Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / John Sculley Sees $10 Billion in Revenues for RxAdvance (Audio)
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: Global business news twenty four hours a day at Bloomberg
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- 1:06Speaker 1: dollar ninety five v one. Uh, that is a gain
- 1:10Speaker 1: of four point four percent. I'm Charlie Putt, and that's
- 1:14Speaker 1: a Bloomberg business flash. You're listening to taking Stock with
- 1:18Speaker 1: Kathleen and Pim Box on Bloomberg Radio. How do you
- 1:23Speaker 1: build a multi billion dollar business? How do you satisfy customers?
- 1:28Speaker 1: How do you know the right questions to ask in
- 1:30Speaker 1: order to get the right investors? Well, chances are he
- 1:34Speaker 1: turned to John Scully. He is, of course, author, entrepreneur,
- 1:37Speaker 1: former chief executive of PepsiCo and Apple, and the author
- 1:40Speaker 1: of a new book entitled Moonshot, Game Changing Strategies to
- 1:44Speaker 1: Build Billion Dollar Businesses, and John joins me in the
- 1:47Speaker 1: studio today. John, thank you very much for being with us.
- 1:51Speaker 1: Let's start off by understanding what makes this book different
- 1:55Speaker 1: than other books about how to build businesses. You've done
- 2:00Speaker 1: that and one of the things that I wanted to
- 2:02Speaker 1: zero win on. First of all, is you talk about
- 2:05Speaker 1: a customer plan, not just a business plan. Explain that, sure, Well,
- 2:10Speaker 1: first of all, this is not an autobiography. Uh. This
- 2:13Speaker 1: is really made up of the conversations with so many
- 2:16Speaker 1: successful entrepreneurs that I've known over the years, and the
- 2:20Speaker 1: lessons we've all learned. Most of the lessons we've learned
- 2:23Speaker 1: PIM come from our mistakes, not from our successes, And
- 2:27Speaker 1: a lot of people are afraid to talk about their
- 2:29Speaker 1: mistakes because they're afraid of getting ambushed by it. Well,
- 2:32Speaker 1: I can talk to the two entrepreneurs. They know I'm
- 2:34Speaker 1: not going to ambush them. But going back to the
- 2:36Speaker 1: customer plan, so many people in business are used to
- 2:40Speaker 1: the tedious process of writing an annual business plan, which
- 2:44Speaker 1: is really a budget, which is really looking back and saying, so,
- 2:47Speaker 1: where were we before and how much further do we
- 2:49Speaker 1: think we can go in the future. The customer plan
- 2:51Speaker 1: starts in a totally different place. It says, what's the
- 2:55Speaker 1: really big customer problem that needs to be solved, and
- 2:59Speaker 1: can you be the ones to solve it? And if so,
- 3:02Speaker 1: how are we going to do it? And how are
- 3:05Speaker 1: we going to engage the customer? What's the cost of
- 3:07Speaker 1: customer acquisition? All the metrics are customer metrics. What's the
- 3:11Speaker 1: cost of customer retention? How do you monetize the customer?
- 3:15Speaker 1: What's the lifetime value of customer? And when you're building
- 3:18Speaker 1: the customer plan, you start with the customer problem what's
- 3:21Speaker 1: in it for the customer? And you look out green
- 3:24Speaker 1: field out into the future, and you say, you know,
- 3:28Speaker 1: let's look at what could be, not what was in
- 3:31Speaker 1: the past. To follow up on that, the questions that
- 3:36Speaker 1: a potential entrepreneur, or indeed someone that is currently running
- 3:40Speaker 1: an entrepreneurial company, the questions you say are really more
- 3:44Speaker 1: important than the answers. Well, of course they are, because
- 3:46Speaker 1: we're in the era of Google, We're in the era
- 3:49Speaker 1: of Wikipedia and many other sources. If you want to
- 3:52Speaker 1: go check answers their commodity, you can get them for free.
- 3:56Speaker 1: The problem is the way most of us grew up
- 3:59Speaker 1: and went to school, Uh, we were measured on memorizing
- 4:03Speaker 1: the answers. But what you really discover in life, it's
- 4:07Speaker 1: learning the context of the right questions. Ask the right questions,
- 4:11Speaker 1: and it's amazing how the same set of facts you
- 4:14Speaker 1: know looks entirely different. So I encourage people, particularly those
- 4:18Speaker 1: who want to be in an entrepreneurial world where you
- 4:20Speaker 1: wouldn't be doing it if you didn't think there was
- 4:21Speaker 1: a better way to do something, to ask the right questions.
