Start with the ad account, not the portfolio
Before you look at anyone's portfolio, ask one question: whose name is the ad account in? The right answer is yours. You open the Meta Business Manager under your own commercial licence, you install the pixel on your own site, and you add the agency as a partner with admin rights you can remove in ten seconds. Same for TikTok Business Centre and Snapchat Ads Manager. Any agency that agrees to that in the first meeting has told you something far more useful than a case study ever will.
If they refuse — we run everything from our account, we'll send you reports — end the meeting. That refusal is not a process preference, it is leverage. Two years of pixel data, every customer who ordered from you, every lookalike audience built on your actual buyers: all of it stays with them the day you leave. Most restaurants we see change agency every twelve to eighteen months, and the ones who lose their pixel history restart ad learning from zero and pay roughly fifteen to thirty percent more per order for the first two months.
Ask the same about everything else you own. Who holds the Instagram password, the Google Business Profile, the domain, the Talabat and Deliveroo partner logins? Your accountant would never accept we hold the bank login and send you statements, and this is the same thing. Get the list in writing before the first invoice: platform, account name, legal owner, who has access, and how access is removed. If an agency needs more than a day to produce that list, their own house is not in order either.
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Guarantees and follower charts are the two answers that end the meeting
The second question is what do you guarantee. The only honest answer is nothing about results. Nobody controls the Meta auction, nobody controls whether Salmiya likes your new burger, and nobody can promise you a number of orders. What a serious agency guarantees is work: campaigns live by a stated date, a set number of creatives per month, a fixed reporting day, and a named person who answers your WhatsApp. If someone promises first page of Google in thirty days, or guarantees ten thousand followers, they are either buying fake traffic or planning to blame you in month three.
Then ask what the monthly report contains. If the first line is followers, reach or impressions, you are buying a vanity report. Ask for four numbers instead: orders attributed to ads, cost per order, average ticket, and repeat rate. Every one of those can be checked against your POS at the end of the month, and every one of them changes what you do next. Followers are checkable too, which is exactly why weak agencies lead with them. A restaurant in Hawally with nine thousand real followers and thirty orders a week has a problem no follower chart will ever show.
Third, make them do arithmetic in front of you. Ask what a 6 KD order on Talabat actually leaves you after commission. If they cannot tell you that aggregator commission in Kuwait usually sits somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five percent before packaging, they cannot advise you on where to push volume. An agency that understands F&B moves part of that demand onto a channel you own, which is why running your own ordering site on Shopify with KNET checkout beats paying commission forever. No F&B experience is survivable. Not being able to do the maths is not.
The contract should have a door in it
Fourth, read the exit clause before you read anything else. A fair deal in Kuwait looks like this: a ninety-day starting period, then month to month, thirty days' notice from either side, and every account and file handed over within a week of the last day. Twelve-month lock-ins with no break clause are how weak agencies survive month four. Ask directly what happens if you want to leave in month five. Any hesitation, any talk of penalties, any we would have to discuss that, means the contract was written to hold you rather than to keep you.
Fifth, separate the fee from the ad spend. Management retainers for a single-branch restaurant in Kuwait mostly land between 150 and 400 KD a month, and content production with a proper shoot day is usually another 200 to 500 KD. The ad budget should be billed to your card inside your account, never routed through the agency's card with a markup you cannot see. Ask what happens to the retainer if you pause ads for the summer, when half of Kuwait travels in July and August. A good agency has already thought about those two months.
Sixth, ask which client they have said no to. Every agency worth hiring has refused something: a Ramadan campaign requested two days before Ramadan, a discount that would sell at a loss. Then ask us the same six questions. Our answers: your accounts, in your name, always. We guarantee work, not orders. Reports lead with cost per order and repeat rate. You pay the platforms directly, we invoice the retainer. Ninety days, then month to month, thirty days' notice. If any agency, this one included, dodges one of those, hire someone else.