What questions should I ask before hiring an agency?

"Which accounts do you run right now" is the strongest question on the list, because a portfolio shows finished work while a live account shows maintenance. Ask for three handles, open them on your own phone, and scroll the last two weeks. A three-week gap tells you the agency is understaffed regardless of how good the work inside the gap looks. If the answer is client confidentiality for every single account, that is not confidentiality, that is nothing to show — a working agency always has someone happy to be named.

The follow-ups catch more people out than the opener. "Who actually does the editing" matters because plenty of twin-city agencies subcontract cutting to a freelancer you will never meet, which is completely fine if they say so and a problem if they do not. "Who covers when you travel" matters because a one-person operation stops during exams, Umrah, a family trip to Murree, or the last ten days of Ramadan, and you will still be paying. "What happens if I stop" should produce a specific answer involving a Drive folder of source files and the removal of access, with no exit fee attached.

Two of the questions are about money and both are yes-or-no. Is ad spend separate, paid from my own card straight to the platform, so I can see every rupee in my own billing tab? And is there any lock-in period? A single blended figure that mixes fee and boosting is how markup hides, and three months paid in advance into a personal wallet is a decision you cannot reverse. One month, on an invoice, is a perfectly normal ask and any real agency will agree to it.

Finish with a question almost nobody asks: what would you refuse to do? An agency that has never turned anything down will agree to your idea whether or not it can work, because agreeing is how they close. We turn down accounts where we do not believe the topic can realistically get traction, and we cap how many clients we take at once because daily management means somebody genuinely opens your account every working day. If you want to test all of this cheaply, the PKR 5,000 audit is a paid, finite piece of work you can judge us on before anything monthly starts.