From Hahah Deals to Orion Digital: How Shanker Joyrama learned when to reset and start again

From Hahah Deals to Orion Digital: How Shanker Joyrama learned when to reset and start again

At 21, Shanker Joyrama had done everything he thought he was supposed to do.

Fresh out of university, he landed a coveted place in Citibank’s graduate programme before moving to DiGi, which he describes as one of Malaysia’s most progressive employers at the time. He believed hard work would eventually pay off.

Years earlier, Shanker had set himself three goals before turning 25: earn US$5,000 (RM20,000) a month, own a house and achieve financial freedom. Instead, he found himself carrying credit card debt and nowhere near the life he had imagined.

“I worked hard. Really hard,” he said. “But when I looked at where I was at 25, I realised I wasn’t anywhere near where I thought I’d be.”

Looking back, he calls it his quarter-life crisis. It was also the point when he stopped waiting for someone else to shape his future.

Orion Digital didn’t exist yet. Nor did Shanker imagine he would one day build a regional digital consultancy with offices across Malaysia and Singapore, clients spanning industries from banking to aviation, and 80 industry awards.

Growing up, finance was the ambition. Citibank represented exactly the sort of career Shanker wanted. Selected as one of only three graduates for a newly launched graduate programme, he entered the workforce full of confidence.

“My ego was damn high,” he said. “I’ll be really honest with you.”

At 21, with a place in Citibank’s graduate programme and the title of assistant manager, he felt he had “made it”.

The next two years gave him a grounding in business that he still draws on today. Rotating through departments meant learning quickly, making mistakes and getting humbled.

“It was brilliant. Work hard, play hard. I learned a lot about business, but I also got humbled very quickly.”

In 2009, he moved to DiGi. Back then, DiGi was already doing things differently. Employees hot-desked, worked remotely when needed and were judged by outcomes rather than whether they were sitting at their desks.

Shanker enjoyed the culture, but something didn’t sit right.

It wasn’t the work. It was the growing realisation that career progression depended on more than performance.

“I realised that if you wanted to go very far in corporate life, you needed to know how to play the game,” he said. “You needed to do good work, but you also needed to navigate politics. I wasn’t very good at politics and, honestly, I didn’t enjoy it.”

What bothered him even more was the lack of control.

“If I failed because of a decision I made, I could accept that. But I didn’t like the idea that my future could be determined by decisions made by someone else.”

By 25, he knew he wanted something different.

Shanker didn’t leave corporate life to start a digital agency. Determined to take control of his future, he began exploring business ideas. His first venture was a group-buying platform called Hahah Deals, inspired by Groupon’s early success in the United States. The problem was that he had no marketing budget.

So Shanker turned to a platform that was still relatively new at the time: Facebook. Within three months, Hahah Deals had attracted 20,000 followers organically, before Facebook Ads became commonplace and before businesses had dedicated social media teams.

“There wasn’t a playbook back then,” he said. “You couldn’t go onto YouTube and find someone teaching you how to grow a Facebook page. We just kept testing things.”

He posted relentlessly, ran contests, watched what people responded to and refined his approach.

Businesses noticed. Many were less interested in the deals platform than in how he had built such a large following. One client asked if he could do the same for them, offering US$250 (RM1,000) a month to manage their social media content. Soon another client came along, then another.

“It wasn’t planned,” he said. “Clients simply kept asking if we could help them with their social media.”

The timing worked in his favour. Facebook was growing rapidly, but most companies were still figuring out what social media meant for their business.

Almost without realising it, Hahah Deals was becoming something else.

As demand grew, so did the team. Then came a bigger opportunity.

One of Shanker’s early mentors encouraged him to pitch for a project with DiGi — the company he had left only months earlier.

“We pitched and somehow won the business,” he said.

But there was one complication: Shanker was operating as a sole proprietorship, which DiGi could not onboard as a vendor. If he wanted the project, he would need to incorporate.

So he did, and in September 2011, Orion Digital was officially born.

There was an irony to it. The company that had helped shape Shanker’s corporate career had now become the catalyst for his entrepreneurial journey.

Over the next 15 years, Orion Digital would grow as digital marketing evolved from an emerging discipline into a core business function. But the journey was far from linear.

Along the way, Shanker would press the reset button twice.

“Right now, we realise that the speed of marketing is so fast, even things that we used to do a year ago don’t really work anymore. You need to adapt, evolve and improve. You really have to stay on top of the trends.”

Shanker traces some of that willingness to experiment back to DiGi, where he was encouraged to test ideas rather than wait for certainty.

“I remember the early days, my boss at the time basically said, just try. If you can validate that it works, then go ahead, execute,” he said.

It is a philosophy he has carried into Orion.

“You know what, we may not have the brightest ideas. Maybe the intern that just joined us for one week has a bright idea.”

