How many decisions do you make each day? If you’re running a business, that number could easily be in the hundreds. And you can probably place each decision into one of two categories:
1. Will it make money for the company?
2. Will it save the company money?
But some things aren’t always so black and white.
Let’s take a look at advertising. Expanding your company’s visibility is key to attracting more customers and boosting profits. However, advertising costs money, which goes against minimizing expenses.
Your solution: save money on advertising by doing it yourself.
Before you spend your time and money on DIY ads, take a few minutes to discover what’s truly at stake.
Where’s Your Focus?
Your business is providing a product or service to your customers. If you want your business to grow, then you need more customers. To get those customers, you need to advertise.
But marketing goes way beyond just “running some ads.” By choosing to do it yourself, you are also choosing:
- Learning platforms
- Watching metrics
- Writing copy
- Fixing tracking
- Testing creatives
Now, you’ve become a part-time marketer.
Hiring an ad agency means you get to stay in your zone of genius and focus on what matters the most: your product.
DIY Looks Cheaper – Until You Count Opportunity Lost
What’s your time worth? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and running a business requires you to get the maximum amount of value from each hour. When business owners decide to run ads themselves, they rarely factor in the value of their own time. Dozens of hours are spent learning ad platforms, building campaigns, writing copy, and monitoring performance. That’s time not spent serving clients, closing sales, and leading the business.
You also need to consider the wasted ad dollars spent while learning. Mistakes are expensive. With DIY ads, it’s common to burn through the budget on poorly targeted audiences, weak creatives, or misconfigured conversions.
In contrast, agencies bring experience that helps avoid costly trial-and-error. Your ad dollars are working efficiently right from the start.
Agencies Bring Pattern Recognition
When you run your own ads, you have a single window: your account. Every decision you make is made in isolation, based on what you tried before and guessing what might work next.
An agency doesn’t have that limitation because it brings pattern recognition. It’s what comes from seeing the same problems repeat across dozens of accounts, hundreds of funnels, and thousands of data points. They know which creative angles reliably convert, which strategies quietly fail, and which optimizations actually matter and which ones are just noise.
An agency’s experience changes how decisions are made. Their perspective is practical and powerful.
Does DIY Ever Make Sense?
DIY advertising can be the smart move, as long as expectations align with reality.
If your monthly ad budget is under $1,000, it may not make financial sense to pay an ad agency. The stakes are relatively low, and hands-on experimentation can be a good way to explore whether paid ads have potential for your business.
DIY also makes sense when you’re still validating an offer. Running your own ads can help you understand market response, which messages resonate with your audience, and if there’s real demand before you invest heavily.
There’s also value in wanting a foundational understanding of how advertising works. Learning the basics of targeting, creative copy, funnels, and metrics can make you a better decision-maker. It’s particularly true if you genuinely enjoy the tinkering, testing, and analyzing data that make up marketing.
DIY builds literacy. You learn the language and understand what questions to ask.
But literacy isn’t mastery.
Running a few ads isn’t the same as scaling a campaign, managing volatility, or diagnosing performance issues. True mastery comes from running many accounts across multiple scenarios over time.
Don’t Miss the Transition Point
There’s a moment when DIY advertising quietly quits working, and most businesses miss it.
It doesn’t quit working because it’s failing, but because it’s starting to succeed. That’s when the margin for error shrinks. Small mistakes that used to cost a few dollars now cost hundreds of thousands.
Now decisions get more complex and involve budgets, creative direction, and audience overlap. They are based on data, not guesses. But that data isn’t as simple as ad platforms make it appear.
Testing speed becomes critical. Winning campaigns don’t come about by making occasional tweaks. They’ve uncovered through disciplined, continuous experimentation. But when the founder is still personally managing the ads, everything slows down. Every change competes with sales calls, client work, and leadership responsibilities. The founder becomes the bottleneck.
That’s the moment to bring in support.
Not because everything is broken and panic sets in.
It’s when things are starting to work, and you have something worth protecting and optimizing. At that stage, an agency isn’t trying to control chaos; it’s turning your early success into sustainable growth.
