The 2022 Best Small Firms to Work For: SSI Strategy

Client Industries Served: Life Sciences and Biotech

Consulting Service Lines: Strategy and Operations Management

CMAG: How would you say you've managed to stay among the industry's Best Small Firms to Work For amid these unprecedented times?

As an organization, we place a high priority on people, both within our clients and within our team. We believe that people, are the key to driving successful outcomes. This year, SSI Strategy had a 92% Employee Engagement score. Engagement is a measure of people's connection and commitment to our company and its goals. Having a highly engaged team is something that our leadership team puts an extensive amount of effort and focus on. It means that we have a team that enjoys working together to achieve common goals and that leads to better client outcomes and overall success as a firm.

We've been able to maintain this level of engagement in part due to the work that we deliver and the focus that we place on creating growth and learning opportunities for our team. We help our Life Science clients Maximize Therapeutic Value by designing their translational and clinical strategies, supporting their product launch efforts, and managing patient safety programs. Our team is deeply involved in assisting our clients with bringing new products to market- often to fill a treatment gap within rare diseases or cancers. We help our clients explore more innovative modalities such as cell and gene therapies and digital therapeutics. In our work supporting the functions of the Chief Medical Officer, we are close to the science and program-specific challenges of bringing novel therapies to market. Our team members can truly see the impact that they are having on each engagement and the overall success of each client program.

CMAG: Were there any specific programs of initiatives (internal or external) that contributed to you being a Best Small Firm to Work For?

In addition to the impact of the work that we perform for our clients, we maintain a strong culture within the firm despite the challenges presented by a largely virtual model. We place a high priority on maintaining communication amongst our team and creating opportunities for collaboration and the building of robust friendships and connections across the team.

We plan activities and events throughout the year to bring our team members together, including All Hands Meetings, Collaboration Days, and Mid/Year-End Meetings which include fun activities and celebration like a recent trip to a restaurant featuring a golf/sports simulator. We even have a bit of fun on our themed slack channels which allow our team to get to know each other better. Current crowd favorites include #chatdogs and #travel. Small occasions like this give our blended model of medical and business consultants an opportunity to interact with each other outside of client delivery.

Over the past year we focused attention on building our internal support structures to match our fast-growing team. We built out our operations team, helping us to roll out a Diversity and Inclusion initiative, an updated employee training program and an improved content management platform to ensure SSI frameworks adapt alongside the changes within the Life Sciences industry.

CMAG: What's unique about your firm? What sets it apart?

A unique element of our firm is our consulting model, which leverages a mix of medical (e.g., former CMOs, seasoned Physicians, and Ph.Ds.) and business consulting staff. It has opened doors for us to partner with the CXOs of emerging biotech's, as our model reflects their immediate needs to propel the science while developing an organization. We are collaborating with our client partners, helping to directly impact where the science is going and helping to shape product strategies while maintaining aggressive go to market timelines.

The model works great for our staff too as our work builds the brand of our business consulting and medical experts – highlighting their voice in the industry. Partnering our medical experts with curious-minded and execution-oriented business consultants helps them to focus more on the science and allows the business consultants to deliver closer to the science than they normally would in traditional models. Our clients believe in the model as well, knowing that they have the right people in place to meet major milestones and support scientific innovation.

CMAG: What's the top priority over the next 6 to 12 months?

Our core area of focus is helping our clients to Maximize Therapeutic Value from translational development to product launch. We focus in the areas typically under the remit of the Chief Medical Officer- including Translational and Clinical Strategies, Medical Affairs, Pharmacovigilance, and Health Economics. We've also expanded our capabilities to additional areas such as Regulatory and Clinical Operations in recent years. Last year we made a strategic acquisition of a Pharmacovigilance focused consultancy to grow our team and expand our capabilities. We intend to continue our momentum and ability to support our clients' evolving needs through both strategic hires and inorganic growth including acquisitions.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2023, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your markets?

Across all industries but especially Life Sciences – we have seen a tremendous pace of change and increase in innovation in recent years. Our team of experts have supported our clients by taking a front row seat to support and expedite these advances across gene and cell therapy, rare diseases, and digital therapeutics- just to name a few.

This fall, we've launched a podcast, The Emerging Biotech Leader, to help showcase these experiences and the thought leadership of industry executives and our team of experts. We are excited to share our newfound perspectives across a variety of topics including, the challenges of being a leader in an emerging biotech organization, the challenges of navigating a new modality and other key topics. The podcast can be listened to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon and more.

CMAG: What impact do you think being a Best Small Firm to Work For has on the firm? Employees? Clients?

Our spot on the Best Small Firms to work for list helps to highlight SSI Strategy as a great place to work to those external to our firm- 95% of our team reports being proud to work at SSI and 92% believe working at SSI motivates them to go beyond what they could in another firm. Receiving accolades from prestigious organizations like Consulting Magazine further relays this employee satisfaction- helping us to attract and retain some of the best and brightest consulting staff. In turn, this leads to quality work for our clients, by diligent, highly engaged, and satisfied consultants.

CMAG: Thank you, and congratulations.