“Platforms such as social media, chat GPT and AI are revolutionising the future of small businesses like Fluqe”
One day, I was on a flight from London to Dubai when I started speaking to a passenger sitting next to me. The conversation flowed for hours, until eventually the young man asked me what I did for a living. Great, I thought, this was my chance to show-off a tad bit. Little did I realise that rather than me impressing him, he’d profoundly end up impressing me.
A step closer to a net-zero future
Thinking back to that conversation, incredibly neither asked the other what their name was? Anyway, as I told him everything about the Fluqe Group and our vision of being a forward-thinking enterprise. I gloated how, well before the pandemic, we’d already built our enterprise around offering our team maximum freedom and flexibility to flourish in the workplace. Since everyone at Fluqe was based globally, we’d done away with boring business bureaucracies, saying goodbye to ugly ties, unnecessary expensive headquarters and scrapping the 9-5 working day system.
I told him how the savings we made from scrapping all the vanity red tape around running a business, were re-invested in our teams training & education and back into our social enterprise and humanitarian efforts. I added that we were committed to reducing and maintaining the smallest carbon footprints in the UK.
A forward-thinking approach
I could tell from his interest that he was definitely impressed by our efforts and was itching to offer me some kind of million-dollar advice. He took a deep breath, looked straight into my eyes and said, I’ll share something with you for free, that you’d normally pay thousands of pounds for, if I was working for your company.
Being socially smart I Image from Google
When he said free advice, my eyes lit up! The young man asked me, how many business websites do you currently have? I stumblingly said, perhaps 8 or 9, as I didn’t have the exact numbers, as no one had ever asked me a question like this before.
He said, why don’t you create a strong social media presence and axe all your multiple websites. What..I shrieked? He continued, it’s a move that would potentially save you a lot of time, money and expertise. Furthermore, he exclaimed that today’s generation use social media for everything and soon you’ll see everything becoming available through social media to buy and sell (today, that makes sense, thanks to TikTok.)
I asked him how could he predict such a future? He went on to explain, that he was working in the UAE since 2018 for a large multinational clothing brand and was in charge of overseeing this transition for them towards becoming less dependent on websites and more reliant on social media in the future. by navigating their funds from maintaining & managing several websites across 21 countries, they were planning to use them towards investing across their social media marketing & advertising strategy and by doing so were bringing in savings in the hundreds of thousands.
Embracing the future
Today social media managers and influencers were commanding higher salaries than those in traditional job roles, a concept which would have sounded alien to us before covid. Mind you, this conversation took place in March 2020, literally a few days before the covid restrictions were set in all over the world. At the time, we weren’t so accustomed to buying things through a social media site and especially not through TikTok. It’s still a pretty new phenomenon even now for some people as TikTok continues to role out its shop features in other countries. I’m still surprised at the things my wife ends up purchasing from them.
Fluqe Empire 