1. What have you found most challenging as a leader of a small or medium enterprise?

Responsibility for another company's marketing activities and delivering every service on promised time on an everyday basis is the most challenging task for me.

2. How did you become a leader of an SME? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I was working in a start-up Marketing and a software firm handling client and team interactions. That was the most pressured job I have ever been to. Days passed and I became the face of the company to my clients and their trust shifted on the company than me. But that company failed to deliver quality and prompt services on time. I could see all my clients stayed back just for me. In a financial crisis, I was asked to leave the company and my clients behind with no choice. I was jobless for half a year. All I knew to handle a client and understand what they needed. One day my client from the previous client called me. He said "I can't move on with another marketing agency because nobody understands my company's promotions more than you did. Why don't you start your own company and continue the services which you did earlier". In a brief discussion, I decided to start my own. Within just 1 day of naming my company, I got 3 clients with marketing needs. It's just been 10 months now, but I am blessed to serve more than 20 famous clients in this City and all those clients approached me either by reference or by seeing my work.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

In my career, We plan 50% of the task in the morning to be done on that day. Rest 50% will fill itself from the client's sudden requirements and we have to fulfil that too. So in the end, we would have worked 100% of unplanned tasks. But we do manage to finish all the tasks by the end of the day by prioritising their importance.

4. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

You should never lose confidence in front of your employees. They look up to you as a leader even if you don't claim yourself as one. But whatever hard times hit, you should fake confidence in them so they feel that we are there to solve things and they feel good to work without any distractions.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

There is a book called "The power of your subconscious mind" by Dr Joseph Murphy. That book really moved by capabilities on how each person has their own strength, not physically but mentally. Tuning your subconscious mind to improve the quality of your leadership life.

6. How do you build leadership capacity in an SME?

So far, by making mistakes and self learn from them with zero guidance. I still believe that I am in the learning phase to build my leadership capacity.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader of an SME so far?

Not as a story, but I always have a reminder to differentiate between being a leader and a commander.