Turn Adversity Into Opportunity & the Importance of Resilience
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Whether you are trying to accelerate your career or get a startup off the ground, it can get overwhelming, especially if the world around you is falling apart.
I was really excited to interview Brennan Marilla, not only is he a long time veteran and commercial leader in the Medtech industry, at one time leading a $1.4Bn P&L in the Vascular space, he has also successfully transitioned from sales to marketing, from cardiovascular to orthopedics and from Fortune 100 companies to startups.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Disrupting the multi-billion dollar orthopedic fixation implant market with Ossio
The first few steps you need to do as a Chief Commercial and Operations Officer at a startup
The importance of resilience in your career
How pushing through adversity turned a potentially catastrophic event into game changing innovation and a market leading customer experience
KEY LESSONS
Telling a compelling story to disrupt a $10Bn Orthopedic fixation implant market
Ossio is a start-up disrupting the metal implant market. While most people may confuse Ossio as a product company, it’s a biomaterial platform technology company, enabling every implant device it makes to be stronger than bone and ultimately “bio-integrating” into the body as bone.
The first thing they had to get right was to create a story about this technology to push against the failed “bioresorbables” category for fixation. Brennan recalled how important that step was to convince investors of the platform and the potential to totally change the status quo of the industry. The core focus of their story was around “biointegrative”, highlighting the difference in technology and the “natural” outcome of the implant where nothing except the patient’s bone was left behind. “In the early days, if anybody in the company used the term bioresorbable, we make 'em throw out, you know, a dollar and a tip jar” Brennan exclaimed, as it was important to repeated tell their new brand story.
Launching into COVID19 and keeping momentum
While Brennan remarked that there has been so much said about how companies have gotten through COVID, Ossio has their own story of how they persevered and kept momentum. Despite getting approval one week before the world shut down, they were able to quickly put a plan together with their board of directors and moved forward without losing a lot of people. “We made some critical moves and looked at our cash burn. We provided a lot of promotional air cover, social media and did webinars with surgeons on how they are surviving in COVID” Brennan was very complementary about the team and especially about their work environment and culture.
Ossio was able to lean into their culture of a safe working atmosphere and warrior mentality. “I had a sales manager in the Southeast named Sarah Dorsey. She actually bought an RV, renovated it and drove it around making sales calls during COVID.” Brennan was adamant that fighting through adversity made him a better leader and his people a better team. When asked about how he was able to create this type of culture Brennan didn’t feel like he had THE answer, but offered some words of advice “I look for resiliency on a resume. I don’t want to hire somebody that is 40 years old and has been with 15 different companies. I want to see somebody that stuck it out.”
Pivoting under pressure to come out on top
Another great example from Brennan was the time when his team had to fill the void from an unexpected FDA refusal to review the submission file. Naturally the approval they were looking for never came and Brennan moved his entire family across the country to launch this product. “That was a real challenge. And you go, oh my God, what am I doing in California? There's no, product to launch now” Brennan and the leadership team looked at all alternatives and scenarios to fill a 5-6 year technology gap from the competition. From iterating on pre-approved products and expanding indications, to creating a digital app to for surgeons to plan a case digitally as opposed to FedEx-ing hard copies of CT scans, the team was coming up with various ways to pivot. “We were able to come up with a service called CT express, which is a way for a customer to upload a CT-scan to a portal. Everybody eventually copied it and but that was a big deal.”
Pushing through adversity was the opportunity they captured. “I was very proud of that because as a team, everybody rallied around that vision and all the things that we were doing. And we were ultimately able to regain market leadership.”
Creating #HealthyBrands
Creating an experience around your product is key to making a healthy brand. It’s really the idea of a “whole product” as opposed to the product itself. This concept was first introduced by Ted Levin in “The Marketing Imagination” but the idea is really to deliver value across the entire customer experience. Brennan talked about some consumer brands as examples “Tesla, it's not a car, Delta airlines is not just a flight, Chick-fil-A is not just a chicken sandwich. There's a whole experience wrapped around these companies, these products. That's why there's just such a cult following around it.”
He also talked about how Brands need to surprise their customers, not just delight them “We don't just want to delight the customer. We want to kind of surprise them. Like they almost think we're clever. Like, wow, you guys are clever. How did you come up with that? Wow. I didn't know I needed that.”
Learn more about Brennan on LinkedIn
Ways I can help you
Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands
Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)