2021 - 2022 - New Beginnings

Self-care, personal growth, Covid round-2, taking time-off, catering vs individual ordering, return to the office, hiring, training, benefits of meditation, founder expectations, source of happiness.

2021: Becoming Your Own Product

Applying self-awareness at every level

It felt really easy, relatively speaking, to run a company that didn’t have day-to-day fires and logistics to deal with. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t only thinking about the company and I used some free time to look at myself as a product to improve. I listed feedback I heard about myself as well as my own judgments and insecurities. I started fixing them, one by one. I finally got myself a primary doctor, a physical therapist, and a trainer. I also tracked and learned about sleep, regrew my hair, and learned more about different human personalities, their thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, and our place in the universe.
Until now, my mind and discipline pushed so hard that I ignored my body and how exhausted I’d been. Increasing my level of self-awareness to more than just my mind, allowed me to slowly start a healthier routine and endure better the amount of work I’d go through. It made it easier to listen and learn from others, with less resistance and emotional reactions.

Losing everything once again

With no recent tech updates and no sight of people coming back to the office, we decided to focus on launching a new product. However, we pivoted once again when companies started inquiring about Mobydish services a couple of months later. They were aiming for a return to the office in the summer.
By May, based on the growing demand, we decided to relaunch Mobydish and started hiring, excited about the idea of finally resuming our catering services.

By July we had a healthy pipeline and were operating again after almost a year without any deliveries. One month later, Delta, the new Covid variant put everything on hold and customers started canceling orders. It felt like March 2020 all over again.
This second instant loss in a row triggered ulcer pain again and I decided that I couldn’t keep carrying all of this on my shoulders. I wanted to find a Director of Operations to help with the day-to-day and relaunch the business with me. I told myself that I couldn’t let work take me that far off a healthy life.

Changing the nature of the company

Every industry was coming back strong, but employees weren’t looking to come back to the office. So far, individual group ordering had been the way to go due to the uncertainty of headcounts and office attendance as well as health concerns but orders were small. 

I like solving complex problems and recurring catering is one of them. The level of customer expectation and the number of variables increase greatly compared to individual orders and requires lots of discipline and processes to do it right. Unfortunately, with people getting into the habit of ordering individual meals during Covid, Uber, and Doordash, among other services, were likely to be competitors now. Going against them meant developing major software updates. We were known for doing catering right, at a good price, and making money doing it. Now we had to reinvent ourselves with group orders. 

Getting ready for a big year

As I was losing hope to find someone great who would be brave enough to join a company that had no market in sight, I found a Director of Operations by October. We still thought catering would come back and that 2022 would be a busy year for us. I was convinced that the hybrid era will be the future of work despite the press and the tech world pushing for a different narrative.

By the end of the year, I packed all my stuff in a storage unit and decided to work and travel around. I took my first 2 weeks off in the same year, during our slowest month, and decided to visit my dream country, Egypt. I’ve yet to have hired someone who’s not been shocked by how challenging it is to be part of such an operations-intensive business, including founder friends. My goal was to be the best version of myself for the upcoming year and be ready for a new fight. I knew I would need the mental space to lead with empathy and be patient, especially since the company’s new and small team hadn’t experienced our growth in the past. We impatiently waited for the new wave of inbounds and to reconnect with our past customers.

Lesson 9: It was the first time I had to scale back a company and relaunch it from scratch. The hardest part was keeping in touch with customers when so many of them have disappeared. The point of contact has changed jobs or moved out of state. If I could have predicted the future, I would have raised more money to actually open up states while everything had stopped. Trusting life will work your way, and staying optimistic when the whole world is pessimistic is where the biggest opportunities await.  

2022: Stuck In a Loop

Relaunching in an evolving market

We spent the first few months hiring and training a new core team. The market and habits had changed. The whole hospitality industry was trying to figure things out but signs were positive.

The opportunity to relaunch a startup that knew how to execute and had found product market fit is something that was appreciated by applicants. I had learn so far that employees from the tech world would thrive with processes and online tools but quickly feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day operations while people from the hospitality industry would thrive under daily fires and pressure but would have a hard time navigating all our tools and online processes. I anyway still hoped that I could help new hires break these habits within their first 3-6 months.

