Today's blog post is a guest entry from our co-founder, Alex Landowski, telling his story of the inception and incredible growth of Medical Logistics and Medical Laboratories over the past few years, and how it all started!
The beginning
When I tell our now-clients that I moved to the UK all those years ago with just £200 and a bicycle, they find it hard to believe! I now own multi-million-pound businesses Medical Logistics and Medical Laboratories. So how did I do it?
After arriving in the UK in 2010 as an immigrant from Poland, I spent five months searching for a job in a tough job market. I eventually became a bike courier within a logistics business, an industry in which I had some experience.
After many years of serious determination and hard work, I worked my way up in the business, proudly becoming one of the youngest senior operations controllers in the company. However, after 10 years in the industry, I started to notice a lack of innovation and recognised that logistics companies were becoming aged, with little deviation from the industry norms.
The changes I wanted to make were too big to implement internally so I decided to quit and start my own business. The ambitious side of me thought - "I can do this better..."
So I did. In 2016, I took out a loan, bought a moped and started Medical Logistics - London’s only 24/7 medical courier. At first, this looked like me whizzing all over London - doing all of the deliveries myself, constantly chasing my tail and trying to make waves in the industry.
We started off being a logistics company that solely dealt with medical supplies, and we did things differently from the companies I had worked for previously. Through innovation and transformative systems, we've created a medical logistics courier that manages time-sensitive, same-day deliveries, and have carved an exceptional reputation within the industry.
The year everything changed
In 2018 however, everything changed. My wife was pregnant with our first son, and unfortunately due to complications during the pregnancy, she needed to see a nurse for blood flow testing. When we were given a window of 10am-6pm to expect a nurse who never showed up, we felt helpless and terrified at the inability to get the care she so urgently needed in a timely manner.
This made me realise a huge gap in the market. I couldn't help but think that there had to be others going through this same experience. Other vulnerable individuals who needed trained professionals to come to their home and perform the health tests that they required.
So it was at this point in 2018, that we started moving over to not only being a medical logistics company, but also a health care provider.
I had a million questions and not a lot of answers - what can we do to help? How do we charge for this? Are there businesses out there already doing the same thing? How do we make this happen?
But we did it - in 2019, I took my phlebotomy training and became a fully trained phlebotomist, and started drawing blood for patients all across London through a mobile blood testing service. We started slowly growing the business whilst focusing on phlebotomy and logistics - with the fundamental aspect of our business providing a time-sensitive, exceptional service that provided incredible care to those that needed it. We were striving to always be the best in what we did, a strong theme within our business that still is at the heart of everything we do today.
The Pandemic
And then Covid hit! Thankfully, being a business in health care meant that we were key workers during the pandemic, so we could continue to grow. The pandemic made things much trickier, of course, but also granted a lot of opportunities. How could we help?
A mix of crazy ambition and a pipe dream led to us spending £20k on some covid testing machines from South Korea (that's a whole other story in itself!). The NHS was struggling to cope with the demand for Covid tests, so these machines allowed us to expand our offering to include Covid testing.
Our existing and exceptional reputation in the industry of providing time-critical services in addition to being able to afford a heavily discounted (due to the lockdown at the time!) office space in Mayfair, London to home the testing machines helped us to start offering urgent Covid testing to those who needed it.
It wasn't easy - I remember multiple times being on the phone to a laboratory at 1am in the morning chasing through urgent covid tests for a patient who had put their trust in us. We provided Covid tests to a BBC crew that was urgently needed to fly to Beirut to report on the devastating explosions within the country but were struggling to get an urgent, same-day Covid test result. We're so proud to be involved in their story, and I've featured their testimonial below:
"I am a BBC correspondent and due to Beirut explosions I was needed to be deployed immediately but for getting on the flight PCR test was necessary. Thanks to Medical Logistics I was able to get it done and receive the result in less than 24 hours just before my flight." - Nafiseh Kohnavard, BBC
We're proud to have gained our UKAS Accreditation and CQC Registration in recent years, meaning we're now a fully recognised, trusted and accredited health care provider. This assures that all our services adhere to international standards and comply with national regulations for safety, efficacy, and competence.
We're proud to be a health care provider making a difference in the industry, and always putting the care of our patients first.
Next steps
After huge growth thanks to the pandemic, the end of Covid testing requirements signalled that we needed to make our next natural step within the business. Inspired by the many incredible MedTech businesses we were surrounded by in London and my huge love and passion of technology and innovation, this was an easy step for us to make!
In 2022, we took part in a first-of-its-kind drone trial, flying medical supplies between NHS hospitals in the UK. We partnered with Skyfarer and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust for a drone trial within a secure CAA-approved airspace called "The Medical Logistics UK Corridor". The three-month trial aimed to ease growing pressures on the healthcare system by performing routine, ad-hoc, and emergency medical drone deliveries. Over 24 hours worth of flights were completed with over 1,889km flown, and the trial proved that drone technology can save lives, time, and the environment by cutting comparable road emissions by over 90%!
In 2023, we opened Medical Laboratories - a comprehensive, end-to-end Healthcare facility with a team of expert trained medical professionals. Our UKAS-accredited and CQC-Registered laboratory is located in Holborn, Central London and has been custom-built to be the final piece of the puzzle for our mobile phlebotomy and medical courier services. The laboratory offers testing managed entirely in-house, meaning every service is managed under our exceptional standards of care, with no need to involve external partners. This comprehensive solution also allows us to keep the costs of our services low and to reduce our wait times even further.
Medical Logistics and Medical Laboratories are now multi-million-pound companies and our current clients even include my previous employer. We have so much more planned for 2023 and the coming years, and with a growing team of 25 staff and more than 50 contractors, we've got HUGE growth plans for the next few years.
Why do I think we've been so successful? That's easy to answer - we genuinely care. Our businesses were built on the belief that we could do things better in order to better serve our customers and clients - and that's exactly what we've done. We're not a business that is chasing after money or our next huge client deal - we're chasing after exceptional standards, incredible care and being the best in what we do. Today, I couldn't be prouder of the business we are continuing to build and everything we have accomplished.
What a journey it's been - and in some ways, it feels like we're only just getting started!
Get in touch with us if you'd like to explore any of the services we offer - contact us at info@medicallogistics.co.uk.
