Building The Future Together with Amey Asuti

We are live. A very good evening to everyone.

Kulpreet: Welcome to building the future together. 2.0 series, we are continually engaging with leaders on emerging trends and collaborative spirit. And today we are going to talk about the digital shift, brought about by the pandemic. And today with us, we have a young and dynamic personality, Amey Asuti, who is a digital marketer and entrepreneur with 14 years of experience, a high energy creative thinker and entrepreneurial problem solver. He's the founder and managing director of Futuready Media, an award-winning full service digital agency working across technology, marketing, and design with outstanding relationship development, skills and ability in strategic partnerships. Amey has worked with businesses in India and abroad. Angel Broking, 48 Fitness, DBS Bank, Enrich salons, Fractal Analytics, Fusion beats, Future Group, Girnar, Glenmark Pharma, ICICI Bank, Loreal, PWC, Reliance group, Tata, UPL, etc. helping them grow and thrive online. Well, that's a long list, Amey, and he is also a visiting faculty at B-schools, a passionate speaker and participates on the topics of entrepreneurship, digital media, and internet marketing. A very warm welcome to you Amey.

Amey: Thank you Kulpreet, Thank you. Good evening.

Kulpreet: Good evening. So tell us about the pandemic, which started last year and we had the first rush with COVID and which everybody was depressed about and everybody got into the digital world. So what actually happened? What brought in that digital shift in the pandemic, during the pandemic and now post pandemic. So if you could throw some light there.

Amey: Sure. So, Kulpreet, my belief is that we are in the midst of digital taking over our lives for the past 25, 30 years now. The pandemic was unexpected, yet one of the biggest crises that we have come across, perhaps, in terms of its impact on businesses, it could be as big as say a world war three would have been right where it has impacted the entire world in that sense.

It has impacted not only businesses but also our personal lives. And, it has been a prolonged event. It started sometime last year and, Like just this morning, I read about there being a third wave in Africa. So the different countries are dealing with it differently.

So, in the Indian context at least, it came as the suddenness of a lockdown, which we had never encountered. It was the first time we heard the word in fact like that there could be something called a lockdown and, you know, an infection would result in creating something of that nature, which was very disruptive.

As businesses went from, business as usual to abrupt shutting down of retail, employees not being able to come to work, the digital process, which was a part of all organizations evolution, suddenly everybody turned to the IT team and said, we have this problem. What do we do about it?

So firstly it was an infrastructural problem. How do we get people to have devices where its security issues are taken care of? Second was a bandwidth issue. And more importantly, I think it was a mindset issue for organizations.

So a lot of these technologies, which we were dealing with for the past couple of years now, like instant messaging, cloud, remote working, all of them kind of came together. And to the credit of most organizations, we adapted to them. As a digital agency, we saw very closely how businesses first had a knee-jerk reaction. But then that led to a kind of a study of what was actually happening, understanding the impact, understanding that things were not going to be the way they usually were and terms like the ‘new normal’ came into play then, that's how we saw it pan out. So it's been an interesting evolution across industries, across operations in many fields within departments within a business. Like if you look at marketing, sales, human resources everywhere, we saw an impact. And, I would say that the acceleration in adoption of digital technology that we would have seen over a 10 or 15 year period, suddenly got shrunk to a year and a half, two years. And, that's the kind of disruption which has happened.

So, as is the case with disruption, you have businesses which evolve, which become better and come out stronger because of this. And there will be businesses or models, which will kind of have a question mark forever and they would not be able to survive this kind of an impact.

So, yeah. Then that's where we are right now. And the best part is we are still in the middle of it. There is still, I believe, about six months to maybe a year's time period where businesses which have been slow in adapting themselves, still have the opportunity to go the whole block.

Kulpreet: Yes, exactly. In fact, that was my next question, even after seeing a giant leap in digital integration we still have certain businesses which are digitally disconnected, or not technologically advanced. Now, because you are into digital marketing and technology, how important is it for these businesses based on technology to upgrade their skills, their entire team, the training programs to treat their workers with best skills. So how important is that? Thats what you were saying at the fag end of your observation and it just connected with my next question. So how would the digital disconnection impact, I think it will have a devastating impact, but let's hear from you.

