Life Sciences 360

Life Sciences Marketing Agency CEO on How to Combine Storytelling and Science for Impact

Harsh Thakkar Episode 66

In this episode, Harsh Thakkar welcomes David Ormesher, CEO of CG Life, a leading marketing agency in the life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors. David shares over 30 years of experience in life science marketing and storytelling. From startups to large enterprises, CG Life helps companies blend complex science with compelling stories to resonate with patients, healthcare professionals, and investors.

David discusses his entrepreneurial journey, how CG Life specializes in biopharmaceutical marketing, and key insights into building an agency that bridges the gap between science and storytelling. He also shares the strategic importance of focusing on the patient journey, how to scale marketing for companies of all sizes, and the role of digital platforms in the ever-evolving landscape of pharma and biotechnology marketing.

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction  
00:09 - The Importance of Storytelling in Life Sciences  
01:00 - David’s Journey into Life Science Marketing  
02:00 - Starting CG Life and its Evolution  
05:00 - Combining Science and Storytelling  
08:00 - Challenges and Opportunities in Biopharma Marketing  
10:00 - CG Life's Growth Strategy and Key Acquisitions  
13:00 - Leveraging Social Media and Digital Platforms in Pharma  
17:00 - Storytelling for Different Audiences: Patients, HCPs, and Investors  
22:00 - Case Study: Terran Biosciences – Building Market Visibility  
24:00 - Case Study: Novo Nordisk – Digital Customer Experience for HCPs  
30:00 - Advice for Entrepreneurs Starting a Marketing Agency  
34:00 - Lessons Learned from David’s Entrepreneurial Journey  
36:00 - Building a Strong Team for Success  
37:00 - Final Thoughts and Call to Action  


Don’t forget to subscribe and share your thoughts in the comments! Let us know what topics or guests you want to see next.

---

Links:
Visit CG Life: (https://www.cglife.com)  
Connect with David Ormesher on LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidormesher)

- Subscribe to our podcast for more insights on life sciences: 
🍎Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3RXPoS1
🟩 Spotify podcast: https://spoti.fi/3EbDZbr

💬 Let us know in the comments: Did you know worms could be this powerful?  
👍 Don't forget to hit Like and Subscribe for more fascinating interviews with leaders in life sciences!


#LifeSciences #PharmaMarketing #Biotech #Entrepreneurship #PatientJourney #StorytellingInScience #MarketingStrategy #DigitalHealth #HealthcareMarketing #CGLife #Biopharma #PharmaceuticalIndustry #HealthcareInnovation #MarketingAgency #ScalingBusiness #LifeScienceMarketing #BiotechInnovation #HealthcareEntrepreneur #PharmaDigitalMarketing #DavidOrmesher #HarshThakkar


For transcripts, check out the podcast website - www.lifesciencespod.com

Harsh Thakkar (00:01)
All right. So we've had tons of episodes on this podcast. We talk with, you know, CEO and other executives of different life science companies. We figure out, you know, what kind of products are they working on? So I wanted to switch things up a little bit and get into the world of biopharmaceutical marketing. I wanted to bring somebody here who has tons of experience in that space, who works with companies of all sizes, you know, one to 10 employees, all the way up to thousand to 5 ,000 employees.

So we're gonna dive into this conversation. We're gonna talk all about biopharmaceutical marketing, storytelling for startups, how to build a marketing agency and everything under that sun, right? So my guest here today is David. Welcome to the show, David.

David Ormesher (00:49)
Thank you, Harsh. It's really great to be here. Appreciate your interest in this space.

Harsh Thakkar (00:54)
Yeah, so you have, I forget the number, but I know it's north of 30 plus years of experience in marketing. I know you found it, Closer Look, and now you're heading up the CG Life Sciences company. How did you get into the marketing world, specifically into life sciences? Can you share with our audience how that journey started?

David Ormesher (01:22)
Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you have to understand I'm an entrepreneur. And when I started my first agency, it actually wasn't a digital marketing agency focused on life sciences. My first career was in television. And so when I started Closer Look, it really was as a creative agency focused on telling great stories. I learned how to tell stories in the world of television. And I thought, can I bring this into the world of marketing?

