Episode #22 – Chris Ragland

Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Pursell. Stacy is the leading executive recruiter for the animal health and veterinary industries. She’s the founder of Therio Partners and the VET Recruiter. Stacy has placed more professionals in key positions within the animal health and veterinary industries than any executive search professional. And along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference. The People of Animal Health Podcast features industry leaders and trailblazers who have made a significant impact or are making an impact in the animal health and veterinary industries. Stacy chats with them to learn more about their lives, their careers, and the unique and interesting things that they have done to contribute to the animal health or veterinary industries. She is here to share their stories with you. Now here’s the host of our podcast, Stacy Pursell.

Hello everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Chris Ragland.

Chris Ragland is an experienced senior executive with more than 30 years of success in the global animal health industry. His assignments have included commercial operations, research and development, business development and general management. Key areas of responsibility have emphasized strategy development, business integration, research, program leadership, and merger acquisition oversight. In founding Animalytix, Chris and his team developed a true market insight platform designed to serve distributors, manufacturers, veterinarians, and retailers in their efforts to drive improved performance and understanding across all segments of the animal health market.

Welcome onto The People of Animal Health Podcast. And how are you, Chris?

I’m doing great, Stacy. Thank you very much.

Well, we’re so glad to have you today on our show, Chris. I know that you have experienced tremendous success throughout your career. I’d love to start off at the bottom in the very beginning of your career, what was your life like growing up, and where did you grow up?

Okay, thank you, Stacy. I am a farm kid from Central Kentucky. I grew up an hour South of Louisville, Kentucky, right in the center of the state, a little town called Magnolia in Leroux County, which is the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. That’s our one claim to fame. My family had a mixed farming operation. We registered Paul Herford and simmentals, alfalfa, hay, tobacco, corn, soybeans, you name it. And I spent my childhood in Kentucky like a farm kid does, showing calves and steers and heifers and farming and 4-H and FFA was a big part of our life growing up. And went to the University of Kentucky, got a degree in ag economics, and then shortly thereafter graduating, left the state and haven’t really been back since other than to visit, been traveling lots of different parts of the US and around the world since then with my career in animal health.

When did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Well, what I figured out and what I wound up doing are two very different things. Of course, when you’re little, you want to be a veterinarian. That’s what all the farm kids want, or a baseball player, some astronaut, maybe. But being a veterinarian was a big deal and I figured out when I was 12, I did not want to be a veterinarian. My first, Joe Heifer was having her first calf and it was breech and upside down and it was 2 in the morning and it was February and it was bitter cold. And I was at the barn watching her and went down to the house and told dad what was going on and he said, “Well, we better call the vet.” So Don Berry was our veterinarian back in the day, and I remember calling Don at about a quarter to 3 in the morning on a Sunday morning and him coming out and having to pull that calf and help us.

And then he had to run right back because they had a sunrise service. His wife was the choir director and she was my music teacher at the time. And so he had to be back for this sunrise service at 6:30 or 7, whatever it was. And I remember when dad asked me to write the check for Don and I did, and I looked at how small that check was and I looked at how disruptive that was for his life and I said, “Wow, that’s a really hard way to make a living.” So I decided at 12, I was not going to be a veterinarian. And then I thought for a long time I would work for the American Cinema Association. I was very active in that group, president of the Junior Association nationally, and had a big dream to move to Bozeman, Montana and do that.

But once I got into school, I was really focused on law and so that’s where I was headed. But then my family went through a bankruptcy, my dad and his partner in the farming business, and it became imperative that I get a job. So I took a job with what was then the American Hoechst Corporation. I thought I would just do that for a year or two and then go back to school. But I actually liked it and it worked out well. And so that wound up being my career. So it’s a complete accident where I wound up as opposed to where I thought it would be.

Well, tell us the story of the beginnings of your career. How did you get started and go from there?

So I had two fraternity brothers that were applying for an internship with somebody called the American Host Company, as best we could figure out how to pronounce it. Not many people in Kentucky were familiar with that German business. And kind of the last minute I decided I would apply for that internship too, and I got it and I enjoyed it. But I had planned to go back to school. I was a graduated senior and I was planning to go back to law school. Then this bankruptcy thing hit and dad called in middle of the night and said, “Hey, you really need to get a job.” And told me what was going on.

So I called the gentleman that I was working for, asked if I could get an interview for a full-time position. I was very fortunate, they had some jobs open at the time, I interviewed and I got a job. So I packed up and moved to Nashville, Tennessee as a sales rep in August of 1985 and stayed there for a little over two years. And then the company was launching a new poultry product, needed some help in Northwest Arkansas. So I packed up and moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, worked there for two and a half years in the poultry business and then got promoted, moved to New Jersey, got into marketing and management and that took me in a whole other direction from that point, but that’s how it got started.

