What an expert should pay for distribution

Your expertise is the product. That makes distribution the whole business, because thinking nobody encounters earns nothing. So the open question is what to pay someone else to carry it, and what to keep for yourself.

Somebody will hand you the standard rule within a minute of your asking. Price your own hours at your billing rate. If the work costs less than that, buy it. If it costs more, do it yourself.

How much to spend in your first year is a separate question. This one is about which side of the line the work sits on.

Run that number. It is the right place to start, and it is not where experienced operators stop.

Run the naive number first

Count the hours the work takes you. Producing and publishing at a serious cadence runs about six hours a week for most owners. That includes thinking, drafting, editing, and posting. Call it 26 hours a month.

At $400 an hour, those hours carry $10,400 of your rate. At $250, they carry $6,500. Set any proposal beside that figure and most of them look inexpensive.

For a large share of expert owners, this is where the decision settles, and it settles correctly. The arithmetic points the right way often enough that a sophisticated buyer should still run it first.

Then correct it, because your billing rate is wrong in two directions at once.

Your billing rate overstates the saving

An hour you stop spending on marketing does not become an invoiced hour by itself. It becomes an available hour.

Professional services firms bill about 70.7% of their available hours.

That figure comes from the 2026 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, a survey of 509 firms. Roughly three in every 10 available hours go somewhere other than a client invoice. Solo practices more often sit below that line than above it. One person carries all the selling and all the administration.

So price the freed hour by what it would have produced. If your calendar has open capacity, a returned hour is worth whatever you do with it. That figure usually sits below your rate card.

Your billing rate also understates the cost

The hours marketing takes are not average hours. Marketing work happens at the edges: early morning, the end of the day, the weekend.

Those same hours hold business development, hiring, and thinking about the offer. They also hold the reading that keeps you worth listening to. Marketing competes with the work that grows the business rather than with the work that bills.

An hour taken from delivery costs you your rate. An hour taken from building the business costs you something you will not see on any invoice.

What operators price that the arithmetic misses

Three costs sit outside the hourly comparison. People who have made this decision a few times price all three.

The first is drift. When delivery peaks, publishing stops. The attention that writes a good piece is the attention that runs a hard project. Consultants describe the pattern in the same words year after year, and the bill arrives late. The marketing you skip this quarter shows up as a quiet pipeline six to 12 months from now. A bought engine keeps running through your busy season, which is precisely when your own would have stopped.

The second is delay. Search visibility, citation, and reputation compound from the date the work starts. Six months of intending to write is six months of the curve you did not begin. No later spending buys that time back.

The third is the ceiling on what one person can sustain. Most owners can produce well for a month on will alone. Few hold a serious cadence for two years alongside a full client load. For an information business, volume is part of the position. A body of work reads as authority. Six good pieces read as a start.

What money cannot buy

Craft is purchasable. Conception is not.

Your specific cases live in your head, along with the numbers only you know. So does the position you would defend in front of a hostile room. None of it reaches a page until someone gets it out of you.

A provider who does not pull that material out of you will produce competent, interchangeable work. Interchangeable is the one thing an expert cannot sell.

That is why a serious version of this arrangement still asks for hours from you. Fewer hours than doing it yourself, and different hours, spent talking rather than typing. Whether you could run the tools yourself instead has an answer of its own.

When making it yourself is the right call

Three cases make buying the weaker choice. They deserve the same directness as the argument for buying.

The first is when your positioning is unsettled. Writing is how a message gets found. Pay someone to scale a message you have not tested, and you buy consistency in the wrong direction. Write it yourself until the argument stops moving.

The second is when time is more available than cash. An owner with open capacity and a thin bank balance pays a small price in hours. Buying would cost a large one in dollars.

The third is where the format is the relationship. A note to 200 people who know you personally is not a distribution problem. Write that one yourself, for as long as the list stays small enough to feel like a note.

The number that ends the argument

Take last month, whatever it happened to look like.

Count the hours you spent making marketing. Count what published. Multiply those hours by what an hour of your attention produced last month. Use that figure rather than the rate on your invoices. Then add the months in the last year when nothing went out at all.

That total is what keeping distribution in-house has been costing you. Set it beside a proposal and the make-or-buy usually answers itself.