BUILDING A VISION GREATER THAN YOURSELF

Last week I saw a notice about Dr Ian Clark stepping down as chairman of the business, International Medical Group (IMG), he helped found.

Dr Clark who has been in Uganda since 1988 begun the clinic, International Medical Center (IMC) on KPC building on Bombo road in 1996 that would eventual grow into the health services conglomerate. IMG has a hospital, clinics and a medical insurance provider.

According to the advert Dr Clarke remains a director and still holds ten percent share in the multi-million dollar enterprise, with the rest of the business owned by a private equity firm out of Mauritius, Ciel Healthcare Ltd.

For people who know

, its an amazing feat building  an enterprise to the size of IMG but even more amazing is to get high caliber foreign partners to invest in your business...

There are four broad reasons we start a business. The first is to feed ourselves, the second is to pass it on to future generations, the third is to eventually sell it and the fourth is for philosophical reasons.

This is important because why you decide to start a  business, the vision you have for it will determine its chances of success in the future..

 

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Of course you can start at the bottom of the ladder and out of necessity, experience or luck find your vision growing.

If you build a business to feed yourself, when you are well fed, housed and clothed then what? Chances are your business collapses soon after or beguns the inexorable slide into oblivion, because your ambition is very short term. Examples abound around us.

You build to pass down the generations, the Asians seem particularly adept at this, then your business has a better chance of success or at least longevity. 

And if you build to sell, whether in part or its entirety, you further enhance your chances of success. You structure the business better, you make it more systematic and your value proposition is crystal clear to people beyond yourself.

And if you build out for philosophical reasons, like Microsoft which aimed to put a computer in every home because it believed in the progress this would generate for all users, the size and success of your company is infinite.

Knowing part of Dr Clarke’s story through his book, “The man with the key has gone” one can assume the good missionary’s ambition was prompted by more than subsistence. If it were limited by his basic needs, his business would not have grown beyond the little clinic at KPC building, like many other clinics around town whose owners are making a good living.

To give better service, its clear the clinic had to grow in size and complexity and its now safe to say the enormity of the vision seems to have out grown the founder’s capacity, hence bringing in new partners who have eventually taken control of the business....

In our patriarchal, parochial society there are people shaking their heads and feeling pity for Dr Clarke for “losing” his business. We would rather own 100 percent of a small, ineffectual enterprise than own 10 percent of much bigger enterprise.

When you have a big vision you recognise you would be content to see others further the vision if you have carried it to the limit of your capacity; but when you are building just to feed yourself and threaten little brown girls, your ambition stops at driving  around saying I own that and that and that...

In a country where much needs to be done with few resources available to local investors it makes sense to attract partners – internal and external into our businesses to further the vision.

There is nothing new under the sun. Our businessmen are not doing anything original. Someone, somewhere is doing the very same thing to a larger scale and has access to more resources.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not the end all or be all, but one of the major challenges of attracting it, is the lack of businessmen who have achieved big enough scale here to attract bigger money... 

We are content to be big fish in our small pond. From purely selfish perspective this puts a ceiling on our wealth but to take a broader view, it denies our people better quality goods, services and jobs.

I hope Dr Clarke got paid a fair value for the “sweat” he has spilled over the last two decades or so, but ten years from now he maybe even more gratified when the house he helped build is providing quality service to thousands and thousands more people in his adopted country.