Nobody Writes the Playbook for a Business Like Ours

My mother started Mark IT, the family business in 1999. My father joined her a year later. In 2024 we quietly completed 25 years of it, in Bombay, with little fanfare and a little je ne sais quoi.

Neither my brother nor I was supposed to be in it. That was most of the point of sending us to the US. Study there, work there, live there, and let the business be the vehicle for better things rather than be the thing you inherit. Then my father got sick, we came home, and the business that was never going to be ours became the family legacy we needed to continue.

We have 15 employees. We distribute Tally across western India, which is what an enormous share of Indian businesses run their books on. And yes, it's as unglamorous as it sounds. We sell licenses, renew subscriptions, do annual maintenance contracts, send an engineer out when something breaks. Kshitij runs it and has for years. And it was purely because of his strong-headedness that it survived.

For a long time, the two of us mostly thought about what was wrong with it. Neither of us is a finance person and Tally is built for finance professionals, so we were selling to accountants, about accounting, without being accountants. And the product was never ours. Roadmap, margins, commission structure, the decision to restructure the whole partner model on some Tuesday morning. Somebody else owns all of that and we find out when we wake up.

At some point we stopped keeping that list, playing victim and tried to flip the question. We started asking instead a much simpler set of questions - What's actually within reach, that we understand well enough to be trusted with, and that if we do well, keeps paying for itself and advances the business forward?

Thinking back, there were probably two seminal moments, neither of which seemed so groundbreaking at the time!

2019, and we had no idea that this would save the company

We moved the whole company onto Zoho in 2019. Nothing groundbreaking. Just two kids who worked in the US and thought keeping data organized in one source of truth seemed like the right thing to do to lay the groundwork for anything else we wanted to.

And I looked back at the first entries in there. Contacts migrated on 21 May 2019. The first support ticket an engineer logged went in on 1 October 2019.

India locked down on 25 March 2020, thanks to COVID, a little under 6 months after that ticket.

We've all heard enough about how that spring went for businesses like ours, not just in India but worldwide. In our circles, we heard about businesses scrambling to reconstruct over WhatsApp who owed what, who'd been visited when, who was even still contactable. We didn't have to do any of it, because we were lucky enough to have set it all up just a few short months ago. Our team simply seemed to seamlessly transition into the new 'work from home' subculture and we just carried on. They could support customers, log their tickets and generate invoices from a laptop in a bedroom in a small Bombay suburb.

In hindsight, we don't know how we did it - No layoffs. No meaningful salary cuts. That was extremely unusual that year, and I'd rather not dress it up as foresight or principle, because it wasn't. Our people were still productive, the business was making money, so it made sense that the people making it happen, get paid. We got the humane outcome and garnered loyalty that you cannot manufacture, from both our employees and customers, because we'd accidentally bought the operational infrastructure 10 months earlier.

The next one was less foresight and more a foreboding that AI will change the world.

2025, and the year we took control of our destiny more firmly than ever before

I hate SEO agencies. Their pitch goes something like this - "You pay us X every month. We can't promise you any results. EVER. But we will work hard. We don't know if it will change anything or by how much. We can guess. But don't hold us to it. If anything doesn't work, it's not our fault. It is Google's." Now imagine if that was my pitch to my investors when I was raising funds for SmartCue?

We were paying an agency about $12,000 a year for maintaining our website and to work on our SEO. And true to form, the spend wasn't producing anything I could point at. More importantly, and less frustratingly, it also looked, for the first time, like something I could take on with no domain knowledge at all, because AI had closed enough of that gap to make it plausible. The money we'd save was a nice side effect and nowhere near the reason.

I fired the agency around March 2025 and rebuilt the site myself.

Then, if I'm honest, we didn't replace them with much of anything for a while. Kshitij was deep in Shrtfrm, I was deep in my day job at OneDigital and in SmartCue, and we were also feeling our way around things. Being able to write a page and being able to leave a system running are different problems, and slowly i gained confidence that I could do it without spending inordinate amounts of time on it.

Kshitij and I sat down one evening, him listing our competitors and nuances of the business, and me making notes on what I could do using AI now, versus what is a nice-to-have for the future.

Fast forward to today - The site and the SEO run without me now. Competitor research, the weekly review, content audits, rewrites when a page goes stale. The site is on Cloudflare Pages and I spend $0 on it. Literally. All of the technical SEO stuff e.g. Google Core Web Vitals, Page Speed etc. are in the 95th percentile or higher. No agency. It happens whether or not I open my laptop. Against the agency's own best months:

	Agency, at $12,000/yr	Now, at $0	Change
Pages ranking	253	634	+151%
Monthly impressions	229,982	225,315	at par
Annual spend	$12,000	$0	$12,000/yr back in the business

Clicks - 307 in March, then 474, 587, 742, and 1,278 in July. Rising month on month.

2.5x the surface area, the same reach, none of the money.

