The Story of Apher’s Birth
My co-founder Azra and I are both from the corporate world. Admittedly, we both also have experience in startups and small businesses, but the point is that we both know what it’s like to work under an already established set of processes and procedures.
That is something my co-founder and I have in common. In my own experience as a marketing professional, the day-to-day of such a work life is pretty packed. There are daily responsibilities that span from planning and creating new content to making sure that there is a regular cadence ongoing on all the channels: blog posts, email campaigns, every relevant social channel… plus the gathering and reporting of post-campaign analytics. Each day is filled with a long to-do list.
So the question is, when does anyone get to do the fun strategic projects?
If you looked at one of those long to-do lists for a previous job of mine, I’d have a set of project ideas that I wrote down so I don’t forget them with the hope that one day, I’d maybe actually get to execute them. They could range from a new set of processes I’ve thought of to streamline certain SOP’s, or a one-off viral campaign to kick start and reinvigorate social engagement. Really, it’s anything to change up the day-to-day of a comfortable yet busy job.
But these ideas have been there for months.
Most of my big strategic project ideas have not seen the light of day because of the daily demands of my past jobs, which I imagine most marketing jobs are similar to. I simply keep pushing them back to next week, and the week after… and the week after that. Eventually, after months of such a cycle, the project becomes outdated or irrelevant.
These are projects that – in my humble opinion – could’ve been very successful in many aspects: revenue attracting, brand building, or awareness increasing, amongst many other potential KPI’s. However, in-house employees only see the immediate responsibilities right in front of them, which is totally fair and normal. I say that from experience.
So how do companies manage to launch new strategies or processes? Unless they are funded enough to afford internal purely-strategic talent, companies tend to hire external consultants to do these big projects – which is expensive.
While we were discussing these woes with each other, Azra and I came up with Apher Consulting: a boutique consulting firm that specializes in big strategic projects for a not-so-big price. Taking our individual areas of expertise, we added a specialty in strategic branding and digital marketing. Then, we added our core personalities of innovative, reliable, and sophisticated.
In a nutshell, we decided to take what we were good at, what we really enjoy doing – and want to do – and make a business out of it. It’s obviously been a work in progress – a journey, if you will. In fact, setting up Apher has been a strategic branding & digital marketing project all on its own... the ultimate project really.
With this first blog post, we invite you all to join us on this journey and learn with us on the way. As two MBA graduates, continuous improvement is in our core, and we’ll obviously fail and experiment and pivot and learn and grow immensely over the next many years of running Apher. We’ll use our platforms as a way to share our stories and lessons, so we hope that you’ll join us as our colleagues, friends, and supporters on our road to success.
Esther