Amey: Yeah, so I think any business has got some physical aspect unless you're running something entirely in the cloud. Even if today you're running a direct to consumer brand, you still have the physical aspect of a delivery happening to the end consumer. So you might be able to sell online, but the delivery still happens in the physical world. So unless you are a completely online technology, like say a Bitcoin, for example, which happens entirely online, or you're dealing with buying stocks and shares, mutual funds, which again happens entirely online. So you see, there are two or three kinds of businesses. One would be businesses which can be completely digital, in the way their offerings are and in the way that organizational structures are. Then there are businesses which have got a physical component along with a digital component. So, what we have seen is that this reliance on the physical component has been tested and a lot of the physical activities have been pushed into the digital realm. So you're becoming more digital and less physical and also businesses have evolved to transfer the risk of physical delivery maybe to somebody else.

For example, in the earlier days, restaurants would have their own delivery boys who would go and deliver or the Kirana stores would have their own delivery boys. And now what happens in this context is that the delivery is taken care of by a partner who can manage certain digital processes very well, who can connect the consumer to the retailer. And the retail outlet then just focuses on keeping their business alive. So there is also a transfer of the physical part of the business to a third party who can do it much better.

And thirdly, we have businesses which are purely physical in nature. Like let's say a restaurant or shops in the mall or travel and tourism. They are purely dependent on this physical infrastructure to be open and alive and kicking for their business to grow.

So across this spectrum I think that businesses which are in the middle, which have a part physical and a part digital have been the ones who have been able to adapt the fastest because there was a dire need. Digital only businesses found it very easy. For example, we are an agency, as a digital agency, our work can be entirely remote. We have found new opportunities in this period.

Take recruitment, for example, earlier we were very limited in our mindset, thinking that for every new hire, we need to have a physical interview. Somebody needs to walk into the office, get interviewed a couple of times, and then if the candidate is the right fit, you flesh out an offer letter and somebody joins you. Then commuting to the office, whether they have a place to sit in the office, getting them a new system, IT working around it and an induction program happening in the office. All of that used to happen. And that was a very small physical component of our business. And that could entirely be shifted in the digital realm and the opportunities that we found were greater. I could hire people from Bangalore. I could work with people across the world. And in fact, in the last one year, we worked with talent from countries like Romania, USA, Bangladesh, we were able to work with a larger set of people. Now talent could be anywhere and because we were entirely remote, we were able to exploit that opportunity, I would say.

So to answer your question, I think across the spectrum, if we look at the physical only businesses, there the impact has been the highest and sadly there is no evolution that one can think of in terms of adapting to digital because the business itself can’t survive if things are shut. But the other two groups that I talked about have done a wonderful job.

Most clients that we work with have lapped up the opportunity that has been available. The funny thing with technology is that now we find there is a huge demand for tech talent because suddenly you are relying so much on technology. You need someone to fix up a zoom call, to ensure security of files, to make sure that remote working can happen in a smooth manner. So in fact, even in digital marketing, suddenly businesses found that they didn't have anyone on board who could understand how digital marketing could be executed. So you need somebody to liaise with the agency. You needed somebody who had that expertise and that talent today is in very high demand.

Kulpreet: Absolutely. In fact, I think you're guessing what's going on in my mind and answering that. So that was my next question, yes, there is a physical component and then there's a digital component and there are companies which have kind of let go of the physical component to a third party. We've seen that.

Now let's talk about Futuready and agencies or only the digital space itself. You mentioned that companies that were only doing digital work, they also had to kind of ramp up their skills, upgrade themselves and create a digital infrastructure. And I also saw there was a lack of talent. So, how did you deal with these situations in the last one and a half years? Because talent is not getting passed out, they're still in colleges, they're not passing or that there is educational collapse there. So how did you deal with finding talent? But yes, you said that you went all over the world, but otherwise, how did you deal with finding talent? How did you deal with upgrading your present talent? Because that was also, I think, very important. So if you could throw some light on that.

Amey: Sure. One of the first things that we noticed is that even when we are a digital business, we were not really digital in that sense. Like a lot of processes were very physical in nature. Collaborating other than being in close proximity to each other was not something that one had thought of. For example, we have a video editing team, there is a graphic designer and an editor and an animator who would kind of sit next to each other and figure out how a scene has to be created in an animation video. We found that the first challenge we had to overcome was how do you collaborate when you're not sitting next to each other? You can't be on call the entire eight, nine hours that you're working. So we needed to have various other ways of collaborating. We kind of looked at upping the game when it came to giving skills for written communication, how to summarize what you're talking to each other in a concise email. So that everybody's on the same page.