So what happened next? I know that eventually you became the president of Intervet. How did you get to that point?

Yeah, so I spent two years, brand management, US, Canada for poultry products. Then I moved over into business development manufacturing for a couple years. Then I moved back into poultry business unit management for North America. So I ran that business for three years. And then I was asked to go overseas to our global headquarters in Wiesbaden in Germany and oversee our portfolio development group for production drugs and medicated feed additives. So I had a team in Paris and a team in Frankfurt and another team in Wiesbaden that we worked with on all of our medicated feed additive portfolio, our anabolic implants and our beta agonist products. And that was an exciting time because it was ’96 to 2000, that’s right when the Scandinavian countries were joining the EU, this huge movement was underway to ban growth promoting antibiotics in Europe. There was a big fight around all of that.

So we spent three and a half years working with the European Parliament in Strausberg, with the European Commissioners in Brussels and all of the state ag ministers defending the use of growth promoting antibiotics. And we were successful, we got a six-year extension for our products. Lanco got an extension on one of theirs as well. And then everything else got taken off the market. But we learned a lot about politics and consumerism. This is right when the whole Frankenfoods initiative was exploding. The Monsanto gene technology for crop was all over the place.

So there was a lot of controversial things that were happening in animal agriculture as that was going on. We had a huge foot and mouth disease leak out of a vaccine plan in the UK and they had all of these sheep and cattle that had to be destroyed there. I mean, it was a huge catastrophe, environmental catastrophe that happened while we were there. So it was a very eventful time to be in the animal health industry, a very eventful time to be in Europe as all of that was happening. So it was very intense, learned a lot, it was a lot of fun to go through all of that.

What did you learn from that experience?

Well, yeah. So you learn a lot about how casual a relationship a lot of people had with the truth. And so a lot of the things that were being said and some instances on both sides about this antibiotic issue and some of the other stuff just absolutely untrue, but it was politically useful or politically expedient to pursue some of that logic and those arguments. And so to prepare yourself and do battle against things where you thought you could just rely on facts and you can’t. Facts is not what drives a lot of what happens in politics, it’s emotion. And that was my first real exposure to that. We wound up creating actually a cartoon series that we used to explain to the ag ministers in the parliament and to the commissioners, the role of antibiotic resistance in animal agriculture and how it works and the mechanisms.

And it was incredibly effective, this little cartoon series that we put together, I still have it today. And I am just amazed that that was the tool at the end of the day that proved more effective than anything else that we had, more than any paper, more than any other argument. That cartoon series we put together was really a powerful way to communicate and simplify this fairly complex message that people were struggling to grasp. And neither of them worked very well for us. But that was probably the biggest thing that I took out of it. And then all the different agendas that are at play, it’s even more complex today. But at that point, that was the first time I’d really been exposed to all of that, all of the different factions and all of the different pressures that particularly impact animal agriculture.

Yes. And so after you were in Europe, what happened next? Where else did you go from there with your career?

So spent almost four years there and the big event that happened was the creation of a company called Aventis. This is when Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst decided to put their human pharmaceutical businesses together. And this was part of a huge reorganization of the Hoechst Global Empire, which was a $32 or $36 billion global multinational at that time. They had lots of different businesses, fine chemicals, specialty chemicals, they had a film division, they had all of the pharmaceutical divisions and lots of other things that they did and they were busting all of that up, and they were very successful in driving increased shareholder value through the process. But of course it was unbelievably disruptive for all the business units and the employees and so forth. So anyway, through that process, Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst came together. They created this company called Aventis. And at that time, Rhône-Poulenc was a 50-50 owner with Merck of Marriao, and Merck did not want any more animal health exposure at that point.

And so the decision was made to divest the Hoechst animal health business. And that process went on for two, three months. And then we were all told, management team was all told on a Friday night when we were going home, that decision had been made in Novartis, would be acquiring the business. So we all kind of look south and we’re excited about being part of a Swiss company and spend some time in the Alps. And Monday morning we come back and said, “Nope, just kidding. Changed our mind. We’re actually selling the business to AkzoNobel. You’re going to be a part of Intervet”, which were to the North and a Dutch company. And so that was a huge difference. The Swiss and German cultures would’ve been more similar and as opposed to, or the German and Swiss cultures as opposed to the German and Dutch cultures, which were a little more volatile when they came together initially.

But anyway, that’s what happened. And so that happened in December of ’99. And so I came home that month and my wife and I moved back and we moved to Maryland, the eastern shore of Maryland near the Delaware offices of Intervet’s US affiliate. And I joined that group then. And for about 6 months, I ran a special project team that was responsible for putting together the R&D portfolio for the new combined business. And then I moved into head of commercial operations and I did that for two and a half, three years and then was named president in 2005 and did that until I left the company in 2008.

