How We Turned a $500 Company into a $400K Turnover Company in Six Years
It may sound unbelievable, even more so when I tell people that we did it in a market that’s traditionally perceived as a Red Ocean. Read on to find out how we did it!
The History
In 2015, I used to work for a digital agency which was the thing back then! I used to manage an online magazine before that and the marketing side of my food cart, so I felt like advertising was somewhere where I could combine my passion. So during this journey, I realized there’s a vast untapped market for SMEs in Bangladesh because existing agencies were charging too high of a price, and most SMEs couldn’t afford it. During this time, I got an offer from one of the most prominent digital marketing agencies in Bangladesh as a project manager. I realized that most of the items in the Job Description were things that I could do myself and were things that most aligned with the CEO’s responsibilities.
How we did it
So while hanging out with friends, we hatched an idea to create our digital agency. Within a month, we hired two employees, took office space in Panthapath (A storage place), bought cheap second-hand furniture, and started. The initial days were challenging since we did not have a lot of capital (Our total investment was 1 lac 20 thousand takas split among three partners). At one point, I realized that my partners weren’t looking to struggle for years before the business took off. So I made an offer to two of my loyal employees to buy the share and become co-founders, which is, to the day, the best decision I have made. In the initial days, we also had to leave our office cause expenses weren’t making sense, so we had to hang up the keys and resorted to the home office.
So since we got back to our home office (Three of us partners working from my room), we realized that there was a lot of untapped potential in the SME market, so we started to survey how much an SME can spend on marketing and how much return do they usually get. We made internal developments and, in a data-centric approach, figured out how to increase sales and ROI for any SMEs or Brands in Bangladesh. Alongside this, we figured out price points that will be affordable for such businesses. Per SME, we figured out promotional channels, brand archetypes, brand positioning, and audience segmentation and worked on that basis. Once we figured out all that, we started business development aggressively while ensuring that our client service and creative team were up to the task. All these departments were internally bolstered to ensure that we can serve clients better and increase capacity as much as possible. We took the Dhaka market by storm and, in three years, gained 100+ retainer clients while we served more than 300 brands in total. Alongside, we have 50+ team members spread across three cities, while our partner agencies and business development associates extend worldwide. The pandemic was really hard on us but thanks to our clients, our international base, and the brands that we serve, we were able to overcome it well.
Although we kept SMEs in mind, we started working with major nationwide brands around 2019 and now our portfolio includes names like Minister Group, Yamaha, ACI Foton, Citizen Cables, BBQ Bangladesh, Eastern Bank Limited, Square, Nadia Furniture, Saifur’s, EON Group, Unigas, Sajeeb Group, DFSK, and a lot of other nationwide brands from different industries who we have been serving for years now. Our SME portfolio also includes brands like 138 East, Hakka Dhaka, Tarka, Dhaka Metro, Sparrows, Puro, White Rabbit (CTG), Chomok (CTG), Villa Azzur, and 60+ other brands.
Our employees also had a big role in our path towards success. I can’t start naming them because the list will be too long, but along the way, we found talented, young, hardworking, and loyal people who kept us going in the toughest of days. One of the primary reasons for our success has always been our people and we consider them to be our biggest asset as should every service-focused business. A meticulous hiring process is also important and finding people who align with your goals and your office culture is equally significant.
Our success got us believing that markets such as Chittagong and Sylhet also have a lot of potential; thus, we opened an office in Chittagong about a year back and already have 20+ clients in that market. We recently also opened a Sylhet venture, a New York Venture, and a European network.
These are still early days, but we plan to grow big with short, witty content, short videos, witty statics, and a data-centric approach that breaks down your target audience to ensure which ad should be communicated for which segment; targeting also plays a significant role there, which is where the future is going towards not extensive budget campaigns which seldom bring a proper return.
To Summarize, here’s what we did, in a fisherman’s tale:
- We found a big yet unnoticed niche amongst a red ocean. In the SME social media industry, think of it like a puffer fish; fishermen (agencies) don’t want to offer SME social media services because they believe there’s no money. When they do, they charge a lot. Go where the pufferfishes are.
- Find a way to sell puffer fishes at a price that makes sense to your customers and still allows you to maintain a margin. We did that by increasing volume and developing capacities. Metaphorically, we just taught our men to catch more fish in less time while maintaining quality.
- Once we saw that we could create our blue pool. We built more ships to all the other places where puffer fishes are. There’s a thing about puffer fishes; they don’t travel much, so you must go to them.
- However, sharks (brands) travel, and sometimes Sharks get tired of the old ways and find new places to visit; if they visited our blue pools, we made it our primary mission to catch them and serve them.
- We did it as fast as possible while focusing on nothing else because we wanted to be the only safe and reliable place where people buy pufferfishes.
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Website: www.wiredmm.com
