Adaptability in the Digital Age: Guide to Sustainable Agency Growth

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, your E-Coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranmay Rath here. And today we have Zeeshan Mallick, who is the Owner of YouYaa, Hey, Zeeshan Mallick, how’s it going?

Hey, it’s very nice to meet you. I’m very well, thank you. How are you?

All good, yeah. I can’t really complain. Great, great, Zeeshan Mallick. You have had an incredible journey, right? Looking back, let’s get to know you more before we dive in. What was the young Deshaan like? What were your passions and interests growing up?

It’s a I play video games. I grew up in East London. I have two older brothers, and it was my parents. And my parents worked every hour that God sent so that we could get through the month, every month. So young me was sitting at home with my brother, going to school, helping my parents playing video games and dreaming of the ability to play Super Mario and get paid for it. And then as I got I realized that, You know what? That dream is probably not going to happen because I’m just not that good. So I had to switch to athletics. That’s what I got into when I was younger. Okay, lovely. I’d run the 100 meters and 200 meters. And there’s a little story behind that. It’s actually a long story behind it, maybe another day. But then when I got to school and university, I was like, Do I go into law or do I go into business? That was the question I had. And when I my A-Levels in here in London, my head of year, Mr. Palmer, pulled me aside and he said to me, Zizhán, you’re not very good at reading.

Don’t do law. Instead, go into marketing and do digital. The future is going to be in the digital world. And I was like, Okay, I’ll do that.

When was this? When was this?

This is when I was doing my A-Levels. I was 17.

Okay.

The while ago. Late ’90s, late 1990s.

Yeah. You should bank him, right? I’m in your faculty.

Yeah. It’s because of him that I’m in digital marketing. It was after that that I was like, Okay, fine. I’ll do that. So I went to university in London at the International Business and Marketing. And my first job was straight into a digital marketing agency. I went in as an Account Executive. After that, it’s been 23 years and I’m still doing the same thing that I was doing back then.

Hello, Megan. As the CEO of UER or agency, what What are most critical factors in building a successful growing agency? Obviously, the initial days must be difficult. How did you overcome them and how is it going right now? Talk us through your agency.

So UER is an agency that specializes in growth. I’m trying not to call us a digital marketing agency because we do so much. Although that’s what it says on the box. But fundamentally, everyone who looks at us and they’re like, Oh, you’re a digital marketing So you do social media? And they look at me and they stop. And I’m like, No, we actually don’t do social media. What we do is that we grow businesses. And that growth is something which we cover across from the offline world through to the online world. So we do events and conferences, we do interviews, presentations in the big wide world. We also then get you written in articles and publications all the way through to, We’ll build your website and we’ll do your advertising market while you’re there as well. But fundamentally, the business starts in November December 2017. By myself, I’m ex-Microsoft, I’m ex-Google. And really what I wanted to do was change the way people viewed agencies. Historically, agencies are very what? They lie, they cheat, they pretend that things are very difficult. They like to pad their invoices, and all of a sudden, a secret invoice turns up, and you’re like, What’s this?

Sorry, $5,000, please. We don’t do that. We’re very transparent. If we’ve got access to something, you’ve got access to something. If we’ve got data, it’s your data. So you walk away with it. Our invoices are set in a way that whatever we agree at the beginning, that is where the invoice will go. It will never go up. It might go down, but it won’t go up. And if there is a sudden secret invoice that turns up, we will pay for it. We will not pass it to the client. And the last bit is we just want to be friends. Life is hard. Life is long. It’s difficult. So we You want to have some fun. If I don’t want to have a drink with the person that I’m talking to, I’d never want to get on a call and be like, You know what? Ranmay Rath is always shouting at me. And Ranmay Rath is thinking, Zeeshan Mallick is an idiot. He doesn’t do anything I say. There’s no need for that. So we started things in a way that, you know what? If after a few months of working together, it doesn’t work, no problem. Let’s go our separate ways and keep everyone happy.

Lovely. Coming from that, I’m sure you would have said a no to quite a few clients, right? So give us one story there where you’ve actually denied a client after they have shown interest in working with you.

Sure. We probably turn away probably about 30 % of people that want to work with us because of that reason. Although we all live in very much a capitalist world, we aren’t capitalists at heart. We are very much people who want to help other people. We want to enjoy our life. So the stories are usually quite the same thing. So A lead comes in, I get on a call and I’m like, Hi, Ranveer, how’s it going? How are you doing? What do you need? Tell me about your business. That thing. You’ll be like, I want to do this, I want to do this. But during the call, I’m looking at more than just what your What your access needs are. I’m not just looking at, Can we do the work? And will you pay your invoices? It’s actually more about, Do I want to get on a call? Do I want to sit and meet you? Do I want to go to your office? Do I want you to come to my office? So all these things are being looked at. And fundamentally, the answer is no, that I don’t want to spend time with someone, irrespective of how much they’re going to pay us.