We use this phrase very often. ‘Are we on the same page?’ But when we are in a physical space and we're going to meet each other the next day, Even if you are not on the same page it's okay, because you can always catch up on things, but when you're working in isolation for eight to nine hours cut off from your team members, then it's very important that certain things are known in a language which everybody understands. So emphasizing on the written communication was a thing that we did for the existing talent that we have, the new talent that we got, to my surprise, a lot of the people who are just out of college have already been using a lot of this technology in their regular day to day life when it comes to their studies. So for them, the adaptation is not very difficult. It's we who have been in the work environment for the last 5, 10, 15 years who are finding it as a change. For the students who are graduating out of college and joining the workforce right now for them it was perhaps as seamless, in fact, to the extent that using WhatsApp or using technology, sharing documents is something which college students do very naturally. It comes like an extension of communicating remotely for them. Sometimes because of deadlines that parents put that you have to be home by nine o'clock. So after nine, you need to communicate remotely with your friends. That comes very naturally to them. Unlike us as working professionals, the communication is more face-to-face and we need to go back to the office and do it. One of the things which was challenging was that when we were not interacting face-to-face a lot of visual cues that one would get through body language, what is someone meaning versus what is someone seeing all of these nuances that you have are lost. Because we have collaborative teams which work together. So those kinds of things got impacted a little bit. But I think over a period of time, the learning has been great across the team. And we’ve found that things have only improved.

When it came to hiring there was a leap of faith, I would say, because one has been used to doing physical interviews and hiring people, physically seeing them, talking to them and then getting them on-board. Now going entirely digital meant that you're taking a leap of faith on people because sometimes the bandwidth didn't allow a proper communication, you would have to kind of hire people over a 15 minute video call. Anyway, interviews are a leap of faith and some new person joining an organization always comes with a certain set of apprehensions at both ends. And this kind of made it far more challenging, but things have gone well.

Kulpreet: So, Amey, like you said, it's all digital and we're talking digital and understanding digital. So tell me something, do you miss the earlier days and would you like to go back to the earlier days?

Amey: Oh, I think it's a mixed thing. What the current environment is, in terms of remote working, there are sometimes no boundaries between personal and professional. There are no boundaries between work and home and you know what I mean? We might be having this call and I'm already feeling anxious because at six, my help would be coming in. A few minutes before six, and I'm just anxious that the doorbell would ring during our conversation. So it doesn't allow you to set very clear boundaries between what is work and what is not. To that extent, I feel that the earlier normal that we had was much better because you had clear boundaries. But then again, when I look back, I feel that my professional journey, when I started about 14 years ago, we started with a simple handheld phone, probably a Blackberry and work would never come home. You know, you might get a call from the office, but that was about it. And since the takeover of laptops and then phones and then work shifting onto WhatsApp, I think those boundaries had already started getting erased to a large extent. You're supposed to be plugged in, working in and out, with managing your professional and personal priorities. So that kind of has been, I would say, I am not missing much of it, but yes you do miss being in a work environment and being focused. So the focus element is kind of far easier when you are in a work environment versus in an environment like this.

Kulpreet: Yes, I do get that because we all, as humans, have been brought up in a format that makes us measure our success, our focus because of work. Whereas actually we get that happiness at home. So I think that counterbalance, I would not call it balance, but it's a counterbalance. I think that’s where we need to pay attention.

I was just recently reading a book called ‘The One Thing’ and where they spoke about a very interesting concept. We all talk about work life balance. There is nothing like balance. Rather there is counterbalance. Sometimes you'll have to give your focus to something and the other thing will get ignored. And then you give focus to something. And the other thing will get ignored. You have to keep counterbalancing so that you are at peace.

So tell us Amey in this last one year, you have been hiring new people, new talent, not only from the place of work, which is Mumbai. It can be from maybe Jaipur or Bangladesh. So give us some tips about how they can build their trust, because like you said, you have to take a giant leap of faith.

While hiring new talent without any kind of communication, which you do physically, while you are sitting together, that is totally missing now. So you never know what's in the body language, you can't map the brain and the body thoughts.

So how do you take that giant leap? number one. And what if that giant leap turns out to be a mistake then how do you resolve it?

Amey: I think that's indeed something which I would say we struggled with in the initial couple of months. There was a girl who joined in on our video project management team. And if you remember the timeline last time with the lockdown happened in the month of April. End of March, early April, her joining was on the 1st of April. And we had to shift that because our office wasn't open and we then thought that, okay, it's going to be 21 days and we'll look at it.

