Going into survival mode

Back in March 2020, when the COVID-19 situation was escalating in the UK, I’d just been in China with our manufacturers – I had even taken the bullet train through Wuhan. 

When I returned to London, people were starting to worry. With ChargedUp, our business model relied heavily on the hospitality industry – so we knew we’d be hit hard if the government decided to close down pubs and restaurants. 

Once lockdown hit, our immediate reaction was to come up with a plan that would enable us to survive. We figured out how to cut back on our burn-rate and expenses, reducing salaries by 20% across the company, and cutting the lease for our new office space. Our board members, including Andy Fisher (Ex-CEO of Shazam) and John Wright (former CEO of Innocent Smoothies), were massively supportive of this plan, and helped us think through our initial strategy of cutting costs back to the bone.

To make sure that the whole team bought into the plan, I held 1-to-1 meetings with every single person in the company via Zoom. I told them: “If we do this, it’s for the best of everyone – we’re not letting anyone go”. 

The good thing is that we acted super quickly. We weren’t going to hang around and wait for the government to tell us what to do. We needed to make sure we’d be okay, even if no help came – that’s just part of our startup mentality.

Two weeks later, furlough was announced.

How we adapted our strategy to launch a new product in under a week

Once we got a plan in place that protected us, it meant that we had more time to ideate. We started looking at “COVID-proof ideas”, creating a Slack channel where we could brainstorm across product, tech, and marketing. 

The question, for us, was: what can we do over the next 3-6 months? We wanted to continue expanding the business – and more importantly, we wanted to do something good.

Our brainstorm generated loads of ideas, and we came up with a framework for ranking them according to the difficulty of execution, impact, and confidence. But our main priority was figuring out how we could help our customers through a tough time. 

ICE Score = (Impact +Confidence +Ease) / 3

We came up with around 50 ideas. There were some super rogue ones in the mix, such as turning pubs into supermarkets – but the most rogue of them all was CleanedUp, which would pivot the business from charging stations to sanitising stations.

The idea made a lot of sense: venues wanted to reopen, and they wanted to give their customers something to make them feel safe. We knew there was a market for it, as we’d already seen a lot of people taking advantage of the need for masks. Meanwhile, no one was able to manufacture hand sanitiser dispensers quickly enough. People were struggling to get the materials from China and shipments of ethanol were being seized by the Russian government. So we decided to make what our customers needed.

The best thing about this idea which made it so attractive to us as well, was that ultimately, CleanedUp would help open the ChargedUp target market when things do return to normal.

We had previously worked with UK manufacturers to produce our charging stations – so we set them to work on making sanitiser stations for us. It took a couple days to produce the first prototype, and another few days to set up the new brand and website – Charlie and I just hacked it together in the evenings. We registered the trademark on the weekend, and CleanedUp was born.

How we kept our team engaged throughout lockdown

It’s easy to run a company when things go well. But when things dry up, it becomes more challenging. We had to deal with a lot of uncertainty – but we didn’t really have time to get upset about it. One day, everything got locked down. The next day, I woke up and thought: “Let’s just solve it”. 

Those first few weeks were chaos: we were building a business and a new product that could be scaled in a matter of weeks. But it was also exciting – and the speed we were working at helped keep everyone motivated.

To be honest, our whole team was quite optimistic: everyone was involved in finding a solution, and everyone rallied around that challenge.

Of course, it’s extremely difficult to set goals in times of complete uncertainty. We kept having to change the goal posts, increasing our target from 100 to 1000 to 10,000 units. We thought we’d try to hit £1m in revenue – and then we completely smashed that target.  

We love the idea of using OKRs to drive progress – something we learnt how to do during our time at Founders Factory - but we quickly found that system too restrictive when things were moving this fast. 

We quickly pivoted to using simple metrics to track our progress, and introduced a daily all-hands meeting for anyone working on CleanedUp. This worked really well to sync up our efforts, especially while everyone was working remotely – so well, in fact, that it’s become a full company all-hands. Every morning, we all spend a few minutes catching up. It’s almost like making your morning coffee at the office, and it’s just a nice way to get into the speed of things.

We had lots of celebrations in those early days. We created a “Big Wins” Slack channel, where we could share major updates with the team, like when we landed Leon and TFL. We also started a weekly vlog, where I would go all around the country visiting new CleanedUp units that had popped up (while that was still possible). Those little celebrations really helped keep everyone’s spirits up.

What happens when things go back to normal?

Social distancing has created a huge need for order-to-table and no-contact delivery services. And when restaurants reopened across the UK the first time around, we decided to launch ServedUp, a platform enabling customers to order food from their table. 

In the UK, venue operators have already found that they’re making more money: when people can order from their phones with just one click, they buy more. It’s easy and frictionless, like ecommerce. And in Australia, venues are still using order-to-table solutions many months after lockdown has been lifted. 

We expected to see things slow down after each lockdown announcement; but each week, we’ve seen another increase in customer acquisition. We’ve actually been able to track our sales and expansion based on government announcements.

Long-term, we hope to push all three of our services forward – ChargedUp, CleanedUp, and ServedUp – because there’s a nice convergence between all three products.  

Someday soon, you might enter a venue and sanitise your hands at a CleanedUp station; you might use your phone to order via ServedUp; and after using your phone, you can charge it in a ChargedUp station.

Of course, everything depends on levels of uncertainty. We don’t think we’ll ever go back to the way things were. Instead, we’re embracing our status as theUp.co: we’ll continue upgrading the hospitality industry, and looking at ways we can help make things better.