So - website sorted. Better numbers than the agency ever put up, for $12,000 a year less. What we'd actually been paying them for all along was the fact that we couldn't do it ourselves, and that had stopped being true without anyone sending out a memo.

That was the easy half though. A website is a thing you publish at the world. It doesn't need to know anything about your customers, or which engineer sat in their office last March.

How it is all coming together

You can't automate a business that doesn't keep records. And our team has been diligently typing in by hand, into Zoho, since October 2019. Which engineer went where, what broke, what was said, what got fixed. 6 years of it. We bought that CRM to be organised and it is turning out to be the backbone that no amount of frontier AI could solve. [So - garbage in, garbage out still holds in the post-AI era!]

We started to take on meatier problems with more ROI. The business does two key things which are our bread and butter (or ARR, the more glamourous terms we all obsess over in SaaS) - License Renewals and Annual Maintenance contracts. With renewals - A customer's subscription comes up for renewal, an invoice goes out, they pay. That's the whole transaction. In practice it is phone calls, follow-ups, more phone calls, and sometimes somebody driving across Bombay to collect money from a customer who was always going to pay. Annual maintenance contracts, same shape. Easy to renew if you can show a customer what you actually did for them all year, and a slog to chase.

So I automated the chasing sometime in June. Individual, personalized emails go out to the customer, from the rep who owns that customer, with perfect English and thoughtful touches. Our AI automation sent out 750 of them in 6.5 weeks, and I've barely touched it. Our CRM now shows 406 contacts marked renewed. Maybe some had renewed through the normal sales channel, but a lot of it can be attributed to the automation. We're still trying to improve the attribution though. It's a harder problem than it looks, even at our size. So take that success story with a grain of salt. We're doing the same thing for AMCs and i'll reflect on it once it's had a few weeks to marinate.

Our whole goal here is to make it as easy as possible for Kshitij and I to automate a legacy business so we can spend more time on building our own IP and businesses. But without the legacy business taking a hit. To that end, we're trying to isolate jobs and tasks that used to eat somebody's week and compress it so that it now eats nobody's, and we're trying to get there without adding a person, removing one, or needing a budget.

What our 15 people now do with that time is sell. One of them closed a deal worth about $6,000 I don't think would have happened otherwise, because he finally had room to properly work the client. He used AI to write a proposal that read like it came from a much larger company, then to think through the negotiation, and closed it inside a month. In this business that timeline isn't normal. My own read of our license sales is that they're running 10 to 15% up month over month, which means that the effort is not just keep the status quo, but the business is actually growing. With little to no manual effort or oversight from either of us.

Looking back - Less effort, less oversight, less money, and more coming out the other end, faster. Same trade we made in 2019. Oh and - nobody had to lose a job for it to work!

The agency's parting gift

There's a coda to the agency story that still makes me angry.

On their way out, they deleted our Google Business Profile. Roughly 5,000 reviews, collected over about 2 decades, gone. Spite or incompetence, I genuinely don't know. Google has no interest in the question and there's nobody to appeal to.

Those reviews were the most valuable marketing asset a local business like ours had. 20 years of customers vouching for us, sitting in the exact place a buyer looks first.

We're rebuilding it off the same Zoho record. When an engineer closes a job, that customer gets a note from that engineer about the actual work, asking for a review. Not a blast. And we ask everyone, including the customers we're not confident about. 341 asks in 6 weeks have taken us from 5 reviews to 13.

13 against 5,000 sounds pathetic. But - nobody on our team has spent a minute earning them.

Everyone's anxious about AI taking jobs and I don't think that's silly. But a fair amount of the loudest version of it comes from precisely the sort of operator who torches a client's twenty-year asset on the way out the door. Nobody is coming for the job of the engineer who did honest work for us for a decade. Whoever deleted that profile did more damage to their own future than any model has managed yet. I won't name them here, but if you're in Bombay and looking for who not to work with, send me a DM.

What I think actually happened

Every story you read about AI transforming a business is set somewhere else - too distant for small businesses like ours to think it affects us. A tech company, large conglomerates, shiny Silicon Valley-based new-age startups. Nobody writes the playbook for a 15-person mom-and-pop company (literally!) in Bombay selling someone else's accounting software to people who understand the product better than we do. There was never going to be a case study for us. We're not an interesting company.

What we ended up doing was unremarkable and equally seminal. Do the dull things you're actually qualified to do, don't overcomplicate things and leave the rest alone.

We did that in 2019 and it carried 15 people through a pandemic none of us saw coming. We did it again in 2025 and, by the measures that matter to us, the business is running better than it ever has. On infrastructure that three years ago would have needed a team we couldn't have afforded to hire.

The next item on our to-do is wiring Tally itself into Zoho, so invoices, follow-ups and reconciliations stop being something a person has to waste time on. That's a simple, dull task though, not a grand plan. Our plan hasn't changed since 2019. What changed is how much of it we can reach.

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