This week was arguably the biggest week in The Creative Brand history—I officially launched What’s Your Process?! It’s a weekly podcast featuring the brightest minds in Marketing. The first guest was Jess Cook and she shared her process for Creating a Collaborative Content Strategy. Plenty of gems were shared but this one in particular has really stuck with me.

Keep Your Strategy In-House | What's Your Process?

Jess says something that I’ve believed for years but unfortunately have not seen too many other leaders embrace:

The Phases of a Creative Team

As companies grow their Creative needs change—in some cases pretty dramatically. Those changes tend to come in phases. Within each phase the needs of the team and the core makeup of the team shift as well.

Creative Teams go through different phases as a company grows

This slide came from a presentation I gave (in early 2024) on where to start when building a Creative Team. In most cases, Brand and Creative leaders will try to jump the gun on hiring but the reality is as much as you need to invest early, you need to be smart. In a lot of cases, we’re actually the reason that execs don’t want to invest in Brand (read: they’ve been burned before). So let’s break it down phase by phase.

Phase 1 - Founding

When a company is just getting started they have a few core needs:

1. an early version of their brand aka a logo and some colors

2. a website that they can refer their customers and prospects to

3. a mechanism for getting work done on the fly

In phase 1, I actually recommend outsourcing the whole thing. There’s not actually much strategy here (I’m not saying there shouldn’t be, just that usually there isn’t). It’s really about standing something up to look at least somewhat legitimate.

While my instinct says you should hire a brand designer, I’ve seen that person get stranded on an island (no other Creatives, no leadership, no direction) and flounder. I’d much rather hire someone external to develop the initial version of the brand and pass that along. Same for dev.

The last argument I have here for outsourcing is that when you’re that early into your journey, you often have no idea what you want or need. One day it’s social posts, then it’s paid ads, the day after that you’re creating emails, and that’s just the first half of the week. By leaving yourself room for flexibility you actually end up winning in the short term and then little by little you start to figure it out. Welcome to Phase 2!

Phase 2 - Start Up

All of a sudden you’ve got a plan. You’ve figured out a few plays that seem to work and you start to run. The days of trying to look legitimate are gone because you are legitimate. Now you’re focused on:

1. moving as fast as possible because you need to keep the lights on

2. building more consistency into your Brand so you continue to build trust with your customers

3. figuring out how to get everything that you need to get done done because there’s so much to do

The business is growing (for the record, I’m intentionally not attaching any revenue numbers here) and to keep up businesses will start to hire more. Now you have designers, maybe a video editor, if you’re smart you’ll have brought dev in-house. Anyway, this is where the things usually take a turn.

You don’t start hiring because of consistency, you do it to keep up. Now those Creatives are too busy to think about the brand strategy because they’re resizing paid ads so instead of flipping those responsibilities over to a trusted vendor and keeping the strategy work with the people you hired to build your brand, you start to outsource.

In deciding to outsource strategy, a new habit forms and team morale starts to dip. Instead of understanding and correcting what’s going on this behavior tends to be perceived as negative and more of the good work gets outsourced which starts a neverending cycle of the in-house team doing the grunt work and the agencies doing the strategy work.

This is the moment when you should be reevaluating who does what and when. There’s a lot of leverage to be gained from embracing a hybrid model (and this is coming from someone who pushed back on hybrid for way too long). The big question is who does what? In a world where you still need a ton of external help, think about why you’re looking for it in the first place—to keep up! So outsource the production work (1 & 3) and keep the strategy internal (2). This is the secret to growth

Phase 3 - Scale Up

As the company continues to grow in revenue, locales, and employees. You also need to grow your Creative. When you’re a startup you get forgiven for a lot of things. Once you truly start scaling, you need to come correct. That takes the Creative Team to new places where:

1. creativity becomes way more critical as you compete for those enterprise eyeballs

2. there’s more humans in the mix so you need to get organized—everything from org charts to goal alignment

3. with more stakeholders, partners, and teammates, you need to set up process to avoid anarchy

We’re not thinking as much about asset creation anymore but about the process of creative and how to create space to be creative. You’re still running hybrid but agency and vendor costs tend to balloon here (market caps are public after all) so on paper it becomes cheaper to hire in-house.

