The studio
One studio or three vendors
Splitting build, growth, and operations across specialists looks like buying the best of each. What it usually buys is the coordination problem, transferred to you.
5 min read
The specialist argument is a good one. An agency that only runs paid campaigns will be better at paid campaigns than a studio that also builds software. Taken one discipline at a time, best-of-breed wins.
The difficulty is that businesses do not experience disciplines one at a time.
Where it comes apart
- The ads promise what the product does not do
- A campaign agency that has never opened the site writes the most compelling version of the offer. The gap between that and the actual experience is where budgets are lost, and neither party sees the whole of it.
- Tracking is nobody's job
- Conversion measurement sits exactly between the people who built the site and the people spending the money. It is the most commonly broken thing in a multi-vendor arrangement, and the breakage is invisible until someone questions the numbers.
- Fixes wait for the other vendor
- Growth work generates site changes constantly. When those go into another supplier's queue, the campaign runs against last month's page while the invoice continues.
- Nobody owns the result
- When performance disappoints, each supplier can point at their own metrics and be correct. Traffic was delivered. The site works. Nothing converted. No one is accountable for the only number that matters.
Three suppliers can each hit their targets while the business misses its own. That is not a hypothetical; it is the standard outcome.
The coordination lands on you
Someone has to hold the whole picture. When the work is split, that person is you — briefing each supplier, relaying decisions, arbitrating when two of them disagree, and noticing the gaps none of them are looking at. That is a real job, and it is usually done by someone who already had one.
When splitting it is still right
This is not an argument that consolidation always wins. Split the work when:
- One discipline is genuinely specialised beyond what a generalist should attempt.
- The scale justifies a person internally whose actual job is coordination.
- An existing relationship works well and the cost of moving it exceeds the friction it creates.
What continuity is worth
When the same studio builds the product and then grows it, the growth work starts with knowledge of how the thing is built, what it does well, and who it is for. Tracking is wired in during the build rather than retrofitted. Changes the campaigns need are made by the people who wrote the code. And when something underperforms, there is one party to ask.
That continuity is not free — a specialist will beat a generalist within their specialism. The question is whether the gap between best-of-breed and very good is larger than the cost of the seams. For most businesses below enterprise scale, it is not.
Build, grow, and automate are three pillars run by one studio for exactly this reason.
See the three pillarsFollow-up
Questions this raises.
- Isn't a specialist always better than a generalist?
- Within their specialism, generally yes. The question is whether that gap is larger than the cost of the seams between suppliers — the broken tracking, the waiting queues, and the absence of anyone accountable for the result. Below enterprise scale it usually is not.
- What about building an in-house team instead?
- It works once the volume of work justifies it continuously. The difficulty for most businesses is that the need is uneven: a build is intense and finite, growth is ongoing, and hiring for the peak leaves you paying through the trough.
- How do I change supplier without losing the work?
- Confirm before you start that you own the repository, the accounts, and the domains, and that access is in your name rather than the supplier's. Where that is true, moving is administrative. Where it is not, it is a negotiation — which is why it belongs in the first conversation rather than the last.
- Do I have to use all three pillars?
- No. They are sold separately as well as together. The advantage of more than one is continuity, not a package — nothing here is a bundle you are obliged to buy whole.