How Simple Online Healthcare rapidly scaled from its Glasgow base

Seizing the market moment and having the people and processes in place helped Simple Online Healthcare to rapidly scale, an achievement which has eluded many other Scottish businesses.

Simple Online Healthcare

Three years ago, the Glasgow online pharmacist was turning over £20 million, however, it is set to report revenue of £155 million.

This is a near eight-fold jump driven by the GLP-1 weight-loss boom.

The east end Glasgow business, headquartered on Dunn Street, was among the UK’s earliest providers to offer a GLP-1 medication through a digital assessment, launching Saxenda in 2020.

But it’s the last two to three years that have transformed the business, as demand for the drug class exploded and forced the company to mature at speed.

The company is also offering nutritional guidance and advice to customers.

Founder and CEO Addy Mohammed said: “We were the first provider in the UK, in fact, to offer a GLP-1 through a digital assessment.

“So we offered a product called Saxenda in 2020. We were early adopters, but the biggest acceleration in demand for GLP-1s has been the last two to three years. It really showed the scale of unmet patient need, but it really did force us to mature the business pretty quickly.”

Addy is a pharmacist by profession, starting his career in community pharmacy with Rowlands in Glasgow’s East End before opening his own pharmacies across the Central Belt and later setting up a pharma wholesale export business.

He co-founded Simple Online Healthcare around 2015 with Kareem Nassar.

Kareem stepped back from day-to-day running of the company about a year ago but remains a co-owner, the two are the company’s sole shareholders.

The business operates from its Dunn Street office, the firm’s single site of operations for its UK business and central functions.

Pick, pack, ship and dispensing operations share the same roof as finance, product, tech, growth and clinical teams.

“There’s such a diversity of people in our building, and it’s all under one roof as well, which makes it pretty cool,” Addy said.

“Communication tends to be pretty quick in this business for that reason.”

Four of the company’s seven executives are Scots who progressed from early senior hires into C-suite roles, though Addy said the business has brought in talent “from south of the border” where needed.

Despite the rapid international expansion, the company now operates across multiple markets, Addy has resisted any pressure to relocate closer to traditional business hubs.

“There is an assumption that as you scale, you might need to move closer to London or another major hub, he said.

“For us, we’ve always felt you can access national and international networks whilst keeping the heart of the business in Scotland, and that’s certainly what we’re most proud of. That’s where we see the future for us.”

Addy’’s own experience feeds directly into a question that comes up repeatedly at Insider’s roundtables, why so few Scottish companies push through the £25-30 million mark into genuine scale.

He said: “Scotland is still very good at producing entrepreneurial talent and early-stage businesses.

“The bigger challenge is that scale-up phase, as a company grows it needs experienced leadership, growth capital, international networks, people who’ve lived and breathed that journey, whether it’s from 10 million to 50 or from 50 to 100.

“There’s an added complexity for us in Scotland because we might not have access to that level of talent within Scotland.”

Unusually for a business scaling this fast, Simple Online Healthcare has done it without taking on external investment, a deliberate choice, Addy said, rather than a lack of options.

“We’ve been entirely self-funded and fortunate enough to have been profitable from almost day one, he added.

“That’s really allowed us to have a disciplined approach and focus on customers and sustainable growth, as opposed to optimising the business for our next round, which can be distracting. Not to say we won’t seek external funding if it helps accelerate our strategic objectives.”

For all the growth, Addy is clear that the business’s ambitions remain fixed and that any strategic options along the way won’t be allowed to pull focus from them.

He said: “The North Star and the focus of the business has to remain that five-year plan or vision.

“And for us, that’s being in 20 markets, serving a million patients monthly, and headquartered in Scotland.

“If there’s a strategic option for us to consider, then absolutely any business would. but that doesn’t deviate the business from achieving its plan, and that is the focus.”