- 4:25Speaker 1: In my opinion, it's always around the context of what's
- 4:28Speaker 1: in it for the customer talking about asking the right questions.
- 4:32Speaker 1: I want to turn your attention to a specific industry
- 4:34Speaker 1: that you have a lot of expertise in and that
- 4:36Speaker 1: you are working in right now, and this is healthcare.
- 4:39Speaker 1: What are the right questions to ask when it comes
- 4:42Speaker 1: to things like the price of pharmaceuticals or dealing with
- 4:46Speaker 1: health care as a huge, uh tangled mess of of bureaucracy. Well,
- 4:53Speaker 1: it goes back to what we've been talking about ask
- 4:55Speaker 1: the right questions. The right question in healthcare that I
- 4:58Speaker 1: focus on are the chronic care patients. About five percent
- 5:01Speaker 1: of the population in the US, about one point five
- 5:03Speaker 1: three dollars have health spent. Around fifty of every dollar
- 5:06Speaker 1: spent in healthcare goes to that five of chronically old people.
- 5:10Speaker 1: The whole movement today is to move these chronically old
- 5:15Speaker 1: people out of the hospitals and to serve them even better,
- 5:21Speaker 1: better customer experience, better patient experience in their homes. And
- 5:24Speaker 1: the high technology that we have today with sensors that
- 5:27Speaker 1: can measure their vital signs, the ability to use video conferencing,
- 5:31Speaker 1: which is really becoming increasingly increasingly accessible and expensive. The
- 5:35Speaker 1: part of the business I'm focused on are the pharmaceuticals,
- 5:39Speaker 1: because the pharmaceuticals UH represent hundreds of billions of dollars
- 5:45Speaker 1: of annual cost savings if you can be able to
- 5:48Speaker 1: deal with issues like avoidable drug costs. For example, the
- 5:52Speaker 1: chronic care patient typically has fifteen meds a day, but
- 5:56Speaker 1: they're being prescribed by different specialists who don't necessarily know
- 5:59Speaker 1: what the other specialists are prescribing because they can't get
- 6:02Speaker 1: the information in a useful form. What we do at
- 6:05Speaker 1: our company, our x Advance, we're the first cloud based
- 6:08Speaker 1: pharmacy benefit management platform with actionable intelligence. We use machine
- 6:13Speaker 1: learning other technologies, and we're able to dramatically cut the costs.
- 6:17Speaker 1: We believe will probably be about a ten billion dollar
- 6:20Speaker 1: revenue company. By we expect to be making close to
- 6:23Speaker 1: a billion dollars of profit. And with that we can
- 6:26Speaker 1: turn back, you know, at least another billion dollars of
- 6:29Speaker 1: profit back into the health system and dramatically lower the
- 6:33Speaker 1: costs of tens of billions of dollars for patients and
- 6:38Speaker 1: health systems. And we can increase the pay of the doctors.
- 6:41Speaker 1: And you say, well, how can you do all of that?
- 6:43Speaker 1: It's because the system is so inefficient. It was built
- 6:47Speaker 1: thirty years ago and no one upgraded the technology. We're
- 6:51Speaker 1: still living with technology that was designed for a different era.
- 6:55Speaker 1: So our company is just one example of that, our
- 6:58Speaker 1: x Advance, but there are others out there. It's a
- 7:00Speaker 1: huge industry. They are going to find different opportunities, but
- 7:03Speaker 1: always start with the customer. In this case, the customers
- 7:05Speaker 1: a patient, and always say, how do I give that
- 7:08Speaker 1: patient just an incredibly good experience now, something that not
- 7:12Speaker 1: many people have always been able to have in the
- 7:15Speaker 1: health care systems. I think of the frustrations of standing
- 7:18Speaker 1: in queues, waiting and waiting rooms, not knowing really what
- 7:22Speaker 1: they want to do, having trouble getting the doctors twenty
- 7:25Speaker 1: one days on average to get to see a doctor.
- 7:27Speaker 1: So those things can be dramatically improved on UH and
- 7:31Speaker 1: taking advantage of the skills of the professionals in the
- 7:34Speaker 1: health care system. There's nothing wrong with our professionals of
- 7:36Speaker 1: doctors and nurses, it's how do we get them up
- 7:39Speaker 1: to date with the same kinds of disruptive innovation that
- 7:42Speaker 1: have taken place in the private sector part of our economy.
