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Four perks of being an independent start-up

When you start spending your own money, you immediately cut out the wastage.

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1. You decide how to position yourself

Like for any brand, when you’re starting an agency, positioning yourself correctly is the most important thing. At a point when there’s a new agency starting every week, the answer to ‘what need-gap are you filling in the client’s life?’ could decide your success. For instance, we were clear we wouldn’t just create advertising, but solutions across media, with a focus on full-service digital. Hence, we launched an agency with our positioning in our name, ‘What’s Your Problem’.

 2. You start from scratch

There’s a reason some mainline network agencies find it difficult to truly marry strategy with creative and technology. They started off being great mainline agencies – that was their focus. And then they built or bought over other departments. It’s like you’re a great aeroplane and suddenly you want to become a seaplane and land in the water. It’s difficult -- you aren’t built for that. But if someone allows you to build a plane that flies and floats from scratch, you’d approach it very differently.

3. You spend more practically

When you start spending your own money, you immediately cut out the wastage that you took for granted as perks: You fly economy, stay in serviced apartments, hire sensibly and such. More importantly, when you really need to spend on something, you do so without any restrictions. For example, even when we were starting out, we didn’t cut corners on hiring our key team. Or when Medulla, our healthcare agency, decided to focus on Cannes, we went all out. Our Cannes budget this year for a specialist independent healthcare agency could easily compete with that of most mainline, network agencies.

4. The only pressure is to create great work

If you’ve got your positioning right and you do work that stays true to it, the business will come. Easily. Of course, we’ve worked harder than we ever have in our lives. But hard work doesn’t kill you; undue pressure, unreasonable targets, politics and a lack of clarity, might. In fact, we’ve said no to taking on new business if the deadlines were too pressing for our team. What’s more, in most cases, clients have accommodated our timelines. The worst thing a start-up can do is take on work that you can’t do justice to.

(Amit Akali left Grey as National Creative Director to start What’s Your Problem, a full-service digital agency, and become Chief Creative Officer in Medulla, a Healthcare specialist agency. What’s Your Problem completed a year this weekend) 

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