disciplines under one roof, continuity that doesn't take annual leave, and, at a good agency, senior judgement steering the work. Here's the equally honest version of the risks: at big agencies you can be the small client who gets the junior team, the scope can be foggy, and the worst contracts tie you in for a year regardless of performance. If you've been burned by an agency before, it was almost certainly one of those three things.

Which is why the questions matter more than the category. An agency where you talk directly to the people doing the work, where scope and pricing are in writing, and where notice is a month rather than a year, is a different product from the one that burned you, even if both are called "an agency."

Hire in-house when one discipline genuinely needs doing every single day, when content volume is the whole game, or when marketing is so central to your model that it must live inside the building. If you're posting daily, shipping weekly emails and running a community, a good in-house exec plus outside specialists is a lovely combination.

Use a freelancer when the need is one discipline, clearly scoped, and you have the appetite to manage it. Also for one-off projects with real edges: a rebrand, a site build, a launch.

Use a retainer when you need more than one discipline working in concert, when you want the flexing (up for a launch, down for a quiet quarter) that an employment contract can't do, and when what you're really buying is judgement: someone senior deciding what's worth doing, not just doing what they're told.

And sometimes the honest answer is none of the above yet. If the budget genuinely isn't there, a focused founder with a content habit and a tidy Google Business Profile beats a starved retainer every time. We've told people exactly that in first calls, and meant it.

C&B Studio sells option three, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. Our version is built specifically against the agency failure modes above: retainers from £750 a month with the starting prices published on the website, one month's notice, and you work directly with the founder, backed by hand-picked specialists per discipline. For the true cost of one mid-level hire, that structure buys the senior team. Whether that's right for your business is exactly the kind of conversation we'd rather have honestly than win cheaply, and the checklist below will keep us honest in it.