Your Expert Team (without the Expert Overhead)

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GR Consulting brings senior level experience from across specialties, and provides the leadership experience, technical ingenuity, and a strong industry network to help start-up and emerging wound care companies execute the correct strategies at the right time.

Transcript: 

John Garrettson, CWCA:
Hello, I'm John Garrettson, and today I am here to introduce you to Gary Robinson Consulting, otherwise more affectionately known as GRC. GRC is setting a new consulting standard by providing meaningful guidance for manufacturers that are seeking improvement in commercialization, regulatory affairs, reimbursement proficiency, and sales force construction. 

To begin, I'd like to introduce you to none other than the founder of GRC, Gary Robinson himself. Gary is a 30-year executive leader in the wound care industry, having led organizations both domestically and internationally in sales, commercialization, marketing, and product development. Gary's worked for wound care giants like ConvaTec, C. R. Bard, and Covidien. 

So, Gary, while consulting stalwarts like BDO, McKinsey, MCRA, they've established themselves, and they've set the trend in the consulting industry. Can you just share with us, why did you leave the corporate world to start this endeavor?

Gary Robinson:
That's a really good question, John, and thank you. To me, it was about early-stage companies and startups. I really want to provide them with an opportunity to get their products to market. I found that, more than anything else, it's meaningful guidance through experienced, senior executive-level support. 

What I found with the company, some of the companies you mentioned, they had a bait-and-switch attitude. What they would do is they would come in with the senior execs, pitch the deal, close the deal, and then they'd bring in their junior level people to provide support, which oftentimes did not provide the support I needed to really drive the business. And young companies can't afford that, and they surely don't need that kind of support. So what I decided I would do is assemble a team of senior levels, people who know reimbursement, regulatory, commercialization, strategy, and health economics to provide these start-up and only-stage companies premium support at a low price. 

Garrettson:
Okay. Thank you, Gary. It's an excellent comment. And personally, I have, I can say with experience related to that, that I have gone through that myself with some of these agencies, and it appears that you are setting out to right-set the consulting world. And speaking of experience with GRC, we're joined here today by Howard Walthall, CEO of ProgenaCare Global. Howard, you are Gary’s longest-standing client and former colleague. As a well-tenured industry leader yourself, Howard, can you please just share your own personal experience with GRC and what it’s provided you?

Howard Walthall:
Sure, I’d make a couple points. So, when you're running a smaller company, you're trying to do a lot with limited resources, limited staff, and you often find that there's an area where you really need help, but you either don't need a full-time person or cannot afford a full-time person. And so it's great to have a resource like Gary and the GRC team who can come and fill in those gaps for you. There's lots of different areas where that can happen. For ProgenaCare, what we specifically ask Gary to do, among other things, is help us with our outside reimbursement team. So he's almost the daily interaction between that team and our sales force, and that allows me to let him handle that, and I only have to get involved if there's a special situation. So it takes a ton of load off my back, and I don't have to hire a whole full-time person to do that for us.

Also, you need a whole network, a whole village of people to run one of these companies. It’s not just your internal team, but you need KOLs, like Dr. Lantis we're going to hear from. You need regulatory consultants, you need attorneys, all kinds of different expertise, laboratories. So you may not have a network that covers all of those things. And Gary's got a great network. His team has a great network. So, if you need to identify and retain somebody to fill a specific need. That's a great place that Gary can help. Particularly Gary has helped us with KOL relationships. So, it's a real win to have that full network at your disposal, even if maybe you're kind of new to the field.

Finally, it's a complicated field. It moves fast. If you're standing inside the storm, it's a lot. So it's great to have an outside person, outside perspective who knows the industry, knows what's going on, and kind of be a sounding board for you. So I know both I and the chairman of our board really appreciate Gary's help and advice. And we use our conversation with Gary to kind of work through our thinking about what to do next. 

Garrettson:
Wow. Thank you, Howard. That's really, really impressive. And it really sounds like you've truly garnered some valuable deliverables from working with GRC. And thank you for that. 

Interestingly, as you mentioned, we are joined here today by a very highly published and well-known clinical thought leader in our space who needs no introduction, mind you, right? So we're joined here today by Dr. John Lantis, who is the chief of vascular and endovascular surgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. So, Dr. Lantis, I've found it somewhat unusual for a practicing clinician like yourself to be affiliated with a consulting group. Can you please share your personal experiences with GRC and what particular benefit does it afford you working with a company like GRC?  

John C. Lantis II, MD:
Certainly. You know, Gary and I have known each other with a growing relationship over the years. but the specifics to our setup is my situation might be a little unique in that we have a research fellow every year. We also have a research enterprise, and we're very interested in new technologies. I mean there are so many areas that we think we could do better in and one of the interesting portions is Gary presents some of these to us. You know, the GRC consulting has brought us some very interesting therapies, whether it's ProgenaCare and various other things over the last several years, and presents them in such a way that we can coordinate, maybe research, small clinical trials, things that a small company, as Howard alluded to, may not be ready to do a large multicenter trial but needs just a sort of a beta test. And GRC Consulting has allowed us to be the beta test center, which keeps my fellow very interested and very up to date, and also allows me to participate in helping some of these companies achieve deliverables. And a lot of them want to really have an outcome that they can take to a meeting, get into a journal, etc. GRC Consulting has been really wonderful in making those connections, continuing them. 

Actually to Gary's point about bait and switch. A lot of companies change, right? There's a lot of change. Young companies often don't change. I mean, Howard's been the person I've known with the ProgenaCare the whole time, but also Gary doesn't change and that allows us to work over time. And sometimes these small projects can take very long and they take a fair amount of time, but we want to be able to develop a project, which Gary allows us to do, with a company and we're able to go ahead, and most importantly, we're able to actually complete it. 

Garrettson:
Well, thank you, Dr. Lantis. That's really fantastic insight. Thank you, Howard, and thank you, Gary. Appreciate all of you spending time with us today to share your insights about GRC Consulting and the impact that it's had on you. And also how GRC Consulting helps companies with new technologies and early-stage technologies break through in the market. 

So if you would like to find more information about GRC Consulting and set up an exploratory conversation, please look at us on the web at www.grconsultingsolutions.com, or simply call Gary directly at area code 215-353-0362. Again, that's area code 215-353-0362. Thank you very much.