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Ritu Narayan Episode

Ritu Narayan Episode

How to Scale Trust Into a Billion Dollar Business

July 09, 2024

For this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sat down with Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zum, which has had incredible success in the field of student transportation. The company began as a private service to tackle a problem Ritu was facing herself: how to function as a working parent dealing with erratic pickup and drop-off schedules.Before long, it became clear that there was a far larger opportunity to change pretty much everything about how all kids get to and from school. Pivoting to working with school districts and a fleet of electric buses, the company set out to “modernize student transportation to make it safe, sustainable, and accessible for all”. To say it’s been a success is an understatement.Zum now serves thousands of schools in multiple states, and in February 2024, it hit unicorn status with a valuation of over a billion dollars. As Ritu says in our conversation, “the service is for everybody.” We also talked about everything from carbon-neutral buses to cracking the procurement system of public school districts, the invaluable asset of parental peace of mind, scaling care, and more, including:

• How Ritu came to entrepreneurship

• Scaling trust

• How coming from the outside allowed the company to transform the industry

• Shifting from a B2C company to a B2B company

• Zum’s values: customer obsession, doing things the right way, thinking big and executing meticulously, and building better communities.

• How a clear mission makes alignment easier

• Zum’s “Five Step People Program” to reinforce culture and behaviors

You can watch and listen on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Meanwhile, here are some of my favorite takeaways from the episode:

The outsider perspective is a bonus. Needing to learn how an industry works from the ground up may seem like an obstacle, but it can actually help identify areas in need of reinvention. And, as in Zum’s case, leads to billions in contracts.
Never get your strategy confused with your vision: “Ultimately we were really solving the problem for children and parents, no matter which way it went through,” Ritu explains.
Don’t be afraid to pivot, no matter how insane it seems. Zum started off as a B2C company, but soon realized that reinventing as a B2C company was the way to make a bigger impact through a larger company that would be much more sustainable.
Acting on customer feedback is key to growth: A culture that clearly values and responds to customer feedback is the foundation of any business that hopes to grow as quickly as Zum has, and it’s grounded in trust and satisfaction.
Financial success and solving social problems go hand-in-hand: With the right structure, companies can scale the positive impacts for every stakeholder. All it takes is a conscious decision not to prioritize one over the other.

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Where to find Ritu Narayan:

• X: https://x.com/ritun

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritunarayan/

• Zum: https://www.ridezum.com/

Where to find Eric:

• Newsletter: https://ericries.carrd.co/