Most of the people who got into the Forbes 400 got there by having an idea and pursuing that idea as long as they could. And it created great wealth for them. They didn’t really care about making the money so much as pursuing the idea.
David Rubenstein
You go through life sometimes and think, ‘Do I know what I really like in life or do I just consume things?’
Chai Patel
CHAI IS tremendously successful in financial terms but what drives him is something beyond money. As a successful doctor in the NHS he felt unable to fulfil his purpose in life to help people. He left and retrained in a different capacity in the corporate world in order to realise his ambitions.
DREAM BUSINESS OWNER
Dr Chai Patel CBE
Chairman, HC-One care-home provider, UK
JOURNEY
NHS doctor 
Care-home entrepreneur and philanthropist
Born in Uganda, he left with his family during the rule of Idi Amin. After spending a few years in India, they moved to Britain, where Chai spent his teenage years on a London council estate where his parents ran a post office.
Chai worked as an NHS doctor for six years before leaving medicine to work in the city. He went on to become the founder of Court Cavendish care homes and more recently chairman of HC-One, which runs 241 care homes in Britain.
“I didn’t feel the NHS was fulfilling my vocational expectations of why I went into healthcare. I also felt I was unable to change things within the NHS. The motivation was to go out, do my own thing, and create a healthcare company so at least I could have some say in organising it, running it, and delivering the care and the quality that I believe in. I wanted to make a difference, to help people.”
He decided to follow the private, commercial model and deliver a service he felt he could be proud of. It wasn’t about being a successful businessman. It was about direct accountability to the customer. He wanted to work to serve the patients’, rather than the system’s, needs.
“If I was going to set up my own healthcare company, I needed to retrain and learn about money. And having no money to invest, I needed to make some. The City was the route to doing that.”
Thus Chai embarked on his career change from doctor to banker.
“I turned up at this office in the City and thought, ‘Oh my god the cleaning lady knows more than I do!’ It was incredible. No one really cared that I was a research fellow from Oxford.
I was just at the bottom of the food chain and I had to go and get the coffees. It was quite a big culture shock and blow to my self-esteem.
“It was a steep learning curve and I wanted to learn. I was with many people I could absorb information from. I read and studied every hour to understand markets, economics, companies and businesses, sales, management, time management and all the other disciplines. I started buying the Harvard Business Review because medicine works through case-studies. I voraciously read company case-studies about how they were run, what worked and didn’t work. It was like doing an MBA by myself.”
Four years after he left medicine, Chai commissioned a piece of research into the healthcare sector to see what the issues were. It was the cash-fuelled 80s and he could have carried on making money, but he wanted to make a difference.
“Banking didn’t make me happy. It’s not what motivates me. I could have had a nice, comfortable life but banking wasn’t what I wanted to wake up to every morning.
“My wife was upset and fearful. Why would I give up this incredible job? What were the motives? For me, it was just an adventure – like sailing the Seven Seas, searching for distant lands, or wandering off up mountains. Except we don’t do all that anymore. So for me, this was my adventure. This was my extreme sport – my adrenalin kick, if you like.”
Chai founded his first company – a long-term care services business called Court Cavendish. He recalls the excitement of buying the first care home, working there, doing the food shopping and being involved in how care was delivered. His sense of fulfillment when writing the first staff handbook and the first mission statement – these were the things that created the culture and values of the company.
“It was immensely challenging. There was a huge risk very quickly. I took a huge drop in income and nearly went bust. For a long time I couldn’t even think of myself as a businessman or an entrepreneur. I was really a medic trying to solve a problem, using a commercial model.
“Commitment to care, comfort and consideration – that was our strapline, and that’s what we built our values and vision upon. It was incredibly thrilling to then see it come alive with our first letter of thanks from a care-home customer! This is what we wake up in the morning to do.”
Like anyone setting up in business, Chai didn’t know he was going to be successful.