Was there ever a point in time where you felt like you were truly beginning to gain traction within your career? And if so, when was that point?

Oh yeah, I would say the first big success that I felt was poultry business unit head for North America. So that was a big team. We had a major product launch, had a great group we were working with there. We had a tremendous amount of success during that period of time, and so that would’ve been around ’93, middle of ’92, ’93. And that was a really big moment, P&L responsibility for a big group, a lot of products, very intensely competing situation with Hoffman Roche and Al Pharma at that time. So it was a lot of fun.

And then of course getting promoted and moving overseas and running a global research and marketing team, that was great as well. So both of those were pretty big. I think I was 32 when I moved to Europe and I believe I was the youngest director at the time in the Hoechst organization. So that was a big moment. It was a lot of fun and realized you had a lot of responsibility, but you realized that was a significant recognition of accomplishment to be asked to take that kind of position.

Yes. And I know that sometimes successful people have massive success and then also some low points. You just mentioned a high point, 32, going to Europe, being the youngest director. Were there any low points in your career?

Oh, yep. There were a couple. The most difficult was a three-year stretch from 2000 to 2004 after I had been put in charge of the commercial business at Intervet. And after we had acquired the Bayer biological business in the United States. Bayer had a great portfolio of vaccines for cattle, for horses, and they had a modest pig business as well. We acquired that business right after the Hoechst’s acquisition. So I think that happened in June or July of 2000. And about a year later, the company undertook what was at that time the most ambitious site transfer project in the history of the USDA by a factor of two, I believe. We had 84 projects and products that were moving between sites and it was a catastrophe. We had all manner of issues around supply and disruption to R&D programs and everything else. But it was for three years, we were running a commercial business there and we could not make many of our major vaccine products.

We had lots of problems in the cattle and equine areas and it caused challenges in other species as well. We had a big poultry vaccine business and it was impacted by the… So it was just extremely difficult. We had to go through three years of layoffs, personnel on the commercial team. We had to make a lot of changes to try to prune back our expenses in the absence of revenue that we needed. Very, very challenging time, very difficult. And there was very little we could do about it in the commercial side. It all had to do with manufacturing and they were struggling mightily despite great efforts.

And that was a really dark and a really hard time to go through for the company. And anybody that’s in the vaccine business that has had some experience with an extended period of time of stockouts, some kind of difficulty around manufacturing, they will immediately be able to relate to the prestige line of vaccines from Bayer at that time of the acquisition, I believe were the number one portfolio in that market and we couldn’t make many of those products for over 30 months. So it was really a miserable time to be in a commercial organization trying to manage through that situation.

It sounds like it. What did you learn most from that experience?

Well, there were two, three things that were really important. One, don’t be so ambitious. Don’t try to do something twice the size of anything that’s ever been accomplished before and just assume you’re going to be able to pull that off. So the planning around that whole initiative and the complexity and so forth, I think was really underappreciated by the people that were going to have to implement it. So that was the first thing.

Second thing, you can control the things that you can control and focus on the things you can control and put the rest of that out of your mind. But don’t try to do too many things all at once in response to that situation. That was the other thing that happened. We had initiatives where people were trying to address some of this stuff and they might be doing three and four things in parallel and failing at all of them at the same time. And a lot of that was because of delusional resources and other things. So it was a cascade of mistakes, I would say at the end of the day that led to the prolongation of that situation and just being a lot more critical of one’s abilities, of the complexity of a situation, your likelihood of success. I think all of those things, you pay a terrible price if you don’t pay enough attention to that and focus on it.

Well, there’s so many things that come up that we don’t have control over. So that’s good advice to focus on the things that you do have control over. Chris, you’ve seen a lot, you’ve done a lot over the years in your career and the animal health industry. What has been the most surprising thing to you so far during your career in animal health?

How much I love the people here. My natural temperament is introverted. And so someone who takes energy from not being around people, but you spend 35, 40 years with an industry of people who are so passionate, so good, let’s say, spirited and well intended, passionate about what it is they’re doing. And that’s true for the farm kids and it’s true for the veterinarians and it’s true for the people that are just passionate about animals and their love for animals. This is a fantastic industry to work in. And I think as a young person, it’s difficult to understand and comprehend what a good industry and a bad industry might be. The facets of a career that you would be exposed to, what it is that you would really enjoy and what it is that would be draining and a more negative experience for you. And the general positivity of this industry surprises me, continues to surprise me in a very positive way.

