#Business DNA: Interview with Chane Laosonthorn
Founder values must be translated into systems: His grandfather's attention to every patient had to become a measurable standard the rest of the hospital could follow.
What clinics can't afford, Wattanapat built: Small clinics can't afford the specialists or the equipment for serious cases. Wattanapat built that capability instead, adding specialists like neurosurgeons and cardiologists.
Local healthcare providers can be partners rather than competitors: Community clinics handle the basic cases and send Wattanapat the ones that need emergency, inpatient, or specialist care. It's not competition; help flows both ways.
Growth requires selective investment: The hospital doesn't try to offer every procedure; it invests where there's real patient need and refers rare cases elsewhere. Even the offices are bare; every baht goes to equipment instead.
People are the real growth constraint: Keeping the right people is what limits growth. On Samui, specialists come from elsewhere and tend to leave. On the mainland, the problem is finding department heads who are managers, not just clinicians.
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LEADER DNA
Chane Laosonthorn had not planned to work in healthcare. He studied management, marketing and accounting in Australia before building experience in finance and human resources. Chane was preparing to accept a promotion in Perth when his grandmother told him that the family hospital was struggling. His grandfather, the hospital's founder, had suffered a health setback, and the family faced a choice between selling, running, or diversifying the business
Chane chose to return to Thailand with no clinical background and limited knowledge of hospital operations. The decision was personal before it was strategic: protecting his grandfather's legacy and testing himself against a genuinely hard problem.
Chane's outsider perspective became an advantage. Rather than approaching the hospital solely as a medical institution, Chane examined its systems, people, finances, and organizational structure. He preserved the founder's commitment to patient satisfaction and quality care while replacing dependence on individual personalities with measurable standards, specialist capacity, and professional management.
His leadership philosophy is to calculate the risks carefully, decide whether the opportunity is worth pursuing, and, once the decision is made, commit to delivering it.
What Chane shared
Founder values must be translated into systems
Values cannot depend entirely on the personality of a founder. Wattanapat translated Dr Wittaya's attention to patients into operating procedures, performance indicators and measurable service standards.
Clinical depth creates a stronger business model
The hospital expanded its specialist and sub-specialist capabilities while investing in biomedical equipment that smaller clinics could not economically provide. This allowed Wattanapat to handle more complex cases and build a strong referral network.
Local healthcare providers can be partners rather than competitors
Community clinics treat basic conditions and refer patients who need emergency, inpatient, or specialist care. Wattanapat supports these clinics instead of trying to replace them, creating a healthcare network that benefits every provider.
Growth requires selective investment
The hospital does not attempt to offer every possible procedure. It invests where there is sufficient patient volume, clinical need, and revenue potential, while referring rare or highly specialized cases to appropriate partners. Also, by design, the management offices at WPH are plain. Every baht saved on non-essentials goes toward biomedical equipment and specialist capacity, the things that actually differentiate patient care.
People, not capital, are the real growth constraint.
Capital and market demand are important, but hospitals cannot grow safely without qualified clinicians, department heads and managers. With hospital financing secured through its stock listing, WPH's bottleneck is finding and retaining the right department heads and specialists, particularly on islands like Samui where staff often relocate away eventually.
Welcome to Business DNA, a chance for us to delve into the essential make-up of business leaders and their organizations. Our focus is not on the short term but instead on understanding the driving forces behind business. Our guest today is Chane Laosonthorn, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Director of Wattanapat Hospital.
TAKE A MOMENT TO INTRODUCE YOURSELF, YOUR BACKGROUND, AND YOUR STORY.
Chane: I am currently Deputy CEO and CFO of Wattanapat Hospital. I have worked with the organization for about 11 years. Before returning to Thailand, I studied and worked in Perth, Australia. I did my bachelor's and master's there, then worked for about six years. I studied management and marketing, then a master's in accounting, honestly more out of practicality than passion. I looked at what credentials Australia wanted at the time, which was accounting, and that's what I pursued. I started as an accountant, and when a payroll officer left with no notice, I stepped in and got it right the first time. That opened the door to HR, and eventually another company recruited me into a more senior HR role.
