This Women’s Day, MediaNews4U.Com is acknowledging women leaders of the Media, Marketing, Broadcast and Advertising fraternity who have given more than expected.
Started in the year 2014, with an idea in mind, fire in the heart and creativity in our hands, we embarked on the journey with thoughts evolving and our strength increasing every year. Today, we are proud to be a full-service advertising agency. With our four pillars of Zero Gravity Communications Strategy, Branding, Advertising and Digital, we are making whispers in this chaos. Soon we wish to make the noise in the Ad world to stop the chaos for a minute to watch the idea people have done.
In this segment, Khushboo Solanki Sharma, Founder, Zero Gravity Communications shares her views as an entrepreneur on women empowerment, the need for more women in technology leadership roles and how she aims to inspire more women to follow in her footsteps.
Journey
I am the founder of Zero Gravity Communications, an integrated full-service agency that is based in Ahmedabad. I have worked with L&T Infotech and Gateway Techno Labs in past before turning to a full-time Marketing and Branding Consultant.
Entrepreneurship is not an easy journey. Challenges are an inevitable part of it, and that is what makes us stronger.
At every stage, there have been different challenges. During the inception of Zero Gravity, our biggest challenge was to make a market like Gujarat realize the importance of the Digital world. Most of the brands in Gujarat were content with traditional forms of advertising. With sheer perseverance and determination, we started building trust amongst these brands. We raised awareness about the merits of Digital media and established ourselves as one of the strongest agencies with a Digital First approach.
Another major challenge was to attract the right kind of talent that I could trust. Over time, we built a strong team of 60+ people. We overcame the challenges of survival by providing the right kind of content and adhering to timelines. Currently, our primary challenge is to evolve into a national agency and attract the right kind of clients. Our work speaks for itself, and we are confident that we’ll sail through every challenge.
Inspiration & Inspiring the Team
Do it, own it, unlearn it, and Repeat it.
Advertising and the digital sphere is a very fast-growing and constantly evolving industry. I follow these basic rules as there aren’t big disruptions to be done rather disrupt the daily jobs to improvise. Also, I try to instill the same in the team.
In eight years, we’ve grown from a team of two to a team of over 60 people. We did a small but functional disruption in 2020 by evolving the lean structure of the company over time into various verticals with a dedicated department and respective set goals.
The inspiration can come from within Zero Gravity as we have a team of young talent who understand the market and are leaders from within. We allow them to grow, learn- unlearn and own whatever work they do. I believe that talent knows no age, and hence we have several young and promising colleagues who are leading respective departments at ZGC in way early in their career due to their sheer capabilities. Moreover, despite having a verticalised structure, I am a part of most projects and I’m directly involved and accessible to each employee across departments.
I empower the team. I introduce processes, learning tools, events, and open sessions with experts in different fields. An open environment is the best way to create innovations and draw inspirations. Even though we’re growing at a tremendous rate, we pay equal attention to all our employees as well as clients and try to ensure that we don’t lose the essence and quality of a boutique agency.
Empowerment of Women
Zero Gravity Communications is an agency which has employees from diverse backgrounds and there are sizable numbers of women who work hard every day whether at entry-level or helming departments. Women are leading from the front in a variety of departments such as designing, content, digital marketing, finance at ZGC. Also, at ZGC we are mindful of providing a necessary support system around personal or family constraints like extended maternity leaves or being flexible with work hours on days they really need to balance their other duties. There is an ownership toward work and deliverables as key expectation rather than clocking hours or being physically present all the time. Also, after working with women from different backgrounds and regions, we believe there is also a need to counsel, mentor, motivate with the right messaging or inspiring stories to make young women realize their true potentials. We often do ZERO HOURS, open house sessions where we bring young entrepreneurs and make them share their inspiring stories that help the team learn and have wider respect. This I believe will only make them more productive as they remain stress-free about nailing the balancing act.
Let’s understand women are choosing work not because of compulsion or need, rather to make an impact and individual identity. But there are years of patriarchy and bias against them. Opportunity and scope for growth is not equally available for them, as a women entrepreneur, I believe I have a responsibility to create a culture, nurturing ecosystem that allows women from different disciplines to come to ZGC and find their professional edge.
