How Can a Startup be Successful Even if it Fails with Choco, Reducing Food Waste [Podcast #101]
This week on the SOL Podcast we welcome Alex Kiely General Manager at Choco, UK, representing their company, their products and the UK team.
We addressed issues like the possibility of decreasing the food waste issue with a better system, the future of the UK ecosystem, according to current needs, business growth, ways of solving problems while scaling up.
Our discussion revolved around how to make a sustainable working product, how to understand who your customer is and who your users are, the key turning point for Choco and the importance of balanced use of hierarchy and having a great team that works together in harmony.
Hello and welcome to the startups of London podcast. I’m your host Roseanne and the founder of startups of London. Today I’m joined by Alex Kiely, General Manager of Choco, UK. So, Choco is a platform that connects restaurants and suppliers, improving the order process to save time, money, and food. I think it’s really interesting as a business because it has a social component to it that I can feel already. Welcome to our chat Alex.
Hi, Ozan. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, can we really decrease food waste with a better system?
Yes, I actually believe so. If you look at the global food waste issue, about 40% of the food that we produce is wasted. And if you look at population growth, we’re going to be 10 billion people in the next 510 years. And we need to find a way of feeding those people, right? And unfortunately, there’s not an unlimited amount of space. So, actually, by making the food industry more efficient, actually, we don’t need to create more farms or produce more. We just need to allocate more efficiently. I mean, that’s pretty all we’re trying to do here, Choco.
I’ve grown up in a society where it was considered a big sin to throw away food. I’m not a very religious person. But that that was like the cultural belief, it is one of the worst sins that you can do to waste food. And I think that comes with societies who have at a certain level experienced hunger, famine, or like those disruptions. But there’s kind of an irony in that now, most of the waste happening around the world. Do you have any statistics or a map that you could perhaps pains to us in terms of which societies are contributing to food waste, and how that whole system is working?
Yes, So, I think food waste in general, can’t be sort of thrown the blame onto one country, one industry, in particular, or so on. And the reason for that is the food system is truly global, right? I mean, if you go into a supermarket, and you want to buy bananas, from South America, or wherever it is, or you want some quinoa, the amount of the journey that the food has to take to get into that supermarket means it’s a truly global issue right? And what that means is it’s not simply enough to go into the UK. And to solve it there. It has to sort of be a global commitment right? And what we find any sort of business or problems in general, if you don’t have clear ownership of a topic, often things do not get resolved. Well. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do here at Chaco. I think when we look at our business, for example, we try and imagine ourselves as kind of this third-generation business, right? See if the first-generation business, which is a company, let’s say, like Shell or BP, they have a pretty negative impact in the world from an environmental perspective. But at the end of the year, they’ll make a 100 million donation to kind of like say, hey, sorry, we’ll offset that. Sorry about that. But look at us with very good because we’re donating. And then you can have the second-generation business, which is, like Patagonia, for example, which is neutral, like a great company. But actually, every time you buy Patagonia stuff, it doesn’t have a negative impact. But it also doesn’t have a positive impact. And we want to do with Choco, the third-generation companies that every time someone interacts with the platform. We’re having that positive impact on food waste, and, and all the environmental impacts that happen by reducing food waste. And so, that’s what we’re trying to do. And in order to make that actually efficient, we need to be a truly global business. And so, right now we’re present in the US across the whole of Europe. But ultimately, we want to be present in every country in the world, because that’s the only way that you can really, truly make a massive dent on it.
How does that happen, though? And perhaps to answer that question, we need to understand who your customer is and who your users are.
Yes, sure. So, at the moment, we have a platform that connects restaurants and their direct suppliers, right? And so, to understand what you putting into this and why irrational that we want to use Choco and why the supplier would want to use Choco. So, the typical Scheffer in London probably has 10 – 11 different suppliers, right? So, they have the meat supply, the fish supply, the bread supply, the fish supply, and so on. And they probably have three or four people collaborating on orders in the kitchen. And so, every night, they probably spend around 20 – 25 minutes, scribbling on pen and paper, hey, we need two kilos of that, two kilos of that, then they spend a lot of time leaving voicemails, they don’t know if things are in stock, often the wrong food is delivered. Because, I say, hey, I want two kilos of tomatoes. But the project supply has 25 kilos, and 25 different varieties of tomatoes. And so, what this means is, then there are a lot of mistakes with orders. When the orders mistake because goods are perishable, it means they often will be thrown away, right? And so, what we do with our platform on Choco is we streamline that ordering process to mean zero mistakes, and the chef’s able to order more accurately and precisely via better inventory, and more precision around the orders. And then if you look at the supply side, they have the same issues, but times 500, right, because they’re 500 customers. So, every night they’re getting maybe three 400 orders coming in all these voicemails, they maybe have a team of six or seven customer support people who Yeah, literally listening to voicemails, then manually keying these orders into the ERP systems, if you’re doing that at 2 am, in the morning naturally leads a lot of mistakes. And yeah, as we said, then they have to deliver goods and then can’t be used because the wrong goods and then ultimately have thrown away. So, what we try and do with Choco is we try and streamline all these ordering processes via technology. That in order sort of reduces the amount of waste in that process.
