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Most independent agencies do not fail for the reasons founders expect. The work is good, the clients are happy, the culture is strong, and still, growth flattens.
The reason is almost always the same. The agency is built around the founder instead of beyond them.
That is the problem The Cofoundry was built to solve. We are not a training course and not a consultant with a template. We help founders scale an independent agency into a business that runs on systems rather than stamina, and we do it from the inside, like a co-founder who has already made this exact climb.
The Cofoundry is a growth ecosystem built for two sides at once: ambitious brands and independent agencies. Our founder, Akshay Gurnani, built it after fifteen years on both sides of the table, watching brilliant independent agencies stay stuck not because they lacked talent, but because they lacked architecture.
Agencies are not suppliers in this ecosystem. They are half of the engine.
An agency brings the craft, the creativity and the execution that brands cannot build alone. The Cofoundry brings the systems that let that craft scale, and a network of ambitious brands looking for exactly the kind of partner an agency becomes once it is Cofoundry-approved. Instead of chasing every pitch and competing on price, an agency that has built real structure gets connected to brands that value it, and gets to grow on its own terms.
Cofoundry-approved is simply Akshay's nod of approval. It means an agency has been through The Cofoundry's vetting and evaluation, that Akshay has worked closely enough with its founders to know the quality of their work first-hand, and that he is happy to put his name behind it and introduce it to brands where the work aligns.
This changes the economics of growth for an agency. Instead of pouring energy into constant business development, the cold pitches, the price wars, the scramble for the next logo, a Cofoundry-approved agency gets introduced to brands that already value structure and are ready to pay for it. New business stops being a grind the founder personally carries and starts becoming a flow the ecosystem creates.
That is what an ecosystem does that a referral network cannot. When agencies get world-class and brands get matched to the right ones, both sides compound instead of grinding against each other.
Most independent agencies do not have a talent problem. They have a structure problem, and it shows up in a familiar set of symptoms.
Revenue plateaus even though the work keeps getting better. Leadership is stretched thin, because every real decision still runs through the founder. Every new project feels like starting from zero, with no repeatable system underneath it. And the best people either leave every few years for money, or because nobody mapped their growth to where the agency was going.
Underneath all of it sits one structural flaw. For most independents, the business rests on the founder rather than on systems, which means growth is capped by one person's capacity and the whole agency wobbles the moment that person is stretched. That is exactly the fragility we exist to remove, by replacing dependence on the founder with structure the business owns.
We see the same story on repeat. An agency crosses a few crore in revenue on the strength of the founder's talent and relationships, and for a while the momentum feels like proof that everything is working. Then it stalls. The founder is in every pitch, every client escalation and every review, because they are the only one who can hold it all together. Hiring more people does not fix it, it just adds more things for the founder to manage. The ceiling is not the market or the talent, it is the founder's own capacity.
The market is not making it easier. Holding networks are consolidating, AI is compressing the value of pure execution, and procurement pressure is squeezing margins. Yet at the same time, brands are increasingly betting on independent agencies over bloated networks, which means the independents who build real structure now have the most to gain. The opportunity is real. The question is whether an agency is built to take it.
The work never begins with tactics, it begins with a diagnosis. Before we build anything, we sit down with the founder and the leadership team and take the agency apart as a business. We look at the niche the agency has chosen and question whether that positioning is even the right one to begin with, how the agency actually runs day to day, where revenue is leaking, and which parts of the business depend entirely on the founder. It is a thorough breakdown of the agency and the founder both, and only once the full picture is clear do we start designing the systems that let the agency scale. That build usually spans six areas, and while some agencies need all of them and others come to us for one or two, we always begin where the diagnosis points.
You do not have to take on all six at once. Some agencies come to us for a single piece, the positioning or the productisation, and grow into the rest over time. What matters is that whichever piece we build is designed to fit the same system, so nothing you fix now has to be torn up and rebuilt later.
Most people advising agency founders have never actually built one at scale. The Cofoundry was built by someone who did.
