Olivier Verot,CEO, Gentlemen Marketing Agency (GMA)
The foundation of any business is largely shouldered by the grit and intellect of an efficient entrepreneur. One such entrepreneur is Olivier Verot, owner of the Gentlemen Marketing Agency (GMA).
Olivier shifted to Dalian, northeast of China in 2007, and worked for four years in Marketing. He created a French blog Marketing-Chine in 2009, about the marketing and business culture in China. The website got a lot of interest from the French Business community that brought him a lot of freelancing missions including marketing, SEO, and Research.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency
Headquartered in Shanghai, China, GMA was founded in 2012 by two industry veterans Olivier Verot and Philip Qian (Co-Founder of the company) as an agency that solves foreign business problems at that time. Olivier (French) and Philip Qian (Chinese), aims to ensure a multicultural environment efficient to success in the Internet Chinese World. The company is specialized in Digital marketing and offers its services to ambitious businesses in China, including SEO/SEM, Buzz, Social Media, Online PR, and e-reputation.
Among the various ranges of services, the company also offers, lead generation for B2B, tourism, and service providers. It helps in Branding for brands that need to increase reputation and brand awareness. It provides E-Commerce services for all the companies that want to sell their products and service online in China. It also helps in E-Distribution to brands that want to be distributed in China both online and offline.
The company has a strong experience in Tourism, Cosmetics, fashion, B2B industry, and Food & Beverage. Olivier says, “I think we are quite specific on this market. We are a digital player since 2012, we live and think digital.” He adds, “We are oriented to performance, we set up KPIs, target and are focused to reach them.”
GMA has a pragmatic approach as most of the clients need a pragmatic solution that is tested on the ground and plan that works. It is also a cross-cultural multicultural agency, where it makes bridges between two worlds, China and other parts of the world. The company tries to keep brands’ DNA, but also localize marketing campaign.
Defining Entrepreneurial Aspects
Olivier believes that every entrepreneur should have a passion and complete belief that their business will be successful and should be willing to put in extra efforts to reach the goals. He says, “Life of entrepreneurs is a life of challenges, it is really hard to estimate which one is the biggest.” One of the biggest challenges Olivier faced was to recruit and train key people and let them drive a part of the company. “All companies that are running are on a human adventure. We need to work with people, and build partners, that take GMA as their own company,” asserts, Olivier.
As the leader of the company, Olivier thinks that culture brings successful results to the clients and the company. He believes that honesty and trust are the base of the relationship between people and companies and also important to be honest with the partners, with the team, and the clients. Olivier tries to educate the staff to solve problems and always think of solutions. “As a service provider, we need to be aware that our clients have problems and pay us to solve them one by one. A company that solves its entire problem has a lot of chance to be successful,” affirms, Olivier.
Today, the company has 5 partners GMA (Marcus, Alexandre, Jynn), and always encourages more people to join their adventure.
Envisioning Success
According to Olivier, Success is a feeling that comes when one accomplishes a big goal. “Life of a company is a list of targets that need to be done, to achieve a bigger plan. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it works and I call it success,” asserts Olivier.
Olivier likes to grow as much as possible and in every step of the company’s growth, he has discovered new interesting challenges. As a leader, he aims to become the number 1 agency in China and stay a leader for decades. “Be a legend. As great thinkers, I like to research, discover a new solution. I would like to be famous for creating methods of Marketing to China,” concludes Olivier.