Resilience

The idea of resilience put itself forward as a theme this week.? I didn’t ask for nominations, but it all began at 8:30AM on Tuesday (Monday having been a public holiday) when my cofounder, Govin Murugachandran and I were discussing with a GP the hierarchy of features of our service. We wanted to understand from his point of view, which end-benefits would resonate more than others.

The GP brought up the idea of workforce resilience.? When I asked him to elaborate, he explained that relying on a small team i.e. without Zonder’s resources behind you, can mean that when one or more team members are unavailable due to personal holiday, training, etc. this can leave the practice vulnerable to a single point of failure if another GP or pharmacist concurrently has an unplanned absence.? ?By diversifying the people doing the work, you end up with a more resilient team.? I noted this down and didn’t think more about it at the time as we’d moved onto other Zonder benefits.?

Team Flexibility

However later in the week, my brain recovered a memory file of my early days building my retail food business.? I’d opened my first location, a small shop off the high street in Kensington.? I only needed one person on shift at any time, and I’d be the person relieving them for breaks, helping with big orders and clean up.? This meant I only needed to hire 3 staff.? I’d made sure when hiring that they understood I could only authorize personal holiday for one at a time.? However, I was soon to discover that unexpected absences often overlap each other or planned holiday.? I’m happy to report I never had to close the shop or skip an order.? However, the scramble to either convince a staff member to come in last minute on their day off or try to juggle serving customers myself without a break whilst running the back-end of a business is stressful, to say the least.? It’s especially difficult when you’re serving individual customers whose celebrations rely on consistent service rather than in corporate where you’re chipping away at a longer-term project and can later make up for lost time.? I learned as I grew to build in resilience by adding more staff and moreover, flexible staff.

I understand that for a GP practice, there is even more at stake for their customers than a birthday or wedding cake.? So more reason to appreciate the resilience that our service will contribute to their business.

Overcoming Rejection

The theme of resilience continued across the week in a number of instances.? As we begin in earnest our cold outreach to GP Partners via LinkedIn, I am mentally preparing myself for a low success rate.? In other words – rejection.? This is the nature of sales.? My first job out of university was as a retail stockbroker. Not something I would have envisioned having just gone through graduation with top honors, but MBA programs didn’t want me yet and someone wise I’d consulted for career advice strongly recommended I get sales experience early on.? So, there I was cold calling for $5 per hour and at night sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment (I owe you, Cyndi!!). ?I had to prove myself before the company would pony up for extensive training and licensing…fair enough) I had the phone put down on me many times a day, sometimes right after being treated to some salty language.? Cold calling continued even after becoming licensed, only this time to build my own book of business. I don’t think I would have survived if I’d been on the phone in a room by myself, but we were quite a few new hires put in the ‘bull pen’, which was the original open plan office arrangement.? We’d cheer each other up and on.? We even had a team song and many, many running jokes.

Although I won’t be surrounded by coworkers making cold calls, at Zinc we are effectively in a bull pen with pods of 4 desks pushed together facing one another (Govin across from me).? We occasionally do enjoy a team joke, so I am ever so grateful to not be on my own doing cold outreach.?

Female Founder Support

Also this week, the female founders gathered (thanks to Pavandeep Rai Ph.D for organising), and agreed to have a regular catch up to talk about things on our minds, including resilience. With this kind of support, I think I’ll have the makings to be hardy enough.? Let’s see.

?Demo Day

Finally, this week resilience came into play as in the course of my 英国帝国理工学院 / Startup Discovery School ‘accelerator on the side’, as we doubled up on sessions in order to prepare for Demo Day, coming up Tuesday 4th June.? It’s one thing to pitch to a room filled with people, most of whom you’ve worked with, but in this case we’ll be on stage in a room filled with strangers.? I’m glad we’ll be ten founders from the cohort cheering each other on.? A quote came up in my feed this week that I thought was appropriate to bear in mind in our attempt to be ‘undaunted’ at presenting:

?"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette?

?Please wish me luck.

This week's:

Lowlight – Having to steel my resilience when last week’s post drew criticism for its transparency

Highlight – Receiving confirmation that our first ‘employee’ will be joining us in the form of a summer intern in July.? Baby steps. Probably for both of us.

Ask – We’re looking for more individuals living with asthma who would be happy to join our research panel.? It will involve around 15 minutes per week, which you can do when it suits you.? Do you consider yourself to be a helpful individual and would like to support us in the development of better process in treating asthma?? If so, please DM me or add a comment below.

Other Founder Insights

Read what some of my ZINC colleagues are up to in founding their impact businesses here:

Air Aware Labs - providing personalized health insights from air pollution data

Kuma Health - transforming immune mediated disorders care through personalized medicine

Deep Roots - Securing additional revenue streams for farms and building resilient supply chains through agroforestry

Ultra BiOmics - improving your metabolic health

Smart Shift Energy - empowering consumers to reduce their home energy costs