In this week's Inspirational Women in Business Series, we are delighted to feature Melissa Morris, CEO and Founder of Lantum - a total workforce platform for healthcare. To date, Lantum has saved the NHS over £15 million and enabled over 5m patients to be seen. Lantum won the Digital Business of the year at the 2018 Amazon Growing Business Awards.
Melissa has worked in and for the NHS for over ten years. In 2017, she was made an NHS Innovation Fellow. She was previously a management consultant at McKinsey & Co, where she developed a passion for improving healthcare systems - so much so that she left to work for NHS London during its reorganisation in 2010.
Melissa Morris - CEO & Founder of Lantum
1. Best piece of advice you’ve been given -
Be consistent. Your team look to you to be steady and consistent; they must know what to expect and not be caught off guard because you are in a bad / great mood. This came from Liane Hornsey, the mother of one of our team at Lantum who also happens to have been the head of people at Google and Uber globally. She knows!
2. Worst piece of advice you’ve been given -
I really dislike “fail fast” because it is often interpreted as “heck let’s just try it” without analysis or deep thought of the consequences. I think it promotes lazy thinking and a haphazardness and randomness in your organisation that will only complicate things later on.
3. What would you tell your younger self?
...that cause and effect is real. Think about your decisions before you make them, all decisions have a consequence.
4. What excites you most about the future of your industry?
That it’s one of the last to innovate and so bringing innovation to the industry is genuinely changing people’s lives, not just optimising what’s already there.
5. Who or what is your biggest inspiration?
Every woman who has scaled their business is my inspiration. Women have far less support than men, often have weaker networks and every day, battle unconscious or conscious biases from investors, senior team members, suppliers, clients. To get your business to scale, to series B and beyond takes Herculean effort and resilience.