In a career that has spanned from software and sales in France to business studies in Southern California to finance work at a slew of West Coast science and technology companies, Nature's Toolbox's new chief financial officer said his move to the Rio Rancho startup is the "logical" next step in that career.
Nature's Toolbox (NTx) appointed Marcel Roche as its new chief financial officer, the Rio Rancho-based life sciences startup announced on Tuesday. Roche joins the startup from Mission Bio, a biotherapeutic company based in San Francisco.
Before that, he worked at other life science and technology companies, both public and private, including Illumina and Guardant Health. While Roche lives in California, he said he commutes to New Mexico from the Bay Area every other week.
"With a proven track record of financial acumen and strategic thinking, Marcel [Roche] will play a pivotal role in steering our financial strategies and driving growth," Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., NTx's CEO, said in a statement.
Coffin told Albuquerque Business First in early August, when NTx was named as a partner on an $18 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract, that the startup is "going to be in hyper growth mode." That includes a significant amount of hiring and physical expansion.
About a month after being named on the DARPA contract, NTx announced another milestone thanks to a partnership with a Texas hospital system through a Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) contract. Alexander Koglin, Ph.D., NTx's president and chief science officer, said that work will allow a centerwithin the Texas hospital to use the Rio Rancho startup's NTxscribe platform to help produce RNA-based products.
"[NTx] has all the ingredients you want in a company entering scale-up phase and posed to revolutionize a market," Roche told Business First this week. "When I think about what happened at Illumina that led the genomics revolution, I really think NTx can lead the biomanufacturing revolution."
Business First sat down with the new CFO to hear more about how he wants to help lead the startup into its period of "hyper growth."
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Albuquerque Business First: I've talked with folks at Nature's Toolbox several times over the past couple of months and they've said the company is about to enter a period of rapid growth. As CFO, how do you think you can take your previous experience and help lead the business from a financial side into this period of rapid growth?
Marcel Roche: When it comes to what a CFO does, there are things that are table stakes. Yes, your books should be in order. Yes, you should be all over compliance and controls. Yes, you should make sure the business is properly funded and you're giving a path of return to investors. That's a given, that's the base.
Where a CFO starts to add value is when they think comprehensively about the business. When I talk to the head of operations, I'm not thinking [generally accepted accounting principles], I'm thinking like he thinks, which is how do I get better products faster? If I talk to sales, I'm going to be thinking like they think, which is how do we delight our customers and increase customer satisfaction. As opposed to imposing the view of the accounting world.
Anybody can do a return on investment calculation, but the true value add is when you really think about the business as a whole and how all the pieces come together. That's what I'm trying to do.
So basically listening to the different parts of the company and then integrating all of those together in a tight financial packing to help continue to grow the company. Is that essentially what you're saying? It goes actually slightly beyond that. Two things. First, a win — when we know we have a high-performing team — is where you could pick any VP or exec and they could pitch what I do, or I could pitch what they do. Which means I really understand, they really understand. That's the beauty, as opposed to having folks who stay focused on their functions.
When it comes to good financial hygiene, a lot of the work right now is to build what I call "muscle memory." There's a certain cadence of asking certain questions. If we have opportunities, how do we think about articulating in a clear, crisp, data-driven manner when we make a decision? Once that muscle memory's built, at every level of the business and in every function, there's a bit of magic that happens. Everything gets easier. When you're going to have a conversation it's to assess options. It's not to argue.
Number two, it scales beautifully. Because those processes — those thought processes — when they're in place, you can multiply your numbers and it won't really change. The culture and the partnership is in place. That's a lot of my job right now.
What do you think the biggest challenge will be to achieving everything you've just said going forward? We have so many opportunities in so many markets and so many applications, that our job is to prioritize and focus. We know there are many extremely attractive markets where we have a very strong product-market fit, but you can't do it all at once. So it ties back to the prior comment on having a bit of rigor in the decision-making process so we know what we're going after.
