 Good evening. So I was just finding a reason why, you know, you should become an agency owner and not, you know, remain freelancer because if you become an agency owner, then probably you can give iPhone as a giveaway, right? And I was also finding a reason why you should keep attending the work and because that is the only day where you find that iPhone is the only cheapest product in the market, right? So having said that, I decided this topic about doing why to take the session on this topic is because last year when we sponsored work camp and I got a chance to interact with a lot of developers and freelancers who are doing that full-time and I found that there is a lot of potential within them that but there is something that is, you know, stopping them doing and growing from where they are or they might have stuck somewhere and they are looking for some input. So they were asking some random questions and I thought that why not to, you know, take a session on it and probably do it. So I thank you, the work camp, Ahmedabad team, who has actually accepted this topic and allow me an opportunity to, you know, speak in front of you and sharing my experience of last 17 years, which I have been, you know, acting as a business owner. So before I start this session, this is just a little bit about me. I am founder and CEO of company called Zealus Web and I have around like 17 years of experience in the web mobile application development and digital marketing services. Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to, you know, attend to work camp in US one was in New York and another one is in LA and fortunately, I got a chance to speak for maybe around five minutes on the concept called bar camp where you have to submit your topic and if you get a maximum vote, then probably you are allowed to speak on it and it was a great experience and apart from this, as far as my educational background is concerned, I am a science graduate having a major in chemistry and which was actually not by my choice, but by force because I really didn't get a good marks in my board exams. So that is the only option that I had and then eventually I found that I am more into the computers and I did a full-time course for the six-month in CREC Ahmedabad, which was primarily run by the company called Gateway Technolabs before 15 years and after doing in computers, I worked for a company for around one and a half year and I eventually found that I am good at and all I like are more of a people management rather than doing a programming myself. So I decided to start my own agency. I worked as an independent freelancer for six months and then eventually I found a need to build an agency and then I started Apart from this, I also did my post graduation diploma from Nirmah University into the international business and as far as my personal life is concerned, I am the youngest child, although I do not look like young, but I'm the youngest one and I have one beautiful wife. Wives are always beautiful. That is what we're told and sometimes the husbands are also handsome as well, but apart from this, I have two kids who keeps me busy with their adventures and want me to be one of the characters in daily and they keep on changing like that. I like sports even though I am wearing the Matt's t-shirt. I am not a baseball fan, but I play a cricket like a baseball, so I just put that, I chose to select that particular photo for this presentation and I am a wicketkeeper and part-time batsman, a batman baller as well. Moving to the next slide, there are a few assumptions that I have taken while making this presentation to make sure that you get the maximum value out of this and the first one is that I hope that you are into the industry, you are not just a trainee or maybe passed out from the college and you have maybe one or two years of experience working either as a designer or a developer or a QA as well. The second one is that you have a burning desire to do something on a larger scale, so if you are happy with whatever you are doing right now and you don't want to take any extra burden or you don't have any goals to grow larger, probably this session would not interest you, but I understand because you are here, you have an interest to grow your company or maybe whether you are working as a senior people in your organization or your freelancer or you are a small agency, you wanted to grow from where you are. The third assumption is that you like to work as a team player because when you think about growing an agency, I have talked with many freelancers and I ask them why you keep on doing this and they say that I like to work alone and I don't get well with the team, so probably that is another reason that I would say that I assume that you like to work within the team as well. You have a good business ethics right now and you are going to keep the good business ethics in the future as well. That is another assumption that I have made and you wanted to grow with WordPress community, that is another because we are all about talking about the WordPress and I think that is the, we all know WordPress either from the front end perspective or from the back end perspective, so we wanted to all build our agency around WordPress and also give back to the community when you get a success in your life, right? So these are the assumptions that I have made. Can you go to the next? So who is going to be benefited from this particular presentation that I am making? First and foremost is the full-time or part-time freelancers. I think they are going to enjoy this session a lot because I have tried to cover a lot of things which is related to their future. The second people is the small startup agencies who are no longer a freelancer. They might have started their own company and they have two, three, five people working for them but they wanted to scale from where they are right now and the third people is the employee in the leadership role because we have heard from a lot of speakers that they are already retired and they are retired means their companies are still running but that is because of the CEO and the COO in their companies which means that if you are today a project manager or a project leader or team leader probably tomorrow if your company owner decides to you know get the retirement at the lead life you are going to be responsible for making all of this decision which I am going to present so probably if you are not a freelancer and if you are working for an agency and at a senior position then probably this presentation would interest you as well. So I pretty much can I ask a question how many of us are working for an agency as a leadership role and not a freelancer. Good. So I would like to start this presentation with the quote that says that there are two great things in a person's life one when we are born and another when we discover why we are doing anything why we are here today to attend the work camp or maybe a question that comes that why tomorrow morning at around 9 a.m. you are going to join your company or maybe if you leave your company around 7 p.m. in the evening why you are going at the home if you can answer all of these questions probably we would