Service / 03 · Consultant
Digital marketing consultant based in Mumbai.
Strategy, leadership, and weekly judgment for founders who need marketing direction without the overhead of a full-time hire. Twelve years across D2C, education, SaaS, and services. No agency, no upsell.
Strategy, not retainer activity Years in marketing
12+
Brands consulted
50+
Students trained
1,500+
Google rating
5.0
What I do / 02
Strategy and leadership.
Not delivery.
Six areas where a consultant earns the seat. Execution lives with your team or your agency — I review, brief, and lead. No retainer dressed up as an agency.
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01
Growth diagnosis
Two-week audit of your marketing function. Channel health, funnel leaks, attribution gaps, content debt, team capacity. Output is a prioritised punch list with revenue estimates, not a hundred-page PDF.
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02
Strategy & roadmap
Annual marketing plan against a P&L target. Channel mix, content investment, hiring plan, agency-or-in-house decisions, measurement stack. Built with the founder, not handed down to the founder.
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03
Fractional CMO
Two days a week embedded as your interim marketing leader. Hiring, agency management, weekly leadership reviews, and quarterly board reporting. Useful before you can justify a full-time CMO.
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04
SEO & content strategy
Topical authority architecture, content briefs, editorial calendar, and technical SEO direction. Not delivery — the delivery team can be yours or sourced. Strategy lives with me.
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05
Paid media direction
Account architecture for Google and Meta, attribution model, creative testing framework, budget pacing. I review, the in-house team or agency executes. No black-box reports.
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06
Team & vendor design
Org chart for the marketing team you actually need, the brief for hiring, and the criteria for choosing your agency. Recover from a bad agency relationship, or avoid one.
Who it is for / 03
Four kinds of engagement.
Founder-led D2C brands
Mumbai D2C brands that have outgrown the first agency and need strategic direction before a full-time CMO is justifiable. Most engagements I take.
Service businesses scaling
Clinics, education brands, SaaS, and B2B services in Mumbai with proven offer-market fit and broken acquisition. Strategy plus pipeline rebuild.
Family business modernisation
Multi-generational businesses bringing the marketing function in-house. Often the first time someone has owned brand and performance under one roof.
Recovery engagements
Brands burned by an agency, a hire, or a platform launch. Diagnosis first, then a clean restart. No blame, no agency-pitch, no upsell.
How it works / 04
Engagement model.
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01
Discovery call
Forty-five minutes. I ask about revenue, current channels, what is broken, and what good looks like. No deck. Honest read on whether we are a fit.
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02
Two-week audit
Two weeks of access to your data, team, and vendors. I deliver a prioritised punch list with revenue estimates and a recommended engagement shape. Audit is paid, win or lose.
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03
Engagement design
Together we decide: project, fractional CMO, or strategic retainer. Term, days, KPIs, exit criteria. One-page scope. No SOW theatre.
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04
Weekly cadence
Weekly review with the founder. Bi-weekly with the team. Monthly with the board if relevant. Slack and WhatsApp for the in-between. Quarterly off-ramp review.
Outcomes / 05
What past engagements moved.
Three engagements from the last twenty-four months. Categories named, brands anonymised at the client’s request.
— D2C jewellery brand · Mumbai
SEO and content strategy that moved organic from near-zero to a consistent acquisition channel
Founder-led brand relying entirely on paid ads. Built a content engine, restructured the site for topical authority, and implemented schema. Organic became a meaningful share of new customer acquisition within the year.
— Education institute · Mumbai
Marketing function professionalised from founder-run to a trained in-house team
Training institute where all marketing was handled by the founding team ad hoc. Built the org chart, trained the new hires, replaced underperforming agency relationships, and set up a measurement stack the team now owns.
— B2B services · recovery engagement
Rebuilt acquisition after a website migration broke rankings
Services firm that lost most of its organic traffic after a replatform with no redirect map. Full diagnostic, redirect rebuild, content equivalence audit, and a new content strategy. Traffic recovered and the site now outperforms the pre-migration baseline.
FAQ / 06
Consulting questions, answered.
- What does a digital marketing consultant in Mumbai actually do? +
- A consultant sits between the founder and the team or agencies that execute. The work is diagnosis, strategy, hiring, vendor management, measurement, and weekly leadership. Not running ads, not writing posts. The output is judgment — who to hire, what to spend on, what to stop doing — applied weekly for as long as the engagement runs.
- Why hire a consultant before a full-time CMO? +
- A full-time CMO at the Mumbai market rate runs ₹60–90 lakh all-in. A fractional or retained engagement covers the same leadership work at a fraction of cost, with the experience profile of someone who has seen multiple categories. Most brands need ten to eighteen months of consulting before a full-time hire is justified — and the consultant often helps run the hiring search.
- Are you the operator, or do you bring a team? +
- On this site, the engagement is with me — strategic leadership, audit, hiring, weekly cadence. Execution lives with your team, your existing agency, or vendors I recommend. I do not act as an agency on this site.
- What categories have you worked across? +
- D2C (jewellery, beauty, food, fashion), education (online and offline), B2B services, SaaS, and family-run multi-generational businesses. Twelve years across the spectrum — the pattern recognition is more useful than category-deep specialism.
- How quickly do you start? +
- Discovery call within the week. The two-week audit can start within ten business days of the call. Engagement design follows in the same week the audit closes. Most retainers are live within four to six weeks of the first conversation.
- What does it cost? +
- Every engagement is scoped and quoted after a discovery call. I work on fixed fees — no hourly billing, no surprise invoices. The call decides whether a project, retainer, or fractional engagement is the right shape, and the quote follows within a week.
- How do you decide whether to take an engagement? +
- Three filters. One — the founder has to want a real opinion, not validation. Two — the business has proven offer-market fit and the bottleneck is marketing leadership, not product. Three — there is a clean way to measure success. If any one of those is missing, I will say so on the call and not take the engagement.
— Next step
Book a 45-minute call. Honest read on whether we are a fit.
Tell me the revenue, the channel that is broken, and what good looks like. I will tell you whether an audit, a retainer, or a fractional engagement is the right shape — or whether you need something I do not offer.
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