Look at almost any small agency site in Pune and the service list runs to eight or ten items. Social media. Websites. SEO. Google Ads. Meta Ads. Influencer marketing. UGC. Email. Sometimes app development, which is a genuinely different business.
Our list has four things on it: websites, social media, photo and video, and creative. No paid ads, no influencer campaigns, no UGC programmes, no SEO retainers.
People assume that's because we can't. It's worth explaining what it actually is.
The long list is a lead-generation tactic, not a capability claim
A long service list exists so that whatever a visitor searched for, they see it and enquire. It works. That's precisely the problem: it optimises for the enquiry, not for the delivery.
What usually sits behind the tenth item is one of three things. Someone learned it from a course last month. It gets quietly subcontracted at a markup. Or it gets attempted, badly, and the client pays for the education.
We know this because we've been on the buying end of it, running our own business.
Ads specifically are easy to sell and hard to do
Running an ad account is not the skill. Anyone can boost a post. The skill is everything around it: knowing what a lead is actually worth to this business, having enough creative to test properly, reading the numbers when spend is low and noisy, and — the hardest one — knowing when to tell a client to stop because the money isn't coming back.
An agency that has just added ads to its list has a strong financial reason never to say "stop". We'd rather not be in that position while we're still learning.
There's also a structural problem for a business our size. Paid ads work best when there's enough budget for statistically meaningful testing. Many of the businesses we want to work with — cafés, clubs, retail, wellness — would be spending small amounts, where the fees eat a large share of the spend and the results are mostly noise. Selling that as a service is easy. Defending it in a monthly report is not.
What we'd rather you spend that money on
If you're a local, owner-run business and you have a fixed amount to spend on marketing this quarter, our honest opinion is that ads are rarely the first thing worth buying.
The first thing is usually that your Google Business Profile is half-empty, your website takes six seconds to load on mobile data, or your Instagram hasn't been posted to since March. Those are the leaks. Paying to send more traffic into a leaking bucket is the most expensive way to find out the bucket leaks.
Fix the fundamentals, and quite often the ad budget turns out to be unnecessary for another year. That's a worse outcome for an agency's revenue and a better one for yours, which tells you something about why the advice is uncommon.
The rule we've set for ourselves
We'll add a service when we've done it properly for our own business first — not when a client asks, and not when we notice competitors listing it.
That rule has a real cost. It means saying no to work, and it means some enquiries go elsewhere because we don't cover everything. We've decided that's an acceptable price for being able to answer every question about the four things we do sell without hedging.
It also means that when paid ads do appear on our services page, it'll be because we've run them on our own money, on our own account, and got something out of it worth describing. You'll be able to read about what happened, including the part where it didn't work.
If you need something we don't do
Tell us anyway. We won't pretend to cover it, and we'll be straight with you about whether we think you need it yet at all. Sometimes the useful answer is "not this quarter" — which costs nothing and is worth more than a proposal.
Related: How we price our work, and why we publish it · Your Google Business Profile probably matters more than your website