TOP STORIES: Ameera Shah's Metropolis 2.0 
Healthcare & Pharma Leadership Next

In 15 years, Ameera Shah transformed Metropolis Healthcare from a single lab in Mumbai to a chain of 135 laboratories, raking in revenues of Rs. 650 crores in FY 2015. This is the journey of Ameera Shah, the woman leader of Metropolis Healthcare, the diagnostics company, who built her organization block by block and led it to become an organization with revenue of Rs. 650 crores spread across 7 countries. Metropolis has expanded its tentacles in the last 15 years and grown to become an organization with over 3500 employees, 135 laboratories, and 1000 collection centers and has created a seamless network across India.

Ameera admits that her best learning has come from a careful analysis of her own journey, and she aims to put it to use as she gears up for her next phase, what she calls Metropolis 2.0. We wanted her to analyze her own decisions (or sometimes, the lack of them), approach to growth, marketing strategies adopted and the key lessons she learned during these different phases. Looking forward, she says, “In the next 5 years, we will be more focused and aggressive and strengthen the brand in the diagnostics segment.” She aims to look for opportunities that can potentially disrupt the industry and achieve the organization’s vision of creating tremendous value for its shareholders.

However, to understand the nuances of the industry, she had to get into the nitty-gritty of the business and, hence, she donned many hats – that of a customer-facing executive, studying new markets for expansion, hiring and building a team and getting into the administrative side of the organization. But her father’s expertise helped her overcome this and eventually, Metropolis went from being a single laboratory organization to running over 10 labs with 150 collection centers by 2005.

One, Metropolis started acquiring laboratories for expanding its tentacles outside Mumbai, while within the city it set up its own centers. Continuing its ascent, Metropolis started implementing a unique strategy of simultaneously growing in both domestic and global markets. Realizing the opportunity that emerging markets offered, the company also entered Dubai and South Africa very early in its lifecycle, while continuing to acquire labs in cities like Pune, Kerala and Gujarat.

And hence, when ICICI Ventures exited its investment in 2010, Metropolis reorganized its board and Ameera became the Managing Director of the organization, while everyone else became non-executive directors. Ameera says, “In hindsight, I feel we should have focused a lot more on systems and processes during this phase, but we were short of management bandwidth.” Despite this, the company did well on revenue growth, touching Rs. 220 crores in 2010 (from Rs. 40 crore in 2005).

It was important for us to start dominating some markets and build density in those markets rather than being across too many countries,” shares Ameera. “For the first three years, marketing was very minimal, while in the last two years we stepped up our spend, especially on building Metropolis into a strong consumer brand,” shares Ameera. Ameera believes that there are three key foundations – an established network of centers, a strong backend, and a well-aligned board structure – that’ll augur well as she gears up for the next phase of Metropolis.

For Metropolis, its Western and Southern regions are strong markets and the team aims to build dominance in these geographies, while its Northern and Eastern markets are very opportune areas that it aims to go aggressive on in the coming years. High quality and standard customer experience – In India and in emerging markets like Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and South Africa, to be able to offer a uniform standard of care at all your centers can be a challenge.