WORKOMICS: Let’s start with you telling us about Suppli and how it works.

Megan Takeda-Tully: Suppli sits in between food ordering platforms and consumers. Our business today has two main components: physical logistics and a software platform. The software side lets us speak to online ordering platforms that are already taking orders from customers, so that restaurants know when customers want reusable packaging. The physical logistics side is about the cleaning and redistribution of reusable containers, from restaurants to customers and back again. Originally, Suppli had a direct-to-consumer element, but long-term, we are focusing on the software component. We operate the physical logistics here in Toronto, but we might either operate or outsource that component as we move into future cities.

WKO: Do you need to build restaurant demand or is that already there and waiting to be tapped?

MTT: There are regulations that have been imposed in Europe and that are coming to Canada that are banning single-use items. Restaurants need a solution. More and more, when we speak to restaurants, the response is “Yeah, we have to get ahead of this.” Or “We have to do this anyway.” Sustainability aside, we’ve tried to craft a good value proposition for restaurants: limited behaviour change, drive more revenue, and as you do more volume with Suppli it lowers your costs. That’s resonated pretty well with restaurants.

WKO: We know you started Suppli while you were on maternity leave with your second child. Can you tell us about that?

MTT: It is probably evidence my brain doesn’t like to sit still very long. The concept is actually over a decade old, and while I was on leave, I thought, “my brain needs more exercise, so let me kick the tires on this idea.” Initially, I just wanted to see if customers cared enough about packaging waste to pay for the service; and I wanted to see if restaurants feasibly could work something like this into their processes, knowing operations are stressful for restaurants.

It turns out to be very busy to actually build out a concept enough to test it! And it is especially exhausting and challenging to work it into nursing schedules and managing a two-year-old, and then a global health crisis hits and you are suddenly by yourself 10 hours a day with two small children in a very small space.  I feel that if Suppli ends up being very successful, I can do anything in the world, because getting through that initial period tested me as a parent and a human in every way possible.

WKO: COVID hit when your youngest was four and a half months old, right?

MTT: Yes, and I thought “Ok, this is going to be a tiring two weeks, wow.” Five months in and it was really tiring, but I had started building the business and I was really excited about it, so I had to figure out what the give and take was going to be on the family side of things.

WKO: How did you go about figuring that out?

MTT: We bit the bullet, took the financial hit, and got childcare help. Honestly, that was the biggest thing for me. Like many parents during COVID, I was mentally burnt out. It was so much healthier to be able to have focused time on Suppli — pockets of more than ten minutes in a row uninterrupted — and then separate, focused time with my kids and family. I feel that when you’re starting a business, you can do parts of it part-time for a bit. Maybe some people are successful doing it off the side of their desk for a long time, but for me, this wasn’t something where I could really give it a go while being a full-time stay-at-home mom. Either I do it or I don’t.

WKO: It’s an interesting dynamic in those early childhood years, because that’s the age when childcare is the most expensive. Adding that cost of childcare really changes your trade-offs and what feels viable at the family level and shapes the decisions that you make, whether it’s with a career or a business.

MTT: My husband and I have constant check-ins to make sure we’re both okay with the opportunity cost of me not working in a salaried position. Are we comfortable with this investment at this stage in our life? It’s intense when kids are young. It’s something we continue to do on a very regular basis: make sure we’re all onboard and comfortable with this as a family unit. In starting a business as a young family, your family are part of the decisions too. There’s not really a way to separate the two.

WKO: Does it make you wish you’d taken the plunge in the business at a different time in your life?

MTT: Timing is important. I don’t think this concept would have been successful five or ten years ago. But in general terms, yes, I would have loved to be an entrepreneur earlier. Maybe if I had been to university in a different era. Students now have entrepreneurship programs, tons of clubs, tons of accelerators you can plug into. There’s way more infrastructure now to guide someone through that path. That wasn’t there when I was coming out of university.

It’s complicated when you’re a woman who wants to bear children. There was this five-year window where I felt starting something new was off-the-table for me. Don’t get me wrong — I loved the work I was doing at the time, and I was still moving forward in my career. I was just a lot less willing to take giant leaps in different directions, which is what entrepreneurship was for me.

The other interesting part is I’m definitely not the standard entrepreneur that comes into a lot of tech start-up programs. Most of the other participants will be in their early or mid-twenties, and they don’t have kids. I remember other entrepreneurs giving advice like, “You just need to take a weekend, work all weekend, and really figure this stuff out.” Do you think I’m just watching Netflix on the weekends? It’s very difficult in general to start a company, but to build it when you have kids and you want to prioritize family time too — it’s not easy.

WKO: Did you always want to start a business or was it this specific business and this specific idea that prompted you into entrepreneurship?

MTT: I didn’t always want to start a business. When I graduated from university, I thought I would work for a portfolio manager and work my way up in a big firm. Then while I was working at Fidelity I got involved with a small, local non-profit providing free hockey for inner city youth. I worked with them for five years to build that organization; it was super entrepreneurial and I loved it. I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but that is definitely where I got my first taste of entrepreneurship, and really enjoyed it.

