Regardless of the tough period, Cedric has held steady, growing the business to 18 stores in 6 towns—the largest pharmacy chain in the country today and growing. Cedric sat down with CEO East Africa’s Muhereza Kyamutetera and shared his experience and building a more resilient business for the future.
How would you describe Guardian Health’s Corporate Purpose? Why do you exist?
Our Corporate Purpose is espoused in our vision, mission, values and core objectives.
Our vision is to become Uganda’s neighbourhood pharmacy of choice. We will do this by, providing quality pharmaceutical care aimed at improving health, well-being and quality of life—this is our mission.
Our values are:
- Professionalism: At GHL, we believe in conducting ourselves in a way that upholds the trust the public places in us as health workers to take care of their health needs and well-being. This means we ensure our staff are accountable experts in their fields and we handle our jobs with a great attitude, respect and moral values.
- Integrity: We believe in employing the highest ethical standards, honesty and fairness in all our activities. This guides all our business processes be it attending to a patient/client or hiring new staff and all other business activities.
- Dedication: At GHL we believe in going above and beyond to ensure the needs of all our clients and business partners are catered for. We always make our level best to fulfil our promises and work through challenging situations with both our clients and business partners.
Overall, our core objective is to improve our client’s well-being and quality of life by improving access to quality affordable health care and health care products.
Ascent Capital, in 2017, made an equity investment in Guardian Health. As the person in the thick of things, rising from the bottom to the top, how would you say the partnership with Ascent has impacted the company in general?
I do believe the partnership between Ascent Capital and Guardian Health, is a long-term one with value creation that relates to fundamental, operational and strategic change in the company. This doesn’t happen overnight.
Regardless, there have been some significant immediate impacts. For example, before the Ascent investment, we did not have proper controls or systems to watch over the business and that led to the aggressive expansion that was not well planned. However now with a fully functional board and management team, we have been able to systematically plan and grow our footprint to now 6 districts and 18 stores which is the largest in the country of any pharmacy chain.
Financially, we have also been able to maintain good cashflows by proper budgeting and managing spending. This means we are able to keep our suppliers happy and maintain good relationships with them such that even when unforeseen events like COVID-19 disrupted a lot of businesses and supply chains, we were able to stay afloat and rebound back quickly.
The core nature of our business is that we supply products to cater for our client’s needs so in the past we found ourselves with a bloated products portfolio and some items would not sell hence putting a strain on our financials however with support from Ascent, we have been able to access analysts and this help to have a better understanding of our portfolio and reduce it down to be more efficient in catering to our customers’ needs in a more reliable manner. This has actually improved customer satisfaction as they can always be sure they will almost always find their product needs available.
With the capital input from Ascent, we have been able to expand our supplier base especially overseas. This has helped us reduce reliance on local suppliers for some products and also helped us to increase access to quality medicines and other wellness products at the best prices in the country which is in line with our mission.
On an impact level by the end of 2022, we would have served close to 1 million Ugandans across the 6 districts we are in and expanding. We have grown to have a workforce of more than 200 while also providing internship/training opportunities to many pharmacy students from different institutions across all our branches in the different districts.
Are you happy that this performance to date reflects the Vision, Mission, Values and Core Objectives of the business?
Yes, of course, I am happy with our performance at the moment. However, I believe with the team we have we should even be achieving more especially in terms of increasing our footprint. We will continue to look to serve a bigger population and want to become a household name.
In your view- in all the achievements above, what would you say has been the single, biggest impact of the Ascent investment into the business?
I think the biggest and most important impact, aside from capital is a strong structure of corporate governance and having sound and effective company policies to guide all our activities.
Overall, how did the Covid-19 pandemic affect the business and how were you able to keep the lights on?
Ah, those were rough times. I happened to get the reins of the company 10 days before the first lockdown in March 2020.
Lockdowns across the world also impacted the global supply chains from raw materials production to freight and shipping. This meant that many essential medicines were placed on export bans by western governments and even those that were available became expensive to ship across the world which reduced access to healthcare as prices also went up.
Lockdowns affected people’s movement and therefore this meant that with our brick & mortar shops we would be unable to reach our clients.
This meant our revenues were impacted significantly in the first few months which made us rethink our strategy as with every challenge arises an opportunity and a need to innovate.
This made us think, “how can we reach our clients despite the lockdowns?’ We have since launched a tele-pharmacy service and an online business department manned by some brilliant pharmacists. This is supported by our In-house delivery service while also bringing the pharmacy closer especially over-the-counter products to popular services like JUMIA and Glovo as well as having our own online store. Think of it as a Bricks & Clicks business model.
We also developed a playbook to guide us on the actions to take during this period. Top management took significant pay cuts while we made sure our people on the front line did not have to take on this extra burden in the already scary covid times. I am proud to say that we did not lose lay off any staff despite the financial hit we experienced.
Also, since we had great relationships with our suppliers, we were able to renegotiate some terms to ensure we all stayed afloat despite the challenges.
We also planned for the lifting of the lockdowns to take the opportunity in the market as many other businesses in our sector were struggling. We made sure to be reliable even in the tough times and this has helped us capture a larger segment of the market.
Future outlook- what are the medium-term goals for the business? Where do you look to be in the next 5 to 10 years?
We are looking at even a bigger footprint across the country to be in at least 15 districts and 30 stores in the next 3 years. We are aiming to expand our online business offering and want to be the leading tele-pharmacy service provider in the country.