A good media buyer is leverage. A mediocre one is an expensive way to outsource your confusion.
Signs you actually need one
- Spend is high enough that small efficiency gains pay for the seat
- You already have creative supply, not a blank Figma
- Stock and offers are stable enough to learn in-platform
- You are the bottleneck on day-to-day account hygiene
Signs you should wait
- You cannot explain the offer in one sentence
- Inventory is chaos and you want ads to “create demand” for dead sizes
- You expect them to also be strategist, copywriter, and therapist
- Monthly spend is still in “learning what works” territory and you have not fixed landing pages
Founders often hire to escape the feed. The feed follows you into the hire if the system underneath is mush.
A healthier split
Keep ownership of offer, margin, and stock policy. Let a buyer own structure, testing cadence, and platform craft. Meet on a fixed review. Kill vanity reporting.
Software will not replace judgement. It can replace the scavenger hunt across tabs so humans argue about decisions instead of data plumbing. That is the honest line between a retainer and an operator stack.
Onboarding a buyer without chaos
Give them offer rules, margin floors, and stock policy on day one. If you cannot write those, you are not ready for the hire — you are ready for a clearer business.
Questions people actually ask
Freelance or full-time first?
Fractional first if spend is uneven. Full-time when the seat pays for itself most months.
Scorecard for the first 30 days of a hire
- Account hygiene improved (naming, structure, waste cut).
- Tests have a hypothesis and a kill date.
- They escalate stock conflicts instead of ignoring them.
- Reporting leads to decisions, not theatre.
If none of that shows up by day 30, you hired hope. End it cleanly.
What good looks like in week one
They ask about margin and stock before they ask for admin access. They clean naming. They do not rebuild the account for sport. If week one is only vibes and big promises, believe them — just not in the way they hope.
If you want stock, ads and the morning list in one place: that is what we built Ralph for — a growth operator for Shopify, with review before anything ships. Not magic. Fewer tabs. See Ralph · Docs