ST14 | Sharad Lal On Growing A Business With Just A Few Big Clients

Most people don’t even get started on one business idea. And it’s rare to find someone who’s worked on two or three. But six, come on, that’s crazy talk, right? Well, not really. Today we are speaking with Sharad Lal, Founder and currently chairman of 24 Inc, a Singaporean advertising agency that helps large clients execute digital and retail campaigns. He also runs a successful podcast called “How to Live”, which was recently number 3 in Singapore. And I’m really frankly quite jealous because that’s a higher rank than my podcasts have ever achieved.

And that’s not all. He’s founded six different businesses in actually quite a variety of spaces. Some succeeded, like 24 Inc, and others did not like his first startup. So we’re going to understand from him how he thinks one can be successful with Bootstrap businesses.

Discussion Topics: Sharad Lal On Growing A Business With Just A Few Big Clients

• Getting a very large, first customer
• The challenges with the business
• Differentiating the business with large agencies and copycats
• To what extent should a new entrepreneur try everything?
• Reducing and managing risks
• Tips for service entrepreneurs

Transcript: Sharad Lal On Growing A Business With Just A Few Big Clients

Amit: Sharad, thank you so much for joining us today on ShopTok. For a start, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your business.

Sharad: Thanks, Amit. Great to be on the show. I grew up in India, and after going to the same business school that you did, in Calcutta, I moved to Singapore with my first job in Procter and Gamble. I worked in marketing for three and a half years. Then I went to consulting with BCG for a year and a half. Back in 2006, I started 24 Incorporate, the business that you talked about an advertising agency looking after big consumers, and good clients. That’s been my core business throughout.

Along with that, I’ve been involved with a few other businesses. I’ve been involved with a tech platform. I recently started a coaching business. I’ve also been involved with the training business early on. So in summary, that’s what I’ve done. I still live in Singapore, I’m married. I have two kids. And that’s what it is.

Amit: Yeah. That’s an impressive array of businesses Sharad. I know some of them, actually, many of them because you started 24 a long time back, many of them are things that you started in parallel. And I think there are probably a couple that are running in parallel right now.

So that’s quite a portfolio. So maybe, let’s try to understand how you actually get started on this journey. And like, was it like some burst of inspiration or something that you took away from work that got you started? And maybe how did you feel when you took your first steps?

Sharad: It wasn’t inspiration; it was more of a practical decision. So at that time, after having worked with PNG and BCG, I wanted to do something on my own, because I wanted to be in control of what I was doing. At the age of 29, I started 24. At this stage, I had created a dot com before that and that was a tech business in 2000.

When the dot com boom was alive. I learned a lot during the dot com boom, it was exciting time, but the business packed up in six months. And I’d seen many other businesses pack up quickly. So that was my background conversation when I was thinking about entrepreneurship at this stage, and for me, the learning was, I’d like to create a business that has sustainable cash flow. So I can move from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial world, and get my financial state to a level where I can have a reasonably good life.

Amit: Wow, that’s pretty cool. It’s impressive that you actually took the plunge and this was a long time back, India was definitely not a startup kind of friendly place at the time. So amazing that you actually went and did it. Okay, and then that experience is what then you later took on to running your own to starting 24. Now you’re saying that you focused on cash flow. Was that something that you kind of started out wanting to do? Or is it something that by constraint or necessity you ended up doing?

Sharad: I want to establish something which is a little more stable, steady cash flow kind of a business, given the experience earlier, because I wasn’t looking at a binary that you do something right, in two years, you can just kick it out of the park and you need not work. So I was thinking of building it ground up because of my experience.

And then with that mindset, I looked at what are the opportunities out there. And one of the opportunities there at that stage in Singapore, this is 2006, many consumer goods companies were creating their headquarters in Singapore. PNG had already done that, but many other companies were coming. And there were no other agencies who were servicing these companies beyond the global agencies.

So these people were looking at agile agencies, cost-effective agencies. And I thought, that’s a big scope of the market there, and having been in PNG, I know what the end deliverable should be. So it’s a calculated risk, which can help me establish a sustainable business reasonably soon. And with that mindset, I went about creating this.

