Most business owners don’t ask the right question when they’re deciding how to produce their podcast.
They ask, “What’s the cheapest way to do this?” instead of asking, “What’s the most valuable way to spend my time?” Those two questions can lead to very different answers, and getting it wrong is an expensive mistake to make eight hours at a time.
On a recent episode of Smarter Podcasting, I closed out the show with the exact framework I use to help business owners make this call. If you’re weighing whether to outsource podcast production or learn to do it yourself, here’s how to actually think it through.
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eeeDIY Podcasting Is a Real Skill, Not Just a Cheap Option
If you’ve got time and no budget, learning to produce your own podcast is genuinely worth doing. It’s a real craft, and there’s nothing wrong with building that skill yourself.
Learning to podcast on your own can teach you:
- How to structure and edit a conversation so it holds attention
- How audio quality affects whether people keep listening
- How publishing, artwork, and show notes actually work
- How much genuine effort goes into something that sounds simple from the outside
For hobbyists, side projects, or anyone who enjoys the process, doing it yourself is a perfectly good path. The issue only shows up once a podcast becomes a business tool instead of a hobby.
Why “Free” Isn’t the Same as Cheap
Here’s where most business owners get the maths wrong. DIY podcasting looks free because you’re not writing a check for it. But your time isn’t free, even if it doesn’t show up on an invoice.
If you’re running a business, you need to do the maths on your own hour before deciding whether to outsource podcast production. Ask yourself:
- What is one hour of my time actually worth to this business?
- How many hours does producing one episode really take?
- What am I not doing while I’m editing audio or building a thumbnail?
- Would that same time generate more value spent on sales, strategy, or clients?
A podcast episode typically takes eight to ten hours to produce properly, covering strategy, filming, editing, publishing, and promotion. For a business owner whose hour is worth far more than what an editor or producer would charge, doing it yourself isn’t actually the cheapest option. It’s often the most expensive way to spend your time, just dressed up as a savings.
Everything Hiding Inside “Make a Podcast Episode”
One reason business owners underestimate the cost of DIY podcasting is that they don’t realize how many separate jobs are hiding inside those two words.
Full-service podcast production typically includes:
- Strategy: planning topics, guests, and formats that actually serve the business
- Filming or recording: setting up and running the session itself
- Editing: cutting the raw recording into something worth publishing
- Publishing: getting the episode live across the right platforms
- Promotion: turning one episode into clips, posts, and other content that extends its reach
Each of those is a skill on its own. Doing all five well, every single episode, is a significant ongoing commitment, not a one-time task you finish and forget.
Signs It’s Time to Outsource
Outsourcing isn’t the right call for everyone, but it tends to make sense once a few things are true.
You’re likely a good candidate to outsource podcast production if:
- You’re running a business and your time has a clear dollar value attached to it
If you bill clients, close deals, or make decisions that move revenue, your hour has a number attached to it whether you’ve calculated it or not. Spending that hour trimming silences out of an audio file isn’t neutral.
- You’ve done the maths and your hour is worth more than the cost of hiring it out
The maths rarely favors the founder sitting in an editing timeline when that same hour could go toward a client call, a proposal, or a piece of strategy only they can do.
- You want consistency without your own schedule becoming the bottleneck
Consistency is the second thing worth sitting with. A podcast only builds trust and momentum if it actually keeps showing up. That’s hard to sustain when production depends entirely on you finding a free afternoon between everything else running your business.
- You’d rather spend your energy on the actual conversation than the technical work around it
That last point matters more than people expect. The parts of podcasting that make it valuable, the ideas, the guest relationships, the story you’re telling, come from showing up and talking. The parts that eat your week, editing, publishing, promotion, don’t require you specifically. That’s exactly the gap a podcast production company is built to fill.
What to Actually Look for in a Production Company
Not every outsourcing option looks the same, and the difference usually comes down to how much is actually taken off your plate.
Some services only handle editing, leaving you to manage strategy, publishing, and promotion yourself. Others, like what we do at Seven Million Bikes Podcasts, cover the entire process end to end. We’ve produced more than 1,000 episodes for over 100 shows around the world, handling everything from strategy through to editing, publishing, and promotion, so the business owner only has to show up and do the part that actually needs them: the talking.
When you’re comparing options, it’s worth asking:
- Does this cover strategy, or just editing?
- Will they handle publishing and promotion, or just hand back a raw file?
- Have they produced podcasts at real volume, across different shows and industries?
- What does my week actually look like once this is off my plate?
The right answer isn’t always the full-service option. But if your goal is to remove the eight to ten hours entirely rather than just make them slightly easier, that’s the level of outsourcing worth looking for.
The Cost of Figuring This Out the Hard Way
A lot of business owners don’t do this maths upfront. They start recording, assume it’ll get easier, and only realize months in how much time a podcast is quietly taking from the rest of the business.
By then, the cost isn’t just the hours already spent. It’s the opportunity cost of everything else that got pushed aside to make room for editing and publishing. That’s usually the point where outsourcing podcast production stops being a nice-to-have and starts being an obvious decision, just a later one than it needed to be.
If you’re already leaning toward starting a podcast, doing this calculation before you record your first episode saves you from learning it the expensive way.
A Quick Way to Decide
Before you commit to either path, run through this quick check:
- Calculate what your hour is actually worth to your business
- Estimate the real time cost of producing one episode yourself, not the optimistic version
- Compare that number to what a podcast production company would charge
- Be honest about what you’d rather spend your energy on: the technical work or the actual conversations
If the maths favors your time being spent elsewhere, outsourcing isn’t a shortcut. It’s the financially sound choice.
Final Thoughts
Deciding whether to outsource podcast production isn’t really a question about budget. It’s a question about where your time is worth the most.
If you’ve got the time and want to build the skill, doing it yourself is a genuinely good craft to learn. But if you’re running a business, the cheapest-looking option on paper is often the most expensive one in practice, once your own hours are counted properly.
If you’d rather hand off the eight to ten hours entirely and just show up for the part that matters, that’s exactly what we do at Seven Million Bikes Podcasts. We’ve built and produced over 1,000 episodes for more than 100 shows worldwide, covering strategy, editing, publishing, and promotion from start to finish.
