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For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

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Every growing business reaches the point where there is more work than the owner can handle alone. The instinct is usually to hire. But hiring is not always the right answer, and outsourcing is not always the cheaper one. Getting this decision right matters more than most owners realize, because the wrong choice in either direction carries costs that compound over time.

Here is a framework for thinking through it clearly.

The hire-versus-outsource question is not really about cost, at least not at first. It is about control, consistency, and commitment. Hiring an employee gives you more of the first two and requires more of the third. Outsourcing gives you flexibility and reduced overhead while accepting that the work and the worker are not entirely yours to direct.

Neither is inherently superior. The right choice depends on the nature of the work, how central it is to your business, and what stage you are in.

Hiring is generally the right move when the work is ongoing, core to what your business does, and requires deep familiarity with your customers, your processes, or your culture. A role that needs to be filled consistently, day after day, with someone who builds institutional knowledge over time is a role that benefits from an employee.

Hiring also makes sense when control matters. If the quality of the work directly affects your customer relationships or your reputation, having someone on your team who is accountable to your standards, trained by you, and integrated into your operation gives you more ability to manage outcomes. Certain industries have regulatory or liability reasons to keep work in-house as well.

The honest cost of a full-time employee runs well beyond salary. Benefits, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, onboarding time, and management overhead typically add 25 to 40 percent on top of base pay. Factor that in before comparing a salary to a contractor’s hourly rate. If the comparison is genuinely close, the control and consistency of an employee often tips the balance.

Outsourcing works well for work that is specialized, periodic, or outside your core business. You do not need a full-time bookkeeper if your books require four hours of attention per month. You do not need an in-house graphic designer if you redesign your marketing materials once a year. Bringing in outside expertise for defined tasks, at the level of quality you need and only when you need it, is often both more economical and more effective than trying to hire for every gap.

Outsourcing also gives you access to skill levels you could not afford to employ full-time. A fractional CFO, a specialized IT contractor, or an experienced marketing consultant may cost more per hour than an employee doing the same work, but the depth of expertise and the absence of long-term overhead can make the arrangement worthwhile for the right scope of work.

The risk in outsourcing is dependency and inconsistency. If the work is genuinely central to your business and you outsource it entirely, you become reliant on a vendor you do not fully control, whose priorities are not your priorities, and who may serve other clients with competing demands on their time. Quality can vary. Turnover on the vendor’s side can disrupt your workflow in ways that mirror the disruptions you were trying to avoid by not hiring.

Before deciding, work through these questions:

The answer to those questions will usually point in a clear direction. When it does not, the tiebreaker is often in the operational stage. Early in the business, outsourcing preserves cash and flexibility. As the business grows and certain functions become truly central, converting those functions to in-house roles tends to pay off.

One thing the hire-versus-outsource decision does not give you is the ability to choose a label for someone doing employee-level work. If an outside contractor works exclusively for you, on your schedule, using your tools, under your direction, the IRS and most state agencies will look past the contract and evaluate the actual relationship. Misclassification carries real penalties.

If you are uncertain about where the line falls in your situation, we covered how to navigate those details in a prior article: Your First Employee vs. Your First Contractor.

The owners who handle this well are not the ones who always hire or always outsource. They are the ones who slow down long enough to ask what the work actually requires, what the business can actually support, and what the decision will look like in a few years, not just next month.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Employment and contractor classification rules vary by state and industry. Consult a qualified professional before making hiring or classification decisions.

Have an interesting business question and need a free bit of advice? Send your question to [email protected]. No confidential info, please!