The false choice
Every owner running a business between $500K and $10M in revenue has had this conversation with themselves. Hiring an agency means a retainer that consumes most of the marketing budget before a dollar reaches a customer. Doing it yourself means learning four ad platforms in the evenings and doing it badly enough that the results argue against advertising at all.
Both options are real. Neither is good, which is why so many businesses in this range just stop advertising and hope referrals hold.
What DIY actually costs
Not the software. The two costs that matter are your attention — the scarcest resource in a small business — and the tuition you pay while learning. Ad platforms are unforgiving to part-time operators: the defaults are set for the platform’s benefit, and the expensive mistakes are invisible.
A month of learning on a $3,000 budget is a $3,000 lesson.
The third structure
Direct the marketing yourself; have someone else operate it. You decide the offer, the area, and the budget, because those are business decisions and you are the business. Someone else builds the campaigns across search, social, streaming, and display, watches them daily, and reports back in plain numbers.
You are not buying advice. You are buying execution — which is the part that requires daily attention and specialized tooling, and the part you have least of.
How to tell if it fits
It fits if you know what you sell and to whom, you can describe a good month in numbers, and your bottleneck is time and platform mechanics rather than strategy.
It does not fit if you genuinely do not know what your offer should be. Fix that first — with a consultant, an afternoon, or a hard look at your own sales data. No execution layer will invent a proposition for you.