And it’s a huge part of why we don’t have people leave this industry once. We get lots of people that come from somewhere else and the majority of them stay because it’s such a nice place to work. It’s a mission people can believe in and feel good about every day, no matter where you are in the mix, what kind of job that you have, which company you work for, you’re doing something you can believe in. And I think that’s incredibly positive and beneficial for us that have the privilege of working here and then for our clients and the communities that we live and work in and make better by our presence and our work.

It’s so interesting to hear you say that you’re introverted because you don’t strike me as an introverted person. I’m also introverted and sometimes people are surprised to hear that I say that I’m introverted. Do you find people are surprised to hear that you’re introverted?

So it depends on who they are. So people who know me well, they know that about me. That’s no surprise. People that I interact with out in the world on a day-to-day basis or let’s say an infrequent basis, that can be surprising. Because my job requires me to not be that. I would say that as I’ve gotten older, I am much more comfortable with it. I enjoy people. The industry’s so much different today. When I started, people rode for a brand and you would have a career for a lifetime with a given company. And now the companies have been so busted up. People are everywhere. People that you know and you’ve worked with are everywhere in the industry and that’s really nice. I mean, you’ve got relationships all over the place. You’re able to share experiences from all over the place in a way that you never could before.

And I think that is, in some ways it’s been hard on employees, because the employee and employer relationship is much more transactional today than it was when I started, soon will be 40 years ago now. But at the same time, people’s relationships I think are as stronger, stronger than ever. And they’re everywhere. And so it’s a lot of fun to go to a meeting and somewhere and connect with people you haven’t seen in a while that you used to work with, used to be a colleague and keep up with them in a way that wasn’t common 30 years ago.

You say more transactional, what do you mean by that and what do you think has caused that change?

Well, I think employers, just the nature of employment changed significantly. I remember my first week as a trainee full-time employee at Hoechst, the rep who had initially hired me as intern told me, “Our company doesn’t pay very well, but you’ve got a job for life.” Now I was 22, and that struck me as an incredibly strange thing to say. But what I learned over the years that I worked at that New Jersey site and met those people, there were three generations of family members working in those Hoechst facilities in New Jerseys. You’d have daughters, mothers, granddaughters, father-sons. It was unbelievable. These were family businesses the way this thing… And Hoechst was not unique in that. So that’s just what my family did. My family worked at Hoechst is what they would tell you. And the job market changed, the economic conditions changed, the value proposition between the employer and employee changed, pensions went away, retirement plans became different, training programs that used to be very prevalent, all went away.

So just the whole nature of the value proposition of the employer to the employee changed and then the employees changed. So they said, “Okay, fine. I’ll have a different attitude as well.” And we see it playing out right now. It’s very, very difficult for a lot of the manufacturers for the veterinary practices that you hear them talking about, these people that’ll take a job and never show up, they’ll ghost out and just disappear or they’ll just quit working. They’ll stop showing up one day to the next. The whole world is much more transactional, I would say, from the employee-employer perspective than it was when I started nearly 40 years ago. Now there’s some pros and cons to that, but the idea of building a culture, having a culture, retaining employees, retaining institutional knowledge, that whole management process I think is way harder today than it used to be as a result of that.

Yeah, you’re right about that. I’ve seen that in my day-to-day work as well. It is very different now. You mentioned a few things, you mentioned about the employee-employer relationship changing. How have you seen the animal health industry specifically change over the years that you’ve been involved?

Well, there’s a slide I use in our intro to animal health training program that we do with the intelligence team, whereas 50 some companies that we’re all operating over the course of my career that are now part of the Big Four. So just the depth and breadth of competitors in a competitive landscape is so wildly different today than it was, is a huge change. It has a massive impact. And so people didn’t move around a lot between companies, but there would’ve been a lot of choices. There would’ve been a lot of places that you could go. Now you’ve got four really big pharma experiences that are available to you as an employee. Then you’ve got a few middle-tier companies with your Vedicinals and your Virbacs and your DECRAs and PRAMs, and there’s a mid-Tuisivas, there’s a middle tier there, Nutramax. It’d be another middle-tier company if you want to be in animal health-ish space.

And then they get a lot smaller really fast, and so that was not the case. And so the kind of experience you can have is quite different today in terms of the choices that are available to you. Of course, there’s a ton of startups, lots of ideas. There’s money available to sports startups. So there’s more of that than ever in some respects. But this, go get a job with a big company, have a big career, do this thing in big pharma, that’s very different. And of course the pharma companies, they’re all struggling to adapt to what the new competitive environment is. You’ve got the public traded exposure that we didn’t have before. Animal health companies typically were not material to anybody’s reporting if they were publicly traded. That’s not true today for several of our big players in the top 10. They have public exposure from an investor standpoint. And it just changes everything about the nature of the business and how the employee engagement and so forth might be as a result of that.

