Five Pieces of Advice for Surgeon Inventors When Writing a Plan
Know the Journey
The medical device industry is highly regulated, potential barriers are well known and highly predictable. Well, they should be.
Whilst working to focus on the essence, to simplify, the journey ahead, I view the journey in four distinct stages:
Product market ready
Business launch ready
Launch and roll out plan executed
Scaleup and expansion
These are broad high-level milestones that paint a simplified, but clear, picture of the journey. There are many steps and timelines that lie below these core milestones, and a reality. Time and cost to market can be minimised and become predictive if the barriers to progress are known and mitigated upfront. It’s the not-knowing that blows out time and cost exponentially, barriers that, to be blunt, should have been anticipated.
Market Acceptance
There must be a clear market need for your product or service. Money can fix many problems and inadequacies but will not fix a market that’s not interested or has no call for your product.
There are a number of key points to think about:
What is the significance of the problem you intend to solve for the potential customer?
Does your potential customer feel the proposed product or service solves their problem?
Do you know who is the buyer and whether they will pay the price?
Are you focused on understanding and delivering value to the customer?
Don’t rely on logic, how will you grab attention?
The more you interrogate and understand the problem, the better and more relevant the solution, and the clearer the value.
Investment Clarity
If you have the journey figured out you will know the cash needed for each step and also when that investment will need to be in the bank.
The magic question… If you had $10M deposited in your bank tomorrow, would you be very clear on what you are going to spend it on? What will you do tomorrow?
So, how exactly and succinctly will you spend the money you are investing personally or raising from others? How will any investment move you from milestone to milestone? What will be achieved with the investment?
Launch Execution
You are clear about what you are doing, and why. Are you clear about the “how”? How will you present your product to market, gain sales and build a sustainable relationship with customers?
If your strategy says “the total available market is $1B” and “we will engage a distributor” then you have work to do – this is not adequate! It’s getting harder and harder to engage, with more and more products out in market, less and less access to customers, and how do you source the best distributors who are already busy? The more physician preference your product, the more you need to be driving market connection!
Scaleup and Expansion
If you want to make a significant difference to patients, your product must be available whenever physicians need your product, wherever the patients may be. This needs to be balanced with the need to achieve commercial success.
You simply must have a clear, concise and well thought out scaleup plan that must include international expansion.
A simple fact to consider:
84% of the global surgical specialty market is in West Europe, North America and North Asia. Implication? Of the 197 markets in the world, less than 25 encapsulate the majority of the medical device market.
We haven’t finished yet. It’s all good to talk market expansion – it’s very important to talk expansion – but you need to plan how you will scaleup your businesses to enable expansion.
Conclusion
My experience tells me that most surgeon founders are very clear on the product, the solution, but lack depth when it comes to the other core disciplines highlighted here. Having a great product is only part of the journey.