Life has been a process of trial and error for Jonathon Clarke but he has come a long way. The CEO and founder of Locate a Locum talks to Neil Trainis…

“I like to think of myself as someone who always thinks about opportunities. If a hundred people are swimming one way, I’ll maybe go another way,” Jonathon Clarke says. As a member of a fairly exclusive group of 30-something digitally-savvy entrepreneurial pharmacists, his search for new possibilities has not only involved swimming “another way” but jumping out if the waves aren’t big and challenging enough.

As we chat over Teams, he gives the distinct impression he doesn’t have time to procrastinate. His LinkedIn profile contains the line: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing every day and expecting different results.’

There have been occasions during his journey to launching Locate a Locum in 2014, a widely used online booking platform that puts pharmacists in touch with employers, which he reveals started life as a basic WordPress website on his laptop in his bedroom, when he decided to jack in what he was doing because of an irresistible urge to spend his time on something more interesting.

Entrepreneurs normally have to undergo a process of trial and error before they hit any highs and Jonathon appears to be no different. He had to overcome disappointment during his nascent years having failed to get a good enough grade in his 11-plus in Northern Ireland to go to grammar school, which meant he had to settle for secondary school. “That was sort of my big knockback, the chip-on-the-shoulder stuff that I had to try and prove the world wrong and be a bit more successful,” he recounts.

And bounce back he did, passing his GCSEs and A levels and choosing to study pharmacy. It is not surprising to hear him say he liked “the business aspect of pharmacy” or his suggestion that the profession is, at its core, “entrepreneurial.”

He graduated as a pharmacist from Queen’s University Belfast in 2012 having completed his pre-reg with Clear Pharmacy in Northern Ireland which he describes as “a middle-sized chain.” It was, he insists, the busiest pharmacy in the country and he makes it sound like a baptism of fire.

“We were doing over a thousand items a day. They had three doctors’ surgeries above it and there was a team of three pharmacists on staff, probably 10 plus the pharmacy staff. The pharmacy was open from 8am until 9pm. When I qualified as a pharmacist, it was around 2012 and there was a recession. There wasn’t actually many opportunities for pharmacists. I was one of the lucky ones.”

One opportunity led to another. Soon, he was offered a job in the Scottish town of Forres, just outside Inverness, but quickly decided it was not for him. “I went there for a day to check it out but found that it was a retirement village where the average age was 60-plus, so for a young, 22-year-old guy, it wasn’t my place.

“The second reason I chose not to take it was it was an acquisition and they were making a lot of changes in pharmacy. Before the role that I was offered, they had a separate manager and then a pharmacist. And the pharmacist just had to do pharmacist duties and the job that I was doing was a pharmacist manager and I could already see some challenges with the staff. So, I decided not to take that and I worked as a locum.”

He found the move into locuming professionally, though not necessarily financially, fulfilling. “When I qualified as a locum, the going rate in Northern Ireland was £100 a day. It’s like a tenner an hour or over. Just to clarify, that doesn’t mean I have a fundamental belief that any rates above £100 are good rates, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that was the de facto norm at that time. I worked across as a locum and really enjoyed the experience of working in different pharmacies.”

The recession, coupled with low rates, made Jonathon think “that life long-term as a locum” wasn’t for him. He was then offered an opportunity to return to university to study for a PhD on improving outcomes for people with asthma. He started the PhD but soon found he “absolutely hated it” and dropped out. “It was strange and the big thing that really irked me about doing a PhD was you follow someone else’s dream,” he says.

“If you come and be my PhD student, I’ll have a dream that I’m working on, say, micro-gels, and by my interaction with you, you can’t make it really interesting by saying ‘can I do it?’ You fit into their current project. It was awful. Reading the whole time, I hated the PhD. But I thought I was being smart and riding out the recession. A lot of it is writing scientific papers and I thought ‘jeez, this isn’t for me.’”

It wasn’t long before another opportunity arrived, this time as a hospital pharmacist at Belfast Health & Social Care Trust. It seemed Jonathon had found something that would fulfil him in the long-term and he admits he enjoyed the experience for a while but fear of stagnation, of missing out on something bigger and better, prompted him to leave after three years.

