Digital Marketing Dream: Keyur's Side Business Turned Career

My name is Keyur, and I am founder of a Digital Marketing Agency called Tinker Solution. We are based in Edmonton, Canada. I once was a software engineer who turned into a Marketing automation specialist. On a personal side I am a father of a 5-year-old boy who apparently loves playing cricket and is surprisingly good at it. I am originally from India and have called Canada my home since 2016. I have been in IT industry for about 14 years now.

In my early days I was privileged to have great mentors who taught me many things that comes along with software coding, such as client communication, perfection for details, positive thinking and more. After I moved to Canada, I had an opportunity to work with one of the best employers in Canada, ATB Financial, where I took the slight turn in my job role. I moved into Marketing Automation role in 2017.

I did not know much about Marketing at that point, but I surely knew my way to handle tech systems like MailChimp, SAP Hybris, HubSpot and Salesforce. They literally took the gamble on me, but it worked out well. I spent 5 years with ATB and joined Vancouver based Media company.

After spending almost 1.5 years there, the company had to lay off the marketing department, that included me.

I took about 30 days to find my next career goal and I ended up going all in with my own digital agency. I was working on and off with some of my freelance clients over the past few years. But the turning point was the ‘beehiiv’ connection. (This email is written and published on beehiiv)

I had spent a year on beehiiv in my last job, so I reached out to Tyler (CEO) & Preeya (COO) at beehiiv to see if they want someone to support their end user’s technical needs. I presented my idea of building a specialised agency that no one had started yet, and I’ve not looked back since.

The main question I asked myself was “IF I start my own agency, HOW that will function successfully?” This helped me visualise the steps I needed to take.

I wanted to build a company based on trust, so this was a main focus when dealing with clients and my team of contractors. Like many other founders, I started small, hired a couple of contractors, and taught them how beehiiv works. This allowed me to work on actual project/clients.

I prefer to connect with my clients personally and often jump on a call with them. This helps set a level of trust and understanding with them especially since we work directly with them throughout the entirety of the project. Most of our clients are content creators which means that their budget is typically much smaller than a traditional business. Knowing this, we designed our packages to be affordable but high in quality.

It took us a couple of months to learn about the services that we are strong in and what else we can offer to our clients. Over time, we started growing our number of projects and clients along with scaling our team.

As time went on, people at beehiiv started noticing our contributions to their user’s success and I was offered a non-paid but glorious position of HIIV Community Moderator which is a lead by Daniel at beehiiv.

When helping people I like to keep things simple, and I feel that this is working out great for me and my agency.

Our social wall speaks for our success. Our clients love us for many reasons such as our speed of work, our communication, for how we take the ownership of the projects, and respect their timeframes.

For me, the success of my company is mainly keeping my employees and contractors happy and secure in their job. I also try to make responsible connections in the community, help people, and give my clients the best possible advice. Doing all of this gives me satisfaction at night. That’s a success for me.

Our business is growing fantastically, and we are making good money along the way. Upwards and onwards from here!

Be honest with people surrounding you. If you commit to something with anyone, fulfil that commitment. Be persistent and ask your clients for feedback and reviews. Creating a social proof is for sure helpful.

Don’t be greedy, the money will come once you nurture yourself and your team to work with any clients — big or small — with empathy.

If you are starting an agency or any other business, make sure your business has something that you as an individual can contribute to. For example, till this date I roll up my sleeves and work with my developers and designers when possible. This provides us a ground level of reality and to be with the team so that they don’t feel isolated.

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- My Personal Community Based Newsletter

- My Agency Site

- Tinker Solution LinkedIn