What does your crystal ball say about the future of the animal health industry?

Well, it’s going to be different depending on where you play, I would say. So the demand for the products is incredibly robust because we need to eat and we can’t have animal-based protein products without the vaccines and pharmaceutical products that these companies provide. So someone will be providing those goods, there’s no question about that. For the pet side, which is where the energy is at the moment in our industry, enormous and increasing demand over time for making discretionary spending available into health related expenses for pets. And so we don’t see that changing either. But who will be supplying those goods? How those goods will be sourced? How those goods will be delivered into market? What the future for veterinary medicine looks like? And how that will be delivered into the marketplace? All of these things are, I would say, aggressively being tested and challenged at the moment in terms of the business model.

So the competitors themselves, the business models themselves, the way all of this happens, it’s all in flux at the moment, and everybody’s trying to navigate through that as best as they can. So I don’t know what that looks like beyond saying, in the one regard, we have had fewer companies, not more over time. And so we’ve gotten to a point where soon you kind of run out of room to make fewer, but that’s the energy is toward fewer, not more. And then choices, the energy is toward more, not less in terms of how product can be sourced.

So with the Amazons of the world and the Chewys and so many other big concerns, that one, again, Mars continues to make huge investments in this space. You can imagine there will be all manner of attempts to disintermediate existing players, create new channels, create new ways that new entities can engage with these pet owners. And be a part of these tens of billions of dollars that are being spent in that marketplace today. So I would predict robust demand for the goods and continued flux and big changes in the competitive dynamics and intensification, competitive dynamics for who makes those products and how they get delivered into the market at the end of the day.

So interesting. And you go back to your slide that you talked about with 50 companies and now down to 4, you mentioned all the consolidation. Do you think it’s harder or easier for some of these startup companies to get started up and going today?

Well, it depends on what you’re trying to do. So if you want to be a full line animal health company, forget it. I mean, that’s not going to happen. But if you want to have a fantastic idea, get a product into development and license it to big pharma X, Y, or Z, yeah, because they need that help. There’s been a rationalization in research expenditures and research overhead and so forth that has to happen as these companies get bigger. So you will see those opportunities. So somebody with a great idea and a good technology, I mean, there’ll be a good opportunity to do something with that. On the tech side, it’s really crowded. So you had lots of people that have attempted to develop some sort of non-drug technology play into the animal health and veterinary space. You’ve got lots of wearables, you’ve got lots of on animal monitoring, solutions in the livestock side.

You got all kind of tools and applications that are being developed for a variety of different business purposes, ways to engage with customers, to create links between the customers and the manufacturers so that they can have a closer relationship. That’s hard, because there’s so much of it that’s ongoing. You’ve got lots of big concerns that are in that space. It’s just really, really crowded. So the ability to have a really good idea that’s scalable, somebody writes you a big check for at some point. I think that’s challenging at the moment, but a lot of people are trying and they continue to do it. I would say the overwhelming majority of those have resulted in failure to this point. But there have been some successes. A few people have been able to sell their business to bigger concerns and those things have gone on to be successful. So there are still some opportunities there as well.

Wow. Well, I’d love for you to share with the listeners about the kinds of projects that you’re up to today.

Well, my day job keeps me pretty busy. So there’s 32 of us here in the Animalytix organization. Our team’s kind of roughly split between the US and Canada. And we will process over 80 million sales transactions. This year we’ll produce close to 30,000 reports for our clients, which they use for a variety of different Salesforce effectiveness, supply chain management and brand management initiatives. These are manufacturers and distributors both, and it keeps us really busy. So that’s where the majority of my focus is. I’m also a partner with Chris Kelly and Steve Curtin in the intelligence business platform, which is the publisher of the Fountain Reports. So we’re excited about that.

Chris has done a fantastic job managing that business and growing that subscriber base. We’re the largest weekly periodical for the animal health industry now, so we’re excited to be part of that. Terry Shean and I do a big training program in that group for people new to the animal health industry. And we’ll do four or five of those sessions a year, plus a few customs programs for people, thoroughly enjoy that because you get to spend a day with people new to the industry, giving them some perspective and history and context around who the players are and what the channels are and who the customers are and how this all works. And so though I enjoy doing that as well, but that’s where the bulk of my time is these days.

Well, what does a typical day look like for you?

Oh, well, we were COVID compliant long before that was a thing. So that was a great thing about analytics from the beginning. We had an office, we had a small office in Maryland and then we had a sales office in Kansas City and we’ve got a small production office in Sioux Falls. And then we’ve got our Canadian team offices out of Waterloo, Ontario. So about half our people are working from an office and the other half all work remote, including our CFO, our head of technology, our head of commercial operations.

