Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Ashish Mohan:With my previous experience in sales & marketing for global brands, one thing that kept popping up was that global brands still considered India as a distant market and used the concept of “one stick fits all” as yardstick for their marketing strategies.
India as a country is very diverse and the buying behaviour changes every 200 kms.
This made me realise that brands are yet to understand the power of communication and in the process the small and mid-size businesses are losing as they are unable to employ good communication agencies.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by The Goofy Ants?
Ashish Mohan:The GoofyAnts is a 360 degree communication, creative, advertising, and digital marketing agency with a mission to help clients grow and nurture their brands with well-crafted communication.
We are a unit of interesting and unusual beings who are passionate about uniqueness, creativity, potency and authenticity in our task.
Like the tiny little creature Ants, we believe in perseverance and tenacity.
We are honest, pragmatic, simple and humble at the same time, just like Goofy!
We provide complete scale of communication offerings ranging from
Brand & Design
Affiliate & Influencer Marketing
Digital & Social Media Marketing
Photo & Video Production
PR & Communication
Paid Performance
We’re passionate about clean and effective communication that makes brands talkable!
Great Companies: What makes The Goofy Ants different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Ashish Mohan:The Goofy Ants is different from hundreds of similar service providers for the simple reason that we do NOT differentiate our clients basis their paying capacity and we believe in not restricting ourselves to any specific media.
For us communication is the key.
And to make communication effective, we identify the offerings of our clients (be it a product or a service), segregate the intended target group, devise right communication message to reach to the customer of our clients and then work out the effective media. Our process is just the reverse of what other agencies employ and identify themselves as either a design agency or a digital marketing agency.
We are the amalgamation of best of both the worlds as the thin line segregating them doesn’t exist.
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Ashish Mohan:For any entrepreneur who is starting with nothing, biggest challenge is obviously getting the right team. I’ve been lucky to have a great team onboard which shares my passion to strive for excellence in whatever GoofyAnts does. Entrepreneurship is a solitary journey which doesn’t mean you have to embark upon alone. But your team, though share the same vision, can only take you further if you believe in them and are able to guide them.
Another challenge is obviously breaking the stereotype that any new entrant in this industry has to start from digital marketing. Unfortunately, recent pandemic not only wreaked havoc on the lives and lifestyle but also on clients’ confidence of hiring agencies for their marketing as so many agencies mushroomed during the lockdown while everyone was jumping onto the bandwagon to go online.
What helped us was belief in ourselves and patience while pitching to clients to take their fears away and let them experience good communication by means of words and designs.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line The Goofy Ants?
Ashish Mohan: There are no specific plans as such, and I really do not believe in setting up number goals. For me, chasing a number limits our approach and our potential and we could miss achieving far better results than the targeted ones. 5 years down the line, I see Goofyants to be well-respected and appreciated by our existing and past clients with team happy with their growth and learning and chasing new dreams every day. For us, every day is a new day and we keep looking out for more challenges and competing with ourselves to do better work every day.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Ashish Mohan: I don’t have one advice. I’ve more than one.
Believe in what you plan.
Do not have a plan B. It would make you lose on your Plan A. Have just one plan, test it with all possible scenarios and then, if found workable, go for execution.
Invest in people. Trust them. But do not trust them blindly. You will always be the captain of your ship.
Be ready to sail alone on a lonely journey as only you know what your vision is and how you are going to achieve it.