Got it in a way you’re acting, perhaps something like a CRM system, the backbone of the ordering or the receiving, how many user types do you have, for example, from the perspective of the restaurant? Is there a single person who is making the entries there? Are they the chefs?
So, the great thing around it. I mean, when we started, right, it was a very basic platform. But now it’s actually grown to be able to service the needs of let’s say, a local kebab shop, actually to like a big Restaurant Group. So, for example, here in the UK, we work with restaurant groups like sticks and sushi, the better phenyl group. And then those kitchens, where do you have like six or seven people who are in the kitchen order, you may have three or four people in the bar. And then you might have the general manager of that location, and then the executive chef of the whole group rides. And so, within the platform, people are allowed to have roles. It’s almost like a group chat, but just trying to design for the gastronomy industry, right? And people can have different roles. So, you can have people who contribute to orders, people who are then able to place orders, and then people who are simply able to view the orders. And yes, the whole idea is that becomes the platform that everyone in the kitchen, everyone in the business sense of the restaurant uses to manage orders and also to control how much they’re spending and things like that.
Got it. So, the idea itself sounds quite simple, from paper to a digital version, and lots of people can collaborate on it. So, you can immediately tell is going to be more efficient. But then comes the problem most founders face, which is okay, how do we actually make this into a working product that is frictionless and that people have habits to use? And then this is a question of perhaps an iterative design process, as well as the conversations that you have with customers. So, can you tell us a bit about that? I think this is a really important context for other founders building products. How do you go from; Okay, here’s an idea. Yes, it makes sense, in theory, but now we actually need to make it work. What are the challenges as you scale that? How do you design it? How do you make sure it sticks?
Yes, sure. I think it’s a super good question. One of the things that I think is the reason why we’ve been lucky to be so, successful here at Choco. If you’ve imagined our business, we’re not a marketplace as such. But we do have two types of customers, right? So, you have the restaurants and you have the suppliers. And often what you need to do then is that balance the number of restaurants, and the number of suppliers. But the great thing about Choco is the way it’s set up means that you can go into any restaurant in the world. And as long as their supplier has an email or phone number, which is every supplier in the world, then we can technically make them on Choco. Because what happens is you can place an order in Choco and then we’ll automatically generate an email or WhatsApp. And what this allowed us to do before getting all the suppliers legitimately on the platform, meant we could go into any restaurant, and then we were able to grow very quickly and get little user feedback quickly. And so, I think it’s really important to sort of nail in on what is the core value proposition. And to begin with for restaurants that was having all your suppliers in one place. If they had to send two orders via WhatsApp to by phone call, one, even by fax in Germany, which they used to do, and then two by Choco, it wouldn’t help them that much. Whereas if they’re able to do all 10, orders via Choco, then it was saving a huge amount of time, and it’s all centralized in one place. And by really nailing on that and making sure that we were able to send the orders via email, by WhatsApp by SMS, and by fax, that really enabled us to grow incredibly quickly because we were launching markets in San Francisco or Barcelona or Madrid, or wherever it was. And in each of those markets, they have a different way of communicating, right? But the fact that we offered all those channels allowed us to grow incredibly quickly. And then beyond that, you can then just keep adding layers and going forward. But it’s always important you keep sight of what is the main reason that customers are using the platform. And then what is sort of the nice to haves, right? Is that a new order flow that can really improve the process? Or is it a little bit for vanity purposes, right? And always making sure that we’re building towards the key value propositions that really make a difference for our customers?
Got it. So, tell us about the growth challenges you had. How many people do you have in the company currently?
