A conversation with Quidel President and CEO Doug Bryant.
The pressures were immediate, and daunting. Early in the pandemic, Quidel, a leading manufacturer of diagnostic solutions, was being asked to go from manufacturing 50 to 60 million tests per year, to producing 16 million a week.
“That does not happen overnight,” said Quidel President and CEO Doug Bryant. Fortunately, the company was up to the task, and in the span of two plus years has transformed its capabilities in servicing the U.S. healthcare industry during a crisis.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Repertoire Publisher Scott Adams, Bryant discussed Quidel’s mobilization amid the pandemic, how its relationships with distribution partners have helped in the past couple of years, and how the organization’s unique culture has contributed to its transformation in a severely disrupted marketplace.
Repertoire: How have your distribution partners contributed to be as quick and efficient as they can at getting COVID testing and solutions in the hands of labs, hospitals, and physician offices?
Doug Bryant: We have had tremendous relationships with all the major distributors and each one of them could tell you about their travails along the way in supporting us. We’ve had a couple of transformational events in recent years following the acquisition of the Alere assets and in our presence in the cardiovascular space.
In March 2020, we were thrown off a bit when we were asked to go to the White House to have a conversation around COVID testing. From that point onward, our company mobilized and did several things that were surprising and exceptional. At the same time, our distribution partners equally were stepping up and handling a lot of issues simultaneously. The consumer market didn’t start until early 2021 when a significant demand was beginning to build. The folks at McKesson were especially helpful with that market in terms of giving us access to thousands of independent pharmacies and also helping with the relationship with Amazon and others.
But truthfully, we could not have done any of this without all our distribution partners. We are super thankful for those relationships.
Repertoire: What measures has Quidel taken to meet some of this increased demand for COVID-19 testing?
Bryant: When you reflect on it, it’s a bit daunting. And just the pressures that we were under immediately to go from a company that had been manufacturing about 50 to 60 million tests per year, to a company that last week manufactured 16 million tests during a week. That does not happen overnight. I mentioned the meeting at the White House on March 4, 2020. By March 17, we had a PCR product in market. By May, we had the Sofia SARS product, the first global rapid antigen test. Later in the year, we had other tests, but then we also introduced a combination assay.
It was a lot of work on the R&D side. Because of what has happened to our company, we have gone from developing about 20 products at one time – 20 products in our portfolio – to managing about 50 product programs across our organization.
The R&D folks stepped up the clinical regulatory folks running the studies to get the Emergency Use Authorizations that we ended up with. I believe the number is seven products that are Emergency Use Authorized and available to be shipped here in the United States. So, there’s that side.
We improved our distribution capacity. You can make a lot of tests, but if you can’t get them shipped, it doesn’t really matter. We had to stand up another 110-120,000 square feet of distribution capabilities just to get trucks in and out to move the product.
In addition, in a nine-month period, we stood up from the studs of a building to a fully-fledged manufacturing facility in Carlsbad, California, which is where we now manufacture the Quickvue products. At the same time, we were dramatically leveraging our footprint in our facility where we manufacture Sofia and we increased manufacturing lines there.
Along the way, you can imagine that each program and each product that we manufactured had significant supply chain issues. Those supply chain issues created the delay in getting our partners the product they needed to supply their customers. As a result, I think we did a lot for the country, and a lot for communities across the United States. We could not have done it without our distribution partners.
Repertoire: What were some of those supply chain issues, and what were some of the measures you took to address those challenges?
Bryant: One of the things that we have done because of the major supply chain issues we faced was to build redundancies across the system. For example, for the extraction vials (where you put your swab in to get the cells off the swab and then take that liquid and use it to run the test) we had one manufacturer that we relied on for years. We’re now employing seven, all in the United States.
We needed that redundancy. We needed partners that were flexible in terms of their ability to ramp up and down, and do so comfortably without suffering extreme economic problems. Cashflow is a big thing for smaller companies. Our ability to work with them, to make all that happen, was an important part of it.
Our company has always done well financially. Our cash flow has been extraordinary. We were able to weather all that, but I would say the supply chain issues were a really big challenge. And the other thing that our partners and distribution would tell you is that while we were making a lot of COVID products, we were not making a lot of other products. Sometimes it was the other things that were creating the most heartburn for our distribution partners who were trying to take care of customers who needed things other than just COVID tests.
I would imagine that would be true across all my colleagues in the industry on the manufacturing side, but those are the two big challenges.
Repertoire: Let’s shift gears a little bit. Can you talk about the unique company culture at Quidel?
Bryant: We try to be nimble, quick, and decisive. We do not have multiple layers of decision-making. I tend to like to hire people that have the technical background to do the job that we are asking them to do. Of course, we also like to have people who can take their raw intellect and combine that with their sets of experiences over time to give them what I would call a “gut feel.”
If a person has that technical skill to do whatever it is that we are asking them to do and they also have that “gut feel,” they tend to be able to make good decisions. So, we have a culture that says, “It’s OK to make a mistake, but it’s better to make more decisions and to move quickly.” We do not have to have five out of five decisions that were absolute winners. I am OK if we have eight out of 10. I would rather have two mistakes and 10 decisions rather than five perfect decisions.
