foodpanda is the largest e-commerce company in Pakistan with a top line of 500 mln usd+ and a market leader across all key business units including pandamart, home chefs, shops, kitchens, concepts, pandago, pickup etc… Did we end up here by chance or was it accomplished? What is one of the secret ingredients for this success?
E-commerce businesses are complicated not least because you are disrupting an existing business model. Disruption – simply put is an innovative way of solving an existing problem. Thinking about new innovative ways on how you can create disruption and then executing those initiatives is quite complicated, actually very complicated!. In case of Pakistan there is an added layer of difficulty as the digital literacy i.e. The number of people acquainted with using technology is low, this includes employees, business partners and customers.
So how do you disrupt such a market? Can it be facilitated through target initiatives? Absolutely Yes!
In this Industry having passionate, driven, disciplined, Intelligent and sincere people is everything. This is largely true across all spheres but particularly important in the context of e-commerce. People are at the center of everything we do, they are developing technology, building marketing campaigns, delivering sales pitches, facilitating stakeholders… and while they are accomplishing their goals – they are also working on making continuous Improvement in their functions and optimizing systems for higher efficiency.
Having a stellar team is imperative for building a successful e-commerce business. This took me years to understand, and I learned it the hard way – “to achieve greatness you need to work with great people”. I am Hands-on when it’s about building a business, I am actively involved working with teams directly to solve challenges and nurturing them at the same time. However, in my initial years I was able to accomplish neither. There were consistent performance issues across all functions of the business, we couldn’t overcome challenges, and the team wasn’t evolving to take charge of the business and lead it. There was a point where it became very clear to me that to build a great business, it is critical to onboard great people, simple.
In the initial days my philosophy was to take onboard anyone working in the market ,with a few years of experience. I thought with the right training , mentorship and countless leadership opportunities eventually they will be able to hold the reins of their function and lead it independently – continuously solving the challenges and bringing innovation and finesse to their function. However, I couldn’t be more mistaken! Getting people from the market by only focusing on a few years of relevant experience, while not considering other key attributes resulted in major issues around non-performance, poor culture, high churn of good employees, unnecessary office politics and last but not the least poor ethics!
One of the things I want to Emphasize and it’s super critical is, “the integrity and values a person exhibits in an organization is not contingent on how well the organization treats him. Rather, this is dependent upon what background the person comes from and what values he has inherited or has been taught in his formative years. It is my firm belief that a person with a great value system will always be positive for the organization, whether the organization treats him badly. A person with a poor or fractured value system will always be bad for the organization, regardless of how well the organization treats him”.
Based upon my first-hand experience, I introduced a structured process through which all/most of the organizations’ hiring were determined. Five key pillars of that structure are set out below:
1. Elementary, High School and University Education. [High Ethics and Intelligence]
To build a healthy culture in the organization, you need to inculcate good values in the team. It is imperative to get people who already have strong values and can inspire the teams to work towards a central vision and mission, rather than getting people with weak values onboarded and then investing time in inculcating values in them. I have noticed that people with solid elementary, high school and university education have a higher probability of showcasing a good value system. Getting people with strong values enables development of a healthy culture in which people are propelled with the mission to achieve great results and less spent on unnecessary issues such as office politics, unwanted discussions, incidents of theft and so forth. I believe people with a solid foundation of education can address challenges more effectively.
2. Adaptable and Builder Mindset. [Ability to Continuously Evolve]
At some point of running foodpanda, I realized that we don’t need managers, we need builders. So, what’s the difference? A Manager in my opinion is given a defined scope of work with pre-determined processes and policies. This mindset becomes problematic when it comes to e-commerce companies because the work within each function is continuously evolving as per requirements of the stakeholders served. People who are intelligent, have a builder mind set and actively monitor the feedback they get from all directions (team, customers, service providers etc.), evolve policies, process, and technology in their function to address the requirement for higher efficiency and customer satisfaction. When getting Managers or Senior people in the company, it’s also very important to ensure that they have adaptable mindset which gives them agility to evolve with the company – You don’t want to have people who keep telling you that I have been part of the Industry for last 15 years etc. and this is how things are done!
3. Relevant and Progressive Work Experience. [Intelligence and grit to excel]
Having Relevant work experience is great, but in a market like Pakistan where it is difficult to get people with relevant work experience, skillset, and expertise – exceptions can be made to get great people on board who do not even have relevant experience but have strong moral values! And established education and work experience. Obviously this requires a stringent framework and an interview process that brings out that level of clarity which was a core feature we had developed at organizations I led. You can train on content and technical skills but it’s much harder to train on morality and ethics – these need to be ingrained in one’s formative years!
4. Exceptional Achievers. [Having the grit to push boundaries and over achieve]
Learned this from one of the Interviews of Elon musk. The message is to hire people who have shown exceptional performance during their education and work. Exceptional performance is not related only to how good the grades were or in terms of work how well they achieved results, but exceptional performance also relates to initiatives an individual took in addition to core work, for example whether the person was involved in curricular or extracurricular activities leading competitions, part of debate competitions, social work etc. Similarly during professional work did the person take a lead on organizing special events related to sports or skill development, or launch new initiatives in the organization. It is imperative to understand that a person with no history of exceptional performance is most likely going to do the same when he joins your organization.