# Andrew Otchere: From 7 Failures To Building ReFill, Ghana’s Largest Pharmacy Aggregator

An episode of [The Peswa Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1781537541), 11 May 2025, 1 h 10 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/110e1ce70/podcast/play/117753075/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-2-31%2F421135809-44100-1-a083d42a6e1946f6.mp3

Send a text This Episode of The Peswa Podcast is with Mr. Andrew Otchere, the Co-Founder and CEO of Refill, a groundbreaking health tech company revolutionising access to medicine in Ghana. After dropping out of university and experiencing seven failed business ventures, Andrew’s resilience and vision finally paid off with his eighth venture—Refill, a company with a clear mission: make medicines available and affordable for everyone. Ghana faces a deep healthcare challenge—2 out of 4 citizens live with chronic conditions, yet many can’t find or afford the drugs they need. In regions like the Upper East, there isn’t a single functioning pharmacy. Patients are left stranded. Refill is changing that by empowering pharmacies and healthcare spaces with tools to track, supply, and provide affordable medications. But Andrew isn’t just tackling infrastructure—he’s challenging a broken system where pharmacists are trained only as retailers, not caregivers. This interview is a masterclass in grit, purpose, and real-world impact. Whether you’re in tech, healthcare, or simply need inspiration—this is a story you don’t want to miss. 📩 Connect with us: • Follow Bill on Instagram: @billcobbinah • Follow us on all socials: @thepeswa 📢 Subscribe The Peswa on all Platforms: https://linktr.ee/thepeswa Get access to amazing royalty-free music for your projects — sign up for an Uppbeat account using the referral link: https://share.uppbeat.io/cy9fcqqxj4tg #entrepreneurship #podcast #productivity #business #africa #Ghana The Fresh Patch Podcast - Where Good Pets Get It. Welcome to the Fresh Patch Podcast where we talk about everything, from dog... Listen on: Apple Podcasts Support the show

## Transcript

[0:00] Seven few businesses, you're still pissing in your house for
[0:07] the next business idea, Yes, Where is that food coming from?
[0:10] At least two out of organia have a chronic country.
[0:14] And I also, I mean at UGMCI was just going around asking
[0:18] questions, talking to doctors, talking to patients, each
[0:21] person, it's like a zoo of problems and everyone's main
[0:28] problem comes to 1 medicine. After all the doctor does comes
[0:32] to medicine. People don't know where to find
[0:35] medicine and when they also know they can't afford.
[0:40] So the model became very clear, Empower access to healthcare,
[0:43] empower the pharmacies, empower the hospital, empower the health
[0:47] insurance, empower the patient, empower everyone within the
[0:50] healthcare space that if you need medicine, you can actually
[0:53] have it. I dropped out of school for two
[0:57] reasons. Wait, university?
[0:59] Yeah, I dropped out of school. The education system trains
[1:04] pharmacies to become retailers. So they complete.
[1:09] They don't know how to talk to a patient.
[1:11] There's no empathy in their line of work.
[1:14] It's transactional. If you walk into a pharmacy, you
[1:18] want to get medication, you will not be interacted.
[1:20] It's just how much? But where's your money?
[1:23] OK, here. Here's a take your medicine.
[1:25] And there's no follow up, what is going to follow up to check
[1:29] on, but in our price, there's no pharmacy in particular how?
[1:43] Friends in Acquire the World Beyond.
[1:46] I just had a conversation with Mr. Andrew Archery, and that's a
[1:49] conversation you're about to listen to.
[1:51] And funny enough, I didn't want to.
[1:54] I I was trying to stall this conversation.
[1:56] I really was in the mood to come to the studio today for us to
[1:59] have this recording, but it's turned out to be a very, very
[2:02] impactful conversation. He's a Co founder, CEO for
[2:06] Refill. What he essentially do is the
[2:10] enhancing of availability and affordability to medicine,
[2:15] particularly for chronic people, I mean, generally for everybody.
[2:19] And there are a lot of insights he shared from his experience.
[2:22] This is like his eighth business, you know, And I
[2:26] promise you, you will enjoy this conversation.
[2:29] But then as a community, there's something we've been thinking
[2:32] about. You know, here at the Peso
[2:33] broadcast, we see that we believe entrepreneurs will build
[2:38] this continent. And we mean that we want to
[2:40] throw all our ways behind it. And so in our bid to do that 2
[2:47] central things, we want to create entrepreneurial stories
[2:51] and create them as well. So far, the conversation you'll
[2:53] be having are just efforts and our bit to create those stories
[2:57] so you can hear them and take on the journey.
[3:01] And now we want to also want to focus on the part where we
[3:04] actually are involved in creating these stories.
[3:08] And our first item line is to you realize from this
[3:11] conversation, we touched on the fact that people who go on to do
[3:14] great things are people who are exposed and a strand of exposure
[3:20] comes from reading, you see. So we want to introduce to you
[3:24] as a community book reading club.
[3:27] So what's gonna happen is that I'm going to announce a book in
[3:32] our next episode, a book we're going to be reading.
[3:35] And then we give ourselves a timeline to read that book,
[3:38] complete reading that book. We're going to keep ourselves
[3:40] accountable on our socials here on the podcast.
[3:43] And at the end of the period, we will invite 3 or 4 random people
[3:48] in our community to join me, have a conversation about the
[3:51] book. This is intentional.
[3:54] We know that these things are way of stirring us up to take on
[3:58] the challenge. My one gather thinks you're
[4:01] considering doing the the creating a fund right to support
[4:05] small businesses. And we are on the lookout for
[4:09] partners in that regard as well. So we have a lot of exciting
[4:12] things coming up as a community, we're going to build this
[4:16] continent. And we're not just a podcast.
[4:19] We're a community of people who are very committed to changing
[4:23] the African narrative, and we will get that done.
[4:26] And so that said, please encourage your friends and your
[4:30] family and yourself, 'cause you realized about 82% of the people
[4:35] who have watched or listened to our content have not subscribed.
[4:39] So I don't know what you're waiting for subscribe share
[4:42] because it goes a long way to help us and then the team to
[4:45] keep doing what we are doing. But anyway, as a mantra goes,
[4:50] build something, just build something and enjoy the
[4:53] conversation. You've you've built this very
[4:57] important company, right? That is somehow flying Lou under
[5:03] the reader right. And it's very interesting
[5:08] because I, for one, I really pay attention to the Ghanaian
[5:11] digital tech space A lot, you know, and when cleaner mentioned
[5:17] that, oh, there's this company called Refuel, I think we should
[5:19] talk to them. I know their founder, Like, what
[5:21] company is that? And I should, OK, let me just
[5:25] check it out and out just can't information online only for me
[5:28] to realize that you guys are really doing impactful work.
[5:32] Yeah, he said. It's intentional.
[5:35] Very intentional. I can give you a scenario like,
[5:39] you know, I know go to how we began and all that, but
[5:46] everything depends on the foundation.
[5:48] What are you building on? What are you standing on?
[5:51] So if it is to make people know what we do would have been all.
[5:56] Over the place, yeah. But that's not the aim.
[6:01] But you see that the kind of work you do, yes, people have to
[6:04] know what you do to make it more impactful maybe.
[6:08] When you're doing it for the first time, you shouldn't start
[6:11] from there. OK.
[6:12] If it says if there was an existing business or existing
[6:16] model like what we have now, but just do billboard ads and of
[6:21] course just on board clients and off you go when you the other
[6:25] one chattering the cost for the first time.
[6:27] Yeah. Then you have to really get to
[6:29] the ground and dig your head down.
[6:31] Keep your head down, keep digging.
[6:33] You need to find your facts, understand the persons you want
[6:37] to serve properly and and the channels that really works for
[6:42] them. Otherwise the biggest problem
[6:44] you'll be faced with is people know about it.
[6:47] Tomorrow, other people copy what you have, launch similar
[6:50] products, and that's the team you lose, you lose steam.
