The Opportunity Cost of In-Housing: Why Strong SaaS Teams Still Outsource Critical Work

“I already pay $500k in salaries. Why should I pay $50k to an external agency when I have talent right here?”

This question comes up in conversations we have with scaling SaaS companies. And it’s a reasonable one. When you’ve invested in a capable marketing team, outsourcing can feel redundant, even irresponsible. Why bring in outside help when you’ve already hired smart people who understand the business?

At certain stages, that instinct is right. Ongoing execution, customer context, and day-to-day decisions are often best owned internally, when you have a team close to the product, sales, and leadership. Strong teams create momentum precisely because they are embedded in the business.

The problem begins when this logic is applied universally, without regard for how the organization itself is changing. As companies scale, the constraint is rarely talent. It is focus. And this is where many strong teams unintentionally slow themselves down.

Capability Doesn’t Equal Capacity as You Scale

At the Scale stage, your internal hires are likely high-value Generalists: a VP of Marketing, a Product Marketing Manager, or a Content Lead. They can configure tools, run programs, and troubleshoot issues when needed. 

But these are expensive, strategic brains hired to understand your customer and craft your narrative. Are those activities the best use of their time?

Just because a Product Marketer can debug a workflow or oversee a technical rebuild does not mean they should. Those tasks consume cognitive bandwidth and pull senior people into execution mode, even when their highest value lies elsewhere.

This is where many teams stall because the people responsible for strategy are spending their time managing mechanics.

The cost of that trade-off rarely shows up on a budget line. It shows up as slower decisions, weaker alignment, and a growing gap between intent and execution.

Why Critical Work Behaves Differently

Not all work competes equally for attention.

Some work is continuous. It never really finishes. It benefits from deep context and proximity to the business. This is where strong internal teams tend to create the most value.

Other work is discrete and high-stakes. It has a clear beginning and end. It touches multiple functions. And if it goes wrong, it creates long-term drag that is difficult to undo.

This category of work has a tendency to expand. It generates more decisions, more dependencies, and more coordination than initially expected. When it lives entirely inside the organization, it competes directly with the responsibilities that keep the business moving forward.

This is not a talent problem. It is a capacity problem.

Different Stages Require Different Outsourcing Models

Outsourcing is often framed as a binary decision: either you do everything in-house, or you hand work off to an agency. In practice, the right model depends on how mature the organization is.

Early-stage companies outsource because they need coverage. They don’t yet have the internal leadership required to set strategy and execute consistently, so external partners often own both direction and delivery.

Scaling companies outsource because they need leverage. Fractional and embedded teams allow them to operate like a larger organization without the cost or risk of building a full executive function too early.

More mature teams outsource for a different reason entirely: to protect focus.

When a company already has a VP of Marketing, Product Marketing, and Demand leadership in place, the bottleneck is no longer strategic thinking. It is the amount of executional complexity those leaders are forced to absorb. In this phase, agencies don’t replace strategy—they create the space for it to function.

These models are not contradictory. They are stage-appropriate responses to different organizational constraints.

The Formula 1 Analogy

You do not ask your Formula 1 drivers to build the engine.

They may understand the car better than anyone else. They may even be capable of contributing. But their job is not to assemble the engine. Their job is to win the race.

You pay engineers to build the engine so the drivers can focus on performance.

Strong internal teams are the drivers. Their value lies in judgment, prioritization, and execution under pressure. Pulling them into complex build work does not make the organization stronger. It diverts attention away from the decisions that matter most.

Outsourcing critical work is not an admission of weakness. It is a way to preserve leverage at the leadership level.

Where Full-Service Partners Actually Create Leverage

This is where the conversation often becomes oversimplified.

Agencies are not inherently “execution-only.” Nor are internal teams inherently “strategic.” The distinction is about ownership, not activity.

In organizations without a full executive marketing function, a full-service partner can and should own both strategy and execution. That includes setting direction, aligning teams, and translating business goals into action.

In organizations with experienced leadership already in place, the role shifts. The internal team owns strategy and decision-making, while the agency absorbs executional complexity and operational load, allowing leaders to stay focused on alignment, growth, and outcomes.

In both cases, the value comes from reducing drag on the system—not from outsourcing work for its own sake.

What Scaling Companies Protect at All Costs: Senior Attention

As organizations mature, the scarcest resource is no longer budget or headcount. It is senior attention.

Every hour leadership spends managing execution is an hour not spent on positioning, alignment, and momentum. Those costs compound quietly, even when short-term output looks healthy.

Strong scaling companies learn to design their operating model so that critical work gets done without pulling leaders out of their highest-leverage roles.

This is how capable teams continue to move quickly as the stakes increase.

Outsourcing as a Leadership Decision, Not a Talent Decision

The decision to outsource is not a referendum on your team’s ability. It is a reflection of how intentionally you allocate focus as the company grows.

Early teams outsource to build momentum. Scaling teams outsource to gain leverage. Mature teams outsource to amplify strategy and protect focus.

Scaling SaaS teams still rely on external partners because they understand where their impact is highest. They keep the right people focused on the right work at the right altitude, and they design the organization to support that reality.

At scale, winning is not about doing everything yourself. It is about ensuring that critical work does not come at the expense of clarity and direction.

If This Resonates…

If you’re evaluating whether your current operating model is helping or hindering growth, it may be worth stepping back from who does the work and looking at where leadership attention is actually going.

At Kalungi, we work with SaaS companies across different stages of maturity. Sometimes that means acting as a full fractional marketing team, owning both strategy and execution. Other times it means partnering with an existing leadership team to absorb executional complexity so strategy doesn’t get buried in the day-to-day.

If you’d like a second opinion, we’re happy to look at how your current structure is supporting—or constraining—focus, velocity, and decision-making. Whether you need full ownership or targeted leverage, the goal is the same: making sure critical work doesn’t come at the expense of clarity and momentum.

When you’re ready, we’re here.