“My experience has been that if I’ve made a huge effort, generally I’ve been able to get close to where I’ve wanted to get to. I’ve grown up to view every problem as being there to be solved. I’ve only known you can win. It’s not that I haven’t had failures but I always remember the successes, and the failures don’t seem to stop me wanting to try again.
“If you work in a system all your life where you’re made to feel you’re a failure and you haven’t achieved anything, then everything focuses on what you didn’t get done. You grow up fearful of failure and that doesn’t allow you to take risks.
“The biggest motivation for people who do their dream job is the opportunity for self-expression. They want to be able to do something they really want to do. They have an idea, a vision.
“In the UK and Europe we’re slightly two-dimensional about business people – we think they’re in business just to make money. Well, actually, most people are in business not to become millionaires but to do what they want to do and be happy doing it. And money just happens to come if it’s successful. People go into business because they want to be in charge of their own destiny. That’s why selling a business is very difficult – because it’s your baby. There’s a lot of emotion involved.”
When the Southern Cross care home company collapsed in 2010, Chai took it over and created a new healthcare company, HC-One.
“Even though HC-One has been incredibly hard work, I can’t remember being this happy in my work life for a long time. This is what I love doing at the end of the day. You go through life sometimes and think, ‘Do I know what I really like in life or do I just consume things? When you do something like this, you can see I’m like a child who’s got a really great toy.
“The hardest part of this latest venture was working out what to say when I went to the first meeting of the managers. Why are we doing this? Why have we taken this on? When we look back in a year’s time what will we see? Creating the possibility to envision a future and that narrative is the hardest part – whether it’s a brand new start up, whether you’re talking to a bank manager for money, or your first customer. What’s different about us? What does it stand for? It’s not yet real. You live it out, and as you live it out the story comes alive and you feel, ‘I wrote that map – we found that way to that destination.’
“That’s the adventure. I would stand up and say, ‘Guys, we’re going to Tokyo, not New York, but I can’t tell you if we’re taking a bus, plane or train, and we may go backwards and forwards a couple of times before we get there. But what I can tell you is that we’re going to take you.’
“What you make clear is the destination. For us it was about quality service. It’s about the individual being important – that’s the destination. If it’s not good enough for your mum, it’s not good enough for me. How we get to that destination from today, we’ll make up as we go along.”
Chai wanted to be financially successful, but ultimately that was in order to be able to stop working for money and become involved in philanthropic work. “The millionaire part was how I could fulfil that part of the journey. That’s been brilliant because at 50 I wanted to do that and I’ve changed my life now. I spend my time as much in not-for-profit areas as in profit areas. I spend as much time giving money away as I do making money. Actually I don’t think of it as giving it away, I think of it as investing in projects that will give me a return in profit and make an impact on society.”
“Our biggest challenge was when we nearly went bust at Court Cavendish. Interest rates went from seven percent to 15 percent in two years. I learnt a lot about cash flow and business management in real time. I always think, in any business cycle, if you haven’t looked at the abyss once, then you haven’t lived! You know you have to go to that dark spot and come back from it. But we kept our humanity together. We didn’t do anything hard or harsh along the way.”
Chai’s Secrets
TO DREAM BUSINESS SUCCESS
1 Be clear about what you want to do. Think through the issues in detail. What will it take to achieve what you’re doing? Whether you are raising money, finding a partner, whatever it is, make sure your argument is extremely compelling. Don’t be put off if someone says no the first time round. Or the second. If you’re very clear about what you want to do, just keep at it.
2 Seek out a group of people. We call them mentors now – friends and counsellors who can guide you and help you and keep you motivated when things are not working. And talk to lots of people about what you’re doing. Don’t be frightened, because the more you talk about it the more real it becomes.
3 Successful entrepreneurs are passionate and driven; they make things happen and love solving problems. They are not put off by the norms of the time and are willing to stand by what they believe in. You have to be courageous.
“There are one or two conflicts in my life I would have dealt with differently. I’ve become more measured and thoughtful about how those conflicts could be resolved. But that’s the biggest sort of learning curve – managing people.”
