"All the skills that you pick up during your life play a role in making you what you are"
Prashant Shanbhag Tweet
Meet Prashant Shanbhag, the Founder and CEO of Nuvopreneur, a digital marketing consulting company helping small and new businesses navigate through the world of online marketing and sales since 2016. Before launching his own venture, Prashant worked as a CEO with VNurture Healthcare Software Solutions and turned around the loss-making company within two years. For this they were awarded the Emerging Company in the Health sector award in 2014.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Prashant Shanbhag: I am a innovative marketing professional. Throughout my career I have used out-of-the-box thinking to out-market established brands and gain entry into new markets. I have helped brands like Disney, Jeanne Arthes & Lomani enter new markets. I have over 20 years of experience.
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.
Prashant Shanbhag: When I was a kid I wanted to be in the military. I was attracted to the uniform. I was always disciplined in my work and life. In school, I was the obedient student- teachers’ pet. In college I was the nerd who never missed a class, and the guy others came to when they needed help with their studies. I was smart, not brilliant. What I have learned in life along the way is well explained in the this quote- “Hardwork beats intelligence, when intelligence doesn’t work hard.”
Another lesson I learned is – you can get anything in life if you try enough number of times.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Prashant Shanbhag: My company helps small and new businesses market their brands online without burning a hole in their poclets. We do lead acquisitions, lead conversions and sales for those without deep pockets and still compete with survive in the digital marketplace. Just to give an example… in the dentistry space, for the product called invisalign, the typical cost for acquiring a new lead is $ 178 whereas we are able to get fresh leads for our client for $32.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Prashant Shanbhag: Becoming a CEO means:
- Becoming a person who others can look up to when times are difficult and feel reassured.
- Becoming a person who can inspire your team members to give their best even when the returns aren’t that great.
- Being able to motivate your team to forget individualistic goals and work towards the overall good of the company
To achieve this one needs the right education (formal and informal), the right qualities, and a track record.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Prashant Shanbhag: I don’t think there are any secrets. What you need to become a CEO has always been the same things you always needed…
- business acumen
- the know-how to navigate the market you are in
- never-say-die attitude and
- courage to disrupt the status quo
People who inspire me are:
- Narendra Modi – for his amazing ability to think and execute strategically and inspire over a billion people to aim big
- Richard Branson to think out-of-the-box, the way he is able to create a buzz and get free publicity that would, otherwise cost hundreds of millions of dollars
- Elon Musk – for his disruptive thinking and execution of his dreams
- Steve Jobs – for this focus on innovation
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.
Prashant Shanbhag: If you break down what a CEO needs to deliver, everything boils down to just three main, broad objectives.
- Grow the top-line
- Grow the bottom-line
- Inspire people to follow your lead
You put a number goal and a time-frame to these objectives and you have a goal. Everything else are just tactics that aim to achieve these three objectives. When you check each activity to see how urgent, vital and desirable they are to achieve these three goals you know what you need to focus on.
Some things are urgent and required in the short-term, while others may be more strategic. These are things that are required, maybe 3-5 years down the line, but you need to lay the ground work today. As a CEO you need to have a healthy balance of both, short-term and long-term activities, on your to-do list. That’s what you focus on. What is more important, what isn’t can only be decided by the company depending on the unique conditions.
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.
Prashant Shanbhag: The most difficult challenge that we faced was the uncertainty. Nobody could plan for a lockdown, nobody could plan for people dying on this scale.
The challenge was keeping the engine running and making payroll, month after month, even when business was down the challenge was keeping my team motivated when there were so many deaths around them. The challenge was being able to keep our commitments to our clients even when we knew that they weren’t going to be able to pay us on time and still deliver uncompromised quality.
The challenge was assuring the team that lay-offs were going to be the last resort, and they had their jobs till the end.
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?
Prashant Shanbhag: What I see as mistakes may not be mistakes when you see them from their point of view. But anyway, here’s what I think:
- Announcing lay-offs the moment there were rumors of impending lock-down.
- Cutting-down all marketing in anticipation of dwindling sales.
