Ask who owns the accounts before you ask about price
Start with ownership, not price. The Meta Business Manager, the Snapchat and TikTok ad accounts, the pixel on your site, the Google Business Profile for the Salmiya branch and the domain should all sit in your name, with your email as the owner. The agency gets added as an admin or a partner. If it is the other way around, the day you leave you lose your pixel data, your review history and your remarketing audiences, and rebuilding that costs you a good three months of learning again. Ask them to show you on screen which account your last campaign actually ran from.
Then ask for F&B numbers, not a portfolio. Any agency in Kuwait can show you a nice grid. Ask which coffee shops they have run for, what the monthly ad spend was in KD, and what a delivery order or a repeat visit cost them. Ask them to open a live ad account and scroll. If they have never handled a cafe, they will price a cup at the same margin as a phone case and burn your budget on reach. Tickets here sit between 1.5 and 3.5 KD. The person planning your ads has to know that before the campaign opens.
Ask the same question about your website. If they build your online ordering on a page they own, or inside a delivery app's storefront, you are renting your customer list rather than owning it. A cafe selling beans, subscriptions or corporate orders is better off on its own Shopify store opened in your name, with KNET at checkout and Tabby once the basket goes above 15 KD. The agency can design it and run the ads on it. It should never hold the login. Put that in the contract before any design work starts, not after they have built it.
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Five answers that should end the meeting
Five answers should end the meeting. First: any guarantee. Nobody can promise you number one on Google, a fixed number of orders, or a cost per order agreed in advance. The Snapchat and Meta auctions move every week, and in Kuwait they move hard in Ramadan, again in Hala February, and again when half the country travels in July and August. A serious agency gives you a range from its own accounts and tells you what it will do if the range is missed. A guarantee means they are either guessing or planning to buy fake numbers to hit it.
Second: reporting built on followers, reach and impressions. Followers do not pay rent. Ask what the monthly report contains and insist on four lines — money spent, orders or covers, cost per order, and the share of customers who came back. Third: refusing to give you admin on your own ad account and pixel, or asking for your Instagram password instead of sending a partner invite. There is no technical reason for either one. It is leverage, and you feel it the day you ask to leave. If they hesitate for more than a sentence, the meeting is over.
Fourth: no F&B experience and no interest in getting any. A cafe is not a clinic or a car showroom, and the buying decision happens in seconds while someone is driving down Gulf Road. Fifth: a contract with no exit — twelve months locked, or a notice period that only starts after you pay the balance. Ask two questions face to face: what would you do in the first thirty days, and what happens if I stop in month three. A vague answer to either is your answer. Anyone confident in the work is fine with thirty days notice.
Sign short, pay for one thing, and judge it in 90 days
Sign short. Three months, thirty days notice, accounts in your name. For a single-branch cafe in Kuwait, management fees usually land between 200 and 600 KD a month, content production between 150 and 400 KD depending on how much shooting is involved, and ad spend stays separate and is paid by you, directly on your own card. Be careful with anyone who bundles the spend and the fee into one number, because you cannot tell how much actually reached the platform. Ask for the invoice split. Under 150 KD a month for everything, you are buying scheduled posts, not marketing.
Agree on one number before anything starts. For most cafes it is orders or covers per week, or the delivery orders that came through your own channels instead of Talabat, where 25 to 30 percent of the ticket leaves the building. Ninety days is enough to see direction, not a miracle. Expect month one to be setup and testing, month two to show a cost per order that stops jumping around, month three to show it falling. If nobody can tell you at day ninety what a customer cost and whether they came back, the contract worked and the marketing did not.
We are an agency, so hold us to exactly this. Ask us who owns the pixel, ask for cafe numbers, ask what happens if you leave in month three. If we ever quote you a guaranteed ranking or send a report about follower growth, fire us. The honest position is that most single-branch coffee shops in Kuwait do not need a full agency retainer in year one — a good freelancer at 150 to 300 KD a month plus a clear ad budget usually beats a padded package. Come to an agency when the work genuinely outgrows one person.