[6:56] Yeah. So our deliberate effort has
[6:59] been to keep your head down, get the work done.
[7:02] Let's get the, the, the trenches up that way.
[7:06] Well laid out or dugout so that when we channel the rivers in,
[7:10] you don't have any handles. Yeah, along the way.
[7:14] OK, so Refill is essentially A telepharmacy startup.
[7:19] Let me give you a So Refill is a is a tech company that focuses
[7:24] on healthcare. OK.
[7:26] So that's what we are, a health tech company.
[7:29] Our main focus is empowering access to healthcare.
[7:33] OK. We focus on medication.
[7:35] Access to medication is our key business and then affordability
[7:39] is our next. OK, so.
[7:41] We come in here 2 fronts. Access, Access and
[7:44] affordability. That's it.
[7:47] OK, so how are you talking the access now?
[7:49] So Access, we started off with working with the traditional
[7:53] pharmacies in town, onboarding all of them basically.
[7:57] So we work through the community, practitioners of
[8:01] pharmacies, work with the pharmacy council, we work with
[8:05] the young professional pharmacists.
[8:09] All of these are existing institutions that have held down
[8:12] the pharmacy industry for decades in our country.
[8:16] OK, now, so that's our first step to get institutions on
[8:22] boarded, on boarded because the patients are already there
[8:25] anyway. Now the next thing was to.
[8:29] But what? What value do you provide for
[8:31] these people? The supply and the supply,
[8:34] what's your value for them? What do you tell them?
[8:36] Traffic. Oh, OK.
[8:39] They their pain is that they have medicines that's expiring
[8:43] on the day. OK.
[8:45] Every pharmacist pain in Ghana today is expires.
[8:49] OK. Now if the medicine was being
[8:52] consumed then they have 0 or almost 0 expires.
[8:59] So if pharmacy sets up 500, usually the regulation allows
[9:05] them to set up 500 meters apart in any area.
[9:09] Now if a pharmacy sets up, they can't advertise based on the
[9:14] style of industry they are in. Regulatory wise they cannot.
[9:18] Oh, OK, so no pharmacy is allowed to advertise like that
[9:22] now because of that. What it means is that what they
[9:27] can do best. They're going up, you see here,
[9:30] Kina Farmer and all along the radio.
[9:32] But how? They they are, they advertise
[9:35] specific things like prostate. So they are talking about
[9:39] diseases and what they have created locally that supports
[9:44] OK. But you was in a pharmacy
[9:48] typically you have many brands, you have Sanofi, you have
[9:53] Pfizer, you have AstraZeneca, you have Rush, you have all of
[9:58] it mixed with the locals and then the generics and then the
[10:04] all types of them on their on their shelves.
[10:07] OK. When a pharmacy puts up a
[10:09] medication on their shelf, they actually don't know who's coming
[10:12] to buy. It's a hope that someone coming
[10:15] by and that's their pain. OK, now, even though when you go
[10:20] to college you have a chain of pharmacies along the road, right
[10:24] to see the hospital, each time a doctor picked out shortcut and
[10:30] actually there's the doctors from those hospitals use our
[10:32] shortcut just by way of speaking, they passed on to the
[10:36] patient. Why?
[10:37] Because none of those pharmacies along the road still has the
[10:39] medication that doctors prescribe because by virtue of
[10:45] infrastructure and supply and demand, they actually can't also
[10:51] stock everything because they do not even if they are right at
[10:54] the doorstep. But he doesn't know the guy
[10:56] working out of the hospital is coming to look for Medicine A or
[10:58] Medicine B. Yeah, all of them are hoping the
[11:01] guy will buy. So if you go through them, they
[11:03] all have same medications, most of them hoping that people will
[11:07] buy. If, you know, the person is just
[11:09] working out of the hospital and the person who works at the
[11:12] hospital goes to each of these pharmacies by the roadside right
[11:16] in front of the hospital, none of them has his or her
[11:18] medication. Then they have a patient who is
[11:21] inward spying on the bed. The hospital does not have the
[11:26] medication. The pharmacies by the roadside
[11:28] right by the hospital does not have the medication.
[11:31] Just two days ago we were dealing with some emergency
[11:34] supply for a patient like a cancer patient.
[11:38] Two different prescriptions within two hours, one
[11:41] prescription at a different hour.
[11:43] After a few, after almost an hour, another prescription from
[11:46] the same patient. They need this now as the person
[11:50] is going into some situation and you ask yourself that you mean
[11:56] all of these don't have, yes, out of six medications or one
[11:59] prescription, this one has one but doesn't have the actual
[12:03] dosage. He has another type of dosage.
[12:05] This one has one, but he doesn't have the brand or the quantity.
[12:09] So those are the dynamics. So how are you correcting that?
[12:13] So by bringing all the pharmacies we have on our
[12:16] marketplace, once we have a prescription, the marketplace is
[12:21] our place to go. All the pharmacies within a
[12:24] region you can say yes, I have this I.
[12:26] Have I have. I have.
[12:27] I have. Somebody, sometimes 6 pharmacies
[12:30] will respond and say I have this one, I have this brand, I have
[12:32] near expiry, will the patient be ready to buy?
[12:35] I can reduce it. Somebody says I have the actual
[12:38] one, I have the actual dosage, I have the actual quantity, but I
[12:41] can only supply 2 on your list of medications.
[12:44] So it means after the six medications or one prescription,
[12:47] you have to get the rest from another set another pharmacy.
[12:51] But because of how we've run our system, it's easy for all these
[12:54] pharmacies to respond within seconds to say here, here, here,
[12:57] here. Then by aggregated system, of
[13:00] course relying on heavily on intelligence 123, we put them
[13:05] together, medication is ready to go, delivery moves from one hub
[13:09] to the other, pick up medications and send it to the
[13:12] patient. Oh wow, So you work with like on
[13:15] the delivery side of logistics like you work with?
[13:17] So yes. Companies or.
[13:19] So we work with the private couriers who work with younger,
[13:24] who work with both Uber. Then of course, the pharmacies
[13:27] also sometimes have their own delivery.
[13:29] System, yes. Nice.
[13:33] How many pharmacy change have you gone?
[13:35] So we started off boarding. We onboarded our 6800 plus in
[13:42] one suite from one meeting of course.
[13:44] But how did that happen? Well, it's, it's simple but
[13:49] complex. Let me put it this way.
[13:52] So once we laid the fact out there of what their need is,
[13:57] everybody says Samia. Oh, OK.
[14:00] But of course it's contractual. So you have to meet certain
[14:05] terms. So if you check our our
[14:08] documentations, we will we will highlight about 470 what we call
[14:12] fulfilment partners. A fulfilment partner, sorry,
[14:16] sorry, a fulfillment partner meets certain criteria, you
[14:20] know, and for a fulfillment partner pharmacy, what it means
[14:24] is that they have a pharmacist, they have good stock because
[14:32] some of them even have deliveries, which is a plus.
[14:34] If they do that's not a requirement.
[14:39] They have good communication skills, they have a good
[14:42] customer service. They stick to instructions that
[14:46] we offer them because you need to attach the medication
[14:51] instructions on how to take it OK, because and you must be
[14:56] ready that if a patient needs clarification, we can rely on
[15:00] you to provide them OK. Most pharmacies don't have this
[15:04] structure. Very few do.
[15:07] So as we move on with them, as at today, we can confidently say
[15:12] that 470 thousand those 6000 meets that criteria.
[15:15] Yeah. But that is also because we're
[15:18] expanding region by region. Today we are in 14 regions.
[15:22] So in those, yeah. But I mean those two, I think in
[15:26] a week there's a campaign that's covering that.
[15:30] So that will be 15, of course then.
[15:35] But in Appa is France, there's no pharmacy particularly.
[15:39] How? That's the problem.
[15:41] So you have a lot of pharmacies in Accra 42 from account last
[15:49] date about 40% of the pharmacies in the country sit in Accra
[15:54] alone. The rest are scattered in over
[15:59] the counter type of drugstore in the rest across the country.
