Shaunak Amin of SnackMagic On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business
It’s always good to keep in mind that when your business begins to see rapid growth, you will continually experience bottlenecks of one kind or another. Whether it’s running out of space to store additional products or having an urgent need for increased staffing, the challenges of a growing business keep changing. And while you want to address these issues immediately, keep your sights on the bigger picture. Hiring for the sake of hiring, leasing excess warehouse space, investing in the latest technology, can lead to excessive cash burns.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Shaunak Amin.
Shaunak Amin is an experienced entrepreneur and operator and has helped launch and scale businesses in different industries. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of STADIUM, SnackMagic, SwagMagic, and the Department of Superior Dishes. Combined, these ventures act as a global gifting platform, catering to WFH employees, global team, client gifts, hybrid events, event attendees, and a slew of other times when you want to give the perfect gift.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
I started my very first business, Tikka Foods, during my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. It initially started as a food truck and ultimately evolved into a wholesale delivery service of ready-to-eat, contemporary Indian food.
In addition to my entrepreneurial ventures, my career spans financial technology and investment management with senior roles at Novus — a fintech firm based in NYC, SAIL Advisors- a multi-billion dollar family office based out of Hong Kong, ING Investment Management, and SEI Investments.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
While having a well-planned road map would be nice, it doesn’t always work out that way.
SnackMagic launched in April of 2020 as a direct result of the global pandemic. As offices emptied and everyone had to stay home, we needed a temporary way to save our NYC-based office lunch delivery business.
We knew the joy of giving (and getting) a stash of snacks would help people feel connected and boost morale. And we made sure that the gift-giving service would be easy enough so that people can quickly send 1 or 1,000 snack boxes in just a few clicks. People were on our website just looking before we even launched, and our first order came within 3 weeks.
Soon event organizers wanted to use our gifting service worldwide. And we found that growing our business internationally meant not finding the perfect solution but a solution that would meet our customers’ needs now. So we would validate ideas by doing something simple. Then once we got validation, we’d build that concept into the product. It’s how we’re fast becoming the one-stop shop for corporate gifting needs.
While this may all sound like a logistical nightmare for a business that launched just two years ago, we have partnered with regional partners worldwide to fulfill orders and bring small local brands directly to consumers in more than 200 countries around the globe.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
With out a doubt, it’s SnackMagic. We started SnackMagic at just the right time. The corporate gifting market began to open up as working from became a new norm. And as teams now consists of in-house, hybrid, and remote employees worldwide, sending gifts to employees continues to be a proven way to boost morale and improve productivity, while showing how much you value your team members. Because of this, SnackMagic became the foundation upon which we broaden our horizons and build more moats by continuing to test and validate ideas in and amongst our teams. This way each vertical has the ability to become a standalone business.
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?
I used to get upset when mistakes were made. However, employees often view a reactive leader as the 800-pound gorilla in the room, closing down communication with a grimace or a flick of the hand, making some team members wary of speaking up. While this behavior can stifle innovation for your company, it can also lead to one employee’s small error going unremarked and compounding exponentially.
Trust is a two-way street in an organization. So when an employee makes a mistake, it’s important that they feel comfortable coming to me straight away to admit their oversight and offer solutions. I’m more inclined to be empathetic if my team member takes accountability and proactively rectifies the situation. That way, we can get back to business.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
It’s every leader’s responsibility to help their employees develop their skills. We provide mentoring and coaching to newer hires by leveraging the strengths of our seasoned employees. This means that while recruits learn about the practicalities of working in their chosen field, our team veteran members gain the leadership skills they need to advance in their careers as they guide, train, and encourage interns in the workplace. And the supervisory roles employees adopt also help us see who is ready to take on greater responsibilities and pinpoint candidates for our succession planning strategy.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
My leadership style has evolved over the years. And the transition to running a global remote team has me talking less and listening more. So I make the most of every opportunity to empower team members to be themselves, say what’s on their minds, and make mistakes as it promotes their professional growth and drives innovation for our company.
As a product-first ambitious team, we solve problems together. And we do so by using clear communication, staying confidently humble, and welcoming change. I encourage everyone to share the good and the bad with everybody, whether it is their first day or they have been with us for years. Going on a journey of discovery as a team fosters continuous learning and improvement to prevent an issue from happening again. And should one idea not work today, we know that it can evolve into something effective tomorrow. It is how we’ve navigated these last few years and supercharged growth for our team, our offering, and our brand.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
1. Being successful in the marketplace means going after something that’s already out there and doing it in a different way. Our goal isn’t to build features based on what other people are doing, so we don’t spend a lot of time researching the competition. Take for example, STADIUM. There are plenty of players in the food delivery market, but we came at it from a different angle and gained a massive loyal customer base. Same thing with SnackMagic. We did not come up with the concept of snack boxes. We are just doing it in a different way by thinking things from the ground up and innovating to bring unique products with different angles to the marketplace rather than benchmarking ourselves against another company.
Going broad to capture different aspects of the corporate gifting market. Our biggest strength as an organization is that we’ve created this massive web and products and services that prevents us from having major competitors. While there are plenty of other snack companies, we have gone so wide and so deep with our offering that we keep broadening our horizons and building more moats. And we’ll continue to be the one-stop-shop for all things corporate gifting by watching trends and being flexible to expand what we offer.
It’s the concept of “blue ocean vs. an ocean” in competitive dynamics and strategy in which big businesses are created when you create your own market. And creating your own market doesn’t mean there’s no competition. It’s just that you create a new playing field by positioning the product so differently as opposed to competing feature to feature which, with so much competition over time, ends in a zero-sum game in which nobody makes money.