Amit: Right. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s really interesting that, essentially, you spotted this opportunity for large brands to be serviced by someone local, versus, those, like you said, large global ones with multi-country presence and all. So is it that PNG was your first customer or among your first customer?

Sharad: Yes, that’s right. So PNG was my first customer. And at that stage, before leaving, I knew I would be able to get some projects there. I knew I would be able to get some opportunities, because there were so many opportunities, and people were looking at quality agencies in Singapore to do it.

So I was able to get them. And then my strategy, to begin with, was to go deeper in PNG, even though it was one company that had multiple brands, and they were looking to do good work and being able to do good work, learn with them, build that in the portfolio, it would be easier to expand in the future.

Amit: So I’m also curious. So I know you worked in PNG, but you also worked at BCG. And usually, I’ve talked to a few service business founders, and they start with whatever they last because that’s where they’ve built their expertise and stuff. And you were a consultant. So why an ad agency versus anything else?

Sharad: Yeah, fair point. So I think the ad agency was purely from an opportunity standpoint, and I thought it was the best opportunity in line with the holistic lifestyle. In terms of doing something related to consulting, I had only spent a year and a half in BCG, and I was still fairly Junior. So I think folks who have gone in and spent five, six years, or even 10 years in consulting, working in a certain sector, they can call themselves experts, and then they can offer consulting, it becomes easier.

I did leverage a little bit of what I knew from the PNG standpoint because there was some understanding of marketing. And the people I was targeting were people like me in my previous life, it was the starting level brand people and the help that they needed.

So I had a good understanding, and there was some continuity to understanding what they needed, what was going on in the organisation inside, and what would make them look good. So I think that was the transfer of knowledge from my previous job moving forward.

Amit: Got it. Okay, I have a bit of a side question over here, if you don’t mind. So, you know, a lot of people, or frankly, everything that you read talks about how you should set up something that you’re passionate about, because if you aren’t passionate about it, how are you gonna keep going for the long run. Is this something that you’re actually passionate about? Like you really, really wanted to do it? Or was this opportunistic?

Sharad: Very interesting. And I think you hit the nail right on the head. It was an opportunistic move. And it wasn’t something I was completely passionate about. But yes, I enjoyed advertising and marketing and I enjoyed working back with PNG, which was fun. It’s of course better if you have both an opportunity and passion sitting in the same box, and you can create something in line with that.

But those opportunities are a little rare. And I think one of my latest businesses, which I’m doing in the coaching space, sits in that space, where it’s an area that’s come from a deep passion as well as there’s an opportunity. I think if people can find that, of course, the best way to go.

But if you can’t, and you really want to experience entrepreneurship, for me personally, I would bias myself towards a business through which I know I can get started, and get entrepreneurial experience, because it’s not that you get into a business, that’s all you do, you build a lot of skills, and then you can use those skills later in creating a passionate business. Or maybe just stay in your business and take it to different levels and develop a passion and create something big. So that’s my viewpoint, I think.

Amit: Yeah, and thanks for sharing that. I think it’s important for people to understand that because I think a lot is made out of, the fact that you need to be all in on something and you’re gonna die for that idea. But maybe opportunity trumps passion because ultimately you have to make money. I think that was a really good insight over there.

So coming back to the agency and the early days, you’re an untested agency. And you’re working with, I mean, really the largest brands in the world. So it’s probably the hardest way to move forward. So what were some of the challenges in working with such clients as a new, untested agency, they don’t really know what to expect.

Sharad: Sure. So I think the biggest challenge was because these were global companies, the decision on what agency to use was a global decision. And lots of the agencies that we competed with, when we started out, were signed agreements all the way in since added that they were going to work across the brand, everywhere in the world. So that was a huge challenge.

So people who wanted to work with us, with my agency had to go around the system and find budgets that were outside, which we’ll call experimental budgets, or things that the big agency did not want to take on, for them to transfer it to me. So I think that was a huge challenge. Because even though they might think at least the people on the ground that they prefer working with us, they are happy with our work globally, they need to go towards that mandate. So I think that’s one.