We simply say to them, Thank you very much, but we don’t see a fit that we’re not able to support you. And sometimes they come back and then I, We’ll pay you double. I’m like, We’re good. Don’t worry. Thank you very much. Sometimes we pass them over to a partner. We’re like, Yeah, we’ll take those people because we just want them. They’re like, Cool. No worries. We’ll pass you over. So it happens It happened every now and then. And since 2017, there’s been quite a few people that I’ve had to say no to.

I see. And given the specialized nature of your niche and the industry that you are in, how do you attract and retain top talent at Uya?

So I’m quite well known for this bit in that I’m very strict with my team, especially when it’s in the first start. In the first six months, I expect you to never be off work. You are never allowed to be late. You’re allowed to have no complaints from the clients, and you have to deliver everything on time. For six months, you can do that. You will be given unlimited annual leave. You’ll be given a brand new laptop and a brand new phone every year. You’ll be allowed to work from anywhere in the world, work whatever app as you wish. There is no requirement for you. I don’t care if you’re online at three o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon. It’s completely fine. As long as there are no complaints, there is no. And because I give people unlimited annually the ability to work wherever they want to wish to work from. And I also reward people for the work they’re doing. So if someone brings in a brand new client, I’ll write them a check straight away. Okay. Like a sign. It’ll be a percentage of the annual contract that they get, so they get given that as well.

But we also then expect everyone in the company to support each other. We expect everyone to work together. There’s a big collaboration around the element in the business. And in the year The reason I’ve run this agency in my previous companies, I’ve only ever lost one member of staff. Everyone who’s come in has stayed in the company right now who’s been in the company for 12 years, not the company, but who’ve worked with me through the organizations for 12 years now. Most of them have been around between five and seven. It’s an environment that we’ve created that I can’t take credit for. It’s the team that built the environment. It’s the team that work together. It’s the team that support and assist each other. And ensuring that everyone is happy, everyone is honest and transparent and truthful with each other allows us to work together. I don’t have a head of HR I don’t have a policy department. I have me and a group of people who are smarter than me, who are harder than me, and who want to enjoy their job and life every day.

Lovely, lovely. And you’re not talking When you’re talking about relationships, you did mention about the employee side of it. Talk us through their relationship with their clients. How do you employ and build or maintain strong relationships with clients? And then especially the niche that you are in in terms of your client, to print tech, blockchain sector, crypto. It’s quite volatile market. How do you ensure the stickiness of your client?

To be honest with them. I didn’t make sure that I then charged them above what I’ve agreed with them. I am true to my word. I expect people to teach you to their work. Relationships are built on trust and good communication. It doesn’t matter if it’s business, if it’s personal, if it’s social, it doesn’t matter. You communicate well and you’re honest with each other. If you can’t do something, say no, and you can do it and then do it well. The power of the moment is wonderful in my industry. The ability to say no, say, I can’t do this, right? I’m unable to support you or something like that allows people to go, Okay, you’re being honest with me. I appreciate that. And then there’s times where sometimes my advice goes against me. Sometimes I say to them, You know what? You don’t need us anymore. You’ve actually outgrown us. It’s time for you to move on. I’ve said that to clients, and they look at me, they’re like, Wait, but we don’t want to. I’m like, Yeah, but you have to because we can’t take you beyond level that you’re at. You now need to go to a large global network agency, and you need to shift your mindset.

We’re not a large global network agency. We are what we are. So we know our place. We know what we’re very good at. And clients, I hope, clients appreciate the truthfulness and transparency that we provide them, and the fact that if a client sends in a request, we have SLAs with everybody. They know what to expect. Sorry. For your views, SLA is service level agreement, meaning someone sends an email, they know that we’ll provide within a certain time frame. And if we don’t, they can come and give us a little slack if they need to.

Right, Aaron, we also follow this It’s fundamental, we talk about this in our team that the retention starts with the sales process. The moment you do the sale, if you sold it right, the retention will take care of itself. For that very matter, We do not have a sales team, sales team per se, who is burdened with numbers to drive home the revenue at the end of every quarter. So they’re also at ease and ensure that the quality relationships are being built and they’re not getting anything and seeing yes to anything and everything that comes their way. They’re a very valid point there.

