5 Questions With…is a bi-weekly local entrepreneur feature giving us a glimpse into their daily lives and thoughts.
This week, we caught up with Ryan Hoe, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Section. Section is a digital agency with operations in Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. Since setting up shop in 2011, Section has grown from a 4-man team to about 80 employees in Singapore and more in its other markets. Today, it counts OCBC, Grab, Ascott, Playstation and other well-known brands as some of its clients.
While business was booming and the company hadn’t faced a major economic crash since setting up shop, Section had to combat the COVID-19 downturn – just like any other business in Singapore and around the world. Ryan took the opportunity to streamline the company’s software usage to improve productivity while employees had to work from home.
In order to keep everyone safe, Section also introduced a 100% work-from-home policy until Q1 2021 – just in time for its move to a bigger office space for its employees. Because Section is a digital agency, it had already adopted a work-from-home policy pre-COVID-19, and Ryan shares that it was just a matter of perfecting the already smooth practice and onboarding the right tools to manage its entire workforce completely working-from-home.
Despite the downturn in 2020, Section managed to win 3 new accounts – entirely while working remotely, and was also able to secure an ISO certification and 2 prestigious digital marketing awards locally – also all entirely remotely.
Despite Ryan’s busy schedule, usually starting around 7.30am when he has to take calls with his teams in different times zone and running around a lot, we managed to get hold of him to get a glimpse into his daily life (outside of work).
5 Things That Are Always In Your Morning Routine?
- Use of Google assistant / Now to see if anything (serious) happened while I was asleep. A lot of my time in a day is spent on conversing with people, use of trending topics helps in my conversations and I don’t want to be the last to know any major news.
- Check in to my calendar to make sure I didn’t forget any important meeting(s).
- My coffee because I will have severe headaches once I log in to my email
- Calls with my teams, which may be within different time belts
- The rest comes in any order depending on urgency – haha
4 Digital Services You Cannot Live Without?
- Google workspace – for all the cloud convenience it brings to the business
- Google Assistant – for all the customised newsfeed that I am interested in
- Sonos Music – I cannot work in silence
- YouTube – I enjoy more content
3 Hacks To Grow A Business From Ground Up?
- Identify a utility gap (The service/product offering)
- Identify a marketing angle (The personality)
- Come up with a value proposition (The deal)
I think if you have a good angle for all 3 things above, you are en route to a good entrepreneur journey. I wouldn’t be 100% sure that it will succeed but it will get the business off on a good start.
2 Tech Entrepreneurs You’d Want To Build A Digital Product With Overnight?
I would want to work with the next aspiring guy with a lion’s heart. Rather than the next techpreneur.
I think the misunderstanding here is that everyone wants to be the next tech business startup. But the truth is that identifying business gaps for any product stays as the leading criteria to determine a successful product.
1 Advice For Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Go wild because you only live once.
Ryan Hoe – managing partner, Section
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