Why smart founders are firing their agencies and building in-house marketing teams?

A look inside Maria Grineva’s method that helps businesses create a full-scale marketing department in just 4 months — without wasting money on guesswork. 

In today’s business landscape, many founders are rethinking how marketing gets done. The traditional agency model — once prized for its scalability — is showing cracks. Founders face scattered campaigns, unclear metrics, and a revolving door of contractors. This chaos is often worsened by a growing talent gap. According to a recent report from Robert Half, 91% of marketing and creative leaders say they’re struggling to find qualified professionals — a challenge that pushes many founders to rethink how marketing should be structured from the inside out. In this article, we’ll look at the options available to companies navigating this shift — from building in-house teams to bringing in external support to help set up the right structure — and explore how some founders choose to move forward.

One of the experts helping companies make this shift is Maria Grineva — a marketing strategist and founder of Escalator Marketing Group. After more than a decade working with agencies, brands, and distributors, she developed a structured method that helps founders build full-scale marketing departments in just four months — tailored to their goals, budgets, and internal workflows.

Two Paths: Agency vs. In-House 

When it comes to growing a company’s marketing capabilities, most founders face a choice between two main routes: hiring an external agency or building an internal team.

1. Marketing Agencies: Flexibility at a Cost
   Agencies can be appealing, especially for companies looking for quick execution across multiple channels. They often come with ready-made teams, access to tools, and a portfolio of past successes. Agencies can move fast and deliver results for short-term campaigns or specialized tasks like paid advertising or design.

   But the drawbacks are clear. Agencies rarely operate with full context. They don’t always understand the company’s product in-depth and often juggle multiple clients. Founders may find themselves in endless loops of briefs, handoffs, and unclear ownership. And when performance stalls, it’s difficult to know whether the issue lies in the agency’s work, the company’s messaging, or something in between. Over time, this lack of visibility and continuity becomes costly both financially and strategically.

   “Founders usually have a lot on their plate — finance, operations, production, and marketing can slip through the cracks,” Maria says. “Without clear direction, agencies may simply send reports and keep things running, but not always in the most focused way.”

2. In-House Teams: Control and Continuity
   On the other hand, there is the option of building an internal marketing department. This approach puts the company in full control of its strategy, operations, and message. In-house teams are embedded in the business — they understand the product, interact regularly with sales, and evolve with the company’s goals. There’s more ownership, clearer feedback loops, and a stronger sense of accountability.

   “Having someone in-house means there’s always a person who understands your product and can keep track of what’s being done — including managing contractors and making sure everything stays on track,” Maria explains.

   The tradeoff is effort. Building a marketing team from scratch is complex. It requires hiring the right people, effectively onboarding them, and implementing processes that can support long-term growth. Unlike agency engagements, there’s no playbook handed over — everything needs to be designed, tested, and maintained internally.

Why More Founders Are Choosing In-House

Despite the challenges, more and more companies are choosing the second path — not out of budget concerns but out of strategic necessity. They want control, continuity, and clarity. They want a team that understands the product, the audience, and the long-term goals — and they want that team close to the business, not operating at arm’s length.

However, establishing an in-house department is no small task. The CEO has to identify and recruit the right talent, align them with the company’s vision, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same outcomes. It’s not just about hiring — it’s about building a system. That means setting direction, creating clear processes, and staying involved enough to guide the team without micromanaging. It’s a demanding process and one that often competes with the founder’s other critical responsibilities.

“Hiring a marketer isn’t enough if there’s no structure in place. Marketing isn’t just a person, it’s a system that needs to be built,” Grineva comments.

This is where some founders decide to bring in outside help — not to run their marketing but to help build the foundation.

Not an Agency. Not a Course. A System 

When CEOs choose to bring in outside support not to outsource marketing, but to help structure it from the ground up, they usually ask such professionals as Maria Grineva for help.

With experience across agencies, production teams, and brand-side roles, Grineva has worked with companies that are shifting away from external execution and toward internal capability. She doesn’t run campaigns. Instead, she works with founders to put systems in place — hiring plans, strategic workflows, shared planning calendars, and performance metrics — so the team can function independently over time. The idea isn’t to step in and stay; it’s to help the company build something stable enough to run without external support.