In the company now we have around 400 employees globally. We’ve grown a really huge amount in the last few years. And I think for us what’s important, right is when you look at companies, often they talk about, we want to have six 700 employees. So, we want to do this, we want to do that. But actually, in reality, that’s put it the wrong way of thinking about it, right? Well, we want to think about is, what impact we want to have this year, that being from how much food waste, we want to reduce what we do want to revenue targets to be how many customers we want to be able to help. And then you need to work back from that and understand how many people we need in order to deliver that value and to hit those targets that we’ve set for ourselves. And when you grow, I mean, we’re lucky to have a very great product and an incredible team. But the challenge is when you’re growing is just making sure you distil the culture, distil the vision into the team, because really, in the end, as a founder or a general manager, or whatever it is, your responsibility is to set that vision to constantly explain why we’re going there, why it’s important, and not necessarily to say how we’re going to get there. But given the context about what we want to achieve, and why we want to achieve it, and then everyone in the team is able to kind of put their stamp on it, take ownership for it, and really sort of deliver a lot inside those guidelines, if that makes sense. And so, it’s just about evangelizing the culture, the vision, the mission, why we’re trying to do it. And if you do that well enough and set the times you’re probably repeating yourself a huge amount, that if you hire a great team, they’ll do the rest.
I have a love-and-hate relationship with every culture because that’s So, overused and So, I exploit it at the same time So, important So, I’ll not use it but go with something else. I’ll say love but setting the tone for the business, I guess.
Yes. But I think it’s super important. I mean, on the culture piece, right? It’s every time we interview someone there, they ask us the question, what is the culture like, right? And I’m pretty sure every startup that anyone interviews in the world will say we have a great culture, right? But within Choco, it’s not about four letters and the way we talk about tofu, but it’s not about things that are written on the wall. It’s actually the actions we sort of live by. And we talk about having this high-performance environment, right?
What is tofu?
It stands for team, ownership, focus and understanding. And so, those are the four values we sort of drive towards. But I think coaches go wrong as if you just have those four ways that can mean 100 different things to 100 different people, right? I think what’s really important then is when you distil those values need to come down into actions and very concrete steps, right? So, for example, we drill down into ownership and we onboard people saying, hey, what does ownership mean? Ownership means, when I see a problem, instead of letting it pass and thinking, okay, that could be someone else’s issue, I take ownership to either go and fix it myself or to highlight it to the relevant people who are actually able to fix that. And so, the more you’re able to drill down and give very clear guidelines on what it means, the easier it is for people to live up to those values. Because there’s so, much context around it, people don’t have to think if is that the right thing to do. And then that way, you get everyone acting in the kind of same framework and the values you want to live by, without someone having to explain it and have the ambiguity behind it.
I couldn’t agree more. I think the founder, the general manager… There was a time I’ll be honest, and fair, I thought hierarchies were bad things, but they’re not. They can be bad if they are pushing people who are not with the good intentions or don’t have the right skill set to the top. But hierarchies are a decent way of organizing information and organizing the flow of some relations, in some sense. It’s just what type of hierarchy you have becomes what’s a good hierarchy type of question. So, there’s always at I think, certain hierarchical components to businesses, because of the nature of things, right? The information doesn’t go into a pool, and everybody doesn’t have the same insight into things. And as an indirect result of that, I feel the executive team’s actions, almost appear through a lens in which they go through to the other teams exaggerated. So, there’s a certain sense of responsibility that comes with that, right? So, setting the right tone becomes just like, perhaps raising children, your actions are mimicked and copied by other people. Do you experience that at all? People watch how you deal with a certain issue. For example? Have you had to deal with frustration? How do you deal with underperformance? How do you deal with uncertainty and then it kind of acts like a signal? Ah, okay, in this company, we do it like this, right? Or this is what management wants. And then it turns into this. It has its life of its own and then evolves into something of a monster sometimes, and sometimes something of a force for good.
Yes, hundred per cent. That’s why Choco, we say there’s no such thing as a bad team. Just bad leaders, right? Because people mimic what the leader does. And I think that’s why it’s super important. As a leader, you need to self-reflect on it. And, often, I think the most difficult part of the most frustrating part as a leader is often when you’re frustrated with something, it’s not going right in your team. It’s because you haven’t set the right tone and people are just copying your example. And I think that’s the most challenging part of leadership, right? But it’s also important to understand when we talk about where you want to go towards, and the leadership values we want to represent. it’s also important for leaders to understand it’s aspirational, right? you can’t always be this sort of superhero and get there. And I think what teams respond to, is just when you’re transparent about that, and say, “look, this is the person I want to be this is a leader I want to be for you, at some points, I will mess up, I will not be able to live by it. But please let me know what I’m doing that so, I can correct it faster”. And I think if you have that desire to be the best leader you can be and really, truly try and help your team and, and help them reach their goals. And by default, the company reach their goals, then people will forgive a lot from a lot of your flaws, right?