“I joined the Royal Victoria Hospital as part of the Belfast Trust which is the biggest hospital in Northern Ireland and probably the busiest and I absolutely loved that. That was an opportunity as a band six to go around different areas and hone your skills as a pharmacist.

Boss was printing off guitar lyrics – it wasn’t for me

“I did a stint in cardiology, in aseptics, in general pharmacy geriatrics. I’d had experience in community before and this was hospital. I really enjoyed that but after a couple of years … I had a boss who was maybe 30, 40 years older than me and he was clearly bored in his role. He was printing off guitar lyrics and I thought ‘jeez, if that is my ambition here on easy street.’

“You know that whole narrative that civil servants get it easy? There’s a wee bit of that in the NHS. Anyway, I wasn’t being challenged enough and I thought ‘I cannot wait about here 30, 40 years and be bored.’”

Jonathon wanted to get away. He had travelled during his years at university and the idea of travelling again grabbed him. He volunteered to work as a pharmacist in an AIDS hospice in Durban, South Africa, where he helped ensure HIV patients took their medicines properly. He says he “absolutely loved” the experience because it allowed him to use some of his clinical pharmacy skills.

“I got a chance to take a break in the NHS. You could go away for a year and they’d keep your job and I travelled the world. Me and my partner, who is now my wife, went to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.”

Reaching exotic climes gave him a chance to assess where he had got to and where he could end up going in his life. He mulled over the time he spent as a locum and decided he wanted to set up his own business.

“I’d had ideas. There’s a lot of people who think ‘oh, I need a business degree’ or ‘I’m just waiting for this idea’ but it actually doesn’t work that way. The idea that you start with ultimately isn’t going to be the idea that you’re ultimately successful with. You need to start with something, you need to get feedback.”

He says his experience as a locum taught him that “finding locum work was a pain in the arse.” The beginnings of an idea to make it easier for locums to connect to pharmacies started to take shape. Nobody had given this much thought but it was crying out for a solution. “When a pharmacy needs a locum or someone gets sick or goes on holiday, the whole process of finding a locum was archaic,” he says, revealing what was going through his mind as he started taking his first steps towards building what would become Locate a Locum.

The craziest, stupid idea

“As a locum, you had to print off your business card and go round all the pharmacies. It was a bit like being a drug rep, when they arrive at the pharmacy and ask to speak to the pharmacist but the pharmacist doesn’t want to see them. They are actively shadowed away and you actually have to sell yourself with a pitch.

“Pharmacists had to rummage through the business cards to try and find a locum. So, I had an idea to try and automate that process, to try and solve it. Have you ever come across a website called WordPress? It’s a bit like do-it-yourself. The first version of Locate a Locum was basically a WordPress website that didn’t do an awful lot.

“People would register and I would do all the matching behind the scenes. I went across my university year group and encouraged them to try the service and the feedback at the time was ‘this is the craziest, stupid idea. This is not going to work.’ This was probably before platforms like Uber and Airbnb and the whole rise of tech.”

Jonathon says “people probably didn’t really realise” what he was trying to do but he persevered. “I worked on that business for the whole year I was travelling.”

The first version of Locate a Locum was called Locate a Locum Now. “The websites have an archive, so you can probably go back and look at it. Someone sent me a picture of it recently. It was terrible, all your primary colours, green and blue, it was just a terrible looking website.” Nonetheless, Jonathon reflects with pride that he “got some locums, got some clients and was doing the matchmaking behind the scenes.” He has fond memories of Locate a Locum Now which, looking back, was a fairly primitive tool but made him feel he was making an impact. It made him feel entrepreneurial.

“A client would say they needed a locum and I was ringing and sending emails. I did three locum placements in the first month and I honestly felt amazing. Three locum placements was worth less than 50 quid in terms of revenue. It was nothing but I felt so empowered, making success as part of this.

