Week 5 – Putting Things in Perspective

Hope you all are doing well.  I wanted to start this week by acknowledging the great teamwork going on at the company, most of which is never seen by anyone outside of the company.  From doing the little things like restocking the lab, cleaning the space, chasing customers/leads and filling out paperwork to more in-depth work like making our Bio-Spun^® products, building new equipment, electrospinning materials or making sure we are compliant with our quality system, there is always something going on that truly inspires us from each one of our team members that drives us forward. 

We have recently had two specific areas that we would like to share.  The first is our recent release of an animation, done by the great husband-wife team of Frank and Emilia Metzel at Life Science Animation (click to bring you to their site), describing the benefits of making a more human-relevant benchtop model for skin (https://www.biosurfaces.us/summary).  For my non-scientist readers, please take 2 minutes to watch the video.  It really breaks down why we are involved in IVRT.  Credit goes to Frank and Emilia, whom we’ve used for several animations, to be able to make something technical easier to understand.  The second is the release of our first peer-reviewed publication for making a full-thickness skin model (https://www.biosurfaces.us/publications).  This work, led by Dr. Patrick Hayden, was a complete team effort and was years in the making.  The response so far has been great.  We look forward to working with various investigators that would like to use the process we developed with our Bio-Spun^® scaffolds as we look to make a more human-relevant model that does not use any animal products.

It seems that most weeks I am opining (maybe complaining is a better word) about the challenges of having this business.  That likely will never change since a lot of what I do daily is not something I love.  It is more of a means to an end.  We all face that to some degree in our lives, whether it is with your personal life or professional life.  I was thinking about this the other day as I was mowing my lawn.  It is not something I love to do (although I do enjoy the exercise), but when I look at the final product, you cannot help but feel that sense of accomplishment.  For some, it could be disciplining your child with a time-out.  Stinks that you must do it but when the child shows good character, it is worth it in the end.  Work tends to amplify this since you spend most of your time there.  Sometimes, you get caught up in the monotony of the grind  and sometimes cannot see past the issues.     

I have been pretty buried over the past several months conducting the necessary business duties that keep the company operating.  I know that it is important that business functions remain a priority, especially as we look to try to grow the business.  I do enjoy different challenges that running a business brings, from working with potential new partners/customers and forming new approaches to working on long range business planning and pitching the company.  Many of these “skills” I’ve had to learn on the job so that brings with it its own set of challenges.  I have been fortunate to have a great group of mentors over the past 23 years to help guide me and bounce potential decisions off of.  I have always been open to listening and learning, knowing I do not know what I do not know.      

This past week, I was finally able to get back to doing something that I enjoy, which is getting into the lab.  There really isn’t any task that I do not enjoy doing there, even things that seem monotonous.  In this case, my focus was on electrospinning some Bio-Spun^® materials for orders that have been coming in for our IVRT products.  While we have a great team that is fully capable of doing this, they have had a few things going on so I figured I would help in this area.  Plus, I like to make sure I continue to keep my skills as sharp as I can.  When you haven’t done something in a while, you can get rusty.  I also did not want to be the one that messed things up for them if they needed me in a pinch so it was better to get some reps in the lab.  One thing I also enjoy, especially on the research side, is trying to troubleshoot when the result is not what you anticipated.  It is like trying to solve a mystery.  Sometimes, it is more straight-forward and other times it can be very complex and possibly not solvable.  Even when it is an extreme case, I still find joy in trying to solve the unknown.            

Tina always says that you do not appreciate the monotonous things in life until they aren’t monotonous anymore.  I take for granted the things that we’ve been fortunate to do for over 23 years.  While I complain about the grind and things that I don’t get to do, I have been so fortunate to have done something in my life that I have truly loved doing.  Setting up this business and the stress of keeping it going were just a means to an end.  Someday, I hope to look back on it when it is over and reflect on what a blessed life we’ve had, regardless of the outcome.

Matt