Until November 2015, Quickee.lk was the overgrown baby of Ashan Whitall and Mariam Moosa’s dreams. Driven by passion, the duo started the business from scratch and generated impressive organic growth. When their finances started plummeting, three friends who believed in them not only gave them the financial support they couldn’t do without, but also pledged intellectual investments to make Quickee much bigger than they had originally thought it could be.

With housing in Colombo changing at an accelerated rate, non-executive Director at Quickee and Director of Corporate Affairs at IWS Holdings Group Dimitri Sheriff assumes for the growing generation of professionals who “don’t have a Somapala to send to the kade”, that being able to subcontract errand work to Quickee is a considerable value addition.

“On top of generating so many orders each month, they had pretty much no overhead costs,” non-executive Director at Quickee and Head of Integrated Finance at Expolanka Holdings Abbas Sethwala explains. “Given the numbers we are working with now, they were definitely very profitable.”

At its best, Quickee wasfulfilling up to 5,000 orders a month, and collecting revenue between Rs300 and Rs400 per order as delivery charges, restaurant commissions and advertising fees when the new partners joined. They estimated that, with capital injections to increase bikes and improve backend technology, the company was worth over Rs40 million. With an investment of around half that value, the new partners helped pay off the debt and started tweaking the business. Sethwala says they are looking at tripling the company’s valuation to Rs120 million over the next 6-12 months.

“Based on our current orders and the capital infusion, the last five to six months have been on-track, in terms of our projections,” Dimitri Sheriff says.

“Food delivery is tough,” Executive Director Nadinka Sheriff says. “Customers are already hungry when they call, they wanted their food half an hour ago. A lot of start-ups focus on tech first and then operations, but we’re going the other way around.”

She uses her logistics experience from five years at McLaren’s to finetune Quickee’s operations, which she is confident are already quite strong.

The only changes to this department are IT upgrades (including automated logistics solutions such as rider tracking) on the backend of the business, which the partners hope will ensure that delivery delays and mixups are drastically reduced. The team has also introduced training, incentives and penalty systems for staff, as well as raised the bar on what type of vendor they partner with, in order to improve customer experience.

Quickee’s revenue stream – comprising delivery fee plus commissions, income from the sale of stocked items such as cigarettes and condoms, and some more from advertising – hasn’t changed. But they have now broken away from traditional commission-based rider pays and begun employing them full-time. As Nadinka Sheriff points out, the move helps them deal with high turnover.

 

The express delivery business was fulfilling 1,200 orders a month and refusing more than 1,500 in November 2015 when the new partners joined. With intentional scaling, which involved a hiring drive and third-party riders who have their own bikes, by May 2016, they were able to fulfil 3,500 orders a month and only refuse a few hundred. Quickee has also managed to clinch deals with a number of important corporate partners from the telecom and FMCG sectors, and is focused on building their B2B service further.

There is undeniably demand for what Quickee offers, and their competitors are relatively new and small. The team plans to catch up to the need and then start aggressively expanding their grid, setting up a second base in either Battaramulla, Mount Lavinia or Wattala, and adding more bikes and business partnersto their profile as they go. They are also looking beyond express delivery to scheduled delivery, and a Quickee app is also on their horizon.

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hittall and Moosa started Quickee in March 2013 on a hunch. They were often wanting food or little purchases – coke, cigarettes, condoms, whatever – too late in the night to go out and get it for themselves. They knew there were probably others out there with the same problem, so they decided to bring the solution themselves.

All they managed to get their hands on to start the business was Rs400,000 scraped together from savings and loans from friends and family. Two weeks later, they had a Facebook page and the basic infrastructure in place.

Quickee instantly became a hit with the growing internet generation that wanted things quick. On their first day of business, three friends and one genuine customer called in. In two weeks, they had 30 unique customers. During the lunch and dinner rush hours, up to 12 Quickee riders now handle between 15 and 20 orders an hour. In March 2015, the business enjoyed a peak of 5,000 fulfilled orders.

