one is a core skill of creativity uh which stands true anyway so I think in any kind of
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marketing you need to be able to write good copy you need to be able to you know communicate the message well so that's one key skill second is so creativity second is Clarity uh which is that if you have a strategic problem then how clear can you get to the solution you know how distilled is your thinking so that's the second skill creativity Clarity third being consumer so how much effort effort you take to understand the consumer of the client that you are being interested with

subject matter kpi client satisfaction kpi uh peer or team satisfaction kpi and your ability to hit the business targets those are the four fundamentals and you can you know double click on each of these so you set goals you give them numbers with respect to this

someone who wants to start a digital marketing agency which is the usual trend of someone quitting an agency and starting a new one what's your biggest advice to them I would say have an anchor client have the first three clients that you know you're going to get and then uh be very clear what your differentiation is going to be if you're going to be yet another agency then there's no point setting it up to be honest uh I mean the market is a
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tough market right now it's like in undated with lots of service providers so what is your differentiator going to be what's your reason to exist um and how is your service delivery going to be significantly better and which actually solves a client paino and then you need to have your first three clients outlined right in addition to that I would say also build the first year business plan month by month how many clients on each month and how many new net new clients on each month at what price therefore
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how many people build that out cool so basically you're trying to say that we need to be uh measuring every single element of acquiring a client and how many people we need to hire so the cost is all yeah so you have a good idea o

if I'm stopping to grow the signal is that what I'm selling to the market the other person is not finding valuable enough to buy Beyond a certain threshold so how can I enrich my product and that is customized to everybody at every different Journey so how do I enrich what I'm trying to sell if I'm trying to make films or if I am making films how do I enrich that film
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quality if I am selling a social media Services package how do I enrich the level of creativity in that if I'm selling marketing automation how do I further in you know kind of increase that

in all the cities in India there is enough business for at least I would say 10 to 12,000 people per city office to exist there's enough business for that much

what's the secret rate of growth I think you know we have these principles that we write down which we try to follow as much as possible I'm not saying we are the best adherance to that in the market but definitely our focus on making sure that client business wins we win so there is a furious focus on making client businesses win and there is that DNA that you know everything that we do is to make sure that the client business Win Second is that one of our big spurts
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that we got known for was something we pioneered called everyday creativity so everyday creativity was talking about saying okay you know actually what client is hiring us for is to inject creativity in the bloodstream of their whole organization so every piece that I put out how can I inject everyday creativity now that is then moving on the tech side with delight and every interaction and similarly on the media side so uh really core single fundamentals which then are relentlessly driven throughs the whole ecosystem is
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the second thing that I would say so this whole client business wins we win and the Cor cor responding principles this principle of everyday creat all the principles are listed on the webs

so covid was definitely good for us in the sense the market demand came we pitched we pitched well we got business um but at the same time our organizational design needed to scale which we weren't able to scale at the same Pace three major things we did one is we divided the company into multiple small business units or strategic business units sbus that we called them within sbus we had multidisciplinary
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functions functioning within the same sbu so in the same sbu you'll have if it's a creative sbu you will have account planning you will have servicing you'll have creative uh all and art all within the same sbu if you're in Tech then you will have your project manager your uh technical manager your coders and your uiux all within the same sbu so we started forming different different SB each of these sbus became roughly 80 to 100 people each then we started really you know what were the problems
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that we had our actually very basic problems so I can't even tell you that which you know some Jadu we did our problems were that we didn't have a stringent system to control over hiring so we put systems in place for that because we we suddenly started exploding in terms of l

now we do you know there are few things we measure at our quarterly business reviews which we are going into next week so every quarter we are managing uh and we are measuring are three four things one is we we set out a business plan at the start of the Year where are we against side business plan not just in terms of new business
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one but also in terms of Team size budgeted for and uh salary budget deployed so at the business level we are managing measuring that then we are measuring how much is our shortfall how much is the gap that we have to cover so that each of the sbus has that intelligence data given by a central team they don't have to do that they are given all that data then we are measuring the scope versus delivery of the client so if the client has given us a scope of 100 pieces have we delivered 100 have we deliv 102 have we delivered
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120 have we delivered 140 so we see the variance where there is lesser delivered it's a red flag for us so that also helps us track and see at a client level where we are not delivering up to the mark then we are able to track you know kpi or engagement score or you know we spoke about those different different kind of servi

what does a shabang digital marketing pitch look like what goes in that winning presentation okay so the pitch usually typically starts with ABC so a is audience uh second is a brand and third is a category uh or actually in the form of ACB so audience category and brand

so audience typically will
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look at like you know for the brand what is the audience exactly like we then go under the skin of the audience typically in the pitch we will do audience interviews we will go and do focus groups we will go and uh you know scan social conversations we will scan what people are saying about the particular you know that particular audience on e-commerce website what reviews they are talking about then we will crunch you know 12 13,000 reviews together and use AI to come with the commonalities of that audience like what is it that
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they're really looking after so we have really good sense of the audience because normally a client will buy your service when they know that you understand the audience very well that's one part of it second your client will buy a service when they know you understand their brand very well so the second part will be brand where we will decode not just the brief but what we understand of the brand and like you know what are the uh you know like visual guidelines what do they say what is the brand personality what is the
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brand archetype uh you know like what does that particular brand uh uh you know like how how a

how did shabang back the first big digital marketing client something that changed the game of organization so our philosophy from day one has been that no single client should be that big to dictate The Fortunes of the agency so our first client that we had we were fortunate that we had a client PHX pipes
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and second client we had godri Industries both these clients were very strong Legacy names that gave a very strong trust to the market to other big companies that they can also work with us so I would say that the more Legacy names you can get behind you and tough players and longlasting players in the market you can get to work with you and if they can give you their uh testimonial or credibility uh then that's a good way to grow the agency I think anchoring on one client alone is a risky

so minimum retainership across Services starts about 3 lakh rupees a month okay and goes up to let's say 18 to 20 lakh rupees a month okay and then the size of the team that is put into that differs between each of these pricing

let's break it down this way in terms of maximum gross revenue it is a media buying and planning business because we are buying and planning space for clients on Google Facebook programmatic what have you so that's the highest volume highest in terms of net volume is our uh digital creative business so that is uh when I mean net is uh net of third party costs what stays at home so that's the highest is the digital creative
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business and the highest margin is on our Tech business

so most people leave because of compensation related issues uh second most people leave is because their manager is not good you know they feel like manager not invested in their growth

last year we were give or take 200 crores what we are projecting this year you will take 250

the best advice I ever got is that the answer to all problems in any business is growth so keep growing

if you're building a uh business so hard thing about hard things is a very very good book to read uh second is if you're building any business or you're doing any kind of marketing uh how to speak to the consumer is a book called The Mom's test so very interesting book on how to speak to Consumers and how to get insights from consumers that's the second thing I would say uh third I would say if you want to understand life then you study the bhagat Gita