Why your digital project needs a consultant (and not an agency)

There's one question I get constantly: "Humbert, should I hire an agency or a consultant for my project?" The short answer is: it depends. The long answer is what follows, and I think it can save you a lot of headaches and a lot of money.

I'm writing this from a slightly odd position, because I have a foot on each side. I run Damos en el Blanco, a creative agency. But my personal work as Humbert Blanco is something else: I'm a consultant. And precisely because I know both worlds from the inside, I can tell you honestly when you need one and when you need the other.

The agency: a delivery team

An agency is, essentially, a multidisciplinary team set up to deliver. You get designers, developers, community managers, SEO specialists, ad people… Each person has a role and, together, they get things shipped.

You need an agency when:

• You know what you want to build and you need hands to build it. For example: "I want a new website with an online shop, a content plan for social media and Google Ads campaigns."
• You need volume: constant content production, daily social media, recurring technical maintenance.
• You have a defined project with specs, a timeline and a closed budget.
• You want an external team that works as an extension of your own, with established processes and production capacity.

Agencies are excellent at all of this. At Damos we've been doing it for years and I'm very proud of the team we've built.

The consultant: vision, strategy and connection

A consultant isn't someone who executes. It's someone who thinks, analyses, connects and steers. Their job is to make sure you're building the right thing before you worry about building the thing right.

You need a consultant when:

• You're at the start of a project and you don't know where to begin. You have an idea, an opportunity or a problem, but you don't know what the best technical answer is.
• You need strategic definition: what product to build, what technology to use, how to structure the team, what phases to follow.
• You want to connect business and engineering: you talk to developers and they don't get you, you talk to your business team and they don't know what's technically feasible. You need someone who speaks both languages.
• Your project needs a change of course: you've invested in technology that doesn't work, the team isn't delivering, the results aren't coming and you don't know why.
• You want an independent opinion: someone who isn't trying to sell you delivery hours, just honest advice on what to do.

The value of the "connector"

There's one professional profile that's very hard to find and adds enormous value: the connector. Someone who understands business, technology and people at the same time. Who can sit in a meeting with investors, then with a development team, then with end users, and take something useful out of every conversation.

You don't learn that at university. You build it through years of crossover experience: having started projects, having written code, having sold, having managed teams, having failed and having learnt.

The connector isn't the expert in anything. They're the expert at joining the dots between everything.

And that's exactly the role I play as a consultant. I'm not the best developer in the world (not by a long way). I'm not the best designer. But I can spot what a business's real problem is, which technical solution addresses it, what team it takes to build it and how to make it all fit together.

My experience: two worlds, one person

When I started Wattly, an app for Tesla owners, I had to be both: the consultant defining the product and the founder taking it to market. With Ajudem.cat, the neighbourhood volunteering platform we built during the pandemic and won Hackovid with, the challenge was connecting technology to an urgent social need. With Cercat, the GovTech Catalunya finalist, the challenge was connecting artificial intelligence to public administration.

In all of these, the value wasn't in the technical delivery (which matters, but can be delegated). The value was in the vision: understanding the problem, defining the solution, connecting the pieces.

So what do you need?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do I know what I want to build? If yes, you probably need an agency to build it well.
2. Do I know what my real problem is? If not, or if you're unsure, you need a consultant before you spend a single euro on delivery.
3. Does my project connect very different areas? (business + tech + users + regulation…) If yes, you need a connector.

The uncomfortable truth is that many projects fail not because the delivery was bad, but because the direction was wrong. I've seen companies spend 50,000 euros on a website nobody needed, or on an app that solved a problem that didn't exist. A consultant wouldn't have let that happen.

And yes, sometimes you need both: a consultant to define and an agency to deliver. That's perfectly compatible. In fact, it's the ideal combination for ambitious projects.

What doesn't work is starting to build before you've thought it through. Because taking it apart costs far more than building it right in the first place.