CxO of the Week: Sumit Ghosh, CEO, PowerAdSpy

For the current week, we have chosen Sumit Ghosh CXO of the week. He is a serial entrepreneur, who started his entrepreneurial career with an IT Services company Globussoft and scaled it to USD 2 million in annual revenues. His second venture Socioboard is into building automation products for digital marketing space. The Socioboard product suite, which includes PowerAdSpy, has MRR of $150,000 and comprises of desktop apps, three SAAS products, and mobile apps which have more than 1 million downloads and 300,000+ daily active users.

Your top priority while making decisions to improve tech infra in your organisation?

The priority is to reduce operational costs & time through efficiency gains. In this order, my organisation uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) on a daily basis. For example - our Facebook Ad-Intelligence Tool - PowerAdSpy - A better way to find and analyze relevant Facebook Ads than Analyze current and past data and leverage AI to identify what type of Ad copies we should create and type of audience we should target. In the past, this would take days to analyze.

Further, I believe to follow the digital advertising ecosystem while making decisions regarding tech infra in my organisation. My priority is to keep safety, digital advertising transparency and feasibility to using the product on top of the list.

Challenges you face in driving digital transformation?

The two major challenges that are faced in driving digital transformation are - Handling Employee Pushback during digital transformation, managing budget through the digital transformation.

Firstly, handling Employee Pushback during digital transformation is a perennial challenge. For a reason, taking out employee from a comfort zone may make employees feel threatened. Keeping employees informed and involved through the transformation process and providing them a future they can work towards by helping employees understand what’s at stake.

Just like, transformation is not easy, it is also not free. Initially, the cost of innovation becomes the huge barrier for us and getting the company digitally transformed requires money. We faced big revenue challenges to meetup this end-to-end transformation and the process of adapting digital transformation became very sluggish. But we were prepared for it with a company-wide digital transformation strategy. This is exactly where many companies lack.

Do you feel that freshers in the industry come with only basic knowledge but don’t have the right skills to fulfil job requirements? If yes, your suggestion to students and colleges?

Yes, mostly all the freshers in the industry come with only basic knowledge which they gain from their educational background. My only advice to the freshers is - Whatever you do, do with all your heart. Also, you should keep aside the ‘Can Do’ attitude and should be open to learn new things. Try to be flexible as much as you can while adopting new technologies.

What’s your mantra to become successful in life?

Becoming the most engaged, whatever I do, I try to put on the maximum effort and becoming the least attached, I stopped caring about what life gives to me, instead focusing on what I can give to life.

What would you like to give back to the society?

I am definitely in favour of spreading awareness among people about each and everything. Also, I would love to give a helping hand by providing employment to the needy people from the NGOs and the organizations.

Your favourite book and what are you reading now?

My favourite book is “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t” by James Collins. & Currently I am reading Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. It is all about considering the culture which you are building and understanding in what way the people you bring onto the organization help upon that culture. It is an interesting book I must say.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I enjoy spending time with my family and friends. Also, I do spend time working out. It makes my mind and body free.

Achievements (Awards & Recognitions)

Globussoft. Largest Software Exporter from the state of Chhattisgarh since past 7 years. (Data: STPI Bhilai)

Experience

Being a serial entrepreneur, I started my entrepreneurial career with an IT Services company Globussoft and scaled it to USD 2 million in annual revenues.

My second venture Socioboard is into building automation products for digital marketing space, the socioboard product suite which includes PowerAdSpy has MRR of $150,000 and comprises of desktop apps, 3 SAAS products and mobile apps which have more than 1 million downloads and 300,000+ daily active users.

First Job - Working with TCS for more than a year, I was involved in researching on latest MS Technologies, making prototypes for enterprise-grade applications, performance modelling and benchmarking of applications on latest .NET technologies like WCF/WPF/WF and Windows Cardspace.

Education - Completed BE Degree from Bhilai Institute of Technology. Plus adept in programming languages like VC++ 9, C# 3.0, PHP 5, Java, Coldfusion 8, Assembly, VB.NET, VB 6.0 etc.

Take a look at the previous CxO of the Week