[16:04] So they feel. Pharmacy in the Upper East
[16:05] region. There isn't.
[16:07] We're trying to get some people to set up something.
[16:11] Oh, so you see that their options are just in in hospital
[16:16] pharmacies or? So the pain is even worse when
[16:19] you go to the in hospital pharmacy.
[16:20] The in hospital pharmacy also doesn't have the capability to
[16:23] stock so they have something they can meet the essential
[16:27] needs of the. Hospital.
[16:29] That's very interesting. But not the need of the guy who
[16:34] has also been prescribed. What do you think is is a hold
[16:36] back clearly there's a market or is it purchasing power of the
[16:40] people in the? App we used to think it's
[16:42] purchasing power, but what you realize is that if you go to
[16:47] excuse me, please like Choco esparsitamol for 20 pesos, 50
[16:52] pesos why can that medicine be up there as well?
[16:56] 50 pesos, esparsitamol for 100 CDs, it is, yes, also 50 pesos.
[17:06] Basically what we're seeing is that the persons who are
[17:10] spreading their, their pharmacy distributions do not consider
[17:16] certain regions. If you go to Ashanti Region, for
[17:19] instance, and in our experience you have for doctors, they use
[17:26] our shortcut more than the doctors in Accra.
[17:29] Typically they'll tell you it's not here, the medicine is not
[17:32] here, we don't have it because they know almost every pharmacy
[17:38] medicine is not there. It's an acquire.
[17:40] It's an ACRA, that's what you are dealing with.
[17:45] So it's not just even the distribution I'd say, but the
[17:50] failure. For me, I'd say that the failure
[17:53] from a healthcare system so far has not helped to distribute
[17:56] data enough for people who sell at pharmacist to know what is
[18:01] in. If you have persons within that
[18:04] region who whose common diseases, glaucoma, blindness
[18:10] medicine in that area or even specialist hospitals for just
[18:16] that. There are some in thermal but
[18:19] driving it across so the glaucoma patient would need
[18:22] medication. It's a chronic illness.
[18:24] Yes. How is the person going to keep
[18:27] getting medication as it come to a car at some point because the
[18:32] medicine is short in supply there or there's no pharmacy?
[18:36] First of all, a drug store that sells over the counter
[18:39] medication cannot sell chronic person's medication.
[18:43] Because the regulations are used.
[18:46] So even if there's a drug store there, what they can sell
[18:49] paracetamol and some few stuff, the rest they can't do.
[18:53] So if there's a guy with glaucoma there, how would he or
[18:56] she get medication? Wow.
[18:58] You see very impactful business you're running.
[19:02] And so now you're tackling the availability problem.
[19:06] You mentioned that another block is affordability.
[19:09] So now you know availability is still on the essentially what
[19:12] happens is that if you're a patient, a patient is in need of
[19:16] medication, right, you just dial a shortcut.
[19:18] Was it now? Star 928.
[19:20] Star 100 hash. OK, Star 928, star 100 hash and
[19:24] then they try to get to dialing. They just dial.
[19:28] Some people put it in their names.
[19:30] OK, when you put in your name, we've just activated our virtual
[19:36] assistant. We call it Reva, revise, refill
[19:38] virtual assistant. It's pure AI, natural voice,
[19:41] natural intelligence. It speaks naturally.
[19:46] OK. The person dials that even
[19:48] there's a number you can call or if you dial the shortcut it will
[19:50] call you back, interact with the person.
[19:53] We're moving it. Currently it's doing English and
[19:56] a few other international language, but we're moving it to
[19:59] local of languages. It's also a test we're doing now
[20:02] so that if a person cannot speak English, yeah, they still need
[20:07] to get medication, can interact with them in their language.
[20:10] Is it the option where after dialing the short code, a
[20:13] contact person from your? Yeah, yes, your call.
[20:16] So once a person has a short code, the next thing is that
[20:19] they get to enter the medication.
[20:20] OK, Some people put in the name of the sickness.
[20:23] They'll tell you that I have pain in my neck.
[20:25] They write it right there or they will say, Isaac call me,
[20:31] people write to us stuff. Somebody will say my armpit, my
[20:35] name. But us, yes.
[20:38] So our our team of pharmacists will call them in addition to
[20:42] our augmented AI system that does their support to call the
[20:46] person and interact with them and then understand what pain or
[20:49] what is that is happening. And of course, because they are
[20:51] pharmacists, they know that OK, with this particular situation,
[20:55] you need to go to the hospital. But if you have a prescription
[20:59] for some medication, they'll assist you.
[21:02] Take the prescription, serve you through our fulfillment
[21:06] partners, and get the medication for the person.
[21:08] OK, wait, were you at the PSI events?
[21:10] No, I wasn't. There's a during the pitch
[21:13] events that day, another company someone came to pitch something
[21:16] similar. We we heard about it.
[21:18] Yeah. OK, interesting.
[21:20] Good. Because we need we need
[21:21] solutions like this in our market.
[21:22] OK. So on the, so that's the
[21:25] availability block. On the affordability, how are
[21:28] you? So medication financing, it's
[21:33] probably the reason why we fall within the low income earning
[21:37] structure in the sub-saharan African market.
[21:43] Now what it is is that you have different groups.
[21:48] One group is persons who can afford medication no matter the
[21:54] price. Health insurance augment some of
[21:57] this for some people. But if you've understood that
[22:01] health insurance in in Ghana so far, you can tell that the
[22:05] National Health insurance has a very, very, very, very
[22:08] restricted block where they it can serve certain medications.
[22:14] The Mahama care, I believe, is stepping in to cater for some
[22:17] aspect of it which is for chronic persons.
[22:20] OK. But then we look at medication
[22:23] financing in general. The institution themselves are
[22:26] lacking one pain, they're lacking one.
[22:30] The persons who need the medication are also lacking in
[22:33] there. So we have the diaspora option
[22:37] where a person can use any of these remittance tools.
[22:41] Currently doing some work with the Z pay and Comiso.
[22:45] They are remittance guys focusing on being able to pay
[22:48] for medication for someone. I know if my friend or my
[22:52] brother or my family members in the US or UK or Germany, they
[22:56] can easily pay for my medication in Agra or in any part of Ghana
[23:01] for that matter. That's one part as complex as
[23:05] that bet is. What we've tried to do is to
[23:08] make it easy for the person who is receiving the medication to
[23:12] be able to tell my, tell their family, mother, hey, you don't
[23:16] have to send me money anymore. You can pay for the medicine
[23:19] directly, OK? Because that's the, our system
[23:21] has that traceability to show who's paying and who's receiving
[23:25] well, medicine and whatnot. So there's that bit.
[23:28] Then they have the other part where the, we have another
[23:32] partner we work with focuses on actually giving people credit to
[23:37] say that, hey, your medicine is 600 CDs, I'll pay for you
[23:42] upfront. You have three weeks to pay back
[23:46] now. We tried that model with a
[23:49] program we started off with Rush sometime last year.
[23:55] The model was to be able to allow cancer patients to be able
[24:00] to have finance, but they need it.
[24:02] So that's the twist. You find those whose medications
[24:05] are very expensive actually need financing more than the regular
[24:10] person who doesn't even have money to pay for a payment
[24:14] person. So structuring payment models
[24:19] for them allows them to be able to stay on their course.
[24:22] And this is for mainly chronic patients.
[24:25] OK. So we, during our survey in
[24:30] 2023, one of the patients we interacted with, she's 62, she's
[24:37] her average incomes about 4500, but she needs 2800 every month
[24:43] to get her from medications. Now the question of your
[24:47] sleeves, how's this person going to keep up?
[24:50] She's she's, she has, she's diagnosed of diabetes and she
[24:55] had just been diagnosed of glaucoma by the time we met her.
