Our Focus will be to be more transparent, Healthy growth ecosystem, expansion and strong leadership team.
By Deep Mehta, Co-Founder, DigiChefs
Since March 2020, when Covid19 struck, we have grown two folds. In terms of our team size as well as revenues. It’s very sadistic to put it this way, but yes, Covid19 brought a lot of work for businesses like ours, in the digital space.
This happened because of 3 major factors:
- We finally got the time to take our own brand “DigiChefs” seriously in the lull period between March 2020 – June 2020. We set up a strong lead funnel for ourselves using top B2B lead generation tactics (that we otherwise kept on using for our clients, but never got the time to implement for ourselves), and that is paying its dividend till date
- Because of the need to bring sales digitally, the businesses we started interacting with were much more serious about digital than ever. Our conversion cycle was halved, and our conversion rates increased two folds
- Our team at DigiChefs put in an excellent effort to generate massive results for brands, capitalizing on the high digital footprint and time spent digitally by consumers of our clients
With that said, we are really excited to move to 2022. There’s so much in our plans that we want to get going with, but here’s what we intend to achieve this year.
Becoming more transparent with our clients
We’ve seen so many clients come to us because they were unhappy with the lack of transparency in other agencies. Right from the billing for media spends, to the team that will be working on accounts, a lot of it was kept intentionally opaque for expected reasons. We want to break this cycle and be honest, genuine & transparent with our clients. That’s the ethos we’re also teaching to our chefs and we want to abide by the same.
Transforming the toxic “agency life” into a healthy growth ecosystem
Working 12 hours every week for several days in the week is not healthy, and there are no two ways about this. While there could be many reasons why the staff is left overworked – both in terms of the daily time commitment to the number of projects one can undertake, we want to be very mature and put an end to the toxic agency culture that exists out there. We now use tools to carefully monitor the bandwidth situation in all teams and systematically allocate jobs to ensure one doesn’t get stressed out of overworking. Of course, once in a while there could be situations where you’re working in full steam for over your working hours, but that cannot be a norm.
Wherever the leadership needs to stand up and put a foot down, they’re given the autonomy to do so.
Along with this, we have a Google Classroom set up to train every single Chef that joins our team to ensure they learn about our internal processes much quicker and don’t have to rely on any individual in the team.
Expansion in USA, Australia, Canada
We have worked with almost 30 clients now in these 3 geographies and the kind of reception has been amazing. Of course, the parity in currency helps us financially too. We’re seeing some very interesting projects in the UI/UX space, SEO, Performance Marketing, Web Development, Email & Marketing Automation from these geographies, and we’re kicked about the same. We’re already testing with having a partner in these geographies to give us a local presence there, which will surely make it more convenient for our customers there too.
Establishing Systems & Processes
One of the key things that we’ve done in the recent past is to not shy away from investing in the right tools. We select a tool and give it around 6 months, if it works, we continue with it, else we move on to find another solution to the problem the tool was solving for us. In 2022, we are aiming to work on – efficient project allocation, understanding real-time bandwidth in teams, calculating & optimizing profitability in every project, and creating SOPs in every activity we do where we typically see red flags with our clients – using tools and systems, no matter the cost associated.
Investing in a strong leadership team
We’ve been growing quite organically in the last 6 years. In doing so, we would douse fires as they rose. Now is the time to be proactive and have a healthy guard so that the fires don’t come up in the first place. One of the key things in achieving this will be to invest in a strong leadership team. We aim to grow our internal staff into leaders while we seek a few leaders from outside. We have already started charting out career roadmaps & paths for the key members of our team. We’re showing them the opportunities and the responsibilities associated with the same. People who show keen interest are given a few challenges to work upon. And people can surprise you when you challenge them! We’ve seen some of the shyest folks now lead a team of 8 wholesomely.
These are some of the key areas we’ll be working on in 2022. The stakes are high and we’re ready and excited to move forward into this year with utmost sincerity towards our goals.