The second thing is even if you’ve established yourself with this particular brand, chances are you may not get the next project because they need to go back to that big agency that they work with. They just used you for this. So I think that was from a challenging standpoint, but the good news was the business was growing, brands that called out this region as a region where they wanted to establish more and more business, Singapore, as a hub was growing, more and more brands were run out of here.

More countries came into the scope from here, because of which the opportunities increased. And the marketing landscape changed as well, purely from the stage when I started out it was mainly television commercials, retail became an important thing, decisions were made in store and a lot of these agencies did not have the nimbleness to be able to do in-store work, packaging became important. Digital became important later on. So as the marketing landscape changed, and as the scope of Singapore as a hub changed, opportunities, the pie became a lot bigger for people like us to operate and work from.

Amit: Right. So okay, this is interesting. So definitely a kind of challenging start, I would say, it’s not something that you just walked in, because you had relationships, I was half expecting you to actually say that, Oh, you know, I had these relationships, and they just wanted to work with me. But on a related question here. So were you the sole person in the business at the time?

Sharad: Yes. So, for the starting point to keep costs low to bootstrap, like you mentioned, to keep it bootstrap it was just me and my laptop. And that’s how we started out. And because I wasn’t the creative person I would outsource work to an agency in India. So it was an outsourcing model. And of course, I interviewed multiple agencies and through that, I signed a contract with one of the agencies so that we would build expertise over time.

So I would get work, do it with them that time you Skype every two to three weeks, go back to Bombay, come back here and get work till a certain stream of business was established and that’s when I had the first hire so it was a real bootstrap starting point.

Amit: Yeah, very interesting. And I really like this thought process of you doing it alone, outsourcing whatever it is you need for expertise. And then when you get sufficient work that will feel like one more person, then you bring that person on board. So on the bringing on board part, how did you get your first few hires? And frankly, why did they want to join you?

Sharad: Absolutely. So, luckily, the undergrad schools here, NUS, NTU had a lot of smart people. And back in 2006, the opportunities weren’t that many. I was able to get people from there. And to them, the value proposition of working with my company was you get to work directly with an entrepreneur who’s worked in PNG, who’s worked in BCG, who gets this training through to you and you’re the sole person working here.

So you’re gonna get all that expertise. So it was a reasonably good proposition for them. Because of this I got one and he had a good experience. And then I was able to get other people in, from the similar in the US, actually, they were from NUS the first few hires, National University of Singapore for people not familiar with Singapore.

Essentially, you were able to sell them on the learning, not the brand name, and you know, that kind of stuff.

Sharad: And sorry, if I may, the brand name was they would then get to work with PNG brands, which was also a little bit of a draw, and get insights into how PNG works, marketing works, which was I think, the little brand draw to them as well.

Amit: Oh, very interesting. So, you’re writing on your client’s brand. That’s actually quite clever. And how did you fund the business initially? Or did you need to fund it at all?

Sharad: I didn’t really need to. It was just getting a laptop. And I think the payment terms were such that PNG had good payment terms at that point in time, the deal that I struck with the agency back in India was a certain revenue share, which would be paid once the money came in. So I needed very, very little to just get going. Back in 2006, things were cheap. So it was easy to get going and slowly build a certain base and build some sort of a balance sheet through which one could expand.

Amit: Right. But the payment terms point here is important, essentially, you were able to do it such that there is a back-to-back process of money flowing versus you having to pay for everything upfront.

Sharad: Absolutely.

Amit: You mentioned earlier in the discussion that you found this opportunity where there was a gap between global agencies and work that needed to be done on the ground. So I guess, overall, that was a differentiator for you versus anyone else. But how did you differentiate from these large agencies on one side? And I’m sure there would have been copycats things happening on the local side as well.

Sharad: So I think differentiating with the large agencies was very clear because it was more on the price point, it was agility, nimbleness, willingness to do work and there’s a big gap of offerings, but it’s not very easy for these agencies to change their model, because they have big creatives who have signed up to work on those agencies, because they want to make award-winning television commercials.