[24:57] So she has two comorbidities. Now, these are different chronic
[25:03] conditions. That's the other twist to what
[25:06] you discover in our system. Persons with one disease usually
[25:10] have two or three more. So they were initially on one
[25:15] hypertensive medication, but now they have to pay for chronic
[25:18] kidney and then also maybe acute heart failure, anything related
[25:24] in that regard. So structuring payment plans is
[25:30] what we've been doing so far. Take care.
[25:34] So essentially you help people pay for medications flexibly,
[25:38] you don't have to have the money up front exactly the help of
[25:41] partners like Rush and. So they are also made financing
[25:46] persons. So what we have, we have of
[25:51] course in 2024, we used that to study what's really works.
[25:56] Because if a person has a bad credit score, then the credit or
[26:02] financing organization also has a concern.
[26:05] So they want to go through any of the telcos to get their right
[26:10] credit score for the persons on how they pay their loans, XYZ
[26:13] and other. But what it is, is that you
[26:16] can't put a price on health. That's the painful bit.
[26:21] So as much as you want to get the medication for the person,
[26:26] you need to really understand how their financing is.
[26:29] Now that's the problem in our markets.
[26:31] You see I also run a credit based business, but it's in real
[26:35] estate and doing for tenants. So we have to do initial checks
[26:41] on tenants to be sure they can afford to pay knowing a car in
[26:44] Ghana appearance in bulk, Yeah. So we are providing
[26:47] infrastructure where tenants can pay rent monthly.
[26:50] Now the bottleneck is that 2 two things.
[26:54] Yes, there's a lot of scanty data on people's
[26:57] creditworthiness to know that OK, this person can afford this
[27:00] can afford it. And then even when you've been
[27:04] able to gather some data to see that OK, this person can afford
[27:09] to pay. This is the issue of willingness
[27:10] to pay in our market. You have to the recollection has
[27:13] to be so fame that he feels like you're choking the person
[27:17] because he he has to be so tight, right?
[27:20] And so giving these like elements of strain in offering
[27:25] credit in our market, how are you navigating that?
[27:27] So what we've realized is that when a person is nowhere, they
[27:33] have an obvious feeling that they're about to die.
[27:41] In studying some bit of human psychology in that area, what
[27:44] we've we've learnt is that people do anything to live.
[27:49] OK. So if it means calling friends
[27:53] to pay up to go there, OK. Now when the person is having a
[28:00] chronic condition, they know then that this will kill the
[28:06] person one day, but they want to live as long as they can.
[28:11] So what does it take? From what we've gathered so far,
[28:17] you have few people defaulting, OK, when it comes to these
[28:20] things because every 30 days they need that medication
[28:28] anyway, so they'll pay. They have to pay for it.
[28:30] Yeah. So if you offer them something,
[28:33] then the person says hey, and they know that we solve
[28:39] affordability on one part. Let me just check that.
[28:43] So what the person would have bought for a monthly cost of
[28:49] this person, let me use this lady.
[28:52] Lady Exos cost is 2800. Upon meeting with us, she's now
[28:59] spending 1600 on the medications.
[29:02] OK. How she forms part of a group of
[29:06] people who are looking for the same medication.
[29:09] So our model allows all our fulfillment partners to say,
[29:13] yeah, yeah, I need it off my shelf.
[29:16] Yes. I need it off my shelf.
[29:19] Before you have the traffic, take the medication then and
[29:22] give me the business. That's interesting.
[29:24] So yeah, it's a demanding supply like I said.
[29:28] So if you create it right then you get it cost.
[29:31] So instead of she paying 2800 now she's paying less.
[29:35] So therefore she has some extra. She says hey.
[29:39] That's an interesting perspective 'cause I was just
[29:41] kindly thinking that, well, if you're going to be a middleman
[29:43] between suppliers and people who need a supply, there's really
[29:49] going to be in a mark up because you have to make money.
[29:52] Because it's a business. But now that you've explained it
[29:56] this way, it gives me some sense of how well the pricing can
[30:00] reduce and you can still get to make your money as a.
[30:01] Business and we're doing the same for I mean even the health
[30:06] insurance companies we work with, all of them will tell you
[30:09] that we want good pricing. Yeah.
[30:11] Now a typical health insurance would want to and they, they,
[30:15] they've been doing it to the methods of course, one of them,
[30:19] two of them said, where have you guys been and what it is that
[30:25] they have to onboard every pharmacy individually?
[30:27] Yeah. But now you guys have that we
[30:29] log in. Exactly.
[30:30] So if they connect to our APIs then it's like straight away.
[30:34] Makes sense they have access. To now, their core business of
[30:38] their core business of insurance is what they do.
[30:40] We do the rest. So it's the health insurance
[30:43] company. They just keep funneling in
[30:45] their prescriptions. Yeah, we do the rest.
[30:47] We send back the bill to them and it's an easy business.
[30:50] For the great, great business. Impactful.
[30:53] I know you're 38, right? You're a young man.
[30:56] Prime, prime of your life. How did it start?
[30:59] So my business had collapsed to a year into two years after
[31:08] COVID and that was like my business #7 I think wow.
[31:17] So what business was that tech? I've been in IT business, IT
[31:21] tech, IT consulting business for since I left Vodafone in
[31:26] 20/20/2013. I was working for the phone as
[31:30] of course Ghana Telecom. Then I left in 2013 and I
[31:35] started, of course before that I had this side gig as we always
[31:39] audit, but then I decided to make it my main business.
[31:43] So in 2019-2020, wasn't due to COVID but just bad
[31:52] organizational governance, we had to shut down.
[31:58] Now, after the shutdown, then of course, I still have my one or
[32:03] two things I do on the side. But then the point is, what's
[32:07] it? What are you going to be doing?
[32:10] So I remember one night, I think in 2020 too late 2022, October,
[32:17] I was just piercing up and down my house, thinking of what next,
[32:22] What next? Because I like to solve
[32:25] problems. I like to to be in tune with
[32:29] complex problems that I can dig my hands in.
[32:33] And just about the time I was thinking about what to do, so
[32:38] the next morning was a Saturday, the next morning on a Sunday,
[32:42] my, my gofounder, David, she, he's a pharmacist.
[32:46] So he sends me a problem out of the blue.
[32:48] This I know, Mama, we're good friends, but not on a Sunday
[32:52] morning. So I look at the problem.
[32:54] I'm like, it's easy. So I start drafting it.
[32:59] So I drafted the solution I sent back to him so we can, he said.
[33:04] How do you know what we can do? Because.
[33:06] Even for years. But well, you are not a
[33:10] healthcare healthcare professional.
[33:12] How do you know as well? OK, I'll structure some.
[33:15] So when I started putting it, I said, yo, come on, this is it.
[33:20] This is what I've been thinking. OK, so the problem is pharmacies
[33:25] struggle to keep track of medications for chronic
[33:29] patients. They don't have a system even
[33:32] now they don't have a system that helps them to track, manage
[33:37] and then process the orders of medications for chronic persons.
[33:41] That's a problem. And it's a whole thing that they
[33:43] were discussing on some platforms and I said, OK, I'll
[33:47] draft it. So I drafted a solution, put it
[33:49] together. Then I called another friend of
[33:51] mine, Kofi Asuma, and said I think we can make a business out
[33:54] of this. So I did a skeletal structure of
[33:58] IT business that solutions. I sent it to him.
[34:01] A week later he called me, OK, we have a dashboard.
[34:06] So I looked at him like, OK, let's get into registration.
[34:11] So 2023 we started registration. Last two years ago.
[34:14] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just moved March, We
[34:16] launched March 2023. We launched the MVP and realized
[34:21] that, OK, here we go, it's selling.
[34:24] It's solving the problem that we thought couldn't be solved so
[34:27] easily. We had managing the patients
[34:30] whose medications were on our system, a pet, they get alerts
[34:35] back in 1960. Also for 1940 to 1960, America
[34:41] had a system where they use postcards and phone calls to
[34:46] remind persons about their medications.