But at one point, a management consultant friend challenged me to declare a focus. He said, you can't be all things to all people. And when you're a small agency, you just can't take everything. If you really want to grow, you have to become an expert. So looking at the kind of work we were doing, we decided, I decided, let's choose life sciences, and specifically pharma. Seemed to make the most sense not only from our experience, but also trends in the marketplace.

And over the years, Closer Look grew into a major digital AOR, agency of record for Pharma. So much so that in 2021, I sold the firm to a UK -based private equity agency called Fishewack. And I stayed on for about a year. I ran the US and the global marketing group for Fishewack.

about half the revenue of the company. And then I left and just started to do some consulting. I started consulting with other agencies like Closer Look in this space. I started consulting with private equity firms who saw what I had done and what other companies like mine were doing and wanted to get into this space themselves. And so they were looking for help in building out their investment thesis. And then at the end of 2022, I joined the board of a small

Harsh Thakkar (02:54)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (03:18)
PE -backed life science agency called CG Life here in Chicago. And after about a year in the role, the board asked me if I would consider joining the company full -time as CEO. At that point, I had the luxury of having spent time with the leadership, with the company, seeing what they do, seeing their passion for life science. And so my decision was pretty easy. Yes, coach, send me in.

Harsh Thakkar (03:24)
Hmm.

Yep.

David Ormesher (03:45)
And so

that's how I started with CG Like.

Harsh Thakkar (03:51)
Yeah, what's really interesting to me is that life sciences industry is filled with tons of technical experts. You have scientists, you have doctors, a lot of these people are becoming CEOs of companies. Maybe they have a business background or maybe they're just extremely scientifically...

respected in the community and that's why they're leading these companies. And a lot of the times, I feel, especially in your shoes, translating what they're doing in the lab and their science into the market to what the patient cares about, right? Because the patient may or may not understand how the drug works, what's the mechanism of action, what's cell therapy, what's CAR -T, all these terms, right? So you have to sort of...

simplify that, tell the story, why did the founder start the company? So I'm sure you worked with, in your experience as you're working with all these companies, you also have this on your, lot of your branding and website materials that CG Life specializes in blending the science and the storytelling aspect for these companies. So can you share with us, how do you go about that? How do you figure out what's the story, what's the science, and how do you merge the two?

David Ormesher (05:14)
That's a really good question, Harsh. Bringing a complex drug to market isn't just about science. It's about telling the story in a way that resonates with patients, doctors, and investors. And at CG Life, that's our North Star. And so when I joined CG Life, what I found so fascinating is we have our complement of scientists. We have PhDs on staff. They really understand the science, but they partner really well together.

with the storytellers, the people who can write content, who can design content, who know how to reach out into the marketplace and tell that story in really compelling ways, depending on who the audience is. When I joined, I saw the foundation of this storytelling and this foundation of understanding the science and being able to translate it. And I thought, OK, let's take this from the world of

genomics and cell and gene therapy that we know so well, a lot of the early stage technologies and research. And let's bring this kind of through its next logical step and bring it right to pharma, right to the companies that are bringing these therapies to market for patients. And so with the board's approval and the support of management, we laid out an ambitious growth plan, an ambitious growth strategy to do just that. And at its foundation,

was a strategy to leverage our life science experience and move into biopharma. We know genomics, we know cell and gene, we know its role in new medicines for patients with rare and hard to treat diseases. I know pharma commercialization. So we said, let's put these things together. So we set out to build out the capabilities and the experience to deliver on the promise of helping rare disease biopharma companies shepherd their

life -giving therapies to market to impact the lives of patients and their caregivers. It was a big plan and we started out 2024 saying, okay, everybody fasten your seat belts because this is going to be a fun ride, but we've got a lot to do. We've got a lot to accomplish to do this. So we started and launched a multi -prong plan. First step was acquire tool house.

