In-house lead gen, agency retainer, or pay-per-lead: honest maths for commercial brokerages
A brokerage doing £120k a month in commissions has three real options for growth. We break down the true fully-loaded cost of each.
The three routes
Every commercial finance brokerage eventually faces the same decision:
- Hire a marketing person and build in-house.
- Pay an agency a monthly retainer to run paid social and search.
- Buy exclusive leads on a pay-per-lead basis.
Each has a real cost. Only one has a real cost per acquisition.
Option 1: in-house
A competent B2B paid media manager in the UK costs £45k to £65k plus 22 percent on-costs. Add £8k to £15k a month in media spend, £400 a month in tooling, a designer on retainer and roughly six months of ramp before you see qualified pipeline. Fully loaded, most in-house builds land between £12k and £18k a month in year one, and the risk of a single bad hire is carried entirely by you.
Option 2: agency retainer
A specialist B2B agency will typically charge £3.5k to £8k a month plus media spend, with a three-month minimum. The retainer buys strategy and execution, not leads. If the funnel underperforms, you still pay the retainer. Most brokerages we onboard have tried this route first and moved on after two or three quarters of unclear attribution.
Option 3: pay-per-lead
Cost is variable and directly attached to output. If a lead is not delivered, it is not invoiced. The unit economics are transparent: cost per lead, pickup rate, appointment rate, conversion rate, average commission. Every one of those numbers is visible on day one and reviewed every month.
When each option makes sense
In-house wins at real scale, past roughly £150k a month in media spend, where the salary is absorbed by efficiency gains. Agency wins when the brokerage genuinely wants to own the brand and has patience for a two-quarter learning curve. Pay-per-lead wins when the brokerage needs qualified conversations in the diary this month and wants CAC pinned to a line item, not a headcount.