"I’m not that ambitious": How a London-based twenty something grew her national business from the ground up

Mona Aboushamalah begins her day doing damage control.

Every morning, seven days a week, she begins putting out fires. From her home in London, Mona is sat at her desk, computer and phone at-hand, resolving customer complaints and facilitating with her team.

This twenty-five-year-old is no stranger to last-minute phone calls and Zoom meetings. Her work-from-home post is convenient. She tends to clock out around three or four everyday. All the better for Mona to sneak a workout at the gym and spend quality time with her family.

However, it’s difficult to keep your phone muted at the dinner table when you’re the chief operating officer and co-founder of a company opened in 13 cities across the country.

1StopLaundry, a speedy pickup and delivery laundry service based in London, is only one of many business proposals that Mona invented. “I have a folder on my laptop called ‘failed business ideas,’” she laughs. “I would always go up to my brothers and say, ‘Hey, I think we should develop this, or I think we should do this idea’ […] and they always just ignored me or told me to kick rocks.”

Chief among these abandoned ideas is a digitalized grocery cart. Acknowledging the time and resources it takes to travel and meal prep, Mona conceptualized a self-service cart that allows a customer to scan their items as they put them inside. By the time they have completed their payment and shopping, they are free to leave.

Mona put together a slide deck and pitched the idea to her family, only to be shut down. Less than a year later, Canada’s first ‘smart grocery cart’ emerged at Sobeys.

It was only a matter of time before her family would finally concede with one of her business ideas.

According to Firas, CEO and co-founder of 1Stop as well as Mona’s older brother, Mona “has always been a tinkerer” and “breathtakingly ambitious.” Throughout their childhood, this meant hanging out with her brothers at the skate park or getting into NFL and UFC. Today, it translates to the origin of the company and its mission towards constant advancement.

“She came up with the idea, as she always typically does,” says Firas. “And you know, when it came to the actual execution, she's always building on what could be the next thing that we can do, what's the next daring avenue that we can take this business?”

Mona’s love of innovation is embedded in her need to give back. “I wanted to do something that was meaningful. I did not want to go into a career that was not just going to benefit me but actually fill my cup.”

She began her post-secondary career in nursing school. For some time, she was fulfilled by the field’s commitment to compassion. Bedside care came naturally to her.

She would still be in nursing today if not for her persistent desire to reinvent or fix things, something that she felt would not be cultivated if she continued this path.

Instead, she finished her degree in computer science at Western University to pursue a career in tech. “The reason I love tech so much is because you can do so much with just your simple resources,” says Mona.

Following graduation, she worked as a customer solutions engineer at a tech company based in Colorado. Mona credits its founders and her coworkers for influencing how she runs her own business. This made the decision to quit in order to tackle 1StopLaundry head on an extremely difficult one.

In fact, she only left May of this year. Until that point, she and her brother, Firas, were balancing their nine-to-fives and maintaining 1Stop at the same time. To meet customer needs, they would deliver orders themselves during their lunch breaks.

In particular, the first six months of starting the company were the hardest. “I remember crying sometimes. I was just so beyond capacity that it was not healthy. You know when there's something you love, and you want to give it your all, but then you reach a limit where it's taking a part of your soul and you're giving too much.”

For Mona, the intersection between her personal life and her work life lies in her family. She works with her older brothers, with Firas serving as CEO and her eldest brother having built the software that enables laundry orders to be sent to one of 1Stop’s partnered laundromats. Her parents were also a driving force in getting them off the ground, with Mona’s father having been a project manager for 35 years and her mother doing all the washing and folding herself for nearly the entire first year of business. Fast-forward to today, 1StopLaundry is flourishing and positioned to franchise in the U.S.

However, that’s not to say that Mona’s hardships can simply be distilled to customer service or marketing woes.

Being a woman in both business and tech is a constant battle of getting your voice heard. Paired with imposter syndrome, there are days that have Mona feeling less than the sum of her hard work and sacrifice. “If I'm in a room talking to whoever it is, and I'm with my male co-founders, the attention is all put on them, so I just feel like maybe I shouldn't be there, maybe I don't belong here. So I have to remind myself and kind of lift myself up, because no one else can do that for me.’

In the end, Mona believes that she’s “not that ambitious.”

“I don't want to take the attention away from anyone else, everyone has such a core part to play.” Instead, she credits the entire force of individuals behind 1Stop, family or otherwise. She makes no mention of her 3.8 GPA at Western. Nor does she say that at just nine-years-old, she attempted an ollie over set of stairs—a skateboard trick that her older brother wouldn’t dare do until he mustered the courage. She doesn’t need to; her ambition speaks for itself.