[34:49] So they switched off and added initial was just a postcard that
[34:54] added the phone calls because people were still forgetting to
[34:57] fill in in the postcard. You have to when they send it to
[34:59] you, you fill in your refill data and send it back to them.
[35:03] Then the medications are organized and then they realize
[35:06] that it's working to some level, but it's still cutting out a
[35:10] large group of people. So they added SMS.
[35:13] SMS was supposed to be an easy option where people get SMS
[35:17] alerts about their medications and next.
[35:19] But when the person gets the alert, they need to act on it.
[35:23] And that's where the problem was ending at.
[35:26] So when we looked at it, we said, OK, we can solve all the
[35:29] reminder problem. I need the patient engagement.
[35:33] The patient's real pain is that after you've told them they are
[35:36] due for refill, they don't know where to find the medicine.
[35:39] So we launched the next, We pivoted literally to what we,
[35:44] you now know as fine, my Med. That's where the shortcut came
[35:46] in. So the short code was to
[35:49] introduce the interaction to kick off the next step of the
[35:52] person making the effort there my amlodipine ex, my amlodipine
[36:01] or my ex forger or this. And that is finished.
[36:04] I need a refill. So they started off like that.
[36:07] Then we turn out that the biggest challenge actually was
[36:11] that almost everyone needs to find medicine so that.
[36:16] Was not just. Chronic, not just the chronic
[36:18] people. So we had to open it up.
[36:19] OK, so that's where the shortcut, we started putting a
[36:22] few billboards and went to radio and all of that was just testing
[36:26] to see. And you could see that thousands
[36:29] of requests coming in, everybody asking for medication all over
[36:34] the country then. So let's cool down here, take
[36:42] all the information you've received.
[36:43] Let's go back to the drawing board.
[36:45] Where is the problem coming from?
[36:47] So that's how we found out that the problem was people don't
[36:51] know where to find medicine and when they also know they can't
[36:55] afford. Yeah.
[36:58] All right. And the third problem was that
[37:01] there are not many or enough pharmacies that can actually
[37:04] serve certain medications. So people are travelling around
[37:08] literally somebody will tell them though the medicine is
[37:11] Nacra, Acra is as you know it. Where in Accra.
[37:16] One friend of mine said that he spent three to four hours
[37:19] driving through communities in Tama just looking for 2
[37:22] medications, 4 hours for his sister who was dying.
[37:28] So the point is can he just done the shortcut and put the
[37:34] medicine and he said to you just did it, 15 minutes, medication
[37:38] is at doorstep 15. Why there are two communities
[37:44] away, That's where the that's where the medication is, just
[37:48] two communities. But how could he have known?
[37:51] He had already driven through 4:00 to 5:00 communities 'cause
[37:55] if you have the junction, do you know should go left or right?
[37:58] Which pharmacy has the medication when you get there?
[38:01] They tell you we don't have the quantity, we don't have the
[38:04] dosage or what we have is also near expiry.
[38:08] If a person needs it for 60 days or 30 days, what they have is 15
[38:11] days expiry. So who has what?
[38:14] Then you have doctors who doubt it, who doubt the shortcut and
[38:18] say, hey, can you guys help us find this medicine?
[38:22] We have a patient about to go to theatre.
[38:27] When I I saw that particular one, our pharmacist was talking
[38:32] to the doctor on the phone. I laughed because I was like,
[38:35] this is insane. You mean you have a patient
[38:39] about to go to the theatre and you are asking us to find new
[38:42] medicine? Say yes, we have 8 minutes, OK,
[38:48] let's do it. So we go ahead.
[38:52] We call the doctor and say OK, we found the medicine, who's
[38:55] paying? That's the problem, Said can you
[38:59] deliver it because the patient is about to die?
[39:04] Deliver. So somebody has to take the
[39:06] risk. So we take the risk, have it
[39:09] delivered and then the patient survives, said, OK, here's your
[39:13] cash. We don't do cash.
[39:15] What's a test basically for us? So we don't do cash at all.
[39:19] We do all our payments are digital.
[39:21] So you have to also not enable digital payments for people.
[39:24] Is there a reason why there's no new cash?
[39:26] Yes, because we don't control the Courier.
[39:28] OK, OK, OK. So you should want someone to
[39:31] collect the cash. It has to be the Courier guy
[39:32] like you have for the food business.
[39:34] But we don't do that. OK, so that allows these
[39:37] payments to work? OK, So what's happened from that
[39:40] test? Oh yes, for that, yes, we had to
[39:43] do cash because one of my colleagues literally had to go
[39:45] there. That's David himself.
[39:46] He went there because the other problem was that the necessity
[39:50] to start that medication anyway. So not to dive into all that,
[39:56] but this is how we tested stage by stage what we plan to do.
[40:03] OK, so the model became very clear.
[40:05] Empower access to healthcare. Empower the pharmacies, empower
[40:09] the hospital, empower the health insurance, empower the patient.
[40:12] Empower everyone within the healthcare space that if you
[40:16] need medicine, you can actually have it.
[40:19] It's a very beautiful story because seven businesses in you
[40:24] kept going. Yeah.
[40:25] I'll ask you about why. What?
[40:27] Let me ask you now, what made you think that you had to keep
[40:30] going because mean you had a job with Vodafone.
[40:32] I'm sure you'd. Oh yeah, Well, and you decided
[40:35] to set out to do something on your own and seven field
[40:39] businesses. You're still pissing in your
[40:43] house for the next business idea, Yes.
[40:46] Where is that fool coming from? So I think that, you know, I've
[40:52] been exposed to a lot of, I read a lot, so I look out for what I
[41:05] think came to me naturally. I would say is that there are
[41:10] many people with different problems.
[41:14] Some people can solve some problems.
[41:18] I thought of myself as one. I remember when I was 16, I
[41:26] think I first thought about the idea that the people in my
[41:29] neighborhood don't know how to distribute, to dispose of the
[41:33] rubbish. So if I could hire some guys in
[41:37] the neighborhood, then we could, I could get them to.
[41:42] I wouldn't be the one to pick up the rubbish, but I could get
[41:45] people to do that and I think people would pay for it.
[41:49] I thought it was a good idea, but I shelved it.
[41:52] I drafted it, I did a whole design of it.
[41:55] And then when I was 17, I thought about why do we have to
[41:59] keep using our hands to weave candy?
[42:01] Why can't we get to? So I drew a machine back in the
[42:03] day that I thought could be of that.
[42:06] Where is that? Where is that coming from?
[42:07] The that's my, that's my core question.
[42:12] Am I bringing it was a father like that?
[42:14] It was a mom like that. So I lived with my grandmother
[42:20] for my grandmother. She was.
[42:26] This is interesting because anything there's a trend picking
[42:32] up speaking to founders on this podcast, right?
[42:36] About 60% of them live with their grandparents.
[42:41] It's interesting dynamic OK is that most of these people were
[42:46] raised by their grandparents. Yes, she she raised me since I
[42:49] was she has stroke when I was 13.
[42:52] And that's my my biggest pain in my whole life.
[42:56] I mean, she was like, she was like, my God, my everything, you
[43:03] know. So when she fell sick, I was
[43:05] helpless. I was completely helpless
[43:09] thinking about what to do. How do I help her?
[43:13] She has stroke and I, I'd never seen somebody with stroke
[43:16] before, so it was quite a thing for me.
[43:19] But that woman was industrious. She had, she was a nurse, a
[43:25] community nurse. She had a cattle farm, she had
[43:30] orange farm, tangerine farm, chicken farm, Turkey farm.
[43:36] Where in Aqua. No, we lived in in some back
[43:38] then. OK, she had all of that and she
[43:41] was to her nurse doing her nurse duties.
[43:45] You would never find her idol. Never.
[43:50] Never. She was, and I was with her
[43:52] almost, I mean, literally all the time.
[43:54] She's going here, she's coming here.