That’s a part of our culture that is a bit unique. We insist on having people that have a positive, can-do attitude who are willing to take the risk, make a decision, move forward, live with the outcome, and be accountable.
We also spend a lot of time on our company’s happiness. It sounds a bit altruistic to say that we believe as an executive team that the happiness of our employees is the most important thing to us. But people who are happy tend to be more productive, and people who are more productive have better outcomes, which in turn makes them happy.
So it’s this circular thing that we have in our company where we have a bunch of people that are just genuinely happy and productive. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the unhappy people. Unhappy people do not like to be around happy people. What happens is over time, we don’t really have to manage that. They tend to go leave and go to work for some other company where they have more unhappy people to hang around with.
I ask all the time when I interview people, “Do you have friends at work? Do you have people that you like to hang around with on the weekends who happen to be also in our company or in your former company?” That’s the type of people we have. And now with this recent acquisition of Ortho, I think it’s super important that we take this philosophy, what we call the Quidel Way, and we figure out how to imbue that same philosophy in that organization.
We almost need cultural ambassadors to continue to tell the story. Imagine if we can get all 6,000 of us together to be super happy in our endeavors and to be thinking about what we can do, not just for ourselves, but for others in the company and our communities. If I can pull that off, it would be the achievement of my career.
Repertoire: How have you been able to balance some of the urgency of Quidel’s mission, which has been incredibly important to our country and to the wellness of the population, with the well-being of your team members?
Bryant: We tried to balance it, but at the end of the day, you are asking people to put themselves at risk to come to work. My HR team made a recommendation, saying, “Doug, you need to communicate with these folks very routinely.” We set up weekly video calls where I talked about whatever was going on at the time and where we were in terms of processes and accomplishments.
I spent a lot of time recognizing people who had stepped up and made things happen. And I did that routinely. I also shared a bit of my personal life. It just became more of a family situation where we created this weekly dialogue where we kept everybody up to speed. And then I thanked them, honestly, for stepping up and rising to the challenge of the pandemic. We did videos of folks in our factories and throughout the organization and took people’s comments.
The positive comments that we were getting back from team members was quite impressive and rewarding, honestly. But balance? I don’t know about balance. For about the first 18 months, I don’t think we took a day off.
We came in every morning early and had a meeting, first on the molecular side with those products, which would then go into the other products. We had a daily meeting about what was going on and what we needed to do to get product out the door. We did our best to make sure that people felt like we were doing the right thing and that we were making good choices.
The decisions we made were not always easy: the way we decided to go to market, the way we decided to protect the interests of our current customer base, to protect the relationships that we had with distribution partners. When we had a fall-off in demand as COVID seemed to be abating for a brief period, one of our competitors shut down one or more of their factories. We never did that. We continued to ramp up. We continued to do what we felt was the right thing, and that helped with the balance.
Repertoire: What are some positives you’ve seen in the supply chain in these last two years that might not have come to light had we not been forced to take a pause?
Bryant: That’s an interesting thought. I would say that from the business side of things, we were not really the size of a company that could compete with these larger companies before. And it wasn’t because we weren’t innovative enough or didn’t have the technical talent. It’s because we did not have the scale.
Now that we have gone through this exercise, we certainly have scale, and we can compete with these other larger companies as we enter new markets. We are not going to be held back by our inability to supply product relative to what they are doing. That’s a big deal for us. The increased manufacturing capability sounds simple on the surface, but it is multifaceted.
We hired 400 people up in Carlsbad for the new factory. It is a significant enough number of people that even the mayor of Carlsbad recognized. That is one aspect. The R&D capabilities, the brand strength that we now have enables us to hire the talent that we need in the R&D and engineering side.
These are the things that from a business perspective have really been transformational for us. The other aspect is we have generated a lot of cash. By the middle of this year, we will still be sitting on a billion and a half or so in cash. The ability to access capital markets and to have cash coupled with cash on the balance sheet has enabled us to look at other things that we might do, investments that we might make.
Certainly, the Ortho acquisition, which is signed but not yet closed, that could not have happened had we not gone through the exercise that we just did over the last couple of years.
Repertoire: Is there someone who helped mentor you and invested their time into your career journey?
Bryant: I really don’t have somebody that pops into my mind because I’ve had the opportunity to be around a number of people that I could observe and emulate. I’ve had some folks that were pretty good at what they did, and they were worth observing and patterning myself after.
When I think about it, I never really planned a career. I just did the best I could and everything that I was asked to do. As a result, I would be asked to do other things. That was what motivated me – the opportunities to take on positions of increasing responsibility over time. So for me, it’s never been about a series of job titles. It’s been more about a series of accomplishments.
I would say to those folks who are trying to manage their career, who might be a little bit earlier in the process, be self-reflective. Everything that you do, try to think, “How well did I do it? Could I have done it better? What are the things that I did that were useful? What makes people successful? Is there something that I can learn there?” I would say the most important thing about having a long and prosperous career is to be observant, but also self-reflective.