Launched in February 2015 as a strategy consulting and design firm focusing on marketing strategies and branding projects, Brand Catapult with time has expanded its portfolio to include services like offline marketing, digital, photography, and more, driven by client demand.
Speaking to Marketing Mind on the agency’s close-to-a-decade journey, Dhruv Goel, Founder, Brand Catapult, stated that all of the agency’s growth so far has been completely organic, i.e.- without any external funding.
“Despite challenges like COVID, we’ve expanded globally, serving clients in eight countries. We’ve learned everything on the go and each step of our journey has taught us something new, helping us adapt to diverse markets and fueling our growth,” he said.
Since Brand Catapult is a house to diverse verticals and therefore focused on integration, he emphasised that the agency has been honest with its clients about what services it can handle in-house and what needs to be outsourced. It is because of this very reason that the agency has overcome some of the many limitations of integration like having bandwidth issues with partner agencies.
Commenting on what led to the birthing of various verticals under the umbrella of Brand Catapult, he mentioned that a majority of the functions that the agency has now built in-house has been a result of its clients’ demands, and the addition of the same has gradually impacted the company’s overall growth, revenue streams, and even attracted clients due to cross selling opportunities.
He also mentioned that even though each of the agency’s verticals has its own benefits, for Brand Catapult, Branding is a very significant category since a large amount of work happens in that area, followed by Strategy Consulting, Social Media. The same is also reflected in the respective verticals’ contribution to the company’s overall revenue.
Throwing light on how the ‘profitable’ agency has been growing until today, Brand Catapult’s Goel mentioned that since the agency had hit the break-even point quite early, revenue growth hasn’t been much of an issue for the agency. The bigger challenge, in his views, lies in continuing the scale and the pace at which they want to grow while staying profitable.
“We at Brand Catapult analyse our growth trajectory not from a revenue and client perspective, even though the both of them are positive, but on our team sizes since we believe that if we have more people working in our teams, our revenues have obviously grown as we’re able to afford them and that our client numbers have increased necessitating more people. That being said, our team size has practically doubled in the last 18 months, which is a significant growth rate considering the competitiveness of the industry and the talent crunch in the advertising and marketing sphere,” he elaborated.
Upon being questioned on the ratio of retainers and project-led work that happens at Brand Catapult, he replied that while 60-70% of the work that the agency does is on retainers, the remnant 30-40% of the work is project-led. However, the focus isn’t necessarily on securing more retainers but building trust with clients and delivering good work.
“Whether it’s a retainer or a project, both work for us. We’re not aggressively pushing for one over the other. We have clients who’ve been with us for years, still working on a project basis even though we suggest switching to retainers for cost savings as they prefer the flexibility of projects, even if it means paying more. So, we’re comfortable with the mix between our retainers and projects,” he added.
With the agency entering its tenth year of existence, he also pointed out that the goal that it has set aside for its foreseeable future is that of sticking to its vision and brand name- ‘Catapulting Brands’ and propelling them to new heights consistently.
“When we were brainstorming names for our agency in 2015, the main idea was to get a name that clearly indicated what we wanted to do and have a simple and easy-to-pronounce name that conveys our purpose clearly so people wouldn’t have to ask us about it. And ‘Brand Catapult’ is as literal as it gets – We catapult brands. In fact, our logo also reflects this concept- with a catapult launching a client forward,” he mentioned.
Concludingly, he also stated that going forward, especially in the agency’s tenth year, the agency is now focused on increasing its physical presence in key locations, beyond Delhi, since its client base is in multiple geographies and as part of this, Brand Catapult is actively working towards expanding into international markets as well as various regions in India, itself.
