While competitors here and abroad have recently announced rival technologies and set their sights on the taxol market, Hauser isn't likely to forfeit its first-mover advantage soon. It's still the only FDA-approved supplier of bulk taxol. And like its potential rivals, Hauser is exploring semisynthetic alternatives to the taxol it harvests from trees.
Still, Hauser is banking little of its future on taxol. Or leaving it to serendipity. "Our strategy is to turn over a lot of opportunities, get paid for it, then when the right one comes along," says Stull, "run with it." -- Anne Murphy
TURNAROUND ENTREPRENEUR
Charles Laverty
Curaflex Health Services
Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
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The company Charles Laverty took over in February 1989 made for a particularly bleak "before." Curaflex Health Services was losing $16.5 million on sales of about $15 million. It's remarkable that anyone could imagine an "after," much less bring it about. But today Curaflex is the picture of health: the company made $1.2 million in 1991 on $39 million in revenues, and industry analysts project 1994 sales of $100 million. The intervening years saw one defining moment and lots of follow-through.
In 1989 Curaflex's main businesses were medical-equipment rental and general home-nursing services. The company, only a regional player, maintained no sales force but relied on managers at each clinic to bring in sales. They marketed Curaflex's services to insurers and to hospital-discharge planners.
When Curaflex's bankers at Morgan Stanley recruited Laverty to turn the company around, he was working at Avon Products as president of its misfit home infusion division, preparing it for sale. Home infusion therapy allows chronically ill patients needing intravenous medication to leave hospitals and return home. Health-care-cost containment has fueled the fast growth of that market, and Laverty saw the coming boom. "I tried to persuade Avon to hold on to it or to let me do a leveraged buyout," he says. "But the Street wanted Avon out of health care, no matter what. The division would have been a $250-million company today."
At Curaflex, Laverty had to make wholesale changes. He moved the company from Houston to Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. -- "there was a stigma attached to us in Houston." He scrapped the capital-intensive, slow-growing core business to focus on infusion therapy for such long-term diseases as cancer and AIDS. Then he thrust Curaflex onto the national stage, opening 49 offices.
Laverty imported experienced management, much of it from Avon. That team tied every aspect of the company to indicators that measure performance -- something that's always difficult to do in a service business -- and tracked them. Curaflex now knows everything from the rate at which offices collect balances of more than $10,000, to the number of infections caused by poorly inserted catheters.
He built a sales force from scratch, then gave it the marketing tools to reach two key classes of customers: doctors and insurers. Curaflex publishes the quarterly Journal of Infusional Chemotherapy for physicians and a sourcebook for insurers, Home Infusion Therapy Resource Guide. "Our competitors bring them doughnuts and coffee," Laverty says.
Confident but not complacent, Laverty is preparing for the next health-care trend: alternative site treatment. Those facilities offer a range of related services, somewhere between home and hospital. -- Michael P.Cronin
SUPPORTER OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
June Lavelle
Fulton-Carroll Center for Industry
Chicago
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June Lavelle may have won this year's award for Supporter of Entrepreneurship, but what won over the judges was her entrepreneurial spirit. Lavelle, who founded a business incubator for start-up companies, created an enterprise with all the commitment and risk taking of any company founder.
To be honest, Lavelle's initial goal was not helping company founders. "My whole intent was really community revitalization," she says. In the late 1970s, she was managing a government-funded work crew in Chicago's West Side in a neighborhood that had still not recovered from the damage of the riots of the 1960s. As long as the 350,000-square-foot factory building in the middle of the neighborhood remained largely vacant, Lavelle reasoned, the area would never revive. So, through Lavelle's work, her employer, the Industrial Council of Northwest Chicago, won a $1.7-million U.S. Economic Development Administration grant to acquire and renovate the block-size property.
At the time, the idea of a business incubator to foster new companies was a largely unknown one. But Lavelle couldn't imagine that any established companies would choose to relocate in what became known as the Fulton-Carroll Center for Industry, so she decided to grow her own.
