Very late in my journey of building foodpanda, I understood with full conviction that you build an amazing business IF YOU CAN SERVE THE CUSTOMERS IN AN AMAZING WAY. This might sound simple and something which everyone speaks about. But honestly, it is very difficult to understand and execute – at least it was for me!
You see once you start running a company over the period different stakeholders become part of company’s eco-system. In the case of foodpanda, we had multiple stakeholders’ riders, restaurants, investors, teams, but most importantly customers. Ideally very Important from the get-go to understand who your real customer is i.e. “For whose wishes you will bend backward to MAKE THINGS POSSIBLE” – Essentially means changing/redesigning everything – going the extra mile to ensure that real customers have a great experience. Identifying the real customer and fulfilling their wishes to the max might seem straightforward, however it’s not the case. The greater number of stakeholders you have, the more is your clarity convoluted as to whose wishes you should be fulfilling!
One needs to realize that all your partners or stakeholders have their own agendas which might be very different to what you are trying to accomplish. Letting these objectives become part of your business strategy or worst their objectives supersede your business strategy is a recipe for disaster!
For example, from a rider perspective riders would want your business to run in a way to create maximum value for them: so minimum working hours, maximum pay, maximum benefits, maximum leaves, etc. At times these objectives are contrary to goals you want to accomplish for your end customers faster delivery, hot food, prompt service etc. The same would be the case for restaurants, Investors, teams, etc. One needs to realize that the wishes of these stakeholders might be contrary to the wishes of your eventual customer – Who is essentially the person placing an order from you and paying you.
If you are not strong enough and make bold decisions and let the influence of these stakeholders take control over what you do as a business, then over a period your service quality drops, resulting in building a business with low customer love, low orders, low growth. Couple of years back we would give in to pressures from stakeholders. This hurt our service. We were stuck in a situation where we provided substandard service to our customers, our growth was stagnant. Eventually we took a principal decision about strategy going forward, I have summarized it below.
“We will bend backward for the wishes of our end customer ONLY, our product design, offerings, speed of service, packaging, everything will be designed and delivered to delight Customers. What this meant was the principles that governed how we operate as a business were only Influenced by Customers. For all other stakeholders, we didn’t let their influence impact our business. Of course we agreed that we should make our stakeholders maximum amount of money, but that’s about it!
Working on this philosophy we were able to drive a very clear vision across the organization, bring clarity to multiple teams across the organization on what our objectives were, and were able to navigate the company into a direction where the service to our end customer became seamless resulting in higher growth, revenues, and stronger competitive advantage.
One of the issues which I see with the existing Startup ecosystem in Pakistan is that founders are bending over backward to delight Investors, rather than customers and the results unfortunately are not good! With the select group of founders, I have spoken to, their fundamental drive is to build something which will get the Investors excited! We all have witnessed how many startups have closed in Pakistan in the last 12 months. It is unfortunate that startups that were driven by the goal to delight Investors, multiplying orders and GMV at any cost. This false focus resulted in delighting the Investors that too for the short term, but unfortunately in the process resulted in a substandard customer experience, resulting in lower number of customers who loved the service and did want to return.
Simply put, if you build a business that is loved by customers, you will have a great business and all stakeholders will do anything to work with you. On the contrary if build a business that is loved by stakeholders (In the short-term), you will have a substandard business with dissatisfied customers and eventually no stakeholder would have any desire to work with you.