Focus on your ‘why?’ for mental resilience‍

With their severe allergies to nuts and sesame, and intolerances to lactose and gluten, Aziz Shariff’s family provided the inspiration for the Auckland-based founder’s startup, myWellaBee.

MyWellaBee’s search engine, which is currently live in New Zealand and Australia, helps people with food allergies, intolerances and preferences find foods that meet their dietary requirements.

Shariff quit the corporate world as an executive at Mars to found myWellabee, which has so far been bootstrapped to the tune of around $500,000, contributed from personal savings from the founding team, grants and angel investors. The startup is currently raising a seed round to fund engineering, sales and marketing developments and expand into Canada and the US.

“A startup is really rewarding, it's exciting, it’s mentally stimulating, you're fizzing all the time, but it is full-on,” says Shariff. “And obviously when you're building a startup, especially an early-stage startup, you are operating on a shoestring budget and have limited resources, so you're really putting in a lot of sweat equity.”

Leaning on angel investors, including Pure SEO founder and CEO Richard Conway and Kami co-founder and chair Bob Drummond, has helped ease some of the loneliness and other stresses of the founder journey, he says – as have some of the following strategies.   

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Walking and talking

Where I live in Hobsonville [in Auckland] there's a gorgeous coastal walkway, so most days I head out on a morning coffee walk and take a couple of calls. Putting that into my daily routine helps me calibrate, reflect, or focus on what's most important and helps me build connections with the team. Building that into the start of the day means it’s more likely to happen than if I leave it later in the day. 

People know when they're dealing with me that it's not necessarily going to be a standard Zoom call; it can be a catch up as I'm walking. I encourage my team members to do the same thing because that way we’re building physical movement into how we operate as a startup. 

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‍Evolving from the nine-to-five

We have four other founding members of the team, and a bunch of suppliers that we work with to build our search engine. The four other team members are based in the US and Canada, so it’s a globally distributed team. 

That's why work/life integration is really important for me, because I'll be connecting with people early in the morning or late in the evening. It definitely doesn't fit neatly into a nine-to-five schedule, which is okay, it just takes some getting used to. That's been one of the biggest shifts – evolving from that traditional nine-to-five to more of a work/life integration.

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Family connections

I make a point to enjoy those small moments with my family and be consistent about it. Despite how full-on startup life can be, when my son comes home from school, that time is dedicated to him and my family until he goes to bed. So he comes home from school, we hang out, we have dinner as a family, we stick with the bedtime routine, then once that's wrapped up I catch up with my wife, then I open up the laptop and continue working. 

A startup is definitely not a sprint, it's a marathon. To not resent the startup, it's really important that I carve out those little family moments day in and day out because, as a founder, that’s what gives me the energy to keep going.

It also keeps those connections with family really strong because as much as everyone focuses on the founder, it's their family and support system that is incredibly important for founders to do the mahi that they need to do.

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Fun times ahead

Having things to look forward to makes it easier to get through those tough times and to put things into perspective. So, for example, I've got my in-laws coming in from Canada and we've got this epic family road trip planned across the North Island. We've planned out different stops: Rotorua, Taupo, Tauranga and then one of my all-time favourites, Hot Water Beach. Just the act of planning it helps to put things into perspective. Life is very short and it's about having fun on this journey.

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Do first, do next, do later

In a startup there's a gazillion things to do and not enough time or resources. It's really important to be ruthless in prioritisation, so I use a simple framework called do first, do next, do later, which I learned from Gerry Lynch, who's a former GM at Mars New Zealand and now CEO of Govn365. 

It’s very simple, but highly effective to categorise all the different tasks that you need to do and help you prioritise what is going to make the most meaningful impact – and then to let go of the other stuff. That's been very effective in helping us as a startup, because a lot of it is workload and workload management. 

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Why?

You can get a lot of no’s or wait-and-sees from customers or investors or you can feel like you've taken one step forward, then two steps back. It's in these moments that I really reflect on ‘why did I start this journey?’ 

This is a really powerful ‘X factor’ that helps not only me, but everyone on the team, because we all have this personal connection to food freedom and what it means to our families. So even though there might be some setbacks and it feels like sometimes the odds are against us, it gives us that motivation to kind of keep going and not to give up and to keep trying.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes

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‘How I keep well’ highlights how founders keep themselves mentally and physically in the right shape to deal with the demands of startup life. If you know someone with wellness tips to share, email caitlin@caffeinedaily.co