Toolhouse is a prominent digital agency for pharma, very well known in the space. I've known them for years. And then secondly, acquire Barry and Company, a New York City -based PR and social media agency specializing in early -stage biotechs. We also made the decision to hire some additional key leadership and align on a very tight, focused value proposition to guide us.

It's really a combination of bringing these three companies together. And since the spring, we've done all that. In just three months, we combine expert capabilities in science, core heritage of CG life and strategy, PR, digital, data analytics, media, and social, essentially doubling the size of our agency.

A lot has happened in the last, well, I would say probably since the spring. Not only have we successfully executed these two agency acquisitions to elevate us into a dominant player in this space, but we've worked to integrate the mission vision values of these three companies into one. We've combined our expert capabilities together and by bringing people together from different backgrounds, skills, expertise, but still sharing.

Harsh Thakkar (08:43)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (09:07)
similar core values, we were able to purpose build an agency to bring significant breadth of expertise under one roof. And I feel like all these strategic moves are really poised to elevate CG Life to help life science clients make a profound impact on the industry and in the lives of their patients.

Harsh Thakkar (09:09)
Hmm.

Yeah, and what's interesting is, as you explained the strategy of how CG Life acquired these companies, you mentioned about, I didn't catch the name, Barry.

David Ormesher (09:42)
Barry and company.

Harsh Thakkar (09:44)
Barry and company, okay. So that's the one that was, you mentioned was really good at social media. And that was kind of a good segue into my next question, which is as you were going through this growth strategy of looking at these potential collaborative partners that you could either work with or acquire them and bring all those capabilities in -house instead of trying to build that arm of your company, which obviously, the build versus buy debate is always there.

I see a lot of companies going with the buy option because it's much easier to acquire and get that strength right away. But the question I wanted to ask you is the biopharmaceutical industry has evolved a lot in the last 15, 20 years. I started in 2007 and just between then and now there is a lot of new types of therapeutic modalities, new types of startups and companies that are coming out. And then the world of marketing has also evolved.

from the early Facebook days to where we are today with video and all other sorts of ways to tell your story, whether you are a life science company or just a single freelancer or anybody, you have so many ways to share your story with the world. So given all this rapid development in the biopharmaceutical industry and on the digital marketing side, what do you think are some of the opportunities

for pharma companies and what do you think are some of the challenges with all that's going on?

David Ormesher (11:20)
So certainly with digital and social media, there are a lot of channels out there. There's a lot of ways for companies to talk to consumers. And if you're not careful, that very quickly becomes noise. We're just shouting at the world, shouting at the marketplace. And all of us, we all know this as consumers, pretty soon we just start to turn it off or we opt out.

And then suddenly that channel's closed for a company. There are better and smarter ways to use these channels and use them in very effective ways. And it really starts with the patient, the consumer, understanding the patient, understanding the health care professional. What exactly do they need? If you can connect with them with content that's relevant and that's engaging and that

Harsh Thakkar (11:54)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (12:17)
meets a need that they have today, suddenly you've got an interested party. Suddenly you have someone who is raising their hand and now suddenly they're opted in to a database. We find that's very true in both digital and social. If we can use social as a way to find a tribe, to find a group of patients that are struggling with a particular rare disease or their caregivers,

Harsh Thakkar (12:22)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (12:44)
and begin to impart to them content that is relevant for their place in the patient journey, you've got an audience. And if you have really interesting clinical information for a health care professional, I can tell you doctors get a ton of content. My wife's a physician. Her mailbox, inbox overflows with all kinds of spam. But...

Harsh Thakkar (12:53)
Hmm.

Mm

David Ormesher (13:10)
When she gets a message that's relevant for the patients she's seeing right now, and it's articulated in a way that respects her intelligence, so it's crystal clear on what the medical insight is, but it doesn't drag her down. She's an audience. She'll take that, she'll save it. Even better, she will pass it around and she will send it to her colleagues.

Harsh Thakkar (13:30)
Mm -hmm.

David Ormesher (13:38)
That's sort of, that's the gold in that. So it starts with truly understanding who your audience is. And that's the role for, for technology, for data analytics, being able to use data analytics in a really smart way to segment your audience, to target them, to begin to learn from them. I often say that every time you engage with a customer, you think you're communicating to them.

