Immodest
Ambitions
by
Melissa Wells
Lakeland high-flying medical
packager Doyen Medipharm Inc.
seeks world dominance.
 |
|
Ray
Johnson, president of Doyen Medipharm Inc., oversees
production of medical packaging equipment at the company's
Lakeland
|
In its
effort to make the equipment "user friendly," Doyen supplies
its customers with CDs that replace cumbersome user manuals.
"The CD features a video that will show step-by-step each
procedure on how to use the machine and replace parts," says
Johnson. "No one else in the industry has done this."
Johnson
has a staff of 34 in Lakeland. The company maintains a sales
office in New Jersey. "We have more engineers here (in Lakeland)
than manufacturing people," Johnson says. "Our assembly
people are machinists. They do acceptance testing with the
customer and install the equipment in the field. This gives
us diversity. These employees are utility players who can
machine, assemble, install and service."
Growing
too fast?
The company"s rapid growth has posed some timing challenges.
"Systems
and procedures can"t evolve, they have to be revolutionary,"
says Johnson. "Some of our employees have had to take higher
levels of responsibility before they were ready because
we can"t afford high-salaried managers and executives. They
were nervous at first. They"ve made mistakes, but we tell
them, "brush yourself off and do it again, right." We have
extremely low turnover and unprecedented cooperation among
departments."
Another
challenge along the way has been cash flow. "That has been
difficult," Johnson says. "Alan and I didn"t take a salary
for a couple years. But we have a supportive relationship
with SouthTrust Bank. They loaned us money when they probably
shouldn"t have. Now we have a $1 million credit line with
them."
Armed
with a solid financial underpinning, Johnson and Isaacs
are studying a map of the world for future market penetration.
"Our general strategy is to dominate our niche in every
medical market in the world," says Johnson. "We have a 90-percent
market share in surgical glove worldwide and we"re still
expanding geographically."
With
two corporate headquarters on either side of the Atlantic
Ocean, "we learned how to communicate effectively early
on," Johnson says. "We had e-mail before people knew what
it was. We also rely heavily on videoconferencing."
Although
Isaacs and Johnson actually meet in person only once or
twice a year, geographic distance hasn"t hindered their
relationship. "There are a few key points that characterize
our relationship," says Johnson. "We have implicit trust
in each other"s business and technical abilities and a nearly
identical work ethic."
This
high level of compatibility is offset by "our very different
views when it comes to risk," adds Johnson. "I have a risk-seeking
personality and Alan has a risk-avoiding personality. Separately,
we would never have achieved what we"ve done with Doyen.
But together it works."
A final
note on the technology Doyen has built into its equipment.
"We have extremely sophisticated computer-controlled motor-drive
systems," explains Johnson. "It"s like the technology that
the early space shuttles used."
"The
five simultaneous PC processors is very close to the technology
used in the original moon flights," says Greg Ward, the
firm"s vice president of engineering. "The days of the squirrels
running in cages are over."
