Sure. Thank you very much. Well, it's been a pleasure working with you, first of all. I'd like to say that.
I have been working in the pharma industry, plus other industries for about 40 years in health, but also data tech. And I decided to set up my own company about 10 years ago, and we finally founded the company in 2017 and have been working since then on some quite challenging issues in health tech.
Sure. So, Volv Global was really set up to take advantage of the large amounts of patient data that were being shared anonymously, so that we could learn much more about patients, their interactions with their clinicians and how they're being treated.
And what we do is we use that data to find ways to predict who might have certain diseases that doctors don't really understand very well and so they often don't get diagnosis right first time.
I'm the founder of the company and I have a bunch of really, really bright people that I work with. We have a big international data science team. We're based in Switzerland and we're growing at the moment, so we've got more functions coming on board all the time. We've been in business, as I say, for quite a number of years and have been in revenue all that time as well.
We'd already landed a couple of customers but we weren't actually getting enough customers to be able to grow the company. And we were doing things very much as a startup, hand to mouth, really trying to make things work, trying to do outreach to people, engaging with people at conferences, attending events, some targeting of customers by social media and trying to contact people on LinkedIn, but we weren't getting very far, and we knew that we needed to do a step change and make it much better.
COVID-19 came along and it made us really focus on this kind of digital first approach. I've always been into that, but it really, really made us say, ‘well, we've got to do this’.
We were locked down, we couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything, but we had to carry on with our business. So digitising and automating as much as we could and being efficient ―and actually then also really thinking about our customers much more and being a little bit more subtle and targeted about using digital. It was just the perfect timing.
Well, I think there are some quite some obvious ones; we are winning more customers, which is great.
So this year we're looking to have signed more customers. We could only ever do one customer maximum a year if we were lucky before working with you, possibly every two years. So that's been a really big leap.
The amount of engagement with the customers we get has really increased, and the depth of that engagement of even potential clients has increased. So that's also great.
But I think one of my favourite stories is that we spoke to someone very senior in a large pharmaceutical company that is now a client, and she said to us, she only took the call because of the way that the message was crafted. She gets hundreds of messages from people trying to sell her things every day, but what she got from us was meaningful and deep and caught her attention and she wanted to talk to us. And I think that is a credit to how we've worked together, how we've collaborated.
Yeah, so it definitely is about top- line growth and margin and impact and effectiveness. What I do like now is that even though we've had quite a complex set of tools that we've imposed upon you, we've actually found a solution whereby we can measure that impact., That is really important because we want to continue working with people that have a measurable impact for us. And by inference that means for our clients and therefore to patients in the long run.
So it's about creating that transparency, creating that ability to see the impact on our business, I can report that to the board, we can report it to other people, et cetera. And it just means that we can do more…and we want to do more with you.
Yes. I think actually it's going to help us a lot more as we grow, I've got some thoughts on this.
I think we're definitely going to see bigger growth targets, and I think we'll achieve those by being much more considered about how we segment our clients, how we actually understand them in their different trajectories; their journeys with us.
And I think being able to address their needs much better through working with you, is really going to be meaningful and helpful. We'll double our number of new clients.
Well, there's kind of intrinsic value and external value. So in terms of external value, of course, return on investment.
Intrinsic values are the ability to work with you well, to collaborate to find custom solutions and thinking about what the future might be, how we might do that, and doing it in a really collaborative way that fits to our business needs.
I think we're quite an unusual business in what we do and what we sell. So, you've managed to really understand that very well, and I think that intrinsic value, it's very important to us.
I think that's actually what real partnering is because people talk about partnering and often it's just transactional. It's not really partnering at all. They're just saying, you do this for me, and I'll give you this - that's a business relationship.
But partnering is actually this, what we're talking about - collaboration, I think that's important. We need to use your expertise and you've got to somehow invest in understanding us. So it's much more than that.
I would be happy to recommend you pretty much to anyone in this field.
It's really difficult when you're looking at service and providers, first of all, in the abstract sense, to know what you're going to get, then to think about collaboration and partnering is a whole nother step. And so being able to recommend people like yourselves that can actually provide that value and make sure that it's measurable.
I think anyone listening to this, if you are interested in growing in a complex market, Simon's got some really, really great ideas and ways to do that.