Evaluate Your Successes

Monthly, as a team, we discuss both gross and operating margins in management meetings. Gross income is monitored and acted upon at the departmental level. We analyze operating income at the higher divisional level, where below the line activities and costs are shared.

We strive to become and remain either the #1 or #2 provider in each market we serve. This revenue position not only enables efficiencies of scale, but also adds benefits in market visibility, achieving client and vendor partnerships, and attracting top employees . We also expect to outgrow each segment by a measurable percentagethat is, growth clearly greater than that we have measured for the market and above the margin for error in that measurement. These approaches almost always translate into above average profitability. However, it is also essential to assess profitability directly each quarter by looking at incomes and margins for comparable public companies.

As I have advised, as CEO, you should surround yourself with the best people you can find. Ask them to be bold and creative, to challenge assumptions, to use each others strengths and support each others weaknesses. Listen to them and develop along with them. If you are as lucky as I have been, yours too may develop into a group of unusual vigor that succeeds above and beyond expectations and peer companies as a management team. In addition to the senior management group , include a large number of people in running the company and planning for its future. Even though you can always learn from others, having to live with your own decisions is ultimately the best teacher for improving management.

Capers W. McDonald is President and Chief Executive Officer of BioReliance Corporation, a $100 million revenue company that is among the most profitable in their industry and growing at over 20% annually. Employing nearly 1,000 people in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, BioReliance supports biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies worldwide by testing, helping develop and manufacturing their biotechnology drugs and other products.

During 2003, BioReliance was ranked #1 by Forbes in earnings per share growth among 200 Entrepreneurial Hot Shots, ranked #11 by Fortune Small Business among The FSB 100, Americas Fastest-Growing Small Companies, and received an American Business Awards Stevie for investor communications. Earlier, the firm was named "High Technology Firm of the Year" from among the more than 200 corporate members of what is now the Technology Council of Maryland.

Capers led BioReliance through five years of nearly 25% compound annual growth toward their successful IPO in 1997, raising capital to continue their profitable growth. He led the establishment of the company's manufacturing services in the U.S. and U.K., and completed the acquisition during 1996 of the Companys operation in Germany. His team raised approximately $70 million during 2003 related to the acquisition of Q-One Biotech Ltd., a significant U.K. based competitor.

Capers was named the 2002 Greater Washington Entrepreneur Of The Year in the Life Sciences by Ernst & Young. He is currently Chair of the Technology Council of Maryland, which has approximately 700 member companies, and is a founder and past Chair of the Maryland Bioscience Alliance, a cooperative business association of over 100 companies in the region.

Capers joined BioReliance as President and CEO during 1992 and has been a company director since that time. From 1989 to 1992, he served as President of Spectroscopy Imaging Systems Corporation, a joint venture of Siemens Medical Systems and Varian Associates, in California. Prior to that, he held senior management positions with Hewlett-Packard Corporation, in their Analytical Products Group and in their joint venture with Genentech, Inc., a biotechnology pioneer.

Capers earned an MBA from Harvard Business School (1983), a Masters degree in engineering from MIT (1976), and a Bachelors degree in engineering from Duke University (1974), where he serves as a member of the Board of Visitors to the School of Engineering.

Acknowledgement

I would like gratefully to acknowledge the several great managers who have helped the most in my own learning in the "art of management." That has been principally an experience-based journey, and therefore a tutorial in the true sense. Those outstanding people include WalBern McDonald, my father and Personnel Director for the Georgetown Mill of International Paper Company; Bert Voorhees, General Manager of Becton Dickinson FACS Systems; Chuck Walker, President of HP Genenchem; and Sidney Knafel, Chairman of BioReliance Corporation.