Three years ago when city based writer, entrepreneur Trisheetaa Tej was on a five-month break from work after marriage, she kept meeting women of her age and beyond who were college and university toppers but those who chose to be homemakers for their family. Also a phase where she was into writing as a personal interest, she yearned to create an identity for married women. That’s when she connected her interests to establish Pencil9, a content marketing startup by and for women that provides writing solutions for clients across the globe. A testimony of Trisheetaa’s efforts is her win at The India Leadership Awards hosted at Mumbai in the ‘Excellence in Advancing the Dignity of Women’ category (through her startup). She was the only recipient from Telangana to have been awarded in an event where entrepreneurs were felicitated across 60 categories.
Sharing her experience of being at the event, she confesses it’s a dream come true. “Being amid global leaders, realising Pencil9 is a small part of it is indeed overwhelming. The win mattered more to my team than me, they’ve started owning their firm with it,” she adds. Also a certified clinical nutrition specialist and writer for several magazines with event-marketing and advertising stints in the past, her sole purpose of starting the firm was to benefit married women. “It was word of mouth that helped me more. A woman generally has enough people to share things. Sans any digital marketing, I now have a group of 100 plus writers across the globe (India, China, Japan, UK being a few) working for Pencil9,” Trisheeta mentions.
And if you thought any married woman-writer could make it to her firm, think twice. “Generally, established writers know the avenues they can tap and don’t require assistance. What I do with Pencil9 is to groom married women, who aren’t natural at writing and give them a voice. After they are recruited, we keep sharing tips on writing patterns, train them vigorously in the initial months. The firm doesn’t work on a profit motive at all,” she remarks.
What she definitely wants to do is to enhance the firm’s scale tapping regional language assignments across the globe (like how she grabbed a project where content had to be written in Chinese). That’ll require a bigger team, she knows and all efforts are on to ensure that. And nothing seems like stopping her from increasing her awards tally this year, she’s been nominated for Middle East Leadership Awards (to be held at Dubai), while she also bagged a place among the top 50 women achievers in Hyderabad for women glory besides the Dr. Amrita Pritam Award to be presented by Jyotibai Phule Nagpur University later this year. “And all of this was possible because of the men in my life, my husband and my brother have been my mental anchors all along,” she signs off.