So we were in a position to hire the right people regardless of where they were, which was a huge advantage for us pre-COVID. Today, it’s a little less so because that’s more the way lots of companies are operating today as a result of this COVID mess. But yeah, so I have several clients that I work with personally, but we’ve got our own developers, our own engineers, our commercial team, we’ve got a publishing division, we’ve published the compendium of veterinary medicine, so we have a group of about six people that are involved in that piece of the business.

So whether it’s sales, marketing, legal, finance, IT or new product development, one or the other. I spend lots of days on Zoom or Teams calls with my folks and fortunately with clients. That was a great thing about COVID for us, was that a lot of our clients being unable to travel, we had lots of FaceTime with them to go through their reports and talk about their market insight needs and so forth. So we still spend a lot of time with clients through remote meetings as well. Very few face-to-face now. I mean some of other clients still are not at the office or they’re at the office infrequently. So prior to COVID, I traveled every week, I’d be out on average of three nights a week, very intense. And since then we’ve travel very, very little, but we have very intense ongoing dialogue between our team and our clients on an ongoing basis.

Yeah, it’s so interesting how companies have adapted here over the last few years and I think in many ways have become more efficient in that process. Our listeners are interested in knowing some of the daily habits of successful people. Are there any tips that you could give our listeners? I’m curious, what are a few of the daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success throughout your career?

Yeah, I think the simplest thing is segregating out the urgent from the important and making sure you get the important stuff done. And particularly when you work in a remote environment, having people that are driven self-starters, serious professionals, conscientious professionals. I mean that’s a must. But once you have that, this ongoing communication with each of the members of the teams on the things that are really important is, I would say, the most important thing to do. And then for me personally, probably when I was 42, so this was shortly after I was named president of Intervet, I had a kind of personal event, kind of a personal epiphany where I was able to, in large part, let go of having to have so much control of things, be right about things. When you’re young, you know everything and you want to do everything and you want to run everything.

If you were a type A personality, which I was, and something happened for me, I would say not to me, but for me when I was 42. And it changed my life in an incredibly positive way. And so being able to let go of all of that stuff and just surround yourself with brilliant people, people that are smarter than you and able to teach you, man, one, it makes it work so much easier. Two, it makes it a lot more fun. So being intentional about the kind of people you have around you and the kind of work environment you foster, you create really, really, really important part of what I have found has allowed me to be successful with what I did at Intervet, at Hoechst and in these later years with Animalytix.

Surrounding yourself with positive people, that’s such good advice. And you mentioned not always having to be right and good tips there. Chris, is there a mentor that’s made a big impact on your career? And if so, who is that person?

Yeah, I was asked a question once about mentoring and books I’d read and that kind of stuff. And it made me stop and think about what shaped a lot of my personal and professional values and perspectives. And of course, personal stuff, lots of that was family derived. And so I won’t dwell on that. But professionally, I think there were three situations… Four situations that affected me in a way that had a huge impact on my life and my career, professional life. And they were interactions. They weren’t books, they weren’t classes I went to. It wasn’t that, it was interactions with other people. The first one was a parking lot exchange in San Diego during very intensive negotiations with a company that was known at that time as Central Vet with the man who would go on to be CEO of Siemens Ag, which is the huge German competitor to General Electric.

And we were having a very intense discussion about intellectual property and the nature of a contract around a bunch of recombinant vaccines that we were paying to have developed there. And my boss, who I was with at the time, this gentleman was very upset with me at something I said, and so he very calmly asked if we could take a short break, and he asked me to go with him out in the parking lot. And then he explained to me the nature of intellectual property and the nature of a win-win agreement and the criticality of knowing and understanding and getting both of those things sorted. And I never forgot that. And of course, now Animalytix is primarily an intellectual property organization. That’s how our whole business is structured here. But it stuck with me forever, that concept of how to value an asset, understand what it intrinsically is valuable, and then secondly, the criticality of a win-win agreement.

That one way or the other, a win-lose agreement is a lose-lose agreement. And how aggressive you have to be when negotiating with a partner to be sure it’s win-win at the end of the day or otherwise, you’re going to have to deal for fallout. If it’s something you want to persist, you have to make sure, even if they don’t recognize it, you have to make sure it’s a win-win. And I never forgot that. Second one was in the Northwest part of Quebec on a Caribou Hunt, four hours under a rock they call the orange peel with a CEO of the huge food company. While he and I waited in this blowing rain for a herd of Caribou to walk by, that never came. But during those four hours, he gave me the most incredible meaning MBA class where he walked me through a decade of unbelievable success that he and his team had accomplished at his company.

