Some companies should hire a go-to-market agency this quarter. Others would be burning money, and a decent agency should tell them so on the first call. The difference is not ambition or budget. It is stage, proof and the founder's honest willingness to stay involved. Here is the split as we see it from the inside.
The signals you are ready
- You have real customers and can say who buys and why. Not a deck hypothesis, closed deals with a pattern in them.
- Founder-led sales built the business and has hit its ceiling. The network is finite and the referrals arrive on their own schedule, which is the problem described in the one partner piece.
- Nobody owns pipeline. Leads happen to you, through luck and word of mouth, rather than being produced by a system anyone can point at.
- You can commit to a quarter. Ninety days of consistent execution is the minimum honest window for a motion to prove itself.
The honest do-not-hire list
Before product-market fit, an agency amplifies a message you have not found yet. What you need at that stage is thirty customer conversations, and no retainer buys those for you. If the plan is to hand growth over and check back at the end of the quarter, the engagement fails a different way: positioning decisions, deal feedback and the founder's voice cannot be outsourced, and the agencies that promise otherwise are pricing your absence in. And if paying for month three is uncertain, wait. A stop-start motion costs nearly as much as a consistent one and proves nothing at all.
An agency multiplies what exists. If nothing repeatable exists yet, there is nothing to multiply.
The stage where it compounds
Between roughly £1M and £20M ARR, the maths favours a partner. There is proof to scale, but a full in-house growth function, a leader plus specialists plus tooling, costs multiples of a retainer and takes two quarters to assemble before it produces anything. An agency arrives with the system already built and the mistakes already made on someone else's budget. Past £20M or so, the balance tips back: at that scale you can afford dedicated in-house specialists, and you should build them, ideally inheriting a working system rather than starting from a blank page.
What to demand from whoever you hire
Stage-fit is necessary and not sufficient. The agency still has to be judged on real client outcomes in your world, ownership of infrastructure rather than just copy, and willingness to define a qualified meeting the way you define it. We wrote the full interrogation list in the seven questions guide, and we are happy to be examined against it ourselves. If you are at the stage where the signals above sound familiar, book a call, and if you are not there yet, we will say so in the first ten minutes.
