Build vs. Buy: When to Hire a Consultant vs. Build In-House

Your ops team is underwater. Leads rotting in queues. Data scattered across spreadsheets. Everyone doing manual work that should've been automated years ago.

You need to fix it. Question is: do you build it yourself or bring in outside help?

Most teams screw this up. They burn months building something a consultant could've shipped in weeks. Or they pay top dollar for work their own people could've handled.

Here's how to think through it.

Build it yourself when...

It's core to what you do. If the automation touches customers or drives your competitive edge, keep it in-house. You need to own the roadmap and move fast.

Your team's done this before. They know the tools. They've hit the gotchas. They can estimate without guessing. Building makes sense when the learning already happened.

You'll be tweaking it constantly. Some automations need weekly adjustments - new segments, different triggers, evolving logic. If you're in there all the time anyway, build the muscle internally.

You're not in a rush. Timelines are flexible. You can absorb the trial and error of figuring it out.

Bring in help when...

Speed trumps everything. Someone who's done this 50 times ships in weeks. Your team learning from zero takes months. If that delay costs more than the consultant, math's simple.

It's not what your team should be doing. Marketing should run campaigns, not debug webhooks. Ops should improve processes, not fight with middleware. Stay in your lane.

It's a one-time thing. Migrations, big integrations, system rebuilds - these are projects. Ship it, document it, move on.

You're in unfamiliar territory. First time doing anything is slow. Consultants already made the mistakes. They know where the landmines are.

What people forget about building

Building in-house isn't free just because no invoice shows up:

• Learning curve - your team reading docs instead of doing their actual jobs
• Opportunity cost - what else could they have shipped?
• Maintenance - who's on call when it breaks Saturday night?
• Tech debt - "temporary" fixes that become permanent architecture

Just because you're not writing a check doesn't mean it's cheap.

What people forget about hiring help

Outside help has downsides too:

• Knowledge transfer - will your team actually learn to run this thing?
• Context walks out the door - consultants leave, undocumented decisions go with them
• Dependency - need changes later, they're booked for three months
• Incentives - are they trying to ship fast or maximize billable hours?

Good consultants document everything, train your people, and build for handoff. Not all of them do.

Three questions to ask

How urgent is this? Need it yesterday? Hire help. Can wait? Consider building.

Will we touch it again? One-and-done favors outside help. Ongoing work favors internal skill-building.

Does the team actually want to learn this? Forcing people to pick up skills they don't care about breeds resentment. Play to their interests.

No universal answer. But there's usually a right answer for your situation.