Growing Eton’s services and sales

I started by mapping unmet customer requests against instruments already sitting in our laboratories, separating quick wins from ideas that required new capital or workflow changes:

• Immediate capability extensions: Using available mass-spectrometry equipment to add oligo quality analysis alongside our purification services; offering small-scale DNA oligos and small-batch messenger RNA (mRNA) libraries for researchers screening many candidates in volumes larger suppliers overlooked; and assembling DNA constructs for labs that wanted finished material without buying an instrument.
• Defending and expanding core accounts: Introducing whole-plasmid sequencing so existing sequencing customers wouldn’t have to send full-plasmid verification work to outside competitors, and charting a longer-term path where Eton could synthesize or assemble a submitted sequence, verify it, and prepare larger quantities under one roof.

Sequencing the roadmap around what our existing labs could deliver right away let us test real customer demand before committing money to specialized reagents, new instruments, or facility changes.

Specialty oligos—short custom strands of DNA or RNA, including antisense oligos engineered to bind specific RNA targets—became the centerpiece of that commercial push. We targeted researchers screening dozens of candidate sequences who needed fast, reliable small batches rather than bulk manufacturing.

I worked with our senior process-development engineer to define clear commercial specifications and trained the sales force on which research labs needed the capability and how to pitch it, while colleagues in the laboratory developed and ran the methods—turning antisense and other specialty oligos into active revenue lines ahead of Eton’s sale.

To make that outreach systematic, I rewrote our website copy and sales collateral with outside design support, mined our existing sequencing accounts to spot likely buyers, rolled out HubSpot CRM with clear territory and account ownership across four branches, and hired a dedicated sales manager to coach reps day to day.

Launching a laboratory service only works if ordering, bench execution, and sales handoffs match up. I designed an operating plan linking a LIMS-connected customer ordering portal with internal barcoding, shared run records, and targeted lab automation so orders stayed traceable as volume grew.

To keep custom R&D requests from disrupting daily turnaround, my operating model required the development team to validate new protocols before handing them over to routine operations—leaving operations in charge of daily delivery, quality, customer support, and maintenance so salespeople could stay focused on winning accounts. Under that staged approach, whole-plasmid sequencing reached initial customer trials on nanopore hardware—pivoting cleanly from an earlier spare-capacity platform proposal—while keeping investment tied to demonstrated demand.