“You’re right. An agency will never care more than you do. That’s not the problem.”
I hear this objection all the time.
“An agency will never know my business like my internal team.”
“They don’t have the same skin in the game.”
“I’ll use agencies tactically, not strategically.”
None of that is wrong.
It’s just incomplete.
I’ve spent my career building and scaling brands from the inside and from the outside. And what most leaders miss is this: depth of context is not the same thing as depth of leverage.
Internal teams have context. Agencies bring leverage.
If you expect an agency to replace your internal DNA, you will always be disappointed. That’s not their job. Their job is to compound what you already know faster than your org can on its own.
The Dangerous Myth: “Only Insiders Truly Understand the Business.”
Yes, insiders understand the nuances. They live the product, the politics, the history, the tradeoffs. That matters.
But insiders also inherit blind spots.
They normalize underperformance because “that’s how it’s always been.”
They optimize locally instead of systemically.
They protect legacy decisions longer than they should.
An agency doesn’t have your emotional baggage. That’s the point.
When my team looks at a business, we’re pattern-matching against thousands of others. We’ve seen what actually moves revenue, not what teams believe moves revenue. We see when a problem is truly unique and when it’s painfully common.
That outside perspective isn’t shallow. It’s earned through repetition at scale.
Internal knowledge gives you depth in one business.
Agency knowledge gives you depth across many businesses.
The magic happens when you combine the two.
“But They Don’t Have the Same Stake in the Outcome.”
Of course they don’t. And again, that’s not the flaw you think it is.
Your internal team is paid to keep the machine running. Their incentives are often tied to stability, not disruption. Missing a quarter hurts, but rocking the boat can hurt more.
A great agency is paid to tell you what you don’t want to hear and then help you fix it.
Their stake is their reputation, their renewals, and their ability to deliver repeatable results. If they don’t perform, they don’t get to hide behind internal politics or sunk costs. They get fired.
That pressure sharpens focus.
The mistake leaders make is assuming “care” equals “results.” It doesn’t. Accountability does.
The Real Question Leaders Should Ask
The question isn’t: “Can an agency know my business as well as my internal team?”
The question is: “Can my internal team realistically build elite expertise in every growth lever I need to win?”
Paid media. Creative testing. Lifecycle. CRO. SEO. Retail media. Amazon. Influencer. Measurement. AI-driven optimization. Platform-native storytelling.
Markets move too fast for that to be realistic.
Hiring one or two specialists internally doesn’t solve the problem. It creates bottlenecks. Those people still operate in isolation, still lack cross-brand pattern recognition, still get stretched thin.
Agencies exist because specialization compounds.
Why “Gap-Filling Agencies” Underperform
Using agencies only to “fill gaps” sounds smart. In practice, it limits upside.
When agencies are boxed into narrow execution roles, they can’t see upstream or downstream impact. They optimize a channel, not the business. They follow orders instead of challenging assumptions.
That’s how you end up with activity without progress.
The best agency relationships are not vendor relationships. They’re force multipliers.
Internal teams bring:
- Context
- Vision
- Institutional knowledge
- Long-term ownership
Agencies bring:
- Speed
- Pattern recognition
- Specialized execution
- Objective accountability
When agencies are treated as interchangeable labor, you get interchangeable results.
How Erik Would Tell Leaders to Actually Use Agencies
If you want agencies to work, don’t ask them to care more than you do. Ask them to see more than you can.
Here’s the operating model that works:
- Internal team owns the “why.” Vision, brand, product truth, constraints, priorities.
- Agency owns the “how fast.” Testing velocity, execution depth, optimization, iteration.
- Both share the “what matters.” Revenue impact, contribution margin, retention, LTV, real outcomes.
- No sacred cows. If something isn’t working, it gets challenged. Titles don’t protect bad ideas.
When agencies are empowered to think beyond a task list, they earn strategic influence. When they’re held to outcomes, not outputs, they perform.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The companies that win don’t choose between internal teams or agencies.
They design systems where internal knowledge and external leverage collide constantly.
If your agency never challenges you, they’re useless. If your internal team never feels pressure to evolve, they’re stuck.
Growth lives in that tension.
That’s the model Erik believes in. And it’s why the best brands don’t ask whether agencies “care enough.”
They ask whether their entire growth engine is built to win.
