I’m Keith Groben. When an owner finally decides marketing has to get handled, they think the question is “how much does this cost?” It isn’t. The real question is what it costs compared to what you’d otherwise have to do yourself. You have four choices. Here’s what each one actually runs you.
Do nothing
This one feels free. It isn’t. There’s no invoice, but you keep losing customers you never see — the ones who found a competitor first, decided you looked like a gamble, and called someone else. You’re still the bottleneck, and the next operator in your market gets your customer every week you wait. The cost is real. It just never shows up on a statement.
Hire a marketing employee
Now you’re paying $30,000 to $45,000 fully loaded — salary, taxes, benefits, recruiting. And marketing is six jobs in one role: design, copy, SEO, AEO, your Google profile, content, video. One person rarely does all of it well. You’ll spend five to ten hours a week managing them. They buy a tool, then another tool. When they leave, the knowledge in their head walks out the door, and you’re back to square one.
Hire an agency
An agency runs $36,000 to $60,000 and up for comparable scope. The work can be good. But you’re paying full labor rates, sitting in meetings, riding revision cycles, and watching scope creep. And every agency is different — there’s no guarantee the plan you get is the same one the shop down the street got.
Run a managed system
This is what we built. A marketing operating system — humans where humans matter, software where software belongs. The plan is already written and proven across businesses for over a decade. After the first month, it asks about an hour a month of your time. If a person rotates out, the system stays, the plan stays, the work keeps going.
Three add a rope. One removes one.
That’s the whole point. Do nothing, hire someone, hire an agency — each one adds a rope to pull: more to manage, more to risk. A system removes one instead. And the savings don’t come from cheaper hands somewhere — that stopped working twenty years ago. They come from system arbitrage: software doing the assembly-line work, getting better every month it runs, not more expensive.
I’m not going to tell you which one is right for you. But I’ll show you all four, side by side, with the numbers.