EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Intro:
If you’re running a software development agency, it shouldn’t be too hard to grow. Welcome to Managed Coder Podcast. Tune in every week to find out how to grow your software development agency and help you to solve your day-to-day problems with 20 plus years of experience running an agency Please welcome your host Shahed Islam.
Shahed Islam:
Hey, Lucky, welcome. Can you introduce yourself?
Lucky Gobindram:
Hi, Shahed. I’m Lucky Gobindram. I’m the General Manager of CemtrexXR and CemtrexLabs.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. So tell me a little bit more about your agency and how many years you’ve been in the agency world?
Lucky Gobindram:
Sure. So I’ve been in the agency world for a decade. It started as a small shop that my brother and I founded. At the core, we’re a creative technology lab. End-to-end strategy design development deployment. We are agnostic to vertical sector technology. We sold the agency to Centrex about four years ago, and have been with them ever since.
Shahed Islam:
The reason I contacted you, I saw you guys were listed as one of the top agencies on one of the portals. And I was wondering when I look into your agency how do you add value to the client? What are the reasons behind the success you got on Cloud top 100? Why are you there? If somebody is listening to our podcast, what would you tell them to do?
Lucky Gobindram:
So there’s a number of ways to add value to your client. It’s not always so simple or straightforward. We’ve been able to look at our business for over a decade and analyze how the best projects have gone versus the more challenging ones because not everything is always perfect. And that’s helped us be able to lean in and grow. Now, the value we provide is a mix of things. It starts before they’re a client, to when they’re client to after they’re a client. And that starts by us communicating our unique value proposition, understanding our audience, and identifying our audience. Understanding how to meet a client’s specific goals, not trying to do everything, trying to do the parts of the stack or the ecosystem that we are best at, and speak to that, and really be able to communicate that. And that comes from leveraging visible marketing and providing that pre-sales in helping customers before they are customers know that value before they’re even there. And it’s not trying to serve everything, it’s speaking directly to those things. And then ultimately listening to those prospective clients. And then being able to throughout the process address those clients’ needs by your unique value proposition. So us specifically, as we’ve evolved and continued to evolve, we’ve seen small and medium enterprises to be the best businesses for us. They are an underserved audience, they are challenged by price and service. And a lot of times the crème de la crème who may be at the top three, or the top four global agencies are way too expensive, and they just simply can’t afford them. And the smaller agencies are unable to provide the pedigree of work. So in our case, we started looking at that specific audience. The organizations I do 50 million to under a billion dollars that are looking for a consulting IT strategy firm that can understand the technology they have, be able to build on that technology, or modernize that technology as well as continue to help them address business challenges. And that’s why the magnitude of things. It could be that, hey, I’m going to provide you an end-to-end service in a project. More often than not we see today that a lot of these organizations are looking for talent. They have a lot of trouble finding talent and servicing their own demand. And they don’t necessarily want you to come in and do things end-to-end. But they would love for you to be able to understand their infrastructure [unintelligible: 04:55], give them an architect, build a team around an architect, help them hire, help them trade out talent and move quickly and be agile. So to us, it’s like, well, how do we serve that? And how do we augment them? And how do we build towards their problem statement? And if you look at the agency world, to be honest, agencies that provide services that are, basically, I’m going to build you a website, it’s in the single-digit billions. But if you look at the IT span of the global ecosystem, you’re looking at multiple, double-digit billions. The majority of those people, and those larger organizations, whether it be small or medium enterprise, you start to learn that they want to have more control and more visibility, and some of these things. So us as an organization as we’ve heard these things, and listened, we’ve continued to optimize for it. So how we add value is truly through our messaging, our listening, and then how we position our services to really address those challenges and help these organizations be able to, above all service their problem statement.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you, Lucky. So Lucky, what I found out talking to other agency owners who have grown over the last five years or doubled their revenue, let’s say, one of the problems in the early days, we all made that mistake that we target too many customers. You mentioned SME. I always thought that I can go ahead and get a fortune 500 company. I did. But getting a second one was a myth. It’s either hit or miss.