When Quickee started, they had no standard to go by, and modelling their business on a similar venture already in existence wasn’t something the not-so-business-savvy founders thought of.

[pullquote]“Based on our current orders and the capital infusion, the last five to six months have been on-track, in terms of our projections”
– Dimitri Sheriff[/pullquote]

Whitall used whatever logistics background he had to work out the intricacies of riders picking up orders from 25 restaurants and delivering to customers from Mount Lavinia to Battaramulla and Colombo 14. Telephone operators would promise delivery in 45 minutes and the restaurant would want 50 to prepare the dish. Riders in the vicinity would pick up items from the restaurant and meet other riders at a designated point, at a designated time. Parcels would be swapped, and riders would head off on the last mile, too often getting lost, caught in the rain or worse, ending up in a motor crash. The impatient customer would finally open the package to find it was not what they wanted. The swap hadn’t gone right.

Being a logistics-driven venture made business that much harder for them, but their customer base grew, because Quickee offered them something they hadn’t been able to get before. Whitall and Moosa did whatever it took to get what the customer wanted to them as soon as possible.

As the months flew by, talk of Quickee grew, but the tone of talk slowly started changing. Rumours of riders and suppliers not being paid for months on end and Quickee messing up orders and blaming restaurants for the mix-ups went rampant.

Whitall and Moosa claim they didn’t know what was going on until the stories started reaching them. At first, they didn’t take it too seriously. Then, friends whose businesses Quickee had partnered with started calling, saying employees were bad-mouthing the company. It took a number of such encounters to convince the dreaming founders that something might actually be wrong. More than 70% of their staff left within a span of three to six months, and only four to five remained. A little digging, and there it was, the cause of what Whitall now calls “the dark ages” of Quickee.

 

With no clue about bookkeeping and time-consuming operations in their hands, the founders hadn’t kept track of their finances.

Within two and a half years, the start-up owed its suppliers just over Rs4 million. Sethwala considers the debt load not too damaging in the grander scheme of things, but the problem was that they didn’t have the cash.

In April 2015, as soon as revelation hit, Quickee left its Rajagiriya office and set up temporarily in Moosa’s family home. They also cut undertakings to 1,500 orders a month.

Then the creditors started showing up. By October 2015, their suppliers’ men were constantly in and out of Moosa’s house. Some had decided to plant themselves there until they got their money back. The couple were desperate, but determined not to go down.

“For some reason, I didn’t want to let go,” Whitall says.

Whitall and Moosa are symptomatic of driving passion and bad business skills. Their commitment to being themselves and pleasing customers has created a strong brand identity that is immediately recognised by their customers and the emerging market as the go-to for anything and everything when in a tight spot. They brought the company depth and organic scale, but sustaining the business and making sure it was financially viable was something they hadn’t managed to do.

[pullquote]“A lot of startups focus on tech first and then operations, but we’re going the other way around.” – Nadinka Sheriff[/pullquote]

In November 2015, brother and sister Nadinka and Dimitri Sheriff, and their close friend Abbas Sethwala bought in to bail Quickee out.

A part of Quickee’s series A funding has also gone towards their new, dedicated office near the Gangaramaya Temple. A sign spanning the width of the building wall displays their new logo outside against the surrounding green. The plain black and white letter “Q” inside a geo-tag pin is in stark contrast to the silhouette of a naked woman in stilettos, which was the original Quickee sign. The change in branding, the management unanimously emphasizes, does not mean that the company is changing.

“One of the reasons we bought in was because of Mariam and Ashan,” Sethwala says “and because their entire soul is in the business.”

Whitall and Moosa are dreamers hell-bent on doing what it takes to keep their customers happy. The Sheriff siblings and Sethwala are business professionals with a keen eye for analytics. The combination of drive and direction, if worked out in continued good relationships, is likely to let Quickee win at everything they decide to put their wheels to.