It was a crazy idea, that generic manufacturers would be able to monitor each other’s sales prices.
Back in 1999, when Charles Joynson was working in the Business Information department at Baker Norton, he was tasked with acquiring some competitor Pharmacy Price Lists. The business, and its parent company Norton Healthcare (later Ivax and even later Teva) wanted to find out what their competitors were selling out at.
Charles went ahead and approached a handful of chemists across the sales territory he’d covered some years before, begging and buying a handful of price lists. Once these had been duly plugged into Excel so that data was in a format that the company could use Charles reapproached the business suggesting an upgrade to databases. The surprising response was, ‘Get back to your desk and get on with your job!’.
It was then that Charles made contact with Michael Norfolk, a talented database administrator and together they created WaveData to hold and analyse generic supplier prices. Starting in the garden shed with barely enough room for the two of them, they were soon joined by two data entry clerks. There was Liverpudlian Barbara, clashing accents with Essex, and Irene who could swear like a trooper and occasionally did!
Then Charles started writing to pharmaceutical companies and the first to respond was a company with an interest in parallel imports which promised him buckets full of cash for PI prices. So, the team fought their way out of the garden shed and rented an office a couple of miles away on the fringes of Southend on Sea.
Over the next few years the team grew rapidly, as did the quantity of data in their databases. The rule was that they’d put anything into the database provided the product had a medical use. That has led to some rather surprising products over the years, the ‘butt plug’ entries are probably the most memorable!
While Michael created tables, forms and queries Charles toured the UK talking to prospective customers. ‘Curiously,’ he says, ‘some of our best customers gave me the hardest of times at the beginning, finding it difficult to change their competitive mindsets. Being grilled by teams of commercial people was tough.’ One criticism was that data was delivered on CDs, which were out of date as soon as they arrived. Michael then began developing websites to hold the data, dramatically speeding up data delivery to just a few minutes.
Today, 25 years later both Charles and Michael are gradually handing over to the rest of the team. Michael has handed over much of his responsibility to his son Aaron, and Charles is handing over responsibility to the rest of the team particularly Natalie, Head of Data, and Jo who heads up Sales and Marketing.
Charles says, ‘We are proud of what we have built, and even more so that we are just as relevant today as the day we launched our services. We continue to do business with ex-colleagues and old friends, and just as importantly we continue to grow with new clients coming on board month after month. What does the future hold? Only time will tell, but we have a very sustainable business with a very loyal and knowledgeable team. We have no doubt that we will continue riding that wave for the foreseeable future.