Interview With Manasseh John wesley - Founder & CEO of River Bend Data Solutions Pvt.Ltd

1. Describe about your Business and founders

RIVER BEND DATA SOLUTIONS Pvt.Ltd., founded by Manasseh John Wesley in 2018 and was officially incorporated in 2020 March 13th under Start-up India. The purpose of the organisation was to adapt to modern technologies and learn the latest Digital trends to create a better, faster and smarter framework in the health-Tech Industry, where general clinics to modern-day hospitals can have a standard and efficient technological stack to operate and diagnose patients faster and efficient than ever. Not just confining our purpose to help in Clinic management and Patient diagnosis, we also plan to contribute the best tools and services to the medical research fraternity for increasing their research line on disease classification to Drug discovery. We defined our purpose through a short tagline of our organisation, “Aiding transformation for better health”.

2 . What is the biggest challenge of being a CEO and how do you overcome it?

 Being a chief executive is a hard place to be because you need to be the first-hand subject matter in every act of the organisation. Not limiting the role to managing the organisation, it has greater responsibilities to play such as People management, growth hacking and taking the flagship of the organisation and being the front face of it in making the organisation a great place of innovation.

 The biggest challenges I have personally faced being a CEO were managing growth, employee engagement, maintaining profitability and healthy cash flow and organizing& leading the change initiatives across the company and developing & executing great products.

 

 To overcome these challenges, here are few things I have learned.

• Learn to ask what is important

I learned to have three major priorities at any point in time. Of course, one will always have a backlog of little things, but I restrained myself from becoming a victim of my to-do list. The last one is developing daily amnesia i.e., asking myself what is most important every day. 

• Tell a story

I’ve learned, the best way to convey your message is through storytelling. I don’t use buzzwords; geek talk and heavy corporate language. I try to keep it secular, light and humorous. I need to charm my team, my customers, and my shareholders. I believe People relate to stories, not buzzwords.

• Having a deep sense of purpose

I often ask myself; if my business disappears tomorrow, will it matter? To whom? and why? Making a difference to the world. At PeoplePerHour, we have a solid sense of purpose we serve. 

• Be the gatekeeper

Don’t get confused between delegation and gatekeeping. I need to be the ultimate gatekeeper of my company. I am the one who is defining and setting the standard. People will push you to compromise your standards for the sake of moving faster or for more freedom. Don’t get tricked and stay true to yourself. 

Setting high goals don’t start with the small ones.

 Your team members will often tell you to “start small”. If I start small, I will stay small! I Start big and set big bold goals. If you set the goalpost low, you will be good at best. I stretch my staff beyond their limits. They may complain that I expect too much, but in the end, they will thank me for it.

 “There is no greater reward than helping my employees achieve what they thought was unachievable.” 

• Serving others

My job as a CEO is to serve others more than I serve myself. I stop thinking about what I need from people and ask them what they need from me. I figure out what my customers need, what my team needs, and what my shareholders need. Then help them make it happen.

Develop a thick skin.

 Being CEO of a business, especially being the founder is an emotional roller coaster. I often have some very low moments. I try not to let the emotional pressures break me. People will read you better than you think, and if they smell vulnerability and weakness, I wield less power.

 

 3. Where do you see the company in the next five years and how will you bring about the change?

 We are now working on a revolutionary technology that can transform clinic management and give it a whole new dimension of possibilities to understand and treat patients better and more efficiently. By deploying this we are looking forward to offering our services to all the primary health care and small-scale clinics in India to help them transform digitally into a super speciality hospital in just one click of a button. Our five-year goal reflects the same i.e., of acquiring and helping more than 40% of the overall percentage of clinics and PHCs’ available in India and continuing to expand and push it into 75% coverage.

  4. Did you ever feel like giving up on being a CEO? What motivated you to pull this off?

 I guess somewhere deep down, we all are unhappy with ourselves and we can never feel complete within since as individuals we all wear masks and pretend to be doing fine. But in reality, we are all sad and depressed at some point in time.

 One can never be motivated by their self; you can never find a motivational driving factor to push yourself to that top! Because no matter how much you achieve there’s still something left. Life is a journey, an experience it never has a pitstop so, keeping up with yourself and finding motivation within is hard and sometimes it is impossible.

I found no purpose to develop or do great things for my benefit or my comfort; ultimately, we can never be content! Life always has great demands to fulfil. But what’s beautiful is that, when you do a little favour to others, let’s say when you help a poor man, the satisfaction and the content heart, the feeling you experience is something that cannot be explained by words.

 The very same experience has become the needed motivation for me. I set a higher vision on a great noble cause, to help people's health and also to help medical institutions, which are serving people.

