How we hire
We test for the job, not the résumé. Candidates do the actual work before an offer. Hiring is the single most refined process I own, because every delivery problem in an agency is a hiring decision that happened months earlier.
Founder
I founded Soltiks. We train and place dedicated people inside marketing agencies — full time, embedded, working like your own employees — and we stay accountable for what they produce. I also run delivery as Chief Operating Officer at RS Gonzales, a US marketing agency, which is where most of what I write here comes from. I am not writing about agency operations from the outside. I do the job every week.
The Origin
Scaling an agency, I needed people faster than I could hire them, so I went where everyone goes — the freelance marketplaces. I lost about $15,000 to remote "experts" who misrepresented their skills, delivered nothing, or simply disappeared.
I blamed the platforms for a while. That was the wrong diagnosis. Staffing breaks when nobody has skin in the game. A freelancer with eleven clients owes you a deliverable. They do not owe you the outcome. Nobody trains them, nobody checks their work before it reaches you, and when they vanish on a Tuesday it is your problem, not theirs.
So I did the expensive version instead. I opened a physical office in Karachi, hired in house, trained people on our own processes, and integrated them until they worked like one company. It took years to get right. Having built it once and proved it works, I founded Soltiks to do it for other agencies: dedicated people, full time, trained and managed from a real office, with somebody accountable for the output.
Serial Entrepreneur
I designed and sold my first website at twelve. At fourteen I tried to build a handmade leather shoe brand, Paizaar, and it failed before it made a single sale. At fifteen I was running modabuck.com, selling tactical gear and camping equipment online. Since then: The BIG. Ventures, an IT services company; Lalafy Eatery, a cafe I built in Lahore; an NFT collection, iNFiniTy ft. AZRAQ, meant to fund water solutions in the Thar desert; a marketing agency; and Soltiks. Some worked. Several did not, and the ones that did not taught faster.
The through-line is not the industries. It is the same job every time — work out what the business actually does, write it down as a system, hire people who can run it, and stay until it runs without me. That is what Soltiks sells. I am not selling you a method I read about.
The Part Most Staffing Companies Skip
Our team is in house, full time, and in one physical office in Karachi. That is a deliberate choice and it is the reason everything else on this page works.
We test for the job, not the résumé. Candidates do the actual work before an offer. Hiring is the single most refined process I own, because every delivery problem in an agency is a hiring decision that happened months earlier.
New people are trained on our processes before they go near a client account. And the training does not stop at the technical — I train our people on career development, personal development and personality development, continuously. Ask me what business I am in and the answer is people.
Quality control happens in real time, in the room, not in a weekly report. Someone is accountable for every output. If a placement is not working, that is on us to fix, fast.
You get someone who behaves like your own employee — same hours, same standards, same ownership of the result — without building, training and managing that team yourself. Cost and peace of mind, not one at the expense of the other.
Associate of Agentic AI
I spent three months learning agentic AI properly — not headlines, not demos. Then I built custom systems for how we work and trained the team to run them.
Here is my strong opinion, from doing it: most AI projects do not fail because the model is weak. They fail because the process underneath was never written down. An agent inherits whatever mess it is pointed at. Define the work first, automate it second, and the same technology that was a toy last quarter starts carrying real weight.
page speed, forms, copy quality, brand voice, fact-checks, Google Business Profile, backlinks and conversion checks, assembled into one report with a severity rating on every finding.
each working from a written brief and the client's own brand rules, not from a prompt somebody improvised that morning.
Claude, GPT and Gemini answering the same question independently, then reconciled into one recommendation. One model's confidence is not evidence.
so updates land where they belong without anyone copying and pasting them.
That is also the offer. An Associate of Agentic AI is a dedicated, full-time person inside your agency who builds these systems for your processes and maintains them — not a tool you buy, not a contractor who leaves with the knowledge in their head. A senior AI hire costs around $200k a year and months to recruit, and you commit to all of it before you know which process is worth automating.
Augment first, hire later.
Automate one process, prove the return, then scale around what worked.
Operations
I am Chief Operating Officer at RS Gonzales, a US marketing agency. I run delivery there —
I keep that role because it is the reason I can talk to you honestly. Most marketing problems I see are not strategy problems. The plan was fine. It was delivered late, by whoever was free, with nobody checking it on the way out the door. Every process we train a Soltiks resource on is one I have had to make work on live accounts first.
Research
I came up doing commissioned research before I did marketing, and it is still how I work. Nothing goes out under my name on a hunch.
You will notice what is missing from this site:
I would rather publish a smaller claim that survives scrutiny than a bigger one that does not. If I put a number in a post, I can show you where it came from.
In Print
I'm a contributor to The Express Tribune, the International New York Times' partner paper in Pakistan, writing in its T-Magazine section — in print, not online only, on technology and the businesses being built on it.
I also publish a newsletter on LinkedIn.
The first is my own, Reclaim The Audacity To Dream Big a short book for people building something from nothing, built around four words I have repeated for years: dream, believe, hustle, pray.
I'm also co-writing Season-Proof: The HVAC Marketing System That Outlasts Slow Seasons, AI Search, And Private Equity with Sarah Gonzales, for independent contractors who are very good at the work and stuck being the reason the phone rings.
Same argument I make in operations every day: a business that depends on one person's effort is not a system, and a system is what outlasts a slow season.
I built Lalafy Eatery in Lahore with my own hands, and I lost it. I have hired badly and paid for it in cash and in months. Neither of those is on a slide anywhere, but both are why Soltiks is built the way it is.
Whether you hire us or just read what we publish, I'm glad you're here. Most of what I write is about making the unglamorous parts reliable, because that is where growth actually comes from.
Mo. Abubakar LalaFounder, Soltiks
