Reflection – Lunch Cycle (Learning Lunch)

Challenge

I spent the past 14 years of my life working in sales in the field of Information Technology, based in the  Arabian Gulf and more specifically, Dubai.  By 2015, I reached a point in my lifetime where I felt the urge  to stop working for others and start my own business. By the end of that year, I had already determined  what I needed to plan for; a new delivery application that no one has yet implemented in my home  country. An app similar to UberEat or Deliveroo but with the concept of anyone can work as delivery  person at his/her own freewill and at any time; simply register in the app, upload an ID, a photo of the  transport mean with plate number, wait for approval, and get to work.

By end of 2015, I was ready to make my final move to my home country (Lebanon) where I was planning  to kickstart my project. So, I submitted my resignation, liquidated my assets, fulfilled all liabilities,  transferred my life savings to a local bank in Lebanon. I simply aimed at closing that last chapter of being  an employee for others in a foreign country, forever.

The Delivery Business Idea was all there with many details, but I was not so sure of the outcome of such  investment because I been away from my home country for long time and I only visit it, occasionally.  Add to that, the culture and the mindsets, I had no idea how that would work for them. They been doing  delivery lately using phone calls and WhatsApp messaging.

Based on the years of experience I had in sales and what I learned from interacting with customers, I  was already adapted to the ideology of “Understand your customer DNA and Problems is the basic of  any Sale”, I knew there was problem in the efficiency of the “Delivery” services across the country, but I  was not so sure how to link all the dots and come up with a successful approach. My team was my own  family, my wife and my elder son.

Selection

To identify the proper solution, I knew I had to be in touch with prospects, collect data, and analyze. I  had to first train my wife and son on this ideology because each one of us will have a role to do. My  solution was based on the Lunch Cycle which is very much equivalent to the Learning Lunch we learned  about in this course. We had to listen and learn various challenges prospects would have, ask questions,  understand processes, brainstorm ideas, identify one or more workable solutions, and launch.

Application

Despite being a small country, Lebanon has a lot of diversities. We have people of different backgrounds  and cultures spread across different geographical areas or states; each is noted for its wealth or poverty  level and buying habits. So, we selected 3 different areas and 3 types of businesses in each area to  approach. These were grocery stores, restaurants, and flower shops. We randomly chose 5 counts of  those businesses to meet. The total was 15 times 3 areas, total was 45.

We then set a list of open questions mostly focusing on the challenges and problems the business  owner/manager is facing with relevance to delivering their goods. We then started the discovery  journey that lasted for 2 weeks and each one of us drove every day to his/her designated area and spent  the whole day from one place to another interviewing managers.

Insights

The cooperation was satisfactory and the data we collected showed that the challenges/problems were  bigger for the restaurants than the rest. Initially, we were aware that the biggest challenge for those  businesses were payments. Lebanon is still way behind the stage of everyone has a credit card and  almost every business has an online presence with online payment gateway. This meant that the  majority of deals are done using payment upon delivery which also revealed a lot of problematic  scenarios such as, trusting the delivery person and ensuring the return of the correct amount not to  mention how we will secure our ROI. The app we planned to create had to be built on that basis.

Approach

With all the data in hand, we conducted several meetings with business consultants and lawyers to  support our approach and ensure compliance. Then we contacted multiple app developers locally and in  India to present our idea for the app including processes and functionality and brainstormed how the  app is going to be like. In some cases, we invested in limited versions till we finally concluded on one  version that met all prerequisites. An app, that allows anyone to work as a delivery person in his area or  neighborhood, with all functionalities such as showing him/her online, location, tracking, expected  arrival, status, and rating.

