COMMERCIAL PROFILE; UCD:Completing an MBA has helped Howard Biggs more fully exploit the niche he has found in the healthcare market

HELIX HEALTH chief executive Howard Beggs certainly doesn't fit the usual identikit of the successful software entrepreneur. His CV doesn't include the usual techie credentials and computer science college background and he freely admits to "stumbling" onto the market niche on which he built his company.

And Helix Health is certainly successful. It is the dominant healthcare software company in Ireland with 80 per cent of GP practices, 60 per cent of hospital consultants, 80 per cent of hospital pharmacies and 70 per cent of retail pharmacies using its practice management and other healthcare delivery products. The company also has a growing share of the UK market and has recently signed a new partnership deal with Dubai-based company GIT to give it a foothold in the lucrative Middle Eastern marketplace.

But it wasn't always thus. "I come from the era before free third-level education," says Beggs. "I left school in 1986 and joined the Jefferson Smurfit Group. Back then the PC had just been launched and Smurfit set up a computing division and I went to work there selling IT solutions to customers - financial products mainly."

After 10 years with Smurfit he set up his own company, Medicom, in 1996. "I came across the healthcare niche in 1996 because I had done some work in it with Smurfit. I won't pretend that it's not a case that you stumble upon a market niche by accident. I noticed that there wasn't an off-the-shelf product to meet the IT needs of private medical consultants in Ireland at the time. I set up the company with IR£10,000 I raised from my own resources and the Enterprise Board and offered a fairly basic patient register and billing system to consultants in hospitals around Ireland."

The company and its product were relatively successful straight away. "We established ourselves fairly quickly as a typical small Irish company with a turnover of a few hundred thousand a year, but the big turning point came with the MBA course I took at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. You think you know all the bits about your business before you do a course like this, but you quickly find out that you don't."

According to Beggs the impact of the MBA on the performance of the business was direct and very measurable. "For the first three years of the company's life we had growth of around 33 per cent year on year and we had revenues of about €500,000", he recalls.

"Now, 10 years later we have €14 million in turnover and more than 100 staff. And it was the MBA that really turned the corner for us; in particular it was the entrepreneurship workshops run by Prof Frank Roche that made the difference."

The difference these made was to introduce him to new concepts that he hadn't considered before. "While the rest of the MBA was really good in terms of giving me greater understanding of business processes and so on, the workshops introduced me to concepts like venture capital, corporate banking, mergers and acquisitions and so on. Within six months of completing the MBA I had raised venture capital funding, doubled the workforce and had proper corporate finance facilities in place. One of our lecturers used to say that when we got our MBAs we'd walk differently; maybe that wasn't true but I certainly performed a lot better as a businessman."

He graduated with his MBA in 1999 and the awards followed quickly with the Colleran Award for Enterprise coming in the same year and the National Enterprise Award the following year. More than €2.5 million was raised in several rounds of funding in subsequent years and the business continues to grow both organically and through mergers and acquisitions.

In 2007 the company merged with Systems Solutions, the leading provider of pharmacy management software in Ireland to create the Helix Health, the largest indigenous healthcare IT provider in the country. In 2009 Helix expanded further when it merged with Health Ireland Partners, one of Ireland's foremost primary care medical informatics companies.

"In 1998 I believed that the way to build a business was by growing it a bit each year through increased sales and so on," Beggs notes. "After the MBA introduced me to mergers and acquisitions I saw things differently and have done three acquisitions since. I see M&A activity as key to driving growth in the company in the future."

As might be apparent he is a big fan of the Smurfit School MBA. "I would 105 per cent recommend it to any would be entrepreneur," he says. But he does add a note of caution. "I can't speak for other colleges, of course. There are different MBAs and people should make sure they get the one that's right for them."

For the future he sees Helix growing on the international marketplace. "We have a seriously dominant position in Ireland and we are building a base in the UK. We have been working with Enterprise Ireland to indentify new markets internationally, particularly English speaking markets outside of Europe. We have done a lot of work in the United Arab Emirates and have just signed a partnership agreement with GIT in Dubai. We will be their healthcare technology partner in the Middle East region. But we are not going bullheaded at the US market just because Obama is going to be spending €13 billion extra on healthcare there: we are going to be a lot more targeted. We have already been speaking to a potential partner in New Zealand in this regard."