His dream when he was in college was to start a chemicals factory. Instead, on graduation, he joined a multinational. He worked there for a few years in various roles, quit that, went to the US, worked in a departmental store earning minimum wages, joined an IT company and then turned an entrepreneur, in the technology space.

He has started and sold two businesses, after scaling them up substantially and after raising funds. He is now into his third venture – Medall Healthcare Pvt Ltd, a diagnostics company.

What about his original ambition, you ask him, in his corner room office in Chennai, and the 55-year-old Raju Venkatraman, Managing Director and CEO, Medall, says he would now like to do something in agriculture. He feels he is young enough to start another two or three ventures.

“Now my dream is to become a farmer. My last venture will be in farming. Agricultural productivity is abysmally low. I am reading up… quite a lot to be done,” he says.

First job

After graduating a chemical engineering from IIT-Bombay, Raju joined Cadbury, which saw him buying apples in Kashmir for an apple concentrate plant that the company had there. After diverse roles in the company, he decided to quit and go to the US.

His first job in the US was at department store Sears, where he remembers earning the minimum wage of $3.65 an hour, in 1985.

After a month, he was recruited by software company EDS as a systems engineering trainee. At EDS, Raju says he did several tasks – computer programming, material requirement planning, engineering drawing management and imaging technology. It was also here that Raju says he “learnt how to price a deal on a per transaction basis,” setting the stage for his journey as an entrepreneur.

It was in 1991 that Raju took the plunge and started on his own, a venture called Vetri Systems that he launched with a capital of less than $10,000. He built it to $30 million in five years; started a software subsidiary in India in 1993 and two years after that started doing BPO for healthcare insurance claims processing in India. Vetri Systems had some of the large insurance companies in the US as its customers.

Seven years after he started Vetri, Raju sold the venture to Lason and continued with the company for three more years. Shortly after that he moved back to India and even contemplated retirement. Instead, he joined a non-governmental organisation, but soon realised that he was not cut out for that.

Second venture

Then came his second venture – RevIT, what else, an anagram of his first business, Vetri. This was focussed on healthcare and high-end claims processing. He built the expertise here and grew the business to 1,300 people. With revenues of about $10 million, RevIT was bought over by ICICI OneSource and Raju stayed with the company for four more years.

His latest venture Medall took off in 2009. “Medall has been a fantastic entrepreneurial journey in healthcare. I wanted to be in healthcare, I wanted to be in rural. These were the two driving things. And, wanted to take healthcare affordability to the masses,” says Raju.

He bought a medical diagnostics company called Precision Diagnostics and raised money from Peepul Capital, a private equity firm, which committed to about Rs 180 crore over a period of time. “This is a capital intensive business. I needed a partner,” says Raju.

Medall runs over 100 medical diagnostic centres in South India and will be predominantly focussed on the South. He plans to have about 300 centres in three years. Apart from the southern States, he will have centres in Maharashtra.

On Buying spree

Medall acquired a company called ClueMax in Bangalore and has bought small diagnostic centres in Tirunelveli and Tiruchi, both in Tamil Nadu. It adopts a hub-and-spoke model with the smaller towns having the basic diagnostic facilities and the larger ones, the complete set of diagnostic equipment and tools.

“Business is business at the end of the day,” he says, when you point out that Medall is a completely different business from his earlier ones. It is a question of getting the right people and processes.

Giving up ownership control the first time was tough, he admits. But, then adds that it was the right thing to do. “An entrepreneur’s life is extraordinarily lonely and I didn’t have any big investors.”

“I realised that I was learning so many things. I learnt computers, then I learnt to sell, then I learnt about imaging. Then I had to attract people, I had to manage people, then bank relationships, equity, meeting bank liabilities… I wouldn’t say life was bad, it was beautiful. But at some point in time, you are keeping on flying, the number of hours was incredible, there were small pressures at home that I was not spending enough time. I wanted to see if I could reduce that and cash out,” he says, highlighting the dilemma that most entrepreneurs face.

As a serial entrepreneur, he has a wonderful perspective on the journey: “I would say that most entrepreneurs figure out how to take off, but they don’t know how to land. Not crash land, but land beautifully and take off after refuelling.”

“I felt that building one business is one kind of a challenge, but cashing out and still having the same passion to go build the next business is actually fun for me. I simulate that I don’t have anything and I start working as hard. There was enough to do and I had enough faith in myself that I am just not going to quit and do nothing,” he adds.

For entrepreneurs

His advice for entrepreneurs: First, they must enjoy what they do. If they don’t keep on investing, somebody is going to eat their lunch. Entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of sitting back and enjoying, and saying let the business will run on its own.

More importantly, it is always bankruptcy of ideas that precedes financial bankruptcy. When they are running out of ideas and are thinking that the business is kind of comfortable for them, they should sell and get out.

>ramakrishnan.n@thehindu.co.in

Please send feedback, comments or suggestions to >emergingentrepreneurs@thehindu.co.in

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