Good morning. Hi, it's Niyadis Gupta, who is the CEO of Circuit Digital, facing Dubai. Hello. Hi, Rose.
And hi, everybody. Well, thank you for joining us. Last month, you were named as the co-female tech trailblazer and Circuit Digital has been a winner, is a big data trailblazer in the past. So congratulations are in order.
Thank you. And it's great that you're able to join us here and share a little bit of your experiences. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Okay.
I'm a mother of two. I am an extremely ambitious, career-minded woman who has managed to strike a great balance. I'll never use the word perfect. It doesn't exist.
But a great balance between managing a life with my family, doing things that I love doing, and building a business that I've still not successfully managed to grow. And also, it is spirituality. Whenever I get some time, I read a lot of that. So that's me.
In a nutshell, I am me, is what I say. And these are the other avatars of me. I'm a professional, a wife, a daughter. And, you know, as a female entrepreneur, because aside from the work you do for Circa, you're also an advisor as well on the other side of that.
Can you tell us a little bit about the other side of your business? Okay. So we have a broadcasting business called AIDM, which one represents a significant amount of small TV broadcasters within the country and does their monetization for them, works on their sales strategy, GTM, the trade marketing. It also brings into the country great broadcast technology.
For instance, we have exclusive partners of IMD, headquartered out of London, in fact, for digital distribution of beta tapes, which is now digital assets, the TV commercial. So I, in fact, not only am an advisor, I'm now actually a group CEO. I've taken on that mandate as well to help the company grow. So as an advisor or now as a group CEO, I've given them strategic direction in terms of what to anticipate in the market in the future, how to deal with broadcasting challenges and constraints and still strive to grow and continue to grow.
It's more focused on solution packaging. What are the different kinds of solutions and creative solutions that will succeed and work? So my role as an advisor has been to enable growth in revenues and enable growth in profits for the organization. And as an entrepreneur, I'll take you as a female entrepreneur, what have you found particularly challenging?
You know, the challenge is to get good and stay consistently good at what you're doing. I think that's a challenge more so for a female entrepreneur. It doesn't matter actually whether you're a man or a woman, I'd say. But as a mother of two children, the only constraint for me is to finish my work in the least possible time within office hours.
And that has been, I don't see, I see that as my biggest positive challenging. How do I organize myself and how do I finish my work on time so that I can get back home to be with my family? You don't have the luxury to get to the soft work. You cannot do things like extending discussions.
You have to be super focused on what the agenda is, what you're doing. But this has also made me super efficient, sharp, and sometimes extremely demanding of my colleagues. And that's where I've seen at times the challenge as a woman entrepreneur. As a woman, I've learned that the male colleagues will often take your strong views as an emotional response.
Even if they're backed by the strongest logic and even if there's tremendous prudence in them, they're just used to the, they're just attributed to societal stereotypes, if I might use the word. And I don't know if I can be proud about this because it's kind of sad. But again, we have learned to implement social skills that make my being a woman impervious to men. We all have to learn basically and fine tune our game to survive and succeed.
I think it's, I've kind of stopped focusing too much on the fact that I'm a woman entrepreneur. And I think being an entrepreneur comes with its challenges. What I experience, I experience them as challenges. When I like, I see, when I see the odd behavior, I make sure that I respond in the right way.
Because I, these challenges are going to continue to be fair. Well, being an entrepreneur is not easy anyway. And what do you think you're proud of that you've achieved on your journey so far? I'm tremendously proud of two lovely kids I've raised.
But despite being someone who has given equal preference to career, my kids now 18 and 13, my son is 18, my daughter is 13, have done that really well. They're independent, they're smart. As far as academics is concerned, they're way ahead of the curve. They're creatives.
Both of them are huge into music, into sports, into fitness. And they have always encouraged me to go the extra way. They have always felt so proud of what I am and what I do. It makes me want to keep going.
