Consultant, Agency or Full-Time Hire? Choosing Growth Help for a Game Studio
Consultants, agencies and full-time hires solve different problems. Choosing the wrong one is expensive in both directions: paying for judgment when you need hands, or hands when you need judgment.
What is the difference?
- A consultant or advisor brings judgment to a bounded problem: a diagnosis, a decision, a system design, a plan. Output is a clearer decision and a team that can act on it.
- An agency brings execution capacity: running campaigns, producing creative, managing channels. Output is work done, week after week.
- A full-time hire brings ownership: someone accountable for an area indefinitely, building institutional knowledge.
When is each the right choice?
| Situation | Best fit |
|---|---|
| A number nobody can explain, a system that crosses teams | Consultant |
| You know what to do but lack channel expertise or creative volume | Agency |
| The work recurs weekly and is core to the business | Full-time hire |
| You need the role, but not yet its definition | Consultant first, then hire |
| A one-off migration, launch or due diligence | Consultant |
| Scaling proven UA across many channels | Agency or in-house team, with a clear brief |
What does each cost you besides money?
- Consultant: internal time to share data and context; the risk of a report nobody acts on. Mitigate by naming the decision up front and making someone internal own each recommendation.
- Agency: dependence on their measurement and incentives (percentage-of-spend fees reward spending). Mitigate by owning your ad accounts, data and creative, and judging on cohort ROAS, not installs.
- Full-time hire: months to recruit and ramp; a hard reversal if the role was wrong. Mitigate by defining the role against real problems first.
What most studios actually need
A sequence. Diagnose first, so you know whether the constraint is product, monetization, acquisition or measurement. Then decide what to staff — and brief any agency or hire against that diagnosis. The most expensive pattern is hiring an agency to buy more users into a product that cannot hold them.
How I fit into that sequence
My work is the judgment layer: a focused Diagnostic that ends in a prioritised intervention list, an Embedded role (typically two days a week) that builds the system with your team, or a Set-piece artefact for a board, buyer or team. Scope is set on the first call. See the Monetization Audit and Ad Network & Growth Strategy engagements, or the UA agency shortlist if execution is what you need.