“When I came home from the career break, I decided to leave the NHS and go into Locate a Locum full time. There was a business accelerator at the time that was starting and I was given access to office space and basically jumped at it. It was able to bring the business further, more locums, more clients. We probably had up to a thousand locums at this time registered on the platform and then I had the opportunity to raise investment to scale the business and bring in technology. A bit like Dragon’s Den.”

Escaping the Troubles

Jonathon’s ability to extricate himself from uncomfortable situations runs in the family. He and his younger brother, who is a pharmacist, were born in South Africa after his parents moved there from Northern Ireland in the early 1970s to get away from the Troubles.

“Belfast at that time wasn’t a nice place to live and my parents had got married and decided they didn’t want to bring their family up there,” Jonathon says. “What’s strange though is that South Africa had its own challenges of apartheid but at that time, even though you imagine the historic view of apartheid, that it was wrong, then the world probably wasn’t aware of the challenges that people of colour were facing, so South Africa looked a great place to live.”

His parents integrated into South African life fairly smoothly. His mother did administrative work and his father was a fitter and pretty quickly, they blended into the country’s Irish society.

“They ended up doing really well. My dad became a head fitter at Cadbury’s chocolate factory and my mum became a buyer for a drug rep, so it was a standard lifestyle,” Jonathon says. The family left South Africa to live in Northern Ireland in 1995.

If the past has its charm, the present is exciting. Locate a Locum, which has a staff of 60, has developed into a successful enterprise since its launch, which was by no means easy. “It’s been an uphill battle for seven years, pushing this big rock up a hill and now, we’re starting to see some of the fruits of our success,” Jonathon says. He raised £500,000 to get the business off the ground by “building a development team, a sales team, to really go after it and capture this market.”

“There’s different private investment (bodies) in Northern Ireland. There’s a company called Techstart. They represent a Fund and they’ll choose to invest in certain business opportunities. It’s a competitive process, they’ll see maybe a hundred companies in a month and only invest in one. So, I had to go through and do the whole pitch, learn what the opportunities were, what the challenges were, why we’re fit to do it.”

Not involved in rate-setting

Jonathon says his business has over 30,000 locums but insists it does not get involved in setting rates. “The middle and upper end of the market are registered and are using our services. And we’ve really automated the manual process. Locums come on, they search on the site for an available shift, they apply, the pharmacy gets notification, they can see the locum, all their qualifications, they can book them in. And we do everything, from sign-up, compliance, shift and payment.”

He says Locate a Locum works with Boots who “utilise our system” and Jonathon recently signed up Day Lewis. And Locate a Locum also operates in the optical sector. “We work with Boots and Boots Opticians have similar challenges. We actually signed the biggest player in the optician world which is Specsavers.”

He doesn’t practice as a pharmacist any more because, as he puts it, “Locate a Locum takes everything of me. I have no time.” He may miss working in a pharmacy but you get the sense he enjoys every minute running his business because he is in his entrepreneurial element. Entrepreneurialism seems to be in his blood.

For about a decade, he was a member of the Young Entrepreneur Academy Northern Ireland, a network of entrepreneurs under 30 who met every two weeks in Belfast to discuss problems they were having in business to find solutions. Now 34, Jonathon says it was part of his “early journey in connecting with entrepreneurs.”

“Entrepreneurship is a lot more mainstream now, it’s a lot more accepted. Maybe then, it was a burgeoning industry. There wasn’t many other entrepreneurs. There was a gentleman who came to Northern Ireland who founded a really successful business called My Gap Year.

“He came and did a pitch and I was blown away that someone had started this business and carried it right through and made it a huge success and came back and was telling us the story. His had a lot more drama than me, sleeping on the floor, not having enough money to pay payroll, that sort of nitty-gritty stuff. But I was just enthralled. I approached him at the end of the event and he said he had connections with other entrepreneurs and wanted to bring them together.”

That chance meeting culminated in Jonathon hooking up with other young business people and budding tycoons to share “war stories and how we’d got help.” He still has a support network. The CEO Connect Club in Northern Ireland is a gathering of 40 or 50 CEOs who share their business insights.

Fending off the detractors

As the saying goes, you can’t please everyone all of the time, and Jonathon’s business has had its detractors. He says he gets “a lot of flak” on social media about locum rates falling.

