Women Entrepreneurs: Urjita Kshatriya (Idecution)

Urjita Kshatriya has done her B.E Instrumentation and started her own venture, Idecution. She has experience of 6 years in this field. You can connect with her on LinkedIn

1. Describe yourself in a sentence.

A practical, independent and self-reliant person who lives life on her own terms.

2. What were the thoughts on your mind when leaving a stable job to start a business?

Starting my own company was on my mind right since school days but I didn’t have a plan for doing it.

When I left my job, I didn’t know whether I would start a business or not. The idea for the business came after 3-4 months of leaving my job.

3. Why did you opt for digital marketing, that too for MSMEs in particular?

I had started exploring digital marketing with the intention of learning more about it. Since I already had offline marketing experience, I wanted to learn more about online marketing. But while learning digital marketing, I realised that MSMEs don’t leverage this and this can be a good business opportunity. Bigger brands have deep pockets for marketing, but the excitement of getting some unknown businesses noticed and getting them customers is something that keeps me going and working with MSMEs.

4. How did you come up with your company’s name?

When we started in Jan 2016, the company name was Vivo Marketing Solutions. During the same time, Vivo mobile gained a lot of popularity and most of the people thought that we had used that name whereas that was not the case. So in 2017 when we decided to form LLP I wanted to go for a unique name. That’s how we coined the name Idecution = Ideas + Execution. This is also because ideas are easy but executing them is the tough part.

5. What challenges have you faced while starting and sustaining your business?

I view challenges as opportunities to improve both at individual and business levels. That’s probably why I don’t have any specific challenges to talk about.

6. What impact has the pandemic had on your business?

The pandemic helped us understand that the process and practices at Idecution have stood the test of time. For eg: Right from day 1, our data was on cloud and so it was easy to switch to working from home. Also, most of our day to day activities are documented in the form of processes. This ensured an easy induction process for the new joinees.

In 2019, I had envisioned that Idecution will work on a remote working model. But I had parked the idea thinking that if we do it then maybe our prospective customers will not take us seriously. Because of the pandemic, we were “forced” to switch to remote working and from July 2020 we moved to a complete remote working model.

Also, before the pandemic, although there were no geographic barriers for our clients, our team was completely based out of Mumbai since that’s where our office was. But post-pandemic the new recruits have been from various locations and not just Mumbai.

7. Did you face any difficulties as a woman while dealing with clients?

Well, I have always been a strong-headed woman and as such have never faced any gender-related difficulties while dealing with clients.

8. What are your short-term and long-term business goals?

Short-term, I am looking at increasing my business turnover by 10x by 2024.

Long-term, I want our clients to think of Idecution whenever they have any marketing-related activity.

9. What are some of the challenges you face regarding catalysing innovation?

Getting everyone on the same page so that they can see the bigger picture.

10. Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently when you were first starting out?

I don’t think so, because whichever way things have shaped up, it’s been a great experience and I don’t want to change it.