Founder VS employee expectations

I tried to take a step back from running the business and counted on the team to follow the documentation and processes we had built for them during Covid. My goal was to avoid rebuilding a company around me and have the team thrive. I thought that by giving them enough space, Moby would have an experienced core team that will then lead the next cycle of growth, hire new people, and become their manager.

Unfortunately, step-by-step guides and lengthy SOPs can take time to be assimilated. Experienced people have habits that can be hard to get rid of. It took more than a few months to motivate and effectively help my new employees change these habits. New habits form best with an open mind and by starting with small and repetitive tasks to allow the brain to re-wire.

The team cared and wanted to do well, but I made the mistake of asking too much of people too early on. Bringing new hires into an environment where they can be comfortable, thrive in doing what they know well, and only then slowly help them grow is a better approach. As entrepreneurs, we often project onto others what we are capable of doing and easily forget that every person is different, with different skill sets, hunger, and motivation.

Working with the right executives

When hiring executives, I would highly recommend connecting with the CEO of the companies you’re hiring them from. The reasoning is that a good executive should most likely be on good terms with leadership and know how to leave the company in a better position than when they joined it. Another important point is to look at their past successes. I thought that hiring people with many failures in a row was ok because they’d learn from it, but it turned out, they’d often repeat the same critical mistakes despite intense coaching. You want to see success in their trajectory which shows that they’re capable of taking a business forward. If they were part of the problem, It would show they evolved as people to reach success. If the company was already great, they’d show that they identified the patterns increasing the chances for success and joined a company that had the right recipe in place.

Starting from 0 versus scaling a business

By September, I had to step back into the game because even if the demand was coming back, the revenue wasn’t growing as fast as we wanted it to be, which meant we weren’t able to fundraise and resume our 2020 plan. I had to accept that I was back running a small company that was scrappy and aiming back to being profitable. It’s fascinating how easy it is to lose discipline as a team when you fundraised and pushed for growth, instead of aiming for profitability. The personality of people who are joining you to give birth to a new project are very different than the ones interested in scaling it to the next level. For example, when you start a business, you’re selling your own product, then you teach your whole team how to sell with the mentality of “always be selling” which creates a sense of ownership in the company growth for every team member. After fundraising and scaling, you start hiring a sales team, have departments with specific targets and KPIs, and get used to running your company differently. Going back to a small startup and remembering the details that made us efficient took more time than I thought. Having expense and performance reports, early on, is probably one of the best decisions I had made for Mobydish.

Embracing the deja-vu

I had to learn how to enjoy going through the same journey again, with the same company and doing the same thing we did multiple times in the past.
My mind, as often, was turning into my own enemy and after reflecting on the amazing impact a short weekend meditation retreat in 2017 had on me, I knew what I had to do. I took a week off for a weeklong meditation retreat, to help incorporate it into my daily routine and be more in tune with my thoughts and emotions. Since then, there’s rarely more than a few days where I don’t meditate for at least an hour. The impacts of that week-long have been life-changing and I have once again, evolved. I am no longer letting my thoughts define who I am. I now believe life is working for me, and not against me despite everything we’ve been through. I could easily use all the past challenges to call myself unlucky, but I don’t. I am actually grateful, and processing it all. Would I have wished for it all to be easier and different? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it would have made me happier. It’s true what they say, happiness does come from within. It is a waste of time to be looking for external context in order to feel happy or relieved. Life will always be good some days and messy other days. The only happy constant you can create is your reaction to external events. You can make it the same, whatever happens to you, and therefore always have a happy outcome, by letting go of control on everything else but your reaction.

By the end of the year and after having spent a good month digging deeper into every aspect of the business and every member, we let go of some people, improved our execution, and have mainly been growing since.

Lesson 10: It is important to hire someone and set them up for success right away. They will build confidence and will be more likely to accept growth challenges and face failures. As a solo founder, you have to be ready to own multiple roles for a longer period of time than you might want. By lifting that weight from others, you’ll be surrounded by happier employees, embracing your vision and welcoming your feedback with fewer triggers. You’ll need to find ways to stay healthy despite the amount of work and pressure. Learn how to control your reaction when things get tough, and focus on enjoying and loving it even if it’s looking hard at first sight. It will make you able to face anything in life

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