It wasn’t an easy decision to leave the company where I started my career, worked for more than 10 years, climbed the ladder from Trainee to Vice President and most importantly, where I learnt lots and lots of things.
But there was something from within which was calling and I needed to be outside of what I was doing to understand that calling. So finally after a long vacation to Europe where I got to spend some quality time with myself, Midas Touch was born in August 2010. Why the name Midas Touch? Well I wanted the name to specify the benefit our customers are going to get and ‘Midas Touch’ says it all :- )
I personally enjoyed every single day of the last year, thoroughly enjoyed the thrill and learning experience. Got a chance to work closely with various business owners and to be part of their journey - start-ups as well as established enterprises. Every aspect, right from convincing stake holders about starting with social media, defining the complete internet marketing strategies and getting on to the ground level of actually ‘doing’ things (rather than giving directions on how to do those) – all the aspects were equally fascinating.
My priority has always been providing quality output. To achieve this, I decided to partner with experienced and established firms and people for specific things which require expertise such as graphic design. While I enjoy training and mentoring people, I realized that at least in the first year, I can’t afford investing much time in that. This strategy paid off really well. Customers got the quality output while I could focus on things which required attention.
I decided to focus in Indian market to start with and I think that turned out to be a very wise decision. The market has changed a lot, businesses have now started appreciating the power of internet marketing, ready to adapt social media in their marketing strategies and are willing to explore this new world of digital marketing. I myself witnessed a tremendous change happening over the last one year. Personally I enjoy being part of something which is just starting off and is growing :-) So it is fun to be part of this change.
Being on my own also made me do lot of things which I always wanted to do but did not for one reason or the other. I always wanted to author a book and last year it finally materialized with consistent persistence by a good friend, Vishal Mehta (CEO of IDYeah Creations) . I co-authored ‘Are you Socially Shy?’ with him. This book describes how business owners can start using six popular social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YourTube, Blog and SlideShare) for their businesses.
Last year I was also invited to write for Technorati. Technorati is an online publication that boasts a community of over 1000 handful writers who share news, trends, opinions and reviews on various topics. It was a high motivation point when one of my articles on Technorati was tweeted about more than 300 times on a single day! Comments like “When is the next article coming?” from my blog readers make me write more regularly on the blog as well :-)
Well, does this mean I slog for like 25 hours a day? Not really. In fact, I am getting to spend more time with my family and have learnt to utilize my time more effectively and efficiently.
As Steve Jobs said, "You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever........." and I think I am able to connect the dots :-)