The process typically starts with a deep diagnostic: analyzing the product portfolio, market position, internal resources, and financial goals. Then comes team design — figuring out exactly who’s needed (a strategist? a content lead? an analyst?), what they’ll do, how they’ll be evaluated, and what they’ll be paid.

The difference becomes obvious early on. When Maria began working with a wholesale and retail construction supplier, the company had no structured lead generation system. Within three months of implementing her method — including hiring the right team and launching strategic campaigns — they generated 600+ inbound leads monthly, forcing them to scale their sales department.

From Assessment to Action 

Once there’s a clear picture, attention must turn to team design. Rather than defaulting to generic roles, the process is to focus on what the business actually needs — whether that’s a strategist to define campaigns, a content lead to manage messaging, or an analyst to track performance. Each role is defined in terms of responsibilities, evaluation criteria, and compensation benchmarks.

“Marketing without structure is chaos,” Maria Grineva explains. “You launch ads and hire agencies, but no one sees the full picture. Sales and marketing don’t talk. Founders don’t know what’s working or why.”

From there, the emphasis is on creating a rhythm: regular planning cycles, weekly strategy sessions, and performance reviews that tie marketing activities to business goals. These aren’t one-off workshops — they’re working sessions built into the company’s operations, designed to make marketing more predictable and aligned.

Planning begins with a long-view roadmap, broken down using Gantt charts — from annual goals to quarterly priorities, then into detailed monthly and weekly tasks. This planning foundation is supported by a flexible compensation model called Fix–Flex–KPI — a model that balances a stable salary with bonuses for task execution and rewards tied to marketing performance metrics.

“Hiring a Marketer” Isn’t Enough 

For many companies, moving marketing in-house means making new hires. Grineva supports this part of the process as well — helping define what roles are needed, crafting job descriptions, and building a selection process that reflects both skill requirements and company culture.

She often collaborates with internal HR teams or external recruiters but remains involved in the most important steps: reviewing candidate profiles, evaluating test assignments, and advising on final decisions. The aim is to avoid rushed hires and focus instead on building a team that fits the company’s actual needs. As Grineva notes, “I often see founders trying to hire a universal marketer — expecting one person to handle strategy, design, ad buying, and content. Or worse, asking a director-level marketer to also lay out brochures. That’s not a hiring plan, that’s a recipe for disappointment.” Her process helps companies avoid this mismatch by aligning roles with the business model and marketing goals.

Once candidates are selected, onboarding becomes the next priority. New team members are introduced to the company’s tools and workflows, but also to the expectations around planning, reporting, and cross-functional collaboration. Each team member also receives access to Maria’s proprietary learning platform — 50+ hours of lectures, templates, dashboards, and process guides — to accelerate their growth from day one.

A System That Lasts 

For founders, the shift can be significant. Instead of approving every asset or managing every campaign, their role becomes one of oversight and strategy. They stay close enough to understand what’s working — and why — but have the space to focus on broader business priorities.

“In one project, we worked with a mid-sized construction company that had tried nearly everything — ad campaigns, trade shows, external consultants — but the results were scattered,” says Maria Grineva. “Within three months of building a structured marketing system, they brought in over $500,000 in new contracts — more than half of their total revenue the previous year.”

What changed wasn’t just the tools, she notes, but how decisions were made. “We started by decomposing revenue goals into specific marketing metrics — traffic, lead quality, conversion rates — and used that as a base for planning. Once the team could see how their daily tasks tied into business outcomes, their focus shifted. Instead of chasing tactics, they were working toward measurable goals — and that clarity made all the difference.”

Smart founders aren’t turning away from agencies because they’ve stopped delivering value. They’re doing it because the kind of value they need has changed. As businesses grow, they need more than execution — they need alignment, continuity, and a deeper connection between marketing and business strategy. Building an in-house team takes more time and effort, but for companies looking to scale with clarity and control, it’s a structure that pays off.

And in a market where 74% of employers report struggling to find skilled talent in 2025, according to ManpowerGroup’s latest Talent Shortage Survey, building internally offers something rare: a way to grow your own team — one that’s trained, structured, and built to last. The shift isn’t just tactical. It’s organizational. And for many founders, it’s becoming the default way forward.

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