“I have the obsessional characteristics all entrepreneurs have: the attention to detail, the finishing and completing, the staying up all night to prepare the presentation, the not letting go.
“But I’ve actually succeeded, more often than not, because I have amazing teams of people that I work with, and they all contribute to the overall success.”
You don’t have to be an alpha guy or gal, a high-fiving graduate of Harvard Business School or an extrovert who can open doors with one flash of your winning smile and hand-crushing handshake to be a successful entrepreneur. In fact, in some businesses uber-self-confidence and salesy pushiness could play against you.
When thinking about your dream business it is a good idea to do a values inventory. Values are the blueprint of our Self – they are the things we trust, believe in and which resonate with us at a deep level. Grace, family, magnificence, to serve, educate, lead, inspire, solve, direct, enlighten, amuse, charm, dominate, excel, rare, traditional, advanced, ethical, magic, to heal – these are just a few examples of values. Take some time out to identify what values you stand for and aim to bring these into your business to reflect your brand.
The destination for Chai’s business reflected his values: quality service and the paramount importance of the individual – if it’s not good enough for your mum, it’s not good enough for him. Knowing what you and your business represent will run through your enterprise like a stick of rock, from your logo and branding through to your customer service and how you deliver. Like attracts like, so if you know your values, like-minded customers will recognise that and gravitate towards your message. It’s like coming home.
If you have had little or no experience running a business (and surprisingly few have who start out), now is the time to research and investigate. Who is doing something similar to what you have in mind? Can you explore how they do it and learn from them?
A big mistake when starting a business is to be the jack of all trades and in a bid to save money try to run every part of the business. But truly successful entrepreneurs play to their core strength, the real reason they went into business, be it decorating cakes or designing advanced software.
Spending your limited time and energy doing things you are not good at will be a self-defeating waste of resources and in the long run money. So plan to outsource as soon as you are financially able.
Find a bookkeeper who deals with small start-ups. Hire a VA (virtual assistant) who is happy to work by the hour to send and chase invoices, plan your diary, redirect your phone calls, sort techie problems, arrange meetings and make difficult phone calls for you.
There are companies that will undertake your cold sales calls, conduct market research, answer and process orders and deliveries, and there are legions of highly qualified graduates and interns who will work on an hourly rate for the experience.
No one can be expected to be the accountant, secretary, technical support and sales person as well as CEO of their own business. These investments in outsourcing allow you do to what you do best and keep the vision alive.
If necessary, invest in webinars, teleclasses, weekend courses in accounting, marketing, website optimisation and PR to learn new skills which will help your business until you can afford to pay someone else to do them. Many businesses allow you the chance to train on the job or via home study courses.
You may be surprised to learn that few people in business are MBA graduates and the most successful, like Lord Sugar, Richard Branson, Karren Brady and Jamie Oliver, for example, didn’t gain their business prowess by taking business-oriented degrees.
It is entirely possible to start your business with the know-how you currently have and building your business knowledge as you progress.
Probably the single most effective way to learn how to develop good business practice is to join some business networking groups or hire a coach to help you grow and learn on the job.
It’s a good idea to ‘moonlight’ whilst in paid employment to see if your business idea has legs. You can create an inexpensive website or business Facebook page, get a market stall, or piggy-back someone else’s business by offering your goods or services under their umbrella. Associates and affiliates are a great way of getting your services out there without huge financial cost.
Most people balk at the idea of creating a business plan; they tap their heads with a knowing “It’s all up here.” Yes, it’s great to have a clear focus on your dream but it is vital to have a well-documented one if you wish to attract investors or get a loan.
You can do a one-year or five-year business plan, and it should include financial forecasts, marketing and sales strategies, management and staff proposals and growth and opportunity predictions. There are many companies that can help you write your business plan, but for a good starting point visit Business Link (businesslink.gov.uk), where you can download various templates.
You could also create a vision board for your business with images of success to inspire you on a daily basis – use this as a golden carrot to keep you motivated and in motion.