Building the Board

One project underway is an oncology clinical trials clinic in Spain. It’s an exciting project for many reasons, but what has been most interesting to me is seeing all of the different pieces that have to come together before you ever open the doors.

We have experienced physicians who understand oncology, clinical research and operations. We have a team in Spain helping navigate the local healthcare environment, contracts, regulatory requirements and infrastructure. We have capital behind the project, a location taking shape and a group of people who are very good at what they do and passionate about the work.

You could say we have the chess pieces. What we’re building now is the board.

Building the board is where operating discipline becomes important. The facility, capital requirements, contracting, staffing, technology and expected clinical trial volume all affect one another. The work is understanding those relationships and turning them into an executable plan.

That’s the part I love.

The focus isn’t only on opening this clinic. It’s also on capturing what we learn while we build it so that the work becomes scalable.

If we do this again, we shouldn’t have to recreate the process.

We build a playbook. A framework for evaluating a location and build out. A financial model that can adjust as the inputs change. Staffing and ramp assumptions. A sequence for the decisions that need to be made and an understanding of how those decisions affect one another.

The inputs will be different. The location may be different. The economics will certainly be different, and there will be things we learn in Spain that won’t translate perfectly somewhere else.

But the framework should be consistent.

For me, that’s part of the value of approaching this as operators. We’re solving the problem in front of us while building the infrastructure that makes us better at solving the next one.

We have the chess pieces.

Now we’re building the board.