Category Archives: Project Management

Eliminate This Risk to Your Sales Momentum

traffic cone

Avoid the ‘out of stock’ pothole on your road to success.

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Your team has pushed hard to get a successful product launch.  There is intense focus on Sales & Marketing to take the ball now to close on ever greater numbers of sales.  There is nothing like being ‘out-of-stock’ to put a crimp in your sales momentum.  With a little bit of post-launch effort, the risk of this happening can be minimized.

STEP 1

  • Assemble a team made up of some of the technical people from your product development team, someone from Operations and a product manager.
  • This team will initially be tasked with the following:
    • For Consumables – Identify all critical raw materials.  These are key components like antibodies or other biologicals or chemicals that are critical for the proper functioning of your kit or reagent.
    • For Instrumentation – Identify components with particularly long lead times.

For consumables, pay especially careful attention to sole suppliers of a critical raw material.  What would happen if this company went out of business or decided to discontinue the product?  Alternatively, what would happen to your business if they doubled the price of this component?

Use Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) to  help you and your team assess not only impact of what delays in instrument components  or loss of a source for a key reagent would have but also how likely it would be for that to happen.  This will allow you to compile a prioritized list with the biggest risks to your business at the top.

STEP 2

  • For Consumables – Have the technical team find an alternate source for the critical raw material.  This alternate source might be more expensive but it is much better to have a validated alternative source than to run out of it when your demand is growing.
  • For Instrumentation – Make sure that your agreement with component suppliers include options for rush shipments.  Find out what the lead times and additional costs are for this.  With good Sales forecasting you should not need to exercise this option but it is good to have this in place (just in case).  Consider keeping some additional inventory of critical components to buffer risk.

You cannot eliminate all of these risks to your business but it is far better to know what they are and have contingency plans in place in the (hopefully) unlikely event that some of them come to pass.   Remember that some of these risks can be mitigated by solutions provided by your technical team and others using business tactics.

Picture Credit:  © Foto.fritz | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

International Team Leadership: A Real Life Case Study in How Not to Be the Ugly American

Dartboard with flag darts

Cultural sensitivity is like getting agreement to the same set of rules for a game. Once you have mutual understanding, you will work together and succeed as a team.

By :  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Taking the time to meet with and understand the culture of your international partners goes a long way to boosting you entire team’s efficiency.  The following case study demonstrates the value of cultural sensitivity when leading an international team.

Case Study:  (some details intentionally left vague to provide anonymity for those involved)

Situation:
Senior executives at company headquarters in the US wanted to have several new products commercialized from a company that they recently acquired in Scandinavia.  The effort was to be led by a US-based Project Manager with R&D, Operations and Finance team members split between the US and Scandinavia.  This product was originally being commercialized by the Scandinavian team alone prior to the acquisition.

Soon after project kick-off, the effort began to run into delays and missed deadlines.  Team members would be absent from critical meetings, deadlines would be frequently missed and resentments seemed to be growing.  This was a project that was on its way to a spectacular disaster.

How we saw them
The US members of the team seemed to feel that all of the project problems were coming from the Scandinavian side.  We would send them plans, proposed work solutions and data.  We felt that we would either hear nothing in return or there was an extreme lack of urgency.  We felt that there must be some resentment among our Scandinavian colleagues since this project leadership had been imposed on them and that they were actively looking for ways to sabotage the project.

How they saw us
The technology and science behind the product we were commercializing had all come from years of work that was originally done by the Scandinavians.  They felt that the US side of the team was arrogant and pushy.  We were seen to be constantly questioning the quality of their science and imposing unrealistic deadlines. To them, the US team seemed to be bent on placing the blame for delays and problems on them.

Getting back on track
The project leader traveled to the Scandinavian site and spent time getting to know each of the individual project members.  Several meetings with the US part of the team where held while the project manager was with the Scandinavians to begin to rebuild trust across the entire team.   This allowed for some mutual understanding to be made between the US and Scandinavian team members and also helped to establish a way of working together that both sides supported.  We finally became one team with a single purpose (Our Team).  Ultimately, we all successfully commercialized our product on time and within budget.