Why did you leave Perth to come back to Thailand?
Chane: I had no intention of ever leaving Perth. One day, my manager came into my office and told me she had very good news. I knew she was about to offer me a promotion. Before she could continue, I went to the bathroom and called my grandmother. She had been telling me that the hospital in Trang was experiencing serious problems and that I needed to return. I asked whether the situation was genuinely that serious. When she confirmed that it was, I returned to my manager and declined the promotion. The decision happened very quickly. I knew nothing about the hospital business, and I had never studied medicine. My grandfather and I were very close. He got sick and could no longer be the doctor he once was, and I wanted to come back and protect his reputation. It was also, I think, a rare kind of opportunity to take something from bad to good. Not many people get that chance.
Tell us about your grandfather and how the hospital started.
Chane: My grandparents founded the hospital. My grandfather was a brilliant student who got top marks in the country in math, science, and physics. He went to study in Bangkok before returning to his home province to start a small clinic, just two rooms. He became so well known that an intersection in Trang is named after him, Dr. Wittaya Intersection. At his peak, around 1,700 patients wanted to see him personally, which obviously wasn't possible, so he referred people to other specialists. That referral instinct became the foundation of how the business runs today.
What shaped his philosophy, and how did it carry through as the business grew?
Chane: Two stories stand out to me because at the time they made no financial sense. He would travel abroad and rack up 300 to 500 baht in phone calls just to check on patients, for a doctor's fee of only 50 to 100 baht. From a financial perspective, the calls made no sense. From his perspective, caring for the patient was more important. And once, he sold a large piece of land, worth hundreds of millions today, to buy the province's first ultrasound machine. The machine was so outdated by the time I returned that its screen was smaller than an iPhone's. I asked him if it was worth it. He said absolutely, because before that machine, Trang had no access to ultrasound at all, and people were dying without it. That's when I understood his DNA. As he aged and the systems around him weakened, we had to translate that same instinct (intense, individual attention to every patient) into strategy, KPIs, and measurable results the whole organization could deliver, not just one person. That is how a founder's philosophy becomes scalable. Patients should receive attention from the moment they enter the hospital.
How does a private hospital generate revenue?
Chane: A hospital's main revenue begins with outpatients. An outpatient visits the hospital, receives a consultation, undergoes diagnostic tests, and may be given medication to take at home. Patients with more serious conditions may be admitted to an inpatient ward. The most serious cases may require intensive care or surgery. Healthcare differs from many service businesses because the customer does not decide the level of service. In a hotel, a guest chooses whether to book a standard room or a villa. In a hospital, the doctor determines whether the patient requires outpatient care, admission, intensive care, or an operation. Referrals are another important revenue source. Approximately 30 percent of our revenue comes from referred patients. These patients may initially visit a primary or secondary care provider that cannot manage the complexity of their condition. They are then transferred to Wattanapat for a higher level of care.
How do you manage a hospital network spread across multiple provinces, rather than one large facility?
Chen: I'm grateful, honestly, that we spread out rather than building one massive hospital. In the countryside, no single province has enough population to sustain that. We're spread from the Andaman Sea to the Gulf of Thailand, which diversifies our risk. A lot of the credit for our success goes to my core team, maybe 20% of our people, who move into each new location to handle hiring, systems implementation, and setup, then stay in an oversight role once it's running before moving to build the next one. Once the local hospital can operate effectively, the corporate team steps back and prepares for the next project. This approach allows specialized knowledge to travel between sites. Each new hospital benefits from lessons learned during earlier openings.
How do you decide which clinical services to invest in?
Chane: We cannot invest in every possible specialty, so we focus on services that combine strong demand with high clinical importance. Tourism-related accidents helped us identify the capabilities we needed to strengthen. We invested in emergency services, neurosurgery, neurological medicine, cardiology, cardiac intervention, and orthopedics. Our orthopedic capability covers areas such as hands, knees, hips, backs, and spinal injuries. However, some highly specialized procedures do not have enough patient volume to justify employing a permanent specialist or purchasing expensive equipment. A pediatric heart surgeon is one example. The number of cases in a provincial market may be too small to support that capability sustainably. In those situations, we refer patients to trusted tertiary hospitals, usually in Bangkok.