The leadership will not turn the agency’s direction towards this. And I think this was, like 15 years back and it still holds true today as well. But like you said copycats or other entrepreneurs coming up and looking at this opportunity was of course challenging. I think everyone had their own areas, some people had very strong creativity.

For us, it was Client Servicing and understanding client needs better because I was part of the client so I could see the big picture and understand what they needed, what made them look good, where do you need to go out and really hit it out of the park in terms of creativity, where do you need to give it early, so that they can show something and creativity is not important, but just giving them something.

So just understanding the client’s needs and being able to service them based on those needs versus anything else, I think was a big differentiator so that we could always create things in line with what the client needed.

Amit: You made a very interesting point here which is what makes them look good. So, it is important because if you’re an agency, you want to do stuff that then they can take to their respective managers and teams and stuff and not look like oh wow look at this fancy thing, which is never gonna work in the market. Or look at this horrible-looking thing, which I got for cheap. The motivations are quite different.

Sharad: Absolutely, and maybe that’s a little bit of learning from BCG because even what consulting as a services business does is whoever hires them, the CXOs and others, the job is of course to solve problems but to make them look good in front of their leadership as well.

Amit: Right. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I think it’s something that every service entrepreneur should actually bear in mind, which is you weren’t just developing that service in isolation or giving that product in isolation. There is a lot of org-related stuff around it, which you need to wrap in that.

So tell me more about this, what were some of the, maybe the other challenges that you faced once, maybe you kind of got going a little bit, and you knew you had a running business. So some other challenges or decisions that you had to make.

Sharad: Sure. So maybe the challenge is something that could be interesting for people to listen to. It is one of the big things that entrepreneurs need to do and I think Service Entrepreneurs more so is putting your ego down. And it sounds good before actually going out to do it.

But if you’re running an agency for four or five years, and then you need to go back to people, and we’ll all compare, these could be people who could be two levels below reporting to you, and then you go there and they piss on your work if I can use that word and tell you what marketing is, and you need to take it and then go back and sort it out.

Because you’re still an agency on the fringe. The big agencies can give back attitude, you do not. So, you have an unequal relationship. So you need to be able to take it, manage the situation, and then go back to get more. So I think that’s self-management, that putting the ego completely away, to be able to hustle and fight it out and take whatever comes your way as you see the bigger picture of growing your business was a huge challenge as well. Yeah, so I think that was a huge challenge.

Amit: That’s a big one, I think the ego element is important. Most people who’ve worked in the corporate and then start their own business, very quickly realise that you can’t think about their earlier VP title or whatever they had. Now you’re just a regular person offering a service. You mentioned or rather your goal, right from the start was to work on large clients. So, is that something that you kind of need to remind yourself about every so often, or you were just clear, you’re just doing this, you don’t need to seek more clients?

Sharad: That’s a good point. And absolutely, reminders are needed. And quite often they come in terms of difficult mistakes that you might make. So there’s always as an entrepreneur, there’s this skill of, or this trait of being hungry for business going out and trying to get business. And after a period of time, you realise that these businesses, which were, let’s say, for me outside the large clients, a new startup that’s come up and you need to do work for them, do not help me take the business forward, because there’s a lot of work.

In terms of profitability, it’s low. I’m squeezed out. If I put the same amount of time into some of the other clients, I can get a bigger bang for the buck and a bigger return on investments. There were different stages where experiences with some other business development taught me these lessons. And then after a period of time, it became clear to us and we still make mistakes.

But it became clear to us that our business model is big clients, profitable business, and we’re going after profit versus growth if there was a tradeoff there. Profitable business, big clients, and let’s stay focused on that. So yes, reminders were needed, but it’s good to be clear on the business model so you can keep coming back to that after making a few mistakes here and there.

Amit: So, again, a bit of a question here. So when you’re first starting out your business, right, you may have a thought process in mind, like, I’ll work with large clients or something like that. But to what extent do you think new entrepreneurs should try everything that comes their way and at what time, should they kind of decide to cut out things that they shouldn’t be doing?

Sharad: I think they should try everything. And for me, to be honest, it wasn’t that large client will always be the case. It was a starting point. And then it was learning through the process to realise that actually, the model can stay good, with large and deep.