Some Lessons Learned:

  • All meetings were held in English.  The Scandinavians seemed perfectly fluent in English so it was with some surprise to learn that their own confidence in speaking and understanding English was low.  Their slowness to respond to questions and demands for information were not being delayed by a willfulness to obstruct the team’s progress but more from a fear of either providing the wrong information or not looking competent.
  • The culture of the Scandinavian team was to work by consensus.  On the other hand, individual initiative was rewarded and appreciated on the US team.  Someone being singled out for a particularly good job was a good thing for a US team member.  The same thing was seen as embarrassing and even offensive to a Scandinavian team member.  This is why the US style of giving ownership of parts of the project to individuals was not well received by our Scandinavian colleagues.
  • National pride was extremely important to the Scandinavian team members.  In the US, individual achievement and a successful commercial launch for the company were rated much higher than national pride (this in spite of all of the hoopla around ‘Made in the USA’).  With the US now owning the company, a successful product launch was no longer seen as important since this was not perceived as a success for their country.  Regardless of these differences, both cultures prized success for the team.  Once everyone felt that we were all on the same team, we worked hard together to succeed together.

The ultimate outcome
Once both sides of the team learned more about the cultural differences between them, new ways of working together that respected these differences got the team back on track.  Ultimately this project was able to launch earlier than expected.  Simply imposing the project management style that had worked well in the US on our Scandinavian colleagues resulted in a dysfunctional team.  The value of making the effort to understand the culture of the people that you will be working with is not only good advice for international teams but also for domestic teams as well.

Some Tips for Managing International Teams:

  • Plan some travel in your budget – Ideally it is best for there to be an opportunity for all of the team members to meet face- to-face at the beginning of the project.  If this is not possible, make sure that at least the team leaders can spend time working with the international team in person.
  • Alternate meeting times to accommodate time-zone differences.  Nothing is as arrogant as forcing your international team to stay late or get up early just so they can make a meeting that is within normal working hours for you.
  • Many things can be done remotely once a connection has been made and trust established.  Build trust and understanding early to leverage the effectiveness of this way of working.
  • Take the time to find out what motivates your overseas colleagues as well as what they might find offensive.  Paying attention to these details can make all the difference between a successfully executed effort and a disaster.

Picture Credit:  © Starfotograf | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

The Next Two People You Need to Start Up Your Startup

Business leader and team

It’s a lot easier to figure out the startup puzzle when you have the right team!

By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

It seems that every week there is an article or post that bemoans the shortage of innovation in America.  However, this is not due to a lack of great ideas and the pace of discovery in the labs across the nation.  The problem is getting the right team to lead and to grow these ideas into commercially successful endeavors.

Don’t go it alone
Having an exciting technology or scientific discovery on hand is not enough to form a successful company.  You need a team of talented people to help you realize your vision.  However, going from one person (you) with an idea and a passion to assembling an effective team and moving forward can seem daunting.  The answer to this is not complicated.  The first thing you need to do is assemble your first board members.

Who are they?  Early Advisors vs. Active Board
Whatever you want to call them, you need others to help you take your idea to the next step along the way to a successful company.  The best way to begin is to gather a small, but powerful group of people that you can rely on to help you develop a realistic strategy, identify productive tactics and complete the critical efforts needed to get this off the ground.  You will find that there are many that will be more than happy to become advisors but far fewer that will become valuable board members.  You need both but you need the active board member more, especially in the early days when this is still an idea.  Here are a few ways to distinguish the two types of people: Table of advisor traits

Your board may typically only have 2 or 3 other members in the beginning which is fine.  You will likely have significantly more advisors at the beginning but some of these may migrate over to the board member column as things progress.  Your advisors allow you to get a breadth of guidance and ideas and your board will provide the depth you need to sort through all of the ‘suggestions’ and actually help you with the heavy lifting of launching your new startup.  In addition to this, it is a lot easier to share the burden of this effort with a committed team than shouldering it all by yourself.

Next Steps:

      1. Identify 10 people who have the experience, resources, talents and connections you need and ask them to be on your board.
      2. Schedule a kick-off meeting to discuss your ideas with them and to identify what commitments you might need from them.
      3. Agree on a regular meeting schedule
      4. Parse this initial group, using the table above and your intuition, into Active Board Members and Advisors.
      5. Continue to recruit until you have at least 2 – 3 board members.

