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My accountant walked into my office in 2017; he was not calling me or emailing me. He walked into my office.
"Subhash sir, I need to explain this to you as if I am five years old. You have two clients. You are paying for twelve people. How does this add up?"
Honestly, I didn’t have a good answer for him that day, at least not one that made sense.
Two clients were making ₹3 Lakhs, payroll was costing ₹6 Lakhs, so every month I was burning money. Even with family, I was starting to get used to the silence at the dinner table, and trust me, the silence was worse than the questions.
However, I continued to hire.
Tuesday Night, January 2019
I was home, sort of watching TV and reviewing client proposals, and just started watching Shark Tank India with my co-founder; she was more excited than I was at first.
Someone then pitched a beauty brand, a smaller company, and some decent revenue. Nothing spectacular. The Sharks asked how much he spent on marketing. “₹4 lakhs per month,” the founder replied nonchalantly.
The next person pitched the food business. Regional presence. “How much do you spend on digital marketing?” “₹10-12 lakhs monthly.”
I took out a notebook.
The next person pitched. Next business. ₹1.2 crores annually on marketing. Two years old.
This wasn’t an exception. This was normal. If businesses that small, that young, and that regional were spending that kind of money on marketing, what did that say about the next three years?
What I Saw That Nobody Else Did
Most digital marketing agencies in 2017 looked like this:
- Founder + 2-3 staff + a pool of freelancers = Agency
- Perfect for servicing 10 clients. Possibly 15 if you really stretched it. Scalable? Forget about it.
Each time a new client came in, they scrambled. They put out desperate job postings, they interviewed during active projects, and they onboarded new personnel while the client waited. Quality suffered, and timelines got pushed back.
I had seen it happen over and over again.
Therefore, my plan was to build a team differently, not as per the current requirement list but with the vision for the future. I hired a content writer before we even had a lot of content to write; I brought in a social media manager to our team before most of us even thought that Instagram would matter this much for a business; I brought in an SEO specialist before people were still asking what SEO even was.
March 2018 Almost Killed Me
Let’s be very transparent here.
Those early days were far from glamorous, Twenty-seven people on the payroll with five paying clients. The rest?
I’d wake up at 4 AM doing mental math about whether we can survive for another month. For another two months? What if that proposal I’m waiting on never closes? At one point, I transferred ₹2.5 Lakhs from my own personal account so we could pay our staff. My wife saw the transaction.
“Can we keep doing this?”
“I don’t know. But I know what will happen if we don’t.” She believed in me. I’m not entirely sure why she did.
Here’s what gave me the strength to keep moving: While we were slowly getting new clients to come in, the team weren’t twiddling their thumbs. They were working, building documentation, building templates and cross-training each other. Our content writer was learning SEO. Our designer was learning about conversion rate optimisation.
- When client number six came aboard, we didn’t freak out. We delivered.
- When client seven came aboard, we were better prepared.
- When client ten came aboard, we had developed systems that competitors would take years to develop.
The gap between us and all of them was growing. They just didn’t realise it yet.
When The Market Confirmed Everything I Said Was True
2020 happened. Then 2021. All of a sudden, every single business in India decided they needed a digital presence. Not wanted but ‘needed’.
All of the digital marketing agencies in the country were turning away clients with the saying that “We’re full” or “We’ll take you on in two months.”
But we? We agreed to start them immediately because we had been ready since 2017.
Our onboarding process had been streamlined, our team had been trained and our systems had been tested, whereas competitors were scrambling to grow and scale in a night. We were simply...operating.
Now ten years in, fifty staff members, hundreds of clients served.
And that ₹6 lakh monthly burn of 2017? It Gave Us Three Years of Market Lead Time.
The Things About Timing
Most founders ask the wrong question: “When should I hire?”
Better Question: What Are You Hiring For?
Every founder should answer this for themselves: are you building for today? If so, build for today. Be lean. Maximise your efficiency.
- But if you’re building for three years from now, if you’ve identified a trend or a realisation that others haven’t fully recognised yet, your hiring needs to reflect that future, not this current moment.
I wasn’t smarter in 2016 but well planned. I had a longer timeline and the stomach to look wrong for a little while. Most people optimise for this quarter, yet I’m curious who’s building for 2027!