This is another inflection point. There’s even more work to do now but that work will only grow your business incrementally which is why creativity becomes so much more important. You see, this is typically the moment when you start to see those TV commercials, OOH, or maybe a big event or sports sponsorship come up.

Someone’s gotta do that work and if you started building the wrong habits as a start up, it’s really hard to shift here. The internal team—especially the people who’ve now been around for a few years—are super busy but ready to step up. They know your brand, they know your customer, they’ve put in the work. They should be ready. I’m not here to say you should reward them just for being around (that’s not how this works) but there are consequences to consistently outsourcing the good stuff.

What can go wrong if I outsource the strategy work?

Turnover

This is the most obvious one. If your team is delivering on the day-to-day stuff, and capable of doing the next level work they’ll expect to get opportunities to prove themselves. If they don’t get those opportunities they’re gone.

I’ve interviewed over 1,000 people in my career. Hired way over 100. Hiring is hard. Onboarding is hard. Managing is hard. Don’t put yourself in a position to have to start over again unless you absolutely have to (and sometimes you do).

Lost Time

Strategy work is not the same kind of work as the production level work. You need a special kind of agency partner for that. That means you’re running an RFP—which takes time. You’re running a new agency through procurement and security—which takes time. You’re onboarding them so they know what’s going on—which takes time. I’m not saying it’s not worth taking the time to do this, but if you’re in any kind of rush, you’re about to be really disappointed.

Generic Work

Most agencies aren’t B2B SaaS experts (or whatever your industry is). They work with a ton of amazing brands but that doesn’t mean they have a complete grasp on the industry, customer, pain points, competitors, benefits, and so on. They can (and do) learn those things—which takes time—but since they do tend to bounce around a lot the work isn’t always going to be as good as it can be. That doesn’t make it bad, but it can make it undifferentiated.

So are you saying don’t work with agencies?

I’d never! I love agencies. Some of the best work of my career happened through strong partnerships with agencies. Take this video for example:

This was my favorite Brand video that I got to make at HubSpot. It was a collaboration with Sandwich (who are awesome!). And a good reminder that hybrid doesn’t mean all or nothing. You don’t have to outsource the whole thing or in-house the whole thing. You can share responsibilities.

For this project that meant in-house we created the strategy, distribution plan, and managed the stakeholders. Sandwich did the concepting, filming, and editing. And we tag teamed the script and casting.

That was great because it was an opportunity for me and a few members of the team to step out of the day-to-day work while also leaning on a partner to utilize their strengths.

How do you fix it?

If you’ve found yourself going down the rabbit hole of outsourcing the good work. It’s not too late—you’re here after all!

Start with setting team goals for work types

Like I said earlier, a lot of this starts to happen not through poor intention but through necessity. The work needs to get done and the easiest thing to do is to go to the people closest to you. Unfortunately that might handcuff them.

Going forward try to shift the balance. Make it a point that once a month or quarter or year the internal team gets a shot at a real project. Don’t just give it to them though, make them pitch. That’ll put some extra onus on it and prove that they can do the work. It’ll also give them something to look forward to.

Split up responsibilities

Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid. I’ve said it a lot today. Our minds like to think in binary (0 or 1, B/W or color, ketchup or mustard) and this is another one of those things where in the beginning it’s just easier to think like that but as your team grows, give them an opportunity to work with the agencies.

Let them lead the projects, let them drive the decisions, and let them report back to their teammates. It’s on you as the leader to introduce them to these different work styles and although this does mean that fewer of your in-house team members will get to participate (like in the Sandwich example above), they will see one of their own get to step in and somehow that’s better.

Be intentional in what you do and don’t do

This is a good time for that Focus Checklist. This isn’t the exact intention behind it but it’s a good starting point. Sit with your lieutenants to understand the work that the team wants to do. Create a list and identify who does what going forward along with why.

It may seem silly but by setting the expectation that brand videos are hybrid, ad resizes are fully outsourced, and events are done fully in-house you provide clarity that the team didn’t have before. When you pair that up with goal setting, that clarity makes a world of difference.

It’s officially rebrand season and as you may be aware, I have opinions. I’m working on something new with an amazing partner (more to come soon). If you’re exploring the idea of a rebrand, refresh, or updated brand strategy in 2025, we’d love to help out.

Reasons to Rebrand from Issue 016

…and please check out episode 1 of What’s Your Process? 🙂