The Noodle Nomad
Scaling your business means more than just running the machine 24/7.
It’s a common misconception that all startups consist of a team. Over the years I’ve met many one-man/woman-band type startups also known as single founder ventures or by the more polished title solopreneur. This person usually has both the knowledge and experience to build the product and/or provide the service. I call these founders nomads for the simple reason they usually do their best work alone.
I once met a nomad with an interesting food product startup. He wanted to revolutionize hot pot soups with a special type of mix that never goes bad. In other words, his concept solved a major requirement of most supermarket brands: shelf life. A product’s shelf life at a supermarket is more than just an expiration date. Understanding and leveraging shelf life will be of great value as your business grows.
Scalability is the cornerstone for all business investing. If you’re a startup looking to expand, your product must be scalable. This means your product, with some marketing of course, can be offered in a variety of places and to a wide range of customers. I rank scalability as a top criterion when I meet with any startup. I often ask deeper questions similar to the following:
What would be the cost to scale the product to 1 location, 12, or hundreds?
Where/How do you envision your product reach in 12/24/36 months?
How do you plan to scale? What is the operations plan?
Who is in charge of scaling the business?
Let’s say you’re selling cookies. You start out in Seattle building your cookie empire. You have a shelf life of 45 days on your cookies. This means that from the time you take the cookies out of the oven you have 45 days until they are below the quality control level established for customer sales. Logistics takes time so factor in the time it takes to send your cookies to supermarkets and distribution centers. Depending on how far the cookies must travel, by the time they reach the supermarket shelf you may be looking at a 30-day shelf life. Knowing this, you may choose to work with smaller supermarkets closer to home that could extend the shelf life by 10 days or more. The point is the longer the shelf life the more distance the cookies can travel and still have ample time to sell at the store. It’s simple math but you’d be surprised how often this important factor is overlooked.
Getting back to the noodle nomad, when I pressed him on the expiration date telling him no food product could be good forever, he claimed the shelf life for his product was 5 years. Intrigued, I met him at his restaurant to see exactly what he was talking about. The moment I arrived the story began to take shape. He opened his noodle shop about 5 years back and that’s when he started his R&D or test cooking in this case. After several unsuccessful attempts he developed a broth with noodles, dehydrated it and added a spice packet. He also experimented with freeze dried vegetables and other ingredients. You get the picture. I observed him running his small kitchen like a drill sergeant; barking orders, yelling and overall acting like an angry person. I noticed a classic trait of nomads being the ONLY ones who were qualified to accomplish a task. This was a big deal. This founder was such a control freak he couldn’t focus on the bigger picture. When I asked him if he had plans to build out his operation for mass production, the confused look on his face said it all. Industrial kitchen or other larger space? Nonsense, the noodle nomad had a plan to do it all from the restaurant, running unsustainable 24 hour shifts to produce the product and still keep the restaurant open for deliveries.
A few months later I got a call from the noodle nomad inviting me to have dinner one evening. I came to his restaurant to find an exhausted staff, mulling around the kitchen like zombies. They had been working nonstop for weeks, with 3 shifts running each day. The kitchen looked like a tornado went through it, no surface was unaffected including splashes of sauce on the walls and ceiling. The nomad explained to me once he was able to get the production down into shifts, they produced dozens of cases of soup packets and he delivered them to local grocery stores himself. He proceeded to show me all the numbers. It was impressive what he accomplished thus far. We discussed ways to expand the operation, imploring him to move production to an industrial kitchen or small food manufacturing facility. His simple response was a solid no. He wouldn’t want to hand over the production to others and too afraid of losing his recipe to a competitor. This was the beginning of the end unfortunately. A few months later he stopped production and went back to just being a humble noodle restaurant owner.
This is a classic mistake many startups make: scaling too small. I shared with the noodle nomad the issues with his plan. He dismissed my concerns as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘unfounded.’ His lifetime of experience running a tiny family restaurant with literally 12 seats and 80% takeaway or delivery service was his sole criteria for expertise in mass production of food.
The founder nomad is not unique. In fact, many founders possess some nomadic qualities in the initial stages that may linger even years later. I once worked with a CTO who founded his company 3 years prior and worked only from his home with three cats constantly at his side. I mean no offense to animal lovers, myself included, but the man would only leave his home for annual company events and technical presentations that required his presence. He never set foot in the office. Over the years his staff grew weary of this work arrangement and longed for an in-person management structure. This kind of nomadic quality is more on the extreme side but nonetheless a cautionary tale.
Nomads are found nearly everywhere. With the advent of the internet, the term has taken on new life in a digital world. I’ve seen many deals with founders and investors both exhibiting some nomadic qualities. The key is to manage them using familiarity and balance. Harnessing the qualities that nomadic founders possess is often a task best done by an investor who may possess some of the same characteristics. Balancing those personalities is the secret towards achieving success in the future.