Metropolis Healthcare's Ameera Shah feels business mergers should be like relationships

By Rashmi Menon

For Ameera Shah, MD, Metropolis Healthcare, the partnerships she forges with proprietary pathology practices is not just regular business. It's about building trust through a human connect.

Shah says she doesn't allow professionals like bankers, accountants and lawyers to helm negotiations. The reason: they will alienate the would-be partners and act as deterrents to the success of the deal.

"Even today, when I am doing a deal — it could be as small as Rs 5 crore or as large as Rs 1,000 crore — I am involved in every step of the way," said Shah at a peer-to-peer ent repreneur conference in Mumbai recently. She has led about 25 partnerships/acquisitions in the past 14 years.

"That's because, I know the promoter is partnering for me. A lot of it is for the equation that we have. The bankers and the lawyers will look at it as a transaction. Whereas, I will see at it as a relationship, which is the reason why he's partnering," she said.

Trust factor

Sharing the story of the first pathology lab the company partnered with in Chennai in 2003, Shah said it took a year to convince the doctor to part with half of his stake. "We could have hired the best accountant, lawyer, etc.

But they would have brought the perspective of what happens in other industries into this [deal], which may or may not have worked," she said.

"If I had brought good quality professionals in that early, the doctor would never have signed with me. This is because the language the lawyers and accountants speak is so different from the one the doctor understands. So, we had to bring it down to a basic language of what he understands."