Lucky Gobindram:
[Crosstalk: 06:46-49]
Shahed Islam:
Now, what you said is really important here. Can you elaborate on why an agency is growing they should concentrate on the SME market, maybe a company with a revenue of a few million-dollar and they can afford you and you can give them better service? So, tell me a bit more about that.
Lucky Gobindram:
You can’t boil an ocean, right? As good as it sounds. First off, not everybody’s a good customer. And that’s not meaning that they’re a bad customer. But you need to have the persona of your buyer. You need to understand your buyer. And after several months, or a year or a couple of years doing it, assess your funnel, assess the businesses you’ve done work with, and assess your successes, and see which ones are the most profitable. In our case, we see SMEs as that vertical for us. And there’s even more zeroing in that we’ve done in SMEs, whether it be industry or specific services we can offer to that SME, and how we gain the most value and how we add the most value. An agency should target an audience because one, it needs to know its buyers or can speak to that buyer specifically. The more specific you are in marketing, and the more specific you are in messaging, the higher your sell-through rating would be. And like you, Shahed, I once upon a time was like, hmm, let me go get the fortune 10. I called every single one. I tried to get every single one. And I got one. But getting a second one is not so easy. And I’m working with X, this is why you should work with me. They’re not really interested. And a lot of times your relationships will take you so far. Like most other people probably listening to this podcast, I started based on all my relationships. I was shaking hands and kissing babies and working my network. And I was able to get to a sizable amount of revenue. But that caps out. That hockey stick growth levels. So at some point, [unintelligible: 09:03] on that growth pattern, what worked and what didn’t work. And then you need to target an audience and be able to speak to their pain points, specifically. And if you listen to them you can address those challenges, and you could speak directly to the value propositions that would in turn you drive them to want to speak to you and then buy your services. It sounds simple but to be honest with you, it took me a long time to get to that point of understanding. I’m still learning. As you know, and I alluded to, I’m evolving the business, and we continue to evolve. We’re a learning organization. We all make mistakes. I fail 9 out of 10 times. I fail more often than I win. It’s just a reality. But what I’ve learned is data is a truth-teller. If you look at the data, and historical data, you can start informing future decisions. And from there you can zero in. And the more audience-targeting you can do, the more likely you are to reach the consumers interested in your services with relevant messaging. It also decreases the odds, you waste time, which is money on uninterested eyeballs and conversations, and help move potential customers down the proverbial funnel. And it yields results.
Shahed Islam:
So one thing came to my mind, which is we are talking about failure here. Just because you tried some niche and a lot of agency owners and I talked in the past, they think that you know what, I have tried with A, and it worked, I’m going to try B and it will work. But they also asked me that question that the B did not work out, that niche customer, as another group of people. But I said I fail every month, every year. We had a big plan at the beginning of the year to target another audience, but we didn’t get any clients. But we worked for six, eight months. And then I said, you know what, probably this is not the right fail. Do you feel you also experienced a similar trend, where failure is there but [crosstalk: 11:27-30] achieved a lot. But you probably fail a lot more times also. And after that you get success.
Lucky Gobindram:
For sure. And failure is better than success, to be honest with you. Success is sweeter but failure teaches you something. A lot of times when you succeed you fail to learn the lessons that you need to succeed. And like you, I failed quite often. I’m not shy to admit that. I feel like if I don’t fail then I’ll never succeed. And if you’re not trying you’re not learning. And it happens all the time. There are services and industries I spin up and I’m like, okay, we’re going to do this, it’s going to be great. And then 90 days later, 120 days later, I’m like, oh I wasted my time. This is not working. But I didn’t really waste it. I definitely learned something. This time sunk but you can’t think about it that way. It’s a necessary part of the equation to get to the Promised Land.
