Our popular Meet the client series reveals the inside story on the companies we support with legal services. This time, we speak to Asim Amin, founder of mental wellbeing platform Plumm Health. The entrepreneur tells us how his start-up pivoted from B2C to B2B during the pandemic and why there’s more demand than ever for their online therapy services.
Name and job title
Asim Amin, Founder and CEO, Plumm
What is it your company does?
Plumm is a mental wellbeing online platform, which connects users with a pool of therapists for primarily one-to-one online therapy sessions. We offer therapist-led online courses, guided meditations and more recently, therapist-led live events: in a nutshell, a 360-degree solution for mental wellbeing.
We are fortunate as a start-up, as we’ve been on the right side of the crisis and delivered all services remotely since the beginning. Now awareness of mental health has exploded in past year and ever people need mental health support more than ever.
Who do you work with?
We started out focusing on individuals or B2C, but since last year, we pivoted into B2B, tying up with corporates to assist businesses with employee wellbeing.
We work directly with corporates and as partners of loyalty programmes like HSBC credit card and Tesco Clubcard. We’re proud of the fact you can now access Plumm online therapy services via your Tesco Clubcard.
We tailor-make employee wellbeing programmes for companies. We’re adding in another layer soon as we’re in talks with large gym chains about how to address mental as well as physical health. The two are so closely related, after all.
How long have you been in business and how has your business grown?
I have been exploring the potential of telemedicine since 2016 and investigating platforms and apps to connect you with GPs and medical specialists. Back then, the whole mental health space was not as robust. We launched the Plumm platform in 2018, and since then, have onboarded 150 accredited therapists and completed more than 2000 one-to-one sessions.
What inspired you to start your business?
My mother is the inspiration behind Plumm. She suffered from severe depression due to the breakdown of her marriage, which not only impacted her, it impacted us all as a family. However, she turned her life round when she started seeking therapy and then actually became a therapist herself.
What have been the biggest recent challenges you have faced and how did you overcome them?
Considering the pandemic, we all have faced some sort of challenge in personal or work capacity. The pandemic’s taught me to embrace failure and learn from those failures. Before the coronavirus breakout, Plumm had a roadmap for our funding, then the investment and funding landscape changed drastically. People’s sentiments changed and investors became more cautious. While that was very difficult initially, it’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us, as we now have a completely different roadmap.
Everything was riding on the funds we planned to raise, so we undertook a lot of internal changes due to this change in investment strategy. In our line of business, we did not want to put anyone in furlough, cut pay or consider redundancies. So we pivoted, and shifted our business model from B2C to B2B. The move to B2B was in our roadmap eventually, just not for 2020. I reminded myself to focus on the things we could control, not those beyond our control. I took a step back, and focused on partnership building.
One of our first partners is Gympass, which means that employees of Facebook, Tesla and Santander now have access to Plumm’s services. If we had raised when we originally planned to, we wouldn’t have pivoted into B2B yet.
What has it been like to work with Harper James? Tell us about your experience.
My experience has been brilliant: from your solicitors to your client services team and your founder, I have only good things to say. The hand-holding and the customer service is phenomenal, the turnaround times are fantastic. Everyone is so helpful and I have always been given the right advice.
When I compare the business model that Harper James has created to traditional law firms, it makes sense for start-ups to work with HJ, because it’s affordable. But the quality of service doesn’t go down: I have an affordable service but I am getting the same quality of service I would expect from any law firm. Happy days!
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