My journey from medical doctor to pan-African healthcare investor

Are these transitions really that strange?

The most common question I get asked on social media, is how a medical doctor like me seems to know so much about business, finance, economics and investing. I get asked so often, that I have decided to blog about my career transition.

Before I go through the steps that I personally took, I would like to point out that its not as uncommon as it seems. There are a quite a few famous medical doctors that have pursued careers in finance.

For example, Jim Yong Kim, the former head of the World Bank, was a medical doctor. Michael James Burry, who was featured in the film ‘the big short’ was a doctor, famous for being one of the few investment managers who correctly identified the abnormalities in the sub-prime market before the global financial crisis. A great number of healthcare investment funds/companies, like my company, are run or managed by medical doctors.

My personal journey

My personal journey started when I left medical school, but really wanted to make an impact in African healthcare. The death of my beautiful, thoughtful youngest sister in Nigeria at just 12 years old had made me acutely and painfully aware of the challenges with African healthcare systems. I became determined to try to be part of the solution.

Shortly after I left medical school, I decided to set up an air ambulance business to cover West/Central Africa as the massive distances between hospitals, poor road infrastructure and low doctor to patient ratios made rapid emergency transport important. Since inception the service has responded to thousands of emergencies in almost every African country! I no longer run the company, but have remained on the board.

However, I began to find it increasingly difficult to balance a medical practice requiring annual subscriptions of hundreds of pounds, thousands of hours of hospital practices and many flights out of Nigeria for continuous professional development courses with running a growing business.

I confided in Dr Sonny Kuku, the first ever Nigerian doctor to list his company on the Nigerian stock exchange and become chairman of one of Africa’s largest banks . He convinced me to give up medical practice even if it was temporarily, to focus on growing my business and acquiring business skills.

So I gave up my medical license voluntarily and committed fully to the impact, investment and business journey. Against my fathers advice. This was one of the most important decisions of my life. I had already started taking basic courses in business, but that singular decision freed up my time to focus on my career transition.

Executive education and professional development

Executive education is expensive. But has been a huge part of my development journey. I started in Lagos business school, getting my feet wet with a short course on business negotiation, after which I went to Cambridge, Judge Business school for an executive course in marketing. I then when back to Cambridge university to study business negotiation. Since then I have studied mainly finance and accounting at the IE business school (Economic policy), the university of Michigan (Accounting), INSEAD, Harvard (Project Finance/PPP), Bocconi (Project Finance), Columbia, the New York Institute of Finance (Infrastructure Finance)and Wharton. As well as University of London for my Masters in Finance. In addition to this, I read every management and business book I could lay my hands on. I stalked all the ivy league professors I could find via their youtube channels, learning everything I could from them. But I realised that I was most interested in corporate finance, becoming fascinated by the way that capital deployed in the right way could become such a transformative catalyst for change, particularly in emerging markets.

I started a finance blog, a finance and economics youtube channel, took courses in accounting and economics at the University of Michigan and IE Business School, all whilst I was also running a sector agnostic venture capital firm with my partners called Greentree Investments. Greentree was one of the earliest investors in Paystack which we exited in 2020; one of the largest technology acquisitions in Africa.

Meanwhile as our air ambulance business expanded, I was able to step down from running it, whilst retaining a board seat, to focus on healthcare investing full time. We started to invest in and operate companies/projects across the African healthcare value chain in diagnostics, telemedicine, drug manufacturing, retail pharmacy, logistics, biotechnology and medical logistics, building it into a leading pan-African healthcare focused investment company. The value of companies currently in our portfolio is over $200m!

Most of my doctor friends say that I completed by transition to the ‘dark side’ :-) when I started my Masters in Finance majoring in Economic policy and even authored a book called ‘Banking, Finance and Economics in emerging markets’

The most important commitment I made was to continuous professional development. The variety of courses available both in person and online at the worlds best universities were crucial for me.

Resources I used include:

1. A list of my favorite business reads
2. My Youtube channels for executives and founders
3. A treasure trove of free downloadable finance and economics textbooks
4. A directory of executive education courses
5. Coursera Online courses
6. You can also check out my online courses on macroeconomics and micrcoeconomics
7. I love finance, so an Msc in Finance and Economics was quite natural for me, but most people prefer a more generalist view of business. So I have posted a list of online MBA programs
8. For finance geeks, you might also want to consider taking CFA, especially if unlike me, you don’t want to focus on economic policy as well

I am thankful to Dr Kuku all these years later for his sage advice and words of wisdom to a scared twenty-something year old me.

Fear should never hold us back from finding work that brings us joy. I changed careers in my 20’s, but I believe that its never too late to find work that you love.

Learn more about me here