Corporate Culture: The Client and Staff Perspectives

Excerpted below are the findings of an independent review of CBI's client satisfaction and staff "satisfaction". The principal conclusion of the study was , "CBI's strength in helping clients to think through and creatively solve early-stage problems from both a design and implementation standpoint is not only what drives people inside the organization but is also the reason clients choose CBI over the competition."

Exceptional Problem-Solving Abilities

CBI is given high marks for its creative problem-solving abilities.

• I think they are extremely good when you have a problem and need someone to help you figure out how to approach it. They have good experience and lots of different ideas when it comes to this kind of situation.
• We were looking for someone who could help us take a cancer test that had been developed and migrate it to a new platform and update the technology. At the time we were researching what platforms could be utilized, and we were looking for companies that had the capability to actually develop the test. And they had the kind of paper experience, meaning the number of PhDs and the unit to be able to do it. They had the scientific knowledge.
• I like the fact that the scientists at CBI have experience in a lot of different areas and can help you look at something from a lot of different angles. That is something I value and think the market is definitely looking for.
• What you're looking for is beyond just doing the assay. You're looking at the level of their troubleshooting capabilities. I can get assays done anywhere but what I liked was their level of expertise beyond that, and I used that quite heavily....Their scientific expertise was one of the main drivers for me to go with them.
• Our interactions with CBI have been outstanding....They have been a group that is original in their thinking. They don't think in a box. In many ways they are academicians and scientists in the way they think about a project. So they have been a very helpful adjunct for things we don't have in-house.

Specializing In Early Stage Development

CBI is seen as specializing in early stage developmental, bio-engineering work. Clients noted that they feel this is CBI's focus and believe there is a great deal of enthusiasm for this kind of analytical work.

• CBI is one of the few vendors who understands the need in the market for a pre-clinical contract development lab - although I don't think they really sell themselves that way, and I think that is a mistake because that's where their real strength lies. We need someone to do engineering work to GLP but not necessarily to GMP. Not just development for assays, but also development in terms of bio-engineering. And, the funny thing is someone like Lark will say they are a contract development lab but the reality is they're really not. When push comes to shove, they'd really much rather be a contract test lab.
• What caught our attention about CBI was that they could help us do some of this engineering work. They seem to absolutely love that kind of work, and they do a good job with it. Custom work with CBI is almost to the point where it's not custom. Their work in this area is absolutely first rate.
• There are a bunch of labs around that they're competing with. But, what we were doing to find someone to help us migrate an assay to a new platform – redesign it – there were a limited number of labs available to do it...So in this pre-clinical development stuff, there probably aren't a lot of competitors on the East Coast.

Creative Problem-Solving

Creative problem-solving is a point of difference recognized by some board members.

• On the commercial side, I think that whereas a lot of CROs will do standard laboratory tests or even difficult laboratory tests, and CBI can certainly do those and do them well, what differentiates CBI is their creativity, as opposed to doing stability tests on a drug, the question is this drug isn't stable, how do we make it stable? And that's something that they're capable of doing. Anybody can do a stability test, but not everybody can figure out how to make something that's not stable, stable.

Employees Share This Belief

What matters to all at CBI, is a desire to do important work.

• From the beginning, there was a really strong desire for us to build a company of bright, energetic people and bring work in that was important. We wanted to do important work.

Employees want CBI's role to be that of a partner, not a vendor.

• We don't want to be a vendor. We want to be participating in the project. We want to be genuinely part of the project, part of the team, part of the process and contribute in ways that I think other suppliers might not.
• We want to be a part of inventing drugs and new technologies. We want our image to be that of a company that is not just doing tests, but that is working with clients on projects to enhance their work.

Beyond Standard Solutions

Where employees believe CBI has a competitive advantage is in its ability to work with a client on a project that does not have a standard solution to it – that requires a creative, open-minded approach to designing and implementing a solution to a particular problem.

• Clients love being able to come in and say, "We have this problem. It doesn't fit into a box." And what we offer them is really a formless box. In these situations, we are very innovative, very adaptive if you will on approaching problems.
• Some cases are straightforward. A client we want you to run these sets of analyses and just give us the results. There is no thinking involved – It just becomes a costing issue and we may not be competitive. But, in situations where a client says, "This is what we'd like to understand, how do we get to that objective?", this is where we can make a difference. Because these cases involve conceptualization and you have to become inventive and develop new protocols to solve these problems. This is where we are strong.