Picture Credit:  © Suravid | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Get the Biggest Bang for Your Tradeshow Buck with These Tips

Tradeshow packing case

Make sure you are coming home with more than just free T-shirts and pens. The best souvenirs are a big list of hot customer leads and referrals!

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Tradeshows can be a great place to get the word out about your product and also to keep abreast of late breaking news, trends and opportunities.  However, they can also be very expensive.  Registration fees, travel costs, shipping and other logistical costs, not to mention opportunity costs by having your sales team out of the field for a few days, add up fast.

Don’t just attend, participate!
It is important to identify all of the tradeshows and conferences that will be good sources for customer leads.  Note that I said ‘good sources for customer leads’ not just which events you think your customers will attend.  Some tradeshows and conferences, although excellent events for scientific exchange, are less than great places to make meaningful contacts with potential customers.  Determine which events will have the most value for you by attending as many tradeshows and conferences (as an individual not as a vendor in the beginning) as your budget and time will allow.  Make sure to plan time towards the end of the event to speak with some of the people manning the vendor booths.  Be sure to speak with a representative sample of vendors to get an overall but relevant sense of how valuable this event has been for them in terms of identifying good sales leads (both quality and number).   Be sure to attend some of the scientific sessions and especially the poster presentations of those researchers that could become some of your first customers when you launch.

When Attending Prior to Your Product Launch

  • Talk with vendors about how valuable they think the show is.  (Do this towards the end of the show but not at the very end)
  • Visit the posters of researchers that you think could be customers for you and find out if the problem you plan to solve with your great product is appealing to them or not and why.  (Don’t propose your solution yet)  This can be a great way to start narrowing down what the minimal performance characteristics and features are that your product must have when you launch.  You will also get a sense of how well your offering will be received if and when you host a vendor booth here in the future
  • Take advantage of the fact that this can be a great place to set up meetings with key people that will be important for your business since they might also be attending the meeting.
  • Post Show – Get all of the contacts that you made into a database and follow up with a brief thank you.   (MS Excel spreadsheet is more than enough for this at this point)
  • Post Show – Use your meeting value assessment (see above) to rank all of the shows you attended based on how valuable they would be for getting customer leads (The conference at the top of your list will be the one that you should plan to use as part of your launch strategy)

When Attending After Your Product Launch

  • Before the Show – Be sure to have a customer lead follow up plan for how all leads will be handled after the show and by whom
  • Have sales team and/or product management manage the booth
  • Have your booth staff rate the value of each contact they make immediately after meeting them.  For example: add an A, B or C next to each new contact using your lead capture system to aid in your post-event follow up.   Put an A next to those that could be customers in the next 30 days (First follow up group), B next to those that would be customers in 60 days (Second follow up group) and a C next to everyone else
  • Continue to visit posters and get feedback on the problem your product is solving.  This way you will be on top of important trends that will guide the next iteration of your product, modifications to your sales value proposition and other positioning materials based on what you learn
  • Measure your brand strength.  When meeting with people at the booth or at the scientific sessions, ask ‘Have you heard of ‘your company name here’ before?’.  If they have, ask what they think about it.  Don’t correct them if they get it wrong.  Just collect this information for now (The first time you do this can be a bit discouraging but you will be setting a baseline, If you are doing things right, you will notice a real improvement at next year’s tradeshow.)

Stay vigilant
Some conferences and tradeshows that were initially valuable may not be worth the expense in later years.  Meeting agendas change as do the attractiveness they have for your customers.  Getting in the early habit of doing a post-event value evaluation after every tradeshow or conference will insure that your time and money for this are maximally rewarded.  As your budget for meeting attendance grows, consider reserving some of this to attend new events that could have a better return on your investment.

Picture Credit:  © Budda | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Are we there yet? The Secret to Keeping your Company on Track

Road in the rural woods

It’s not how far you have gone, it’s how much further you need to go to get there.

By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Every summer as a kid, my family would pile in the car and drive to beautiful Lake Champlain, Vermont for a week of fun and relaxation.  The car ride itself felt like a quick detour to the 9th circle of a place a little less nice than Lake Champlain.  This was due to my brother and I repeatedly asking my Dad, “Are we there yet?” (Ten minutes into a 6 hour drive).  Sound familiar?  This scenario plays itself out every week at companies all over the world at the dreaded update meeting.