But they're also communicating back to you. They're telling you, did I stay on this website? Did I open this email? Did I respond to this email? Did I download this clinical study? Did I start to follow? Did I start to like? Did I start to pass someone? That is giving you really valuable information on what they care about and what they want to consume. And if you can use that in a smart way and use that then to evolve your next communication, now you're engaging.

Now you're having a conversation and now you're building a customer.

Harsh Thakkar (14:40)
Right. Yeah. 100%. I know you mentioned like talking to the customer or talking to the consumer. And then what you said is also really important because just because we have multiple channels today or multiple ways of creating content, if you don't have a good strategy, then it's just a bunch of noise. But if you know exactly what kind of platform, like let's say if you are a biotech or pharma company and you want to post content on TikTok or

on LinkedIn that might look very different from what you might write on a blog article or what you have one of your executives go to a industry conference and say on a keynote speech or a podcast, right? So understanding that, yes, there's all these different ways to share what the company is doing, what are their values, what are their mission, what are they trying to do for those patients? But if you don't have a strategy for every channel or at least

you know, idea of which channels are your strengths or weaknesses, then you're just going to be throwing a lot of money and resources and not seeing the results.

David Ormesher (15:48)
Yep. And I would say to build on that.

to build on that harsh, the life science industry, the farm industry really needs marketers who know how to translate complex science and make it approachable. Early in my agency career, I came up with a communication principle that is as true today as it was ever. You must touch the heart to move the mind. You must touch the heart to move the mind. Effective communication is key in the marketing world. And when complex science has evolved,

Harsh Thakkar (16:03)
Mm.

Mmm.

David Ormesher (16:22)
becomes even more crucial to turn complex concepts into stories that resonate with people. It's this dynamic, compelling storytelling that provides people with an emotional connection to science, to scientific advancements, and what it means for patients. And that's really critical for us today.

Harsh Thakkar (16:45)
All right, so I think the next one is, we're gonna take a break here because we're going into the question four. So Kelly, do you wanna hop on and share what?

Kelly Biele (16:56)
There's nothing yet. Usually these come around 3pm if breaking is correct. So yeah, just to make everyone, it's going to be fine either way, but just wanted that update that I'm monitoring it.

David Ormesher (17:00)
Hahaha!

Harsh Thakkar (17:01)
We'll be done by then.

David Ormesher (17:04)
All right.

Yep.

Harsh Thakkar (17:13)
Alright.

Kelly Biele (17:15)
So I'll pop back up. It's going great though.

Harsh Thakkar (17:18)
Thank you.

So if you're okay, I might skip the science first part. I'll just go to the case studies and then we can go to behind the scenes stuff, because we're already at 17 and I don't think we have all the time. Okay, so let's go into the case study part.

David Ormesher (17:36)
Sure.

Sure.

Harsh Thakkar (17:48)
That's really interesting, David, and you've shared so much insights on marketing, on storytelling, and working with companies. For anybody listening here that wants to maybe dive a little bit deeper as to how exactly does CG Life work with biotech companies? Do you have any case studies or examples of maybe a smaller startup and versus a enterprise company and how do you help them in what ways?

David Ormesher (18:17)
Sure, I'm happy to, I mean, we've got a lot of great stories. I get very excited about the work that we're doing here and the companies that we've helped. And frankly, the companies that we're working with, I mean, they're the highlight of our day because we're working with really exciting scientists and entrepreneurs that are bringing new breakthroughs to the marketplace. One of our clients, Terran Biosciences, is a

phenomenal company, very exciting. They're an early stage biotech platform. They're dedicated to the development of transformational therapeutics for metabolic, neurologic, and psychiatric diseases. The founder, Dr. Sam Clark, he personally is driven by the impact and devastation of those with neuropsychiatric illnesses that are not being properly treated or unfortunately, in many cases, not being treated at all. And he began thinking,

Can we bring much more effective psychiatric therapies to market for these patients that don't carry the debilitating side effects that are so common in some of these psychiatric therapies? And with that, that was really the motivation for him to start Terran in 2017. And since then, Terran has built out more novel psychedelics than any group in history and has generated many new approaches to making

Harsh Thakkar (19:23)
Mm.

