Selling my Contract Research Organisation (CRO), with Helen Colquhoun

Gerald Turner

Good morning, this is Gerald Turner for Corporate Finance, and this morning we are talking to Helen Colquhoun, who is a recent and happy seller of her business, which closed about three weeks ago. I guess we are going to talk about your recent transaction, and so I would like to ask you, ask you some questions about that. You obviously have been an entrepreneur for many years, you have built a company on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit a small company, but nevertheless a company operating on both sides of the Atlantic, not easy to do, and you decided to selling a business; what brought you to the idea of selling your business?

Helen Colquhoun

I think two things, one personal and one business related. So the personal one was that I wanted to spend my time doing things that I enjoyed, and not doing things that I did not enjoy, and I do not enjoy the day to day running of a business, the financial monitoring, managing people that kind of thing, but I do enjoy business development and managing large projects and I thought that if the business was acquired by another company I would have a better chance of doing things that I enjoy, plus I would actually have more control over my time and I would have a little bit more personal time. The business reason was that we were a small company, about 35 people, and I felt like we were in a small boat in a very rough economic sea and all we needed was one big wave and we might go under, and although we avoided that, we avoided it by, sailing very close to the wind in some ways. So I felt that being part of a larger organisation just meant we were in a bigger boat and we were more likely to weather the storm really.