Inside One of Australia’s Fastest Growing Start Ups. Part #1

Doing What You’re Not.

How to Dismantle Your Own Business Model

Allocating capital in performance marketing is a competitive advantage, but at this point in the cycle, it is a table stakes function. This is something that Eucalyptus has traditionally done very well, and I suspect in Australia you would be hard pressed to find better in-house operators. Iteration is, at this point, a lifestyle.

The impact on the culture of the business of such a strong marketing function with fast changes and multiple angles can not be understated.

A warp-speed iterative culture is not without its systematic risks if not counter-balanced. One of the things that can occur if taken to its natural extreme, is optimising a sub-optimal system. In math, this phenomenon of taking tiny steps towards a great height, and celebrating when you reach the top is called solving for the local maximum.

The implication is that if you take steps that are quick and small in the steepest direction, you will reach the top. But if the steps are too small, it may be possible that you settle at what you think is the top, where the real summit is just beyond the horizon (where you may need to go down first, before you go up).

Solving for global maximum means that you need to systemize the method of how you think about breaking your businesses, their processes and the way you run them. How do you do something that is completely new, even if it means giving up something that is working?

This thought process, like all, becomes harder as you grow larger. A friend of mine who works in private equity (the practice of buying businesses to then make them better) put it to me as I suspiciously asked him why he thought his team was better than the hundreds of others that litter downtown Sydney and Melbourne’s hallowed institutions — and he said that they’re the only ones who sit down with a blank piece of paper and ask

“what could this business be”?

Whether this is true or not is beside the point. We’re constantly evaluating this exact sentiment at Eucalyptus, and trying to ensure that we’re doing the right thing by both our patients, our staff and of course our investors who have put their trust in us.

No one has ever said that our team has all the answers, and by its very definition doing what you’re not currently doing, is very hard. The only certainty is that we will be working at the intersection of doing things that are objectively* right, and trying to do it well.

Tough decisions are always necessary — especially if those decisions are ones that ensure the safety and well-being of our patients.

The ends do not justify the means, the means are everything.

*the only thing we can know to be objectively right, is doing the right thing by our patients by trying to lift the ease of access to medical services, access to understandable jargon free medical information and striving for best in class patient outcomes