My global executive MBA internship literally took off the ground, on a flight to St Louis from Boston with Mark Bamforth, President & CEO of Gallus Biopharmaceuticals. Couldn’t have asked for a more exciting start than that!

Gallus is a biologics contract manufacturing start-up which will be formed based on the acquisition of J&J Centocor’s multi-million dollar biopharmaceutical manufacturing operation in St Louis. I’m spending 3 months of my 1 year Saltire Fellowship program with Gallus developing a marketing strategy for the company in tandem with the acquisition process!

I was given a full agenda for the first 2 weeks to give me a good start into my project. On my first day, I met with the operations management team and had a full tour of the facility, from where the raw materials are brought into the plant, right through to the end of the production line, packaging and warehousing. This was followed by various interviews with key personnel who gave me more in-depth information on each production stage. My journey into the world of biotechnology had just begun!

A key learning/reminder from Babson which I’ve found useful over and over again is accelerating the learning experience by getting comfortable with asking questions. Just by serendipity, I found posters on the office walls of the St Louis plant relating to the Japanese (Toyota) philosophy of asking Why? at least 5 times when conducting a Root Cause Analysis to really help understand a problem. It has certainly helped me to understand my new surroundings quickly!

The whole SaltireFoundation Fellowship journey has been nothing but phenomenal, life changing and full of opportunities and this is a good example of all that. And Mark Bamforth (GlobalScot) has been a great mentor to me on this journey. I’m looking forward to adding value to Gallus and bringing back valuable experiences to enterprises in Scotland!