The Problem
You and the team went through the effort to prepare a good plan for charting how you will get to your next milestone.  One day after publishing the plan, it is out of date.  The key here is then updating your plan with new information and then moving on.  When a lot of effort is spent fiddling with the plan and keeping it updated, a lot of time is wasted on  ‘managing the plan’ rather than focusing on getting the things done that are going to move you closer to reaching your goal.  At the end of the day, you really need to know what is left to do more than what you have already done (eg you really want to know how many more miles left to go before getting to the lake than how many you have already travelled).

The Secret
It’s how you ask for progress updates.  The use of Gantt charts, lists and other planning and project management tools can make this seem like an exact science.  You plug in a number and out comes the new finish date.  The problem is that most of us are terrible estimators of how close we are to finishing unless there is a hard metric to provide guidance.  So here is how you ask for feedback that will be the most accurate and will require the least amount of time and effort on everyone including yourself.

Cut and paste these lines into the Request for Updates e-mail that you are sending your team.

  1. What tasks on the list assigned to you are now completed (100% done)?
  2. Which tasks have you started?
  3. Of those tasks that you have started, how many days will you need before it is done?

Sounds simple and it is.  The key here is in the last question.  When asked in this way, a person will have a much better idea of how much time they need rather than the percent complete of the task.  (Professional project management tools will automatically calculate the percent complete when you enter this information – you will find that the percent complete will go up and down over time until this is finished) Each person will automatically factor anything else that they are working on or delays or problems that would affect getting the task completed.  This whole process should take no longer than five to ten minutes of effort from the team including yours to update and send out the updated plan.

Quick Tips:

  1. Cancel all update meetings.
  2. Send out requests for progress updates via e-mail using the 3 lines I suggested above. (Once every 2 weeks or more often as you approach a critical milestone)
  3. Update the plan with progress and send out to the team.

Picture Credit:  © Hamiltongraphics | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Six Steps to the Epiphany: Get This Right and Go Big

By:  Steve Haralampu, Sc.D. & Bill Skea, Ph.D.

Toaster

Every technology company strives to offer the best thing since sliced bread. Achieve commercial excellence with these key insights.

Successful commercialization of a new technology has more to do with marketplace needs and product execution than with the technology itself.  The main factor driving success is the customers’ perception of value:  “What does it do for me?” and “Is it better, faster, or cheaper?”  Technology rarely sells for technology’s sake.  We will discuss some factors to consider during the commercialization process.  Although the concepts are generally applicable to all product development efforts, we concentrate on how these relate to the introduction of new tools for life science R&D and diagnostics laboratories, especially within startup companies or other small organizations.

Changing Priorities: Transitioning from Bench to Product Development
Product development and commercialization is a truly multidisciplinary activity, especially at the beginning of the process:  the product specification.  The focus should be on filling customer needs.  Traditionally, sales and marketing is the conduit to the marketplace, and they should be involved in defining what the customer wants, but too frequently they are the sole drivers. Scientists that develop novel technologies have unique insights into their potential for being revolutionary, and to see outside of the conventional box.  How a product is specified and developed also depends upon design and manufacturing constraints.  The main design constraints are product complexity, such as automation, which drives product cost and time to market; and design for manufacture and assembly (DFM/DFA), which also drives cost, and whether a product can be made or repaired.  Finally, the whole process is driven with money.  Finance must be at the table to assure that the product development and commercialization effort is affordable.  A product funded for 95% of its commercialization is still not a product.  Resources must be available to cross the finish line.  Therefore, an agile team of scientists, engineers, marketers and financers, each with the ability to wear many hats, and each with roughly equal input, drives a successful product commercialization effort, since each has a stake in the outcome.  Since the product development effort is usually a period of intense activity, and is an activity with which a small organization is not constantly involved, it makes sense to share some of the workload with external resources. Otherwise, at the end of the process, an organization can be stuck with excess headcount.

