Why Ivory Circuit narrowed its focus to three local sectors
Nirar Punj is the founder of Ivory Circuit, an Ottawa marketing agency serving med spas, dental practices and home-service companies. The conversation explores how a narrow market focus, free audits and attention to missed enquiries shape the agency’s approach to winning and serving clients.
Choose a specific customer group and understand its recurring problems before deciding what to sell. Ivory Circuit’s experience also shows why businesses need to lead with the outcomes customers want, not the technology behind them.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I spent years working in performance marketing — paid media, mostly — before I started Ivory Circuit in Ottawa. The pattern I kept seeing was that local service businesses weren’t short on marketing options, they were short on marketing that was built for how their customers actually choose. Nobody Googles around for fun before booking a dentist or a med spa treatment. They search, they check reviews, and they call whoever answers first.
So I built the agency around just three kinds of businesses: med spas, dental practices, and home-service companies. That’s the difference, really. We’re not a generalist agency that will take anyone with a budget. I only work in those three worlds, I do the work myself as the founder, and every engagement starts with a free Growth Audit — I look at how the business shows up on Google before I suggest spending anything.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
The slow way. There was no launch campaign — I was the sales team. I reached out to local businesses directly, led with the audit rather than a pitch, and showed owners what I could see in their Google presence that they couldn’t. When you’re new, a free, honest look at someone’s marketing earns a conversation that no ad would have.
Today new business comes from the same places I build for clients: showing up on Google when someone searches for what we do, the content we publish, and direct outreach that I still run myself. There’s something to be said for your own pipeline running on the exact system you sell.
The growth move that made a real difference was narrowing. Early on I would have taken almost any business as a client. Choosing to serve only med spas, dental practices, and home services changed everything — how I sell, what I build, even what I write about. The problems repeat across those businesses: missed calls, thin reviews, no-shows, a Google profile doing less than it should. Go narrow and you stop starting from zero every time.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed the direction of the business was narrowing. Early on I would have taken almost any business as a client. Choosing to serve only med spas, dental practices, and home services changed everything — how I sell, what I build, even what I write about. The problems repeat across those businesses: missed calls, thin reviews, no-shows, a Google profile doing less than it should. Go narrow and you stop starting from zero every time.
The mistake was leading with the technology. I built AI front-desk tools — an AI receptionist, a review engine, reminders to cut no-shows — and put them at the front of the offer, because I found them exciting. But small businesses don’t wake up wanting an AI receptionist. They want the phone answered, more bookings, more reviews. So I reordered everything: services first — SEO, Google Ads, web design, Meta ads — and the AI tools as an add-on to a working front desk. Demand decides what leads. I learned that one by watching what people actually searched for, not what I wanted to sell.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Customers judge a business before they ever speak to it now. They check the Google profile, scan the reviews, look at whether the website answers their question in ten seconds — and if nobody answers the phone after hours, they just call the next name on the list. A missed call at 8 pm is a booked job for a competitor by 8:05. At the same time, search itself is changing, with AI-generated answers sitting above the listings businesses used to rely on.
How I’ve adapted is practical. Every client conversation now starts with the basics being airtight: an accurate Google profile, a steady flow of real reviews, a website that loads fast and answers real questions. Then we fix the leaks — after-hours answering, follow-ups, appointment reminders — because getting found is wasted if the enquiry dies at the front desk.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: pick a narrow slice of the market and learn it properly. One type of customer, understood deeply, beats ten types understood shallowly. And give value before you ask for money — an honest free audit or a small useful tool will start more real conversations than any pitch deck. Then do the unglamorous work of being findable yourself. Your own marketing is the first proof of what you’re selling.
Ignore: the urge to look bigger than you are. Don’t fake scale, don’t rent credibility with other people’s results, and don’t chase every new tool as if it’s a strategy. Clients can tell. A small, honest operation that answers its own phone beats a polished façade surprisingly often.
Thank you to Nirar Punj and the team at Ivory Circuit for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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