Ahead of January’s Professional Women’s Alliance tomorrow, Doris Huang, Head of Customer Success for evolvedMD, shares the lessons that she learned from the abrupt failure of her business in New York City in the wake of COVID and the road that she has traveled since to reinvent herself as the Head of Customer Success for a local mental health company.
What was your biggest career failure, how did you respond, and how did you learn from it?
After leaving a corporate role at Godiva Chocolatier in May 2016, I spent the next 3.5 years working with an investor to develop a brand-new food hall in New York City, from finding the right commercial real estate and undertaking a major renovation to recruiting nine food vendors and creating an operating plan for a high-volume food and beverage operation. We finally opened our doors in mid-December 2019 – exactly 3 months before COVID hit New York hard in March 2020. Over the ensuing months, we struggled with questions of whether, how, and when to reopen for business, but it became clear that our neighborhood within Manhattan would take far longer to recover than other areas. In September 2022, we finally decided to shut down the business for good.
From the failure of my business, I learned many things: ; what the most important qualities are to look for in business partners and employees; what can happen when the best-laid business plans meet harsh economic reality; how to respond to unexpected challenges with agility and pragmatism, even when disappointment and even despair feel overwhelming; how to navigate how to manage your emotions as a founder and entrepreneur; and, perhaps most importantly, how to carve a new path for myself out of the ruins of my failure.
What are your recommended approaches to handling a professional failure?
- Lean on others. Family, friends, current and past co-workers, professional advisors (like lawyers and accountants), fellow entrepreneurs if you experienced a business failure – all of these people can provide perspective, moral support, and business advice to help you through a tough transition. If you have an executive coach and/or a therapist, those individuals can also provide valuable support with their professional training. Don’t forget that your emotional and psychological well-being are crucial to resilience and bouncing back from a set-back.
- Open your mind. It can be hard to let go of a dream that you’ve been pursuing for a long time, especially if you were making progress towards it. But the old adage that when one door closes, a window opens is very true if you can open your mind to new possibilities, including ones that you may never have expected.
- Use your network. Networking is built for times like this when you’re closing one chapter and opening a new one. Don’t be shy about asking for introductions, being curious about the work that others are doing, and talking openly about the budding ideas that you have for what might come next for you.
What are your top recommendations for professionals to excel in crafting exceptional customer experiences?
- Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. It’s critical to experience your company’s offering from your customer’s point of view. Shop your own product or service as a customer and take note of how the experience feels – is it seamless, or is it bumpy? How’s the customer service? How does the transaction or experience make you feel? Shop competitors’ products or services as well to gather comparative data points or capture ideas that you may want to adopt yourself.
- Ask questions; don’t make assumptions. There’s no substitute for real customer data. Mine customer and transaction data for insights if you have it; if you don’t, then hold focus groups, customer interviews, and/or customer surveys.
- Embrace all types of feedback. This includes negative or critical feedback. This isn’t to say that the customer is necessarily always right, especially as today’s consumer culture allows everyone to have a soapbox. But don’t dismiss the opinions of customers who have “bad” things to say about your product or service – dig into that feedback for nuggets of wisdom if they exist.
- Have a hospitality mindset. Look to the brands that are famous for their customer service and guest experience as role models: the Four Seasons, Disney, Chick-fil-a. These companies live or die by how they treat customers, so even if your industry is far removed from hospitality, chances are that you can learn a thing or two from hotel, food and beverage, and travel and leisure brands that are best-in-class.
Describe your career changes and how they led to the position you’re in today.
When I was in college, I originally thought I wanted to pursue a career in international diplomacy because of my cultural upbringing as an Asian-American and my early interest in policymaking, but I found myself uninterested in navigating the political world. Instead, I decided that the non-profit sector (i.e. foundation or development work) was a better fit for me, and I spent a few years working for a global social entrepreneurship non-profit called Ashoka in Mexico City.
In due course, I came to feel that although non-profit organizations are crucial to a thriving civil society, I wanted to work directly in the economic engine that drives change through business and commerce. To pivot to the private sector, I applied to and attended business school back in the U.S. at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton opened many potential paths for me in business, including the job that I eventually took post-graduation at Godiva Chocolatier’s headquarters in New York City.
Godiva’s office happened to be located in an area of Manhattan that I came to believe was ripe for development – the Garment District, named for the textile factories that used to be there before the 1960s and 1970s. Over the few years that I worked there, I became convinced that a business opportunity existed for better food and drink options for the office workers, commuters, and tourists that thronged that neighborhood every day. After securing an investor, I left Godiva in the spring of 2016 to embark on an entrepreneurial journey to develop and launch a brand-new food hall called The Deco Food + Drink.
As you already know from the story of The Deco’s demise during and after COVID, my business venture turned out very differently than I had hoped. However, at the beginning of 2021, I relocated to Phoenix with my now husband, who had received a job offer in Tempe and who, like me, was looking for a fresh start away from New York. I literally did not know a single soul in Phoenix. My instinct was to start building new relationships one by one, however, so I asked family and friends if they knew anyone at all in Phoenix who would be willing to have coffee with me. One such introduction was to Scott Weiss, a well-established attorney to entrepreneurs and tech companies in the Valley, and he generously introduced me to six or seven other individuals, each of whom introduced me to one or two other people in turn. Eventually, one of these paths led to me meeting the head of sales for the company where I now work, evolvedMD, a mental health company based in Scottsdale. While I never thought that I was qualified to work in healthcare, thanks to my purposeful networking and to the faith of evolvedMD’s founders in what I can contribute to evolvedMD’s growth, I’m now a very happy and very fulfilled member of this local company’s leadership team.
How is your approach to business different in Phoenix vs. New York?
Compared to New York, Phoenix is driven by a much smaller, tighter-knit community of movers and shakers who strike me as truly motivated by communal gain more than individual gain. Virtually everyone whom I’ve met here has been open and generous with their contacts and connections, whereas in New York people tend to be much more guarded and circumspect about helping you unless it’s clear what you can do for them in return. In Phoenix, business and community leaders seem much more united in their desire to see Phoenix advance and succeed as a city, whereas in New York people are more concerned (and overtly so) about getting ahead personally. I find myself much more comfortable being open and transparent in business dealings in Phoenix than I ever would have dared to be in New York, which I think is a huge advantage that Phoenix has in fostering collaboration and community-minded impact.