The budget floor, the data feedback loop and the goal you can name in one sentence. Most of us start out running our own ads. But how do you know when it’s time to take the next step and hire an ad agency?

Former Google trainer Chantelle Bowyer has run SA paid media agency Metis for 16 years, auditing SA accounts, and she sees the wreckage of early agency hires every week.

Here’s how to know when to hire and when not…

You’re not hiring an agency to start paid media. You’re hiring them to optimise something already running. If there’s nothing yet for them to optimise, the fee buys you nothing.

“Don’t hire anyone until you’re spending at least R15k a month on paid media. With smaller budgets, you’ll struggle to get results unless you’ve been doing it for years.”

That’s Chantelle’s working floor for SA accounts. Below it, the platforms don’t have enough data to learn, the campaigns sit in learning mode, and the agency fee eats up the spend that should be going to ads. If you’re under it, keep running it yourself until the budget grows in.

An agency optimises against data. If your sales and lead-quality data isn’t being fed back into Google and Meta, they’re flying blind, too. They’ll spend the first three months setting up what you should already have running, and you’ll pay them to do it.

Get tracking sorted before you hire. If you can’t, that’s the audit you buy first, not a campaign.

If you can’t define a win, the agency will define it for you. And it’ll be the metric easiest for them to hit, not the one that grows your business.

“Two qualified leads a week at under R800 each.” “R4 of revenue for every R1 of ad spend.” Those are real goals. “More leads” isn’t.

Walk away from anyone who pitches a rebuild from scratch on day one; it throws away every signal Google has learned about your buyer. Prefer a flat monthly fee over a percentage of ad spend, because a percentage-of-spend creates a quiet pull to recommend more spend. And listen for data-analysis skills, not platform knowledge. 

Platforms change every six months. Reading a conversion report doesn’t.

Get the timing right, and the hire pays for itself inside a quarter. Get it wrong, and you’ll lose six months convinced paid media doesn’t work; when really, you just hired the wrong person at the wrong time.

It takes one honest look at your account to know which side you’re on.

This decision is one piece of Paid Ads 101, Chantelle’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session goes deep on:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, automations and more inside The Founder Collab.