And so with that context, what I would say is people should try everything, especially in the first one or two years, where the stakes are low, where you’re trying to get your business model, right where you can pivot a lot. So my thing would be to try as much as you can, and then slowly settle into a model.

Because everyone has a timeframe, you want the business to start working, you want the confidence loop to hit in that, yes, I’ve kind of created something, I can have a life based on this. And then you create a steady business. But as you even create a steady business, there could be areas along the side that you experiment with and keep seeing whether it works or not. And whether you should change track or not. But it’s good to create that core very early maybe in the first one or two years and then be able to do experiments away from that which does not distract from the core.

Amit: Got it. So, essentially you are saying for a year or two, you can actually just go for whatever will pay you money. And then you can settle down too.

Sharad: In my opinion, and eventually you would settle down, you would still try different things. But if I can put my point clearly, you can still try different things, but at least have a very clear sense after one or two years that this is your core. So you have to have 80 to 90% of your energy towards this. And for the rest, you can keep trying. And if something else becomes big, you add that to the core later on.

Amit: Right. So a few more questions on the thought process of going deep within a few clients, because that’s actually, I mean, it’s not something that one would normally think about, I guess if you’re starting an agency, but on the face of it, the way you’re explaining it, it sounds actually quite good. So my question is, number one, how do you reduce the risk of this approach, because the few clients obviously mean large parts of your business are dependent on them?

Sharad: Yeah. And you’re right like my BCG brain would tell me that diversification is the right way to do it. But I think when the rubber hits the ground, the reality could be different. But in terms of managing the risk, a few risks are managed in terms of like for PNG, there are multiple brands, and the buying process is decentralised.

So it’s not like one source that suddenly gets cut off. So there is an event risk, which is global, they reduce agencies, or some ethical stuff goes wrong, and they don’t want to deal with you across brands. So I think that’s one macro risk that exists. But from a micro standpoint, these are mini companies that you’re working with.

So there could be 20 or 30 mini-companies within PNG that you’re working with. And obviously, it’s a lot more efficient to work with them because they have a similar way of working and what works in one can also work in the others this synergies and productivity there. So I think that’s one way. The second is the services that are offered. We started out doing retail design work, stuff you see in supermarket aisles, designing them because that was the area.

But as we went forward, it went into packaging design, it went into videos, digital work, and creating many events. So at any point in time, there are multiple services that we were doing. So from a services and brand standpoint, there was some amount of diversification. And then after a period of time, there were a few more clients outside PNG which were again, big clients with multiple brands. So there was some level of diversification, not ideal, but there was some level of diversification that took place.

Amit: This makes sense. Essentially, you’re saying that the big client is not one big client, it’s a portfolio of clients. I’m sure this is new to many people who might be listening to this. So that’s one side of the story, which is the few clients. And then there’s the whole question about going deeper and deeper within clients. And you did mention that you expanded your portfolio of services, which means you can do more with them.

But again, I mean, any agency working with a large client is probably trying to do something similar. Even if the agency is diversified, the Account Manager in charge of that client would only have to do that, right? So what’s your superpower that keeps you kind of expanding or deepening within these clients versus others?

Sharad: So in terms of our differentiation, which was understanding client needs, I think one of the things that happened quickly to us versus the other agencies was, we were able to see trends as they were shifting. So we were able to see that now, these are the buzzwords, this is what they want, this is what has been called out in their annual meets.

So we’ll see a lot of this over the next two years, let’s build expertise in it, or let’s find the right partners to do this work. So I think that client focus, being clear on where the market is moving, what people are looking at, and creating services back to that was a huge skill that helped in this.

And second, it is this entrepreneurial hustle thing that we had, as an agency, we were small, we were able to hustle and figure things out and work with experts, try things, learn things, and there was excitement in doing so. So I think for these two reasons, we were kind of able to differentiate from some of the other competitors that we were put up against.

Amit: Right. So you know, this is interesting, essentially, you are saying because of your subject knowledge in the space, like as a person from the industry you were able to pick up on cues. So if somebody says, Oh, you know, I heard this thing, or rather somebody said this at our event, you were able to pick up on the meaning of that versus just saying, Okay, fine, you know, somebody said something.

