Why We Refuse to Outsource the Work
Let’s start with the obvious: outsourcing is cheaper.
If we wanted to run Swagger with fewer people, less overhead and probably better margins, we could. Keep a small core team, sell the work, then assemble freelancers and production partners whenever a project comes through the door.
Plenty of agencies operate that way. And from a business perspective, we get it.
We just refuse to do it.
Because somewhere along the way, agencies got really comfortable outsourcing the very thing clients were hiring them for.
The work.
We believe the people thinking about the work should be the people making the work. They should know each other, challenge each other and get better together. And when a client comes back with the next assignment, we shouldn’t have to go find the team that’s going to solve it.
They should already be here.
That costs more. It requires a bigger commitment. But it also creates something you can’t assemble project by project.
Competency.
There’s a big difference between having access to talented people and having a team that has done hundreds of projects together.
Our team knows how each other thinks. We know who to pull into a conversation when an idea needs another perspective. We know what’s possible because the people coming up with the ideas are constantly talking to the people responsible for making them real.
There’s no big handoff between thinking and doing. It all happens together.
We don’t just learn the brand. We learn the business.
We remember the conversations that happened six months ago. We know why certain decisions were made. We know what worked, what didn’t and what we’d never do again. We understand the personalities, the pressures and all the little things that never make it into a creative brief.
That knowledge compounds.
When you constantly rebuild the team around a client, some of that knowledge inevitably walks out the door when the project ends.
Ours sticks around.
And that brings us to another reason we keep the work in-house:
We want our clients talking to the people doing the work.
Not someone whose primary job is managing the relationship. Not someone taking notes so they can explain the conversation to another team later. And definitely not someone sitting across the table thinking about what else they can sell you.
When you work with us, you work directly with the people responsible for figuring it out and delivering it.
We like the accountability that creates.
If something isn’t working, there aren’t six layers to go through. We get together and fix it.
If there’s a better idea, we chase it.
If we tell you we can do something, we know we can do it because we’re the ones who actually have to make it happen.
It keeps things pretty simple.
It also keeps our culture focused on what we think an agency should actually care about:
Creativity, not sales.
Of course Swagger needs to grow. We’re a business.
But we’ve never wanted to build a company where the best salespeople have the biggest voices in the room. We want the people obsessed with ideas, craft, problem solving and execution to have them.
We believe the best way to grow an agency is to become incredibly valuable to the clients you already have.
Do great work.
Deliver.
Learn.
Get better.
Then do it again.
We work with some of the biggest brands in the world. The expectations are high, the timelines are real and the work has to deliver.
They don’t need us to be really good at finding someone who can do the work.
They need us to be really good at doing it.
Could we outsource more?
Absolutely.
Would it save us money?
Probably a lot.
But we’d give up too much of what we believe makes Swagger good in the first place: the shared experience, the client knowledge, the speed, the accountability and the creative culture that comes from having the people responsible for the work actually working together.
So we’ll keep the overhead.
We’ll keep investing in the team.
And we’ll keep doing the work.
