Serving 120+ families with Free Food Daily during the Covid crisis + Business Lessons from the initiative

This a bit different article that you would not normally expect on this site. But I just wanted to express myself.

I am feeling really happy & proud to announce that we are now serving 120+ Covid affected individuals & their families with Free Food on a daily basis.

We started with this initiative on May 8, 2021, when I posted about this on my Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/p/COnHULSjtSc/

I have some lessons for you from this initiative. But before I come to that, let me share the background of how it started.

Last month I got admitted to a hospital because of Covid & then my father too was admitted. Rahul (my elder brother) & Zubin (friend) used to stay outside our wards to take care of us. Throughout the day they were not eating anything. Hospital had no canteen & it was lockdown everywhere. So no place to eat. Swiggy & all is there but it’s not homely food. And when people are ill, you really avoid such food. Thankfully we recovered & came back home.

But we realized a big problem. That attendants who are sitting outside the wards would be hungry all day. It’s complete lockdown still. Plus, families too who are already stressed & running around all day from hospitals to medical stores… we can support all of them if we can take care of this basic need. And that’s when we started the Free Food initiative for the Covid families & attendants.

Business lesson for you – Business too is similar in which you first identify the problem by either going through it yourself or from someone else’s experience & then you create a solution for it. We identified this food problem by going through it ourselves, and then came up with the solution. Of course, your product won’t be free 🙂

Here’s the interesting part:

All the planning & execution of the plan was done within a day.

To take such initiative, we needed 2 things:
#1 Food preparation &
#2 Delivery person.

For the delivery person I posted on my Instagram story & Whatsapp & I started getting leads for that. We have a team of volunteers working for Covid help. So they helped in arranging & we hired the person. For food, my cousin sister runs a tiffin service (that I was not aware of), but she posted about the service on her Whatsapp story. Thankfully my father noticed it. I contacted her & asked her to do the food preparation. Our delivery person would pick the food from there.

So 2 lessons for you here:

#1 Keep promoting your business every time everywhere. You never know when some right person can have a look at it & you will end up getting business. Like my sister was doing by posting about it on her Whatsapp story.

#2 I have no idea or experience of being in the food industry but we managed to pull off the entire thing running within a day. The reason is “Whatever it takes”. When you are committed wholeheartedly to do something, you somehow figure out a way. It was very easy for me to think that “yeah I wanna do it, but from where the food & delivery person will come”. But the thing is, when you commit to something, you always figure out a way.

Here’s what happened next:

On the first day of the announcement of the free food initiative, we received ZERO orders. We thought it’s ok, no worries, let’s keep patience. The next day for lunch we got just 3 orders. And then doubts started coming. We thought what if we just take food packets outside the hospitals with a big banner. That would make people aware. But we thought of waiting for a couple more days.

Gradually we started getting more orders. The word of mouth picked up. And from ZERO orders on the first day, we are now helping & serving 120+ individuals & families on a daily basis today (increasing every day).

The lesson for you is – Everything starts at zero. You need to keep patience when you start with anything. Plus it does not matter if you are doing great in something else. Because when you start something new, you are at zero. So you need to keep patience, give your best & wait for good things to happen.

Here’s the thing I am happy about:

The number of cases in India is on a decline. Plus, the availability of resources in the country is continuously going up. We are happy to be playing a small part in this overall big change that’s happening in the country. I know this contribution won’t even get counted in the bigger scheme of things. But the small number of lives we are able to impact in these tough times are definitely gonna remember us. Messages like these:

This gives us the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile that is actually benefitting others. (Manika is our volunteer who is managing the entire operations).

If you are thinking about the funds for the entire thing:

Right now doing it from the own pocket. They say that whatever you give, it comes back. Well, that is true or not, I don’t know. But I do trust myself. I will earn it back. And btw… my businesses are completely online. So they are still running on complete automation. I take care of meetings here & there, the rest of everything keeps running. So the incoming is there. Thanks to all the team members too who take care of their responsibilities. Yeah, I am definitely not able to put a lot of attention on my work atm, but we know that we are serving a bigger cause, and that’s more important. Things in our country should be completely on track within ~10 days & then I will be back into full work mode with double the amount of energy & focus. Let’s keep fighting!!

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