Ajay Prakash
speaker
105 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Ajay Prakash’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's been critical since the beginning. I mean, it started with James's upbringing and growing up in the space and wanting to really being on a mission to help the industry. And as we got started, you know, we wrote our core values in March 2013 and the main core value. was Make Mom Proud, which is really an ode to James's mom who helped us out a lot as we got started.
But the idea there was, you know, whatever you do as you represent yourself and you represent the brand, you know, you should be proud to tell your mom about it. Not just okay that your mom found out about it, but proud to tell them about it And that's a big distinction for us because that's how we want to treat our cleaning partners when we work with them.
That's why when we brought on valets, we knew that having valets be W-2 employees was not only is it better for the customer because they get a better experience, but it's way better for the valet. They get protection as employees. And frankly, it's been better for Rinse because we deliver a better experience to the customer.
And we've actually found a lot of our valets have become operators within Rinse and they've taken full-time jobs within Rinse. So You know, I think that idea of doing the right thing has always been pretty important since the beginning.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it certainly evolved over time. I think, you know, when we started early on, the calendar year was less important and it was more about just continuous progress and always doing better. And the way we used to do it was we would say we did 50 stops in a night. We would sit in a room and say, okay, what breaks when we get to 100? Okay, what breaks when we get to 200 or 500?
And so early on, you're really just trying to manage the complexity and make sure you can navigate it while maintaining an amazing customer experience. We've grown up a lot since then. And so now we're at a stage where what we do is we try to keep it simple. I think there's so many things we could be doing.
And something I say internally sometimes is there's a lot to do, but we don't have to do a lot. And what that means is that there's only a few things we have to really get right to have a successful year. And so what we have evolved to is at the beginning of the year, we start with a one-page strategy. And on that one-page strategy, we'll have an overarching company goal.
We'll have a couple areas where there are key initiatives and I like to work in frameworks. There'll be two or three pillars at most and then some core metrics. What we want to do is have kind of this overall overarching alignment across the company. You know what we're working towards. Everyone has a job to do and it's in service of this broader goal.
And so, you know, last year in 2024, there was a lot of focus on unlocking efficient growth while achieving profitability. That was sort of the overarching company goal or demonstrating profitability. And our pillars were around growth, profitability, and operational excellence. And so it was very clear, you know, if you're working on something, it should be in service of one of those.
And one of the frameworks I've learned in the past is called it's called this even over framework. When we talk about growth and profitability, they're both really important. But what's more important? And so last year, you know, the internal conversation and the way I described it was profitability even over growth. Right.
If we have the opportunity to be be more profitable, have the business be stronger, we're going to take that over trying to achieve more on the growth side. As we transition to 2025, we're still putting the final touches in place. And we have all hands next week to start talking about the year and all that. But there'll be a slight change where now it's gonna be growth even over profitability.
We've demonstrated profitability. We know we're in a good spot, but we still have a lot to do to become that household name and the national brand and really to kind of power all of laundry. And so there's work to be done and we wanna make sure that we're focusing on the right things, but it'll always be kind of,
you know, buttoned up into this very simple, easy to digest one page strategy that allows everyone to sort of know, hey, this is what we're going after.
Yeah, absolutely. We've always been focused on social impact. We've always focused on doing the right thing. We already talked a little bit about helping local cleaners and W-2 valets, but we've also taken clothing donations since the beginning. We've donated several tons of clothes over the years. We've provided free laundry to fundraisers.
During COVID, we helped get PPE to local hospitals who needed it. So it's always been kind of one-off.
efforts that you know we when we can find the opportunity we want to do it but but the general core focus has always been well no but we got to grow and we got to become profitable and certainly when there are things like covet it's like well we got to navigate this whole thing but but i think the nice thing is we've kind of earned the right to formalize this and so we're actually we're we're launching a social impact initiative we call it rinse rise where the idea is where can we provide laundry which is our core focus
to people where it can be meaningful. And so the first partnership we're kicking off this week is with Barrier Free Living in New York, and it's people who have survived and fled from domestic violence. And so what we're going to do is we're going to provide a few months of free clothing care for them as they're kind of working through that transition. So I'm excited about it.
It's going to be, hopefully it's a great partnership we can build on, but more importantly, hopefully it's the first partnership of many under the umbrella of Rinse Rise where we can really have an impact.
yeah i mean i think it is scary it's not for the faint of heart i think it's one of those journeys that is it's it's incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding but it's one that you don't want to limp into and so i i think first it's important to understand There's never a good time to start a business with life because you're always busy. Maybe you're thinking about family.
Maybe there's financial considerations. There's always something that can kind of hold you back. And so I think the key is to really understand if you have conviction and excitement.
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