A major consideration in the specification and design of a product is developing a strategy for how it will be manufactured and distributed.  Manufacturing entails investment in manufacturing space, equipment, and personnel.  This investment can be significant, and can be the burden that breaks an organization if product rollout is late, or sales do not meet projections.  There are many vendors that provide contract-manufacturing services.  Whether it is the whole product, product subsystems, or final assembly and packaging, the use of contract-manufacturers can significantly reduce financial risk in the early stages of a product’s life cycle.  Determining how vendors play into the overall manufacturing scheme can impact product design.  It can be extremely valuable to give your contract-manufacturing vendor a seat at the table during product development, to assure a design for manufacture, and to avoid surprises late in the game.

Associated with early-stage manufacture is a realistic sales projection, or a willingness to manufacture to orders.  Excess inventory of an expensive laboratory instrument ties up huge amounts of capital needed for an organization’s growth.  Maintaining financial flexibility during product rollout is important should it be necessary to redirect efforts into sales or applications development.

Six insights to keep you on the path to success
All of this is common sense, and most managers feel like they would never fall into any traps posed by the product development and commercialization process.  This does not seem to be the case, however, since there are so many examples of organizations that stumble, sometimes fatally.  Heeding the admonition, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” we give some real examples from which we can learn.

  • Technology Evaluation/Due Diligence Alone Is Not Enough

Even before a technology is approved for product development, before a startup is approved for funding, or during due diligence of an acquisition target, the projected product development process needs to be evaluated.  Sometimes inventors are so close to the technology that they do not recognize the marketplace landscape they are trying to enter.   This can be particularly true, for example, when a technology is developed by physicists and/or engineers and is to be applied to diagnostics.  It is typically not within their realm of experience to understand the technology alternatives or regulatory landscape.

      A clear sign of being too focused on the core technology is making the statement, “We have no competition.”  A core technology may be so revolutionary that there is indeed no competition that performs its specific task.  What can be unrecognized is that there are perfectly adequate alternative technologies for performing the task.  One team of inventors developed a methodology for detecting metabolic stresses within living cells.  Another established company had a similar physical product already on the market.  When the team was asked how they were better than this competition, their response was, “They’re not competition because they measure amplitude modulation, our invention measures frequency modulation.”  One needs to have very solid intellectual property protection if one plans to enter a marketplace and not expect competition when the method of data analysis is the only point of differentiation.  The technology is good, but the inventors did not adequately evaluate its potential versus competitive stresses.

 

  • Listen to the Customer (sometimes)

It is important for a product to be successful that it fulfills some unmet need of the customer.  Although this is true, end users do not always recognize their unmet needs, especially with regard to technologies that require a paradigm shift.  Therefore, asking sales and marketing to poll customers for their needs, tends to generate feedback that is incremental improvement of known product forms.  Apple, Inc. has been a leader in creating marketplace needs for its new products.

With respect to laboratory products, it is important to understand the customers’ workflow.  A product might do amazing things, but if it does it in a way that is not helpful, it will not be a success.  One company had an interesting platform for growing cells.  Their development team designed a product that compared a control to a test under a wide variety of environmental conditions.  This seemed logical to the design team.  However, research is normally done using plates with 24 or 96 wells, not just 2.  The company had a good idea, but its execution did not meet the most common workflow.

Small organizations tend to focus on the new technology.  A lot of this is driven by the fact that completion of the technology development is going on concurrently with the early stages of product development, and, after all, new technology perfection is what the small organization is all about.  One company developed a technology to separate proteins in a way that enhanced the research information obtainable once the proteins were further analyzed.  Unfortunately, that company did not provide the customer with an adequate way to retrieve the separated proteins from its product and into the downstream analyses.  Although the technology met customer needs, the overall product system execution was not useful in the laboratory workflow.

  • Customers Don’t Like to Read Instructions

Once a technology is demonstrated and shown to be useful, the technology development must focus on making that technology execution robust.  An inadequate technology execution is when:  failure rates are high, and it takes a skilled practitioner in the technology to recognize the failures, but when it works, it’s great!  Technology developers need to realize that they probably have an extraordinary skill at getting things to work, while the customer may not be willing to invest this kind of time to come up on the learning curve.  Technology developers deal with the technology 100% of the time, customers deal with most technologies only a fraction of the time as part of a larger workflow.  Therefore, they cannot focus on the nuances of running a finicky product.  A technology needs to be simple (sometimes requiring significant automation to conduct the difficult tasks) and needs to work reproducibly and flawlessly.  One company’s product was based on an array of test sites.  Each test site had >99% reliability, but since there were 41 test sites on the product, and each needed to work for the product to have worked, there was only a 65-70% chance that the product worked.  This was unacceptable in most laboratory situations.

