Telesis Bio & Eton Bioscience
Leading Eton through its sale
General Manager, Eton Bioscience · 2023–2024
Running Eton Bioscience as General Manager while preparing the subsidiary for divestiture meant balancing two demanding responsibilities at once: keeping sales reps and four regional laboratories focused on customers, while giving leadership and prospective buyers an honest, branch-by-branch picture of how the business earned money and what it cost to run.
I built the bottom-up operating forecasts, modeled branch-network alternatives, organized the diligence materials, and worked alongside the transaction team through buyer review—closing the sale on August 26, 2024 without interrupting laboratory service for customers.
Enlarge imageEnlarge: Evaluating branch consolidation meant checking whether local drop-box pickups could still reach the regional shipping hub before evening cutoff.Understanding the business by service
Applying a single top-line growth assumption across Eton would have masked major shifts happening underneath: specialty oligos were expanding fast, while emerging whole-plasmid methods were changing the long-term outlook for traditional Sanger sequencing.
To ground both internal decisions and buyer conversations in reality, I built bottom-up financial models from each branch’s P&L, customer ordering patterns, lab staffing, service-line margins, and facility costs—showing clearly what each location needed to operate and how proposed changes would flow through the business.
The cost of changing the branch network
Closing a regional laboratory branch could cut facility and payroll expenses on paper while quietly costing the company local customers. Working with the team, I modeled branch scenarios that weighed payroll, rent, moving, and shipping savings against realistic customer retention—separating accounts that relied on local courier pickup from customers who already mailed samples in.
For any proposed branch consolidation, the physical logistics had to work on the street, not just in a spreadsheet. I mapped the daily route a customer’s sample would actually travel—checking courier schedules from local drop boxes to make sure collections could still reach the shipping hub before its evening cutoff, preserving the turnaround times customers depended on.
Keeping the business running through the sale
While leading day-to-day sales, service launches, and multi-site lab operations, I helped identify a buyer, organized our financial and operating records into a structured SharePoint diligence room, and worked within the transaction team to walk prospective buyers through how the laboratories operated.
Even with hiring and capital investment constrained during the sale process, revenue stabilized and our teams maintained turnaround and continuity for customers and staff right through the August 26, 2024 closing.
Experience used here
General management · Financial forecasting · Operating analysis · Diligence preparation · Business sale · Customer service