[43:56] We go to every Saturday, we are going to one of the farms and
[44:00] she owned these farms and she had a lot of workers on all
[44:03] these places, all these farms. So I think.
[44:07] You got that from here, I think, so I can show me that after
[44:11] school when you're working with Vodafone matter if you felt like
[44:15] there is more you could do, yes, and that's why you set out.
[44:18] So I'll give you a shocker. I dropped out.
[44:20] I dropped out of school for two reasons.
[44:27] Wait, University? Yeah, I dropped out of school.
[44:30] Your school? Ghana Telecom.
[44:33] Wow. Yeah, I dropped out of school
[44:35] for the first reason was that I used to wonder what they were
[44:40] teaching. Sorry.
[44:45] And so I, I started working before I went to school
[44:49] actually. So instead of going to school as
[44:51] my colleagues were going to school, I went to get a job.
[44:54] I got it. So I said yes, yes, yes.
[44:56] So I got a job with Vodafone before I went to school.
[44:58] So you said why did your portal can not telecom again?
[45:00] When was that you didn't understand what you're?
[45:01] Trying to yes, yes, I I used to wonder because what I knew in
[45:05] the real world didn't exist in the school.
[45:08] And I asked myself like after this, what am I going to do?
[45:12] So I left Ghana Telecom and I signed up with NCCNCCIPMC had a
[45:17] program with University of Cambridge that was teaching
[45:21] business IT, which I found very interesting in cyber security
[45:25] stuff. So I signed, I signed up with
[45:27] NCC and it was great. I mean, I did full two years.
[45:33] Then my shift at work for some reason was moved because we, I
[45:40] used to go for lectures in the afternoon.
[45:42] Then the school changed the lectures to morning.
[45:44] I have to be at work. So now I'm torn between working
[45:51] school. So I had to drop the school.
[45:55] But in dropping the school, what I set out to do was then I'd
[46:00] have to be better than anybody, everyone within that group.
[46:06] And when I left Vodafone and set up my company, I mean, two years
[46:12] later, I hired some of my friends, my friends from the
[46:16] schools, by the way. Interesting.
[46:18] So it proved to me that obviously it's not, I don't
[46:22] believe in it. Our education system, you know,
[46:24] I that's it works for some people, it's just not for some
[46:28] of us. What do you think your core
[46:29] value is on that front? What?
[46:35] What value is that place in you that you didn't find in the
[46:39] school? Problem solving OK, I I didn't
[46:43] think what was being taught solved the problem.
[46:46] I'm and perhaps if people want to, if it's some people's nature
[46:53] to work for some people for years.
[46:56] Today I'm not that type. Yeah.
[46:59] I when I was in waterfall by the third year under to exit, my
[47:03] pastor would didn't let me. He kept saying I just stay.
[47:06] I stayed on for two more years, but I I get bored with not just
[47:13] the monotony, but I I can't find progress.
[47:16] I need to make a move. And I like progress.
[47:19] It excites me. So we have to make progress.
[47:23] In other words, what's the next thing?
[47:27] So we're doing something, but life evolves, yes.
[47:31] So why are we not evolving into something?
[47:33] Why are we not building something new?
[47:36] Let's move on. So if we're not moving, then I
[47:39] have to make a change there. So when?
[47:41] You when you made the resolve to be better than any of the people
[47:45] in your group at the time, what did you do?
[47:47] Reading Great. I went, I spent.
[47:51] I still do it, of course. I spent hours reading in a week,
[47:57] try and read about 15 books or more.
[48:00] Just read a lot because I realized that I was very limited
[48:06] in information and if I met anybody who had just finished
[48:11] university with PhD or Masters or whatever, I want to be able
[48:16] to look at them in the eye and make them feel that they need
[48:25] me. Oh dear, you mentioned this out
[48:26] of me. It's good.
[48:30] It's good you mention the reading thing.
[48:33] Yes, no longer. A friend of mine wrote this on
[48:35] Medium about how the people who go on to do great things, being
[48:41] great and subduing the world so to speak, is a function of
[48:46] exposure. Yes.
[48:47] And exposure can come in the form of the people you talk to,
[48:52] how you erase travelling, reading, right?
[48:56] And so I think it's true, like it's true like it's a marker of
[49:00] almost any person I speak to who is something remarkable.
[49:03] It's a certain contact with knowledge that most people don't
[49:06] know, I think. It's the what I discovered from
[49:10] psychology book as reading about the fact that and being a
[49:14] Christian to became morial that the brain is such that you have
[49:18] to push it to have. It's like a car with a lot of
[49:23] cylinders of you need to really press that thing before some
[49:26] parts will open up. And it looked like our
[49:32] upbringing did not give us that energy to push our brains to
[49:37] solve problems or to think about what to do.
[49:41] Most of our people even till now still just wait for someone to
[49:46] give them something. Not how do I get it?
[49:49] Like, what do I do apart from asking?
[49:53] So for me, what pushed me in all these areas was not to be a
[50:02] laughing stock. You need to become something
[50:06] that can be reckoned with. See, this guy is good and good
[50:11] because you've really mastered what you are doing and you are
[50:15] open to learning on it every single second because there's
[50:19] something more. Yeah.
[50:20] And that's one of the things that drives me so much.
[50:23] There is more always. Oh, yes.
[50:27] I mean, I remember when we launched Refill during the MVP
[50:34] testing, someone very dear to me had what they call ischemic
[50:38] stroke. Of course, at the time we didn't
[50:40] know. She just went to work and I got
[50:43] a call that the person couldn't move personally to the
[50:46] flashlight to the hospital. When I got there, I was just
[50:49] looking around. We had just launched the MVP,
[50:52] just about that, and it was confusing 'cause I'm looking at
[51:00] this person and I'm looking at the situation.
[51:03] So the next morning I started interacting with friends and
[51:06] family members who were coming around to check on her, and each
[51:10] person I spoke to had a chronic condition.
[51:15] I couldn't believe it. I'd done my research.
[51:17] I had my research papers in my hand that indicated that at
[51:22] least two out of four Guineas have a chronic condition.
[51:25] And I thought it wasn't true. So here are 10 people in front
[51:30] of me who have come to visit someone.
[51:33] Everybody has some chronic and some of them had been on
[51:36] medications for 15 years, 10 years.
[51:38] And I was like, yeah, where are we going?
[51:43] So I called my friend. I said bro the data is true.
[51:48] Yeah. People are really, really,
[51:51] really struggling and as at that time, of course, I didn't know
[51:54] this person had to stroke. So we got to the hospital and I
[51:57] also, I mean at UGMCI was just going around asking questions,
[52:01] talking to doctors, talking to patients and each person, it's
[52:05] like a zoo of problems. And everyone's main problem
[52:10] comes to 1 medicine. After all the doctor does comes
[52:14] to medicine, medicine, medicine and their pain is where can I
[52:19] find it? How can I afford it?
[52:20] Where can I find it. So we go and we come back to it.
[52:24] But that became my use case that if we get this right, you will
[52:32] be we'll be solving problems for millions of people.
[52:36] So expanded the research across 47 countries in Africa and it's
[52:43] the same somehow W Ghana has we have about now you have almost
[52:54] every university in Ghana almost teaching pharmacology.
[52:59] So we are churning out more pharmacy pharmacists than most
[53:04] African countries on the flat. Some have one pharmacist to
[53:09] about 200,000 people, some have to about 300,000.
[53:15] But when we looked at it on a large scale, you can see that
[53:19] the solution is clear, but there are no systems in certain
[53:25] places. So if you want to do anything
[53:28] outside of this country, then you have to now go back into a
[53:32] lot of some fine tunings. But with where we started off
[53:35] with the shortcut and so on, it became clear for us that yeah,
[53:39] we can solve a problem. But for me, driving back to the
[53:43] point by what you're asking me, it's problem solving.
[53:48] Problem solving. So in two years you are in 14 of
[53:54] our I was like 15 more or less at about 16 regions.
