By Irina Bond, CEO at Medi-Gyn Centre and Senior Consultant at Sapience Communications.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spark. For me, that means the passion for a product or service, along with the strategic thinking and determination needed to bring it to market. This interest has taken me on a journey from high finance in the City of London to helping build up a bespoke hormone therapy clinic in Dubai, and, latterly, working with Sapience Communications, a London-based PR and digital marketing consultancy looking to establish a Gulf presence.
Quite a transition, in other words. But the common thread running through my career has been a set of core beliefs about how best to scale up a business. To my mind, this means real dedication to the product or service; strategic thinking about a core proposition and target consumers; relentless persistence in finding leads; and, lastly, empathy for the customer and their needs.
Beginning my journey – the City of London
I began my career in the City of London, working as an analyst for the EBRD and Barclay’s. The lifestyle of a high-flying City professional in the 2000s was exciting and fast-paced, but it could be punishing. It was hardly uncommon for analysts like me to still be in the office in the small hours of the morning.
This issue had a special salience for me. I’ve always been interested in wellness, and am fascinated by the body’s own ability to regenerate itself naturally. I was passionate about helping the kind of people I was working with – people with very active lives – make time in their busy schedules to look after their physical and emotional wellbeing.
And so after the financial crisis of 2008, I decided to open up a business that could marry my passion for wellness with my intimate knowledge of the lifestyles of City professionals. I launched Purifyne Cleanse, which offered juice cleanses to high-powered clients in London, in the early months of 2009.
It wasn’t the easiest of starts. The City was suffering from the fallout of the global financial crisis, so consumer and corporate budgets were tight. And that winter of 2009 was one of the coldest in living memory – hardly the best time, then, to be launching a line of healthy juices.
But I was quickly able to make a success of Purifyne Cleanse for a number of reasons. For one, the passion I felt for the sector allowed me to create a unique, high-quality product. My previous knowledge of the field meant that I could design Purifyne Cleanse’s line of twelve vegetable-based cleansing juices myself. I took a qualification from the College of Natural Medicine to sharpen up my technical knowledge, and consulted with leading nutritionists to perfect the recipes.
Further, before I began, I had already developed a detailed business development and communications strategy. I knew which consumers I wanted to target, and what core message I needed to get across to them in a clear and powerful way. Thinking about these questions from first principles is the core of sound business development and PR, and it should be done well in advance of any new venture.
Fortunately, my passion and strategic planning soon paid off. My first customer was a salon owner, who was soon followed by a slate of City clients. Next, Bank of America approached me to sign up its trading team. It was a case study in how – once the hard work of planning and promotion are done – word-of-mouth and reputation will do a good deal of the rest.
Taking a business international
Having founded and scaled up Purifyne Cleanse in London, I decided for my next venture to launch a similar service overseas. The same philosophy of PR and business development served me well in in this new role: as CEO and Well-Ageing Expert at Medi-Gyn Centre, a leading provider of hormone balancing, menopause, andropause and longevity protocols in Dubai.
As ever, my passion for the products and services was key. I am active on both the client relations and nutritional sides of the business, and seeing the positive differences we make to people’s lives has spurred me on. After undergoing our protocols, clients enthuse about how they have more energy and zeal for life. One’s passion truly drives any business, and Medi-Gyn has been no exception.
Again, setting up this business meant thinking strategically about the state of the local market, our target clientele, and how we could position ourselves. Dubai is, of course, now becoming a global centre of commerce, and patterns of work and life are changing to match. There is now more of a ‘wellness culture’ among its class of professionals: an understanding that a healthy lifestyle is an essential precondition to a successful career.
We positioned Med-Gyn Centre, then, as a key facilitator of this change, and as a partner to busy professionals looking to take charge of their wellbeing. This facility for getting a proposition across in a pithy and incisive way is also serving me well in my complementary role: as a Senior Consultant to the London-headquartered PR and digital marketing firm Sapience Communications.
Crafting compelling messages is key for new businesses
Being a consultant for Sapience Communications is enabling me to put all the lessons I have learned throughout my career into practice across a variety of industries. Healthcare is one of Sapience’s main sectors, as is finance – so this dovetails nicely off my career so far.
In an agency, the sectors and clients vary, but the core principles of PR, communication, and business development remain the same. Sapience prides itself on its rigorous strategic planning when taking on new clients: mapping out target audiences; analysing the state of the sector; and crafting a clear and compelling story to position each client. I look forward to using the skills I have learned to set up Sapience’s Dubai office. It’s a dynamic market, abuzz with new ideas and new businesses to scale up. The task, as ever, is to craft the compelling messages to reach them.
