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Should you hire an in-house video editor or work with an agency?

Hire in-house when video is core to your product story and you'll need 20+ videos a month for the next two years. Hire an agency when you need strategy, format range, and pipeline impact in months not quarters. Most B2B SaaS companies between $10M and $100M ARR get more leverage from an agency, because the bottleneck is rarely editing capacity. It's knowing what to make.

Ademola Adelakun2 min read

What does an in-house editor actually solve?

An in-house editor solves throughput. If you already have a content engine generating raw footage faster than you can ship cuts, an in-house hire unblocks the queue. They sit in Slack, turn around quick edits, and own the small day-to-day asks. What they don't solve is strategy: most editors aren't paid to think about which video moves your buyer to the next stage, and very few have ever sat in a sales call.

When does an agency outperform a hire?

Three conditions. First, you don't yet know which formats work for your audience, so you need range across Customer Stories, Episodic Series, Talking Heads, Animated Explainers, Shorts, and Product Launches without hiring six specialists. Second, you need someone who's already shipped this in your category and won't take 9 months to figure out your buyer. Third, your CMO needs measurement reporting, not just deliverables, and the agency owns that layer.

  1. Volume target: under 10 videos/month? Agency. Above 20/month sustained for 2+ years? Hire.
  2. Format range: more than 3 formats? Agency. One repeated format? Hire.
  3. Strategy ownership: need someone to decide what to make? Agency. Have an internal strategist? Hire.
  4. Time to first results: need pipeline impact in 90 days? Agency. Building a 12-month engine? Either works.

What about the hybrid model?

Hybrid works once you've validated formats. The pattern: agency owns strategy and the high-stakes pieces (customer stories, product launches, founder content), in-house owns repeat-format throughput (weekly shorts, repurposed clips, internal video). The split usually settles at 60/40 agency-to-in-house in months 6 through 12, then shifts further in-house once you've codified what's working.

If you're stuck between the two, the question to answer first is not "can we afford the hire." It's "do we know exactly what to make and what good looks like." If the answer is no, hiring an editor first is expensive guessing.

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