Today we have selected Ali Al Jasmi To to take his interview. He is the CEO of EOV Media Company.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Honestly, we were a bit worried at the beginning of the Pandemic with few big-size projects getting canceled and on hold, but that was only natural since we did not know what we are dealing with in the first few months. Fast forward a few months after, business is getting back to normal and we are again seeing a recovery in the market. Part of running a successful business is ensuring the team is resilient and flexible enough to stand in front of any change.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company.
I always had a thing for graphic design, so during my school years, I started working on photoshop. I was teaching myself using whatever reading material I could find online and going through the Adobe help button. During my days in college, I met with like-minded people and we started doing small freelancing jobs, this resonated with me and after graduation directly we approached Dubai SME and got the license to establish EOV Media Company 2006.
How does your company innovate?
I think innovation comes from being open-minded. We make sure we hire talents that are open for change, open for opinion, and open for discussions. We don’t believe in having hierarchies in the organization. We all are the same and we all work towards the same goal, which is not financial but rather “spiritual” in a sense of producing a design or a product that we are proud to be part of.
How the Corona-virus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
We got affected like any other business with the pandemic, but our resilience and flexibility helped us get through it. I would say we experienced the pandemic firsthand by branching out EOV the establishment of A & T Services towards the end of 2019. A & T is the arm that would focus on Events & exhibitions. Everyone knows the event industry was hit the most during 2020, but for us, we anticipated the pandemic early on and quickly reshaped our unique selling points, from events into interior work. This change made us not only survive during these hard times but also triple the size of the company from labor and locations.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
During these hard times, we invested more toward building a stronger team and expansion, unlike many businesses during the pandemic where they were downsizing and shutting down. We were hiring and also adding new locations to our portfolio. It was a risk that we took but it paid off very well showcasing the strength and resilience the EOV team has.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We were lucky that we are used to using tools prior to the pandemic so shifting the work environment from the office to a remote working location was easy. We mainly use Slack for our communications, Trello for our management, Jira for our development, and HubSpot Sales for leads.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
I don’t see any competitors for us in the market, they are all partners, and they help us thrive in what we do. In EOV Media we always try to learn from other’s mistakes and success.
Your Final Thoughts
Nowadays all the resources to be successful are available much more than when I have started, we need to use that to our advantage. Business is not a competition, between companies to get more revenue it should be about the customer and providing a service that you can be proud of and say when asked “Yes, it was me, I did that!”.
- Spokesperson: Ali Al Jasmi
- Company: EOV Media Company
- Website: www.eov.ae