Great Balls on Fire

Hi Boba Guys and Gals,
A big update for you all. First, we made a COVID-19 page for all the latest updates about what we are doing to evolve our business model during this crisis. We’ve been pretty good at keeping it current, so please refer to that page as the single point of truth.

Since our big blog post on March 15th, we’ve been releasing bits and pieces of our Boba Guys Express model on our Instagram. However, we want to get ahead of everything like we usually do and share with the pubic what to expect next.

Boba Guys Express
As of today, we opened two stores with the new Boba Guys Express business model: The Burrow (Brisbane) and our Hayes Valley (San Francisco) store. We had some hiccups along the way like bringing our POS to its knees, but we seem to have figured out how to throttling demand and improve efficiency. As we’ve said this whole time, public health is our top priority. If we see unmanageable crowds again, we will shut down the store. Last week, we anounced that we even turned off DoorDash for a store because the demand created a public health hazard.

Rollout of Future Stores with Boba Guys Express
It seems as the peak is behind us in SF/LA/NY, but we must stay viligant in keeping the curve flattened. The shelter-in-place rules will stay in effect at least through May, so the best model to sustain our business and keep the public safe is our Boba Guys Express model. That means the limited menus, no customization, and contactless systems you see now will remain indefinitely.

At this point, we feel confident that the Boba Guys Express model can scale, which brings us to the big topic…

#ReversingTheSnap (Bringing Back our Team)

As we’ve said in our initial post, the moment we went into hibernation, the remaining four of us (me, Bin, COO Katie, and chief-of-staff Jesse) had one mission: reverse the snap and bring everyone back. We made the tough call to close early for public health reasons— we simply couldn’t pivot our model quick enough to address growing health concerns from the public and team members (and their parents). We now know it was the right decision as the new model is working and we’re actually hiring again…

Our focus now is to hire responsibly while addressing risks to personal health. As stated before, we know a lot of our team live with those susceptible to COVID-19. This is nearly half our team member base, so we inevitably have a cap number on who we can bring back. This is all to say that two things will happen:

1. We cannot re-open our stores with the Boba Guys Express model as fast as we’d like.

2. We will need to hire from the outside. We did also lose a couple people from our management team who switched companies/sectors. We know there will be more as a part of natural attrition.

We just want to be upfront about why we are hiring— we need more, amazing people who want to bridge cultures. (Btw, if you got those UI benefits, we advise keeping it. It’s a sweet ass deal.)

We also want to be incredibly transparent about our upcoming PPP Loan. There is a forgiveness portion but we need to spend it on payroll within a 8-week time-frame. If we cannot rehire enough of our team, we lose the forgiveness portion and it turns into debt— something we’re collecting every day with our stores being closed. Debt is not good. We share because there are tens of thousands of businesses around the country going through the exact same situation as us. We share our situation— just like we did with Wells Fargo, my congressional testimony, and interviews— because we are trying to change the system or at least push it to be more considerate. And together, we have.

About the Future

I’m going to soon share a couple internal emails that we sent out a while back to gather a list of individuals who wanted to come back to Boba Guys. At the time, we didn’t know if they harbored deep resentment about the layoffs. We know many supported our decisions, but we have to assume some didn’t get it and probably never will. As a leader, you learn the hardest decisions are easily critiqued. As I tell my mentees and team, you just gotta be confident in your decision-making ability. And if those decisions are always rooted in the same core principles, you’ll be fine. You know ours: Quality, Transparency, Giving a Damn, #DialogueWins, and #DoYourHW.

For now, we want to tease a theme in our internal emails…

We do not want another cultural war in this country. A great article came out recently— is the post-COVID America more like the Great Depression or Great Recession? One exacerbated income inequality while the other slowed it down. We are aware that there’s a growing divide between workers and employers, have and have nots, and most importantly, extremists and moderates. As a company that prides itself on bridging cultures, we think the solution is simply #dialoguewins. The world is incredibly nuanced and we often lack the empathy and curiosity to see the beauty and truth in the nuance.

I end with a scene with one of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting. In it, a wise-ass Will Hunting thinks just because he’s read about Michaelangelo, he knows what it’s like to be in the Sistine Chapel. I think that’s a lot of what’s going on right now. We need a lot less posturing and a lot more empathy— and the only way to empathy is to have real dialogue.

Onwards.

Andrew (and Bin)