be in better position to decide what we wanted to do right. So moving to that I think I have a few wise that would clear us that whether we should why you should go for an agency ownership rather than doing in full-time freelancing. So there are eight reasons and out of these the first one is the heavy workload how many of us has you know found ourselves going on a vacation with the laptop and you know working maybe one or two hours when you are you know on a vacation you are not supposed to be working but you are answering your client's email being a freelancer can you raise your hands is it very common yeah okay let's forget about laptop how many of us as maybe you are on an international trip on a vacation and you have an international roaming on just because you don't want to connect with your family members like parents you you wanted to call them but you want to check your emails in the mobile devices because you want to make sure that you are not losing any money right. So these are the situations where you find that you have a heavy workload and you should think about you know when you are on a vacation you are actually enjoying a vacation and somebody else can take care of certain tasks that keeps your clients on as well. The second is that freelancer business isn't scaling which means that as a one person you are really good plugin developers but you can develop maybe one plugin in three months time or maybe a two plugin in six or nine months time and also you can't build anymore because the two plugins that you have built you have to provide the support as well. So your freelance business is not scaling and you wanted to scale it then that is another reason why you should go for an agency owner ship rather than doing freelancing. The third one you are already collaborating with other freelancers this is what I have heard because I ask questions that you are a developer and you are working as a freelancer what do you do for your designing and they say that we work with another freelancer who is a freelance web designer and they give us a part-time support. Now if you are doing this very aggressively and not occasionally which means that you are risking yourself because the availability of the freelancers are not if they are not full-time then it's it's on a risk so probably that is another reason that rather than relying on somebody for a longer period short term period it's fine but for the longer period it would good to employ somebody so that probably you haven't you know you can be having an accountability and you can answer to your clients as well. The fourth one is that your ability is about to change let's say you got married maybe two three years and you are going expecting a baby and probably you are thinking that now you are not able to give maybe the same amount of time that you are giving to your business being a you know bachelor or being a you know a non-parent but now your ability is going to change that is another way of thinking that now your personal time is going to be splitted and you should have an extra hand then that is another reason why you should you know think about this. Your client wants more everybody here thinks that we are the best freelancer in the world which also your client thinks as well and they want you to work on multiple projects but because you don't finish your first project you can't move to the second or even if you are a really good juggler then probably you can work on two but not on three or four or five projects so if your client needs more from you that is another reason why you should also think that it is a time to you know build your own agency. You are a good team you are a good at team management that is an essential part of you know owning any agency that you have to be a really good team management otherwise what will happen that you will hire somebody if you are not able to manage them they will leave you and you will keep yourself finding busy hiring more and more people so that is another important aspect that you have to be a good player so if you think that you are a good team manager then probably there is nobody to you know start your own agency you love the business development most of the time you will find that the owner's life at the end maybe after five years or six years they find themselves more involved into the business development and if you think that you love this activity then probably you are also eligible for you know owning a company as well and last but not the least to work with an established agency this is one of the one of the point that would probably interest some of the CEO or the agency owners as well because I have been you know agency owner for 15 years now we get a lot of work request we many times tell no to the client because we don't know any small agencies that we can sub outsource those projects to and if you are a freelancer probably because it's not because of the capability of the freelancers but sometimes it's the turnaround time that we expect on a project probably only a small wave agency could help us so if you build your own agency from the freelancing probably you get a chance to work with maybe larger companies that is around you as well so that is an entry point for you as that that you can say that now I am a small wave agency owner rather than a freelancer and probably the companies would work with you and give you an you work as a subcontractor for them as well so these are the reasons why you should start your own agency so before we conclude whether you wanted to go for it or not there are some pros and cons of starting your own agencies and I would like to go through that as well so you have a team you can't if you don't have a team if you are a team you can support and maintain your client as well so which means that you have five different products or maybe 15 different projects running and if client after the projects or product delivered probably you have to give the support to the client I think if you have a team then probably you can put somebody to you know finish the task so that allows you as an agency owner to you know support multiple clients you can delegate the work that you do the best which means minimizing your weaknesses which me the thing is that if you are you as an individual cannot do everything whatever even though your requirement is that you have to do everything designing development qa and deployment everything but it doesn't mean that you are good at everything if you hire somebody if you become an agency owner you only do what you are good at and other things you can always delegate to somebody else and focus on what you do the best so you play against your friend lot of time you have strength your skills but you are not actually able to utilize that because you find yourself busy with the other tasks so in case you have a multiple team members that supports you probably you will be able to focus on something which you are good at and when you are doing something which you are good at probably the success ratio is very high so there are pitfalls of owning an agency as well that you have to keep on recruiting people as and when project requires or somebody you know leaves your company