As we say goodbye to the twelve days of Christmas and welcome a positive, upbeat-sounding JP Morgan conference in Boston, we know that an exciting new year has begun. It’s important when looking at a New Year to remember the challenges and achievements of the year just gone, analysing what went well and what was challenging, taking those learnings forward into a successful 2024.
Life Sciences saw a difficult end to 2023 with many companies failing to reach their annual earnings forecasts, personnel layoffs in the industry and a depressed M&A landscape. The annual JP Morgan conference this month is predicting a more positive 2024 with renewed investment into our industry and a more active intercompany landscape in terms of licensing, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. Pivotal Scientific will, as always, be at the forefront of supporting our clients be they large corporates wanting to learn more about specific life science reagents, private equity organisations looking to broaden their portfolio via acquisition or smaller organisations looking to expand and broaden their marketing reach or even merge with a larger organisation. We are here to support all with our expertise in life science reagent marketing, sales and strategy.
Here we reflect on what Pivotal Scientific achieved in 2023 against a backdrop of our core services
- PSL Alliance – We were honoured to welcome 21 new companies to the PSL Alliance in 2023.
- Pivotal Links – June saw our biggest Pivotal Links networking meeting with 8 industry presentations, 81 life science companies and over 120 delegates. This multi-national networking event for life science research and IVD reagent companies allows so many organisations to make new connections, nurture current relationships and facilitate business growth.
- Strategy & Consultancy – We assisted over 30 individual organisations with projects ranging from platform strategy work ups, long lists for acquisition strategies, business plans, business strategies, marketing strategies and more specific consultancy projects. Many of our customers worked with us on several different projects last year.
- Marketing & Content
- Our content writers produced 46 high-quality articles and blogs for clients last year.
- We ended the year managing 302 Google Ads campaigns, running 6,634 ads across our clients’ accounts. Our ads generated a total of 8.83 million impressions, and 283,000 clicks in 2023.
- Expert customer or supplier interviews to assist organisations in answering business or market questions, supporting strategic growth for the organisation commissioning the questionnaire.
- Business 2 Business – we started working on 10 B2B outreach projects last year, with each outreach campaign tailored to the client’s niche offering and desired target audience. An average of 88 companies were contacted for each project, including follow-up activity and feedback tracking.
- M&A – Despite a challenging M&A landscape in 2023, our dedicated and expanding M&A team was privileged to successfully manage the sale of Virusys Inc. to LGC Clinical Diagnostics and the sale of Percorso Life Sciences.
- Expansion of service offerings – Pivotal Scientific is home to a superb group of in-house talent with skill breadth from business strategy and M&A to digital marketing, content writing and graphic design. We are also privileged to be able to call on a talented network of industry professionals in our external consultants. 2023 saw us begin to develop ‘Bio-Direct’, our platform to allow our external consultants to connect with and serve clients directly with their specialist skill. This service will launch formally early 2024 and we are excited to see it evolve.
- Culture – At Pivotal Scientific, we have a fast-paced, open, collaborative working environment as you would expect from a dynamic consultancy. We encourage a healthy work life balance and flexible environment ensuring face-to-face collaboration and quieter home working time to allow focus. We like to socialise as a company every month during our monthly projects meeting and always enjoy the down time over lunch. A new concept introduced in 2023, these lunches allow personal relationships to be strengthened, vital to ensuring our teams work well for our clients. We’re already looking forward to our first lunch of the New Year next week.
Our Aims for 2024
- PSL Alliance – We look forward to welcoming new alliance members in 2024 and have already welcomed one new member after only one week of the new year. We hope that our new incentive for 2024 to encourage smaller start-up companies to join will help them along the route to build successful B2B relationships and find new routes to market.
- Pivotal Links – Scheduled for 17th – 18th June 2024 in Oxford UK, early bird tickets are selling fast and this year’s event looks like it will be even better attended than last year. With private meeting spaces as an alternative to our always popular meeting tables, the opportunities for networking and building fruitful collaborations are even greater than in previous years.
- M&A – 2024 looks to be a strong year for our M&A team with 2 companies already in process for sale later this year. We tailor our sales process to each organisation, taking the time to get to know our clients and what they really want to achieve from an exit process beyond a financial reward. We take care to ensure the companies we sell are ready for sale and that the process will be as smooth as possible. Approaching carefully selected and agreed targets only maximises the likelihood of finding a buyer or partner that really works for our clients.
- Biodirect – We are excited to launch our new consultants platform later this month. When you need support from an external expert to meet a specific business aim, Biodirect offers a single source of consultants with a diverse range of life science expertise from specialist science to finance and legal. The platform is designed to simplify your search for the perfect consultant.
Collectively our expanding team of consultants offer a wealth of expertise across different fields gained from experience in both the scientific and commercial marketplaces. With an expanding portfolio of successful projects our knowledgebase is continually growing along with our confidence to offer the best advice to achieve the most desirable business outcomes.
