Female Disruptors: Shireen Salehi of GoMaterials On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
“Focus on your core”.
This is one of my key mottos, which was particularly helpful in the early phases of the startup. It comes down to understanding what your product is and what customers are really paying for. Narrow your focus on that. You would be surprised to see how difficult this can be.It’s easy to get distracted by the number of great ideas that you’ll have and continue to bounce off one another. But getting carried away with these ideas will ultimately affect the quality of the final product you’re offering your customers.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shireen Salehi.
Shireen Salehi is the co-founder and CMO of GoMaterials, one of the fastest-growing start-ups for landscape materials in North America. Having left the corporate environment at Mattel working in Global Brand Marketing, Shireen felt the call to take on a new and challenging adventure in an industry where the lack of female C-Suites is especially prevalent. Shireen brings a unique perspective to the green industry as one of the few leaders looking to solve its complex supply-chain issues with technology.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I worked for 5 years at Mattel in product and global brand marketing, but I had always had a vision of starting my own business in collaboration with my friend, Mike, from business school. Mike and I had started meeting regularly to come up with innovative ideas for a startup. His friend Marc who’d started his own landscaping business for ten years was also looking to get involved in a new venture.
Marc joined in on brainstorming sessions and inspired by the troubled experiences sourcing for his landscape jobs, the roots (pun intended) for GoMaterials were beginning to be formed!
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
The landscape industry is far behind as it relates to tech innovation, particularly in the supply chain. As a result, industry workers need to work 32% more for the same level of output as other industries. GoMaterials is disruptive because we are intervening in the landscaping supply chain issues head-on with our tech. We’re helping landscaping professionals with the estimation, sourcing, and delivery of plant and tree materials to their job sites in the most efficient way possible. Our successful run in the last few years is the best way to demonstrate that tech-based services like GoMaterials can solve real-world challenges for landscaping.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Not many people know that when we first started, our business name was “Redwood Materials”. A couple of months after we bought the domain and created some of our basic branding (including logos, colors, etc), we found out that a new venture by the same name had just been launched by an ex-Tesla founder!
Needless to say, we knew that any chance of our brand ranking on Google felt unachievable. We contacted the business to sell the domain and quickly pivoted to GoMaterials.
In retrospect, our brand name today is much better seeing as it is descriptive and indicative of what we do. Here’s the lesson: be mindful while picking your business name before going through the hassle of investing in branding. I also learned through this experience that sometimes what might seem like a setback is in fact a blessing in disguise.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve had many mentors along the way that were both budding and established entrepreneurs. The magic of mentorship is that you can ask the same question to three different mentors, but they will all give you a different answer. It is so rewarding and can be highly educational to hear different perspectives and approaches on the same challenge or issue. This way, you can make the best final informed decision.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruption is always good when the objective is to solve a real problem and/or to improve the ways things are currently done. It’s important to ask yourself: when all is said and done, will the disruption have caused a net positive in the lives of the people impacted? If so, it’s a good thing. If not, then that’s a case where disruption wasn’t necessary. Not everything needs to be reinvented- as the cliché idiom goes, you can’t reinvent the wheel!
To illustrate this point, I think that one of the reasons that so many start-ups fail is because their organization is not solving any problems and day-to-day headaches for their target audience. Perhaps startups sometimes fail to recognize the needs of their customer. So how can that be gauged? You need to see whether you can get repeat purchasing customers at scale.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please share a story or example for each.
“Focus on your core”
This is one of my key mottos, which was particularly helpful in the early phases of the startup. It comes down to understanding what your product is and what customers are really paying for. Narrow your focus on that. You would be surprised to see how difficult this can be. It’s easy to get distracted by the number of great ideas that you’ll have and continue to bounce off one another. But getting carried away with these ideas will ultimately affect the quality of the final product you’re offering your customers.
“Walk before you run”
This motto exemplifies how to build a sustainable business. Make sure that you have strong building blocks in place before you aggressively scale. We learned this in our early days before we had a real website. We were considering spending on paid media to attract leads. One of our mentors detracted us from this and pointed out that we would be spending thousands on ads that would likely be wasted since these leads had nowhere to convert. Instead of jumping right into paid media, we invested in a comprehensive website instead and we’re very happy to have made that decision!
“Stand by your values”
Figure out what values are most important to you as you build your business and remember to always stick to your guns! Let those values guide you in making the next big business decision.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We’re just getting started! There is so much more work to be done with GoMaterials in our mission to help landscaping businesses source more efficiently. It’s an exciting journey. I’m currently working to continue working on scaling the business and innovating the landscaping supply chain with more advanced tech innovation! Making our tech platform more intuitive for our users — both wholesale plant nurseries and landscaping companies will be the first step. The idea is to enhance our platform further to solve concrete, everyday issues in the industry.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by “women disruptors” that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Being a disruptor means that a large aspect of your role is navigating the hurdles thrown at you. In a business context, this could mean building a team from the ground up, fundraising, negotiating, and convincing your stakeholders of the value of your big idea.
While every one of these steps is a challenge, women disruptors unfortunately still have a harder time than their male counterparts trying to overcome these hurdles. Gender bias continues to massively impact the startup and venture capital community. The stats speak for themselves- in 2021, the investment of venture capital for all female-founded teams had actually decreased as per a Forbes report. At its height in 2009, it was 2.8%. Mixed-gender teams of founders also have less venture capital than their all-male team counterparts. There’s no denying that there is differing treatment leading to meager investment in women’s ideas and innovation.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
Yes, I do! It’s Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” TED talk. This powerful talk focuses on shifting the ordinary business paradigm- instead of trying to gain customers by presenting the what and how the product or service does and instead you should present the why of the company. In other words, Sinek compellingly argues that companies thrive when they can successfully communicate the core values of their business. Companies first need to figure out what they believe in. This talk is included in everyone’s onboarding at GoMaterials.
What I’ve found is that once you have a why for your company, it gives a sense of direction, clarity, and motivation to your entire team. Sinek also has a book, Find Your Why, which is a super practical and actionable guide for organizations to find their why.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would it be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 😊
I’ve always loved the idea of “Paying it forward”. This notion is that when someone does something for you, instead of paying that person back directly, you pass it on to another person instead. This creates a domino effect of good for a larger number of people. I think this kind of movement could inspire some positive sharing of knowledge and expertise in the field of business, especially.
On a smaller scale, one movement we’re started at GoMaterials is similarly positive. In one of our Slack channels, any team member can shout out another team member for a job well done. It’s contributed to creating a fun culture of appreciation and celebration of other team members. Also, by specifying what the employee did successfully, it is its own form of paying it forward by showing behavior that other team members can also learn to emulate.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have a lot of favourite quotes, but my favourite life lesson quote is by Steve Jobs ; It really resonated with me when I first read it:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things”.
Anytime we’re considering a new initiative, a new project, a new launch at GoMaterials, I’ll come back to this quote. It ends up being a practice of discipline to make sure you are continuously focusing on what is most important.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can follow me on LinkedIn under “Shireen Salehi”.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thank you for having me!
Female Disruptors: Shireen Salehi of GoMaterials On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.