It has been a full year since I visited the Pakistan office of Globital where many of our wholesale digital marketing services are fulfilled, so I was quite looking forward to flying out on Friday 3rd March. My excitement largely came from preparing my slide deck for my annual staff presentation. Preparing this presentation allowed me to take a breath, step back and see how far we’ve come in the last 12 months, how much we’ve achieved. Here for example are just some of these achievements:

• An increase in Pakistan team members from 46 to 72
• An increase in global team members from 49 to 82
• An increase in the number of new services started each week of 320%
• A decrease in customer complaints of 560% (and our drive for ongoing process improvement continues)
• We successfully documented and published our Vision, Mission, Culture and Values statements
• We successfully formalised, launched and have been running our staff appreciation and rewards program.

Wow, what a year. Yet in looking back, I still see 2016 as a foundational year, a year of working really hard to set up a platform to launch off for this year. It’s this platform that will allow us to kickstart some exceptionally exciting projects in 2017. These include new products, continual improvement of our processes and quality standards and new innovative ways to offer real support for our clients, the digital marketing agencies of the world.

My 2017 Pakistan visit itself had many highlights. To begin with I had the honour of presenting our Director of Operations Asjad Afzal with a Gold Coast Suns AFL footy jumper and footy, successfully handballing to his successful catch, in front of the entire team. We followed this up later with some YouTube videos of the biggest AFL marks and another of the biggest AFL hits, to give the guys an appreciation of our great game. I think they are hooked and we need to seek a special International Membership with the Suns.

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I also really enjoyed meeting with all the teams during the week. This gave me the opportunity to really appreciate how the team numbers have swelled over the 12 months, doubling in every single service line. This I found to be extremely satisfying. This growth in team numbers really highlights to me just how well our services and quality execution is meeting the mark for the many digital agencies who are enjoying our support. This growth really reflects just how much value we are providing to marketing businesses across the globe and their business clients, who we service with our wholesale platform.

The final part of my trip involved initiating a number of key projects in Pakistan and focusing on what we want to achieve over the next 12 months. These initiatives are extremely exciting for me as I believe they will enhance the way we support our marketing agency clients beyond anything they expect, completely delighting them in the process. I also believe that this will set us so far apart from other outsource marketing companies, that we will absolutely cement our place as the service partner of choice to the global marketing industry. Some of these initiatives include:

• The launch of many new products, including wholesale Conversion Rate Optimisation and Content Marketing services.
• Having employed Ali Sultan as our Quality Assurance manager, we have started a project to align ourselves with ISO 9001 best practise, and are progressing to achieve this quality accreditation.
• We launched a “Staff Expert” initiative where one team member volunteers as the expert of each service line, a significant portion of their role then becomes seeking, training and industry participation in the expert panels of that discipline. My ideal here is that, over time, each of these professionals lifts both their skills and knowledge so far that they become renowned experts in the field of that discipline, so people begin to come to us for advice and training. By having people in our teams whose job it is to become global authorities, the idea is that this knowledge and skill will raise the standards of all members of our teams through simple association. From there we will be able to lift the standards of marketing for all the agencies we support. So as a long term result, we lift the standard of excellence for our entire industry. I know, it’s a lofty vision isn’t it? Regardless, it’s one we are actively pursuing today.
• We also agreed to hire a full time english teacher for the office. The idea here is not only to help communication between our team and our clients, but we also want our team members to obtain skills of real life value to them. One of the points of our mission statement is to be an employer of choice in our industry, and this move helps us to accomplish that goal. With this in mind, the english teacher will not only be charged with training our client interfacing team members, but this personal and professional development initiative will be made available to ALL members of our team.

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For me, this visit was an inspiring and energising week to say the least. I’d really like to thank Asjad our Director of Operations in Pakistan, his management team and everyone for making me feel so welcome during my stay. It was great to see old friends again as well as meet so many new friends. I really look forward to my visit this time next year to see how far we have come again and how much success we will enjoy from the key initiatives we have launched this year.