When life doesn’t challenge you enough, some choose to go with the flow like a dead fish would, while some don’t rest until they find a place with enough challenges to make them feel alive. Arshad Ameer, the Co-founder, and Director of Flash Health belongs to the latter. He fast-forwarded life during his Ordinary Levels, facing the exam a year prior, just because things were a little too slow and didn’t feel challenging enough. His passion for software development had him do a diploma in computing and he took double classes to finish his 2 year HND in one. All the while, he had also started his career journey, first as a call center agent, at Pizza Hut, and then as a business development executive for an IT hardware company. His journey to Virtusa begins when he accidentally sits for a wrong interview and manages to get the job anyway, which ultimately pushes him to do what he had been passionate about since the beginning. Arshad, giving in to his curiosity by accepting the job, ended up working at Virtusa for 2 years, before going on his way to satisfy his thirst for novelty and more opportunities.

He took a leap of faith to work as a Business Analyst / Project Manager (BA/PM) for a newly initiated company which has gotten him as far as he has come now, and Arshad has never regretted that decision. According to Arshad, this period was full of learning and abundant with new experiences, especially when it comes to working in Bangladesh where the literacy rate was just about 24%. Nurtured with all this experience and knowledge, he comes back home to continue his MBA, which is when the initial thoughts of revitalizing the Sri Lankan healthcare system began to take over his mind.

In a country where healthcare is somewhat of a challenge due to inconveniences and complicated work processes, another issue he has identified is creating leaders out of typical Sri Lankans who look forward to being led. He does not believe in micro-management and would rather allow individuals to come up with ideas, execute them, take risks, and work through difficulties. Just as much as he values teamwork, he doesn’t believe it to be just about working as a team. “In my team, everyone is a leader. Leaders are not afraid to make a decision’, stated Arshad. Problems can be solved, but doing so without complicating them is also an art he believes should be mastered. Attitude, in his view, is an important necessity when it comes to his or any business’s success, because while skills can be trained, attitudes cannot, and the impact of an attitude can overpower anything else.

Flash health is originally designed with the goal of making healthcare really really simple. Keeping them on top of their game is Alvin Toffler’s quote, “You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction”, motivating them to deliver the best services a system can offer, reinventing the present gamut of medical care by rendering it customer-centric from the beginning, enriched with simplicity, quality and speed. Among the range of services that Flash Health offers are Medical Products which will be delivered to the consumer’s door-step, Home diagnostics makes getting tests done more convenient, RAYA – an innovation designed to make sure nobody runs out of any essential medical products and finally, Move, Burn and Earn which is an engagement driver to the service where consumers can benefit from earning money just while being on the move. The Flash Health app is one of their initiative designs, making sure customers feel more found than lost when visiting it, which is also designed to manage medication and diagnostics bills, along with a feature that updates the order statuses and rider tracking; making it easy for consumers to track where their meds and lab teams are, as well as helping everyone stay on the top of their health by tracking the daily calorie burns through the app. Flash Health is now a service that runs with over 15 key B2B customers such as HNB, Elephant House, MD, Commercial Bank, etc.. making their dominance and importance be felt when it comes to the needs of every customer that has placed their faith upon them. 

Arshad wasn’t hesitant to share the qualities that got him running on top. He referred to this hard work simply as the ‘grit and hustle’, which has held many sleepless nights, obstacles that no one could see coming, and tons of risks that just had to be taken. This ambitious man follows the footprints of the world icon Steve Jobs and stands by his saying ‘if you don’t love what you are doing, it is going to be very very hard’. Thus, the love you hold towards the cause is vital to keep you hustling through the difficulties.

Covid19 has been a blessing in disguise for Flash Health. Arshad reminisces about the days when the team was looking forward to their first order and how, with COVID19, they received all and more, pushing them to evolve, adapt and be better with every wave. He identified this push as having been extremely helpful and was much needed to achieve their goals. However, with his exposure to the international aspects complied with his hunger to grow and be better, he undoubtedly has huge plans for Flash Health. Within the next two years, they plan on dominating not just the country but the global stages.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish. You have got to keep your curiosity up and running”, added Arshad. He truly stands by his words and believes that as long as you have the mindset to face what comes, there is no failure in this game plan.