An enterprising and young entrepreneur Mr.Mehul Gupta CEO and Co-founder of SoCheers Infotech

by Shrutee K/DNS

Mehul Gupta is the CEO of SoCheers, an innovative end-to-end digital media agency that services 50+ brands from varied industries. An enterprising and young entrepreneur, his unique engineering-yet-creative mind, created the strong base of carving a niche in the booming world of Digital Marketing with the launch of SoCheers in 2013. He took over the reigns at a young age, of starting an agency and taking it to astonishing heights with his caliber and patience. His foresight and insightful strategy has enabled SoCheers to become the market leader by providing right solutions at the right time and delivering the best Digital & Social Media campaigns to clients.

Mehul Gupta played an instrumental role in convincing brands to experiment and making them aware of the advantages of the digital medium. This involved converting an offline client and infusing the importance of allocating significant budgets for digital mediums. Mehul’s prime focus is to help start-ups and concentrate more on customized digital branding while understanding the right marketing mix; to provide both online and offline integration for brands i.e. providing a proper mix between digital and traditional mediums.

His strength is his undying potential to ideate, innovate and create a system of shared knowledge, ideologies and creativity. The success of SoCheers is their flexibility to adapt and a 24/7 service as their key unique selling point. Mehul is also responsible for the company’s growth as it has forayed into acquiring clients across the globe, which adds a lot of exposure to their plate. SoCheers plans to bank on booming e-commerce waver in India for the next few years.

Mehul completed his education from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies with an MBA in Marketing. He previously worked at JWT and Naaptol to name a few.

In coversation with Mr. Mehul Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of SoCheers Infotech

What drives you?

To define it in one word, it would be the ‘adrenaline’ - the adrenaline of doing something different, creating experiences and adding value to businesses in different industries. I love waking up every morning with a purpose, a list of things to do and to do them differently. What helps is to have a team who executes every idea to perfection. If it hadn’t been for my team, I don’t think it would have been possible to do half the things we do currently. And what drives them is the adrenaline too. So it’s a cycle.

How big is the potential for a business like yours? Any major customers that you now cater to? What kind of numbers do you expect from a business like yours? Any statistics to compare with international standards?

The potential is quite limitless. Marketing in general cannot be curbed to numbers, it goes way beyond that. And digital marketing in specific is still growing. New opportunities to do different things keep popping up. So infact even our clients sometimes end up spending more on digital than they had budgeted for at the start of the year. It’s a lot about experiences on digital.

Over the last one-year, we’ve scaled up 3 times in turnover with some big brands under the Mahindra & Mahindra umbrella, along with some great names in the F&B and retail industry. Our end consumers (brand consumers) are an everyday you and me – so technically everyone we meet, see or talk to, are somewhere our end consumers.

Like I said earlier, potential & opportunities are limitless. It’s like an ocean – it’s very difficult to measure it in droplets. Our revenues will keep on increasing based on our client revenues, so they are quite variable, but consistently on the upside.

To compare internationally, we are looking at growing to about $3 million by the end of FY 2018. We are a lot smaller than some of the big players in the industry, domestically and internationally, but we’ve got some plans in place to start moving up at a faster pace than we are currently.

How do you plan to scale up; raise funds through seed or venture capital or simply grow the old fashioned way through rising turnovers?

Our business model is a mix of traditional & modern values. It probably comes from what we’ve learnt from our fathers & grandfathers in their businesses. We are sticking to growing the old-fashioned way for now as it’s working well in our favour. We’ve had a couple of offers for raising funds from seed & venture capitalists, but we have no intentions of giving away our control of the company any time soon.

Who would primarily be your consumer audience?

Like I mentioned earlier, our end consumers (brand consumers) are an everyday you and me – so technically everyone we meet, see or talk to, are somewhere our end consumers. While most of our audiences are primarily metro based, we are doing a lot of different campaigns that reach out to people beyond that.

Where do you see yourself five years down the road?

Five years down the line, I see myself as an industry leader in marketing. Someone who knows which way the wind is going to blow. In the old school way, it’s a lot about the influence than it’s about the money - atleast that’s how I’ve been groomed. Money is a by factor of everything else you do, so I’m not worried about that. Also, there are very less people in India who command that authority in the marketing industry and I’d like to change that.