Indeed. From the perspective of potential consumers, I’ll ask this question. And I don’t even know the answer. But honestly, I’m curious about it. There are some businesses as you talked about the three stages of businesses, you’ve put like BP, Patagonia and companies like Shoko. Negative, neutral, positive impact. There are a lot of companies that do not actually profit. Some companies do not all their existence to the fact that they’re being a positive impact created for the world. And then it comes as an afterthought because it really works well as a marketing perspective perhaps. How can a consumer make the differentiation between these two types of businesses, IE in if you were to perhaps challenge this perspective a bit? How do we when we take a look at Choco that you are not a company that has added the wasteless save more angle as an afterthought, versus that being a core part of the business, how can consumers make that differentiation?
Well, I think in the end, it comes down to the consistency of the message, right? Now, if you start the business and the reason you start the business is for the mission. So, I found that Daniel spent a year from his previous projects, investigating what he wants to work on. And he’s very experienced in growing and scaling businesses. And, but in the end, it was, for example, the last product was a company called Vanny De which was essentially kind of like a treat well in the APAC market, right? But in reality, wanted to work on something that had a bigger impact that even if it fails, after 10 years, they are still proud to work on. And I think he’s really distilled down to all of us. And so, yes, as a company, we want to make profits and we want to grow. But actually, in reality, if that’s what you’ve started the business for, and, and that’s what everyone who joins the businesses told that story and why to it, and if at all, all hands, the senior leadership are talking about it, and bringing him back to that mission, maybe it’s difficult from an outsider to see if it’s genuine or not. But I think it’s just a case of anything, we were talking a little bit before, right? You just have to keep showing up and stay consistent. So, it’s and if, within yourself and within the company, that we have integrity around that, then ultimately others will start to see it too. And if they don’t, then that’s also fine. And it’s just up to us to keep showing that integrity and that desire to live to our mission, and also internally to call each other out if we feel like we’re going away from it. And I think that’s when we do always in a planning session and always looking at, whether are we truly living our mission. Are we living to the value and a half? And if not, that’s also fine, but we have to create a path for it to get back on track with it. So, yes, I guess you can’t say 100% from the outside, you just have to trust in yourself that you’re committing to it. And if other people choose to see it, and they choose to see it, right?
Yes. I mean, numbers, consistency of the message, everything. But as we all know, from the emotion, it can be doctored in, statistics is an incredible tool to tell lies when it has to. So, I guess it comes down to a certain level of a gut feeling about the business. But that being said, it’s not always that I find something new in these podcast conversations that truly fascinate me because I’ve had, if you’ve robbed them, and I’ve been in the startup world for some time now. But I just want to reiterate and underscore something you said because I just like it very much. What you said was, in the way that I phrase is, how can a startup be successful? Even if it fails? Right? Yeah, no way, even if the company ceases to exist at a certain time, and fail is in quotation marks. Because if it hasn’t failed, right, but it created So, much social impact, and also a positive impact for the employees and the people who vote to build it as it’s become a meaningful part of their life. So, for the founders who are listening to us. And I think I’ll take this as a form of insight for the next venture that I’m going to build as well. How can we build a company where it is creating a positive impact for the people who work in it, giving them a sense of meaning purpose, a good place, and a good experience of professional work, and at the same time, creating a positive impact for the world? And if the business fails, it will still be successful?
Yes, hundred per cent. I think also a big part of it comes down to ambition level, right? When we talk to our team, we talk about, look, we want this to be the best place that you ever work out, right? In other places where even if you go on to a new opportunity, right? You look back and go well, those days at Choco, were unbelievable. I learned so, much. There were such great driven, bright people who were also kind of and great to work with. And the same thing we want to build this truly generational company internally, which we never talk about. There are a lot of companies that, hey, we want to be the Amazon of this, or we want to be the Shopify of that or the Spotify this, we never do that, because we think that puts bounds on the upper limits of what it is. We’re Choco, we’re not anyone else. And we want companies in the future to be talking about we want to be the Choco, this and that. And I feel if you put a ceiling on it, even if it’s a huge, massive company that’s doing incredible things, then you’re still putting a ceiling on the limits of your potential. And so, the more you can set the ambition level, high and high and high. I think the more inspiration on a more fun of this to work on, right? The harder the problem, the more fun it is.
