The most revealing thing One Source did in its first year was work it did not do. A real-estate company approached the young consultancy with a proposition: place favorable stories in newspapers and get paid for the placement. For a business running on ₹5-10 lakh of its founders' savings, this was not a philosophical exercise. It was revenue. It was also, in the founders' view, the wrong kind.
They declined. The contract was sizable, co-founder Sandeep Rao later recalled, but accepting it would have trained everyone involved to mistake purchased editorial space for earned belief. The young firm chose slower growth instead. It is easy to admire a principle after the balance sheet is healthy. A principle before the first office is a different animal.
A company borrowed from a chat group
The name already had a life. In 2014, years before the consultancy, Rao, Srishty Chawla, and collaborators had started One Source as a free communications community. On WhatsApp, PR people, journalists, brand teams, and job seekers swapped information that agencies often guarded: media movements, openings, leads, advice. By 2024, the separate community was reported to span more than 35,000 members across 85 groups.
This mattered because the founders were not designing an agency from a conference-room abstraction. They had watched the industry at conversational distance. They knew the familiar irritation of a journalist receiving an irrelevant pitch, the client's frustration with five agencies protecting five scopes, and the agency's temptation to count activity because impact is harder to prove.
In June 2018, Rao, Kunal Rao, and Chawla pooled their savings and began working from home in Delhi. Launch coverage also names Anup Kamath as a founding partner. Each brought a different corner of the trade: public relations, content, branding, films, and animation. The domestic arrangement was not serene. Sandeep joked later that arguments about work left broken tables and cupboards. It took about a year for home and company to stop occupying the same emotional room.
Start at the other end of the funnel
Most agencies are built around the thing they know how to invoice. The PR shop proposes coverage. The film studio proposes a film. The digital agency proposes impressions. One Source's central idea was to begin one step earlier: what, exactly, must change in the client's business?
The One Source operating sequence
The company says it does not charge to figure out how to meet the objective. It figures out the route, then attaches the cost sheet and the timeline. The line is partly salesmanship, but it contains a useful operating rule. Strategy is not a decorative stage placed before delivery. It determines what delivery should exist.
“The trick is not owning every instrument. It is making every instrument play the same song.”What the integrated model amounts to
Today the score is broad: corporate communication, public relations, digital marketing, investor relations, branding and films, content marketing, public affairs, analyst relations, and influencer marketing. The company can develop an executive voice, manage a crisis, make an explainer, position a company for analysts, plan paid distribution, or shape a policy argument. It sells retained and project work to enterprises, growth companies, institutions, and public-interest organisations.
That last square is the product hiding inside the services. Integration reduces the handoffs where a message gets translated, diluted, or defended as somebody else's responsibility. It also raises the burden on One Source. The firm cannot blame the media agency when it is the media agency too.
The first failure was scale - or the appearance of it
The home office was one difficulty. Credibility was the larger one. As better-known clients appeared, some wondered whether the small team could handle the volume. A young consultancy can claim senior attention; a large buyer hears capacity risk. Referrals from existing clients and venture investors helped cross that gap. Delivery did the rest.
A renewal says more than a launch party. In 2020, Rebel Foods extended One Source's integrated mandate for three years across corporate communication, investor relations, consumer outreach, and content marketing.
The early roster included Rebel Foods, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Reliance General Insurance, and Uflex. Later public mandates included DriveU, Juniper Green Energy, Vitraya Technologies, Grant Thornton Bharat, and, in December 2025, Bata India. The Bata brief involved corporate narrative, leadership visibility, and reputation as the shoe company pursued younger customers, omnichannel retail, and product expansion. That is the kind of assignment the integrated premise was built to win: a business transition that cannot be explained by one press release.
There is no disclosed institutional funding, valuation, or precise revenue. One Source remains privately held. LinkedIn places it in the 51-200 employee band and recently showed 132 discoverable employees. Those are useful scale signals, not an audited growth chart. The cleaner evidence is the sequence of larger mandates and the widening range of services.
Purple squirrels need vacations
One Source uses the recruiting term “purple squirrel” for a rare person whose skills, experience, and temperament fit an unusually specific role. The firm's purple version appears everywhere in its current identity. It is playful, memorable, and a little odd - much better, in other words, than another photograph of people pointing at sticky notes.
The cute mascot covers a serious constraint. Integrated consulting needs people who can see beyond their own craft. A brilliant publicist who treats design as decoration is not integrated. A performance marketer who cannot read a room is not integrated either. The model requires specialists with enough curiosity to share a problem.
By 2023, the company had appointed a Head of Culture. It had also publicised mandatory block leaves every six months, an annual nine-day company-wide vacation, extended off-sites after pandemic screen fatigue, and a “high performance, high reward” philosophy. In 2026 it held a Human Library during Mental Health Week: colleagues paused for short conversations in which volunteers shared difficult personal experiences and listeners practiced the unfashionable office skill of paying attention.
The useful thing is the boundary
Founders often ask what they can copy from another firm's success. Copying One Source's list of services would be expensive and mostly beside the point. The portable move came earlier: decide which revenue would deform the company, refuse it, and make the alternative concrete enough to sell.
For One Source, the alternative was not “better creativity,” a phrase flexible enough to mean nothing. It was a sequence: business objective, backward plan, integrated specialists, cost, timeline. This works when the client can name the outcome, share enough information to measure movement, and give one partner room to coordinate. It works poorly when procurement buys isolated outputs, when every channel has a different owner, or when the desired result is coverage at any cost.
The company has accumulated awards, offices, clients, and a rather busy purple squirrel. Yet the first refusal still does the most explanatory work. One Source began by turning down a shortcut that would have made the next shortcut easier. Then it built a business around the longer road.