Sharad: Yes, and getting that intelligence because we were connected to the clients a lot deeper. Since I was one of them they would talk to me a lot more based on other things. And it was easier for me and the others who then work with me to get a lot of these buzzwords because often you’re just doing transactions then you just get lost in the transaction, but you’re not able to go deeper with people you’re working with and understand what really is changing in the landscape.

Amit: Does that play into your hiring decisions as well, then or not now like do you try to hire more people from the industry versus more creative people or something like that?

Sharad: So, to give the honest answer, we’d ideally like to hire better people in the servicing space who can do this, but over the last 5 to 10 years, like, the hiring has become very difficult in Singapore, and people coming out of NUS and even people who’ve worked in agencies have so many options the startups and stuff. So it’s difficult to get that.

So it’s better, we better place to train others to do it and take a lot of it between one or two senior people me and one or two others in the company take the bulk of this business development and relationship work while making sure that the others who bring in other skills in terms of execution doing it well, they stick to their skills.

Amit: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Because if you cannot hire a lot of people with a certain skill set, you have to leverage best the people that you have and try to distribute the work where you can actually hire or scale. Sharad, tell me, this is all based on 24 Incorporated. Now you’ve had other businesses, five other businesses. So are there any learnings running those businesses or even from the failures there?

Sharad: So maybe I can talk about what I might have done differently, and then talk about learning. So when I started at 24, because I was from BCG, I wanted to create a business with strong buzzwords. So I needed to leave BCG for something really cool. And that cool thing was creative process outsourcing. So my search was to create a business with these buzzwords.

So I went to India, got an agency, and wanted to outsource to them. I’m creating this outsourcing New Age outsourcing system. And that’s the way I was looking at it. To me, that was a big mistake, because I was getting into a business for the first time. The agency was a different business, I’d never done it. And just understanding that business would take time and establishing it.

And here I’d gone and complicated even further by actually getting the people who are working on the project based in India, communicating with them, and making the business work. So if I were to do it again, I would still outsource but I would keep the team in Singapore working with me dedicated so we all learned together, I had control over the entire thing, I learned better, and it moved forward and started hiring people once the model was established. It took me four or five years to do that. And then the business grew to a different extent, I would have done that earlier. So I think that was one big mistake.

The other thing, which I think I could have done better, was it’s good to bootstrap in the beginning, but you need to then start gearing. If you want to leapfrog in terms of growth, you need to get some superstars to help you do that, especially for my kind of business, which is an agency business services business people can bring in more.

So I could have hired either a superstar creative person who’s at my level or even senior or a superstar account person, again, senior to me on my level, who can bring in a huge chunk. Most of the people I hired were starting level and they grew ground up based on so the whole agency was based on what I knew and what everyone learned from that. But getting that external person can help leapfrog the growth.

So yes, I think these are the two learnings. How have I incorporated that? I think in __ (34:40 inaudible), Now, I’ve got a CEO who runs the business, she’s a smart lady. And I can already see her making a huge difference. She used to work in the agency business and actually seeing it now, it would have been better if I did that earlier and worked alongside her to do it.

So that was one learning. In my other business, which is my coaching business, I worked out with my wife who is also at my level, like she’s also worked done startups, and corporate level, and we’re together creating something. So the synergy of creating something with someone who is at equal to you is more different with someone versus hiring people and you’re learning together. So yeah, I think that would be a big lesson for me.

Amit: Yeah, thanks a lot. I think this is also good advice. Essentially, if your business is limited by you, what you know, and what you don’t know, and everybody else has to learn from there, then there’s a limit to all of that. I’m curious to know about your podcast. How did you get that started? Have you incorporated any of your business learnings in running the podcast itself?

Sharad: The podcast was like you initially talked about a project which has to do with your passion. So this has something to do with my passion. It is related to the coaching business that me and my wife created which is “my life house”. And in this coaching business, we’ve got a sense of many people who are stuck in life in different stages, smart people stuck in life who are looking at something more than just achievement, they’re looking at a meaningful life, they’re looking at managing stress, some of them are looking for ways to deepen their relationship.

