300 leads a month. A $6,500 build or a $1,600 VA, and neither feels right.

canton's list is right and I'd add three clauses I'd read the contract for. Auto-renew with the notice window, because 60 day notice on an annual term is common and people miss it. Ownership of automations and templates, since some agreements assign the consultant everything he builds and license it back to you, which means you cannot take it to the next guy. And who registers the texting sender and whose entity is on the record for messaging consent, because if his agency is the registrant and you leave, your speed-to-lead texting stops the day you leave.

girder, one more thing. $1,100 a month managed usually includes a capped number of change requests. Find the cap. At 300 leads a month you'll want changes constantly for the first 90 days and that's exactly when overage billing shows up.

Numbers, since nobody has touched them yet.

300 leads a month, 2.5 deals, so you're contracting under 1% of inbound. $19k average spread means roughly $47.5k a month gross. The $1,100 managed fee is 2.3% of that. The VA at $1,600 is 3.4%. Neither is the expensive line on your P&L, the mail is.

So the question isn't which one you can afford, it's which one moves the 0.83% conversion. Two days to first contact on a mail lead is where deals die, and a text at 60 seconds fixes exactly that, so I'd guess the build has more upside than a human calling within an hour. But the real version of the math is you don't know what your speed to lead is worth until you measure it, and right now you don't have the instrumentation to measure anything. That's an argument for the build too.

What I'd cut is the managed retainer, not the build. Pay $6,500, take ownership of the account, and hire the same consultant hourly for the first 90 days at whatever his rate is. If you use 8 hours a month at $150 you're at $1,200 and you own the thing. If you use 2 hours you saved $10k a year.