Akshay Gurnani co-founded Schbang in 2015 and, over the next decade, bootstrapped it into India's largest independent agency. Not a modest success, a genuinely large one: more than 250 crore in revenue, over 300 brands served, 1,200-plus people, across three countries and multiple offices, all without outside funding.
He started it with two co-founders and no capital, and grew it across India before expanding into Europe, all while deliberately staying independent in a market that pushes founders to sell early. Building something that size, and keeping it independent, meant solving every structural problem an agency can hit, the pricing, the positioning, the leadership gaps, the culture strain, the founder-dependency trap. He did not read about those problems. He solved them, in real time, with his own business on the line.
Every problem we help agencies solve is one he has already lived through personally.
He has hit the revenue plateau and broken through it. He has felt the agency depend entirely on him and built the leadership layers that freed him from it. He has productised services, sharpened positioning against bigger networks, and kept a culture intact while scaling past a thousand people. That is the difference between advice and experience. The Cofoundry does not hand an agency a framework it read about. It builds with the founder using the exact playbook that built one of the country's most respected independent agencies from nothing.
That lived experience is what a founder is really working with when they partner with us, judgment earned by doing the thing, not studying it.
The difference between The Cofoundry and everyone else advising agencies is proximity. A consultant diagnoses from the outside and hands over a report. A co-founder gets inside the business, builds with you, and stays accountable for whether it works.
For an agency founder, that distinction matters more than usual. Founders are rightly wary of advisors who have never carried a payroll, never lost a pitch that mattered, never had to hold a team together through a hard year. We have. When the advice comes from someone who has sat exactly where you are sitting, it is easier to trust and far easier to act on.
That is the model. We embed with your leadership team, co-build the systems alongside you, and bring real operator experience into the room rather than a set of recommendations. In practice that means we are in the decisions that matter, on the pricing, the positioning, the leadership hires, the hard call you keep postponing, not parachuting in for a quarterly review. We care about the outcome because we are close enough to it to be measured on it, and we do all of this without taking a rupee of equity.
It is, put simply, a co-founder in everything but the equity.
You are probably ready for this kind of partner when a few things are true at once:
None of those are failures. They are simply the signs that your agency has outgrown the way it was built, and that it is time to build the structure that comes next.
This is the ecosystem Akshay set out to build. Not a place where brands and agencies simply coexist, but one where they compound each other's growth, with agencies bringing the craft and The Cofoundry building the structure that lets it scale.
The agencies that will still be scaling in five years are not the ones whose founders work the hardest. They are the ones built to run beyond the founder, with a partner who has made the climb before. That is the work, and that is where The Cofoundry comes in.
The Cofoundry helps independent agencies scale beyond the founder. That covers diagnosing the bottlenecks holding back revenue, sharpening positioning, productising services into high-margin packages, building leadership and culture, applying AI-powered frameworks, and empowering managers so the founder can step back. It works like a co-founder embedded with the agency, without taking equity.
The Cofoundry starts by diagnosing where the agency depends on the founder, then builds the systems that remove that dependency: clear positioning, productised services, leadership layers, culture, and management structure. The goal is an agency that runs on systems rather than the founder's stamina, so growth no longer has a single point of failure.
A consultant advises from the outside and hands over recommendations. The Cofoundry embeds like a co-founder, co-builds the systems alongside the agency's leadership, and stays accountable for the result, all without taking equity. The difference is proximity, ownership, and the fact that its founder has actually built a large independent agency.
Founder Akshay Gurnani co-founded Schbang in 2015 and bootstrapped it into India's largest independent agency, over 250 crore in revenue, 300-plus brands, and 1,200-plus people across three countries. Every challenge The Cofoundry helps agencies solve is one he navigated while building it.
The Cofoundry works with independent agency founders whose revenue has plateaued, whose business still depends on them for every decision, or who want to scale without burning out. It is built for founders ready to move from running a founder-dependent shop to building an agency that scales on systems.
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