2. Not burning through investment money enables you to keep growing. At the onset of the current economy strains, many companies started saying they were going to cut spending. But, oftentimes, we are contrarians and we’re not going to do what other people are doing. We’re going to do what makes sense to us and the future of our business. And because we had not yet used any of the money we raised from the previous year — despite us growing so much — it put us in a position of strength. So there is no need for us to cut back or slow down. We’re actually doubling down on what’s working and aggressively expand the team, the business, marketing, everything. The opportunity in front of us is so enormous that it would be sad not to capitalize on it because we’re so early in the game. All the work we’ve done up to this point puts us ahead of any competition. So we’re going to continue to lean into our strengths and continue to grow aggressively by investing in our product and our people.
3. You acquire customers at different entry points when you have a multi-brand eCommerce. For this reason, each vertical must relate to your other offerings for you to be able to cross-sell to customers. There are only so many times a customer will order from one vertical. But by playing to your strengths and creating a horizontal integration of your offerings to include related products and services, you can make it difficult for other companies to compete against you because people use your brands for many things. A “same customer, different sells” strategy keeps customer acquisition costs low as their lifetime value grows.
4. If there is one motto that no longer applies in business is it’s “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Being successful requires knowing when to pivot. Changing the direction of your business can put you on the path to success. This is especially true when there’s too much competition in your niche or you realize you’re not attracting enough customers to be profitable. Flexibility welcomes that change by being amenable to quickly cutting losses and investing in making your strengths stronger. Building an agile mindset into your business model will better prepare your business and your team for long-term success.
5. It’s always good to keep in mind that when your business begins to see rapid growth, you will continually experience bottlenecks of one kind or another. Whether it’s running out of space to store additional products or having an urgent need for increased staffing, the challenges of a growing business keep changing. And while you want to address these issues immediately, keep your sights on the bigger picture. Hiring for the sake of hiring, leasing excess warehouse space, investing in the latest technology, can lead to excessive cash burns.
Devote time to finding applicants with varying skills sets and decide if you need to hire them full-time, part-time, or on contract. And expand your core team strategically as this will strengthen it with each new addition.
Keep pace with advancing technology, but spend money on upgrading the software you’re already using when do-able. And maintain a small footprint until your business is on the map. While warehouse financing is available, the lender controls your business’s inventory and can seize goods when you cannot repay the loan or you lag on payments.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
1. The cost of failing is so much smaller than the cost of not trying. Because if something is successful, it can grow to a billion-dollar business quickly. Whereas, if it doesn’t work out, you may be set back by two or three months, but the knowledge you gain is valuable going forward.
2. Many startups focus on brand storytelling and fail to present themselves as a lucrative business opportunity. We wanted our pitch deck to represent us as an established business with revenues, profits, losses, and unit economics. So we put together a robust investor deck outlining what SnackMagic is, its strengths, and its proven product-market fit. Then we asked ourselves, “How do we create a splash and get attention?” We decided to produce an 8-part video series on how the how SnackMagic became viable in the marketplace- from pivoting to scaling from $0 to $20 million in ARR in just 8 months during a worldwide pandemic.
This video series, combined with our product-market fit, our solid unit economics, and the fact that we were already profitable, helped us attract investors. We ended up raising $15 million in our Series A round of funding, which Craft Ventures led.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
SnackMagic is a team of people from all over the world, with different cultures, and backgrounds. We don’t go looking in a particular country, but we look for the best people, wherever they may be! And that’s actually worked out in our favor so far because we get very diverse opinions and ideas from everybody everywhere. This leads to more exciting innovations which we’re all taking part in as a global team.
Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
Part of our company’s core values is to experiment because a lot of good things can come from that. While snacks are the foundation of SnackMagic we have a lot of initiatives which are going in different directions. While this can seem chaotic for the team, everything falls into our strategy to capture different aspects of the corporate gifting market. And we’re utilizing components from one thing to the other. What worked for STADIUM, we reuse and adapt for SnackMagic and the same goes for Department of Superior Dishes and SwagMagic. Things we test out for one vertical may work better in another with some tweaking — or it turns into something completely new.
This also enables us to provide team members with the opportunity to experience our different verticals. It’s satisfying to see how different people start in one area and cross over with their experiences and their knowledge to own another. And while they’re solving problems that apply to us, the solutions can also be a useful service to other businesses. This gives us the opportunity to package the tools we develop as standalone products for a whole new customer base. For example, CPGPulse, which is powered by SnackMagic, allows emerging brands to track customer trends in the CPG landscape, using real-time customer data and insights.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
Simpplr. is an excellent communication platform that connects and engages remote, hybrid, and on-site team members for better collaboration. Your portal can also foster company culture by including your mission statement, story, and behind-the-scenes videos. Links to informative online books, articles, and podcasts can help develop their professional growth. And with employee checklists, form templates, media assets, fun zoom backgrounds, and an employee directory, your remote contract workers will have the resources they need to perform well, be productive, and stay on the same page with the rest of the team.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
I believe more companies should stop overlooking applicants who didn’t attend the best colleges or those who didn’t receive any post-secondary education. We should always hire someone based on their attitude, ambition, and ability to think on their feet. Because as the global marketplace expands, so does the talent pool. And companies that invite different perspectives, skills, and experiences to the table from across the globe create opportunities for people they did not previously have access to.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so people are more than welcome to reach out to connect with me there. But, for people wanting a deeper look into what we do, our teams continue to make informative videos on our product and services. These include the full story of our pivot to our “Future of Work” series that talks about our culture and how we examine and define our culture in a work from anywhere environment.
But there’s also a lot of fun to be had watching our SnackMagic shorts and our Gifting the World videos, where we surprise people on the street with the gift of free snacks. There’s nothing better than spreading some joy!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunak/
https://www.youtube.com/c/SnackMagicSwagMagic/playlists
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
