The Feedback PLC Turnaround Story: How They Achieved 74% YoY Growth

When most 30-year-olds are still finding their career path, Thomas Oakley became CEO of a public company in decline. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he revealed how Feedback PLC transformed from a struggling medical imaging business into a fast-growing healthcare technology platform.

The Starting Point: A Company at a Crossroads

When Thomas stepped in as CEO in 2019, the situation was clear but challenging. “When I joined the company, it was very much in decline, looking at legacy products that didn’t have recurring revenue,” he explains. Their core medical imaging products were being “overtaken by much larger companies, such as General Electric, Phillips, Siemens.”

Even more challenging, the company had a history of disappointing investors. As Thomas notes, “a lot of those shareholders had been with the company for a long time and they had been over promised and often under delivered.”

The Turnaround Strategy

Thomas approached the transformation like a clinician diagnosing a patient. “In many ways, actually, it took the best bits of my clinical background and turned them into a commercial way, because essentially you’re looking at a diseased company… working out which bits you need to keep, which bits are salvageable, and which bits you actually need to cut out and move away from.”

The first key decision was resetting expectations with stakeholders. They announced “a bold new strategy we’re going to under promise and over deliver.” This required “changing the type of shareholder that we had and bringing on more institutional investors that could come on that journey with us over the course of multiple rounds of investment and over multiple years.”

Leveraging Hidden Assets

Rather than competing head-on with industry giants, they identified unique advantages in their legacy technology. Their medical device certification, typically seen as a constraint, became a competitive moat. “We are certainly in the UK, the only clinical collaboration platform that is certified as medical device for image display,” Thomas notes.

This positioning opened new markets. They won “the UK’s first end-to-end care pathway between GPs in primary care hospitals, in secondary care, and these new community diagnostic centers” because they were “the only provider that had the capability to stitch the IT infrastructure together.”

Building for Sustainable Growth

The team developed a unique approach to regulated innovation, maintaining an “absolute obsession with sitting close to the customer.” This customer-centric approach led to breakthrough features during COVID, enabling “consultants who were treating patients in Manchester and advising on treatment plans whilst being at home with family in Delhi.”

Even their approach to development changed. As Thomas explains, “The medical device way of developing software is to risk, assess everything that you’re doing, anticipate risk and try and remove it from the product before you ever put it into the hands of clinicians.”

Managing Public Market Challenges

Being a public company added complexity to the transformation. “The biggest frustration I have with being a public company, it is actually very difficult for us to communicate everything we would like to with shareholders, because a lot of it is inside information,” Thomas reveals.

Their solution was focusing the team on customer value rather than stock price. “You can’t run the company for the share price. We have to focus on running the company, and we trust that the share price will take care of itself as we produce results.”

The Results

The strategy has delivered consistent 74% year-over-year growth for three years running, with an 89% increase in sales in their latest period. More importantly, they’ve demonstrated the ability to “reduce wait times in the NHS by 70% without needing any additional clinical staff at all, and in a way that actually releases cash back to that system.”

Looking ahead, Thomas sees their platform becoming “essentially a digital glue that pulls healthcare environments together.” It’s a vision that has helped transform not just the company’s performance, but also its relationship with stakeholders, proving that even public market turnarounds can succeed with the right balance of bold vision and disciplined execution.