DIY or outsource
Building it yourself costs no money, it costs your evenings.
With today's builders you can put something decent up in a weekend. The question is not whether you can, but what it costs in time you could have spent on jobs, and whether the thing then produces enquiries. Both sides below, without the conclusion being fixed in advance.
Do it yourself
Full control, and every change is your evening.
What it gets you
- No monthly fee, only hosting and your domain.
- You change something the moment you think of it, without emailing anyone.
- You learn exactly how your own visibility works, and that knowledge never leaves you.
- For a one person business with a full diary and enough word of mouth, this is often plenty.
What it costs you
- Building is the smallest part. Writing copy that sells, taking photos, setting up measurement and keeping it up monthly is the work.
- The parts that produce enquiries, follow-up, confirmations, asking for reviews, you rarely build yourself and they are exactly the difference.
- Updates and security become your job, and you only remember them when it goes wrong.
- You have no numbers, so you do not know if it works. That is more expensive than it looks.
Outsource
You buy time back, and you hand over control of the setup.
What it gets you
- You are done weeks earlier and those weeks go to work that actually earns.
- The parts behind the site, follow-up, assistant, reviews, are right from the start instead of eventually.
- Maintenance, security and speed are no longer yours.
- You get numbers, so after a quarter you know what it earned instead of sensing it.
What it costs you
- A monthly fee, running through the months when you are busy and never look at it.
- You work within a fixed setup. If you want to decide every detail, that will chafe.
- You depend on someone else for changes, however fast they are.
The question that decides it
Work out your hourly rate and multiply it by the hours you will put in. Forty hours of building at seventy five is three thousand in unbilled time, and you still have no follow-up, no review system and no measurement. If outsourcing comes in under that, the sum is done. If it comes in above and you genuinely have the evenings, doing it yourself is a fine choice.
When you should simply do it yourself
If your diary is full from word of mouth and you have no growth plan, you do not need a system but a tidy business card page. You can put that up yourself in a weekend and it is enough. We are for the business that wants more enquiries and is currently getting too few, or losing them in the follow-up.
Questions
Questions about this choice
Still not sure which way to go?
Put your situation to us in a twenty minute demo. We will do the maths with you, and say so when the answer is that you do not need us.
Book a free demo