Why I Sold – Acquisition Stories with Kate Rhind, Healthpoint

We caught up with Kate Rhind, the founder of HealthPoint, and current CEO of Healthpoint. To talk about the acquisition process for the New Zealand company and what life looks like post-acquisition.

Watch Kate's Acquisition Story

What is the Origin of Healthpoint?

I founded Healthpoint 22 years ago following the death of my father. What I realized following his death, was that his journey through the health system was disrupted or wasn’t as good as it could be because he didn’t have the confidence and the ability to communicate in each area.

He saw general providers, pharmacists, he had intensive care, cardiology, and renal care. Everyone was amazing looking after specific organs, but it was really up to him to be able to look after his whole self. Unfortuntatly, he didn’t communicate through this process, which means that he didn’t really have an in-depth conversation.

I believe that if he was able to have those conversations during his care, he would’ve had different pathways and he would’ve had a different outcome.

So I wanted to set up Healthpoint, which would make the New Zealand health system transparent. This way, everyone knew what services were available, who the people were that were providing different procedures, treatments and services.

It started off with free services in a public hospital in Auckland, and now we are the National Health Services Directory in New Zealand.

We also have a tool we co-desgined called ‘Medinz‘, which allows for communicating clinically relevant updates across primary care (GPs, pharmacies, community providers), keeping providers informed with essential emergency communications.

We’ve grown from the idea of connecting information enables people to connect, but all our tools actually enable that same philosophy: technology providing information that enables people to connect and use the health system.

How Did You Discover Jonas and How Did We Compare to Other Acquirers?

How did I discover Jonas? I think Jonas discovered us actually! They reached out to us via email and we weren’t looking at selling at that stage.

What we were looking at was our strategy and saying we have had 20 years of building the Healthpoint technology and the Healthpoint customer base and actually adding real value to New Zealanders.

What we wanted to do is understand what our next 20 years looked like and how would we be better in that next 20 years than we were in our first 20 years. We wanted to continue to grow, to be autonomous, to actually understand the new technologies that are coming through, such as cybersecurity and AI. Most importantly, we wanted to ensure that we are a relevant fit for purpose and still enabling the New Zealand Health Service in 20 years time.

When Jonas approached us with a different model than we’ve been told before – not the VC model or the merger model. But the model of acquire and hold, it was a really attractive model because it would enable us to be stronger and to layer a whole lot of capabilities over what we currently have to enable a sustainable future.

That was the core driver for us. That it was better for Healthpoint to be part of Jonas than to be autonomous.

– Selling to Jonas or Taking VC Investment: Understanding the Differences

– PE or Jonas? What You Need To Know

Watch The Acquisition Story Below

How Has Your Experience Aligned With The ABC’s?

We are still new in our journey. But I feel that the layering of the capabilities, which Jonas promised when were acquired, has actually exceeded my expectations.

We have used a whole lot of the services that Jonas has, such as the best practices, the playbooks, they are very interesting actually.

We explored them against our strategies and our playbook and actually got to see market leading business processes, which is great. I have also been really impressed with the layering of cybersecurity over Healthpoint and the layering of AI and the encouragement to build our capability in AI. This is one of the core reasons why we wanted to have a larger footprint because it meant that we could do more in the AI space.

So the community at Jonas, the sharing best practices with other organizations, and the inspiration to do more has been really significant.

From a workforce perspective, we’ve really utilized the learning opportunities with Jonas GROWs and JSA for many of our staff, which has been great. We’ve also had professional development for our staff, which we hadn’t been able to provide previously. Such as the e-learning through Udemy and other tools in which a lot of our team has been doing their own personal development in their own time as well.

So all of that packaged together has meant that the staff and and the organization is in a better place than we were prior to the Jonas acquisition.

What Was Your Experience With Jonas Post Acquisition?

My experience with Jonas post-acquisition was that we had a significant amount of work to do to transition our systems and our process over to the Jonas model. But they were led by very skilled, interested people that were able to inquire about our processes and have a really nice match for us.

During the onboarding, there were some of our services that Jonas decided to pilot and see whether that’d be useful for other Jonas companies. So it was a really nice collaboration together to say, “Hey Healthpoint, you’re doing this really, really well. Can we as an organization learn off that?” Then other areas that was, “Okay we need you to be within the system.” And the transition to those systems was very smooth.

Advice You’d Give to Software Owners Looking to Sell Their Business

The advice I’d give to owners looking to sell their business is understanding what it is that you want through the process of selling your business.

For me personally, I wanted Healthpoint to be in a better, stronger place. That meant that when I looked at other alternatives, such as a merger where potentially we would lose our identity, or VC where there is a whole lot of future risk, it wasn’t what I wanted for Healthpoint.

Then with a buy and hold strategy, I feel like I was confident enough that a business that I’d spent 22 years building would be in a really good space for the next 20 years. And most importantly, I would still want to work within that business – that that was my driver.

Additionally, I think if you are looking to sell your business, you want to make sure the organization that is caring for your business is planning for the future and looking at a five year plan. You want that organization to be looking at the market and considering the business and how they can grow it and how tools like AI can actually excel your company.

All that to say, I would highly recommend having a conversation with Jonas. What I did find is what they said came true. That was really, really nice because I didn’t know Jonas before I started these conversations, so I did talk to a few people and what they said is what has happened. So I’m very thankful for that and very thankful for the people that have supported us through that journey.