Then I moved from Fidelity to another organization called Grand Challenges Canada, where I got to work with very early-stage companies. I loved supporting the build-up of those companies, but I really wanted to get my hands on something of my own. And I didn’t want to just start anything — it had to be something I was passionate about, and I had to have an edge.

WKO: We want to ask you about your capabilities and expertise. You have been on Bay Street, so you knew what makes a company successful from a financial perspective. On the other hand, Suppli is also a technology company, which was less of your sweet spot. We’re curious about how the strengths and gaps in your own expertise intersect with the day-to-day business.

MTT: In the early days, I leaned a lot on my background in finance, and that’s been massively helpful. I think that knowledge helps you set the base and get to that proof-of-concept level. But the whole game plan was to have technology enable what we’re doing, making it scalable and therefore a financially viable business. I find in most areas, you can listen to webinars and figure things out, but it’s not really the case with software engineering. That side of things has always made me feel a bit vulnerable. However, I like to think there’s pretty much a work-around for everything, and the no-code and low-code solutions available now made it possible for us to get our proof of concept together and have our minimum viable product out in the market and operating. We’ve otherwise been able to lean on some great technical advisors to help us navigate the product side of things. Although we’ve certainly made some mistakes and had some pretty substantial learnings along the way, it’s all part of the journey!

WKO: We’re also curious to unpack how you think about employees, both from a business model perspective —how fast, what skillsets— and from a culture and employee experience perspective. 

MTT: All the people that work for us now are people that connected with us when we weren’t in a position to hire them, but we stayed in touch because we saw the potential to work together. I was very transparent all the way through saying things like, “I think you would be amazing; I don’t want to overpromise anything but I would love to keep the conversation open.”  Being really open and honest with people when we saw a potential fit was so important. I would talk about what kind of compensation we could afford, and whether full-time or part-time was realistic.

As a socially-driven company, it’s also important for us to set boundaries. I think it’s very easy for people to throw themselves all-in and burn themselves out. They’re so willing to do anything for the mission, which is amazing; but we have to keep each other in check and try to encourage a degree of balance. Having been in similar positions as an employee, I know how passionate you can be about your work, but you do need to set limits for yourself, and to feel supported in doing so. I’ll typically check-in with the team and say, “You’ve been working a ton. Do you want to take tomorrow off?” or “I don’t need this deadline to be here, let’s just take some time.” I think that has been really important.

WKO: You started the business on your own, but then brought on a cofounder, Julianna. Tell us about that thought process.  

MTT: Even though I spent the previous five years working with early-stage start-ups, I was surprised to find that entrepreneurship is really, really lonely. I’m a Type A person, I like making decisions, I like being at the helm. But I’ve also always been a team sport player.  I didn’t realize how lonely I would feel making all the decisions by myself.

Once we launched Suppli, people would reach out interested in working in a cofounder kind of role. Julianna and I got connected serendipitously, and for me it was obvious from our first conversation that there was a great fit, and it grew from there. I don’t think I could have gotten to this point if I didn’t have a co-founder — and the right co-founder.

WKO: How do you go about determining that you have the right co-founder?

MTT: My biggest concern was long-term fit. I know most companies fall apart because of co-founder strife, so we tried to talk about short- and long-term concerns and have all the hard conversations first.

I said to Julianna, “I’m going to outline on a Google Doc a whole bunch of questions that I want us to talk through. They’re going to be hard questions.” It was life goals — very personal stuff, family stuff. I wanted to share my limits, ask about hers, and figure out if we jived. After those conversations, I felt we could work through divvying up company percentages.

WKO: You send out a newsletter about Suppli, that opens up a lot of the nuts and bolts of the business to a broader set of stakeholders. We’re curious about your decision to do that.

MTT: I send out the stakeholder update email because I find there are a lot of people who are very open and willing to help. We’ve met a lot of people, and I don’t always know who is going to be best positioned to answer a particular question. I think the newsletter lets people know the direction we’re taking and keeps them familiar with us and our journey.

I assume there’s always a chance it might be forwarded, so I don’t put anything super confidential in it. I do like to be as transparent as possible about why we’re making certain decisions, where we’re having challenges. I feel like that sparks much better discussion, and goes a long way towards building credibility. We certainly don’t know everything, and having all these really smart, experienced people take the time to read our updates and ask great questions or challenge certain points has definitely helped us improve.

WKO: What does success look like for Suppli in five years or in twenty?

MTT: The vision for Suppli is to be the digital backbone for reusable food packaging worldwide. In the next five years, we want to be powering reusable food packaging programs across a number of different cities, probably different countries. I’d imagine we’ll be the operators in a few cities, but the goal is for Suppli’s technology platform, with our food app integrations and technology infrastructure, to bring immediate scale to other reusable packaging operators globally.

You know how you see transactions “Powered by Stripe”? I want food transactions to be “Powered by Suppli,” and that it adds confidence to someone checking out on apps X, Y, Z. When they see “Powered by Suppli” they understand and have confidence in the reusable container side of the transaction. That’s where I’d like to be.

I also want to create a company where people feel super valued and just love working for the company. I think the biggest asset is going to be our people, so success for me would be that people feel super proud to work for Suppli, or to have worked for Suppli, or to be partnered with Suppli.