Today we have selected Vasilis Stergiou to take his interview. He is the Founder and CEO of PowerHouse Consulting Group.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I’m from Greece, and as far as I remember, I was always unemployable, doing part-time jobs here and there to pay my bills. Entrepreneurship is a passion I stumbled upon by accident in 2010 after getting introduced to internet marketing and the world of self-development from a friend.
Little did I know that because of that, I would move to another country – on the other side of the planet – and incorporate multiple companies, including PowerHouse Consulting Group, which is an all-in-one high-performance digital marketing & business development strategy, an international consulting agency in Southeast Asia.
I have 11+ years’ marketing, advertising, startup (SMB) business, and entrepreneur consultancy experience. I help entrepreneurs start up a successful business, grow them by telling their stories in a clear, persuasive way that will attract & engage their target customers & drive their business forward.
How does your company innovate?
Operating in a space where everything accelerates by the day puts our clients in a difficult spot. They have to devote resources to follow the online and digital world with all its opportunities.
PowerHouse Consulting Group’s strategic advantage is diluting all this information into practical actions and strategies to be followed by our clients. We use critical thinking before acting in any capacity, making us priceless partners to our clients. I could say that anything pre-packaged is a no-no in the way we work, and we look at each client as a unique custom-tailored project.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you Coping?
Fortunately, this story has only benefited our company in the long term. From the mom-and-pop shop to the traditional old-fashioned industries, every business worldwide realized that having an online business and brand positioning is the only way to stay in business.
That realization forced them to invest heavily in their online business and transition to more online-focused business models. Additionally, all companies are now allocating a higher percentage of their annual budgets to online business models and activities.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
Of course, we went through some difficult months, especially at the beginning of this story, as many business owners were unclear where this would go and how to handle it. Companies immediately put investments on hold, and funds disappeared, which affected almost every industry.
During this time, we had to reduce the engagement of our team to make sure that we could maintain everyone on our payroll, and we are very proud to say that we didn’t have to lay off anyone at all. All our team members from 2019 are still with us.
A crucial lesson that we learned through this story is that we could do many more things with less available time and fewer funds. In other words, become more productive and cost-efficient, which is very helpful in the quality of services and results we can provide to our clients moving forward.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this situation?
Luckily we didn’t have to adjust as the whole company was structured to operate remotely from any part of the world and in any time zone from the beginning. On top of that, we don’t have physical assets and supply chains to restructure.
In detail, we had been using Slack as our team communication and project management tool, which we replaced with Google Chat once Google made it public and a remote worker time-tracking tool and Google Meet for our regular calls.
I realized early on that our team members would need someone to motivate them and keep the morale high throughout this story while everyone is bombarded with negative news. So I tried from my side to be more active and more public with all of them to reassure them that we would get over this all together and no one was going to lose their job.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
PowerHouse Consulting Group is positioned in a market segment where the competition is low. Our clients further support this idea by telling us that it’s practically impossible to find an agency with our breadth of experience and knowledge (of course, in our price point).
I would say that the competition is either huge agencies with 10x higher price points and very specialized in specific segments of the market agencies (i.e., SEO specific agencies). Still, very few offer a wide range of all-in-one solutions and experience.
There is only one way to stay in the game in our business, and that is by becoming indispensable to your clients, by providing more high-quality services, better integration, better results, and by working to deeply understand the needs and requirements of your clients to offer them a custom-tailored solution. Happy clients bring you more clients.
Your Final Thoughts:
Moving forward, I believe that this acceleration of technology integration in our daily lives will only further confuse small and medium enterprises with limited amounts of time and money to invest. They will need a strategic partner to help them make sense of this and guide them to where they have to put their attention for the best results. I see an opportunity for the agencies to position themselves and their offerings in that market segment.
- Spokesperson: Vasilis Stergiou
- Company: PowerHouse Consulting Group
- Website link: https://powerhouseconsulting.group/