Pink Branding, Capitalist Women, and the Lazy Genius.

Since coming back from maternity leave, I haven't had a social outing if it wasn't church, or a family related. Being invited by Al Abreha, in public, and after reading the stellar review from Diana Yohannes, I couldn't say No to try #EtalemLunch.

I asked Al, how did it start? (He thought this was text-book journalism questions :-D). This Gooday Online thing- his response had me laughing. "I came to Addis from abroad at the time where there was no Ride hailing services. So, when I found a good driver, I noted him down on an excel sheet (and other service provider individuals) and shared with my other Diaspora friends as recommendation. And then they added more people to the list... and more.... and more.... It is then that he had the eureka moment that this could be a business. The ideation was far from the ordinary business planning, analysis and proposal writing. For me this was a systems thinking and a human centered design approaches at its best. This coupled with the "I am too lazy to do the chores, but I want them done well" mind-set is how the boldly pink branded Gooday started! Entrepreneurship could come as a result of many reasons. Being too lazy to do the job yourself is as good as any. Thank you for the brutal honesty, Al.

I will leave it to you, the reader to do your research about Gooday Online but I will share a few things that remained in my thought bank after leaving the beautiful lunch conversation planned for 1.5 hours but ended up being a 3.5hours affair.

After I got married and moved into our 2-bedroom apartment, in which my husband lived for over 4 years alone, we had to make time to clean the house either on Saturdays or Sunday afternoons. With both of us being hygiene freaks, it took all our spare time and most importantly "the honeymoon phase spare time". Putting our OCD level habits aside (and resonating with Diana's argument about what is my time worth), we agreed to get a part-time helper, but faced a difficulty to decide on (a) finding a person, (b) finding a trust worthy person as we do not have many locks in the house, and (c) finding a person with the standards we are looking for.

With out inflating, I have asked over 15 people for referrals. Some who lived in my neighborhood, some who have previous experience of hiring, some who are fresh like myself. After searching for a while I finally landed on a lady who comes to sort me out three times a week. But the vetting process and reaching to a standard of execution, training her and guiding her was a cumbersome task. My helper lady comes to my house at 10:00am. Usually, I would be in meetings at this time or some work that requires my full focus. I remember once while dealing with a work crisis, she called me to ask what I want cooked, and I accidentally pressed the loud-speaker button while she was saying “should I make it with Turmeric or Red-pepper?” Cringe moment!

This is where the value proposition for Gooday Online ’s Etalem Services comes into play. The identifying, training, capacity building, and managing the execution of the helpers saves a good load of time (and embarrassment!)

Al says “our intension is to make the ladies capitalists. For them to earn more, they have to do more, become efficient as well as creative”.  #Etalem services provide an additional income to the talented women who are in the roaster. You know what that means? It means they can send their children to better schools; they are role models of hustling to make ends meet. The confidence that comes with being able to provide for their families. The fact that there is a fee standardization vis-a-vis the workload, planned and scheduled provides dignity to house-help work.

In the meantime, I, as the service requester, can be efficiently lazy by investing time once to give a list of things to be done and outsource the management.

Spending over 3 hours deliberating on this and much more was fueled with the #EtalemLunch made by the talented Wubalem, who is a chef at a restaurant and using her spare time for the extra income. I could already see the discipline she had for time keeping as she excused her self to leave to her other job well in time. Kudos Capitalist woman! And the food…. Was balanced, clean, warm and homey that I couldn’t stop eating.

Taking this opportunity to appreciate the hospitality and the very creative, immersive marketing experience to reach the target group, I look forward to visiting the back end of the operation at the ware-house office as they call it. Hey, I will keep you posted but if you want to experience it yourself call 9675, download the app, or just grovel to Al Abreha for a tester lunch! ;-)