"To become successful, I had to do everything by counting only on myself."
Benjamin Poirrier is a resident from France who relocated to Vietnam in 2007. He is the Founder & CEO of Prodima. Arriving in Vietnam to validate a degree in Marketing and Communication, Benjamin soon immersed himself in the culture and community of Vietnam. With a bare minimum of 500 Euros to survive and a lack in the local culture, Benjamin explored the Vietnamese language and continues to practice it today. The ways of Vietnam resonate within Benjamin’s values, consistently drawing him to learn from Vietnamese people and Vietnamese mindsets – essential to success and growth in Vietnam.
Following years of global travel and local expertise gained through living in Vietnam, Benjamin has built Prodima based on the needs of the Vietnamese business community. Gaining insight through the digital market in Saigon, Benjamin has aligned the needs of the industry with Vietnam’s market for talent and online attraction.
Prodima leader and innovator Benjamin maintains a developed passion for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) based upon a foundation of years of digital marketing experience. He is also a passionate PPC (Pay Per Click) expert in media ads campaigns whose professional experience and success are valuable to all partners. Finally, Benjamin produces website development strategies alongside an experienced team to deliver professional and authentic results.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Benjamin Poirrier: I am a French eating smelly cheese but good chocolate & bread also drinking real wine. But not smoking cigarettes, sorry. I was a student when I first came to Vietnam in 2007. No money ahead, no friends, no family support, not even Vietnamese or English language at that time.
To become successful, I had to do everything by counting only on myself.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Benjamin Poirrier: My dream as a child was to become a teacher. I wanted to help people learn & show the best of themselves. From a very young age, I understood that you cannot grow alone. You must cooperate at some point. And since you must cooperate, better being surrounded by skilled people. By “skills”, I don’t necessarily mean people with the most expertise. Expertise without empathy gives toxic people. You must find the right balance. If you have an expert AND empathetic coworker, then great, you are lucky! However, in real life, this kind of people is rare.
That’s why great CEOs are the ones who know how to choose the right teammates… and train them! A good mindset is always more valuable than good skills in the long term.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Benjamin Poirrier: Prodima is a full-service digital marketing agency. We do web design & development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid ad campaigns, and social media. We are unique because we are not only here to make money, but also to educate the market about digital techniques.
We take the time to answer every single request. The market is full of small businesses that have no idea how to get started with their digital transformation or have no finance to go ahead. We help them with free advice. We believe that digital knowledge should be as free as the Google search engine.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Benjamin Poirrier: Degrees are useless. You do not learn how to become a CEO at school. You learn it from real-life experiences, failures, and successes. You must plan ahead. Never launch a business if you have no idea where you could be in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years (a.k.a. “have a realistic business plan”). And focus on the most pessimistic estimation. Shit happens and will happen.
Perseverance is key. Don’t be afraid to start small and grow on the go. Recruit your core team by yourself. Never delegate this critical task.
Know your product or service, know your market, know your target audience, and know your competitors. No clear competitive advantage = failure.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Benjamin Poirrier: I think having one or two role models is extremely restrictive. In today’s connected world, we should take advantage of the communication facilities and get as many “role models” as possible. In most cases, we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Checking what has been done before by other people is an excellent way to get started. Learning from others’ failures is a valuable experience too.
So go check other CEOs and leaders who are relevant to you (your industry, your country, your culture, etc.). And learn everything you can learn from them. You are unique and your leadership will be unique anyway. There is no “perfect role model” but you can learn from a blended mix of them.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Benjamin Poirrier: Ideally, the CEO needs to have a minimum understanding of the whole value production process. If not, teammates will tend to cheat (for example, be lazy, or delay the work, or even do illegal stuff). At the same time, the CEO doesn’t need to be an expert at everything. We can hire talents for that.
The role of the CEO is to drive the company to a vision and make the most important decisions. Having great interpersonal & HR skills also helps a lot. Hiring the right persons is key to running a successful business.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Benjamin Poirrier: The 3 months of strict lockdown were the most challenging covid-19 experience for my agency. I managed to keep everybody full-time, working remotely from home, with a full salary. Obviously, our activities were slowed down (because we work for clients who were also slowed down).
The most important was to keep the team’s morale, keep them busy, communicate on the next steps, and have quick video calls with them. What worked is that I announced that, right after we could come back to the office, our agency would accelerate its activities: we launched a big PR campaign and ran ads to boost our online visibility and get more clients on board.
This is what we did and today, my team is solid.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Benjamin Poirrier: During the pandemic, I saw too many businesses rushing to get online sales. They thought that the digital transformation meant switching from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce websites. Well, the experience taught us it was not the right way to proceed. Especially when you are in a strict lockdown like in Vietnam (between July and October 2021, people were not allowed to go to the streets and we could even not get delivered).
Having an online store is great, but there is no point in launching conversion campaigns while no one can actually purchase your goods. Instead of running lead generation campaigns, the pandemic was the right time to conduct brand awareness activities.
And then, after the lockdown was over, switch the brand awareness to conversion campaigns.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Benjamin Poirrier: Empathy.
We understood that most businesses were struggling during the pandemic, so we helped lots of them (for free) to operate their digital transformation.
It does not seem like a sustainable plan to grow a business… except the fact that a few of those companies trusted us, and were contacting us after the lockdown to start doing “real business” with us (meaning signing contract and paying for our services).
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Benjamin Poirrier: I want to share more expertise for free via videos and maybe webinars or 30-minute free consultation calls, but it requires lots of time & resources (that we currently don’t have).
It’s in the 2022 plan. Hope we will make it true.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Benjamin Poirrier: The SCRUM methodology.
And I think I will never understand why there are still people hiring staff based on this “skill.”
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Benjamin Poirrier: We had to reject a deal request from a high potential lead who was directly competing with one of our current clients. There was lots of money involved, so it was hard to say “no” (and we had long internal discussions about that).
In the end, I made the decision to not go for that partnership that was going against our non-competitive policies. It was the right choice. We know that, if we tried to hide this, at some point, we would have faced big issues later on.
Mike Weiss, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Benjamin Poirrier for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Benjamin Poirrier or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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