Thanks to the explosion of internet, companies in the digital media and search engine optimisation space have almost become commodities. But, AdLift, a Gurgaon and Palo Alto, California-based SEO agency seems to have broken through the clutter. Prashant Puri, the company’s co-founder & CEO admits the company’s current annual turnover of Rs 54 crore has “exceeded” the expectations they began with in April 2009. Puri was certainly well-equipped to power this growth with his experience of growing websites such as Shopping. com and Yahoo! But, he quickly demystifies the 'Keep It Simple, Silly' philosophy—dogged monitoring of margins, a strict focus on the task at hand, and not having a sales team (yes, you heard that right, no sales team!).

People find it strange but it’s true—so far, we’ve never invested in a sales force. When my co-founder Vivek Pahwa and I began AdLift in 2009, we believed that if you say what you do, you deliver what you’ve put down on paper, and you do good work, you should be able to scale existing clients, and grow by word of mouth. The inspiration for that really was the Google story. Look at them, they’ve been in business for nearly 15 years, but it’s only in the last year, or year and a half, that they have spent money on advertising. Otherwise, although they were at the centre of the advertising ecosys­tem, they themselves never advertised. So, even though we are not a B2C company like them, that philosophy can still work. See, search marketing is a pretty small world. In the industry, people will find out if you’re doing good work. And, if your name comes up in a conversation, that’s way more valuable than 35 people pound­ing the phone with cold calls.

So, even today, we’ve got one person who is the VP, sales. Otherwise, our account management team is at the fore­front interacting with the client. We have a 90 per cent client retention rate, and the top reason for actually losing a client would be that a client’s budget has been squeezed. We internally don’t have much control over that. Needless to say, not having a bigger business development team isn’t something that is going to be a reality forever. It’s been the reality so far. But, we are toying with the idea of expanding our business develop­ment team now. That should happen at the end of this year because we’re looking at several strategic partnerships in 2014, and also want to scale up across multiple geog­raphies simultaneously.

When we started out though, we kept things real. I think entrepreneurs can get lost in all the big talk about valuations and investments. I’ve seen that in the many years I spent in the Silicon Valley ecosys­tem. But, that is not the approach we took. We bootstrapped AdLift, we built it on profitability. In fact, we were profitable from the second month itself. The only negative month we’ve had in four years was our first month.

Margin has been a key focus for us throughout. We hired people as we brought in clients. Actually, just-in-time hiring really worked for us—it allowed us to hire the right people for the right clients.

Up until now, we haven’t really worried about growth rates, although growth has been pretty astounding at 185 to 200 per cent CAGR, year on year. But, till 2011, we didn’t even put in business projections in place, however when we were starting out, it was our sky-high, almost unreal dream to see if we could grow a search marketing firm to $10-12 million in revenue in a short period of time. But, that wasn’t our focus. We were hands down in getting the work done. Thankfully, we managed to sign on great clients—companies such as eBay, Barnes & Noble, Maclaren and PayPal.

When we began AdLift in 2009, there was also an option of doing business in India, and expanding here. But, when we started speaking to various companies in India, we realised there was a price dis­connect. We were data-driven, and confi­dent of the ROI from our services. But, at that time, the understanding and market for search marketing wasn’t very mature in India. The next agency would be offer­ing seemingly same service at 1/10th the price. We didn’t want to be in that zone. The potential clients we were pitching to would ask—why are you asking for 5x more, when you’re offering the same thing? In fact, that pricing war has led many e-commerce companies and sites in India to burn their fingers. Slowly, they realised why a premium service comes at a premium cost.

Around 2011, we got back into the Indian market again. Today, we work with companies such as Nestle and the entire InfoEdge group. We see a lot of potential here now. Over the next two years, we might even have an equal distribution of revenue between US and India. Working with Indian clients has meant a certain level of cultural acclimatisation for our teams. For example, when I started spend­ing more time pitching to clients here, I realised that a “no” in India doesn’t really mean a “no”. In the US, if somebody has said no, they’ve pretty much thought it through, and there’s no going back. But, in India, you don’t know for sure—maybe it’s a price negotiation tactic, or there’s some­thing else going on!

We kept things simple by focusing on getting work, doing it well, and keeping a close eye on margins.

It’s also interesting to see if we can bring the strengths of our US team to India, and vice versa. We have 40 people in India, and 15 in the US. Actually, what helps us stand apart is our training and experience in the US market. Based on our experience abroad, we’ve brought to India a lot of proj­ect management tools popular in the US but are rarely used here. Another thing I’d like to transport from the US to here is the sense of accountability—of timelines and deliverables—that our team there has. Everybody feels such ownership to what they do. Our Indian team, on the other hand, constantly surprises me by how fast they catch on to something. From an effi­ciency point of view, the team in India sometimes manages to achieve a lot in a shorter span of time. We are trying to examine how they do that here, and take it to Palo Alto. That will be hugely helpful to power our ambitions now—to become a 200-300 people firm, and target a turnover growth of five to ten times over the next three years.