So I'm tremendously proud of the way I've actually managed to handle myself at work and at home, of how I have had the support, tremendous support and encouragement of my family. I must have done something right growing up because they take immense pride in what their mother is doing and contribute so much around home to make sure that I don't get bogged down the court. Even now, I don't have a very big house, but I'm working from home. They've given me total space to make sure that I have completely my professional time while I'm working from home.
So I am extremely proud of that. And I'm also proud of my resilience. You know, the attitude of not giving up. I'm someone who's always been extremely positive.
I always tend to the good side. Having said that, I'm not foolhardy. I'm also conscious of the downsides, but I'll always choose the path that tells me that there's an opportunity. Therefore, I was extremely proud of my resilience, which is why I've actually managed to build that and take it to this height and scale today.
Great, great. And from your perspective, diversity and inclusion, why are they important for startups in particular, but in business in general? I think it was. It is and it always will be important, startup or not.
I think it's our diversity as human beings that brings specific values to any organization. Each one of us brings our own strengths. Each one of us brings our own abilities and life experiences to the workplace. I think without diversity, we'd be better stagnant.
It's what makes great ideas bubble to the surface. I think it's what gets different perspectives to an argument. It leads to a better solution. And diverse organizations tend to be more successful simply because of the contribution that comes from these people and individuals.
However, we've been talking a lot about diversity and inclusion. Some of the things that I believe in significantly in the inclusion part is that we always take differently abled people. And we take people from different segments of the society who are not otherwise offered a job very easily. So there are two examples in our organization.
One is of a man who was recruited as a driver who we trained. And he now runs the operations for one of our key businesses doing really well. But we made sure he studied. He got his college degree.
He's been with us for now about eight years, nine years. But for us, inclusion meant providing opportunities to people who otherwise won't get opportunities. There was another girl who did the same. She came from an extremely impoverished family but highly creative.
And she's also differently abled. So we trained the creative part. We gave her a lot of courses. We provided mobility by giving her a vehicle.
She today is a significant contributor in our art department. So I believe inclusion is more from giving opportunities and getting the best out of people. We bring women back to workforce after they've taken maternity break. We usually go and hunt for them.
People have had great pasts and bring them back. So for us, inclusion is about making it worth the while for the organization and for people who haven't had opportunities in the past. And we have, as a company, we have always followed diversity and inclusion. Whether it's capabilities, whether it's religion, whether it's differently abled people, whether it's male-female ratio.
We've always believed in it. It's just coming out. We haven't had to plan it. No, no.
Embracing that. Yeah. So what was, obviously you've been named our female trailblazer this year, along with another awful lady. So what words of encouragement would you give to other female entrepreneurs, CXOs, in startups, as they're weighing up, whether they should enter these types of awards?
One of the key messages and words of encouragement I'll give from my side is love yourself, believe in yourself, and do not give away the authority to someone else to approve you or approve of the things that you do. And I think that is where second-guessing comes in. If you take control of yourself totally, your second-guessing will go. And more than 80% of your problems, your confidence issues, all of that will disappear.
So believe in yourself, but more importantly, love yourself. And two, keep your authority of judging yourself to your own self. Do not keep going and seeking suggestions and advice from people because, you know what, you'll never get the right one. What is the right one is right within of you.
Go ahead and always place yourself in the limelight. You may be asocial, but these are behaviors that can be changed. Don't say I can't do it or don't say I wasn't born with it because there is no such thing that I wasn't born with it. Of course, you can, you're born with a personality, but you can bring some changes to your behavior.
So seek the limelight. Do not play small, ever. And these awards will do primarily according to me two, three things for you. One, it'll actually tell you where you stand in your category.
It doesn't matter which award. It doesn't matter what kind of award. But every award will tell you where you stand in your category. It will always encourage you to keep going because there isn't much of that coming.
