Gore’s had a long run and shows no slowing of vitality

● Adrian Gore has been at the helm of Discovery for 26 years, one of the longest tenures for the CEO of a JSE-listed company.

He started Discovery at the age of 28 and has no plans to hang up his hat any time soon as the company continues its ambitious growth trajectory.

Gore, who with Barry Swartzberg founded the company in 1992 after leaving Donald Gordon’s Liberty Life, said he would leave only when his presence no longer benefited the company.

“I’ve been here a long time. I feel I’ve still got a long run, but factually if I don’t add value, it’s time to go. I’ve actually been pretty good in that ... I personally don’t have a need to control things I don’t add value to,” said Gore.

Sitting in his office in Africa’s richest square mile, a day after his results presentation, Gore looked energetic, his easy-going tone belying decades of hard work, tenacity and a disruptive, innovative business style that has set trends in the health-care industry.

Since its start as a small, specialist risk insurer, Discovery has grown into a company spanning health, wellness, insurance and financial services.

The company listed on the JSE five years later. Over the past decade, Discovery’s shares have gained over 650%. Older rivals such as Sanlam and Liberty have gained 362% and 87% respectively in that time.

The most recent venture that has Gore energised is the move by the insurer’s Vitality unit into Japan, striking up a partnership with one of that country’s biggest insurance companies, Sumitomo Life.

“Given the scale of the Japanese market — I think it’s the second-largest globally — it’s an ageing population, so insurance is important, along with long-term savings,” said Gore, explaining the decision.

Much like the programme in other parts of the world, Sumitomo Life Vitality enables members to earn points for regular health checks, exercise and healthy eating, in addition to providing gym membership discounts, hotel discounts and other benefits.

Discovery launched Vitality in SA in 1997; it later evolved into the Vitality Group, and turned a profit for the first time in the past financial year. Partnerships are at the heart of Discovery’s Vitality business and its foundation was with the now-defunct Health & Racquet Club, which was acquired by the Virgin Group in 2001. The gym company had approached Discovery with a proposal for the group to sell its health plan to the gym’s membership base, propelling the health company into a future of success and accelerated growth.

The Health & Racquet Club’s proposal soon led to the Vitality programme, which allowed members who belonged to Discovery to use the gyms for free.

“We never really had any idea about behavioural economics [and] shared value; what we’d stumbled on … the real value wisdom of it was much deeper,” said Gore.

It was then that Discovery started to learn about the irrational health choices people make and how creating incentives could help people live healthier lives.

However, Vitality was initially hard to sell and Gore recalled how many did not believe in his vision. One of SA’s biggest publications criticised it at the time, saying it was a waste of health-care rands on gyms and flights.

Growing the Vitality Group to its current scale was not an easy process and Gore believes that getting into the wellness business more than 20 years ago has given Discovery a head start over its competitors.

In that time, the group has had an opportunity to fine-tune its model, building partnerships with companies such as Apple, Starbucks, Virgin Active and many more.

“So all of these things come together [and] make it [our model] quite harder to replicate,” said Gore.

Leveraging its loyal customer base and the network of personal information it has built up has enabled Discovery to grow its Vitality business to 8 million members in 18 countries including Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, the US, the UK and SA.

“The only way you can sustainably grow is if you have a truly repeatable, scalable model … and I think we stumbled on a model that is repeatable and scalable.

“The same model can work in any country, it can work across long-term savings, life, health — not everything, but it works well.”

Gore was humble about the success of Discovery, punctuating his descriptions of the company’s journey with the words “no hubris” as he explained how it went from being a small company to one of SA’s biggest.

Ever the innovator and disrupter, Gore will be adding banking to his list of achievements with the soon-to-be-launched Discovery Bank.