“As long as we all think it’s logical from a business perspective and understand what it means for the client, there’s no harm trying it out,” he added. “If it works, we can do it again and share it with our clients as well. That’s how we always learn, adapt, try and experiment.”

For Shanker, AI is less a threat than a tool. Internally, it has helped Orion improve efficiency and productivity, freeing the team to spend more time on creative thinking.

He has also seen clients rethink the assumption that AI tools could replace agencies.

“What we’ve also realised over the last two years of this AI boom, I think initially we kind of saw that realisation that clients were saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do anything with agencies at this point. We all want to try internally with an AI tool.’

“But then they realised that it doesn’t really work as well, and they still need someone to look at it.”

After 15 years in business, one of Shanker’s key lessons is learning to ride both the good and difficult periods.

“You need to be able to ride the waves of the good days and the maybe more challenging days,” he said. “And sometimes, you need to click the reset button and start fresh again.”

The first reset came when Orion had been in business for about five years.

“There have been a couple of times where we realised we were doing work that we didn’t like to do. When we were early and we didn’t have money, you end up doing everything.”

That included work far outside its core focus, such as designing menus for an extra RM2,000 or RM3,000.

“We’re not a creative agency, we’re a digital agency.”

Around that time, an entrepreneur friend introduced Shanker to the Pareto Principle, better known as the 80/20 rule.

“Ours was the bad end of the stick. We had 80% of our most difficult projects or clients that we had to deal with, which were coming from our lowest-paying 20%,” Shanker said. “So we realised this is not cool.”

“Sometimes the only way to succeed or win through life is to cut off a limb to survive. Sometimes you need to do that rather than play a slow, painful death. It’s either every team member sinks with you and dies, or you cut, regroup and realign to move forward.”

Five years later, following Covid, Orion went through another reset.

This time, the problem was not its clients but the business itself.

“We realised there were smarter ways of doing things and improving our workflow.”

Shanker declined to share the company’s headcount before the second reset, but the experience reinforced another lesson.

“It’s actually not about the number of people that you have, it’s about the amount of quality people that you have.”

There was also a culture problem that Shanker admitted he had been slow to address because he was too focused on the work.

Team members had begun comparing who had hired them, creating divisions within the company.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m better because I was hired by B,’” he said. “It really baffled me.”

For Shanker, this was a line Orion could not cross.

“That is something we couldn’t accept because I’m big on mannerisms and how we carry ourselves,” he said. “Even if you bring in a new person that’s very good, there would be no point; what will happen is that the politics would influence them easily.”

The experience reinforced his belief that people at Orion need to share the same mindset, attitude and “can-do” mentality.

“We may not be able to understand what we’re doing right now, but if it’s something new and we need to learn this, then we’ll figure it out.”

That philosophy extends to the way Orion works with clients.

Instead of simply executing what a client demands, Shanker believes in first understanding the problem they are trying to solve.

“You need to have those conversations with the clients. We always ask any client that comes to us, ‘What are your pain points?’ Then we are able to diagnose the issue, present a remedy or a few solutions to it, and then the client can take an actual action in terms of fixing that problem.”

Being a partner also means being willing to disagree.

“If I know you’re going to spend money blindly on something that’s wrong, I’ll tell you, don’t spend your money there. It has worked in our favour for 15 years.”

Shanker believes this approach has helped Orion build long-term relationships and generate word-of-mouth business.

“Almost all my clients either come back or, when they do switch companies, we’ll just wait for the two, three months and then they definitely give us a call back if they join a new company,” he said.

The same principle applies to protecting Orion’s people.

If a team member experiences unacceptable behaviour from a client, management decides whether the relationship is worth continuing.

“We have terminated contracts before because of that,” Shanker said. “Because there’s no point having the money, but then you lose your talent.”

“That’s partly why our turnover rate is actually really low,” said Chew Ean Leen, Strategic Director of Orion Digital.

Today, the company has a headcount of 26.

Working across MNCs and government clients has also shown Shanker that, regardless of industry, many organisations face similar challenges.

“In a way, we’ve got our resources in terms of our wisdom to guide the clients.”

Saving the windfall from the good days

Another lesson Shanker has carried throughout his entrepreneurial journey is the importance of preparing for downturns during good times.

When the company enjoys a financial windfall, he said, reserves need to be kept for periods no one can predict.

“But you also keep it because there will also be days where you may not predict when you may need to use those reserves,” he said.

Shanker also embraces what he calls the “law of abundance”.

“I always believe in the law of abundance, which essentially means while we work with our colleagues, our clients, our partners, it’s about sharing everything with everyone.”

He believes that approach helps Orion attract people with similar values.

“Believing in that and nurturing that, it also means we attract the right kind of clients that are on the same kind of wavelength as us in terms of building things together and creating things together,” he added.

But abundance does not mean saying yes to every opportunity.

“We say no to a considerable amount of opportunities that come our way because we want to pick and choose the ones we want to work on. But we also do seize opportunities as they come along,” Shanker said.