So something beyond work, some of them of course, looking at how to do better in their career, but something beyond work. And given the exposure, we had many people who we met in coaching through this, we felt a podcast like this could be very useful to people and could also give us satisfaction in creating materials, talking to people, and learning more through this. So with this objective, we started the podcast. Luckily, and then we’ve kind of done 15-20 minute episodes, which are more consumable to people, give them a certain topic.

Luckily, a lot of the topics have been interesting to people, because lots of folks who hit the age of 40 had similar problems. Am I in the right thing? Should I become an entrepreneur? Should I do something more fulfilling? What would I be remembered for in life? And we tackle all these topics through various episodes where people have got something out of it, and we got experts to talk about it, because of which it has been fulfilling. So that’s where I’m spending more of my time right now, along with, of course, like you said, overseeing the 24 business.

Amit: And I’ve heard a bit of your podcast, and it’s actually really nice. And I really think your 15-minute format works very well, because you can tackle one question, and it’s just enough time to talk about that one thing. And the podcast is available everywhere, right?

Sharad: Yes, So people can search how to live Sharad Lal because I think how to live many people tackling this topic. So how do live Sharad Lal on Apple podcasts or Spotify or any other place where you listen to podcasts?

Amit: So Sharad, thank you so much for joining us today. I mean, I have to say, being attempting to be a bootstrapped entrepreneur myself, these are all really good points to learn from, and I take away something from every conversation that I have. So just to summarise a few of the lessons.

One takeaway for me is that even in the market where there seems to be a lot of choices, there is a way to differentiate, like you’ve done, and you’ve managed to do it against big agencies, small agencies, and so on. And more importantly, I think, another big one related to that was to spot the opportunity. And to capitalise on that, even if it isn’t exactly your passion project. But as long as you’re interested in it, and you’re willing to give it a shot, and it’s not something you’re actively against, you could probably do it as an opportunity may Trump’s passion in that respect.

The second one, which was really good to know is that you can grow by working with a few clients and just trying to grow within them. And there’s no real need to go out and try to acquire the whole world as your client, you can actually go narrow and deep within the few clients.

Third, one around attracting talent. And I think in today’s context, this has become just a really difficult task. And I think it’s interesting that you can perhaps attract talent for reasons other than money, other than the title, other than the brand of your own company. And that could be for mentorship, learning, or, you know, the very interesting trick that you mentioned, which is to use the client brand, as you know, something that you learned from.

So I thought that was really interesting. One other point you mentioned was around outsourcing, and how you tried doing it initially, and I guess it was successful to the extent it got you started. But it’s not the way to grow because you need people to work with you and to learn together, which is pretty hard to do at a distance.

The other one you mentioned is around deciding between growth and profit. And potentially due to cash flow, or probably due to cash flow maybe you choose profit over growth. And in your case, you are making that choice, which is rather to go for profitable work, given you know, the way that you want to run your business, but it is a choice, and it’s gonna be hard to do both. So which makes sense.

And finally, I think one of your learnings was to keep things simple. And don’t try to overdo the thing that you’re trying to start. So I think you’ll try to do three different things together, which is an agency that was new to you, a concept called Creative Outsourcing, which is new to everyone, and trying to outsource it somewhere else.

Instead of doing all of that just do the basic thing that people get, maybe with one tweak to the model to make it a bit different. And that’s how you get started. So thanks a lot, Sharad. These are all extremely valuable. I’m definitely taking notes and I am going to look at what we do based on this.

Sharad: Thank you very much, Amit. Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. Congratulations on all your work. I love your podcast, I listened to some episodes on JobTok. I also listened to some of the episodes on ShopTok, where it’s so good that you’re bringing out entrepreneurs who are not necessarily considered cool tech entrepreneurs but are creating real businesses and giving them a platform to talk about themselves. So thank you very much for doing this. I wish you all the best as you continue with this.

Amit: Thanks a lot, Sharad. Thanks for the wishes. And we were Sharad and Amit with ShopTok. See you next time.