An Under-The-Radar Task That’s Wasting Your Company’s Money and Productivity

This is one post of a series diving into the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Puerto Rico. For more, follow via www.catgeorge.com or @kittengeorge on Instagram & Twitter
 

4 to 5 days every month are spent managing office supplies and logistics — an under-the-radar a monthly activity that is wasting up to 25% of your HR and Office Manager’s time with a mundane and repetitive operation. Yaydoo is stepping in to eliminate this inefficiency by providing a smarter more effective office management service. Not only does this company based in Mexico City save employee time and enable them to do much more important tasks that will move the needle at your organization. Not to mention, it increases monthly expenses by 30%. The company’s name Yaydoo comes from their enthusiasm to do this task for you and take it off your hands.
Simplifying office management operations decreases a company’s monthly expenses by 30%.
The companies most in need of this service are small to the midsize organizations with anywhere between 30–100 employees. The most popular types of companies working with Yaydoo are technology, marketing, and co-working spaces. Why? These industries manage quite a bit of monthly operational office logistics and care about putting their qualified and effective employees back to productive work (not to mention, more engaging than the administrative nitty gritty to-dos involved in office management supplies). The gist? These companies have highly talented employees and want to keep their talent happy. Improving disorganized office management systems — particularly supplies and managing vendors is the definition of an industry you’d call a super niche. Yaydoo’s current clients include WeWork, Conekta, and Despegar. These companies are the Mexican equivalents to US companies Stripe and Expedia.
What is it about this often forgotten the monthly task that makes it so time-consuming? It’s antiquated communications between suppliers– an industry that is stubbornly allergic to technology and necessitates old school methods of supply and demand.

25% of your human resources team’s time every month is wasted on office management operations, especially restocking supplies.

Yaydoo is providing services for companies headquartered in the largest cities in Mexico including Mexico City, Monterrey, Cancun, and Guadalajara. Simultaneously, they are piloting expanding operations into Puerto Rico by piloting new partnerships with co-working spaces. As with scaling into any new region, Puerto Rico’s office management operations have their own cultural context. As opposed to Mexico and majority of United States where office management and supplies logistics falls onto the role and responsibilities of companies leasing a building, Puerto Rico inverts these responsibilities in that office buildings take over the supplier operations for all the companies in their building. Providing an even easier way to scale by selling to fewer clients (the buildings), and reaching more companies (the subleases). Collectively, these cities in Mexico add up to a total population of just over 18 million people. The economies of these cities and business sectors are flourishing. Guadalajara is the 10th largest GDP city in LATAM, of which most of this GDP comes from commerce that employs 60% of the city. Mexico City’s gross domestic product make it rank 8th in the list of richest cities in the world and is home to the most active startup scene in Mexico along with Monterrey. Cancun is an important tourist destination with a robust economy. Monterrey is a major industrial business center and home to Mexican companies such as Grupo Bimbo, CEMEX, and Heineken as well as a handful of high-profile international companies.

Creating relationships between suppliers, offices and banks open up gateways to new trajectories of high impact growth.

Beyond expanding to Puerto Rico with their current pilot partnership, the Yaydoo team is excited about the possibilities and opportunities of the various trajectories available as they grow. Their business has the possibility to grow in many different directions, including discovering surprising industries who may benefit particularly from Yaydoo’s services. One example of this– banks and financial services companies. By collaborating with banks, the companies can skip the payment hassles that tend to come with payment logistics and create innovative relationships with banks to get credit for their services. Creating relationships between suppliers, offices and banks open up gateways to allow banks to finance productive credit and loans and empower people and companies to scale with resources. Not to mention, having a bank and it’s employees as a key collaborator comes with the perk of access to human capital specialized in finance that can help advise these small to medium enterprises on how to budget and better use their expenses.

Given the very small early stage investment ecosystem in Latin America, fundraising is even more taxing and time consuming for startups in LATAM.

However, Yaydoo’s growth is met with a need for pursuing investment possibilities. The early stage investment funds in LATAM are few and far between. There are a lot of Series A investors, but very few options for even earlier stage investors. This makes the task of fundraising — already an energy taking activity that takes up the majority of most startup CEOs time–an even harder endeavor and taking even longer. Considering that Yaydoo stands out from its closest competitors – in that its closest competitors only work with a single supplier or provide one supply as opposed to office management supplies in entirety like Yaydoo and these “competitors” likewise only work with companies who have over 1k employees. Yaydoo is providing a first of its kind services for an entire sector of companies in a bit earlier stages on high-growth trajectories.

Yaydoo is providing an innovative holistic office management supply service for an untapped market of consumers. If there was a more robust early stage investment ecosystem in Latin America, Yaydoo would be a clear all-star prospective startup investment. They are currently raising a round and the ideal investor is a single, well-connected investor with great distribution connections or venture capital firms with companies in their portfolios with distribution expertise. Examples include banks, enterprise customers, telephone companies to name a few. Is this you or someone you know? Are you interested in increasing the productivity of SME’s workforce and decreasing the inefficiencies of office management operations?

Are you an investor and interested in increasing the productivity of SME’s workforce and decreasing the inefficiencies of office management operations? Yaydoo is looking for you.

Having participated in Parallel 18 business accelerator in Puerto Rico — the program that provided a bridge that opened them up to the opportunity to pilot scaling into this region– Sergio Almaguer, CEO of Yaydoo, shares the most impactful results of this experience on him and his company including the opening up Yaydoo to learn about expanding in the new market of Puerto Rico as well as the positive supportive community of energy-giving entrepreneurs, mentors, and connections that are key components of the Parallel 18 ecosystem.

Sergio shares two resources that have been especially impactful on his entrepreneurial journey and Yaydoo’s growth. First, is a book that shows the importance of culture in impacting your startup and the value of putting an emphasis on passion over profit. This book by CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, “Delivering Happiness“.

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The 2nd book Sergio recommends is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” that demonstrates there are a lot of factors that must coalesce in a moment that fuels a success story that defies the status quo, but there is one thing you can control to increase your odds — hard work.  Hard work is the one thing you can control that increases your odds of success.

There is one thing you can control to increase your odds of success:  

hard work.

Malcolm Gladwell



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