#454 – Outsource vs. In-House: What Actually Makes You More Money?

Selling on Amazon with Andy Isom

Andy Isom | Amazon FBA Seller & Agency Founder

Amazon, Business, Amazonfba, Selling, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Personalbusiness, Productbusiness, Ecommerce, Onlinebusiness

4.9 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Struggling to decide if you should hire in-house or outsource? In this episode of Built by Business, Andy breaks down the real cost—and profit impact—of agencies, freelancers, virtual assistants, and full-time hires.

Learn how to evaluate ROI by role, avoid common hiring mistakes, and follow a smart three-phase framework to build a team that grows with your business, not against it.

This is a must-listen for e-commerce founders and Amazon brand owners looking to scale lean, fast, and profitably.

Grab your free Amazon brand audit at www.weavos.io or DM Andy “audit” on Instagram.

Transcript

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0:00.0	As a business owner, you're either spending time or you're buying it back, but not every hire is an investment.
0:08.2	Some are just expensive to-do list managers.
0:19.9	Welcome back to Built by Business. I'm your host, Andy Isam. And in this episode, we're going to kind of play off a recent episode 4-51 with my special micro guest, Michael Jordan. If you haven't listened to that one, I recommend pairing that episode with this one. We're going to take it a little bit further. Again, in that
0:38.5	episode, we talked a lot about how to hire, what countries to look for to hire, even when to hire.
0:44.9	But in this episode, we're going to talk about outsourcing versus hiring in-house and what actually
0:52.7	makes you more money. We're going to break down the numbers.
0:56.0	We're going to talk about maybe some pros and cons of each of the strategies so you can make
1:00.3	the best decision for your business. One of the biggest scaling dilemmas brand owners face is
1:06.3	do I hire someone full-time or can an agency, virtual assistant or freelancer actually do
1:13.4	it better and cheaper?
1:16.2	I don't love the word cheaper.
1:17.7	I think it has a negative connotation in our society.
1:21.0	So maybe a better way would be can they do it more cost effectively or more efficiently? One of the best ways to hire more cost effectively or more efficiently.
1:28.1	One of the best ways to hire more cost effectively and more efficiently is to hire overseas.
1:33.7	But a common early stage trap that I think business owners fall into is hiring to relieve stress
1:39.6	and not to solve a specific problem.
1:43.6	It's the illusion of delegation when you're just creating
1:47.5	more oversight for yourself. In my opinion, a hire is only profitable if they remove decisions,
1:55.4	not just remove tasks. Here's a question to ponder as a business owner. If I gave you back 10 hours a week,
2:03.7	would you actually grow faster or would you just be less stressed? Let's talk about the four
2:10.5	buckets of help and what they cost. Each of the four buckets are, number one, an agency. So that would be like working with
2:19.7	someone like Wevos, my agency, where we do brand audits, we do one-time gigs to help people
	...

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