The following are key lessons from this session:
- Elderly care and specialist care are highly fragmented sectors
- Transfer of care is a big problem UK healthcare faces, if not into next phase of care, trying to build a cohesive dominant company for both elderly and specialist care
- Being a long-term partner of the NHS
- Acquired 1 care home end of 2016, Kings Bromley, comes with best-practice in place, admin side of things were acquired
- 24 months from the 1st to the 6th acquisition
- Legal set-up: RDCP is the ‘advisor’ to RDCP Care
- Being able to understand how to structure an investment, how to best optimize a balance sheet is important
- Sense of holding period, RDCP brings permanent capital, and that is what’s needed when you’re taking care of so many people
- Luxury care-homes are getting all the capital, competition increases, sign of a bad bull-cycle
- Care-excellence to be prioritized, without the gimmicks, comes down to total transparency
- Any member of team has to ensure the residents and relatives are happy
- RDCP care built leading presence in midlands, nursing and dementia care
- Specialist care has higher barriers to entry, is harder, took path of least resistance and got to certain critical mass
- Only so much you can do by reinvesting cash flow, to get to higher market share would need RDPC Group to provide capital or raise funds
- Goal is to have one company that the NHS can rely on as trusted partner, could be late-50s person with brain injury, go to immediate relief at NHS then if needs therapy can go to RDCP
- ‘10x book’, if you’re not taking massive action, it’s hard to achieve even the smaller steps
- One mistake Sameer saw the larger players do, is that they overpay and over-leverage and then compromise by cost-cutting
- Agreeing to overpay is a start of a very bad cycle, particularly as debt needs to be paid back to a bank (or syndicate)
- “Don’t overpay and focus on care excellence”
- Single most important value is transparency, it’s key
- Reduce incidents, and if they occur, reduce negative impacts
- For Sameer, high-performance means you have a company you can run profitably and well, and that can get money reinvested back into the biz for growth and for other opportunities. That is high performance.
- In order to grow at the rates desired, need to take a lot of action
- Sometimes it’s a cost thing, more deals you have the more legal fees, brokers can lose trust in you if you keep saying no
- Greatest leadership lessons
- Sameer still wants to be the hardest worker, either trying to grow the business or manage it
- Not taking the foot off the pedal after some element of success
- Best piece of advice received
- Iryna’s late father, told her “it’s significantly better and more fulfilling to work for yourself even if it’s a much smaller company, than a much larger corporation doing what they tell you and collecting a salary, and that’s the best piece of advice I’d give”
- If you are entering, the best way to enter is to buy one of the entrepreneurs retiring or groups exiting, don’t overpay as that will determine your next 5 years, if you don’t overpay you have more cash flow left
- If you get in at a good price, everything else will fall into place, once that is in place, never forget to prioritize care excellence
- Aim is to build a really large conglomerate, spreading wings outside of just healthcare, absolutely no stopping
- Age, one of the biggest difficulty factors