- 7:45Speaker 1: In putting together are ex advans, you went through some
- 7:50Speaker 1: of the same issues that you note in your book
- 7:53Speaker 1: Moonshot one. If you could tell me some of the
- 7:56Speaker 1: maybe anecdotes that have illustrated your progress to under standing
- 8:00Speaker 1: what it means to put together a new company. Well,
- 8:03Speaker 1: one of the real challenges is that, uh, the incumbents
- 8:06Speaker 1: really don't want to change, you know, for a whole
- 8:09Speaker 1: bunch of reasons. It may be because they're worried about,
- 8:11Speaker 1: you know, what does it mean to their particular job.
- 8:15Speaker 1: How does it um you know, gonna make life different.
- 8:18Speaker 1: So what we realized was, even though we can build
- 8:21Speaker 1: an entirely new pharmacy based management supply chain system, that
- 8:26Speaker 1: that's probably not the best place to start because it
- 8:28Speaker 1: disrupts too many people's lives in the health care industry.
- 8:31Speaker 1: So we said, keep what you got and we'll build
- 8:35Speaker 1: on top of that. So we'll fit in. So you
- 8:39Speaker 1: can say, we can stand out with many of the
- 8:41Speaker 1: advantages I was talking about earlier, you know, cost savings,
- 8:44Speaker 1: better customer experience, more things we can do in the
- 8:47Speaker 1: patient's home, make it real simple for people who know
- 8:49Speaker 1: nothing about technology. For instance, we're using um the new
- 8:53Speaker 1: Alexa smart assistant that was developed by Amazon. Terrific product
- 8:58Speaker 1: Amazon development. We had corporate it back into our system
- 9:01Speaker 1: because the Amazon open the technology up. But uh, we
- 9:04Speaker 1: are trying to say we can fit in. We can
- 9:07Speaker 1: don't have to force you to change everything that you
- 9:10Speaker 1: already have. And it's amazing the difference of the reception
- 9:14Speaker 1: we get from the insurance industry when we say, hey,
- 9:16Speaker 1: we can fit in and by the way, we won't
- 9:19Speaker 1: charge your fee for service. We'll take the risk. And
- 9:22Speaker 1: when they say you mean you'll take the risk, you
- 9:24Speaker 1: of that much confidence and what you're doing that you're
- 9:26Speaker 1: willing to bet on performance. You don't get paid unless
- 9:29Speaker 1: you perform to what you've said to absolutely and why
- 9:34Speaker 1: can't we do that? Because the inefficiencies of the systems
- 9:37Speaker 1: are so incredibly big and the advantages of disruptive technology
- 9:41Speaker 1: can make such an incredibly large impact. How big is
- 9:45Speaker 1: our x advance today? We launched it in January of
- 9:49Speaker 1: this year, we started back in. We'll do about a
- 9:52Speaker 1: D five million revenue this year and next year we're
- 9:55Speaker 1: looking at well over five hundred million. It could be
- 9:57Speaker 1: closer to a billion next year. We think we'll be
- 9:59Speaker 1: at hen billion dollars revenues. Our plan by and we
- 10:04Speaker 1: think that we have pretty conservative outlook to get um
- 10:09Speaker 1: somewhere around eight hundred million dollars for profit. Now, there
- 10:12Speaker 1: aren't many businesses that grow that fast to that size,
- 10:15Speaker 1: but it's still very small in the context of a
- 10:19Speaker 1: three training dollar healthcare industry. I mean, even then, we'll
- 10:22Speaker 1: probably have less than a three percent market here at
- 10:25Speaker 1: that scale. At that scale, well, I want to thank
- 10:28Speaker 1: you very much. When you talk about that, it sounds
- 10:30Speaker 1: almost like a moon shot, and I guess that's a
- 10:33Speaker 1: good way to describe your book because that's the title,
- 10:35Speaker 1: Moonshot Game Changing Strategies to Build Billion dollar Businesses. Thank
- 10:39Speaker 1: you very much for spending time with us. John Scully, author, entrepreneur,
- 10:43Speaker 1: former chief executive of PepsiCo and Apple much appreciate it.
- 10:47Speaker 1: I keep him and it's available on Amazon. Maybe you
- 10:51Speaker 1: can use Alexa to order it as well. You can't. Actually, yeah,
- 10:53Speaker 1: say Alexa, I want to order John Scully's moon Shot,
- 10:56Speaker 1: and if you're connected to Amazon Prime, you'll get the book.
- 10:59Speaker 1: Thanks very much, John Scully, author of Moonshot game Changing
- 11:03Speaker 1: Strategies to Build Billion dollar Businesses. You're listening to taking Stock,
- 11:07Speaker 1: I'm pim Fox and this is Bloomberg