Martin Levermore is the CEO of Medical Devices Technology International Ltd (MDTi), based in Wolverhampton. MDTi is the first UK company to specialise in commercialising medical device ideas generated by NHS clinicians under a common brand.
How is MDTi dealing with the challenges of the current business climate?
Compared to most, we’re not doing too badly: we’re seeing growth of at least 10% month on month. Obviously, like every company, we’re always concerned to improve cash flow: the more the cash flow improves, the more quickly we can bring products to market. The current investment climate is proving, not only to ourselves, a bit of a tiresome situation – but we feel that by weathering the storm, we can actually get to where we need to be.
What are your main priorities as CEO of the company? How do you divide your time between different aspects of the business?
My key responsibilities lie in four main areas. First, strategic direction of the company. Second, directional management on a day-to-day basis: leading the development of the company’s activities, including marketing, technical and financial control of the business. Third, corporate affairs: increasing the profile of the business, talking regularly with my shareholders, customers and partners and maintaining our visibility. Fourth, board affairs: we intend to go for market flotation further down the line, so attendance at board meetings and preparing board agendas are important.
How I split myself down in all that is: strategic direction takes 20% of my time, 50% is spent on day-to-day direction of the business, 20% is spent on corporate affairs, and 10% on board affairs.
How does the fact that MDTi’s products were developed from ideas generated within the NHS affect the way you do business with the NHS as a supplier?
Generally, our products are more easily taken on board by clinicians, and that’s a great plus. The fact that frontline individuals have come up with the ideas, after seeing the deficiencies of existing products or processes, has meant that there are earlier adopters for these products. Obviously the NHS is a peculiar type of buying organisation, as what’s taken on is not mandated from the centre – so as a supplier we still have to follow the traditional course of any medical device company of trying to talk to the key opinion leaders, not only the clinicians but also the budget holders. But ideally speaking, the acceptance of those products makes it slightly easier when doing business.
Your Wolverhampton HQ employs six people – yet you have reached markets in Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and the USA, as well as the UK. As a small company, how do you manage to maintain a global presence?
From day one, we’ve had to look at improving the skill resources of each of our employees. Multi-tasking and the ability to manage key relationships from a distance are highly important. How we’ve done that is through the help and support of our NHS partners, and through relationship positioning with our overseas marketplace. We have regular communications with our overseas customers, both by e-mail and by telephone, and also through visits. Those further afield, for example in New Zealand or the USA, generally come to see us rather than us going over there!
How did MDTi start? What are the key factors that have contributed to your success?
It goes back to Lord Hunt, who recognised as a Minister for Health that NHS clinicians were coming up with ideas that improved patient care and improved their own way of doing business – but what was lacking was a commercial arm that could take these ideas and make them real, and also reduce the risk of the products failing.
Recognising this gap in the market, we felt there was a need for a commercial company that could aggregate all the different elements of product realisation: proof of concept, design testing, regulatory approval, investment into manufacturing and putting the requisite sales and marketing structures out there. That would empower the clinicians to get on with doing what they did best, while ensuring that their ideas saw the light of day.
One of the key features of our business model was that every product that was sold not only into the NHS but also further afield accrued a financial return back into the NHS. It was looking not only at cost savings, but at providing a royalty-based income for the NHS.
We’ve grown through having a focused business model, predicated on stating that we wanted to get 20 products to market within a short space of time. We’ve already launched eight, with a further three to be launched this year and the objective of having 20 in the market by the close of 2010. We’re clearly on the road to achieving that.