How do you balance financial discipline with patient care?
Chane: My grandfather focused almost entirely on providing the best possible treatment. My role includes preserving that commitment while ensuring the hospital remains financially sustainable. When the business performs well, there is temptation to invest in many new ideas. When economic conditions become difficult, the CFO must review spending and reduce unnecessary budgets. However, I will never compromise on patient safety. When an investment is necessary to prevent harm, that budget remains protected. Financial pressure does not justify postponing essential safety measures. You can also see this principle in how we design hospitals. For new facilities, safety standards are considered from the floor-planning stage. Patient movement, emergency access, clinical separation and traffic flow are built into the design. When patients arrive, trained staff assess the severity of their condition and determine whether they should proceed to the outpatient department or go directly to emergency care. Patient safety is therefore embedded in the building, the staffing model and the operating process.
What was one of your toughest moments coming into this role?
Chane: Imagine a 30-year-old company that isn't performing well, with its own entrenched management, and then a young, inexperienced outsider, not even a doctor, arrives to change how things are done. I spent a full year trying to work with the existing team before I concluded it wouldn't work unless we changed almost everyone. That was an incredibly difficult proposal to bring to the board and the founders, essentially telling them: let go of nearly everyone, including people who'd been there 40 years, or I go back to Perth. There was no guarantee I was right. But the board didn't have a better option at the time, and they backed the decision. At the time, nobody expected the organization to build a multi-hospital network or list on the stock market. The immediate objective was simply to make the original hospital profitable again.
Why did you list the company on the stock market, and what was that journey like?
Chane: It's actually a funny story. When I came back, our annual profit was around 1 million baht. It grew to 17 million within a few years, and at the time that felt enormous to me. I went to Bangkok to talk to a financial advisor about listing, and they told me our province was too unknown, our profit too small, barely clearing the minimum threshold, and offered us a loan instead of an IPO. That knocked my confidence. But a second advisor saw it differently; a small southern company with none of its region's private hospitals listed, but strong growth, and wanted to work with us. The whole IPO process took only seven months, much faster than the three to four years some companies struggle through, partly because we'd already engaged a Big Four auditor early on for transparency among our five family shareholders, so our accounting was clean going in.
Why go through the trouble of listing at all?
Chen: Two big reasons. First, hiring. As a family business, we had a reputation problem with specialists and doctors who worried decisions were made on a whim. Listing forced governance, internal audit, and corporate governance standards that built trust. Second, it's a public commitment. When I make a promise to investors, I take that seriously, and that discipline, plus the credibility it gives us with doctors we're recruiting, has been worth the added compliance burden.
What advice would you give a young entrepreneur considering listing on the stock market?
Chen: The work is ultimately done by people. Find the right people, then build an environment that makes them want to stay. When you gather genuinely smart, capable people, they will have conflict with each other; that's natural. Part of leadership is helping them work past it toward something shared. You'll never know for certain someone's as good as their résumé suggests until you've actually worked with them, so you keep monitoring and adjusting even after they're hired.
What's the biggest constraint on your growth right now?
Chane: It varies by site. In Samui, being an island, most specialists and staff come from elsewhere, so turnover is higher than at our mainland hospitals. Retention in Samui is a constant effort. In Trang and our other locations, the harder challenge is finding strong department heads. Clinical excellence and management skill are different things, and medical training doesn't teach people management. So we need people who are excellent clinically first, but attitude and leadership capability are what ultimately determine whether they succeed as managers.
What keeps you focused and motivated day to day?
Chen: I genuinely like what I do, and it's not only about revenue and profit. I care about our staff's wellbeing. In Trang, we're one of the biggest and highest-paying employers in the area. Because we're not an enormous company, I still know a lot of our people personally, and I feel like we're helping each other build something better for the community too.
If you had to reduce your philosophy to one sentence, what would it be?
Chen: If we decide something is genuinely worth doing, and we've weighed the risk honestly, then we owe it to ourselves to see it through.
