iQuanti has just been named to the Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. It’s a great honor – not least because it’s our fourth time as an Inc. 5000 winner.
As we grow our firm, generating meaningful year-over-year gains in revenue becomes more difficult. So, given the challenge of posting steady growth, we’re especially excited to be in this year’s Inc. 5000.
How have we done it? For me, iQuanti’s founder and CEO, there are four things that stand out.
Being Clear About What We Stand For
As one starts off, there is obviously a need to be opportunistic. After all, you have to pay your bills and meet your payroll. We did not have VC funding like many other firms.
But there comes a time when one has to learn to say no. And have a clear understanding of what one stands for.
iQuanti is about using data to drive exponentially more effective digital marketing. Everything we do, down to our name, signifies this mission. Our employees, clients and other stakeholders will all agree that our core attributes are digital, data and depth.
This underlying foundation helps guide our offering, our approach and our hiring. It is this focus that has enabled us to work with some of the world’s leading brands – who have many options in the agency landscape.
Aligning Our Interests With Those of Our Clients
This is a huge one for us at iQuanti. For us, client success isn’t about gaining search ranking or even site traffic. It’s really about leveraging those things to deliver our clients more paying customers – or more revenue from their existing customers.
In other words, what we care about at iQuanti is bottom-line results, which we help our clients unlock from the digital platforms that their customers are already using. Often, it is easier and more convenient to use upstream metrics like ranks or visits, both of which are useful indicators of progress. But we at iQuanti focus on client bottom lines, which shapes all of the strategies we develop.
For example, you may expect ranking on a popular keyword – e.g., “mortgage” – will lead to more traffic. At iQuanti, we drill into our clients’ performance metrics to find out which phrases actually maximize revenue. Often, in our experience, more targeted terms like “best jumbo mortgage rates” perform better than generic ones.
We’ve learnt to align our interests with our clients’ to grow iQuanti. In fact we relied only on word of mouth of satisfied clients in our first several years of business. That’s a testament not only to the results we generate but our focus on going above and beyond for our clients.
Learning to Say No
As a company is growing, there are many roads to choose from. Having a strategy is about making a choice: taking one road and saying no to all the other ones. This is easier said than done, and has taken a long time for us to learn.
As we’ve become better known, we have many small businesses approach us for help with their digital marketing. It is very difficult for us to say no; these are businesses like ours which we would love to help, and it is always difficult to say no to new revenue. But for us to deliver value to clients, they need to be of a certain scale. So we’ve chosen to say no and focus on clients who can get the most value from our offerings.
It’s the Team, Stupid
If there was one single reason we’ve made the Inc. 5000 four times, it is our winning team. iQuantians are a force that drive us forward. As a founder, I feel I am the steward of a brand that a tremendous group of people are creating.
From our HQ in Jersey City to our engineering office in Bangalore, to sales offices in Mexico City, London, and elsewhere, it took the combined efforts of every iQuantian for us to make the Inc. 5000.
As we’ve progressed, employees now choose key initiatives to work on, and cross-functional employee teams drive a lot of change.
So these are the four reasons that we credit for being on the list of fastest growing companies four years in a row. As anyone on this list knows, there is a tremendous amount of luck involved in making it to the list. And it is not a race. By sharing our learnings and learning from others, we hope to be in this journey together to create something great – and help people realize their full potential.
