Does luck count in business?

When Dr. Davis Musinguzi and his four colleagues launched Rocket Health, a telemedicine and digital health service, in November 2012, the initial goal was to operate a 24-hour call center to provide mobile phone consultations for patients.
Within the first six months, it is said that around 7,000 people had used the service. But seven years later, the market was not growing at satisfactory levels. 

The challenges were a combination of factors including limited internet access, limited exposure to modern technology and low literacy rates among the targeted users.  
However, in a moment of unexpected luck, the Covid-19 pandemic struck at the tail end of 2019. 

And in March 2020, the government instituted lockdowns where peoples’ movements were restricted amidst great uncertainty and anxiety about health. 
This created the perfect opportunity for the business to grow from a small call center to an end-to-end digital health provider with tele-consultations, mobile laboratory services, and pharmacy deliveries. 

The demand for the Rocket Health service spiked. Available data indicates that tele-consultations rose from 4,269 in November 2019 to12,746 in September 2020 and further grew to 24,226 by September 2021. 
The e-shop visits grew from 4,343 in the third quarter of 2019 to 241,056 in the third quarter of 2021. Rocket Health has also since attracted more than $5 million in funding. 

While hard work and resilience cannot be downplayed, I think we can all agree that Covid-19 greatly contributed to Rocket Health’s terrific success. 
By his own admission, Dr. Musinguzi was once quoted saying: “2020 was a blessing in disguise. It took a global pandemic for Telemedicine to truly show its value”. I call this luck!

I have spent more than 10 years studying businesses, locally and globally, interrogating reasons for their success or failure. 
And I have observed that in numerous cases, business success has been better explained by luck and fortunate circumstances rather than by skill, resources and disciplined adherence to principles. 

Oddly, many business people actually attribute their good business fortunes to luck. In a 1972 executive council meeting, Bill Hewlett the co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) remarked: “Look, we’ve grown because the industry grew. We were lucky enough to be sitting on the nose when the rocket took off. We don’t deserve a damn bit of credit”.  But luck can also break the other way: some people continue to place substantial blame to bad luck over their business failures. 

Why would two entities operating in the same industry, with similar amounts of resources, opportunities and facing similar competitive challenges, take completely different paths? Think of these entities: Bugisu Cooperative Union (Thriving) and West Mengo Cooperative Union (Extinct); Express FC (Thriving) and Mbale Heroes FC (Struggling in FUFA Big League); and Nice House of Plastics (Thriving) and Sembuule Steel Mills (Extinct). Does luck have anything to do with the destinies of these entities?

Well, in my judgement, the winners in business do not generally get more good luck or less bad luck than their less fortunate competitors. 
As Jim Collins notes in his book Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, what the best entities achieve, instead, is a higher return on luck. 
Bad luck does not necessarily mean that the business will fail. In fact, visionary companies more often had to overcome early failures, defeats and setbacks that helped them forge the organizational character that would make them truly exceptional in the long run. 

Yes, luck counts in business but the question should not be whether you will get lucky or not—you certainly will get luck, both good luck and bad. But the critical question is: what you do with the luck that you get? 
 

Mr. Brian Mukalazi is the CEO, Talis Consults Ltd
[email protected]