Where are they now: Robin Modak, Founder and Chair of GENMED

Since its launch in 2018, the LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme has celebrated hundreds of exceptional individuals. In this series, we reconnect with some of our alumni to discover where their growth journeys have taken them, the impact of being part of the programme, and what their ambitions look like today.  

Robin Modak launched GENMED from his garage in 2007, supplying services, equipment and consumables to the NHS. Today, the Cwmbran-based business has 65 staff and over 200 contracts across pathology, endoscopy and surgery. Robin featured in The LDC Top 50 in 2019 and faced his biggest business challenge just a year later: the pandemic.

“Hospital theatres became Covid-19 wards and elective surgeries stopped. It hit our balance sheet hard, but we got through it without furloughing anyone.” Now Chair, he’s proudest of backing young talent. “Work should be a place to grow,” he says. “We’ve always taken risks on early-career hires, given them hands-on experience and then watched them fly. Yes, we lose people to head-hunters, but that’s our contribution to a stronger UK workforce.”

What’s been your biggest mistake?

Our revenues jumped from £38.6m in 2018 to £63.2m in 2019. With that growth, we thought we needed to become more corporate. In hindsight we hired expensive executives too quickly and let them build out parts of the business without enough proven demand. We gave it significant time but ultimately those initiatives failed and, by 2023, we had to make some tough calls. We restructured to focus on our core: customer service, efficiency, cash management and upgraded IT. The business rebounded to £114m in 2023.

You recently moved from CEO to Chair. How was the transition?

Our new CEO, Jolene Rayner, started at GENMED as a junior sales rep and worked her way up to operations director. She knows every nut and bolt of this business; she can tell if the engine room’s humming the wrong way. Now as CEO, she brings the operational discipline the company needs, while I’m more of a dreamer. At first, I felt lost: far less phone calls, no floods of emails. The hardest part was not looking over her shoulder.

What’s your best piece of advice for entrepreneurs?

Never neglect your partner, family or health. Success is wonderful and heady, but the journey can be relentless and personally costly. I’ve been lucky – married for 36 years! In 2019, my wife and I started an alpaca business with two other family members. We have 44 alpacas on 20 acres in Hampshire; we sell fleece to spinners and the bulk poo as soil conditioner. Now that I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day running of GENMED, I’m spending more time with my grandchildren and mentoring the next generation of healthcare entrepreneurs. It’s a new chapter for me.