Then 21 days eventually became a couple of weeks, right. And that wasn't on the horizon. So we said we're going to freeze this right now. The situation was such that she had already quit her previous job and 31st of March was going to be her last day. So she hadn't been to her office ever since a lockdown had been announced. And here was an individual who was supposed to join us on the 2nd of April and she couldn't join us. The month of April went by, mid May finally we had a call and at that time I explained the situation to her. I said this is what is happening. And she said, I don't mind if there is a pay cut, but I want to begin work. And this is my situation. So I said, yes, I think if you are being that honest about it, and I think we need to take that leap of faith, as I said, and we need to begin this association as soon as we can. And the very next day she started work.

So an organization takes one step, the employees also need to take that one step forward, especially the new joinees to make sure that the faith and trust is restored between the organization and the joinee. We need to put an effort in equal measure.

Over a period of time, I realized that as an organization, you need to have very clear tasks cut out for at least the first two weeks. So that when a person joins like the first day of work and we had a couple of people joining. And I wrote to them and I said, I find it very strange that I have to welcome you over an email. And we don't do the usual welcome that we have in our office. You don't get a new desk to sit on. There's a sense of curiosity that you have. There are smells that you associate with your workplace that are faces that are familiar. There is a certain commute that you do. All of those things matter. And these were kids who were joining in their first jobs and they were not getting any of those experiences. So I feel a little sad that this is happening, but this is where we are and one fine day, I'm sure you will be in our office and you'll get to see what Futuready Media is all about.

Ah but yes, the first 10 or 15 days become extremely critical. So have tasks which are clearly cut out, have a way of conveying what is expected and also ease them into things. Maybe make the first two or three days all about going slow. Just talk to people, understand what they do, then jump into a task and that kind of thing has made the process a little easier. I don't know how successful that is because all this still is relatively, not even a year old. So it would depend if these guys who have joined us in the past one year continue to stay with us and benefit from it then I think that we have succeeded in what we do.

Kulpreet: Yes. So it brings me to the last few questions.

You are running a digital marketing agency, so in the last one and a half years, have you seen some kind of a shift in your work requirements from the clients? Obviously it might've been expanded or gone in the other direction. So what kind of work is a digital marketing agency doing today? And what do you foresee in the next six to eight months or maybe one year, but let's talk about six to eight months because we are in a dynamic world right now. We can't really foresee, at least I can't foresee this much.

Amey: Yeah. So I would say there are three, four kinds of businesses which are looking at digital marketing in terms of saving or in terms of an increase in revenue, right?

They're wanting to do the very minimum of digital activities because you know what, we have our website, so we need to have a website. So let's get something out there. They're doing the very minimum. These businesses continue to exist. They still do the very minimum and they don't expect a lot from their digital activities.

There have been businesses who try to keep up with the competition. So the way they go about things is okay, what are my top three competitors doing? And am I doing the same thing? So the reference points remain those competitors and they want to emulate or do what others are doing. And these are basically businesses, which are not the leaders in their respective industries, and they want to kind of catch up with things.

So the first set who are just trying to do the very minimum look at services like having a website or having basic social media in place. That's about it. The second set who are trying to be competitive, looking at the competition, are the ones who kind of go a little beyond but they play it safe in terms of the budgets. So the budgets are not very great. They will look at, let's say social media, they would look at a little bit of influencer marketing. They will look at digital PR. They look at of course websites, apps, if those are important, but that ends there, and the third set of businesses are the ones which, uh, actually carve out digital led growth for themselves or who want to build it out as a competitive advantage. A lot of our clients, I would say, are in that zone. For example, we cater to a multi brand luxury garage called Autorounders and they are present in Mumbai and Hyderabad. In fact, they opened a new location in Hyderabad in the last one year. And they have looked at digital as a means to grow their brand significantly. So, we do a lot of video content for them. Their Instagram and WhatsApp or YouTube gives them a lot of inquiries on a regular basis.

The business fundamentally believes in creating digital content to generate more leads, more business. So when somebody looks at a car modification or a car service being done and you watch a five minute video about what has happened to one of the car models that you perhaps might be owning, then you have a desire to at least know what is the price point? How do you service it? And that's how they are able to create a kind of space for them, which didn't exist before. You know, so they are somewhere between the company service centers and the roadside garages that you find, and they have clearly built that unique positioning through content.

