They met on a jet in 1998. He was an assistant professor in Oklahoma with a PhD in sociology. She had a PharmD and a job in big pharma. The chemistry between Eddilisa Martin and Marcus Martin was instant; they married a year later. Their entrepreneurial offspring is 2M Research, a health care-focused research and consulting firm. --As told to Coeli Carr
Marcus: When Eddilisa and I met, she had just gotten a job at Abbott Laboratories in Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb. We settled in Arlington, and I kept teaching at the university--I commuted--and all Eddilisa and I talked about was how we could use our expertise to start a company of our own. Finally, we landed on doing clinical research for pharmaceutical companies--specifically, helping manage their clinical trials and track their outcomes.
To that end, I also got a master's in public health in 2003. That year proved to be a turning point. I got a call from the Foundation for Community Empowerment, a nonprofit, which asked me to help start its public-policy think tank. Many high-value Dallas entrepreneurs visited that organization, and I had the opportunity to speak with many of them. Those conversations validated my own startup plans. When I left my next job, in 2010, we knew this was our now-or-never moment.
I sat at our kitchen table 24/7 figuring out our strategy. That was literally the first time I had ever heard the term "government contracting." I researched that industry and became convinced government consulting projects had good scalability and could secure our reputation prior to our entering the commercial space. In 2011, we became 2M Research, with me as CEO and Eddilisa as president, even while she continued at Abbott.
Eddilisa: We used my 2010 end-of-year profit-sharing bonus to fund our legal and operational requirements, and Marcus used my saved-up airline miles and hotel rewards to conduct ongoing meet-and-greets and brain-picking in D.C. We took several small research jobs with local firms, too. In 2012, in anticipation of government work, I quit my job--which turned out to be premature. Getting a foothold was more competitive than we could have ever imagined, mainly because the government values past performance. We had none.