- Not adapting to the remote working scenario.
My learning from these mistakes are:
- Your team makes your company. If your employees aren’t happy, imagine how they are going to treat your client. Treat your employees with compassion and respect. They weren’t responsible for the pandemic.
- Even during a lockdown, there were industries that thrived. All those companies providing remote-working tools and capabilities thrived. Our market niche had shifted. We simply needed to go after a different niche. Adapting was the key.
- How quickly you adapt to the changing conditions determines the lifespan of your business. It requires taking a step back. You simply need to figure out a new way and proceed.
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?
Prashant Shanbhag: The first, and most important, change that worked in our favor was that people moved to working remotely and digitally. This played well for us since we are in the digital marketing business.
We needed to target different niches – the ones that were making money even during the pandemic. Adapting our marketing and sales effort to target such companies helped us thrive.
The lesson it taught me was were simple… no matter what, there are always some sectors and companies that thrive in the market. If your company can identify and target them before other players, you can hit the jackpot. Being agile is the key. If you become too comfortable in your ways, you start becoming obsolete.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Prashant Shanbhag: The most pressing challenge I am trying to solve is that of adding more capabilities and at a bigger scale. Our clients want us to offer them more services, which currently we don’t have the capability to offer.
For example, just a couple weeks ago, one of our clients inquired if we could deliver them 15X more than what we are currently delivering. The margins on this particular service isn’t great.
So, should we outsource? How to manage out-sourced talent so that we don’t compromise on quality and deadlines? Or, should we build the capacity in-house?
This is one example. We have a few more requests. Which ones to prioritize? These are opportunities but they take time to build up to a certain level and still maintain quality. These are some of the challenges I am grappling with.
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?
Prashant Shanbhag: I wouldn’t say any skill is useless. All the skills that you pick up during your life play a role in making you what you are. You may not be aware that a particular skill is playing a role because you have taken it for granted.
For example, I used to sketch very well when I was in school. I never developed it to a professional level but I won a few awards in interschool competitions. I don’t use this skill at all in my job. I don’t create any designs myself. But having the skill gives me a sense of proportion, focus element, etc. in a design. Having the skill enables me to appreciate a good ad design, and at times, advise on the changes.
Do I always attribute my ability to discern a good ad to this skill? Maybe not. But, if I didn’t have the skill, I’d have to go by what the designer gave me.
So, there’s no useless skill. It may be helping you without you knowing.
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?
Prashant Shanbhag: The most difficult decision I had to make was to avoid lay-offs when business sense dictated that doing so was sensible.
This is a decision I had to take and announce to my team even before I had a plan to make it work. I wasn’t sure how we were going to be able to do that. But I knew there were busineses laying off staff by the droves and this was causing distress among employees.
So, early in the pandemic period, I announced that Nuvopreneur wasn’t going to lay-off people. No matter what their role was. This meant carrying the weight of the people who’s services weren’t going to be required at all during the lockdown. Like the cleaning, the computer maintenance staff (since people would be working remotely), etc.
What made this decision so difficult was the fact that, at the time it was taken, there was no clarity on how long the lockdown would last. Also, there was no definite plan to survive the pandemic and make regular payroll.
But this decision helped my team to feel reassured and motivated them to go out of their way to adapt during the pandemic.
For example, we created a self-help group to cater to our members who needed assistance during the pandemic.
The objective of this group was to reach out to anyone needing help and provide any assistance they could.
There was a time when one of our employees was quarantined, she needed someone to stay with her aged mother. Her mother had restricted mobility due to her advanced aged and some medical condition. She needed assistance to take her through her daily activities. She even needed help eating, because she had to be fed and needed assistance going to the bathroom.
Two people volunteered to help. One person would bring the food and another offered to stay with the girl’s mother, and take care of her, till the quaratine period ended.
And it was this staff (cleaning, maintenance, support, etc.) who came forward and put in their time and effort to make the initiative a success.
Therefore, in the end, I think, the decision helped my employees and drove their motivation up to give their best to the company.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Prashant Shanbhag 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 Prashant Shanbhag or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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