David Ormesher (19:41)
these otherwise difficult compounds viable. In fact, Dr. Clark himself is co -inventor with more than 200 patents. So he's the brain surgeon, if you will. He's the smart guy in the room. But he has built a team around him because he recognizes that there's a real need in this space. The global neuroscience treatment industry is expected to grow to over 200 billion by 2026. So when we got involved, Taryn looked to us.

Harsh Thakkar (19:49)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (20:11)
to gain neuroscience market visibility for the firm and to establish Sam Clark, Dr. Clark, their CEO as an innovation leader supporting a changing landscape in this neuropsychiatric space. So we got to work. Here at CG Life, we have a 25 person strategic communications group that includes PR, corporate communication, social media advocacy, crisis communications. This team has extraordinary depth in

both early stage biotech and life science. So Taryn's initial market visibility was to appear at conferences and we provided onsite interviews at multiple conferences in late 2023. We secured Dr. Clark as a guest on leading life science and biotech podcasts and expanded his voice as a thought leader in industry articles. We combined Taryn's impressive expertise and Dr. Clark's growing media presence.

to put him up as an expert for commentary on major industry news. And we landed him top coverage in top tier industry publications like Bloomberg, Pharma Voice, Politico, Stat, Bio Pharma Dive. In less than a year, we secured 60 pieces of original coverage for Terran. So it was a big deal. When you're a very small company,

Harsh Thakkar (21:33)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (21:38)
and you're going up against a very entrenched marketplace, it's really important that you build your brand. And that's what our team here is experts at. We're also very good at when a company is about to come out of stealth mold. Like they've just raised their series A and they want to emerge in a big way. We provide a lot of the strategic advisory services, including comprehensive media relations plan to

Be able to tell the company's core narrative, develop their key messaging, we provide media training to key spokespeople. These are all the components that are necessary for a company that is an early stage now, but they are getting ready to come out and debut in the marketplace. So that's the kind of stuff we do for some of these small emerging clinical stage companies. They deserve all of this.

awareness building because what they're bringing to the market is critical. And our team, I can tell you, is very passionate about this. And they've got the leading editors and writers on speed dial so they know that when one of our team members calls, it's something that's important. At the other end of the spectrum, we also work with established pharma companies.

Harsh Thakkar (22:55)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (23:02)
Novo Nordisk is a global pharma company, quite well known in the area of diabetes and obesity management. And they're also very well known in other chronic conditions, including rare diseases such as hemophilia and growth disorders. We've been involved with Novo for many years. One particular area that I find really fascinating, this is really at the enterprise level, Novo was looking to improve

the overall digital customer experiences for HCPs, healthcare professionals, across its portfolio of drugs by focusing on the HCP journey and the needs of each individual customer. In other words, can we build a platform, an online platform that allows any physician to access any bit of information about any up to 20 brands across a variety of therapeutic areas?

Harsh Thakkar (23:34)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (23:55)
while streamlining in the back office the workflows that it takes for people at Novo to be able to update that with new content. so Toolhouse, which is one of the companies that we bought earlier this year, worked with them to find an approach that would leverage technology to automate campaigns, to reduce costs, to break down channel silos within Novo itself. And what they created

Part of this solution is called NovoMedLink. NovoMedLink .com. It's a centralized hub that brought together all of NovoNordisc's physician -facing product information services, clinical education, patient support materials into an easy to use site. Particularly the patient support materials is really important because now physicians can go out and they can actually download materials that they can in turn give to their patients.

Harsh Thakkar (24:27)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (24:54)
It's really a one -stop shop for a wide variety of HCP customers. It also includes other centralized web -based services such as sample ordering. So if you're, as a physician, you want a sample of a product, you can go online and order it. If you want a sales rep to come by and drop off materials or talk to you about a new product that's coming out, you can go online and find your local rep.

