678 - Why The CFO Said No To An In-House Podcast Team
Jens Heitland breaks down a real client decision: why a small company chose to outsource its podcast production instead of hiring an in-house team, and why the CFO's math made the case.
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Why The CFO Said No To An In-House Podcast Team
A conversation with a small company we work with settled a question I hear often. Should podcast production live in-house, or should it stay outsourced?
They ran the numbers themselves. Producing at the scale we were delivering would have required three or four hires: someone to manage equipment, someone to edit, someone to run the whole operation day to day. Once the CFO added up the cost of those roles, it came out to more than triple what they were already paying for the service.
The decision that followed was not about preference. It was arithmetic. Four salaries against one contract, for a function that had nothing to do with the business they were actually running.
I understood the decision immediately, because it reflects a pattern I see across most companies that consider this seriously. When a business is built around something other than video or podcast production, adding that skill set internally pulls resources away from the work that actually drives the business forward. The core team stays focused on what they do best, and the podcast function stays with people who do that as their core business instead.
This is not an argument against building capability in-house in every case. Larger organizations with enough volume sometimes reach a different number entirely. But for a company still finding its footing, the CFO's math usually holds. Paying for expertise as a service, rather than building an entire department around a single output, often protects the core business.
Highlights:
00:00 In-House Podcast Debate
00:16 True Cost of Hiring
00:44 CFO Makes the Call
00:55 Focus on Core Business
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Transcript :
We were discussing if they should build the skills and the setup internally. So it was a small company. And they were considering, "Ah, we need to have someone who is doing all the podcast in-house. We need to have all the equipment. We need to have the cameras. We need to have someone who is the editor."
And what came out was that they need to hire, like, three or four people, especially at the scale that we were producing for them. And then what, what the CFO was saying, " But this four people cost more than triple what we are paying for the podcast service. So does it really make sense to hire people that just do this podcast in-house and we cannot leverage for our core business?"
And what came out was that they decided not to hire these people, and the reason for that was purely an economical decision from the CFO. And I understand this because in the end, if you have a business that is focused on their core business, and their core business has nothing to do with video and podcast and so on, then it doesn't make sense to have it in-house. -