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

Gerald Turner

As you say it does appear as if some of the larger ones are trying to become dominant, if you will, in becoming world wide, I guess we all know who those are; and you have teamed up with a very interesting company, I think, that is a nice compliment to what you are. You obviously have strengths in the States and some backroom capability in the UK and you have got an ambitious group out of Italy that is doing quite well in most of middle Europe.

Helen Colquhoun

Yes. I think we are going to try and buck the trend; so we are going to try and successfully set up a medical device division within a pharmaceutical CRO and when you look at why that has failed in other circumstances I think the key difference here is that the senior management team, particularly the CEO and Owner of the largest CRO is very keen on this and very supportive and it was part of the motivation for the acquisition. I think if you look at other examples there was middle management who were quite keen, who thought this might be a good marketing ploy, they might bring in some different business, but I am not sure that the very senior people were fully committed. The history has been that the smaller niche CRO’s have been just eventually swallowed up into the big machine, but I think now maybe that will change in that there are now approaching middle sized CRO’s that specialise in things like oncology, so it seems to me that there is a pattern that maybe things are changing and that we will be successful in building a medical device division – a successful one, within a pharmaceutical CRO and that is my job, basically.

Gerald Turner

That is the intent which sounds very interesting indeed.