You can order in -office patient materials, such as product and disease state information. So it's a phenomenal site that's used every day by physicians all over the country. And the result is it's streamlined, it reduced the costs, and it provided a one -stop shop for physicians so they don't have to go from product site to product site. They can go to one place. It also is interesting because behind the scenes,

we're obviously collecting data. This goes back to data. We're collecting data on people who come, what they look for, what are they asking for, what are they downloading. And that enables us to go back to Novo with great insight into what's important and how would we continue to personalize the experience for physicians. So this, think this is a great example of the role and the power of technology to bring more efficiencies and better service to the physicians that are caring.

patients every day.

Harsh Thakkar (26:24)
Yeah, and when you mentioned, I had no idea that your team works with Terran. So shameless plug. I'm pointing here because my team knows. We got to show them the episode of, because we had Dr. Sam Clark here in July, amazingly talented entrepreneur. He's so passionate about the psychedelic treatments and

He started this company with $10 ,000 back when he was in his dorm room and tons of patents. He was going into all these regulatory strategies, how he's gonna have every single, it's insane. I've never talked to somebody who is so dialed in. So if anybody's interested, go check out that episode. We'll link it here. He's amazing.

David Ormesher (27:12)
That's great, Harris. Well, now you know why we love our job, right? I mean, you get the opportunity to talk to people like this. We get the opportunity to work with these people day in and day out and help them move along that commercialization journey and help them accelerate that path to get these products out into market so they really are doing, they're really helping patients.

Harsh Thakkar (27:34)
Yeah, so this is really a great representation of how you work with external teams and partners at these smaller companies like Taron or bigger companies like Novo Nordisk. For somebody who maybe wants to start a very small CG life or some sort of a marketing agency catered towards life sciences, based on your entrepreneur journey and

the experience you've had in seeing how marketing was done 30 years ago and how it's done today. What are some nuggets of wisdom that you wanna give other entrepreneurs who are trying to build a marketing agency of some sorts in pharma?

David Ormesher (28:20)
Well, it comes back to, think what I started with at the very beginning and that's understanding your focus. And because the market is changing so much, I always start by saying, you know, talk to your customers first, find out what they really care about, what they really need. mean, even now today, I still have these conversations. I had dinner three weeks ago with the president of a very large rare disease pharma company and

I sat down with him and over three hours and a couple of bottles of wine, I said, I'm building a purpose -built agency to serve companies like yours. What should I do next? What company should I buy next? What practice area should I invest in next to be higher value to you to help you get your products to market faster? And I got really important, insightful information from him that

Harsh Thakkar (29:00)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (29:17)
is influencing how I think about our next moves. Two weeks ago, I talked to another pharma CEO coming out of a board meeting, and I told him what we were doing. And he said, what you're doing is so important. He said, working with early stage clinical stage companies, he said, you need to be talking about commercialization 10 years before they expect to launch. Because right now, at that stage, they're so focused on the science, but they need to be thinking about where they are going. So I would suggest

to any young entrepreneur, the first thing to do is go out, talk to the marketplace, and see if you can find some white space or some unmet needs or where they say, you know what, I've got some agencies that do this and do that, but I really could use some help over here. And if you hear that two or three times, suddenly you've got a theory that you can start to experiment with and play with and test in the marketplace.

Harsh Thakkar (30:14)
That's very, yeah, that's very powerful. And this can apply to many other parts, right? Like even when I started consulting agency two years ago in quality and regulatory and software validation, it wasn't like there was no company like that, right? So when I started, that's all I knew. That's all I had done for like 15 years. So naturally I knew that's how I wanted to start.

David Ormesher (30:14)
That was where I would start.

Harsh Thakkar (30:40)
But as you rightly said, I was talking to so many people in the early days of the company and I was basically asking them, what kind of consulting companies do you work with today? What would you want to change in how they're working? So I'll give you one example, because this is something that one of our clients said. He's like, know, like,

We are a small company. So we don't like when consulting companies are just saying you get a part -time or a full -time consultant and you pay for 20 hours or 40 hours whether you have work or not and I was like interesting so I asked him like what do you Can you tell me a little bit more? Like what would you like? He said I would like some kind of a flexible pricing So basically we sign a contract for a year. There's a minimum monthly commitment that we have to pay

But then from there on, I might need a consultant for five hours. I might need one for 60. And it really changes week to week or month to month. And if I can get some sort of analytics or the time reporting, then there is some transparency into who's working on what project on how many hours. So from there, I took that information. I'm like, okay, what can I do?

