We've watched in-house teams run rings around remote ones. We've watched remote teams outbuild the agencies with a full office. The pattern underneath both had almost nothing to do with geography, and by the end of this playbook you'll know what it actually had to do with.
This playbook does two things. First, Kristina lays out the real pros and cons of all three models with no spin, so you choose with your eyes open. Then Olly Hudson, who runs Soar With Us, tells you how he actually built his team and why he made the calls he made. One framework, one operator who's living it. Use both.
Synthesised from work alongside 60+ agencies including:
What's in this guide
One framework and one real operator, back to back. Skim the outline, then read straight through - the argument only lands if you take all four in order.
With Kristina, Co-founder, Big Growth Group
Kristina walks through the pros and cons of all three models: fully remote, fully in-house, and hybrid. The written section below is the companion to the video.
The mistake almost nobody avoids on the first attempt is choosing the model before knowing what they're building.
Before you compare offices and hiring pools, three questions decide more than any pro or con below:
What model are you actually building?
Not what's fashionable, not what the last podcast told you. What structure does the business in your head need in order to work?
What are you building it for?
A lifestyle agency that pays you well and runs calm is a different machine from an agency you intend to scale to 50 people or sell. The right model for one is the wrong model for the other.
What are the prerequisites for the model you want?
Each of the three below only works if certain things are already in place. Pick a model whose prerequisites you don't have yet, and you'll spend a year blaming "remote" or "the office" for a problem you built in on day one.
You won't get all of this right from the start. Nobody does. Building teams is a skill you learn by making mistakes with real people and real money. The point of this playbook isn't to spare you every mistake - it's to spare you the basic ones, the avoidable ones, the ones that come from choosing a model without understanding what it demands.
Here's the honest accounting of all three.
Pros
- Faster problem solving. When your media buyer, designer and account manager share a room, a problem that would sit in a Slack thread for three hours gets solved in ten minutes across a desk. Speed is the in-house team's quietest advantage and its most real one.
- Juniors onboard by osmosis. A junior sitting near experienced operators absorbs the standard without being formally taught it. They overhear the client calls. They watch how a senior strategist thinks out loud. Onboarding that would otherwise take months can compress into weeks.
- Trust builds faster. People who spend real time together tend to trust each other sooner, and that trust shows up as more honest feedback, better collaboration and less friction. It isn't guaranteed. But the odds are better in a shared room.
- Rituals are easy. Weekly wins, team lunches, workshops, the celebration when a client hits a record month. All of it is easier to build and sustain when everyone is in the same building.
Cons
- Your hiring pool ends at the ring road. You're limited to people who can commute. So instead of hiring the best Meta buyer in Europe, you hire the best one within 30 miles of your office. At a senior level that's a real competitive disadvantage, and you feel it in the client results.
- Fixed costs that produce nothing. Rent, utilities, furniture, equipment, parking, insurance. None of it generates a client result. It only raises the number you have to clear before the business makes a pound.
- Deep work dies by a thousand interruptions. "Quick question." "Got a minute?" Each one costs far more than the minute it asks for. The work that actually moves client numbers is the work that suffers most when the room keeps talking.
- Presence gets mistaken for performance. In an office, managers start scoring the wrong thing: who stayed late, who's always at their desk, who looks busy. None of that is the same as who delivered the result, but it's what gets rewarded when effort is measured by eye.
- Scaling is bolted to a floor plan. Growth means another office, bigger premises, moving people around. Your ability to add capacity is tied to real estate, and real estate is slow and expensive to change.
Pros
- The whole world is your hiring pool. This is the big one. You're no longer fighting over local talent. You can hire the best Google Ads specialist in Poland, the sharpest CRO mind in Portugal, an outstanding designer in Argentina. The ceiling on who you can hire goes up dramatically.
- Lower operating cost, redeployed. Strip out the office and that capital doesn't disappear, it moves - into senior hires, AI tooling, better software, client acquisition. The business gets leaner and the spend goes where it actually produces a return.
- Specialist teams scale on demand. Another creative strategist, another Klaviyo specialist, another developer. You hire on capability rather than postcode, so adding capacity is faster and far less painful.
- It suits experienced operators. Senior people usually want autonomy, not supervision. Give them ownership, measure the outcome, get out of the way. Remote rewards that management style because it forces you into it.
Cons
- Communication has to be deliberate. You can't lean on "did you tell John?" Decisions have to be written down, ownership has to be explicit, expectations have to be documented. If they aren't, information evaporates and you don't notice until something's already broken.
- Weak managers get exposed. A manager who ran the team by walking around the office discovers on day one of remote that they were never really managing. So they overcorrect: micromanaging Slack, booking meetings nobody needs, asking for updates on the updates. Remote didn't create that manager, it just removed the office that was hiding the problem.
- Juniors are harder to grow. No overheard calls, no watching a senior work at the next desk. Without a deliberate onboarding structure, a junior on a remote team develops far more slowly than one who's absorbing the standard by proximity.
- Culture has to be designed. Culture is how people behave when no one is watching, which is a very different thing from Friday drinks and a shared playlist. Remote teams need intentional rituals and standards, or people slowly drift into disconnected islands who happen to share a payroll.
