Hakeem from Singapore reflects on his time with Innovaid Advisory Services, taking our online strategy to a new level
At Innovaid, I was tasked with implementing measures to help take the company's overall online strategy to a new level. This included a fair bit of dabbling with Search Engine Optimization techniques, playing around with Google Trends, Adwords and also Word Press. The aim, of course, was to set the foundations to boost the online presence for Innovaid's Corporate Social Responsibility on Google. I saw this as a great opportunity to hone my online business development skills. This meant leveraging off the internet, be it social media or not, to increase the number of leads for Innovaid's CSR services.
The team was a very diverse one comprising of individuals from Italy,
Australia and India itself. It was great getting to know them and also about
their backgrounds over the lunches that we had. Sharing horror stories about
our respective commutes to work was rather common too.
As an entrepreneur, I feel that the team that you have with you
is one of the best assets that you can gain. Thus, ensuring the right kind of
people join the team is one of the best things an entrepreneur can do for his
company. It was nice of Emily to have shared some of her learnings when it came
to hiring the right people. Emily also spoke of people building being one of
the key things that you, as the head of the team are tasked with.
One of the best experiences was that I got the opportunity to
talk to the Emily on her past entrepreneurial experiences and upbringing. As it
turns out, we both had our first shot at entrepreneurship rather early. She
sold cute little magazine things and self-made toys at school and made a
relatively huge fortune at that age. Having sold noodles at Secondary 1 and
making a fortune from it, I was able to relate to her story well. Our first
brush with entrepreneurship, as I found out, was to be an experience both of us
would probably never forget. Besides that, gaining insights into the
journey that she has been on so far, was rather interesting too. Nothing beats
hearing an entrepreneurial experience right from the horse's mouth.
We also got the chance to sit in for two corporate pitches with
a multinational corporation. This was really insightful as we were
involved in this project from the research stage itself. We got to experience
what happened in a corporate to ‘corporate pitch’. The biggest takeaway again,
was to really listen to what your client wants. Once you have done that,
you'd be in a better position to reconsider your pitch and project only the
necessary bits that you feel would maximize your customer's benefit. True to
Innovaid being a personalized boutique advisory service for CSR and celebrity
philanthropy, we got to experience the customization process during the
meetings as well.
In
one of my conversations with Emily, we spoke about future plans and expansion
and what she had in mind. We also spoke quite a fair bit about branding and the
issues of branding for Innovaid as opposed to branding for Emily Harrison.
Hearing her talk about such issues and putting myself in her shoes gave me
insights into some of the challenges being faced by an entrepreneur at her
stage too.
All
in all, my 2 months or so at Innovaid was certainly a great experience and a
worthwhile journey that I would not have replaced for anything else.
Opportunities to grow and challenge yourself at Innovaid are aplenty. The one
most outstanding thing that I will always remember is the dynamic team and how
each individual brings an exciting set of experiences and a different dimension
to the team.
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