So, you know you need help with HubSpot. Now you need to figure out who should help you.
Do you hire a big HubSpot agency? A smaller agency? An independent HubSpot consultant? Someone in-house?
I’ve been a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2014, and over the years I’ve worked alongside all kinds of internal teams, agencies, consultants, and HubSpot users. The truth is, there isn’t one right answer. It really depends on what you need and how you like to work.
I run what clients have sometimes described as a “boutique” HubSpot agency. In reality, that means something pretty simple: when you hire me, you get me.
Here’s how I think about the difference.
What’s the difference between a HubSpot consultant and a HubSpot agency?
The biggest difference is usually the team.
With a larger HubSpot agency, you may have an account manager, strategist, HubSpot administrator, developer, designer, writer, and other specialists involved in your account. If you need a lot of different people producing a lot of different things at once, that can be exactly what you’re looking for.
My model is intentionally different.
I’m the person on your calls, answering your emails, thinking through your strategy, and actually logging into HubSpot to do the work.
There isn’t a junior staffer behind the scenes who gets handed your account once the contract is signed.
Why work with an independent HubSpot consultant?
For me, one of the biggest advantages is how well I get to know my clients’ businesses.
I only take on up to three ongoing clients at a time. That’s intentional.
It gives me the time to learn how your business actually works: how your sales team sells, how marketing generates leads, what happens after someone becomes a customer, where your data comes from, what your leadership team needs to report on, and all the strange little processes that make your business your business.
Once I understand those things, I can start finding much more interesting ways to use HubSpot.
And that’s the fun part.
When is a larger HubSpot agency a better fit?
Sometimes!
If you need a team of designers, developers, writers, paid media specialists, SEO experts, and HubSpot administrators all working simultaneously, I’m probably not the right choice.
I’m one person. I don’t pretend otherwise.
A larger agency has a much bigger bench and can throw more people at a large project. If that’s what your business needs, that’s a real advantage.
But if what you need is an experienced HubSpot person who can become part of your team, learn your business, and stick around long enough to understand why that workflow somebody built three years ago is still doing that weird thing…that’s much closer to what I do.
Will I actually work directly with you?
Yes. Always.
I’ve never wanted to build the kind of agency where I sell the work and then hand it off to someone else.
My clients work directly with me, and one of the things I hear most often is how much they value my responsiveness and attention to detail.
Keeping my client roster small makes that possible. I know what’s happening in your portal because I’m the one working in it.
Are you a strategist or a hands-on HubSpot consultant?
Both.
This is an important distinction because I’ve spent a big part of my career on the marketing side of the table.
I’ve been a one-person marketing department responsible for proving ROI across every channel. I’ve led marketing teams at high-growth startups. I’ve worked with sales teams, leadership teams, agencies, and plenty of people who just want to know why their CRM isn’t doing what they thought it was going to do.
So yes, I can talk strategy.
But then I can go into HubSpot and actually build it.
I work with workflows, properties, pipelines, integrations, reporting, data cleanup, custom objects, and all sorts of other HubSpot puzzles.
I particularly love the puzzles.
What if we’ve already been using HubSpot for years?
Please call me.
Some of my favorite projects are the portals that have been around for years and have had a lot of hands in them.
Maybe you’ve had three agencies, six marketing employees, a sales operations person, and somebody’s intern building things in HubSpot over the last five years.
Now you have 600 properties, workflows nobody wants to turn off, reports nobody trusts, and a general sense that touching the wrong thing might make the entire house of cards collapse.
I genuinely enjoy this work.
We’ll figure out what’s happening, what you still need, what you don’t, and how we can make HubSpot useful again.
Why do you work with clients for so long?
This wasn’t necessarily something I set out to do. It just kept happening.
A client would hire me for one HubSpot project. While working on it, I’d learn more about their business and think, “Wait, we could use HubSpot to do this.”
Then we’d solve another problem.
And another.
Some of my client relationships have lasted for years because once I really understand a business, there are so many interesting ways we can use HubSpot to make things easier, smarter, or more measurable.
That’s the kind of consulting relationship I enjoy most.
So, should I hire a HubSpot consultant or an agency?
If you need a large team of specialists producing lots of different deliverables at the same time, a larger HubSpot agency may be the better choice.
If you want to work directly with an experienced HubSpot Solutions Partner who will learn your business, think strategically with you, and also roll up her sleeves and do the work, that’s where I come in.
And if your HubSpot portal is currently a mess?
Even better.