What was the biggest win that really made a difference in how people felt in the company from one day to the other? Sometimes these big b2b deals, sometimes it’s something else, sometimes it’s an investment in your personal view. What was that key turning point for Choco?
It’s a very good question, actually. So, an investment and that was kind of a bit strange, right? Because there’s not always the investment, it will be celebrated, right? The investment is kind of like, it’s like a tick, Hey, you did good work. And so, therefore, you then get this much investment. I think there’s been a number of moments by certain milestones and telling whether it’s a certain number of restaurants in the platform, signing a deal with maybe a huge supplier and there’s one I think about in Germany that gives them the confidence and belief towards it. But I think what you sort of touched on there is when I think about when we’re forming a new team, right? So, personally, I’ve been involved in teams across Spain, the UK in the US. The most important thing when you start a team is everyone needs to believe that we will be successful and that we will achieve what we want to achieve. It will be difficult, there’ll be days when we think we won’t do it. But there needs to be this unwavering belief that we will be successful no matter what. And so, we launched in the UK eight months ago, that was the most important thing, right? It’s like the rest, we’ll figure it out. If we have great people in the office, we’ll figure it out. But there’s always that moment, I feel when we’re working with the teams, when everyone kind of looks around the room, right? We’ve had a great when we persevere through it, there have been four or five pushbacks, whether it said our supplier blocking us in integration going wrong, or customers, just not understanding the value, to begin with. And there’s that moment, whether it’s acquiring a customer that we’ve been chasing for months, and then everyone just sort of has that aha moment. And that true sense of belief. And then the rest looks after itself, right? It’s kind of what I said earlier is just, if you’ve got a great team, doesn’t matter what the problems are the biggest problem we face. Now, we’ll look back in a year’s time and say, well, that was easy. The one we’re facing now is 10 times harder. And that’s why it’s just So, important. As a team, when you have that self-belief and you have that vision, then every team has the muscle of solving problems on its own. And, and it doesn’t matter what the problem is, we will solve it. And that’s really when you get into a really powerful place as a team in a company.
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And the problems get bigger, but you get stronger as well as a team.
Yes, exactly. And I mean, for us as a company, right? We’ve been through a huge amount of adversity in a short amount of time. So, if you look at most companies in, I don’t know VCs portfolios, majority, kind of like sort of E-commerce business, right? And So, even though COVID was a terrible time, economically, many of these companies were absolutely booming, right, you look at Shopify, and companies like that, just everyone was going online. And so, if you’re involved in the tech business, in general, you did pretty well from it. Whereas for us, we were working with restaurants, and restaurants were closing, because now if you go to them, and there was someone delivery, but not as many as people thoughts, and so, literally, we had sort of two years work that kind of just all the graphs almost go down to zero. And we had to work through that and get through it we went to, and we chose to keep pushing and pushing through it and looking for solutions, right? We didn’t do furloughs, we didn’t do this kind of stuff, we actually went to markets that were open and carry to grow the business, and we looked for ways to support our current users. And so, you go through these kinds of moments of COVID, not just one lock down to lock them three locked down in a business severely impacted by it. And that’s pretty much bought the team incredibly close together, right? And we go look, if we can survive our customers not being open and actually not having So, much utility for our product. And yet we can still grow enormously during that period, then yes, okay, if we have an issue with one customer, or there are some market conditions that are making it challenging, doesn’t really matter. Because we got through COVID We got through other solutions and things like that. And so, when you have that innate belief that will solve whatever problem there is, yeah, it’s extremely powerful.
But the good thing with Choco I can tell is it has some experience as a company, in different parts old world, in Spain in the US. So, I guess my next question is perhaps intended to help entrepreneurs, founders, and people understand the UK ecosystem a bit better. That’s one of the missions that we had from day one as Startups of London because there was a lot of content on startups, most of them have been created by Silicon Valley, and so on. But we’ve always thought that context and location-specific information and culture-specific information are also really important. That’s why we have a media company and a podcast and everything that is focusing on London-based startups. So, with that, in the back of our minds, what can you tell us about the way the UK system UK ecosystem marketplace works? That is kind of perhaps different from how it works in Spain, kind of different from how it’s how it works in the US, especially in terms of growing your business, right, in terms of finding the channels to grow the sales, growing the business? What are the things that work in other places, but don’t work here? And the opposite, that perhaps doesn’t really work? Well, in other places? What was great in the UK?