 When you are working towards a greater cause and a higher vision to serve people and to serve the country, you can always find a great sense of strong motivation because you are working for the betterment of the society and the people in it. This becomes a strong motivational driving force to move forward towards your vision.

 

5. Describe your biggest achievement

Observing the revolution of digital transformation that took place. All the industries started adopting cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence. As a vision of aiming towards transforming and shaping the health care industry, we as an organisation have decided to develop smart tools and services which are available for hospitals only in the US / UK but not yet explored in India.

 We have developed a very first A. I Diagnosis tool, which has14+ ML models that help and assist Doctors in the Diagnosis of patients varying from the field of Radiology to Epidemiology. Once we deployed the Beta version, more than 300+ doctors signed up and we received great appreciation from a lot of reputed medical institutions from India and overseas. This enabled us to open a new portal of opportunities and possibilities to work on artificial intelligence in the health care industry.

 6. From where you get the idea for a business? What was your aim to start the company?

 In India,33% of the population above 30years suffer from 1 or more Lifestyle Diseases. 6.0 million people die in a year due to NCD and 35 million people are affected by chronic diseases. There is a total number of 69,000 hospitals in India. I have personally encountered a lot of differences and gaps between how mainstream corporate medical institutions operate and how low line clinics function. We see that low line clinics and hospitals lack basic technological infrastructure and necessities.

This was the moment that rooted the seed of doing something to aid the current needs of the health care industry. This burden grew and took shape into River Bend Data Solutions where we aim to provide a new formula of digital health care solutions to help Clinics and low line Medical institutions to have a standard technological infrastructure and advanced tools which are driven by the best technologies such as Artificial intelligence to help doctors and other clinicians operate and diagnose faster and with more efficiency.

 I strongly believe A. I (Artificial intelligence) is changing the way we think and understand the basics of our life such as our Mind, Body and Soul. It is changing our very Human Experience.

 A.I is now said to be the new generation tool that we can apply to clinically meaningful problems. There are a lot of countries that have already adopted these technologies and are advancing on the growth of the Medical Curve. I want to create a bridge between Hospitals and Patients, a greater bridge between People and their health.

 We as an organisation want to shape and transform how health care is practised.

 Our vision as a company is to bring a new health care revolution that brings great technologies and adaptable solutions which can accelerate Doctor’s workflow in a way where we can increase the phase and efficiency of Diagnosis and create a standard body of technological framework to operate and optimize clinic management.

 7. Tell us some of your failures

Start-up is a journey a road of great learning's, one of the greatest failures that I've experienced was not giving enough time to nurture the idea and try to fully understand the needs of the existing customer and how we can change their experience.

 So to simply put into an analogy, you need to first validate your idea and do some math on how exactly you want to go forward, why you think your product or service is really important to your customer. By doing this earlier, Start-up can save a lot of resources and time which are the most crucial areas for a Start-up which I learnt the hard way.

 Another important lesson from another failure is, always employ the right people who are the perfect fit for the organization otherwise they become a liability to the organization. Finding the right like-minded people who can reflect their vision to the vision of the organization which in turn creates a great ecosystem of a healthy workplace and a greater scope of innovation.

 

 8. What is the role of your family in your successful career?

My family played a really important role in my start-up journey; it’s something that I will be debt to. Many parents these days restrict their children from exploring their passion and interests, they are forced into education and they never really get a chance to explore themselves and know what suits them best and what they are good at.

 My parents were kind enough to always allow me to explore the world to learn new things and to create larger than life moments. They have always been supportive of my vision and ideas that I wanted to work on. I guess more than the support what is more important to me was their life, how they have started from nothing and entrusting hard work, they are “self-made”.

 I was very much influenced by seeing my father and his journey. He stood as a great example of how to live life and work towards the betterment of people and society. I have learned a lot of things from my parents and all of those learning's are very much important to practice in leading this organization.

9. What is your message to the young generations and their parents?

 My message to the young generation is that the world is rapidly changing what we have seen yesterday is not visible today and what we have today cannot be seen tomorrow. It’s really important to be in line with the trends of the market and acquire skills that are required to match the technologies booming in the industry. God has blessed everyone with a special ability, but identifying it is the most important stage of life. So, one should explore, learn and formulate his/her best interest and channel his/her ability in that field to create great miracles.

 Parents also have a take on this, they should give their children a chance and allow their children to explore the world by themselves and to find out where their strength &passion lie and where he/she can perform the best! and work towards the same goal and be a part of great innovations which uplift and make a difference in society.

Your intelligence should help in making life better! We are the people who can change the world. We have a big responsibility to make the world a better place.

 You should always believe in yourself. You have the ability to do any kind of work whether it is easy or tough. So be confident and work hard to get your dream. Be a good human being who helps everyone. Be a good partner, a good friend, a good soul who is honest, trustworthy and responsible. Happiness will find you.