| The Cool Company Awards 08 |
And the winner is…
“What’s cooler than saving lives?” asked one of our judges during the debate over which Cool Company category winner was worthy of ‘Coolest of the Cool’ honours. In the absence of a compelling answer, our 2008 champion was crowned.
Aspen Medical delivers scalable healthcare solutions to clients in Australia, South East Asia and Europe. In layman’s terms, it assembles all of the components required to address medical emergencies in areas where medical services are either at a premium or non-existent.
Co-founded by life-long friends, logistics expert Glenn Keys and clinician Andrew Walker, Aspen caught the judges’ eyes not just because it is a compelling business (it took out the Big Kahuna Award category) but also because its work has a profound impact on the lives of people whose health might otherwise be placed in jeopardy.
Aspen Medical received international attention when the company’s surgeons saved the life of East Timor’s president and aero-medically evacuated him to Darwin in Feb 2008. But while these kind of operations help market Aspen’s services in a way no commercial advertising campaign could, the company’s real bread and butter – and the foundation of its legacy – is anchored very much in its lower profile work.
According to Aspen’s application, “We have removed over 3,000 people from the dental waiting list in NSW, removed over 12,000 patients from the surgical waiting lists in the UK, and are about to treat over 1,000 indigenous people who have been waiting years for surgery in remote Australia.”
The core value most entrepreneurs provide is not so much specific technical skills but the foresight and ability to assemble the necessary resources to service a commercial need. Aspen is the perfect embodiment of this. The founders don’t dash off to remote places and perform surgery whenever they see the bat signal. They rely on their logistics expertise, their network of contacts and cutting edge technology – both medical and administrative – to ensure that every material and human component required for a project, no matter how disparate, is delivered where and when it is needed.
And the numbers speak for themselves. The company is already approaching $100m annual revenues, half of which is derived from international customers. Pretty good work for a five-year-old company.
Who knows? Perhaps one day you might be in a remote location in need of medical assistance. If Aspen Medical personnel save your life, you won’t just be admiring their coolness. You’ll be thanking them.
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