And the fact that he had recognized that the next decade could not be delivered successfully with the same team doing the same things. And how he was very intentionally and systematically dissembling that team and that whole business model to prepare himself for the next decade. And it was shocking to hear what he was thinking and what he was doing and why he was doing it. And I never forgot. It came to be very important for me with some things I encountered later. But his realization of that fact in the middle of all that success, he was going to tear this whole thing down, rebuild it, and put a brand new race car on the track. And that was a fantastic afternoon with him there. Now the third instance was senior leader in our manufacturing team in Intervet, when we found out that the Intervet business was going to be sold to Shearing, this was a huge shock.

We had been preparing for 18 months to be IPOd. We had all the legal entities were separated, everything was ready in place for us to be a standalone entity. We were to be the largest life science IPO in the history of the industry at that point. Working on biosciences was the combined human pharmaceutical and veterinary business of Axxiom Mobile. And on the Sunday, before we were to be, the IPO was to be launched on Monday on the London Stock Exchange, Shearing plow bought the business for $14 billion.

And so we found out driving into work on Monday morning that the IPO didn’t happen, that in fact we had been sold to Shearing. And this was devastating. This was devastating in more ways than you can imagine. And so it took two or three weeks to kind of get everybody’s head around what was happening and that this was real, and what this meant. And I remember sitting in my office one day and a gentleman that I worked with, he was a former general manager of the Sterling vaccine business and Delaware, and just a fantastic guy. And he walked into my office and he said, “Hey, can you come with me for a minute?” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Come here.” So he had me walk outside my office and he shut my door. And he said, “From now on, we need you out here. We don’t need you in there.”

And that’s where I stayed for the next 10 months outside my office. I was with the people I was traveling, I was everywhere. We had a huge initiative with the Cornell University around change leadership that we deployed in the midst of all this to prepare our team for this integration because it was just emotionally so devastating for everybody. But what a fantastic gift that was from Fred that day when he walked in, walked me out of my office, told me where I needed to be, and he was right. And I loved it. And it was a fantastic experience going through all of it. It meant a lot to the organization. It calmed a lot of people down. And we had the best year we’d ever had as Intervet in the middle of all of that. So that was a great moment.

Well, it sounds like you had… Go ahead.

Well, I was saying the most important is a 37-year conversation I’ve been having with a guy named Terry Shean. So Terry and I’ve been together, we work together that long. He was my boss for a long time, and then we were colleagues for a long time. And he’s worked with me now at Intervet and Animalytix for a long time. And he is an incredible blessing for me personally, professionally and personally. But that’s a very long-term coaching and mentoring relationship I’ve had with Terry that I’m incredibly thankful for.

Well, it sounds like you had multiple excellent mentors along the way. And I’m curious, what advice would you give to the younger version of yourself?

Well, do as many different things as you can. If you want a career in animal health, to be exposed to sales, marketing, general management, manufacturing, R&D, finance, to get exposure into all of these different disciplines was a huge benefit for me. I didn’t even understand it at the time. I was enjoying it, but I didn’t understand how important that was going to be going forward. So that was fantastic. Be intentional about being engaged in the industry, not to the detriment of your employer. So some people spend so much time outside the company, they don’t get their job done. But being a part of the industry, I didn’t do that for a long time, but at a certain point I got on the Animal Health Institute board. And I was very fortunate, Tom Corcoran was chairman of the board at that time, and Carol Ren and Jeff Simmons and Rob DeMarzo and Joe Huff, I mean a fantastic group that was on that executive committee that I got to work with.

And that was great. That was a fantastic experience. I’m appreciative of that to this day. So being engaged in the industry in a meaningful way I think is incredibly important as well. And then just trying to think about what kind of person you are and what kind of brand that you’re developing for yourself, and what does it feel like to work with me? Is this a good experience for people or a bad experience for people? And just appreciate how that affects who wants to associate with you.

And have been incredibly fortunate to have just an unbelievably talented, wonderful group of people to work with here in Animalytix. And prior to that at Intervet, I mean, unbelievably blessed. And if you’re the wrong kind of personality, you can’t have that, you can’t have those people. Particularly now because today’s a seller’s market for talent. Talented people have a lot of choices of where to go. And you have to earn that right to have those people work with you. You cannot take that for granted. And knowing and understanding that particularly now, I think is really important. So if I could have earned that lesson sooner, if I could have known that sooner, I certainly would’ve tried to coach the younger me. I don’t know if the younger me would’ve listened, but I would’ve tried to get that across to them.

Yes, the experience that you provide for other people is so important. Just because your ABC company doesn’t mean that companies can rest on their laurels. They have to continually provide an excellent experience for people to keep their employees and also to want people to come work there.