so you have to spend extra time which isn't freelancer you are not worried about because you don't have to look for anybody else everything that you are doing yourself trusting other with the work you do is very hard a lot of people will keep on saying that I am doing freelancing for five years now because the level of quality of work that I can deliver to my clients nobody else can do it but if that is the case then there is a no like thousands and hundreds of freelancers out there or maybe wave agencies out there to serve the clients so it's it's more often like you have to find the right people and right potential and you can always train them if you need to learn how to train them you can probably go ahead and do it but that's not the right excuse according to my experience that nobody else can do the similar work like I can do and sometimes I have found myself that I hadn't this assumption or this this philosophy when I was like two or three years of you know running my agency that I can do things a bit and hire hired people and I actually found that they are doing it better than what I was doing so if I would have taken those decisions earlier probably I would have grown much more time like bigger than what we had in like two or three years of life my agency life so sometimes it's a reverse as well that somebody else can do better than what you are doing if you run an agency you never actually do the work you enjoy now a few people were you know asking me because somebody who might have come earlier than this morning like around 8 a.m. I was just trying to stick the stickers in our booth and as an agency owner you probably I'm not supposed to do that but I love doing it because there was nobody somebody was needing an assistance there so there is no fixed job profile for an wave agency owner and you shouldn't have no shame on doing anything that is required and that needs to be fixed this is a thumb rule for owning any agency and you might have found maybe if you are working for a company your project managers or maybe your directors might be doing something which they are not supposed to do but they do it because it required and they love doing it right so that is another drawback of if you think that you wanted to do only if you are certain things then you have to be prepared for that and the last is that a team means people and people means responsibility as an influencer you are just responsible for feeding your own family if you extend it you might be you know feeding maybe your elders who might need your financial support as well but when you are owning an agency you are no longer responsible for your family or extended family you are responsible for each and every employee that you hire because every month the the check that you pay that also helps that particular family as well so you have to think from that perspective that you are adding this additional burden that you will be responsible now for helping others as well so I think these are the pros and cons that I can think of and now I believe that if we are still here and we are still interested to listen further so I understand that we are now wanting to you know build an agency not tomorrow but maybe six months or maybe one year or two years down the line so if we are building it what I'm trying to do is that instead of making these a flat slides I have tried to build a little bit story so there will be a different stages of an agency life that I have tried to cover here and we will be looking at those points from those stages that we have experienced in the last 15 years so those stages are so there is a hand behind this it's a lighter version so you can't see it but there is a legal aspect that you have to look after there will be a stage where you have to think about whether you need a co-founder or not then you need an office space then what should be your first hire and what are the things that you need to consider by that then what are the things that you should celebrate as an agency and then infrastructure human resource sales and system processes and there is a last one going global so these are the different points that we will be looking at and let's look at them one by one okay so to start with I think the first there are various legal aspect that we should be looking at and the first is that the agency name now I have a recommendation that people I see that people keep the agency name which are very fancy one which has no meaning and if we ask them what is the meaning about this company and they don't know about it what I tried to pass here is that whenever somebody five years ten years down the line will be asking you why you have named the company like this you should have a vision attached to it so whatever name you keep it but you make sure that whatever culture you wanted to build in the company you try and attach that with the brand name as well the next point is the legal aspect what kind of company that you wanted to build there are two different kind of I'm not going to touch in detail about this because I personally believe that you should hire a CA who is a better person who can give you a right suggestion which would save a lot of tax and you know save you from the lot of headache from the government agencies and kind of things so I'm just giving you an overview that there is an limited liability companies and unlimited liability companies that you can build in the limited liability companies unlimited liability companies there is a proprietary shift firm which is the easiest one and that is another thing is the partnership firm where maybe one or two people minimum two people are required so that is an unlimited liability companies and in the limited liability you have a private limited the limited liability partnership firm which is called LLP and there is one more company that is started like they they have route out the rule is out there in since 2013 that you can build one person company as well so one person company is similar to the private limited firm but there is only one person or one director required there there is no other required the only limitation with the one person part company is that it should not cross the turnover more than two crore rupees so you can discuss these all details with your CA and all but there are various kind of companies that you can form but the easiest one here that you can start with would require a less documentation and would allow you to focus your own business the next point is the co-founder selection this is very much important because a lot of people think that right now I have skills to handle everything and probably being an owner of 5, 10 or 15 people you can do it all alone but when you grow when you have a 50 60 or 100 or 500 people you need other people to help you so try and make sure that you if you have a long term vision you try and go for a co-founder as well who is equally interested and having similar wavelength like you have so there are various things that you should consider while selecting the co-founder and the first one is that you make sure that you are not trying to replicate the strength you have if you are a really good developer it is not a wise decision to partner