Chapter 04 · The agency decade
I came home to start an agency. Instead I spent ten years learning to earn the right to.
Seven stops across India’s best networks. Read as a list, it’s a career. Read properly, it’s a decade of deliberately renting myself out to build a way of seeing.
Back in India, certain I’d launch my own shop, I ran straight into a piece of Marwari wisdom: before you lead, learn to follow. The obvious, ambitious move was to start immediately — that’s what most people with a London master’s and press clippings would have done. I did the opposite, on purpose. I decided to absorb first, and to move fast while I did it: to get two decades of craft into one.
I wasn’t building a résumé. I was building a lens — a way to look at brands, problems and people.The Agency Decade
So the through-line here isn’t the logos. It’s a progression in what I was learning to solve. I started close to the craft — making the work good. I moved to owning client relationships — making the work matter to the business. Then to leading teams and winning new business — making the capability, not just the campaign. Each move was a rung up the same ladder: from executing marketing, to owning outcomes, to building the thing that produces them.
The order matters, so I’ve given each stop its own chapter — what the mandate was, what I was learning to solve, and how it changed my thinking. Together they explain the ending: by the time I was leading a 30-person unit for Netflix and OnePlus, I’d stopped thinking about campaigns and started thinking about businesses. That’s when agency life had taught me everything it could.
- →Webchutney (Dentsu)Account Manager — Where craft met scale.
- →Jack in the BoxBusiness Manager, then Associate Business Director — The place I grew into, twice.
- →OgilvyGroup Account Manager — A short, sharp stretch at the top of the craft.
- →Isobar (Dentsu)Group Head — Learning to lead the room, and global brands.
- →White Rivers MediaHead, Business Partnerships — Building the business, not just the work.
- →The Glitch (WPP)Director, Business & Client Relationships — Culture, entertainment, and a team that scaled.
How he thinks
- His most revealing early decision was choosing to follow — proof the instinct isn’t reflexive rebellion but a judgement about when a convention is load-bearing.
- He climbed a consistent ladder: craft → owning outcomes → building capability. Each move traded proximity-to-the-work for accountability-for-the-result.
- He kept score by the wrong-for-an-agency metric — business impact and talent retention — which is why the ceiling, when it came, was inevitable.