Don’t Conflate Hard and Emotionally Hard. Easier Said Than Done.
We recently had a speaker join us at Handy for one of our monthly fireside chats who shared some good advice — “Don’t conflate hard decisions with emotionally hard decisions.” This is sound counsel for anyone in life as well as in startups. But like most good advice, it’s easier to offer than to follow. Especially when it means letting go of good people who helped us on our goal of trying to build something great.
Over the course of building Handy, we’ve made both of these types of decisions. Hard decisions are the ones with two right answers, but different possible outcomes for the organization — where additional analysis or due diligence today will not provide more certainty about which answer is more right. Emotionally hard decisions are those with one right answer that you know will lead to the best outcome for the platform. They are also the ones that, because of the immediate consequences of the decision, sit in the pit of your stomach, like a heavy weight. Confusing the two may keep you from acting, even when you know the decision is right for your organization.
Because fast-growing startups like ours are learning, growing and scaling at a faster pace than most organizations, we’ve learned this lesson sooner rather than later, and we are glad we have. This is how we got here.
At different inflection points in our journey, we’ve needed to test and prove new questions or assumptions about how to best move forward and get the job done. This has required Handy to evolve over time.
The first version of Handy (then Handybook) was designed to test product and market fit and answer the question: will people use our platform? We acquired customers with a street team of brand ambassadors handing out flyers, onboarded professionals in our personal apartments, and packed individual cleaning supplies from the local Target into makeshift backpacks to offer as supply kits. A team of agents “dispatched” job notifications by phone, calling and messaging back and forth between customers and professionals to arrange bookings. This was the first version of Handy. It looked nothing like the disruptive end state technology solution that inspired us (and our investors). It was not scalable, but it helped deliver the first bookings and get our idea off the ground.
From there, we gradually moved our focus on to a different question: could we execute with consistent, repeatable processes at a greater transaction volume and in new markets? In this phase of Handy’s growth, we introduced online customer acquisition channels, a more functional booking flow, automated job notifications via SMS, and a supply chain where pre-packed optional supply kits were shipped to local offices from a central warehouse. Professional onboarding sessions were now hosted by local operations associates in rented conference rooms in local shared workspaces across the country. This phase put us on the map across 28 cities.
We’re now in the next iteration of Handy and focused on being a scalable, sustainable organization. Today, we’re fortunate that hundreds of thousands of customers and professionals depend on the Handy platform to make their lives better. This means we need to be operationally and financially built to last, so we can continue to be around to help the people who use and rely on our platform. Simply put, this is the stage where we optimize Handy for enduring long-term growth, and we have spent the last year executing on a plan to get us there. Specifically, we’ve closely examined how to make two significant product functions better for our customers and professionals and for us as a platform: customer service and the onboarding of professionals.
A year ago, we had an average of four customer service interactions per booking — customers were contacting us by phone, email and chat an average of four times each time they booked a service. We have worked hard to fix this and have done so by building a better product that enables customers and professionals to do more and more on their own — things like rescheduling, canceling, rating, tipping, and other frequent requests that can be resolved faster when they are in the driver’s seat.
Today, we’ve successfully reduced the number of interactions to 0.3 contacts per booking. We’ve done this while answering 90% of customer queries within 100 minutes and dramatically increasing customer satisfaction. The result is that we can focus on and prioritize complicated issues, resolve them faster, and deliver better customer experiences.
When it comes to onboarding professionals, we’ve transformed a very manual process that involved more than 40 people and made it significantly more efficient by automating where it made sense. Today, the automated process includes an initial application screen, ID scanning, facial recognition, federal, state and county background checks, bank account validation, phone number validation and platform registration. By automating these functions, we are allowing more qualified professionals to register on the platform who can then offer their services to more customers. These changes also allow us to significantly improve our unit economics, setting us up for long-term sustainability.
As we’ve transformed Handy over the last three years, our priorities have changed as well and the mantra has gone from “do things that work now” to “build things that scale.” Along the way, we assembled a great team to help with each of these different stages and objectives. While building the best team possible has always been a priority, the nature of the team — the skills, the experience levels, the headcount — has had to keep pace with Handy’s evolving needs. Take a look:
The earliest part of the journey required an energetic team that was ready for anything, people willing to get their hands dirty — to hand out flyers, pack supplies, handle customer calls and so on. If we wanted to quickly test a new “feature”, but didn’t have enough engineers to build it — we’d hire people to do the manual work to make it happen, no matter how inefficient it was.
Now, fast forward to where we are today. Our aim is to optimize Handy for where we want to go over the long-term and support as many customers and professionals as possible. This means building self service functionality for customers and professionals and automating internal processes — and building a team that is best suited for this challenge. We’ve increased our engineering and product teams from 20 people a year ago to over 60 people today, and are still aggressively expanding this team to ensure we are continually improving.
Each time we reached the next stage of product development, we have needed to make changes to ensure the team matched the direction we are headed. In many cases, employees who had been at Handy from the beginning were able to learn a new skill or build specialty — going from street team member to engineer, from customer support agent to customer support manager, or from local operations associate to supply chain manager. While we tried to foster as many of these transitions as possible, it wasn’t realistic for everyone. We had to make the emotionally difficult decision to let go of people whose roles no longer existed — amazing people who were critical to building the early versions of Handy. This included several people who helped us launch our first markets outside of New York — like D.C. and San Francisco — markets we knew nothing about at the time, and it was these teammates’ hustle that helped us get a foothold into those cities and out-run our competitors. It included someone who had helped us hire the majority of the customer service and operations teams that allowed us to scale. And it included someone who helped us manually dispatch hundreds of unfilled bookings a week by working late into the night.
There is no way around it — these were some of the hardest decisions we’ve made as an organization. The backbone of Handy’s success has always been our talented people, and it is tough to say goodbye to even one team member.
At the same time, all of these decisions were necessary as we moved to a better product and more sustainable platform. Our entire team is now 125 people. Because we made those hard decisions along the way, the team today manages a platform that handles millions of bookings worth hundreds of millions of dollars of income for our tens of thousands of professionals. This commitment to the best long-term experience for customers and professionals is absolute, and unfortunately, sometimes that means making emotionally hard decisions. We’re going to continue investing in our platform to make sure we deliver on this commitment and achieve the vision we have always had for Handy: seamlessly delivering every service to every home.
We are thankful to all of the Handy teammates — past and present — who have helped Handy get to where it is today and look ahead to the future.
Umang Dua & Oisin Hanrahan
Co-Founders — Handy