Founders reach for hybrid assuming it takes the best of both. In practice it often takes the hardest parts of both.
Where it genuinely works
- Work that needs both modes. Creative workshops in the room, deep work at home. Hybrid is a real fit when the work itself demands both settings.
- The gentlest path off an office. If you're moving an office team toward remote, hybrid is the softest transition. You get face-to-face planning without a daily commute, and people get flexibility without losing the relationships.
Where it bites
- Two communication systems at once. The people in the office hear things the remote people never do. Information splits before you notice it.
- Meetings get awkward. Half a room and half a screen, and someone always asking if everyone can hear.
- Managers default to the room. Under pressure, they manage whoever is physically in front of them. Left unmanaged, the team splits into "office people" and "remote people," two cultures under one logo.
Hybrid is the model that punishes you hardest for weak systems, because it doubles the surface area where weak systems show up.
The pros and cons tell you what's true. They don't tell you which one is right for you.
That depends on where you are and what you're optimising for, so here's the honest version.
Remote genuinely wins when you need access to talent you could never afford or reach locally, when the roles you're hiring give you real cost leverage without touching the client relationship, when you want a founder life that's sustainable rather than performative, and when your clients care about the outcome landing, not the postcode it was produced in. For a lot of agency founders that description fits, and remote is the correct call rather than the trendy one.
In-house genuinely wins in two specific places. The first is early, before anything is written down, when culture forms faster because people share a room and can feel the standard instead of reading it. The second is your first two or three senior hires, the ones who need to absorb your judgement and not just your process. Proximity is one of the best teaching tools there is, and you can't document taste.
In-house's edge is concentrated. Remote's edge is structural, and it compounds as you grow.
Notice the asymmetry there. In-house's edge is strongest at the start and around a handful of formative hires, and it narrows as the business matures and the standard becomes written, teachable and repeatable. That's why so many agencies start in a room and gradually earn their way out of it. The office did its job at the start. Once the standard is written and teachable, they graduate from needing it.
One distinction to hold onto, because it sets up the next chapter. Clients rarely care where the work is produced. They do feel the relationship. So keep the client-facing judgement close while you're still building it, and let the production work go wherever the talent and the leverage are.
All of this assumes one thing though, and it's the thing the last section is about: that the systems underneath the team actually exist. Without them, none of these wins show up in either model.
With Olly Hudson, Founder, Soar With Us
Olly shares how Soar With Us built its team in-house first, why client management is the role they keep closest, and what they're now moving offshore. The written chapter below is the companion to the video.
Kristina's given you the map. Here's what one route looks like when a real founder walks it.
Olly Hudson runs Soar With Us. He didn't build the model this playbook's remote section describes. The bulk of his team is in-house, with only a small slice working remotely. That was a choice, and it came with a specific bet attached.
For Soar With Us, the thing that had to be protected above everything else was the client relationship. Olly's view is that when you're in-house first, client management becomes the edge, and the roles that carry it - account managers and strategists - are the ones you keep closest. His sit in the UK, near the founder, near each other, inside the standard. The client feels that proximity even when they never set foot in the office.
He's clear that this isn't a law of nature. You can absolutely run world-class client management with a remote team. It's that Soar With Us was built in-house first, and once a business is built a certain way, its strengths compound in that direction. What makes the model work is coherence - it matches how they actually win business - not some inherent superiority of in-house over remote.
What's changing now is the edge of it. Olly is looking to move low-leverage work - the tasks that don't need to sit next to the founder or touch the client relationship - out to remote offshore talent. Watch the sequence. He's not remote-ising the core. He's protecting the in-house strengths that make the agency win, and offshoring the work that was never strategic in the first place.
Most founders get this backwards. Soar With Us did the opposite, and did it in the right order.
They try to save money on the expensive, client-facing roles and keep the cheap, low-leverage work in the expensive office. Soar With Us identified the two or three roles that carried their competitive advantage, built the model around protecting those, then let cost and leverage decide everything else.
The argument founders love to have - office versus remote - is a decoy.
Look at the agencies that make remote work brilliantly and you find the same short list again and again.
What every high-performing team shares
- Clearly defined ownership
- Documented SOPs
- Decisions written down where anyone can find them
- A KPI attached to each role
- High hiring standards
- Management by outcome, not by presence
Now look at the in-house agencies that outperform their category. Same list.
That's the uncomfortable part. The things that make a remote team work are the exact things that make an in-house team work. Which means the real variable was never location. It's whether the business runs on systems, or on you remembering everything.
A well-run agency thrives in either model. A badly-run one struggles in both. Location just decides which weakness gets exposed first.
So before you sign the lease
Before you sink another five figures into an office or a recruiter's fee, answer the harder question: if you moved your whole team to the other model tomorrow, what would break?
Whatever breaks is the system you never built. That's the work. Not the seating plan.
Find out how much still runs through you.
The team model is downstream of one thing: whether the business runs on systems or on you. That's exactly what the Key Man Score measures - one score, across the five things that keep a founder trapped inside the business. It takes a few minutes, and you get a structural read at the end of it.
See where your agency depends on you- Romans