And I found a bunch of time tracking softwares and tools and I told our consultants, hey, we're gonna be working on three, four projects at the same time, but we're not like other firms where you get one client and one project and that's all you do. You're juggling three or four, put everything here in this time tracking and then automatically that goes to every client. So they only pay for the hours that you work.

And that's, I would have never done that if this client didn't tell me that that's what they wanted. Right. And I've had other clients tell me, wow, these time reports are crazy. How do you, where are you getting all these from? And I'm not crunching them. It's a software that, you know, it costs 20 or $30 a month, but to the client, it just signals that, it's trans, it's transparency, it's flexibility, all these values that matter to, you know, 40 or 50 come 50 people startups.

So yeah, I totally relate to that advice.

David Ormesher (32:52)
So harsh and believe me, that's true when you're starting a company, a small company like you did, like I did years ago, like I'm doing now. It's also very important for those scientists that are building these small early stage client, know, clinical stage companies. It's so easy to say to fall in love with your own science and then hope that the market will come to you. But even as you're building out the science, the innovation, you need to be out in the market.

Harsh Thakkar (33:12)
Right.

David Ormesher (33:21)
finding out where is the white space and where can I be the most effective and provide the most value. And that's part of the role that that's part of what CG Life does in our our upfront brand strategy is we really help these CEOs understand the marketplace and listening and listen to the HCPs listen to the patients.

Harsh Thakkar (33:41)
Yeah, and it's a very exciting space to be in marketing, especially in pharma, because like I said, both pharma, the bio -pharma space and the marketing space are increasingly changing really fast with a lot of new developments, especially with technology, AI and all this stuff happening. So it's a very exciting space. I'm sure you're busy. You have tons of projects going on.

If you want to share a little bit with our listeners who want to learn more about CG life or maybe look into what you are doing, maybe have a potential call to see if you are the right partner to work with them, where should they reach out to you?

David Ormesher (34:23)
Well, they could certainly go to cglife .com, which is our website. You could certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there as well, and I make a lot of connections through LinkedIn. just David Ormishare. There's only one of us in the United States, I think. So it'll be pretty easy to find me.

Harsh Thakkar (34:47)
All right, yeah, we'll link those in the show notes so the listeners can check it out. Before we drop off, I just have one final question for you. Looking back at your journey, if there is one lesson, maybe something you learned at your first venture at Closer Look or something you learned at CG Life, what do you want the listeners to take away from this episode?

David Ormesher (35:12)
Well, I would say if there's one thing I've learned time and time again, it's all about the team. I can't do this alone, but by attracting a team of individuals who are smarter than me and who are willing to learn how to work together, we can do anything. Years ago, I had this thought experiment that went something like this. Can I create a self -managing company where I didn't have to be on every decision or in every sales call?

Harsh Thakkar (35:18)
Hmm.

David Ormesher (35:41)
I know a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders who are still totally wrapped up in the business. But when you recruit the right leaders that are willing to get out of their way, you can have a high functioning, high performance team. And that's good for everybody, our clients, our employees, and me.

Harsh Thakkar (35:59)
Yeah. Yeah, that's really powerful. And talking about team for our listeners, please let us know in the comments, what other types of topics or experts do you want to hear from on the podcast? Our team does a really great job of reaching out to all these experts. But if there's a specific topic that you want to learn about, like today we learned a lot about the world of marketing, which is not the type of content we've done in the past, at least six or eight episodes.

So there's something interesting that you wanna learn about, just let us know in the comments and we will find a really amazing guest to come here and share some knowledge on that. Thank you, David. It was nice talking to you.

David Ormesher (36:40)
It's been great spending time with you as well. Take care.

People on this episode