Every morning when you wake up, you usually wake up with challenges, right, as an entrepreneur. So it will always encourage you to keep going and it will always turn the focus on you the minute you put yourself in the space of an award, which always helps the business, invariably helps the business. So go out there, seek your award, and stay happy. Very good.
And that sounds like good advice for some other leaders generally. Obviously, we're facing very interesting times, to coin a phrase. What do you think is going to help people to survive in the current economic climate with all the uncertainty we're seeing? Well, each of you will have to determine your own solution, your own system of trying to place this economic downturn.
But I'll tell you a few things that I'm looking at very clearly. One is you have to very critically focus on conserving cash because profitability needs to remain key. But given that there is revenue impact expected, one, become extremely conscious of your cash flows, significantly conscious, because what happens today is going to impact your cash flows three to four months down the line. You will not feel it in fact because your money is coming in, but it will stop coming in after a while.
Two is fast and effective adjustments that actually remain agile. Try and anticipate what you see at the economic opportunities, because with every downturn come opportunities. Try and anticipate what those opportunities are. What are the industries that are going to come up on the back of these opportunities, and how is your solution relevant for those industries?
Get a solution up and running, test it, and have a market outreach plan to make sure that your cash flows don't get impacted in the long run so that you have some new business that you're bringing in thanks to the opportunities that the downturn has provided. Three is, of course, your leadership. How are you steering the ship, and how are you conducting yourself in the wake of the crisis is going to be very, very critical. Your leadership at this point needs to be very strong, very calm, very resilient.
There is a huge amount of instinct that will create, but there is a significant amount of actions that are going to play a role now. You have to define your outcomes that you desire in the next, according to me, 18 to 24-month plan, but with three-month planning windows, and make sure that you keep doing something and make your teams do something consistently, because it's consistency and it's action that's going to make you come close to your outcomes that you desire. So make sure that you put your outcomes out there as a leader and keep sharing that with your team so that your teams stay aligned. One of the most critical things is that person who is at the bottom of the organization chart, make sure that even that person knows what your plans are for the organization.
You may believe they don't play a role, but every individual plays a role in the organization. And make sure that everyone is informed of your plan and is informed of what the organization is going through, and make the teams a part of your entire agenda. They may be mundane in their roles, but they're critical in your success. So these are my advice for general entrepreneurs, especially at this time of forward.
Very good, very good. And one of the things I share with you is Sequoia Capital gave advice to startup leaders. I think one of the things that came out of that is to look at the Darwin premise of those who survive are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change. Yeah.
Those are important words at this time. And very much to look at cash flow, look at, you know, expecting to see some possibly significant drop in turnover and revenue. And then, of course, you know, pocket in check. Keep the organization healthy as well as this particularly turbulent storm.
So looking beyond that, I mean, looking to the future, what's next for you, Nina? Well, there are a few things. One is, of course, this business itself is expanding. We're launching in other markets very soon, Southeast Asia and London, actually.
Well, I may have to delay it a bit given the current situation, but that's there on the cards. And I'm also now working on my next business plan, which is to bring back women in the workforce by ensuring that we don't lose them to maternity. I have managed to do it well. My assumption is that one out of two of everyone who drops out will be able to do well if we can provide them the right support and the right help.
I'm currently working on that plan. And it's something where we work with HR of the organizations and provide for, you know, counseling, provide for protection and also provide for child care. So that's next. That's one of my dream, one of my dream plans.
And let's hope I can bring it to life in the next couple of years. Well, it's definitely important. Certainly what I've seen is wanting to get women into the tech industry. Yeah.
Keep them in there. And as I say, moving forward, that's an important thing as we all juggle our various responses. you know very very nice nice duties and challenges that you are too yeah fantastic well thank you so much for your time i really appreciate that do keep us posted on you know how things progress and wishing you the best of luck in your new and your existing endeavors thank you so much jules all right well thank you very much janina there there's gupta who is our female tech trail blazer we'll see you we'll speak to you soon thank you very much