Meena Ganesh, CEO of Portea India, the home healthcare provider, on how to step up during a crisis 

What is it like being the MD and CEO of Portea, India’s largest home healthcare company, in the midst of a pandemic? 58-year-old Meena Ganesh replies, “It’s relentless!” Portea, which Ganesh co-founded with her husband Krishnan Ganesh in 2013, has been at the frontline of the COVID-19 battle since March last year. With hospitals severely overburdened, the need to help people at home has gone up drastically. 

Portea has helped about 5,00,000 COVID-19 patients, working with seven different city and state governments, including Delhi, Mumbai, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bengaluru and all of Karnataka. Portea offers at-home COVID-19 solutions from testing to home isolation, with remote services including daily nurse calls and doctor check-ins. The company is also setting up isolation centres at some hotels, with round-the-clock medical monitoring. The 4,000 employee strong company has never been busier, even as many battle the virus themselves. 

“This is a shifting cycle, with different cities experiencing rising cases,” notes Ganesh. “We have many months of hard work ahead of us.” Last year, when the crisis hit, Portea had to be nimble. “It was fascinating to see how the company evolved into being extraordinarily dynamic, coming up with solutions to ensure patients were taken care of.” 

Calm of tone and temperament, Ganesh is one of India’s most celebrated entrepreneurs and business leaders.  She sits on the boards of numerous blue-chip firms like Pfizer and Axis Bank, and has a string of start-up successes to her credit. She co-founded her first company, Customer Asset, in 2000, in what was then the fledgling BPO industry, before selling it to ICICI. Then came TutorVista, which she ran successfully till it was acquired by British publishing giant Pearson. 

But Ganesh isn’t one to rest on her laurels and was off searching for her next big idea. This one hit closer home. As the primary caregiver to both her mother-in-law and her parents, she had witnessed first-hand the difficulties of caring for the elderly. When her father was unwell with cancer, she realised that while hospital care was good, home care was a struggle. 

“The recovery process for people post hospitalisation or managing care of anyone with a chronic illness requires a lot of help,” Ganesh explains. “That piece was totally missing. People don’t just look for a nurse, they want a comprehensive solution. They want to know how to manage cancer at home. They want to know how to manage a post ICU patient at home. They want to know how to do neuro rehab at home. They may need a nurse, a nursing attendant, perhaps a physiotherapist, medication and medical equipment, regular doctor visits and follow-ups. How do you package all of that and make it easily available? We created these solutions.” 

Portea has served one million patients, and is present in 22 cities across India since it first began operations about eight years ago. With the pandemic still raging, caring for infectious diseases at home has become paramount. The company has a medical team headed by Dr Vishal Sehgal, who lays out the standard operating procedure for hiring, training and on the ground processes. Ganesh explains that employees have a mobile app which captures patient details that feeds into a central monitoring system. Patients also provide feedback. 

Portea is India’s first home healthcare firm to receive the accreditation for quality by the Quality and Accreditation Institute (QAI)—the gold standard in the sector. Pricing per patient varies depending on individual needs, but a basic package of remote monitoring home quarantine with daily nurse calls and regular doctor calls comes at a cost of about Rs 6,000 for two weeks. 

Alongside her husband, Ganesh also runs GrowthStory, which the couple founded in 2011 to invest in start-ups. They have promoted a dozen firms, including Big Basket, Home Lane, Bluestone, House Joy and Hunger Box. And while she can’t pinpoint how the entrepreneurial bug bit her, Ganesh says that her years in corporate India—first at NIIT in Delhi, followed by stints at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Microsoft, all involved roles which were entrepreneurial. “Of course, doing your own start up is very different, there’s no safety net, and you have to figure everything out,” she says. “But once I started, it became an addiction. It’s a good feeling to be able to create something from zero, especially because each of the companies I started have been in new industries.” 

She attributes her entrepreneurial bent to her mother. “I had such a pedestrian childhood that nobody would have written about it. There is nothing to tell. I grew up in a middle-class family; my father was a railway employee and my mother was a housewife. But she was one of the most entrepreneurial people I’ve known. She didn’t have much of an education but she could do anything. Maybe I inherited a bit of that!” 

After finishing her undergraduate studies in Chennai, Ganesh attended IIM, Kolkata. When she graduated, few women were to be found in corporate India. That has changed, she says, but not enough. As for being a first generation women entrepreneur, the challenges are never ending. “There is nothing predictable in a start-up, and our social structures want women to be in stable situations,” Ganesh explains. “You need good mentors. And the investment community is bereft of women. There are very few venture capital and private equity firms with women. That’s another thing that needs to change so that both parts of the ecosystem understand each other and can support women. But it will take another 5-10 years before we see the kind of transformation we want.”

The hardest part of her job right now is to stay calm, composed and focused. She does so by singing, meditating and talking to her two children, her 31-year-old daughter and her 22-year-old son. But she admits these days, her biggest challenge is ensuring the safety of her employees. “How do I make sure my employees are safe, that they are able to remain sane in the middle of all this madness while managing their own family challenges and doing their best to support patients?” But she is determined in her focus. “We need to go onward and upward as we manage this crisis,” she explains.

1. Focus on the now.  Don’t worry about tomorrow or dwell on the past. Do the best you can now.
2. Find a way to de-stress, especially during these harrowing times. For Ganesh, it’s singing for 15 minutes.

In our new series, How I Made It, Gayatri Rangachari Shah speaks with successful women in business who let us in on their inspiring stories, and challenges we can all learn from

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