A Startup pivot in a weekend in the middle of a health crisis - Alexandre [Five a Day]
Entrepreneurship that makes sense, a pivot and fruits, lots of fruits…
Alexandre Guillaume is a former rugby player who delivers fruit, it’s atypical but not as much as the masterful pivot made in a weekend in the middle of a health crisis. Five a Day is the art of pivoting in record time to save a startup.
🏠 Country : France
🎂 Age: 34
🏫 Studies: Master’s Degree in Educational Engineering
⚙️ Favourite tool: Quickbooks
📅 Creation date: 09/2018
🏦 Turnover (or range): 200K€ in 2019
👨👩👧👦 Number of employees: 4
🤑 Amount raised : Peanuts
🤠 Jobs, Musk, Besos or else? Richard Branson
💻 PC, Mac, Linux or another? Mac
🎒 Who are you? What is your background?
I was a professional rugby player for 6 years (until I was 24) and had to stop my short career for medical reasons. Alongside rugby, I followed a business/management course at the Leonardo da Vinci University in La Défense.
Having been forced to stop playing rugby for a year, I decided to study pastry making, as well as a remote degree learning English (very remote BTW…).
Following my career, I put my first foot in adult education, first as a trainer and then as a pedagogical coordinator.
I obtained a master’s degree in Adult Education Engineering and took over the management of a training organisation at the age of 26.
I then managed two other profit centres (a B2B business and a business school).
All this led me to create Five a Day, in association with my brother.
💡 What’s your Startup? How did you came with the idea?
The project was born out of a strong desire to do business in association with my brother. We wanted to create a company that would have a positive impact on a large scale. From our previous professional experiences we realized that there was a great need for wellness at work. We asked ourselves what the fundamental vectors of well-being were. Food is one of them and it is recurrent! We tested in our respective boxes to bring fruit to our colleagues. The effect was immediate, moments of sharing, smiles and exchanges with people we knew too little about! We decided to go for it :)
Five a Day is a fruit delivery service to your office.
The goal? To promote the well-being of employees in their workplace, to create new meeting points in offices and to offer a healthy alternative to the junk found in vending machines.
I’ve told you about positive impact and values, here they are in a nutshell:
- Social: preparation of orders in ESAT or integration projects
- Local economy: 40 to 70% locally sourced products
- Ecology: 1 basket delivered = 1 tree planted — Deliveries by electric vehicle or bicycle
- An apple a day… well you know it
🎯 A word to describe yourself? A word to describe the way you work?
Combative: my rugby past taught me that everything is earned through hard work. I’m a warrior in general, I like effort and difficulty. Every problem has at least two solutions :) What does it feel like to climb to the top of Everest?
🧰 Which applications / tools are essential for you?
Quickbooks: Management software that allows me to follow the activity in real time, automated invoicing…
Google Suite: Our teams are not all geographically grouped together, which allows us to share information remotely in an efficient way. The plus? It’s free!
🔥 Actionable tips / best practices you can share?
Less is more ! Drive your business in a “low cost” way. No need to invest thousands in a tool that only pays you hundreds. This has been our leitmotiv since the launch of Five a Day, doing a lot with little ressources. This limits risks, improves your profitability and keeps you in your comfort zone.
🤓 What’s the best advice you’ve been give and that you can give?
Determine the problem of your customers, build a solution, focus as much as possible on customer satisfaction, become essential :)
🎱 Magic Wand! You can go in the past, what do you change?
I will try to surround myself with experts on specific questions.
This would certainly have saved us time and we would have perhaps tinkered less on certain aspects.
⚖️ Personnal / Professionnal life : How do you balance?
I try to take care of my family as much as possible, even if it’s not always easy. I’ve got a big job to do on this aspect.
📚 Which books, podcasts, people (etc) have influenced you the most? What blogs or news sources do you follow?
For books:
- The Art of War: Sun Tzu.
- Rich father, poor father: Robert Kiyosaki
For people:
- Fabien Prêtre : Founder of Easyflyer started from 0 and reached 24M€ of turnover in 10 years. He revolutionized the printing market in France. A top mentor.
- Richard Branson: Founder of Virgin. He succeeded in diversifying into markets with no apparent links. I was particularly impressed by the way he launched Virgin Airlines. At the time, he communicated as much as British Airways when he only had one plane! To remember, make noise even when you’re very small :)
⭐ How did you turn a difficult situation into a success?
I have a fresh example related to the health crisis we are going through.
On Thursday March 13th the French President of the Republic called for remote work, and on March 15th all the shops were forced to close their doors.
As our customers are mainly offices and stores, we lost 100% of our turnover within 48 hours.
In one weekend we pivoted by creating a home shopping delivery website (MonPtitPanier). The success was immediate, we registered more than 2000 orders in one month.
A nice anecdote? On the same street, I have eight customers of a certain age who all spread the word. On delivery, they hand over an envelope containing the money for the day’s order and a piece of paper on which their next order is written with some very nice little words. In the digital age, we succeed in making our service accessible to the whole population and it is a real satisfaction!
We made ourselves useful for the population, for the small producers who had stock on their hands and we saved our company :)
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