I think that’s more true today than it’s ever been. And you see it in the interviews with people. I hear it when I talk with people like you and others and talk about the experience they have with candidates and what they want and how they think about a job and what a job is and what it isn’t. And they’ve got so many interests outside of their work. My generation work was a huge kind of center part of a lot of your life, and that’s not true today for so many people. And so earning that, keeping that attention, keeping that, they talk about loyalty. I don’t know if loyalty is the right term now, but that interest in and willingness to and commitment to that employer, I think it’s more challenging than ever now.

It goes back to you, one of your mentors that said it has to be a win-win. The employee-employer relationship has to be a win-win. And then when it stops becoming a win for one of the parties, that’s when it’s over.

Yeah, that’s right.

Well, Chris, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone today?

Oh wow. That’s a big question. Life is a gift. And so are most of the people in your life. Not all, but most of them are. And most of the things that you get to experience in your life. And live a big life. If you can do as many things, meet as many people, experience as many things as you can, whether it’s in one job or several, be intentional about that and appreciate how blessed and fortunate you are if you’re in the animal health industry, that there’s lots of opportunities, there’s lots of great people here, lots of stories. There’s lots to be learned from things that we’ve already experienced and gone through. And people are deeper, their experience is richer, their lives more complex than you realize. And if you take the time to get to know people, you will be rewarded with what you find in most cases when you engage with them at a deeper level.

So true. Take the time to get to know the people that you’re with. Chris, some of our guests mentioned a key book that they’ve read that helped them in their lives or in their career. Do you have a key book in your life that has impacted you the most?

No. That’s what I was talking about before when I had been asked that question before. The things that have been most impactful for me have been these experiences, not something I’ve read. Not a class I went to, not a seminar I attended. It’s much more life experience. I’ll give you another one. In that 2002 to 2004 period, that was so horrible for us when we couldn’t make anything, it was so bad. We had two buildings. We had a north and a south building, three-story building there in Millsboro, Delaware for the Intervet headquarters. And this would’ve been probably the latter part of 2003 or beginning of 2004. It’s just miserable situation we were in. And I was crossing the center portion, connected those two buildings where our receptionist was located. So there was a big foyer there. She had her desk there. And as I was walking past, she reached out and she put her hand on my arm and she stopped me and she said, “I have to tell you something.”

I said, “Okay.” She said, “We need you to hum.” And I said, “What?” She said, “You have stopped humming. You always hum when you’re walking. Always. And for the last three weeks, you don’t hum. And everyone has noticed and we really need you to hum.” And she was dead serious. So I hummed. I got my head around that and I had no idea, one that I did it, two that people noticed that I did it and three, that it had any effect on people. But when Jane grabbed me and she told me that, I thought, “wow, these little tiny things that are going on in your life, and you may not even realize it, having these effects on other people, good or bad.” And so my life has been filled with those kind of interactions and they’re all such a blessing to be aware, to know, and to have that kind of awareness, to learn those things. So that to me, way more powerful than anything I ever took from a book or a course.

Yeah, it is a little things like you mentioned, and it’s so interesting because you didn’t realize you were humming. You probably didn’t realize that you had stopped humming until she mentioned it.

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what happened.

Well, Chris, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic?

Well, I would say collectively to them, I would thank them. Any of them I’ve ever had a chance to work with. And for all of them, for the jobs that they do. Because as I said before, I think this is an absolutely wonderful industry. I could not have asked for a more enjoyable work experience or more enjoyable group of people to have that experience with, than the colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, the clients that I’ve worked with over the years, the competitors that I competed against over the years in incredibly pleasant and fulfilling life experience.

And so I would start by thanking everybody that had anything to do with that was just a first and foremost. And then secondly, I would say this industry offers so many opportunities. So if you stay, you should constantly test yourself to see what else you can do. You don’t necessarily want to do something crazy, but you can always do more than you think you can. And there’s almost always opportunities to find ways to try to do more, in the company you’re with today or in a future employment situation you might have tomorrow. So test yourself, test your boundaries and be aware and be appreciative of what a great environment it is that we work in, for those of us that are in animal health.

Well, it really is the people who make the animal health industry special. And Chris, you’re one of those people I’ve certainly had. I’ve really enjoyed working with you over the years, and thank you for being here as one of our guests today. We’re so grateful that you took the time to be here on The People of Animal Health Podcast today.

Well, thank you very much. It was my pleasure. And I’ll take the opportunity to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas holiday and New Year holiday and the year was more difficult this year for everybody. So people that are listening to this are probably not thrilled with how the business year finished out. So we’ll wish everybody a very robust and profitable and successful 2023.

Yes. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas everyone. And here is to a successful and happy 2023. Thanks again, Chris.

Bye-bye. Thanks, Stacy.