Shahed Islam:
I think our listeners probably would think that these people who are successful they are always winning. Whatever decision they make, everything is perfect. It’s not like that. Following up with that one other thing I’m interested in there are so many new technologies coming out. What I found out that five years ago I could say, oh, there are few things I could do and provide service to SMEs. Now, I’m sure even in Shopify there is API development, there is front-end work, there is management. Now, how do you decide on new fields? How do you get into the new field of, in your service, which is related to that? And how do you decide which one will work and give in our follow-up that if they can follow some formula?
Lucky Gobindram:
I don’t know if there’s a direct formula. There is a couple of things that I pay attention to. I pay attention to market trends. I pay attention to other technologies that I see [unintelligible: 13:3]. For example, WordPress. WordPress was once just a blogging technology. Everybody was like, oh, it’s a blog. WordPress makes up the lion’s share of the web today. Whether you’re a startup…
Shahed Islam:
80 plus.
Lucky Gobindram:
80 plus, correct, yes. And today, we’re one of 12 gold partners of the WordPress enterprise suite of solutions, WordPress VIP. There are dozens of people trying to build WordPress out there. But we’re one of 12 partners that are working directly with automatic to use their enterprise cloud computing solutions to enable enterprises to build on those platforms and those tools. I didn’t come because I just knew I was like, let’s do this. I was paying attention to trends. And I started by doing a little bit of WordPress development. And I saw, okay, it’s working. Then I started optimizing towards it. Even Shopify. Shopify was something that I was building e-commerce. And we were building Woo Commerce. We’re building on Magento. We’re building on big commerce, we’re building custom websites for e-commerce, and we were doing everything. Then I started to see a trend. People wanted things that were easy for them. They wanted these tools that their marketing team could use, and they wanted some of these things. So I started optimizing towards those things. And I think that’s a very important thing. It’s like you can pay attention to your customer. But you also on your side, as you’re running this business, you need to pay attention to trends. It’s like I alluded to in that first question, Shahed. It’s like staff augmentation, people would think that’s counterintuitive. People want people to build everything. Over my time and looking at it, and me just being a diligent person and reading, and just reading about different companies you start to realize what’s important to these SMEs. It’s control of resources, its ability, it’s all these different things. So what does that point towards? If those are the things they want, what type of service do they need? Okay, they need access to resources, they need dynamic resources, they need second-tier resources that can do cloud computing and all these other more complex things. So, it’s not just staff augmentation. It’s staff augmentation of full-stack developers that can use all these other tools and do all these things that are senior architects. Okay, so let’s do that. And let’s make it easy for them. So that’s how I’m looking at things. That’s how I’m trying to spin up new services. And that’s how I even knew to spin up my ARVR business. Because we’re doing too much. Why are people confused? They are like do they do ARVR? Do they do web? Do they do mobile? Okay, make this a separate business. Do this and separate my funnels, speak more conservatively to these audiences. And then you start to see things working and moving towards a more successful pattern.
Shahed Islam:
This is amazing. I mean, what you have done, congrats again. Lucky, sorry, we have limited time here on the podcast but I would love to catch up with you in the future on other topics because you know a lot. What is the best way people can contact you?
Lucky Gobindram:
They can shoot me an email, lucky@cemtrex.com. They can get me on Twitter @ llgobindram. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Lucky Lance K Gobindram. I’m very responsive across the board. So, whatever means is preferable. I’m happy to chat. I’m excited, and I welcome conversation. I love sharing expertise. And I love knowledge and just having an open discourse with people. So don’t hesitate to have people reach out or please do reach out, I should say.
Shahed Islam:
Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was very nice talking to you. Thank you.
Lucky Gobindram:
Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you, everybody.
Outro:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, and you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from us you can follow us on Twitter at managedcoder or visit our website at managedcoder.com. Thanks again, and we’ll see you next time.
