Hero to Zero and back

Food, glorious, food

Food delivery has been around since restaurants started offering those services. However the industry really took off with the advent of mobile phone apps, greater convenience with an influx of delivery drivers and riders, and lack of personal time.

Renee was an MBA graduate from a well-placed university in North America. Like many in her cohort she was attracted by the glitz of the management consulting industry, and joined a company called Cain and Abel.

While providing plenty of structured training and guidance from senior consultants to develop their fresh talent, Cain and Abel always threw their new management consultants straight into the deep end. No better way than to stretch highly intelligent and ambitious graduates from the get go.

Moving up and out

Within 2 years Renee was promoted to senior consultant and took on bigger and more complex projects. Towards the end of her fourth year she was in the running for another promotion, this time to lead a project team of her own as Lead consultant.

It was around this time that Renee made several trips to Asia where her family was originally from. With her mid twenties coming to an end and her late twenties starting, she was instantly excited by the energy and growth and opportunities that she saw in the Asian region; it made Cain and Abel back in North America seem a little slow in her eyes. She started to keep an eye open for fresh challenges to take on.

Then she met Wolfgang, a German representing Torpedo Investments, a venture capital firm behind some of the internet startups that would go on to become big names in Asia. He approached her with a unique opportunity.

Starting up a startup

Torpedo Investments loved to approach management consultants like her, with a few years experience under their belt, with unique opportunities. They knew that highly capable individuals like her were hungry to be part of the next big thing. So they offered her several million dollars to establish a food delivery startup in Taiwan named Delivery Bear. The money offered as substantial compared to what she had gotten as a management consultant so far.

Renee was experienced in corporate structures through her management consultancy work, and while she had little experience in actually starting up a business from scratch, it was an opportunity that she relished without hesitation. She had also heard of Delivery Bear starting up in other Asian countries, and after doing her research, decided to take the plunge.

Landing in Taiwan she immediately hit the ground running, and the next 12 months would turn out to be one of the scariest and yet most rewarding experience of her life.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

On what hand, she had absolutely no experience in a startup, and at the back of her mind she knew that were she to fail, Torpedo Investments would simply replace her with the next management consultant. 

Every single day she focused on what she had to do, hiring people, setting up the organization structure, creating buzz about the new venture, ensuring the operations was running, and anything a fledgling business needed. Delivery Bear Taiwan would quickly grow to about 80 people.

One of her highlights was when a TV commercial for the Delivery Bear mobile app went live, and for 24 hours that app was even more popular than Instagram in Taiwan.

Many of the early employees in Delivery Bear Taiwan took pay cuts from more established jobs elsewhere to be part of this venture, and were given equity in the business. 12 months after it started the news that everyone had been waiting for arrived. Delivery Bear across Asia had been bought out.

Financial rewards aside, she was also immensely proud of the fact that many of the early employees who joined were able to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

It was not long before the next challenge came along.

Groceries

Fresh Produce, an Indonesian company who delivered grocery, had heard of Renee's success with Delivery Bear Taiwan. They offered her the opportunity to start up Fresh Produce Taiwan. 

Renee saw the venture with Fresh Produce as a replication of what she had done the year before with Delivery Bear, so she took up the challenge, and was able to easily convince a number of his previous employees from Delivery Bear to join him.

Success with Fresh Produce was a done deal, right?

8 months later, facing the realization that the business model was not going to work in Taiwan, the Fresh Produce headquarters in Indonesia pulled the plug on their Taiwan venture. Renee and her team of 70 people that she had hired were all out of a job.

Hero to Zero

Renee went through an absolute high of achieving success in Delivery Bear, to total devastation in the span of less than a year. She sat down and asked herself what had gone wrong when everything seems so right.

She realised that Taiwan was ripe for Delivery Bear because finding a variety of good restaurants within convenient travel was not easy, so being able to have different cuisines delivered was a huge advantage.

Whereas grocery shops were common place within 10 minutes walk in any location, so why have your groceries delivered by Fresh Produce when it is quicker and more convenient to buy it yourself? 

What drives your belief

She could have called it quits, after all she still had her pay out from Delivery Bear, but Renee believed in the business model of grocery delivery, and there were no signs that showed her otherwise that the model would not work. Fresh Produce Indonesia offered her a frontline position in the headquarters in Jakarta. 

She acted on that belief in the business model and relocated to the headquarters, where she applied all of her leadership, skills, and experiences gained in Taiwan into helping the business grow rapidly in Indonesia. The business grew to a point where they needed a chief operating officer and Renee was the ideal candidate to fill that role.

What got you here might take you there

Looking back it was not her intellect that got her through all the challenges that she had faced in setting up Delivery Bear, the struggles and failure of Fresh Produce Taiwan, relocating to their headquarters, helping the business grow and eventually becoming its Chief Operating Officer.

Her leadership has been marked by her belief in the business model of food delivery, and the resilience that resulted from that belief was what kept her going. 

Renee continues to be the Chief Operating Officer of Fresh Produce Indonesia, guiding the organization to overseas expansion into other Southeast Asian countries. Fresh Produce has growth to several hundred employees, and she now plays an active hand in developing the new talents that the organizational needs.

Question: What keeps you going during the times at work when all else seem doomed?

About the writer:

Daniel Lee is a speaker and writer and is co-authoring a book on First Time Leadership (FTL) to create a roadmap to understanding leadership for aspiring and first time leaders.

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Disclaimer  

This article is based off a true story that I learned during my interviews with senior and first time leaders. Any similarities with fictitious events or characters are purely coincidental.