  • Beware: The Misguided Cost Estimate

Especially with regard to the micro- and nanotechnologies being developed today, product cost estimates that drive the business plan can be based on faulty/excessively optimistic assumptions.  One company developed a rather extraordinary biochemical sensor that was based on a silicon chip only 0.2 x 0.2 mm.  The materials cost for the sensor was only cents.  Micro- and nano-scale products use very little material because of their size. The fault in the analysis was that the nanosensor still needed to interface with a macro world.  The product cannot be a box of grain-of-sand-sized sensors.  A housing to allow a customer to handle the sensor, along with the appropriate plumbing to get the sample prepared and to the sensor cost as much as an alternative sensor technology for the base application they chose.  The core technology probably still has great potential, but an application needs to be found where its small size is the advantage, and enables sensing in places unattainable by the alternative technology.

  • Product Design is a Predictable Task, or is it?

Many aspects of product design are predictable.  It is merely the engineering task of finding OEM components or designing custom parts and fitting these together in an operable system.  What could go wrong?  Missing cost targets, inappropriately setting priorities, or inadequately integrating systems are frequent issues.

Engineering design is fun for those involved, but sometimes it is hard to know when to stop. Over design with too many features can make a product too expensive, and/or unreliable.  Some features are just annoying.  One company decided to have its product send a stream of text messages to the operator’s cell phone updating the instrument’s status.  This sounded novel and useful, but in practice was just annoying.  That same company decided to custom design most of its mechanical components.  This approach was in some cases expensive, but more importantly did not leverage the knowledge base of OEM suppliers.  Consequently, some components did not perform as expected, which ate up valuable development resources to debug components that could have been purchased with proven performance.  Too much time was spent resolving issues that could have been purchased, and defocused the team from its core technology and applications development.  This company failed.

We are accustomed to seeing sculpted cases used in consumer products around us.  It is an attractive concept to create products with an eye-popping “look”.  This is possible for products manufactured by the thousands, but sculpted skins for products manufactured by the hundreds can be surprisingly expensive.  This is an example of an inappropriate priority in a resource-limited environment, and where paint might be a better alternative.

The product design effort is not complete with a final set of product blueprints.  There is still substantial work to be done producing support materials.  The user manual is not just a set of step-by-step instructions for the customer, but is also a legal document that is used to support safety testing and certification.  It has a particular format and set of regulatory requirements.  Another neglected aspect of product design completion is product packaging.  One company had great success beta testing its product at the university located across the street from their headquarters.  The same could not be said for beta tests at major research centers halfway across the country.  Placing the instrument in a shipping crate was not sufficient protection.  Beta testers received product, with screws missing (loose in the shipping container) and critical components out of alignment.  Needless to say, these beta testers were never converted to customers.

  • Transitioning from Prototype to Manufactured Product

The main pressure of an organization is to get income as early as possible, and to manage cash flow.  This drives some compressed schedules, and encourages cutting some corners.  Sending a product design to manufacturing too early can have profound consequences.  When a design flaw is detected in the design phase, it may be expensive to fix, but it is preferable to fix it before the flaw is replicated by the manufacturing process.  Just think about the costs associated with retrofitting multiple products in inventory, or in the field in comparison with taking the time to assure the design to manufacturing is correct.

Inevitably, some flaws in product design go undetected until the product is stressed in the marketplace.  One company did not make it that far.  They experienced too many bumps in the road during product development, so they were running out of money.  The product still had severe flaws.  They decided to launch the flawed product because investors promised that they would provide more capital if the company demonstrated they could sell product by the end of the quarter.  The company’s management thought that selling flawed products would buy them enough time to fix the product later. Unfortunately, customers were not willing to pay full price for a product that virtually did not work.  No products were ever sold.

Two clichés come to mind:

  • You only have one chance to make a first impression. 
  • If we don’t have enough time to do it right, why do we have enough time to do it twice.