with somebody who is good at development because you are already good at development you can take care of those things it's better that you complement each other so go for a designer or somebody who is from the non-technical background from the sales and marketing or kind of thing so that would probably help you taking care of certain other departments which actually requires your attention as well next so next is the office space think about the office like you know you are a startup you don't know how much you are going to grow go for an easy option that is a leasing an office because and go for maybe 5 10 15 people office space rather than investing more into it make sure that you find a location which is easy for your employees because even if you have to travel maybe five extra miles that's fine but if your employees can probably reach and have an access to the public transport and everything which I found that are the constraint when you are hiring a people probably you should be thinking about those aspects as well and apart from this you also look at the multiple isp options as well because we are into the internet business we have to make sure that we are not just stuck with one isp but we have multiple isp options so that we always give and haven't back up options for the internet connections as well next point is around 6 to 12 months of your agency life and that is the first hire that you and that is the most crucial according to me because they are going to represent the culture that you are trying to build and that first hire that you make make sure that you don't go for an experience but go for a potential in the person which means the easiest thing in this world is to you know train somebody on the technology side if you don't know something you are going to google it and fix the problem if there are a number of videos available that you can learn from there are a number of professionals who provides the training nobody provides the potentiality right if person has a potential you can train them so always whenever you are hire and specifically the first hire must have a potential to grow with your agency or your vision right so make sure you do that and another thing which is always interview with your co-founder or maybe somebody other than you who is having an equal LGBT to interview somebody because you don't want to you know interview from a one perspective always ask somebody else what do you think about him let them ask the questions from the other end and have a discussion and then do the first hire it's not something that you should know neglect apart from this a lot of people a lot of companies do celebrate a lot of things there are minimum things that you need to you know do is that everything that you do first has to be celebrated which means that your first hire has completed maybe a first month in your company and you have to celebrate that with you I don't know what scale you are celebrating it but you have to celebrate it the reason why we always found that anything that we achieve for the first time if we celebrate it probably it gives us a lot of confidence when we are doing something else for the first time because we have an history that we have achieved this in past so always always celebrate the I'm not talking about the first anniversary now which is very common I'm talking about every minor thing that happens in your company for the first time try to celebrate that as well okay apart from that then I actually haven't read like so I need to you know speed up the session so I will go faster than it comes to like one or two years when you are already like 20 or 50 people then you have to go and buy another office your choice whether you wanted to rent it or whether you want to lease it make sure that you spend little amount of money into the infrastructure side but make sure that you have really good security and data protection this is the stage where you will be working on a multiple projects if you ignore this fact you may end up you know losing the clients or maybe losing your data and everything so make sure you have a security in place and really good backup options apart from these this is the time that a human resource department that is very crucial because you will need to hire more and more people you will find yourself busy in other tasks you need a department who will be in bridge between the team as well as the owner that is the single most department in the IT field because we all are the resources are the assets for the company and if there is a no good HR department in place probably there will be a problems with the trainings and everything and then go to the sales and marketing part how to you know scale your company there are various things one of the single most important and the most most modern thing is that the content marketing so I give you a couple of example like an SEO Moos who has you know did the content marketing for the three years of you know their initial company and then they have built the loyal audience around them and then probably you know everybody was following those articles and everything and they changed the brand name with the product that they launched and then they have those loyal customers who has actually purchased those products so doing in content marketing around the services and the product and plugins is the way to you know grow yourselves as well apart from this I think you need to hire the sales team this is the time where you have to hire maybe multiple of people who can probably help each other compete each other and probably bring more and more leads for your organization as well then it will be a stage where you need a systems and the processes in place as an agency and as an agency you have to have those minimum five different things which is related to CRM or maybe your billing or project management or maybe customer support all of this system needs to be there and you need an SOP for each and every department you have in your company whether it's a designing sales marketing QA you need your SOPs in place as well so having said I think I have lost five different questions that I will quickly answer how to be successful while living agency life there is no shortcut you have to have put a lot of amount of effort time in the initial stage the next one how to decide what is ethical and not you are the your own boss you have to decide what is ethical and you have to keep make sure that you pass this message into your agency as well how do I change my persona for the agency's growth if you find as an owner some negative or weaknesses in yourself probably you have to you know change yourself first then probably you will be overcome and grow your agency and how to balance the work life and leisure make sure that you become an agency owner because you want to balance these work and personal life so don't forget about that and why and whom I am doing this this is what I have started with and if you can answer this question probably you will be able to make the decision whether you want to live the agency life with this said the last quote in the last slide that says none of us is as smart as all of us this is what I personally believe thank you