This year Roger Stephens, founder and chairman of international life science resourcers RSA, celebrates 40 years in the pharma industry. Here he describes starting out in his front room and sowing the seeds of a growing global business.
After graduating in Law and working as a company secretary in the automotive and electronics businesses, I joined Riker Laboratories in Welwyn Garden City in 1968 - the year of the Medicines Act - as Research Administration Manager. It was a classic admin role in an extraordinary little pharma research group of about 100 people. Then after about 18 months Riker was acquired by 3M who decided to close all the small research outfits around the world. One my last tasks was to help find work for my colleagues - and myself. A lot of them joined the nearby Roche Products and one day the Head of Personnel there asked me what I was going to do. He said he had a vacancy coming up because they were going to be doubling the size of their research division over the next two years, and would I like to help with this?
You bet! It was a great opportunity. Roche was a very innovative company that thought for the long-term. The task was to recruit staff, lodging many of them in University laboratories before we had our own building to house them. It was a challenging recruitment role which led on to a series of good, old-style personnel jobs which suited me very well.
Fast forward 10 years or so and a third Managing Director appointed one of my peers as Acting Head of Personnel - a clear signal to me at 38 that it was time to move on. For a short unhappy time I worked back in Central London in the TV business and that experience led me finally to decide it was time to start something of my own.
Roche had been a founding member of a 20-strong pharmaceutical personnel managers' liaison group (imaginatively titled the PPMLG) and for many years I was the company's representative. As it turned out, it was through my fellow-members that I found my role for the next quarter century. I began by helping them with a wide range of consulting assignments - for example drafting new employment contracts, analysing performance appraisals, doing training needs analysis and so on.
It wasn't long before four successive clients had told me they thought the-then leading recruitment company had an unhealthy grip on the market for medics. They'd welcome it if someone like me could offer a competitive service. My first reaction was that recruitment was boring, but my wife brought me up short by suggesting (not for the first time) that it might be a good idea "just for once" to listen - and anyway, I didn't have to do the work like the others, did I?. So I went back round my Liaison Group contacts and asked if they would open the door to their medical directors. Every one said "yes", but that from door-opening onwards, I'd be on my own.
That's how my business was born, initially in a spare room at home but quickly via an associate office in London to my own small place in St Albans. Within a month Roger Stephens & Associates (later RSA Search and Selection and now The RSA Group Ltd) was full time. It took off like a rocket in spite of the imposition by government of the wretched Limited List of NHS prescribable drugs, the biggest recession in years and the start of the Falklands War.
As it turned out, my first independent project was to find a Marketing Manager and not a medic - swiftly followed by a succession of assignments to find people in almost every specialism you could find in a pharma company.
In not much more than a year, it became clear that if I was to serve all the needs of my fast-growing client list, I'd need more consultants - and before that, I'd need more space. Hence the move to Old Hatfield in Hertfordshire, where the business has been headquartered ever since.
One of the least-well served areas in pharma recruitment was pre-clinical research and development. Though I was getting plenty of work recruiting medics, technicians, executives and managers in areas like accounting, drug development, IT, logistics, manufacturing and marketing, I wasn't making much headway in R&D. Science managers knew that I couldn't evaluate candidates in the technical way they wanted. Then my former colleague Dr Mike Hall, Roche's head of biology - a brilliant and distinguished scientist - rang me up for career advice. When I suggested he should come and work with me, I think he nearly fell off his chair. He said he was intent on becoming a medical writer and developing his interests as a scientific consultant. When I told him that it could only be helpful if he did that too, he joined my budding team of freelancers - taking us into biotech as well as classic pharma research.
Around the same time Andy Forrow joined and became our expert on marketing and sales. Next up on the horizon were Ann Judge and John Hawkings who soon went a few miles up the road to start their own competing operation. Then Catriona Shuba who had started out as PE teacher and switched careers in her 30s to become a dentist turned up on my doorstep and said she wanted to be a headhunter. Dentists take the second MB degree, and so "Keena" knew the language of medicine. She's also one of the most empathetic people you could ever hope to meet, and after a very short period as my shadow she could understand what was being said in the pharma business and carry great conviction with candidates and clients alike. She quickly took over most of my Regulatory & Clinical Research and much of my Medical recruitment work.
So at this stage, we had four consultants, two secretaries and a daisy-wheel printer, all in one room. We had also launched what I think was then an unique Quality Improvement system based on questionnaires which candidates and clients returned for evaluation by an independent outside consultant who then reported his findings to RSA. The questionnaires asked recipients to evaluate every key aspect of RSA's service against the standard set by the very best competitor search and selection companies they knew. It still runs to-day and you can see our performance data - improved or not - on the RSA website - www.theRSAgroup.com. I'm sure it is one of the cornerstones of our success, and I'm proud that the most consistent word-pairing people say they use to describe us to their friends is "Friendly and Professional."
Through the remainder of the 1980s and 90s we continued to grow the business, taking on extra office space to accommodate more staff - secretaries, researchers and salaried consultants - until in 1996 my son Nick came on board after 9 years' working in non-ferrous metal trading, medical sales, and finally the NHS. He spent a year as a Researcher - still the best learning role in our company - and then graduated to Consultant status. He went to Cranfield Business School to take their brilliant Business Growth Programme. It was very soon clear that he had what it would take to move RSA forward into its next phase of development, and in 1999 I asked him to take over the running of the company. Meanwhile, we had appointed three independent Non-Executive Directors and developed our first-ever formal strategic plan. Subsequently we've also:
- promoted an excellent Chief Operating Officer to our Board,
- moved to custom-built offices in Lord Salisbury's prestigious Hatfield Park,
- launched one of the UK's largest Interim Management businesses and a management consulting operation, and
- internationalised our operations, opening offices in Germany, Singapore, Switzerland and the USA as well as Central London.
I'm no longer active in RSA's day-by-day operations, but I'm still Chairman of the RSA Board, contributing a little to the induction training of new staff and representing RSA at appropriate Industry conferences, dinners etc.. During the last year, apart from new office openings and the appointment and development of some brilliant staff, the three events which have given me the greatest satisfaction have been the royal visit of HRH The Duke of Kent to our Hatfield office (during which he performed his first-ever videoconferenced official transatlantic opening ceremony - of RSA Americas' office in New Jersey), the endowment of the Roger Stephens Prize for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Medicine at the Postgraduate Medical School in the University of Surrey and the achievement of the DTI Passport to Export Award for Hertfordshire presented to Nick by Lord (Digby) Jones at a recent ceremony to recognise our achievements in Singapore.
I look forward to the next 40 years: whatever next?