Being a founder has taught me HEL
These days I find myself exploring the journey I have been on and where I will go in my life. I am full of ambition and dreams fuelled by this desire to conquer it all. I feel this desire deep inside me to be better, do better and prove myself. But before I can get there, I find myself in this incredibly frustrating rut of uncertainty and confusion.
Let’s rewind a bit.
It all started when I had just quit my job in 2014 and relocated back to Toronto. I was in a job I really did not love, the perks and pay were great as was the travel but fundamentally I also wondered how selling HR software was going to make me the leader I so desperately wanted to be. I often questioned “what’s the point or why” to leaders I admired and I would often be told, “well, you do this really well so you get promoted to the next level and so up you go up the corporate ladder”. Except I didn’t see it like that. I felt bored. And uninspired. When I would sit down trying to fix a broken demo environment to show to a customer the next day I’d literally want to pull my hair. I was selling something I personally didn’t believe in. Here I was, a bright eyed MBA graduate hardly 25 with her whole life in front of her destined to a high paying tech job that didn’t exactly match her vision. However, unlike many of my colleagues I was always asking why and challenging the status quo. This made me a rebel in my own polite and proper way. Playing politics was never my forte and ultimately I ended up leaving the firm because I couldn’t manifest my vision. It was like a repeat of my corporate experience in 2010 that drove me to pursue a premature MBA. Smart, educated, but somehow continously falling into corporate positions that didn’t quite pan out. Why couldn’t it work for me? What was wrong with me?
Come fall 2014 I moved back home to Toronto. Super excited. No more horrible bosses. Full of freedom. Now what? I started dating a guy (who is now my husband) and we had lots of fun. Life felt good. Career? I had all the time in the world to figure it out. Took a long vacation, relaxed, focused on my emotional state and overall felt pretty content. Started the job hunt — management, strategy, leader, MBA, powerpoint guru, sold many millions in software to the best companies , all the buzz words all over my resume — “yes sir, I am the employee you are waiting for!” Soon after I got offered a job at a small boutique firm, I thought about it but didn’t want to resell the same software I hated except this time with a nice group of people. I turned it down. Kept going. I wanted to explore “start-ups”. Having come from a mammoth software company I knew tech was great, just I wanted to be part of something new and exciting. All my collegues previously seemed to have kids my age! Jeez, I was so out of place. So off I went to sales interviews with many of Toronto’s thriving startups, backed by the who’s who of the Venture Capital world. This was the real deal my friends. Things went well, I even came close to landing an amazing job at Twitter. Went through 7 interviews with members of their team in every corner of the globe and just as I was about to anticipate my offer, I got a call — “I’m sorry but we have decided to offer the other candidate the position!” What??! How?? This was the job I wanted. I was so upset. I didn’t understand why this happened. I felt I was played with and someone else was picked for reasons that might not necessarily relate to the job. It really didn’t add up to me and it was a fall that I felt hard. It made me feel that I was not good enough. But maybe there was a reason for this?
All along, the universe kept offering me positions almost to show me I am worthy but at the last minute they’d slip out of my hand or I’d decline them perhaps signalling to me to look beyond the norm. As someone who has always craved excellence, I never understood that perhaps to get there I have to look beyond what is readily available.
Greatness never comes from doing the stuff that is around us, we must take risks, be vulnerable, and feel at the end of the rope before it can manifest for us. We have to feel exhausted.
Around this time, my fiancé and I took a road trip for Thanksgiving to Montreal. We noticed our dry cleaning running around with us all over the country. It was the one chore we never seemed to be able to be on top of. We had a cleaner, options to get food home, Uber for our cabs but this was a nuisance. And voila, the seed for what would become our business was born. Laundry and dry cleaning picked up, cleaned and delivered to you. We would do all the tech and leverage the existing industry to do the “dirty work”. Maybe this would be my calling? Finally an entrepreneur I always wanted to be. I felt excited but scared. Where do I start? Do I do the deliveries myself?
