How Dr Lal PathLabs is helping its franchise partners in COVID times
Opportunity India Desk
Jun 18, 2020 -
3 min read
COVID-19 has changed a lot of things. It has changed mindsets everywhere. Today, health and consciousness about health have come center-stage, with a great demand for safety and hygiene.
In conversation with Franchise India, Shankha Banerjee, COO of Dr Lal PathLabs, talks about how they are helping their franchise partners in COVID times. He also highlights the importance of training for franchise partners.
Dr Lal PathLabs is the largest and trusted diagnostic service centre since 1949. It has over 200 labs, about 2600 collection centres, and more than 6400 pick-up points. The brand offers about 4600 tests and packages. It tests over 34.7 million samples every year.
Established in 1949, Dr Lal PathLabs is an international service provider that has been successfully emerged as one of the top pathology labs in India. The brand has been constantly focusing on hiring and retaining skilled manpower forces that could bring out the best quality services from their different departments situated within and outside the lab.
Dr Lal PathLabs has a Pan-India presence that includes all major cities along with towns in the form of state-of-the-art laboratories and collection centers. The company started its franchising in 1951 with a vision of being present in every corner of the country.
From 10 clinical labs in 2005, Dr. Lal PathLabs has become the largest diagnostic chain in North India with over 200 clinical labs, 2600 collection centres and more than 6400 pick-up points across the country. The company credits the growth to increasing focus on newer markets in East, West and South India.
The company grew its franchise outlets by over 46% from 1,759 patient service centres in 2017 to over 2,569 in 2019. It also witnessed a 32% revenue growth in the same period.
Dr Lal PathLabs has rolled out a full SOP on how to manage the social distancing norms and safety of patients. Also, the company has to think about the safety of the staff as they are closely connected by the patients, so the safety of the staff is equally important.
Dr Lal PathLabs has also started physically-enabling its centres. They have enabled them to do home collections, digital payments, track the patient’s report status. All this is integrated for its franchise partners.
Training is a very important part of this whole franchising effort of Dr Lal PathLabs. They want each patient, whether he/she comes to Lal PathLabs or franchise centres, should get a similar experience. Therefore, a lot of training goes into each setup.
The company has rolled out a digital platform where it is doing a lot of theoretical training, even a pre-start-up is possible on the platform. Ongoing training has now become online. Dr Lal PathLabs has even created a portal for each of its franchisees, where regular training programs are loaded and owners are expected to complete those training.
Shankha Banerjee said, “We will also shortly start a program for our franchisees, where we can check patient rating and also completing training on time, and a lot of other parameters will be put together to start a rating mechanism. This will keep telling us people who are following the mechanism or not, therefore, we will see how do we intervene and get them up to the standards.”
Area Required - 100 sq ft.
Investment - Rs 50k-2 lakh
Franchise/Brand Fee - Rs 50,000 Security deposit
Royalty/Commission - 25% to 30% commission
