Nazmul Chowdhury

Never stop learning. Technically, emotionally, spiritually, etc. Always try to improve on yourself and don’t get into your comfort zone.

 

Nazmul Chowdhury is an online entrepreneur. He’s the founder and CEO of Powerphrase, a digital web marketing agency in Orange County, California. Nazmul is originally from Bangladesh and also holds a Canadian citizenship. Before coming to the United States, Nazmul was a programmer and worked in Canada. He received his bachelors for UT Dallas. He would often travel back and forth between the U.S. and Canada then finally decided to move and live in Southern California. He has a family of four and his daughter and son are twins. He worked for years and started from the bottom, literally from scratch. A successful immigrant story one could say. In 2003, he and a few colleagues started Powerphrase. This type of idea & business was revolutionary back then. They started right at the time when Google AdWords went live and before it became a popular way of online advertising. Not many companies were doing Google pay per click marketing around his area, so they had a first mover advantage in obtaining success early. In a couple of years, they managed to grow to 8 people and started to specialize in web design & SEO. Naz and his team started to get bigger clients. They started to grow to a point where everyone was earning a good living. He employed over 5+ Americans that earn more than the average American. Now in 2018, Powerphrase is a full-service digital marketing and software development company. Powerphrase has served over 100+ clients throughout the United States whether they are small or large businesses. Today, Naz lives in Irvine, California and still works very hard even though he’s 60+ years of age.

Where did the idea for your company come from?

The name came from one of the founding partners who’s not here anymore. He came up with it because it was “different” and something related to our business, which is PPC & SEO marketing. Picking a name was challenging so we all of us came to an agreement Powerphrase was the name they we were going to go with since it made sense for the services that we provide.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

Our typical day starts out with coming into the office and checking our emails first. We check to see if we received any emails from our clients or new inquiries for web design. We check to see if we got any missed calls since some people call after 5pm. My day spends mostly around managing current projects. I also help manage sales/customer service for current and potential clients. My hours are 9am-4pm in the office. A lot of my time is spent having meetings with my developers, project management and overseeing my sales force. I try to stay productive by not focusing on one thing for too long. I tell myself from 9-12 I’ll do this and form 12-3 I’ll focus on these things etc.

How do you bring ideas to life?

We get ideas from inspirational sites and from people’s feedback. We look at current technology trends and see what everyone is doing in terms of their UI/UX design. Once we get some ideas, we create a mockup/prototype. Once it gets approved by everyone we move forward with the project.

What’s one trend that excites you?

I would say voice search. Since I specialize in keyword search, voice search is the future of search in the digital world. You have search features like Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana that is changing how we search for things online. The future of search is very interesting.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

Working during certain intervals throughout the day. I don’t believe in the typical 8-10 hours of work straight. I do believe we should take long breaks and have time gaps to relax and feel focused again. Break up certain task and do it at certain times of the day. In order to stay productive, your mind has to feel relaxed an opened other wise if you focus on something for too long you get that “burn out” feel.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I would tell myself not to get comfortable. I got in my comfort zone and lost some clients and could’ve gotten more clients. I would tell myself to stay focused and not get distracted by so man little things in life. Focus on exercising my mind, staying healthy and thinking positive.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

You don’t need to have a degree or a lot of corporate work experience. The things that I do today for my company is not even related to having a degree. I don’t have a masters, MBA or any type of special certificate to do what I am doing today. If someone tells you, you need a college degree or need to have a lot of work experience for this that’s not really true at all. All you need is the proper mindset and willingness to learn to get what you want.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Never stop learning. Technically, emotionally, spiritually, etc. Always try to improve on yourself and don’t get into your comfort zone.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

Digital Marketing has helped grow my business. Specifically, SEO. SEO helped place my company to show up on the front page of Google for my company’s services. So, when people type in SEO, marketing, web design related services, my company shows up. Because of this, we get calls every month and we were able to close some of these people to become our clients. This is how we mainly grew our business, through organic reach.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

Losing RFP’s and losing current clients. It is what it is. For proposals, we practiced and revised our proposals until it became good enough for people to understand what we are providing them so they’re willing to sign it.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Voice search marketing. This is the future along with AR and VR. Paid and organic search marketing will grow on AR/VR and search marketing on these technological features will become big.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

Best $100 would be on a software called Nusii. Nusii is a proposal building software. It has saved us hours and hours of time in drafting proposals.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

Again, Nusii. This has been a live saver for us when we create proposals. We don’t have to add and delete people’s name or companies. There are variables that automate the process. You can also see if they opened the proposal or not. It also has an option to sign your signature. Instead of taking 4 hours to create a proposal, now it takes half the time.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

The Alchemist. I loved the story. The story basically sums up this: Look forward and create your dreams. Don’t look back and don’t be held back by fear. Great book for entrepreneurs.

What is your favorite quote?

“Eye for an eye make a whole world blind” I like this quote because sometimes in life there are people who wrong you and you want to do something back to them. That bring negativity thinking and you waste time thinking like this.

Key learnings:

• Strive to be positive and productive by surrounding yourself with the right people and right technology.
• Continuously look out for new ideas to grow your business and save time.
• Break your tasks into segments throughout the day. It’s about being productive rather than sitting at the desk all day.

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