Company Name
Thinkbox Communications
Ideas That Actually Work
To provide the biggest bang for our client’s buck
Our work equation:
Creative ROI (Relevance, Originality, Intelligence) = Advertising ROI (Return On Investment)
To be recognizes as a “Powerhourse of Workable Ideas”
Mrs. Irtifa Nasir
1. What is the need that you were trying to satisfy? Why did you want to start?
2. How did you start?
3. When did you start?
4. What is the nature if the business (partnership, sole propriety, etc)?
5. What was your role?6. What is the potential market size?
7. What is the marketing/sales channel for product/service X?
8. What were you major show-stoppers?
9. What did your business model look like?
How The Story Goes
Irtifa Nasir received her entire schooling at an Indian-Arab education institution in Abu Dhabi (UAE) right up to A-Levels. She joined the Lahore University of Management Sciences BSc. program aiming to major in Computer Science but eventually graduated with a major in Mathematics. Outside academia, she took active part in basketball & volleyball teams, the dramatics society, the music society and even went on a couple of trips up north with the LUMS adventure society. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006, she left for the University of Florida in order to pursue her Masters degree in Advertising.
Her first job was at a small media selling house in 2004 followed by a short stint as Creative Manager at Time & Space; a Lahore based advertising agency. Soon she moved to Synergy Advertising in 2005 and a year later left for America. Once back in Pakistan in 2008, she rejoined Synergy, but this time switched to account management and led on a couple of high-net-worth clients. By mid 2009, she started teaching at The Lahore School of Economic as visiting faculty, while at the same time collaborating with ex-colleagues to establish a small creative hot-shop which they later named Thinkbox Communications. When she heard about the School of Management at Forman Christian College along with the fact that the crème de la crème of LUMS were leading at the front, she took no time in applying for a teaching position there.
Thinkbox Communications started off as a very small setup with only three team members; Irtifa handled creative development and strategy (her responsibility was inclusive of developing creative, copywriting, developing communication & brand strategies, organizing pitches and pitching), Hassan was responsible for business development and account management, and Bilal took the lead on graphic design and art.
They did not have a business plan in mind when they started off and none of them really had any prior business experience personally or even in the family. The team started working from home initially. A month or two later, Hassan convinced one of his family friends to rent out the upper story their office premises to them so they could give their company some semblance of a real entrepreneurial venture. They agreed, but only under the condition that they would let them invest and take the bigger chunk of the profit that was made. The team did not have a problem with that. In October 2010, Thinkbox Communications moved to the office premises. It left that office premises in January 2011.
The Thinkbox Communications team did not have anything to invest in this setup anyway; other than old desks, their laptops, skills and time. Money was never their primary concern. Here we see that Irtifa, Hassan and Bilal are what we call life-style entreprenurs (those who go into business for a reason other than the financial rewards of owning a business) with visionary and idealist qualities. It was the feeling of being their own masters and making all those creative advertisement which they could never work on at their respective jobs. However, they would soon discover that the day they get an investor for their idea, the investor would become master for all practical purposes.
A couple of months later, the investor (with no idea of what advertising is) started demanding returns, and the team had none because they were still pitching & trying to develop business; the meager they earned were used up to pay utility bills and the small amounts of salary they withdrew for their services. In three months’ time, the investor decided he would not be making any profits from this setup and the team decided to part ways; without being sure what legal implications this had; Hassan was always the sole proprietor and Iritfa was always a profit-sharing member of this venture with no financial stake in it; too risky for someone like her.
Basically, Thinkbox Communications was never part of Irtifa’s personal to-do list at least not when Hassan proposed the idea to her in August 2010. At that time, the three of them (Hassan, Bilal and Irtifa) had already left their regular agency jobs for different reasons. In case of Irtifa, she had taken a break from the 9am to 9pm work schedule for six days a week and taken up university level teaching for a change. Meanwhile, she was also freelancing as a creative writer/communication strategist for a few smaller clients to stay in touch with the industry. So when Hassan proposed the idea of the three of us collaborating (given his skills in getting business and Bilal’s in design), we thought “why not?”. It would be easier getting clients (and more lucrative) if we could provide the complete bundle of creative services instead of just design or just copy or planning. Hassan had good relations with a client from his previous agency job and so we started off (from our respective homes – without an office setup) as a team in September 2010.
Thinkbox Communications is a sole proprietorship. Initially in a colleague’s name, and then transferred to the second investor (who now runs the company with a new team). As far as the market need was concerned, the original plan was to be an agency offering creative services with the interests and needs of the advertiser as opposed to their own self-interest (trying to sell print/TV advertising to all sorts of clients with the hopes of making money with media releases like most advertising agencies do). Objectively speaking, they were just another creative hot-shop and if they could differentiate themselves at all, it would be on the basis of good creative, design, competitive rates and better levels of service.
The ‘potential market’ for advertising is huge. Everyone advertises at some level or the other. There is a lot of money to be made if you manage to get the right kind of clients on-board. However, the industry is extremely competitive and in order to survive, one needs more than just good ideas. You need excellent Public Relations, enough investment to sustain you for a good 8-12 months before you can expect decent returns, and a highly dependable team of people who will stick around especially in the first few months of extreme hard work and uncertainty.
As a team, they were more interested in providing the right solutions to clients and not sell them what they did not actually need. In this scenario, they went with the best option which was to enter into retainer-ship agreements with clients (fixed monthly fee) instead of charging them for individual jobs or services. In this was, made independent cells for their various clients (dedicated teams for bigger clients) and cater to their needs in the best possible way without being tempted to milk them by proposing unnecessary ideas. Additionally, they also offered the conventional charging on tariff options for smaller clients/jobs that came their way every now and then. Also, like all agencies, they also had a coordination commission component for outsourced jobs (printing, photography, recordings, etc).
As far as advertising agencies are concerned (more specifically creative services), most business development is done through personal contacts, referrals and sometimes (although proven to be pretty ineffective) the traditional means of cold-calling. Online bidding for projects is becoming popular with some freelancers but they did not really tap into that source of business (while she was part of the setup). But generally, once they find a client and make a creative pitch, and if it works out then they would work out the financials with them.
Major show stoppers for them included lack of investment on their part, investment from people whose vision clashed with their own, unrealistic financial projections due to lack of experience of running a business and foolishly expecting local clients to pay on time.
As of December 2010, Irtifa parted ways with Thinkbox Communications which is now being run by a team of different employees under one investor.
Group Members; Anmol Joy John, Zoia Michelle Parvez, Umer Shuja ud din, Taseer Raza Hassan
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