PurpleClick has also been conferred numerous accolades over the past few years, including Agency of the Year for SME Market Education 2008 (Google) and Top Winner, Emerging Enterprise 2009 (Business Times and OCBC Bank). Leonard himself has won the Singapore Youth Award 2010 in Entrepreneurship, the highest national honour conferred on youths in Singapore who have significantly contributed to the society and achieved excellence in entrepreneurship, and other awards such as Entrepreneur of the Year 2009 by the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (ASME).

What is the key to PurpleClick’s success in such a short frame of time? And why has it succeeded when so many other technology start-ups have failed?

Let us hear from Leonard on lessons from his venture journey.

Key Success Factor 1: Seize thy opportunity
In Leonard’s case, the opportunity came when he was still in his previous job. As a sales manager of Yahoo!, he came to know of many businesses which were looking for help in online advertising. Leonard realised that there was a huge demand for such consultancy services, yet no one was able to serve this need effectively. He saw a huge potential in providing online marketing consultancy to such businesses, and his background in Yahoo! certainly gave him the opportunity to perform that service well.

“I realised that as an independent company, it would be easier to forge collaborations with government agencies to promote e-marketing. With my own company, I could promote e-marketing in general and inform the consumers about the different options available,” shares Leonard.

Thus, he presented his proposal to the top management of Yahoo!, who were “happy with the proposition because it was a win-win situation” for all parties. Leonard then left Yahoo! to start his own business, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Key Success Factor 2: Treat the customer like royalty
Says Leonard, for a company in his industry to do well, the entrepreneur must always remember that “the customer is king”.

“The most common problem faced by businesses is the incessant need to find ways to generate sales with the lowest cost possible. As an entrepreneur, I truly understand this problem and because I know what they’re exactly looking for, I am able to present the perfect tailor-made solution to them. And only if the solution really works will they keep coming back with more business.

The key is to always understand what your customer really wants. “Armed with this philosophy in mind, PurpleClick sets out to provide perfect solutions that work effectively for their clients. For example, it does not recommend popular marketing strategies to clients even thought it might generate more revenue for the business. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t believe in always giving clients what they want”, explains Leonard.

“What our clients want might not be the best for them. Most of the time clients come in and tell us that they want their online advertisements to be on the first page or right at the top of the search engine listing. They will pay the amount it costs to get on the first page without thinking about whether that can help them achieve their objective and goal.”

“When clients come to us with this request, we usually take the time to ask them questions and find out more about their business. This way, we have a better understanding of what they actually want to achieve. Maybe for them, they think that being on the front page of the search engine listing will give them good leads. But based on our vast experience, we might already know that it will be a waste of their money to use that strategy. Our customised solution can in fact save them more money and generate less revenue for us. But I don’t mind that. My aim is to help my clients make money. Because if I let them throw money into something that I know will not work, then I will lose their business.”

Key success factor 3: Always go back to the basics
Leonard also shares with us what he thinks is an essential entrepreneurial quality needed to succeed in business, which is the ability to go back to basics. This ability is crucial because from there, the entrepreneur will be able to come up with more effective solutions for the business. Leonard uses an analogy of a leaking water tap to illustrate this point, saying that most people would typically approach such a problem by wrapping a cloth around the part of the tap that is leaking. But if they were to think deeper, the problem could actually be solved more effectively by turning the main water source off.

“Often, when we are “fire-fighting” in business, we rush to solve the problem without thinking about what is the root cause. However, this form of problem-solving would not solve the problem ultimately because we did not take the time to think and pinpoint the root cause of the problem,” elaborates Leonard.

“Whenever we face problems, we just need to return to the fundamentals of why something didn’t work out. For instance, say we are trying to sell a product and perspective clients are not keen to buy it. Then we have to go back and re-examine the prospecting process. If the prospecting was wrong in the first place, a product, no matter how good, would not be sold.”

Success is sweet, but tempered with challenges along the way
Like many other start-ups, PurpleClick also experienced its fair due of challenges. It experienced a drop in sales when competition started kicking in. Similarly, there were also challenges when more clients started coming in and their backend operations could not handle the influx of demand for their services.

How did PurpleClick deal with such challenges? Leonard shares, “When we had more competition, we went back to the root of our problem to look at what we were strong at – identify what is our value proposition to our clients. We projected ourselves as a solutions-provider to clients instead of just an order-taker of product and services. We also stayed focus on providing quality service to clients and all that helped us gained a stronger foothold in the industry, especially during the bad economy. Customers also grew closer to us when they could see that we were trying to solve their business challenges.”

“When we had a pipeline issue and it was a challenge for our backend operations to handle the influx, we looked into our individual processes in every department to see if there was anything we could improve on. True enough, we did an overhaul and restructured the processes to suit the faster-moving business. Above all, we started to practice a higher level autonomy for the managers. I live by this adage: “You take the credit, but also the bame.” In this way, the decision-making and business processes move much faster, solving the problem as a whole.”

Full Speed Ahead
From our interview, it seems that having the right attitude in business definitely helped PurpleClick to plunder on despite the challenges and seize the opportunities and customers that came along.

So where is PurpleClick headed in the next few years, having defined its business proposition clearly and generating a name for itself in the industry?

“We have expanded into Malaysia and are looking at going into the emerging markets in the Southeast Asia region. I am looking forward to introducing this very powerful platform to more businesses and we are very excited that all kind of businesses are coming to us! Ultimately, we want to make PurpleClick an iconic Singapore brand in the global marketplace, to help drive sales leads from all over the world to SME clients in Asia.” shares Leonard.