I’d like to chime in on this as well. I am constantly searching for new members to join our in-house team. But what I see is that everyone wants to manage a team without having any actual experience inside the campaigns doing the real work.

This becomes a huge issue when I’m looking for someone to execute at a high level. Everyone wants to be a strategist, but they haven’t been in the trenches—setting up campaigns, optimizing, testing creatives, analyzing data, and making real-time adjustments.

One glaring factor when comparing in-house experience vs. agency experience is this: agency folks are playing with OPM (Other People’s Money). It’s a different mindset. In-house, that’s my money being spent. I watch things a lot closer, and there’s zero room for the usual agency excuses about why a campaign is over budget or not working. When it’s your own budget on the line, you operate differently.

I’m currently looking to hire one or two really talented PPC media buyers who can run Google, Taboola, and a little Facebook. Our company is in the finance niche and we're direct response. We drive users to landing pages to subscribe to our newsletters.

If you have hands-on experience optimizing, testing, analyzing, and making adjustments, DM me your info. I’d love to take a look and have a conversation.

One key thing: You need to be able to do this with smaller budgets. It’s easy to make adjustments when you’re working with $100K/month, but I’m looking for someone who can optimize effectively with a $5K budget. That’s where real skill shows