Setting the Company Vision

When you did enter the business, how did you set your vision?

For me, I’ve had a brilliant career, from mentors and people and what I’ve experienced. When I entered Push Doctor, I felt I had had all the required feedback, training and was ready to pursue it. But when I initially joined Push Doctor and I was COO at Push Doctor, I looked at the absolutely phenomenal and brilliant business. But we had to take it to the next level. Everything that I had experienced at Just Eat and Treatwell, in my hand, I had already been thinking three, four years ahead. I absolutely loved the Push Doctor team but, at that time, we weren’t thinking four, five, six years ahead. We were thinking for the next six to 12 months. We have to think forward. We have to think about where this business is going.

A simple example was, we were the largest provider of private appointments. I said, that’s massive; what do we do from this point onwards? The biggest challenge we had at Push Doctor was repeat. Unlike food and beauty, you can’t make people get sick. The oldest trick in the book in Just Eat or Treatwell is, you send a 10% discount code. If you send that out with Push Doctor, a 10% discount on your consultation with a doctor, people will go, I don’t want to talk to a doctor unless I’m sick.

So how do we generate repeat (business)? If we work with other digital partners, that’s how we can do it. But then the margins on those weren’t so great. We’ve got to work with the NHS. There’s only one way that this can go to where it can go, and that’s really focusing on, firstly, there’s a massive opportunity in bringing the NHS into the new digital era and helping that is absolutely huge. So in my mind, I sat there and I was thinking about three years and I said, it’s got to go this way. From a total addressable market, if you’re thinking long term game, you’re thinking Mr Smith is going to come on Push Doctor. He’s going to have a consultation on Push Doctor; it’s outside of your medical records, which are stored within the NHS and it’s external to all that. You’re then working with other digital partners. These are all external. So then you will have a health record in the NHS, a health record privately, a health record, probably with Apple, a health record with Google. For me, you get to a point where a patient is sitting there to say, I just want this altogether, in one place.

Then we had to ask the question, is that one place Push Doctor or is that one place the NHS? Frankly speaking, we would have had to have spent millions and millions and millions, hundreds of millions. We can’t battle with the NHS. It has £130 billion (expenditure) a year. We felt that the best approach was, how do we actually work with the NHS? How do we partner with the NHS, to bring the digital revolution? Actually, from a consumer perspective, if I sit there and I say to you, Push Doctor NHS product, versus Push Doctor private product, consumers love it. I’ve got the NHS; I’m assured.

But it was a delicate conversation, because I was the new guy. You’re walking into an organization, you’re making recommendations. I moved from being the person learning and growing, to the experienced, to the visionary. Those were all delicate jumps.

How did you navigate that conversation?

It wasn’t easy. From an exec team’s perspective, we had to gauge everybody’s thoughts on it. To Be frank, there was a split in the exec team. Some people felt we should grow privately. Some felt we should grow with the NHS. Some thought we should do both. So there was that first discussion within the exec. The second piece was around the financial model. Does this make any financial sense? Frankly, the private platform burnt a lot of money. A path to profitability, within our model today versus the model of the past, was much easier within the NHS. That’s how we made it make sense.