[54:00] I know you're expanding to Tanzania, you're going to do
[54:02] Nigeria sometime in July or something.
[54:04] Yeah. That's like really a great skill
[54:09] endeavour, great scaling endeavour over a two year
[54:11] period. Yeah.
[54:12] And I gather that you you've bootstrapped to this point, no?
[54:18] External financing, no how external financing.
[54:22] So my colleagues are also well experienced entrepreneurs in
[54:29] different, different. Most of us are only mighty.
[54:31] I mean we are 4 founders, myself, David, Kofi and so all
[54:37] of us are David is a pharmacist but the three of us are in tech
[54:41] business in different areas. So experience is key and form
[54:45] our years of experience we we're very clear on the fact that if
[54:49] we can solve the need to raise capital at the very early stage
[54:57] by proving that what we say we're doing is working and has
[55:02] the ability to scale and prove the scale scalability itself to
[55:06] you to whoever wants to invest. If we have been, if we've been
[55:13] able to go to Tanzania and set up shop and have traction,
[55:19] excuse me, to say without your money, when you come and you say
[55:23] you want to invest, you come at a high price.
[55:26] Yeah. Straight away because somebody
[55:29] has worked to get that done. We do the same for Nigeria now.
[55:34] Over the years, we also built a network of friends who who also
[55:42] have a need. So in some cases almost like a
[55:46] battery, we have a refill platform.
[55:49] You have a health insurance company we can partner with you
[55:52] serve your patients in this country or that country.
[55:55] So in Tanzania, we're going straight with one of our clients
[55:58] who is a health insurance company.
[56:00] We have a business there, but they they have a need for this
[56:02] solution that is working in Ghana since they partnered with
[56:06] us for us to serve their patients.
[56:08] Their business are skilled like 6X.
[56:10] So yeah, it's no brainer. Yeah, let's go.
[56:14] Do we even asking if we go to other countries in Pakistan?
[56:18] We. We want to work in Africa.
[56:22] So. The bootstrapping basically was
[56:27] to prove to ourselves first before we tell someone to bring
[56:31] their money to do business. And one of our biggest challenge
[56:36] even in that area was when we had to deal with manufacturer
[56:40] like Rush for the first time. What they are looking for is
[56:43] cash intensive. It's not just a solution.
[56:48] They are manufacturer, they are looking to do direct to
[56:52] patients. Not necessarily we got to want
[56:54] to cut out the middle man. Not necessarily that, but
[57:00] there's a lot of in betweens that prevents the persons from
[57:03] getting their medication. And they have medications for
[57:06] cancer patients who are dying on the daily.
[57:08] They could they could give the person the medication at half
[57:12] the price like they actually can.
[57:15] So they wanted to run what they call patient support programs.
[57:19] That's where they wanted to bring the cost of medications
[57:22] down. Who who facilitate, who give us
[57:24] credible data that the patient that we are about to serve
[57:28] actually can be served. This is their actual location.
[57:32] This is the Doctor Who served them.
[57:33] This is the dosage that they actually need month on month.
[57:36] And if they are taking these medications, how can we help
[57:41] measure who's going to provide us with the two that will
[57:44] measure that refill? That's that they have that.
[57:48] They said OK, why not? But along the line, they changed
[57:52] their mind. I mean, we figured out that they
[57:55] wanted something else. So they wrote back to us and
[57:58] said they'll come back to that conversation because it looks
[58:01] like someone gave them an impression that we have a very
[58:04] big company. I don't know who did that.
[58:06] Yes, so but they offer commissions and it's like oh
[58:10] that's a too big for this Commission.
[58:12] If we have a bigger you, we are a very, very small team.
[58:17] No, no, no, no, no, no. Why what you are saying you are
[58:21] doing is a billion dollar solution.
[58:23] So why should we give you something that is for a few
[58:26] hundreds of patients. But that was just so we've been
[58:31] on with AstraZeneca and the rest.
[58:34] So hopefully this year we'll be matching strongly in some of
[58:38] these areas with them. I know.
[58:39] You mean there's another health startup that comes to mind, M
[58:42] Pharma. Yeah, you know, I like great
[58:46] solution. How are you different from M
[58:48] Pharma? So M Pharma's model, of course
[58:51] they've pivoted many times. I'd say started off as a a
[59:00] digital pharmacy or digital health to for people to get
[59:05] medications. They've moved on to working with
[59:09] brands. So first of all, we don't do
[59:13] brick and mortar. We don't own a pharmacy in the
[59:16] country. We work with every pharmacy
[59:19] including a pharma. So pharmacies that they work
[59:22] with as a multi pharmacies. We don't have revenue share
[59:27] models with any pharmacy owner. We don't do brands because we
[59:33] are not tied to any brand and most of all, we are not a
[59:36] pharmacy. So if a business is a pharmacy
[59:40] that Dist distinguishes from them instantly.
[59:43] And Mpharma is 1. We work with organizations,
[59:47] healthcare providers that provide their telemedicine,
[59:51] Mpharma, that's that. We work with organizations like
[59:54] that. Some of our clients are
[59:56] telemedicine clients who provide telemedicine for all different.
[1:00:00] People. So M Pharma's multi model that
[1:00:04] works for pharmacies which we are not.
[1:00:06] So technically our business with M Pharma is that we give
[1:00:11] business to M Pharma, they serve patients on our behalf as well.
[1:00:15] Oh, OK, OK. I see.
[1:00:18] So. So what have been the challenges
[1:00:21] you faced building this great company over the last two years?
[1:00:26] Yeah, well, biggest challenge for us has been the the the
[1:00:36] people, the culture of pharmacists.
[1:00:39] The education system trains pharmacists to become retailers.
[1:00:45] So they complete now they do pharm D as doctor pharmacy.
[1:00:51] So they can either be clinical pharmacists or community
[1:00:55] pharmacists. Our initial intake of
[1:00:58] pharmacists were community pharmacists.
[1:01:01] Of course, we quickly switched to clinical pharmacists.
[1:01:06] But the training from school they have is to be able to go
[1:01:10] and work in the community shop of a pharmacy.
[1:01:14] And that is, excuse me to say, buy and sell.
[1:01:16] Basically somebody wants medicine, they sell.
[1:01:19] So they don't have a corporate culture how to work in a team
[1:01:25] where every pharmacist work in our setting, in the pharmacist
[1:01:28] where they where they are the bosses and they don't know how
[1:01:33] to manage A-Team. That's one.
[1:01:35] They don't know how to work in a team because they have MCA's and
[1:01:39] technicians. They give instructions to to
[1:01:41] take stock and do this. So when we advertise for people
[1:01:44] to apply for our jobs, you get all kinds of pharmacists
[1:01:48] applying. And when you start talking to
[1:01:50] them, they start fidgeting. Why?
[1:01:57] They don't know how to talk to a patient.
[1:01:59] There's no empathy in their line of work.
[1:02:02] It's transactional. What we do is service.
[1:02:06] You need to have empathy. You need to be able to listen to
[1:02:10] a patient and you need to be able to provide them with
[1:02:13] credible answers, not sell them medicine.
[1:02:17] But if you walk into a pharmacy, if you've not had the experience
[1:02:21] yet, that would be great. But even me and some of my
[1:02:25] colleagues died that Oh no, no, no, no, no.
[1:02:28] If you walk into a pharmacy, you want to get medication, you will
[1:02:31] not be interacted with the guy who's looking at the other
[1:02:33] pharmacist looking at you. A few 1-2 places we've been to
[1:02:37] you see the person smiling at you, trying to reason with you
[1:02:40] and understand what you're actually feeling.
[1:02:42] The rest is just how much. Where's your money?
[1:02:45] OK, here, here's a go here and give the money to the person and
[1:02:50] take your medicine. And there's no follow up anyway.
[1:02:53] Nobody's going to follow up to check on you.
[1:02:55] We spoke to a few of the latches and so on and they said, Oh
[1:02:58] yeah, they have data on patients.