Two years later we were growing, hired our first few employees and had an app and a loyal customer base. However, we were still not as big as I wanted us to be. I’ve always had this measure of success so focused on metrics, probably because of all my business degrees, but what about all that I had learned? How many from my MBA actually went on to start their own business? 1%? Yet again, here I was questioning myself. We were an early stage, bootstrapped startup with some investment from our family. I’d go to pitch events while other entrepreneurs pitched their AI fancy platform I’d be pitching a laundry business? Why could I not see how “cool” this was the same way others did and I did when I first started? Afterall, we were building a technology platform to enhance an experience for consumers and changing a chore every household faces. Was this another failure of sorts? Would we be able to scale without the funding we needed? Did we want to vertically integrate and run the whole supply chain similar to the big guys? Yet again, we reached a conclusion where I started to really question why I started this business and my goal for being the CEO of a startup. Regardless of whats next a few things are clear from my experience being a founder of a startup.
Being a founder has taught me Humility, Empathy and Loss. My entire career and childhood, I went through life checking off the boxes — got straight As, got into good unversities, landed the corporate dream jobs, ate at the best restaurants, had amazing holidays and behaved well at home. There was never any time to really “feel’” or question my purpose. There was always plenty to do on the plate and I didn’t really have time to feel raw human emotion.
In the first few months of having my own startup, friends would always comment on how cool it was. “Oh you’re a CEO that’s so cool” or “What a neat idea, I wonder why I didn’t think of it!” or “Do you get to just manage your time, work from anywhere, have employees do the jobs?”. What most people don’t understand is how lonely and tough the feeling of being an entrepreneur especially in the early days is. I would walk through the PATH where all the corporate towers in downtown connect and recognize faces, charging to their next meetings all suited up, while I dressed in jeans tried to frantically hurry by because I too was a busy entrepreneur, even though I was just lost and looking to do something that didn’t involve being alone. There were times this made me feel small, I felt like I had this fantastic education and corporate career, which I left to do a laundry tech business? I walked out of a six figure job to sit alone in my condo and try to be an entrepreneur? With no previous startup experience who would even fund my idea? All these realities would creep inside me and suddenly from being an entrepreneur with a great idea, I’d feel worthless and stuck.
Weeks and months went by doing deliveries ourselves, commiting our weekends and nights to the business, thinking the next stage would be better and we’d get bigger. Running around condos, I’d have flyers in my hands to distribute even though signs clearly stating “No solicitation or you will be walked out” stood out everywhere. As any entrepreneur you have to just do it, and hustle harder. This can be a really difficult feeling when you go from being an entitled corporate employee who walks into board rooms to present fancy slides to running around doing menial work in the effort to get your business of the ground. It is extremely humbling, while simultaneously teaches you a whole lot of empathy.
Growing up in a very sheltered environment, I found we were always taught to be kind and care for those less fortunate but I never understood what it felt like to worry about a meal being on the table or having a warm place to sleep. I’d feel sorry for someone but I’d never quite feel their emotion because “oh, that couldn’t be me”. We take for granted our life circumstances without any consideration for how hard maybe my dad worked to give us the opportunities we had. Take me to today, and I can feel exactly what it feels like to earn every dime. Corporate jobs after university often tend to be overpaying. So much time is wasted due to the inefficiency of large corporations often making it easy to hide behind your tasks. Spend a few solid hours working and there is still time for post work drinks or just switch off when you get home. Having the ability to experience this ‘high life’ at a young age allowed me to feel a sense of loss when I spent my days plagued with uncertainty. I’ve never before felt such dramatic highs and lows. Losses are real — they affect you mentally and financially. Learning to feel loss allows you to feel grateful for the good times, it makes you stronger and tougher and much more resilient. Feeling loss allows us to grow and manifest the life we desire.
This is why I believe every founder grows and learns despite the odds of success. It changes who you are forever. Even though it can take you through hell.
