John Olajide, President and founder of Axxess, the largest home healthcare provider in the United States, speaks to BusinessDay’s Frank Eleanya on his vision for the healthcare sector and creating new opportunities for millions of Nigerians. He recently came into the country to expand the footprint of Cavista, a software engineers training company that services clients around the world.
Why are you in Nigeria?
I am in Nigeria for three reasons. Number one is to create jobs and number two is to create more jobs and number three is to create more and more jobs. I am very passionate about economic development, about leveraging business to improve the lives of everyone and create opportunities for other people. Nigeria is blessed with human capital and I believe that the most important resource any society has is people. We don’t even need natural resources, we just need people. We can harness their creative abilities to work. I also believe there is nothing wrong with us. We can deliver excellence. We can achieve excellence right here in Nigeria. You have seen it on display here already. That is why I am here. I am a very proud Nigerian. I wear my Ekiti identity proudly.
What do you mean about reverse Japa?
We have seen our best and brightest leaving our nation and going abroad. It is a phenomenon that has lasted hundreds of years from when people were taken involuntarily to now when we are going voluntarily. I think there are opportunities for us to invest here; create opportunities for our people and leave a better society for generations to come. I am hoping I can make my contributions to make that happen.
What is Axxess about?
When I was in college, I had an aunt that worked for a local healthcare organisation. I was a very broke college student. She often gives me money. When I got to her office – it was a fairly large size organisation – I noticed that there were a lot of people working on different workstations. This was in 2001. So I started asking questions, you have done all this work here, are the computers connected, or are they connected in a computer network? She said “No”. We take those things for granted now but then it was a big deal. I started explaining what a computer network was and the benefits of a network to help them improve their business, grow their revenue, streamline their operations, decrease the cost of doing business, help them be more successful as a business, and help them improve their patient’s outcomes. She liked that idea and took me to her boss and I told him the same thing. The boss said it was an amazing idea and asked if I could do it for them I said yes. I did a decent job and he told other companies and I did a similar job for them. That way, I paid my way to school.
The business was healthcare at home where they send medical professionals to homes. I saw from the beginning that it was an industry that was underserved from a technology perspective. So I said these folks need technology to help them be more efficient. At some point, I told my aunt why don’t you set up your own organisation? She said she did not know where to start doing that, so I helped her with the technology aspect of the business. My parents owned their business, they were distributors for Unilever, so while I was a kid I already understood business. I used to go to my parents’ store to help sell goods like Omo, Lux, etc. During the holiday my parents often allow me to manage the storefronts because they had different stores. I understood business fundamentally. Even when I studied engineering, my passion was in business. The foundation for my entrepreneurial success was right here in Lagos. So for my aunt’s business, I could see end-to-end what the organisation needed. I became a consultant for her business. That’s how it started. I realised that there is an industry that is underserved from the perspective of technology and I had the ability to create technology, my passion was computing. This industry can benefit from cloud-based technology or software in the cloud. What healthcare at home does is send medical professionals into people’s homes to provide care, after documenting that care, the organisation that sends them will collect that data and bill insurance companies or whoever they need to bill, and manage the workflow. There are times when the organisation will have to wait two weeks to get documentation on what is happening to that patient. That is not effective because the patient could have been dead within the period.
I started thinking why can’t we create technology where we can provide excellent healthcare and get information in real time? At the time we were thinking about it, no one else was thinking about it, so it was revolutionary. We set out to build technology to help them be more effective. I thought it will take me just 6 months to build the technology. The first version took four years to get done. After four years of work, you will think it will be an amazing platform. The very first client we went to see, we got there we set up with a lot of excitement. We started it, but it did not work. So my very first experience was not successful.
We went back and tried to find someone we could work with. We kept working on it and today we are the leading provider of care at home in the world. This includes the United States, we have clients in the UK, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Canada, India, Philippians, and many other countries. More than 8000 organisations use our technology platform. Everything they want to do end-to-end they can do on our cloud-based software. The CEO of the organisation has his own dashboard to manage, the same as other staff of the company. We are like the SAP of the global health sector. We are more advanced than that though. It is a cloud-based software that can be used from anywhere in the world to manage the healthcare sector.
Axxess is important to Nigeria and its development because it holds promise for increasing access to quality healthcare. There are not enough resources even in the developing world to build shiny new hospitals for healthcare delivery. I also think that is not the best way to deliver the best healthcare. The best is through technology to deliver it to people anywhere they are. Some of the health problems we have in Nigeria are completely avoidable. I wake up every day to build technology to make a difference in people’s life.
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What is the Axxess Way?
How we operate our business is what we call the Axxess Way. it is who we are. Our commitment first is to our people. We make sure they are the core of our success story. It is people first. We have a commitment to our clients, we make sure that we understand them and we help to accomplish their goals. It is a commitment to our partners. No one builds success alone. Let’s do it together. It is the same thing with Cavista. We have the Cavista Way. It yields an incredible dividend. You can do good and do well. We don’t even think it is exceptional because this is who we are. My group of companies is the leading investor in Ekiti State today. We are running Egbeyewa farms, which means being a farmer is a thing of pride in the Yoruba language. People know me as a tech person but I am just a humble farmer. We have employees in Cavista writing codes for us across the country. I believe that we can harness our diversity because we employ people from 50 different countries and we do it successfully. We want more women to be on our team of engineers.
What is Axxess client base like in Nigeria?
Axxess is not serving clients in Nigeria yet. Cavista is Axxess’s global partner to help service our clients all over the world. Eventually, Cavista will be client-facing here in Nigeria. What we wanted to do is lay the foundation for the success of Cavista. We are not in a hurry to anywhere. We want to make sure we support the Cavista team and that they can work at world-class standards. Eventually, when we face the market here and they understand what the challenges are, their global standards and experience will be leveraged with our local expertise. Cavista is very busy. We need more engineers here. The engineers we employ here are not enough to service Axxess’ business. But the good news is because they have access to that experience to build at a world-class level it will be easy to integrate our solutions here and also export our local solutions to other parts of the world. Here at Cavista we export talent. We have had people from the banking sector approach us to build technology for them. When we find the right opportunity that match. We will get that done. But our clients will be assured that this is the best they can get anywhere in the world.
What is the Ekiti Knowledge Zone about?
When people think about Ekiti State it is about professors and people with PhDs. There are a lot of professors and intellectual human capital but that hasn’t translated into economic success or prosperity for the state. What we are going to do is figure out what the state is best known for and figure out how we can partner with the government to export that to the world. In Ekiti, there are lots of universities, and a lot of them when their students are done are heading to Lagos to work. Things can’t be this way. Why can’t we create viable options in other parts of the country and leverage what they have in human capital and provide opportunities in human capital in partnership with the government to upscale those young people and give them opportunities? Imagine thousands of software engineers’ ecosystems servicing clients globally. The forex challenges Nigeria have is because we are not providing enough oil to earn forex, but imagine exporting millions of people to provide services for clients globally, we are talking about billions of forex, and the challenge to our currency will disappear. We are not talking about Ekiti, we have similar operations in India. Our vision for the Ekiti Knowledge zone is to harness all the available human capital there for all kinds of sectors, leverage world-class technology and showcase that to top firms all around the world. Think about the multiplier effect.