[1:03:00] We said, OK, here's the system, use it to manage your chronic
[1:03:04] patients. Oh, we are not sure.
[1:03:09] And we told them that the reason why you don't have that is that
[1:03:11] you don't have a patient control system.
[1:03:13] You don't engage patients, you only sell to them.
[1:03:17] That's why you don't know who will come next.
[1:03:20] So people became our biggest problem and that's pharmacies.
[1:03:25] So we've of course, we have had a very, very high turn out to
[1:03:31] turn around on, on, on, on that side where you have many
[1:03:35] pharmacists who come through assistance.
[1:03:36] Oh no, I can't work here. Oh no, I cannot work here.
[1:03:40] So we picked some people from school.
[1:03:42] As you speak now, we are working, we're picking students
[1:03:46] from Central University and training them.
[1:03:48] OK. That those are the interns we
[1:03:51] have so that they they get a certain working culture.
[1:03:54] Now the reasons are very clear. Apart from all that, that they
[1:03:58] learn in school and so forth. When you come into the real
[1:04:01] world of business, you need to be able to think and provide
[1:04:05] credible answers. If a patient is on the phone
[1:04:09] with you and is telling you that they have a back pain, you are a
[1:04:13] professional, but you're also a person.
[1:04:17] They are not trained in that area.
[1:04:19] So it's something that we are pitching in.
[1:04:21] And that's because the whoever or whoever sponsors the
[1:04:27] education material in town that goes to the universities only go
[1:04:32] to. It's like what some people do
[1:04:35] for the nursing schools. They just want nurses to ship.
[1:04:40] So you have pharmacists who are coming out of school and don't
[1:04:42] know how to solve a problem. They don't know how to even do
[1:04:47] business. All they know is that I have a
[1:04:51] license and because of my license, you should pay me X or
[1:04:56] Y. And you come to our where we
[1:04:58] say, no, we don't. I don't need your license.
[1:05:01] You need your license to work here.
[1:05:05] I don't need your license for you to work here.
[1:05:07] If you don't have a license as a pharmacist, you cannot work
[1:05:10] here. So get your license and come.
[1:05:13] But when you come here, then we have to not train you.
[1:05:17] We have lots of SO PS and SL as all over our systems.
[1:05:23] You have to go through rigorous training to be able to work in
[1:05:26] our system in our in, in our business.
[1:05:29] So that has been to for us, it's been the biggest.
[1:05:33] Culture and people. Creating a culture that fits the
[1:05:36] problem solving value, which is the core of the core value for
[1:05:41] you as a person. Yes.
[1:05:43] Interesting. So those who have worked with us
[1:05:46] for the past year and have stayed on, they can tell you
[1:05:50] that hey, this is the best place for us.
[1:05:55] We we interviewed pharmacist and you can hear them after school.
[1:05:58] They don't know what to do. They don't know where to go
[1:06:00] because apart from working in their community pharmacy or now
[1:06:05] some hospitals adopting their clinical pharmacy idea, even in
[1:06:09] the hospital where there are pharmacist, where there are
[1:06:11] supposed to be clinical pharmacist, there's not much to
[1:06:14] it for them. Yeah.
[1:06:15] Because they are not trained on patient engagement.
[1:06:18] So the guy is in the hospital as a pharmacist but doesn't know
[1:06:21] how to talk to patients. He doesn't know how to engage a
[1:06:23] patient. Ideally they should have been
[1:06:26] trained by nurses. Maybe that will help them the.
[1:06:30] Same way you were trained by a nurse used by.
[1:06:31] A nurse. Oh, well, yeah, yeah.
[1:06:33] And of course, anybody who just used that service, that's what
[1:06:37] they they look of someone who cares about their pain.
[1:06:40] OK, that's all. Who cares?
[1:06:44] Very interesting. So I see you're married.
[1:06:47] Oh, yeah, Yeah. Leaving your wet urine in my
[1:06:49] face. Yeah.
[1:06:52] And you mentioned the how? How long have you been married
[1:06:54] for? 13 years now.
[1:06:56] And you and you are 38. So you married in like 2014.
[1:07:00] Five. Yeah, that's very early.
[1:07:02] Would have been earlier. Why?
[1:07:05] What happened? My father-in-law, my
[1:07:08] father-in-law say, hey, you guys are too young.
[1:07:11] My wife at the time were friends.
[1:07:13] She was in her third year university.
[1:07:16] Wow, studying aerospace engineering.
[1:07:20] And it's like, oh, you guys are too young.
[1:07:23] You're too young. Just started out life and I'm
[1:07:26] like, yo, I have a place. I got a job students.
[1:07:31] I still descend that of my own. Let us be.
[1:07:33] How has it been for you? Pardon.
[1:07:35] How has it been for you? Hasn't.
[1:07:38] It's been fun. It's been fun.
[1:07:41] It it's nice to be with somebody like, yeah, yeah, that's a vibe.
[1:07:45] It's been for kids too. Great.
[1:07:50] Yeah. I'm happy for you.
[1:07:53] Well. And I wish you all with your
[1:07:55] business. Thanks a lot, Bill.
[1:07:57] Yeah. You know The funny thing about
[1:07:59] today? This conversation, right when
[1:08:02] they told me that you're gonna do this at 8:00 AM?
[1:08:04] Oh my God, 'cause I typically wouldn't.
[1:08:08] If you need an ETM meeting, yeah.
[1:08:10] In my own business, I typically like to push it back.
[1:08:13] A. Little I start my meetings at
[1:08:15] 10:30. Yeah.
[1:08:16] So what you told me after minutes, 1/4 of this want to be
[1:08:19] here. I I almost wanted it in Klener.
[1:08:22] Yeah. Can we push it back a little?
[1:08:24] Can we postpone? But I'm glad I came.
[1:08:27] Really. Funny enough, it's this thing,
[1:08:29] this dynamic about how the best things happen after you just
[1:08:33] leave your comfort zone. And this is a quite an example
[1:08:36] of it for me. I am.
[1:08:39] I still. Now that you see it, I'm now
[1:08:42] wondering why I took an 830 call.
[1:08:45] Usually I don't. I mean, I don't even.
[1:08:49] I'm up usually by two or three AM.
[1:08:52] Yeah, because I sleep at two or something.
[1:08:55] But I you know how it is. Yeah, but I don't start business
[1:09:00] meetings until after 9:00 AM. Let.
[1:09:02] Me. Just reflect, let me chill out.
[1:09:05] Yeah, yeah, I I use my mornings to read and think.
[1:09:08] Yes. So to I still interesting.
[1:09:12] I need to find out what happened.
[1:09:16] So thank you so much, Mr. Thank you so much, Bill.
[1:09:19] Your your company is on to do great things.
[1:09:21] We aim to. Yes, and the core value of
[1:09:27] problem solving. It really stuck out for me,
[1:09:30] honestly, because it's funny you mentioned this because you're
[1:09:32] about to introduce this thing to our our community reading, you
[1:09:36] know, and it's interesting that it comes out from this episode.
[1:09:40] So thank you so much. I.
[1:09:42] Look forward to my episodes. I I thought that this wouldn't
[1:09:47] happen, but here we are. I hear we are.
[1:09:50] I'm grateful. Thank you so much.
[1:09:52] Thank you. And I wish you guys also all the
[1:09:54] best. I'm an addict of podcasts so
[1:09:58] they should. Be on the list as well now.
[1:10:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, I was just listening to
[1:10:02] HBR on my way here so. OK, OK, OK.
[1:10:04] Yeah. About business review, all of
[1:10:06] it. Great idea.
[1:10:07] Cast, leadership, all of it. So great.
[1:10:10] Yeah. All right, So friends.
[1:10:13] Community in the car, the world beyond.
[1:10:15] I told you it was going to be a good conversation and it's been
[1:10:18] a good conversation. So you know what the mantra is?
[1:10:21] Just build something. Yeah.

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