New Series: Making the Leap to Entrepreneurship

Our first episode focuses on Rohit Bhargava, founder of Non-Obvious Company and co-founder of Ideapress Publishing.

Many entrepreneurs don’t start out that way: they may spend years working for others in salaried jobs, where the paycheck may be steady but the potential for creativity and independence is limited.  In this new series, EIX will feature people who started off as employees and made the leap to being business owners.

The first episode focuses on Rohit Bhargava, founder of Non-Obvious Company, a consulting firm that advises businesses on how to develop non-obvious thinking. He also co-founded Ideapress Publishing, the independent hybrid book publisher whose authors include business luminaries such as Ram Charan and Charlene Li. Ideapress also published my own book, Competing on Thought Leadership, in early 2022.

Before starting his own business Rohit spent years working in the advertising business as a well-paid account executive. While at Ogilvy, a top advertising firm, Rohit began blogging as a way to understand the new phenomena of social media, still in its infancy at the time. His blog focused on marketing trends, and he was soon named to a list of the “top 25 marketing blogs” and began to attract attention and invitations to speak while still working at Ogilvy.  Eventually, he discovered he couldn’t do both his day job and his speaking engagements. 

In my conversation with Rohit, which is part of a longer interview, he talks about how he built his reputation as a trend curator and book author while working as an ad exec, when and how he realized that he had to be on his own, the financial uncertainty that beset his first year in business, his adventures in publishing his own books, and how he built a thriving publishing house by nurturing and publishing other authors.