26 Dec Small is big, less is more
19, our beloved work place where we spend most of the time of our days either giggling or working, has been re-strategizing its social media plans and as a co-founder and social media strategist, I obviously have a lot to do in this regard. I have been thinking the competitive advantages of a small digital agency like ours so that those can resonate with the new plans. To my sheer wonder, I found out thousands of pluses of being a small digital media agency; Google has never made me so happy ever before, to be honest. Ad agency veterans and marketing experts are quiet confidently leveraging the small media agencies like us and they do have valid points.
Will Burns, a contributor at Forbes and the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle, a virtual marketing-ideas company writes about the small agencies can be the big ones when it comes to advertising. He argues that small agencies have potent culture and they don’t lose their identity very often as they get to be united under a strong and fearless leader. I can see how this plays in reality: we are doing nine million different things at 19, each employee taking up responsibility of his or her expertise or of a completely different area, but at the end of the day we all know what we want to see and how we want to achieve it. There is no red tape in 19 whatsoever, and thus the work culture is as lucid as creativity or art itself.
“Don’t forget to write about the massive overhead that the big agencies have to pay at the end of the month”, says my designer Hasanul Banna, while I was brainstorming about this blog post. What Banna really means is, if a company has a big overhead, the cost is generally passed on to the clients. A small agency is constantly building its reputation and understands that it needs to hold its partners and external vendors to the same standards. Hence, we do our diligence working with new vendors and new clients and we bring out the best of us to be able to collaborate further.
You would think that a small company has no work and thus can be as lazy as it wants to be. Wrong! Flexibility isn’t really synonymous to laziness. A small agency like ours doesn’t have any room for Sunday morning blues and sometimes not even a proper weekend. Everyone is expected to give their 110 percent at all the time. Passion roars through our hallways and weaves its way around the office, forcing us all to remain deeply connected. Most importantly, passion is what keeps us standing strong during our most challenging days. A small team feels every nook, bump and curve in the road and they feel it together, but let’s not forget they also feel their achievements together and that too very strongly. At the end of every successful day, we realize it with a big heart that small is big and less is more.