Yes, sure. I think it was a great question. I mean, from my perspective, the UK, and London, in particular just an awesome place to be involved with the startup. So, I spent two and a half years in Spain, and I love Spain, I love the culture, and the people are fantastic. And the culture of food and life is just beautiful. But their productivity to adopt technology is definitely a lot slower than in the UK. Right? So, I often met with the supplier maybe 1015 times because of the two years sort of evangelizing okay, we need to think about digitising, because maybe it’s not the most efficient way to have, your sales reps going into every shop and placing the orders and then the next day having to go back for deliveries. And it took time to understand and it really a lot of its investing and trusting and relations with people. Whereas would have been really pleasantly surprised with the UK where people are always thinking about how they can improve their business rights. Even in an industry like the food industry, which is particularly antiquated in some ways, and be able to work with people who are constantly thinking about how to drive their business forward. It means they’re willing to take risks on new products. And instead of the question being okay, why do I need to do this? They know why they need to do it. It’s just Hey, why are you better than x compared to a y competitor? Why should we work with you? And when you’re working with customers who are asking those questions, it forces you to be better. It forces you to improve your products and really solve their pain. I’m most deeply. And so, I think if you’re
Sorry to interrupt, but just I think you said something important. I don’t want to miss that issue. Perhaps it’s not about selling the idea that okay, there’s a digital transformation here that can make your business more successful people have already been onboarded to that. The question is, why you and why this company, right?
Yes, exactly. Exactly, hundred per cent.
Readability, I guess that is what I’m driving to.
Yes, hundred per cent. And I mean, when you launch your market, you have nothing. So, Choco could be a 1.2 billion company or whatever. But, the person a new Covent Garden market who’s been running their produce business for the last 25 years. They don’t care about that. They just care, can you solve their problems? Can you help them? And I think what’s really important is that and so, when you come into new markets, you will come with that sort of humble mindset truly understand their business, understand if we can help them first of all, and if we can help them, what does that look like? And I think the deeper you can get into people’s business, understand what’s worked for them when the current solution was not working. So, well. What are they trying to achieve? What is their sort of dreams for the business? And can we help them achieve it? And more often than not, the answer is yes. But the key is really getting to know them and understanding what they’re looking for. And then just making sure we work incredibly hard to deliver it to the standard they’re expecting,
As a business struggle does excite me. I’ll admit, I like your mission. I like the way that you’ve built a theme. I like the message that has echoed through the corridors, let’s say from the founder of the value of the business, especially with the emphasis of okay, businesses come and go, but how do we make a positive impact? And I think you’re sincere, the company’s sincere in that, like, I definitely am very sceptical with these, but I buy it right? I understand. And I like it. I like it very much. Thank you, because it also shapes the conversations you have with team members as well. And perhaps with that, my last question is, how do you see talent retention as an issue? Perhaps you could tell us, the people who joined Choco today come and leave it in like three to six months? Do they stay longer? What type of people do you usually recruit for?
Yes, great question. So, I think people stare at Choco, for a long time myself, personally, I met them for over three and a half years now, right? So, So, probably have a slightly biased impact on it. But yeah, I think the people we bring into Choco in general are very passionate, ambitious people who want to work with bright intelligent people who are also pushing for the same mission. I think in terms of retaining talent rights. In the end, if you’ve recruited, well, what do people want, they want to have an impact. And they want to have clear ownership. And they don’t want to be weighed down by bureaucracy and things getting in the way. And so, one of my key challenges is, as we scale the business, right? It’s not about what I do on a day-to-day basis. It’s more like, what can I take away from our team that allows them to focus on what they’re great at? Or what can I take away that allows the person to have an impact? Or how can we put this person who has incredible skills at x y Zed on to that project, which means they can 10x their impact in the business? And really, that’s what it’s about if you can get really great people, and you give them a very clear mission, you give them freedom, you give them ownership, then they will achieve great things, right? And then the minute you start weighing them down, and you put constraints on it, and you start blocking them from things and there are too many processes, and it’s hard to get anything done, then that’s when you get great people leaving, right? And we’re lucky that we’re also growing a lot. And obviously, people want to grow growth opportunities. And what we always say to that team is, hey, look, the more we grow, the more opportunities they are. So, if everyone’s incredibly focused on growing, then we’ll make sure to help you get there and make sure that we work on the skill gaps you have in order to fulfil your dreams. And so, yeah, I think I think it’s something we’re very proud of. You can always be better at it, of course. But I think if you ask most people who work here, they truly love it, right? It’s very unique.
It sounds unique. I like what you’re doing. So, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for joining the podcast and I wish the best for Choco and the whole theme there.
Thank you very much as a real pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed it.