Am I Incapable, Or Is This Agency Just Badly Managed?

I’m 21M from India and recently joined a small digital marketing agency. I was completely honest during hiring that I had zero experience with Meta Ads or digital marketing. The main boss who is also a CA and which I think running this agency is a side business knew this and was actually very good during the hiring process. He told me he wouldn’t teach me everything but would guide me.

For the first few days, I genuinely thought I had found a good opportunity to learn and grow. I’m completely fine with learning things myself, and I’ve already learned the basics of Meta Ads.

But now I’m honestly confused as fuck.

They expect me to figure things out on my own, but most instructions are just given verbally and the actual work is pretty complex. I don’t even properly understand how the agency operates, what my exact role is, or what I’m supposed to be responsible for.

The person who is supposed to guide me does help sometimes, but he already has a lot of work and has literally told me not to keep calling him because he’s busy. I understand that — I don’t want to bother him either. But the main boss doesn’t even read or reply to my messages sometimes.

So what the fuck am I actually supposed to do?

I was hoping to learn Meta Ads properly — campaign setup, running ads, optimization, analysing results, client handling, etc. Instead, most of my work right now is making AI videos and static creatives as the content guy. Clients have even started contacting me directly about how they want their creatives made.

I’m also being given access to client accounts and expected to work on them quickly despite having no prior experience. I obviously don’t want to make mistakes with someone else’s money, but there isn’t really anyone consistently checking my work.

The roles are also extremely confusing. There are only around 4–5 people working, but everyone seems to have unclear/overlapping responsibilities.

Sometimes the boss says we should make the creatives ourselves. Other times he says we’re not a creative agency and our primary job is running ads.

He also sometimes gives me a lot of ideas and tasks during meetings, but they don’t always seem practical or clearly explained. For example, when he asks what I’ve been doing, I explain the work I’ve completed — which obviously isn’t much because I’m still new. Then he responds with a whole list of additional work as if I should already know how to execute everything.

And honestly, I can’t figure out what the owner himself is like. I can’t tell whether he’s actually deeply involved in the work, genuinely passionate about running ads, or whether he’s mainly good at talking to clients and selling the agency. Maybe I’m judging him too early, but internally the agency feels very disorganized.

The biggest issue is that I’m expected to be independent without actually being given enough context to become independent.

I’m only one week in, so I know I’m inexperienced. I’m not expecting someone to hold my hand or teach me everything. I’m willing to learn on my own.

But if I don’t understand the workflow, my responsibilities, or how things are actually done here, how am I supposed to independently figure out what I should be doing?

I took this job mainly to gain real-world experience, not just for the money. Right now I feel like I’m barely learning anything useful and sometimes don’t even have enough work to fill the day.

Am I expecting too much as a beginner? Is this normal in a small agency? Should I just give it more time and learn to figure things out myself, or is this genuinely a badly managed agency?

I’m genuinely trying to figure out whether I’m the problem because I’m inexperienced, or whether the workplace itself is the problem.

SORRY FOR THE RANT ???? NEED SOME HELP THATS All