The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the situation of the SME sector including Shree Gopal Pharma and Surgical (SGPS) - our family healthcare business run as a traditional, legacy business with little-to-no technology. Although profitable, the inefficiencies of business operations limited its ability to serve consumers, especially during the pandemic.
I thus co-founded LivCure Surgical Pvt Ltd in 2021 with my brother-in-law, while I was based in the UK. LivCure is a Med-Tech business, a result of digitisation of our legacy family business to address: 1) the demand surge of medical disposables and 2) the management inefficiencies/redundancies in the business.
Business Strategy
Our longer-term strategy is to simplify the procurement ecosystem for healthcare providers and to create the most efficient market access pathways for manufacturers and other healthcare suppliers.
The roadmap for next 5 years is to streamline and automate business operations through process optimisation and digitisation. Reducing costs, increasing revenue and retaining customers are some of the goals and metrics we track. This roadmap is being achieved through lean development implemented on the Zoho product platform.
The SME landscape
SMEs account for almost 90% of all businesses worldwide and employ around 50% of the global workforce. India has about 63 million Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and they are one of the largest employment providers in India. They account for nearly 50 percent of the country's exports. These SMEs are crucial for India to achieve its target of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2025 - world's 4th largest.
In spite of SME contribution to the socio-economic growth, SMEs face a number of challenges:
Technology and digital knowledge gap
Inability to attract talented and tech-savvy manpower
Lack of innovation
Lack of marketing know-how
Access to finance and constant cash flow
Delay in payments, insufficient tracking of payables, receivables, etc.
Due to these challenges, SMEs are unable to scale to their full potential. On the positive side, these challenges should be perceived as untapped opportunities for the SME sector.
User behaviour
In the current world of e-commerce, SMEs worldwide are facing a huge challenge to grow because of low software adoption, mainly driven by technologically inept users. Digitising for this type of consumer profile is not easy, as they operate in a very unorganised manner and have a particularly long learning curve that requires a lot of patience.
Product Strategy
LivCure is a product-led company, using digital technology to improve access to healthcare products globally. As a technical founder, I have developed a range of digital technology products as shown in below table to serve the needs of our business and our customers.
Success till now..
In just about 2.5 years of operations, we have seen 1200% revenue growth from ₹4.7L in FY20-21 to ₹75L in FY22-23.
We have gained a good reputation in the surgical market in a short period of time. Launched in 2021 and by 2022 they were one of the fastest growing OEM of Gloves, Masks, Respirators and Blood Lancets in the market.
We continue to march on and grow the business to meet the growing demands of the market.
designed with ❤️ by myself