Every organization that produces live or recurring video eventually faces the same question:
Should we build an in-house production team, or partner with a managed staffing provider?
On paper, the in-house option often looks appealing. Hire full-time staff, avoid agency fees, and build culture internally.
In practice, many organizations underestimate the true cost and operational risk of owning a fixed production team in a highly variable industry.
Between recruiting delays, retention challenges, training costs, and the inflexibility of fixed headcount, what seems like the cheaper option often becomes the most expensive long-term liability.
Before you post that job requisition, it’s worth understanding the real tradeoffs.
1. The Talent Magnet Problem: Where do top pros want to work?
Top-tier broadcast talent is drawn to environments with scale, variety, and cutting-edge workflows. That typically means production companies, not corporate job boards.
Highly skilled technical directors, audio engineers, and operators want to stay sharp. They want exposure to different shows, formats, and equipment. A static corporate studio can feel limiting, even if the compensation is competitive.
The Recruiting Reality:
- The “A-Level” Gap: Internal teams often struggle to attract elite freelancers who fear “going corporate” means losing their edge.
- The Recruiting Gap: Corporate HR teams face “CV Overload” but often lack the specialized networks to find niche broadcast talent.
- The Lag Time: Research shows the global average time-to-fill for technical roles has reached 44 days. That is six weeks where your studio sits idle or under-resourced.
The BMG Advantage: We are a Tier-One Recruiting Engine. Professionals want to work with BMG because we live and breathe live production. Our Production Staffing division maintains a nationwide bench of vetted professionals, enabling us to source and place talent swiftly and bypass the 44-day lag.
2. The “Fully Burdened” Cost Fallacy (OpEx vs. CapEx)
An Full-Time Employee salary is just the tip of the iceberg. When finance leaders compare an agency rate to an hourly salary, they often miss the hidden operational costs that drive the real price up by 25% to 40%.
The True Cost of Ownership:
- The Overhead: You pay for benefits, payroll taxes, 401k matching, and general liability insurance.
- The Admin Tax: Recruiting fees, HR onboarding time, and performance management are hidden costs that eat budget. BMG handles every administrative task so you can focus on your business.
- The Training Tax: New processes or equipment mean downtime. With an in-house team, you pay for the training days. With Managed Services, expertise is the deliverable—training is included.
3. Agility & Coverage: Scaling without Friction
Production demand is rarely consistent. Town halls, earnings calls, product launches, and major announcements create sudden spikes in staffing needs, followed by quieter periods where a full team sits idle. Fixed headcount struggles in both directions.
The real risk shows up when coverage matters most. If a lead engineer is unavailable on the day of a CEO’s global address, an in-house team is often left scrambling to find a last-minute freelancer who doesn’t know the workflow, the systems, or the expectations.
Managed production staffing removes that risk. Because teams are backed by a bench of trained operators who already understand your environment, coverage is built in. PTO, illness, or unexpected schedule changes don’t translate into production risk.
The same advantage applies to scale. A routine three-person flypack can quickly expand into a twenty-person crew for a product launch or investor event, then scale back down just as easily. You pay for the coverage you need, when you need it, without carrying unused headcount in between.
4. Retention & Career Progression: Avoiding the Turnover Loop
A single corporate studio offers limited upward mobility. Once a technician masters your setup, they often get bored. This leads to the “Dead End” risk, where your best talent leaves for new challenges, triggering the expensive turnover cycle.
The Cost of Turnover: Replacing a skilled employee can cost 33% to 200% of their annual salary in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.
The Managed Solution:
- National Career Path: A TD in your studio isn’t stuck. They can grow into a Director role across BMG’s global network of client sites.
- Performance Management: We handle the reviews, the upskilling, and the career pathing.
- Investment: If an employee isn’t the right fit, we handle the reassignment. You are never stuck with underperforming talent.
5. Culture Integration: Outsiders vs. Embedded Partners
The biggest fear of managed services is “losing the culture.” Leaders worry that outsourced staff will be “checked out” mercenaries. In our experience, the opposite is true.
The Embedded Model:
- Badge Alignment: Our staff attend your meetings, know your vision, and wear your badge. They act as an extension of your Enterprise Communications team.
- Subject Matter Experts: They don’t just know broadcast; they learn your business.
- Best of Both Worlds: You get the cultural alignment of an internal team, backed by the resources, training, and support of a national broadcast firm.
Conclusion: Don’t Turn Your Media Team Into a Recruiting Agency
The choice isn’t between control and flexibility.
Managed production staffing offers the consistency of an embedded team with the agility and depth of a specialized provider. It removes recruiting risk, reduces fixed costs, and ensures coverage when it matters most.
Instead of spending time writing job descriptions and managing turnover, organizations can focus on what actually moves the needle: content, messaging, and strategy.
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