Jack of All Trades - Master of One - Rahul Aggarwal

“You have to believe in people and trust them because the more trust you give the better people perform.” Rahul Aggarwal

When starting out, business owners are always forced to work with tight budgets to remain afloat. With such constraints, businesses have always opted to outsource tasks that are not within their core activities, and sometimes finding qualified professionals to do those tasks can be an uphill task. Our guest today, Rahul Aggarwal, is passionate about technology and the solutions it provides in managing businesses. Rahul has faced such difficulties in the past which motivated him not only to start an online professional talent outsourcing agency but also to go ahead and manage some of the world’s most talented professionals.

Being awarded as the Rising Entrepreneur of the year 2019 and Entrepreneur 35 under 35 in 2020, and Asia’s Most Promising Business Leaders 2021 by Economic Times, Rahul Aggarwal has cofounded Designhill and created a unique online marketplace to overcome the challenges faced by the business owners in outsourcing high-quality creative solutions and designers who have been looking for creative freedom. He’s a serial entrepreneur, passionate marketer, investor, advisor, and a firm believer in the concept of constant learning and growing. His astounding digital knowledge and impregnable business skills have led Designhill to be acknowledged as the Creative Startup of the Year 2019 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

In today’s episode, Rahul will talk more about what motivated him to start his company Designhill and how he has managed to grow it to be a globally recognized platform. He will also give us some leadership insights that he believes works well in managing people and businesses.

Listen in!

Social media handles;

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raggarwal1/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/A10Rahul

 https://twitter.com/Designhilldh

 https://in.linkedin.com/company/designhill

 https://www.instagram.com/designhilldh/

 https://www.facebook.com/designhilldh

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoKjPhUAFttvUzQbx_JwOmw

 

• I'm an entrepreneur and I started Designhill with my brother, who is also a co-founder and we live together despite having worked together for the last eight years. [4:15]
• We started this business about seven, eight years back. We thought of it in 2013 but we ended up starting it in 2014. [4:40]
• It was something that just got born out of the individual needs that we had at that point in time. [4:50]
• I joined the family business and I wanted to get our branding organized since design was not something that was given a lot of value at the time, however, that's changed a lot in today's time and world. [4:57]
• I was struggling to get a good agency or designer to get the business brand rebranded and have everything more consistent and quality. [5:14]
• My brother was working as a freelancer, and he was having his struggles in terms of finding good clients, how to communicate with them, and getting paid on time. [5:24]
• We happened to speak about our problems and we realized that this was not a local issue, but a global problem, and technology as an enabler could facilitate and solve that. [5:38]
• Good design is omnipresent and every business needs it whether it's an online business or an offline business. [5:52]
• When young or new entrepreneurs come with business ideas and concepts they are always vibrant and they look for something that represents that idea that helps them show that they are serious about what they're talking about. [6:29]
• We as a company help these individuals and businesses to accomplish those dreams by facilitating or helping get their business on the ground. [7:05]
• We have tried to have services that can cater to every kind of customer with every kind of budget because design is very important for the success of any business. [7:33]
• When starting a business, you don't want to spend so much money on professional branding or with an agency or you don't even have the resources at the time. [8:49]
• With design, it is always something that is always on the back of the mind as you are always thinking of acquiring new customers or getting more traffic on your website but you don’t want to invest in a full-time designer. [9:00]
• That is where we come in or any other online platform comes in because we help you connect with the best in class people around the world. [9:17]
• You might have somebody who might charge you a lot more maybe in us but a designer with an equal level of quality may be sitting in Australia or Brazil or India and they might be able to do a great job for you at probably 1/3 the price. [9:27]
• I think that's the beauty of the internet in the kind of world that we live in today, that you really don't need to travel anymore and you can just get connected and get on a Zoom call with anybody from anywhere in the world on a click of a button. [9:43]
• This allows businesses to experiment, explore, and understand somebody before making that commitment to hire them. [10:54]
• Technology and platforms allow businesses to experiment to know different skillsets and get different options and varieties while working with different people. [11:40]
• Sometimes you may have a particular stream or school of thought that this is how you want certain things to be done but get swept away with other kinds of options and varieties that people with different backgrounds can come up with. [11:53]
• I think what the pandemic has done is it has sort of accelerated working online businesses that get coupled with work-from-home situations. [13:04]
• I think that is wonderful because it not only gives people the opportunity to make that extra buck but also follow their passions and dreams. [14:10]
• There's a lot of dynamism and flexibility that you get today with the kind of things that are getting built up. [15:00]
• We have sold to more than 1 million businesses, marketing professionals, small and large companies, from all over the world and the majority of them come from the United States and Canada, UK, Australia, English speaking countries. [15:21]
• We have over 300,000, creative professionals, designers, and artists who have their portfolios on our platform and sell their artworks, services, and merchandise. [15:38]
• We have launched a platform called Print Shop last year where these artists from all over the world are selling their artworks on merchandise and we do shipping worldwide. [15:50]
• Commercial Break. [16:50]
• The dynamism of working has completely changed now and we were lucky enough that we were already a technology company and are using a lot of these online tools to manage and break down our processes for our daily communication reporting mechanisms. [18:10]
• Having all these tools threaded with each other enables you to run your business on your mobile. [18:46]
• I think technology adoption is really important and if you're able to break down your processes with the right tools you can scale your business because most of the things are already laid down in your tools and processes. [19:07]
• From a leadership perspective, I feel it's really important to delegate and give ownership to your colleagues because you can't do everything on your own. [19:24]
• You have to believe in people and trust them because the more trust you give the better people perform. [19:44]
• We are all humans and we are going to make mistakes but as long as we are trusting people to do a good job and trusting them to be honest about their work, you will often find people overachieving. [19:50
• We have to be successful very few times, it's good to fail many more times because then we know what not to do. [20:18]
• We live in a dynamic world especially in technology and so many things happen every day. So we should always do that. [20:25]
• Experimentation is something that I value and we do encourage our teams to experiment. [20:35]
• As a leader, you should be a jack of all trades, and a master of one. You should know about all the facets of your business. [20:48]
• Create micro-projects and make individual team members owners of each of those micro-projects or processes. [23:20]
• We need to delegate and give ownership which is very important to do as a leader. [25:40]
• Failure is something that we should accept warmly because it is going to be there daily. Success comes far and few and it takes time for success to come in. [25:45]
• Be consistent and persistent as a business owner because you don't know what is around the corner. Success will come if you have the right intent; you just have to persevere a lot. [25:58]
• At the end of the day, it's all about team effort and so you have to have a great team because you can't do everything alone. [26:25]

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