We are creating social impact at our core

If you did not know what Oriol Fuertes Cabassa MBA2015 does for a living now and were invited to guess based on his early career, you would likely say something in finance. After completing an MBA specialising in finance at Barcelona’s prestigious Esade business school (it turns out that Uri, as he is known to friends and family, has only attended prestigious academic institutions), he worked for McKinsey for around 10 years in Barcelona and London before completing another MBA at London Business School in 2015, where he also tutored students in finance.

In fact, he has such a mastery of the subject and was so good at communicating it to his peers that LBS Professor of Finance Alex Edmans said: “In 12 years of being a professor, I have never seen a tutor receive as high praise from students as Oriol. He has a rare gift of explaining complex concepts in simple language, and makes finance accessible to students who previously found it daunting.” Add to the mix that his father was a banker and you would be forgiven for thinking he followed in the family footsteps.

In fact, Qida (Spanish for “care”), the social-impact company he founded in Barcelona in March 2018, is a homecare supplier aimed at achieving "Triple M” impact, which translates literally from Spanish as “more people, living more time, with more quality of life, at home ". Or, as Uri puts it simply, “We are in the business of keeping elderly and chronically ill people at home, living a better life, for longer".

An epiphany

Although most of his time at McKinsey was spent working with clients in the healthcare industry, he attributes his decision to go into the homecare sector to something of an epiphany he experienced in the LBS classroom: “The professor asked us this question: ‘What will your best friend say about you at your funeral?’ I started writing something like, ‘Uri was a McKinsey partner and advised many governments and helped reform healthcare at scale and was a good father [he isn’t a parent yet], and so on.’ But when I read through what I had written, I didn't feel connected to it – it didn’t say anything about my purpose. So I deleted it and wrote something like, ‘Uri was someone who changed the world for the better through healthcare and was a good father.’ Doing that exercise gave me a sense of purpose – a very clear life direction.”

On completing the MBA at LBS he went back to McKinsey with the intention of trying to fulfil this new sense of purpose, but grew impatient at not being able to effect change fast enough: “When I rejoined McKinsey, whether it was working with private clients or regional governments in the healthcare sector in the UK or Spain, you were always facing the same issue: how do we make these systems sustainable? And the answer was always the same – you need to push for more digitalisation, you need to keep people at home longer, you need to make primary care more resilient, you need to motivate and attract the right talent, you need to focus on prevention, and so on. The problem was, it was just not happening at the pace and scale that I wanted. And I thought, I have one life and I want to make an impact during this life. I want to leave a mark on the world.”

By that time he had been with McKinsey for almost 10 years and began to consider whether he was good for another 10: “One day you wake up and think, I've been nine years at the firm. Will I do the next 10 years? Probably not. That was when this idea of ageing well and caring well began to take shape and I decided to jump.”

His time at McKinsey had shown him that high-quality homecare was part of the solution to making healthcare systems sustainable and that tech-enabled homecare (at its core, matching clients with suitably qualified carers) was the way to provide it. The difficulty of finding a good carer when his grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, fell and broke his leg in 2017, allied to the problem of a massive black market of uninsured, low-paid carers, inspired the thought: “Maybe I should solve this problem.”

‘I’m the best of the worst’

He gave some thought to going to work in a hospital chain or (in the UK) a hospital trust, but wanting to be “the protagonist of change” was uppermost in his thoughts: “In the LBS exercise, I had not written, ‘Uri was part of an organisation that...’ No – I wanted to lead change, I wanted to leave a mark. I understood from that classroom experience at LBS that I was a selfish giver, in a way – I was the best of the worst. Among the worst, who are the selfish people, I am the best, which means I give to others because it gives me joy. I feel well through giving. And once you learn that, you need to channel it. I realised that I wanted to invest my professional life in helping people to live longer at home, with better quality of life.”

He initially explored the UK market, but decided there were too many established players, so opted to set Qida up in his hometown, Barcelona (it helped that he had a very well-established network of relationships there from his time at McKinsey.)

The business, which has three arms –out-of-pocket homecare (typically a health-insurance policyholder's non-reimbursable share of medical expenses); homecare for the public sector; and InsureTech (supplying prevention and technology services to the largest life insurer in Spain) – grew exponentially. By year-end 2018 Qida had 50 customers; 400 by 2019; 1,500 by 2020; 4,000 by 2020; 8,000 by 2022 and 12,000 by 2023 year end. In that time the company also achieved many milestones; attaining €70 million gross merchandise value (GMV) by 2023 year end and positive GMV across markets by 2022. Along the way it established key partnerships, including a 2020 deal with the largest private hospital chain in Spain, and in 2022 and 2023 deals with the largest bank and the largest life insurer in Spain, respectively.

A business born from impact

In 2022, some four years after launch, Qida became the first homecare business in Europe to achieve B Corp status. It is also the only start-up in Europe to have attracted investment from three of the 10 largest European Impact Funds – a feat that has helped it achieve 100% of its impact plan since launch. 

Given that achieving B Corp status generally takes around four years – and is hard enough for an established company, yet alone for a startup – how did Qida achieve it so quickly? Again, it seems Uri’s time at LBS was well spent: “Yes, it's a lot of work, but for us, it was very natural because we were born from impact. A key learning at LBS was that, if you have your own path and you have to do it to create social impact, then you're not a social-impact company – you're a business that might have social impact, which is different. At our core, we are creating social impact. I don't have to choose between economic impact and social impact – the more I grow, the more people I help, the more jobs I create, the more money I make. That’s basically at the core of Qida – I don't have to choose between economic and social impact. My choice is not to have to choose, if you like.”

Not given to boasting about his own achievements, Uri is quick to emphasise the importance of the Qida team: “Building an ‘A’ team is perhaps the thing that I love the most about our journey and, as many people will tell you, it’s one of the biggest determinants of success.” It’s something that has occupied the majority of his time as CEO to date; in fact, until around 2022, he had personally interviewed every new employee that Qida recruited – something that brought home the value of another leadership maxim: “I say ‘no’ more times than ‘yes’, even if my interview is the final one in the recruiting process. It’s very hard to be in an ‘A’ team. It must be tough by definition – otherwise, the bar is too low. We look for fit with our culture, winning attitude, intelligence and hungry people.”

Another touchstone he lives by is to hire fast, fire faster and promote even faster. If that sounds both harsh and scary, it is tempered by a highly supportive environment. Qida assesses every member of staff every six months, which “helps us identify how we can help each of our employees. It also allows us to see where our talent stands relative to ‘the bar’ and our values. And it helps us identify the right next steps for people in each case.”

Another leadership principle is to make sure that everyone at Qida remembers that “what got us here won’t get us there.” As might be expected of someone who has done at least one marathon every year since 2014 (apart from one year when he was prevented by ill health), Uri demands the best from everyone around him: “We all know that the only way to be in business in two years’ time is to continue working in a humble way and to grow as individuals faster than the company. The bar keeps going up for all of us, and past performance is no guarantee of future success.”

Clearly, his time at McKinsey and LBS taught him many valuable business lessons and helped shape his world view – but he attributes his ability to focus on detail to an altogether different source. Between the ages of five and 13, he would spend every Friday afternoon with his father, building things together with wood. “It made me someone detailed,” he remembers. “I had something to look forward to, something to prepare, something to organise.”

He attributes another valuable entrepreneurial skill to early childhood experience: “Together with my father and my mother and my sister, we've always climbed – I was climbing at the age of four and to this day I've been climbing in all seasons. I think that is what has made me able to take risks, or controlled risks, let’s say. I guess you could say I’m a controlled risk-taker.”