Hiring is the default answer to a delivery bottleneck, and it is often the right one. It is almost never the right one at the moment it feels most urgent.
The reason is timing. Demand spikes are visible immediately; the cost of a hire is spread across a year. By the time the new person is fully productive, the spike that justified them has usually passed. What is left is a fixed cost and a hope that the pipeline holds.
Before you write the job ad, run four numbers. It takes an afternoon and it is the cheapest due diligence in the business.
1. The fully loaded monthly cost
Not the salary. Salary plus employer taxes and social contributions, plus recruitment amortised over the expected tenure, plus software and hardware, plus their share of office and admin. In most of Western Europe this lands 25–40% above gross salary once everything is counted.
Use your own country and your own numbers here — the multiplier varies enormously between, say, the Netherlands, the UK and Ireland, and a generic figure will mislead you.
2. The ramp
Count the weeks between the start date and full productive output. For a mid-level specialist joining an agency with documented processes, eight weeks is realistic. Without documented processes, twelve.
Then count the senior hours consumed during that ramp. Whoever trains them is usually your most billable person, so this cost is doubled: you pay for the trainer and lose their billable day.
3. Real utilisation, not planned utilisation
Pull the last three months and count how many days your existing delivery people were genuinely on billable client work. Divide the fully loaded cost by that number of days rather than by twenty-one.
The cost per billable day is the only number worth comparing. Comparing salaries to supplier invoices is comparing two different things and reaching a comfortable conclusion.
4. Pipeline depth, honestly
How many months of signed, contracted work — not proposals out, not verbal yeses — would keep this person busy? If the answer is under six months, you are not hiring against demand. You are hiring against optimism.
Reading the result
Once the four numbers are on paper the decision usually makes itself:
- Deep pipeline, steady shape, core discipline. Hire. This is what employment is for, and an in-house team doing the work that defines your positioning is an asset.
- Deep pipeline, unpredictable shape. Book capacity. You need output, not a specific job title, and the shape will change again next quarter.
- Shallow pipeline, urgent spike. Book capacity, and revisit in two quarters. A three-month commitment is a far cheaper mistake than a twelve-month one.
- Shallow pipeline, no spike. The problem is sales, not delivery. Adding capacity will not fix it, and adding a salary will make it worse.
A capacity retainer you regret costs you one notice period. A hire you regret costs you a redundancy process, a damaged team and, in most European jurisdictions, a lawyer.
The version most profitable agencies land on
Staff in-house for your quiet months, not your busy ones. Keep that core close to fully utilised on the disciplines that define you. Buy the difference as external capacity, and let the supplier carry the utilisation risk that would otherwise sit on your payroll.
It is a less satisfying answer than building a big team. It is also the structure that survives a bad quarter without a difficult conversation.
