As we celebrate Consilium’s 10th year, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on some of my experiences as an advisor here for nearly nine of those years.
There have been some enormous changes, both to the way we work and the markets we operate in. We have weathered times of market turmoil and ridden on the wave of a resurgent healthcare sector in the wake of a global pandemic. The UK and Europe has remained an incredibly important marketplace for healthcare, but in line with wider trends we’ve certainly become more US-facing and global, aided by better technology which has improved our ability to work seamlessly with clients all over the world. Our industry has evolved with the rise of social media and it’s exhilarating to be standing on the cusp of another technology revolution as we begin to realise the potential of advancements in AI to impact not only our clients, but our own work as communicators.
Amid a world of rapid changes, I find myself somewhat comforted to realise that many other things have remained remarkably consistent. Good advice remains good advice, no matter how it’s delivered, and so the fundamentals of what we do as a strategic communications advisor have remained unchanged. Technology has not altered the fact that we are a people-centric business, with our success based in no small parts by the quality of the relationships we build with our clients, colleagues and partners. Long may that continue.
What I love about the job hasn’t changed much either, after nearly 15 years in financial communications, I still very much enjoy the excitement of getting to know a new client, going through the detailed learning process to really understand their business, people and strategy and working out how we can best help them achieve their goals.
I have been lucky enough to see many client relationships develop into the long-term, giving us the opportunity to continue supporting our clients as their businesses continue to grow and evolve. Perhaps my favourite example is MaxCyte – one of my first new clients at Consilium, and one that we’re proud to still be advising over eight years later.
Theirs has been a fascinating story. Offering unique cell engineering capabilities through their flow electroporation technology, MaxCyte’s technology was ahead of its time when we first met them. In 2015, with the first CAR-T therapies not yet approved, the enormous potential of a new generation of gene and cell technologies was only just permeating the wider public consciousness. From the outset we knew that this company had great potential, and conversations within our network revealed that their reputation in the field was excellent, and indeed many of our existing clients and contacts were using their technology in their drug discovery programmes.
Communicating the story in those early days was not without its challenges. We worked hard with CEO Doug Doerfler, the wider management team and other advisors to develop a set of messages that would convince analysts and investors, many of whose limited experience of electroporation was limited to memory of a cumbersome process in their university labs, to recognise the promise of this exceptional technology offering.
The Company delivered their IPO on AIM in 2016, itself no mean feat in a UK market that struggled with the perceived binary risk profile of biotechnology. However, the revenue generating aspect of the MaxCyte business model ultimately proved attractive for UK investors to commit.
In subsequent years AIM investors were well rewarded. Led by a respected, liked and trusted management team, MaxCyte consistently delivered, steadily gaining a following, enhancing its shareholder register and advancing its development through successive fundraisings to a valuation of over $1bn.
The company became a textbook example of how to deploy capital markets to support and develop a highly promising technology platform, culminating with a successful crossover round supported by blue chip specialist investors closely followed by a dual listing on NASDAQ in 2021, a milestone for the Company.
MaxCyte is now a recognised leader in the field of cell-engineering, and it is exciting to think that even now we are barely scratching the surface of the potential of the advanced cell therapies that their technology helps enable, and we very much look forward to continuing supporting them on their journey.