 

In Conclusion
Nearly every function within a company has a vested interest in the success of product commercialization.  The commercial product is the physical manifestation of years of work, and is what will bring reward to the development team.  The product development task requires teamwork between corporate functions that typically do not have much interaction.  Lack of appreciation of the constraints of a given function by team members leads to disaster, e.g., specifications/expectations that cannot be met by the technology or by the design team; specifications that cannot be supported by finance; designs that are difficult to manufacture; executions customers do not want; etc.  The commercialization process is capital intensive, and has very little leeway for errors.  Product commercialization uses unique skills and experience not needed 100% of the time within an organization.  Outsourcing is a great option to minimize risks during this critical growth function.

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What You Can Learn from an Orchard about Growing your Business

Apples

Approach building your company like planting an orchard. Be sure that you know what your customers want today but also a few years down the road as well.

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

What does growing apples have to do with building a life science company?  It turns out that there are a lot of similarities if you look closely.  A successful orchard requires a huge investment in planning (what variety of trees, how much of each, etc.), effort (a lot of work before the first harvest), finances (cost of land, labor, farm equipment etc.) and time (trees need a number of years to mature before your first harvest) to become successful.  The successful orchard keeper needs to have a good assessment of what types of fruit his customers will want in a few years and also how he can differentiate his own business from other orchards in the area to compete successfully.  The leadership of a strong life science business needs to think in the same terms.  What need will your offering(s) fulfill in the future and why will customers come to you rather than to your competitors?  With an orchard, once you plant the trees, you are now committed to your view of the future market for your products and now everything is about nurturing your trees until you have your first harvest.  With a startup, once you have selected a product and/or service, all of your efforts will be to get it successfully to market.  The orchard keeper cannot rip up trees next year if he thinks that the market for his fruit has changed.  Likewise, most startups do not have the funds (or time) to scrap a product offering once they are working to get it to market.  The lesson here is, make sure to spend enough time to understand your market, your customers and how you will successfully sell and then commit to a laser-like focus for getting that offering to market as soon as possible.

Tips for Building a Strong Startup:

  • Plant Trees:  Build your company for strong and steady future business.  Whether you are offering a platform, service or a one-time sale of a large instrument, referrals are the key to efficiently growing profitably.  Winning new customers is costly so getting referrals from happy customers is like harvesting apples in the fall.  The time, effort and investment you put into winning strong early customers will pay off as they share their experience with your future customers.  Building a scalable infrastructure that consistently and efficiently delivers the goods that delight your customers will insure success in the long run.
  • Build a Barrier to Entry:  It takes a while to plant and nurture an orchard.  However, once your trees have matured, you will have happy customers coming on a regular basis.  Building strong relationships with key opinion leaders, establishing preferred vendor status with organizations and establishing your company as a market leader in the technology is a lot like planting new trees.  There is a lot of prep work up front and the rewards are not immediate but once you have done this, this makes it very difficult for competitors to come into the market later.
  • Plant some Pumpkins Too:  As a startup, you need to start generating revenues as soon as possible to prove out your business.  Your team will need to put a lot of focus on getting your first sales and creating happy customers.  Many startups make the mistake of neglecting to build in some time for creating a scalable and profitable business.  You will be planting and harvesting an annual crop like pumpkins to do this. Developing a product road map that contains both near term (pumpkins) and long term (apples) offerings will allow you to get to market faster and get the insights you need to insure a better outcome with your later prospects. However, the key here is using what you have learned about your customers, their wants and needs and enthusiasm for your offering to build an infrastructure that will allow you to maintain the high level of customer satisfaction that will lead to referrals from your customers (See first point – Plant Trees).

Take Home Points:

  • Start building relationships with key opinion leaders and strategic partners early (even before the launch of your first product or service).
  • Use the insights you gain of your customers’ wants and needs from early sales to guide your efforts as you scale the business.  (e.g. if you will start selling using distributors, make sure that you build in an infrastructure (tech support, technical inside sales, social media outreach, etc.) to maintain the level of support and service that your customers valued in the early days).
  • Everything you do and every interaction you have with the public will shape your brand.  A strong positive brand can be a powerful barrier to block your competitors.  Clearly identify the brand identity you would like to have and make sure that you and everyone in the company reinforce this in everything they do and with every interaction with the public.

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