Nowadays, starting up a business or campaign can be as easy as creating a business page on Instagram and growing from there. But to create a sustainable business, more people have to be involved and growth is inevitable.
Hearing more from both Reena and Aashiq, here’s how they handle networking, finding clients, and dealing with the industry.
What is the importance of a good team and strong partnership?
“I stress on self awareness, understand everyone is an individual and has personal aspiration and emotion. And what’s important may vary to each person at different places.”
Though the co-founders split their roles, where Reena takes execution and Aashiq is more in networking leads, they make sure to bounce off each other, and their team. Their team is involved in most, if not all, systems and processes, because what they feel is important is to create an inclusive environment for growth and learning and using that to help each person achieve their individual goals as well as team goals.
Aashiq and Reena don’t penalize mistakes, because everything has a reason. Being able to communicate properly, and being understanding is an important facet that applies to every team member. They strengthen their bond by sharing the negative losses, as well as celebrating the wins, as a team. Honesty is important in order to grow, so as to learn from mistakes matters more than never making mistakes, and hold accountability and reliability moving forward.
What about networking and finding clientele?
When they first started, both Reena and Aashiq they reached out to hundreds of clients across multiple platforms including email, phone call, LinkedIn, etc., that resulted in two interviews. But quickly, through their past connections and close-circle support, their reputation grew because of the quality of the work they put in.
In their first year, 95% of customers came from past connections, in 2nd year it went down to 75% coming from networks and 25% of leads came to them through other platforms.
According to Aashiq, there are two distinct paths that businesses go through:
1) The Hunt: where the team searches for potential companies and customers.
From there, if you do it well, build trust and a positive reputation, then –
2) You become the hunted: not every business goes through it, but it is the aim in order to reach enough people, because it isn’t possible to reach everyone, which is the gauge of success in their service.
Externally, Aashiq and Reena are customer-centric, meaning they care about the service they provide and their relationship with their client above pricing. They would personally rather take a financial hit than have their reputation reflected poorly to the client, which means being honest with the clients just as they are with their team.
As for making positive connections, Reena stands by the fact that “humility plays a big role, and emotional responsiveness — if you have likeable traits, people will like you and want to work with you”, that’s what it boils down to, being a decent person who provides quality work.
Can you speak to the competitiveness of the industry?
“I’m aware of what’s out there but I don’t concern myself with other companies trying to do the same thing, if you’re convinced and know your value then it doesn’t matter who your competitors are or your numbers on socials; consider your impact and value even to one person. That’s what matters.”
What sets 78inc. apart is that they provide services in two sectors of marketing, which nearly no other companies do, so their main competition comes from the older and bigger corporations that have fine-tuned their strategy and processing.
But Reena and Aashiq don’t look to that as competition, but as a means of growth. Having a hand in multiple sectors opens up many doors, which also creates an opportunity to learn more in other fields, putting the importance on service value and flexibility, because it’s the people who bring value to the company in the end.
Take every competitive opportunity as a space to grow, whether you rise or fall, at least you’ll have learned something.
Continuing next week, read what Aashiq and Reena’s advice is for the upcoming generation in the digital industry.