Yeah. I mean, sales is an interesting thing. We don’t have a large sales team, but we do have people who work within sales. And I mean, just a little bit of outreach. We don’t run ads, anything like that. Most of our business comes to us. We’re very fortunate, very lucky like that, that people will actually want to come and work with us, which is an amazing thing to It’s referrals.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it’s taking years to build that, and it’s not something box. So sales, it really depends on what you do in the sales process. My sales process is not to sell, to just see if you can work together, see if you can build a relationship and if you want to work together. After that, once you’ve figured that out, then the sales is easy because you know. Then it’s just like, what are we going to do together?

Right. I mean, it is a byproduct of of the entire process, if you have actually found out the problem. At times, the client do not really actually are aware of their problems in the first place. So you as the marketing expert or whatever we want to call ourselves, have to Identify the problem in the first place and then in cases, and then understand and ask yourself if you have the solution for it or not. If not, like you said, there is no harm in saying no. But if you have, then if you move forward and deliver the results, then like you mentioned, then you work together and the relationship gets stronger.

Exactly. No, I absolutely agree. But it’s something which comes with experience. Experience, yeah. Because when you first start off, if anyone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, That’s not how I do it myself, and you’ve been doing it the best. Yeah. Once you’ve had that experience and you’ve captured something, you’ll realize that there’s actually a better way to do things to make people feel comfort. In the process and not feel like as if you’re going to take all their money and run.

Absolutely. And then talking about technologies, Jashan, you have seen enough summers and winters in the space, right? So which emerging technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact moving forward in the next decade or so? And we’re talking about decade, it’s quite a long time period in the industry that we all are in. But still, where are we headed as for you?

This is where everyone is going to expect me to AI. Yeah. He doesn’t say AI. He doesn’t know anything. I don’t know is the truthful answer. I don’t have a magic ball that tells me what’s going to happen in the next 10 years. What I can say is that The FinTech world, sorry, the finance world is not going anywhere. Technology has been part of the finance world for many, many decades, longer than most of the people watching this video have been alive. And things Things are only going to get faster. Things are already going to get busier. There’s going to be more people in it. Communication is going to get more and more fragmented. It’s going to get more and more difficult and more and more stressful for people. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not an opportunity if you stay calm. Now, to answer specifically onto your question, which technology choose to go? I don’t know. Ai will have its place. Ai has been around for a very long time. People don’t realize that it’s been around for as long as it actually has. It’s been decades that AI has been in our lives.

Now, generative AI will have its place. We use generative AI in some places. We have an AI-powered programmatic network, which we’ve been working and building on for nine years. And it works very, very well. That works in the ad space. It doesn’t work in the generative AI structure. I’m not worried about it. What I look at is how we can use the tools that are available to us to make us more efficient. If we maintain a certain level of efficiency through automation and through using different tools, whether it’s something physical like a Bluetooth keyboard, or if it’s something that we’re using that’s built into a software, if it makes us faster, makes us more efficient, that we can pass on some savings to clients, the business will survive. And people need to be trained how use these technologies. So how do I protect myself from that? By having people who are younger than me, smarter than me, more interested in this stuff than I, who can wield the sword better than I can. And everyone in my business is a specialist in the area. They’re all specialists in different tools and different softwares and what they do to be the best at what they do.

They are all better than me at everything that they do, every single one of them. And that’s why they’re there. So to me, the business will survive because the people are there.

Lovely. Thank you for seeing that as a leader, putting your team in front in terms of giving them all the credit makes a lot of… It shows the culture that you have in your organization.

It’s a good little team. We’re a good bunch of people.

I’m sure.

And hopefully, if anyone was watching, if they wanted to have a chat with some of them, let me know. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been a pleasure, actually.

Lovely. For people looking and listening to us, for our listeners, what is that one piece of advice that you’d want to give to them, especially the young ones who are starting out, trying to make a mark in this space or trying to start out on their entrepreneurial journey as well.

Work hard, put in the hours. Don’t think it’s going to be something that you’re going to get in a year. It’ll take years and years and years to have success. Put the time in, read a lot, read everything you can find, get a mentor, someone who can guide you and support you and nudge you in the direction that you need to go.

All right. Lovely. Lovely, Jasonia. Thank you so much for sharing those insights. I’m sure our audiences would have loved the conversation. And once again, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

So we have a contact form on the site. There’s go to unia. Com and a section called Contact Us. There’s a form that they can sit out there. And if they need to look a call with us, they can definitely reach out and speak to us. And obviously, we’re on LinkedIn. If I’m not reach out to me personally on LinkedIn, if anybody wants to, I’m always active on LinkedIn, always chatting to people. So more than. More than happy to be there for anyone.

Lovely. Thank you so much once again, Jushan. I really appreciate it. Cheers, man.

Lovely speaking to you, Ramblin. Thank you very much.