Sweet 16 people say is a transition year.

Isn’t that how when we talk about a child turning 16.

The year 2025 marks 16 years of 30TH FEB.

The reflection feels like a surreal roller coaster, a tumultuous journey well travelled.

I feel like the transition has happened and what we see today is transformation in progress from here on.

Writing about this progress in my annual letter is as good as doing my annual kick start.

That will probably happen within weeks of this celebration.

Every year around this time, I just sit back and think about how I started, why I started.

Also the things, events and situations that I had not expected, planned or was ready for.

The answer I got from about this year, the 16th for us: has been a year of change.

Change because, January 01, 2025 we started our Jaipur office and it was a well thought of decision to expand our team with a change of place, while the Delhi team continued as usual.

This change of place came with a strategic decision because we wanted to go back to work from office mode.

We continued the hybrid mode for the Delhi team which we had adopted since the Covid times in 2020.

Also, we have had clients on this side and from the strategic point of view too it looked promising. I am sure we are all aware of the Delhi weather condition lately.

Jaipur did offer a better work-life environment as compared to Delhi which anyway is only 04 hours away.

On the personal side, we are enjoying the little less rush, slow mornings and coming to the office.

As a plus, the Delhi team has been loving the city ever since the last workcation and their visits in between.

We have been doing fairly well and this change of place, transition and transformation looks worth it so far 🙂

The next change I could think of is the change in the work force.

Almost all of you reading this will agree that the business ecosystems are experiencing a huge workforce shift.

We have all felt the change as founders, directors and team leaders.

As founders we fine tuned our systems, processes and organisations to embrace this particular change.

We are now working with GenZ who are too straight, a little out spoken and a little naive at times.

They are no different set of people but demand a different sort of hand-holding.

I can say that because I have been working with a lot of businesses in the growth and maturity stage.

GenZ and Millennials share this workplace shift as a major development at the work side.

This year we too embraced the shift and learnt to tread differently, while not diluting the purpose and values.

The next big change is what made us all curious, the artificial intelligence [AI]. The world, both yours and ours, is busy embracing AI while sailing through the confusions, concerns and curiosity around it.

This year was a year that taught us to comply with this big thing that the internet defines.

As a branding agency there were a lot of discussion and view points around AI taking the centre stage.

Yes, the advent is impacting what we deliver and how we deliver.

I particularly feel that AI is a good tool but it definitely is not something that will replace human intelligence.

We embraced it and aligned with it.

Additionally, we  started to receive a lot of things that were more AI and less human. As brand police to many, we had the challenge to ensure the brands stay close to the brand vision and purpose.

This year we  had to gear the defence around it because the algorithms are not supporting all AI. We adopted AI and created systems with checkpoints that helped us retain quality, capture algorithms and work better with it.

We had to be sure that it is not leading to make teams lethargic, lazy or tech dependent.

A branding agency zooms around the technological changes and algorithm shifts all throughout the year. AI is one big change that we embraced and we are still a work in progress.

It has changed the paradigm of content creation but it is also something that we need to be very mindful about.

Personally and as an entrepreneur a lot has changed this year. They say change is the only constant, and it is mostly for the good 🙂 

This year not only I learnt but practiced the very art of ‘doing less to do more’.

Yes this is something which is very close, an inner reflection on how things worked for me as a person, as an individual because when you are getting ready for transition or transformation you really need to learn the art of keeping calm.

I have been working a lot on the very element of ‘one day at the time’ and this year I brought it down to ‘one moment at a time’.

This has changed a lot in me both as a person and as an entrepreneur, a business leader.

I would say I learnt about this great insight at the Goldman Sachs 10k Women Entrepreneur program a year ago. This year the lessons I learnt around emotional intelligence and leadership sessions came to fruition.

I picked self care not by the fancy market routines but through a lot of inner work. The year resulted in better time on foot, time in nature, time with myself, with music and books.

On the personal side, since I mentioned to you last year that we were in and out of grief, I learnt to live with it.

As a family, we  got better at managing and accepting the shift in our roles, we had good moments, tough moments and great moments that helped us heal better.

All this while, the inner work helped me navigate better while maintaining and ensuring that things do not get jazzy or chaotic at the professional level. Even if they did, I handled it well 🙂

So this year of change, I think I have evolved as a better person, a better team player and a better friend.

This inner shift also led to a lot of change and transformation in how I was working as a business leader and more like a team player.

The inside always impacts the outside. This helped us bring change and evolve as a service provider. Be it the external offering design or the internal set-up.

The brand account pods that are more collaborative in nature and designed as per the required marketing skill set and expertise for each client helped.

We opened up to options of facilitating our clients and making it easy to work with 30TH FEB.

We now serve as brand consultants, as the integrated brand marketing team. We also adopted industry and domain friendly norms like, time and material model. We evolved as the strategic consultants and branding advisors to the c-suite.

Our journey evolved.

We also engage as  brand consultants and strategists for helping the c-suite with high level decision making while carving the way for their respective marketing teams to execute.

In both cases, our focus as the brand team remains the same. We are constantly on a mission to create net value for the clients we facilitate. We do the way they are comfortable with.

As per the industry and business paradigms, corporates as well as MSMEs wish to work with Fractional CMOs for personal attention and accountability.

We evolved and rolled out focused solutions like: Founder to Founder, Fractional CMOs and Brand Audits.

This made branding solutions accessible to various sizes of businesses who wished to align for strategy, need support with execution and value external viewpoints.

With that amazing professional edit, we come to the last and most important change.

The change in my growth routine.

Where I finally could dedicate my one hour to growth and took up something which is all me. I kept it rotational so that consistency doesn’t get ruled out by monotony.

I started with an hour of LinkedIn everyday.

This hour consisted of thinking, reflecting, writing.

Sometimes editing and posting in that one hour only. I carried on this exercise for good 3 to 4 months which resulted in more than 130+ posts in the last one year on my Linkedin space.

The impact?

My posts fetched 100000+  impressions and some 3600+ people engaged and 1500+ joined me in my universe through linkedin, calls, zoom meetings and a couple of  in-person meetings.

No wonder the year marked me doing the maximum number of meetings.

We changed and learnt the lessons around demand velocity.

These numbers may not be magical but these numbers are very affirmative in nature because they established that if we decide to do something, we can do it all.

We regularised the calendar flow with my team managing more without me.

The only thing I decided to NOT SAY NO was a meeting.

I did it without chasing but actually tried to make this a habit.

I evolved from being an entrepreneur, that was a goal last year after my NSRCEL certification.

Someone who feared every new meeting a decade ago was looking forward to meeting new people.

Here too it was more of inner work, which helped me handle panic with patience.

I learnt to stay calm, navigate anxiety and win the ambiguity.

Did I fail?

Hell yes! It still happens at times but now I know the way out.

You too can do more by doing less. We just have to choose to do more. And in the process, don’t forget to choose ‘self’ more.

Do it without pressure or guilt. It is okay to be.

Like Warren Buffet said, “Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.”

Love & Light!

Jigyasa
Founder, Chief Brand Strategist – 30TH FEB