Key Takeaways

  • Chris Farkas nearly lost emergencykits.com, an e-commerce business, after a revenue-crushing J-curve driven by a disastrous full-stack marketing agency and a critical website bug.
  • His experience led him to abandon the common strategy of hiring one agency for multiple services, labeling it "a big mistake."
  • Farkas now advocates for a "best of breed" approach, hiring individual, specialized point solutions for each marketing function, like SEO, ad management, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
  • This refined strategy for finding and paying top-tier, specialized talent minimizes risk and ensures focused expertise, captured in Chris Farkas's Best-of-Breed Marketing Agency Hiring Method.

The Chris Farkas's Best-of-Breed Marketing Agency Hiring Method

Step 1: Identify Functions & Avoid Full-Stack: Don't hire an agency to do multiple things for you. I think it's a big mistake. I think you go out and you find best of breed for each function. Go find the best SEO person you can find. Go find the best ad management person you can find. Go buy the or find the best CRO person you can find.

Step 2: Source Top Talent (e.g., Upwork): I went on to Upwork and I found about 10 people who had really good reviews for for ad management.

Step 3: Shortlist & Paid Assessment/Proposal: I narrowed it down to three and then I paid the three of them to do an assessment and proposal for us for our business.

Step 4: Select & Onboard: And then from that we picked one. We actually had two that we really liked and we ended up picking one.

When This Works (and When It Doesn't)

Chris Farkas compares his point-solution strategy to building a stereo system from individual components rather than buying an all-in-one unit. He explains, “if one thing breaks in the integrated unit, you know, the whole thing is kind of useless.” This method shines when you need deep expertise in specific marketing channels and want to avoid a single point of failure that can derail your entire strategy, as Farkas experienced at emergencykits.com. It's especially effective for e-commerce businesses or B2B SaaS companies past their initial startup phase that have specific growth targets for SEO, paid ads, or CRO, and possess the internal capacity to coordinate multiple external specialists.

However, this approach might not suit every business. A pre-seed or very early-stage startup with minimal marketing budget may struggle to afford several independent specialists. In such cases, a single, more junior generalist might be a temporary necessity, consolidating initial efforts until the business scales enough to justify the investment and internal oversight required for a best-of-breed team.