Today we have selected Mannie Usman to take his Interview. He is the CEO of Knock Knock Digital LLC.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
These are challenging times for all of us everywhere in the world. Thankfully my team and I have been safe from the Covid-19, and we are taking precautions seriously to make sure we and others around us remain safe.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company. How does your company innovate?
The journey has been an unexpected one. Digital marketing was not something I planned as a career when graduating from high-school. My father is a civil engineer and runs a successful construction company. I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps and work in construction. Unfortunately, while in the final year of my bachelor’s degree in Construction Management at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, a well-known construction company withdrew my work placement offer with them at the last minute due to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
Left with little choice, I started working for a local fashion designer selling clothing. They sold excellent products on a small scale and in a local boutique. I took it upon myself to digitalize their boutique and expand their operations. I built a website for their business and started learning ways to market it. Little I knew then that after a few digital marketing courses and few experiments later, the small boutique would become a nationally recognized brand within their niche and have a strong following.
After the boutique’s success, I started working as a freelancer and helped businesses grow from different industries. Over the years, I developed connections with other talented digital marketers. In the year 2019, a couple of us decided to start our digital marketing agency. We planned and launched our agency at the beginning of the year 2020.
The joy I got after achieving success for the boutique was the best feeling in the world. Nothing can replace that feeling, and that is what we seek to accomplish with all our clients. Digital marketing is a fast-paced industry always evolving. Our thirst for learning and adapting to different situations has helped our careers so far, and I believe it will do the same for our agency.
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Luckily for us, we can work from anywhere where the internet is available. My team and I are active on Microsoft Slack. We use it to hold regular meetings and for support.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
Before the pandemic, we were in the process of expanding our business by hiring digital marketers. Unfortunately, we had to put that on hold temporarily due to the pandemic. Covid-19 has created a lot of uncertainty for businesses, and in the first couple of months of the pandemic, things were looking quite bad for us. We had three clients in the pipeline who decided to pull out or wait till the crisis is over.
Expansion is important to us, but our sole focus turned to help our existing clients navigating their businesses through the crisis without them taking any serious damage. It was challenging, but we managed to keep all our clients, and the experience we gained has put us in a much stronger position for expansion than previously.
What specific tools and software are you using to navigate this crisis?
We are a small team, and Microsoft Slack is doing an excellent job for our internal office work. For our clients, we can communicate with them on any channel available or convenient for them.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Our goal is to become one of the top and a recognized digital marketing agency. For that reason, our competition is some of the top digital marketing agencies out there. Our agency’s reputation is important to us. We want to maintain high standards, and competing with the best gives us the motivation to achieve our goal.
- Spokesperson: Mannie Usman
- Company: Knock Knock Digital LLC
- Website: http://kknockdigital.com/