“The fact is an employer registers on our website and they choose the rate that they wish to go out to locums. So, Neil’s pharmacy says ‘I need a locum and I’m going to pay 20 quid.’ We also have a negotiation function because negotiation is important between both parties and they’ll choose to negotiate or not. We do not get involved in rate-setting.

“What’s happening though is we’re getting a lot of flak in the industry because rates were really high post-Covid and they’ve come down. My opinion on that is rates are a factor of supply and demand. Anything in life, price is a factor of supply and demand. The salary you’re paid will depend on how easy it is to replace you and the skillset you bring plus how well you negotiate around that.”

However, Jonathon believes some locums think a good hourly rate should fall into their laps. “I think there’s maybe a bit of an attitude that if you’re a pharmacist, this is what you should get. I was a pharmacist and the rates at that time equated to a hundred pounds and I wasn’t happy with that, so I changed my scenario. I went out to find different work, I changed things.

“I didn’t say ‘oh, I’m worth more than a hundred pounds.’ How far would that have gotten me? Not very far to be honest.”

Rates have been inextricably linked to workforce shortages and pharmacy closures and debate has raged in the industry. Some believe closures have occurred because pharmacists have not been willing to pay locums a good enough rate, and so have not been able to get staff in. Others think some large chains have refused to pay locums what was agreed, something the Company Chemists’ Association denies.

Jonathon says that when it comes to locum rates, there’s a minority in pharmacy who want to make a lot of political noise. “I appreciate this article isn’t going to be ‘me versus Tohidul’ but I’ve got views around that,” Jonathon says. For those who don’t know the background, ‘Tohidul’ is Tohidul Islam who runs The Pharmacist Cooperative, which provides online discussion groups and also connects locums to employers. He has arguably been Locate a Locum’s biggest critic.

“I think his biggest issue with me is success is very much dependent on your personal aspect. Maybe for him, I’m successful, I’ve created this company, and I think that’s his biggest issue rather than the whole locum piece. He’s trying to create a business,” Jonathon says.

On one occasion, Tohidul took to Facebook to accuse Locate a Locum – or ‘Locate a Homeless Locum’ as he referred to it – of falsely claiming average rates in the UK were lower than they actually were. Jonathon says he has considered legal action against Tohidul over some of the things he has said because “it was bordering on defamation of character” and insists the research Locate a Locum produces on rates is based on facts. “We do thousands upon thousands of shifts, we aggregate and anonymise the data, then we present it factually. Then we have a snapshot of what is going on in the industry which is really valuable,” Jonathon says.

“We do that because, selfishly, it sets us up as a ‘these guys are a leader in this market. Look at the scale of their operation, they provide a lot of value.’ I would say now, rates have come down slightly.”

Rates, he insists once again, are a factor of supply and demand. “For example, all pharmacists flocked to London. It was the financial hub. People incorrectly assumed that if you go to London, you’ll earn bigger salaries but in pharmacy locum land, locum rates in London are one of the lowest. Do you know why? Because there’s an oversupply of pharmacists in London. Rates being a function of supply and demand affected it.

“If you go a couple of miles west, Southampton or Plymouth region, rates are much higher. Why? Down that way, it’s maybe more retiring age, old people. There’s not as many pharmacy schools, not as many higher concentrations (of pharmacists) and so rates are higher.”

Jonathon adds: “Do you know what Tohidul and his merry band of people want me to do? Their point is ‘you should have a minimum rate on the platform. You should set the minimum rate.’ Well, if I set the minimum rate, how can I choose what the minimum rate is?”

Jonathon says he doesn’t take notice of reviews that mention Locate a Locum. And he doesn’t want to dwell on Tohidul.

“We believe we can bring more value to locums. We’ve created a lot of innovation and there’s further innovation we want to bring. Making payment easier for locums, for example. I want a future where you work a locum shift on Locate a Locum and you get paid 30 minutes at the end of the shift. That’s real level innovation and that’s where I focus my efforts and my thinking power and my time.

“Spending time thinking about Mr Islam is not the best use of my time.”