I am Manav Sadhwani. I have worked on healthcare marketing, and nothing else, for thirteen years.
Pontem One is my practice. The registered entity is The Health Route Private Limited, Gurugram. If you work with us, you work with me.
Most agencies will not tell you who does the work.
You meet a director at the pitch. The account is then run by someone three years out of college who has also been handed a cement brand and a housing project, and who learned what a PSA test is the week before your call.
I am saying this plainly because you have almost certainly experienced it, and because the alternative I am offering has an obvious cost, which I will come to.
I was not an advertising person who discovered healthcare.
I started in 2012, in medical travel — the business of helping patients from other countries find treatment in India.
I nearly studied medicine. I did not, and I have made my peace with it, but the interest never left; biology is still the thing I read for pleasure. Medical travel was the closest I could get to the work without the degree, and it turned out to be an unusually good school.
It was unusually good because it was unforgiving. The patients were frightened, far from home, and spending money they often did not have. Nothing clever worked on them. Clever copy did not work. Urgency did not work. Testimonials did not work.
Telling the truth in enough detail that the reader could check it.
I learned the technical side because nobody else would do it — websites, content, AdWords, search. Not because I wanted to be a technologist. Because the work needed doing and I was the one in the room.
Healthcare is a distress purchase. That single fact invalidates most of what our industry sells.
Nobody approaches a hospital in a good mood. They are dealing with a problem — theirs, or belonging to somebody they love. And because it matters more than anything else they will buy this year, they want to get it completely right.
You cannot create urgency in someone who is already frightened. You cannot build a brand on adjectives for a reader who is checking every claim you make. The usual levers do not just underperform here. They work against you.
The part that costs me business
You are patient-centred. It is the thing your training beat into you and the thing you judge your colleagues by. And then you hire a marketing company that is not patient-centred at all — one that measures itself on leads, treats your patients as volume, and would run the same campaign for a diagnostic chain or a dental clinic or a gym.
I think you should hire people who match you on that one parameter. Not people who say they care about patients. People whose actual method falls apart if they stop caring.
I am not suggesting you will earn less. Practices that are genuinely findable, genuinely checkable, and genuinely trusted by referring doctors do better, not worse. I am suggesting the route there is the longer one.
What I have actually risked on this.
I run a second-opinion service for nuclear medicine scans with a consultant radiologist, as a partner rather than a vendor. I am paid a share of what the service earns. If the enquiries do not arrive, I am not paid.
I built it to find out whether the method works when there is no retainer to hide behind. It is small. It took longer than I expected. It is growing by referral from doctors who were not asked to refer, and it has never been advertised.
That is the whole case for it. I am not going to inflate it.
What thirteen years has not given me.
I should be straight about this, because you will find it anyway.
- I have not scaled this. For most of those thirteen years it was not my full-time occupation. The specialty I know best — nuclear medicine and theranostics — is small, and I did not broaden fast enough. I have two young children and for several years I did not have the hours. That changed. I am full time now, and this is what I intend to do for the rest of my working life.
- I am not a clinician. I do not write clinical content under my own name and I do not review it. Anything on your site touching a clinical decision carries your consultant's name, or it does not go up.
- I am one person, with a small team. That is the cost of everything above.
Fair question. Here is the honest answer.
What being small costs you
No overnight turnaround on large jobs. When you ask for twelve pages, you get them over weeks, not days.
No office in your city unless your city is Gurugram. No twenty-person team to put in a pitch meeting. No television, events or public relations — if you want everything from one supplier, a large agency is the right choice and I will say so.
And no ability to take you on if you need patients this quarter. I will tell you that in the first call.
What it gets you
The person who writes your strategy is the person who answers your phone. Nothing is handed to a junior after the pitch.
Thirteen years of clinical-sector context, not a briefing document read the night before. I have read both advertising codes end to end — most agencies have read a summary.
A refusal to publish anything about your practice I cannot show you the source for. And the honest answer when marketing is not your problem — sometimes the waiting list is, or the referral relationships are, and no amount of content fixes either.
Do not take my word for it. Use the test your patients use on you.
- Everything we claim about our own market is published with the data behind it, including the findings that make us look less clever. The working notes state the method, and the figures are reproducible on any Ahrefs seat in under an hour.
- When we get something wrong, we publish the correction under its own heading rather than editing quietly. There is at least one live right now — our published correction on the Patanjali case.
- We name our competitors and declare our interest. The comparison pages say when somebody else is the better fit.
- Ask me for a Physician schema example I have built that validates. Almost nobody in this market can produce one. It is the fastest way to tell whether an agency understands clinical search or has simply added it to a service list.
Pontem One is the healthcare practice of The Health Route Private Limited, Gurugram. Always written as two words — several unrelated companies use the first word on its own.
Start with an audit, not a pitch.
It takes about a week, it is free, and it ends with four numbers and a straight answer about whether this is worth doing at all. If the answer is no, I will say so.