Ameera Shah, Metropolis Healthcare (The Journey to IPO)

Ameera Shah is Founder and Managing Partner of Metropolis Healthcare, one of the largest and most trusted Healthcare Diagnostic company of India.Ameera joined Metropolis when it was 1 lab in South Mumbai started by her father. Over the years she expanded Metropolis to 120 Labs and 2400 collection centres. Metropolis Healthcare went IPO in April 2019. The company in recent fiscal year posted Rs 760 Crores revenue and Rs 205 Crores EBITDA.The podcast shares her journey to make Metropolis one of the most trusted names in Healthcare in India.Some notable quotes from the podcast:1. I started building Metropolis at the age of 21 in 2001. When I started building this firm the biggest issue people had with me was with my age, the lack of medical qualifications and with my gender. People couldn’t see me as somebody who could be relevant as I had none of these three attributes which people assumed to be very necessary to build something.2. To me the principles and the values that built Metropolis are probably the most important pieces of the journey. And we are very happy and proud to say that we accomplished that. Whether we accomplished the size we wanted is secondary. What we wanted is reputation. Whenever we meet anyone in the fraternity, Metropolis and I are recognised for being a clean promoter, for always being fair to people, for giving credible results and for making sure we take care of patients.3. In healthcare industry commercialisation, corporatisation and profit are all bad words. Because in India we are conditioned to believe if you make money you are not good.4. I discovered along the way that expressing your emotions in your work life actually can be a huge strength because it allows you to relate to people, it allows people to feel like they are understood, that we are not all robots coming to work and just doing our jobs but actually we are human beings. That allows ourselves to engage with each other on non professional fronts and that actually helps huge amount in building connections. Along the way I started showing my emotions. Some of my employees have seen me cry.5. I have 3 investors in Metropolis and I have made sure to deliver excellent financial returns on their investment: ICICI Ventures in 2005, Warburg Pincus in 2010 and Carlyle group in 20156. A lot of people used to ask me how are you so confident ? And what I realised where does confidence come from. Confidence doesn’t come from trying to be confident, confidence doesn’t come from suddenly you being born with confidence. Especially for women confidence comes from actually confronting the biggest, deepest fears that you have. And when you come through the biggest fear on the other side, that’s the thing that builds confidence. 7. Governance is a mindset. It’s not for everybody. But for me I was very clear I would build a company like HDFC or Kotak which is about good governance, transparency, good communication and not being overly aggressive but being consistent and delivering what we say.

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