Scripting success | A conversation with serial entrepreneur and pharmaceutical expert Jean Hoffman
Jean Hoffman is a successful entrepreneur who has worked in the global pharma industry for more than 27 years. She is the CEO and founder of Putney Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company in Portland serving companion-animal veterinarians. Hoffman was formerly chairwoman and CEO of Portland-based Newport Strategies, a company she founded and built into the pharmaceutical industry’s leading supplier of database systems for generic drug business development and licensing, product targeting and brand and generic drug sourcing. I sat down with Hoffman to talk about her past and present ventures.
Venture builder: So how did you come to start your first venture, Newport Strategies?
Jean Hoffman: I’d graduated Bowdoin [in 1979] with degrees in East Asian history and government and wanted to do something in China. I ended up working with a Chinese trade association and my first assignment was a pharmaceutical delegation, taking engineers from China’s largest pharmaceutical plants to visit American pharma companies. The luck of leading that delegation was that the engineers invited me to visit their factories in China, which were off-limits to Westerners at that time.
Being allowed in the Chinese pharmaceutical factories turned out to be an incredibly privileged position as the major pharma companies wanted to get into China. I parlayed that into a business development position with one of the association’s clients, a U.S. subsidiary of a large Swiss conglomerate with interests in human and animal health. During the last two years of that role, I was named, at age 29, CEO of a pharmaceutical ingredients company that needed to be turned around.
It was a terrific experience, but by 1989, I decided that I wanted a life and so returned to Maine, thinking I’d go into politics or landscaping — boiled the choice down to people versus plants. Meanwhile, I needed money, so I started in 1990 a consulting business leveraging my background in pharmaceuticals. At that time, Microsoft Windows and the first relational databases had been released and I got the idea that I could resell information if I put what I knew into an electronic format. That led to IBM providing me seed capital [by purchasing worldwide marketing rights to part of that database] to launch what became Newport Strategies.
Over the next 12 years, I grew a team of people — hired from Maine — and Newport became the leading marketer of databases in the global generic pharmaceutical industry. In 2004, I sold the business to Thompson Scientific, which has turned it into one of their most successful business acquisitions ever.
So, you obviously didn’t retire.
Well, I took a week off, flying myself and my kids to a sunny island to decompress, something which was hard for me. Based on my experience selling Newport, I came back to Maine and started a small consulting firm that sought to advise clients who were engaged in mergers and acquisition activities in the generic pharmaceutical space. I did that for a couple of years and then came up with the notion of building a general generic and specialty pharmaceutical business targeting pets.
This became Putney, your second venture?
Yes. I’ve always had a love of animals — one of my first jobs as a young girl was to take care of other people’s pets when they went on vacation. Knowing how much people care for their pets and how expensive pet medications are, I saw an opportunity to parlay my background in human generics to the animal health field. So I worked on a business plan that had sufficiently strong financials to attract investors — targeting $125 million in revenue five years after development. (For more, read “Furry Pharma” in the May 28, 2007 issue of Mainebiz.)
I recruited back a key marketing manager from Newport to be VP of marketing and hired a regulatory affairs VP to manage the [U.S. Federal Drug Administration] approval process. Having put my own money in the startup, I then raised $6 million financing from a mix of individuals, some institutional investors investing personally because they knew me, and an Indian strategic. We launched our first product and are on path to finalizing our second financing round.
How have you found the financing market, particularly in light of the current economic situation?
It’s certainly been more challenging as a result, but we expect to get it completed despite this. As it happens, our high quality, lower cost generics suit the market, as consumers find higher costs of living forcing them to look at cheaper alternatives across the board.
What advice can you offer entrepreneurs?
Being an entrepreneur is about working incredibly hard, building relationships and understanding risk. And it’s about being able to inspire other people to work really hard and encouraging them to take risks. An entrepreneur has to be comfortable with risk and be prepared to manage it.
Michael Gurau, managing general partner of Clear Venture Partners in Portland, can be reached at mg@clearvcs.com.
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