There are businesses who want to be digitally savvy because they see it as a competitive advantage. And yesterday we had this out on social samosa about BSES. So as a business, they have looked at using social media to reach out and resolve customer complaints. And we run a 24 by seven monitoring mechanism for them, which allows them to cater to customer complaints much faster and get a sense of what is the nature of the complaint overall, which zones within the geography are more affected? and certain insights are then generated for them to act proactively rather than reacting to situations. The businesses which take it as a competitive advantage, I think those are the ones who are going all out and doing everything possible in the digital space.

Kulpreet: That's interesting. Obviously having an online competitive advantage will actually mean everything in today's time. How do you see the new trends now? What we are seeing in the last one and a half years? Yes. we have digitally advanced. There was a shift. Then you said you're also onboarding people digitally and taking the giant leap of faith in knowing what you have to get out of them. Plus we also have seen kind of shifts in clients demanding for digital competitive edge. What new trends do you see emerging in the next one year, because in the last one year we have seen some trends emerging. If you could put some light on those new trends, And how do you see the mapping out of the coming year?

Amey: Great. I think we all are very familiar with the term ‘new normal’, but today The new normal has now become old. The ones who are extremely competitive are now looking at what would be the next normal, right? So from the new normal you are already looking at the next normal and the next normal is going to be a whole lot different from how we have experienced it so far. There is a lot of emphasis that's going to be there on digital marketing and inside an organization there is going to be a lot of emphasis on digitization. So moving away from physical, moving away from paper to maybe secure environments, which are very, very digital in nature. One of the trends that I see curiously ‘voice’ coming into picture as one of the trends of last year.

What happened was, suddenly when we face these situations of lockdowns and remote working and everything about our lives became video. You're doing personal video calls to other people. You're using WhatsApp video, you're doing zoom calls and that led to a video fatigue. And soon people said that video is very good to watch, but it's very painful to produce. And it takes a toll on you because you have to be physically far more present for a video interaction than you are for voice interaction. So a lot of that interaction which had to be personal, then moved to voice and we saw the lights of say a Clubhouse or Twitter spaces, which has kind of taken up. These are new areas for brands. So brands are also kind of slowly wanting to move in over there. So that's one of the trends that we have seen. The other trend I would say would be in terms of cloud computing, shifting a lot of the data on to the cloud, where data security is important because you could have situations where you're dealing with a lot of sensitive data and that data could go out anywhere.

You're also looking at certain things which are to do, of course, with remote working and how that changes what you meant by an organization. So particularly in the case of digital agencies, I think, what would the agency of five years from now look like? It could not have an office. It could be entirely digital. It could work on a lot of collaboration across the globe. It could cater to any brand anywhere. So if you can have employees who are from different continents, you could also cater to brands which are from different continents. So that kind of brings up interesting possibilities for what one can do and how work will evolve from now on. When I look at digital as a space, I think, a lot of the physical barriers once they get broken, we are looking at a far different way of working from now on.

Kulpreet: Yes, actually. Amey, you rightly said when barriers are broken you kind of unleash your limitlessness. So I think now on that note, it was great chatting with you. And I would like you to kind of sum up what we discussed so that the listeners who have come in late can catch up on all that was covered. We have covered a broad spectrum in terms of digital shift, internal and external communication and the business part as well. But could you just quickly sum it up and then we will end the show.

Amey: Sure, sure. I would say one of the most interesting periods of our professional lives has been the last year and a half. And we are still in the middle of it. It's one of those events which kind of change things. I remember when I got into my first job, we were hit by the recession of 2007/8 and that kind of was a defining moment at that time. And my CEO at that time used to say that if you start a business in recession, you kind of are very frugal and you know how to go about things with an eye on the cost. So that's one learning that somebody has when you start in tough environments.

Similarly, I think this time period has also given us a lot of learning in terms of internally how one can look at organizations, adapt, evolve, and thrive in the environment today. Digitization, digital media, a lot of trends which are new and exciting that we have caught up on, we have seen businesses reacting very differently to this change based on what their component of physical has been in their business versus component of digital. I think a very defining moment in our lives, I would say, whatever age we are at, whether one is a 20 year old or a 40 year old or a 60 year old. I think this is a period of time, which nobody has seen.

And as a professional, the many learnings, which one would take from this period to build a future, which is going to be far more exciting, definitely faster than what we can imagine it to be right now.

Kulpreet: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Thank you so much Amey. It was lovely hosting you. You are definitely pretty young and have great insights. I learned a lot. So thank you so much for your time and for the listeners, thanks for being there. And we'll be back with our next series next Friday. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Amey: Thanks Kulpreet. Have a nice weekend. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Kulpreet: Yeah, you too. Bye bye.