Fast forward five years and there’s a Fast Company magazine with a photo of an open door on the cover.
The headline reads, “Alfred Becomes Amazon in Person.”
“It’s about turning your home into the store. Services and products are customized to your routine,” Co-founder and CEO Marcela Sapone explains.
Alfred is air traffic control for your life; A dedicated person who visits your home each week, takes care you, notices you, and anticipates you.
Founded in 2013 by Marcela and her Co-founder Jessica Beck, Hello Alfred is a personal butler service that gives you back your time.
While the core of Alfred’s work is maintaining your household so you don’t have to, the real truth lies in the details.
It’s not a transaction. It’s a relationship that gets better over time.
The more your Alfred understands your routine the more intuitive they become. Thus, if you’re home with the flu, not only will he or she drop off soup, they’ll know you’re allergic to gluten and hold the noodles.
“It’s those small touches that really make you feel like someone is taking care of you,” Marcela said.
Hello Alfred’s mission is to redesign the way we take care of our homes; this is certainly not an easy feat, especially when we each possess deeply personal habits.
The execution requires a self-sustaining culture that thrives on learning, collaboration, and rapid iteration.
Ritual is essential at Hello Alfred, where the team relies on daily routines to avoid getting caught in the whirlwind of scaling a startup.
Every Monday at 8:30 a.m. the New York based team declares their aims and goals. They practice the same habit throughout the week.
While they follow up each Friday, it’s the daily round robins that enable them to operate like Alfred’s original client, Bruce Wayne.
Everyone considers him or herself a detective. We try to solve problems as they come up.
The team uses a Slack channel to optimize constant communication, share updates, and default to transparency.
“It’s a level of transparency where if you haven’t hit the goals you projected for yourself in the morning, people are asking for help and ideas on how they could have done it better,” Marcela shared.
There’s no judgement for not hitting your goals. We are always improving together.
Marcela similarly relies on routine to excel in her role as a founder. She spends her mornings identifying three personal goals for the day that she shares with her co-founder and team.
The practice emulates captain’s logs where ship captains are required to document how far they’ve sailed, the elements they encountered, and what they learned.
Reflection is crucial for improvement and the team is constantly reviewing their daily intentions.
“It’s a circle where you’re starting and closing together as a group,” Marcela explained.
These habits stimulate an “electric” culture that continues to build on itself.
“We are trying to be better athletes,” she expressed, reflecting on the team’s relentless quest to improve.
They achieve that by embodying Marcela’s insight: “When something is hard, work on something harder.”
“It’s a day by day battle where you show up and bring your best. It requires you to break a lot of things, make mistakes, and react to those things very quickly,” she said.
“You have to start with conviction because everything else will change.”
Give yourself permission to be the best.
To find out how Hello Alfred’s achieving their goal of becoming ‘Amazon in Person’ tune into Marcela’s episode of Beyond the Headline and follow the team on Twitter.