Tell me about your greatest achievements, things you are proud of. This usually makes me uncomfortable as this means you either have accomplished something significant or are close to retirement. Both are untrue, personally for me.
But when this question was posed to our founding team by a person we all respect for his insights into our industry and reputation for building strong organisations, we did some hard thinking.
We all agreed that we we might have not accomplished all that we set out to do when we started Vaatsalya, but we believe we have done a few things which makes us proud. We have been able to build a clean practice, when the entire industry is geared against it. We have been able to bring services that were not available earlier, which everyone thought was not possible. We have been successful in scaling the tier 2 model to some extent, which again was very against what everyone else was doing. We focussed on secondary care services, and within that only a few services. We did more with less, which is again not the norm, where bigger, better, faster (or the latest and the greatest) is preferred. Essentially, we went against all the usual practices, and built our own markets, our own model and our own path. It has been challenging but we believe we have made a small dent.
He thought about this for a while and finally said. I see what you mean. “You guys basically dug your own graves every which way”.
Yes. That is correct.
Digging our own grave every which way, everyday and not get buried in it, till now, is our biggest accomplishment.