Granite Mountain Recruiting was founded in 2017 as a way to continue contributing my skills and knowledge earned after a 20-year Biotechnology career, a career that allowed me to see the growth of science and technology in leaps and bounds.
THE BEGINNING
In the late 1990’s I worked on the bench cloning and building gene-expression assays for BioSource International, which soon after the micro-array boom started to go crazy. One of the many bottle necks during the early days of glass arrays and Affymetrix chip technology was the enormous amount of data that needed to be organized, stored and most of all analyzed.
In 2000, I joined Silicon Genetics as the West Coast Regional Sales Manager. Silicon Genetics were the inventors of GeneSpring which would later become a standard in gene-expression analysis. In this role I was fortunate to show success early on and asked in September 2001 to make a move to Oxford, UK where I would become the Director of European Operations. During a 1-year period based in Oxford, we opened and developed new business in Europe, traveling and spending time working all large pharma sites and genomic core facilities. Part of this role included hiring and developing a great team of sales representatives and field application specialists.
RETURNED TO THE US
Soon after my return to the US, Agilent Technologies purchased Silicon Genetics and I moved on to a new opportunity with a small start-up called Agencourt Bioscience. Again, a company answering the need for the human genome project by automating the sample preparation and extraction process using nanoliter sized magnetic beads. I was hired in San Francisco to manage all territories west of the Mississippi.
In all, I built and managed a $22 million-dollar territory consisting of senior sales representatives, a team of field application specialists and product managers. In 2005, Agencourt Bioscience was purchased by Beckman Coulter and our sales teams spent the next 2-years struggling through the integration of a small start-up into a large 10,000+ person company where we had to fight for existence. Fight we did, because of strong support by Beckman senior management and in 2008 we were officially integrated into a combined Life Science and Diagnostic division now called Beckman Coulter Genomics.
TRAVELING AROUND THE GLOBE
Leaving Beckman Coulter, I eventually grew into a role at IntegenX that allowed me to develop and grow their international distribution business, visiting and traveling regularly to South America, Australia, Asia, India and the Middle East. I formulated relationships that would define the existence of the RapidHIT ID System for Human Identification, now owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific. Important to the acquisition of IntegenX by Thermo Fisher Scientific was not just the sales of the RapidHIT into these countries, but it was also the cumulation of the data collected during this time from actual crime scenes. These data sets were organized specifically for the passage of the Rapid DNA Act of 2017 into US Congress.
Ready to slow down on the travel, I joined Twist Bioscience in early 2016 as the West Coast Sales Manager based in San Francisco. Twist offered another opportunity to work with a technology that would start to push the barriers of gene synthesis and gene-editing with its own CRISPR technology.
MAKING THE BEST OF MY EXPERIENCES
In late 2016 I was diagnosed with liver disease that eventually lead to a liver transplant in February 2017. With the help of my family, friends and colleagues I am now healthy and pursuing a career again. Many months of hard work and rehabilitation enabled me to start recruiting at smaller firms and companies in the biotechnology field. I was able to benefit from these experiences in such a positive way, gaining the confidence to launch Granite Mountain Recruiting in December of 2017.
