The business supplied clinical trials with everything from pipettes to centrifuges, about $40M a year, and it only sold. Customers were asking for rental, trial costs were rising, and we were losing bids. Leadership had been trying to add a rental model for ten years.
Why it kept failing
Rental touches everything a sales business takes for granted: how assets are accounted for, tracked, returned and billed every month. None of it was documented, and most functions had already decided it couldn't work.
The finance director was firmly against it; his team was tired of always patching systems after the fact. Operations had twenty years of practice and saw only risk. The procurement director had watched it fail before and wished me good luck. The business owner wanted everything built in-house in the first version, knowing he would leave within a year.
What I did
Operations said the process was too complex to describe, so I documented it myself, across accounting, procurement and operations. That map became the company standard and was reused for a site migration.
The finance director's objection was that his operations system couldn't support rental. I spent four hours learning that system, then two weeks of daily calls mapping a multi-site accounting setup where every site worked differently. Two months later he asked for his sites to run the pilot.
I could have escalated to the division president. It would probably have been faster, and it would have cost the team's morale and invited quiet sabotage.
With the business owner, I built an assumption backlog, tested positioning with customers, and argued for starting with vendors instead of building everything ourselves. Getting there took some maneuvering.
Most of the team wasn't used to this much uncertainty inside a stage-gate process. We started before the path was clear and found it by walking. Their managers later told me they barely recognized them.
What happened
The service launched nine months after I started, before any customer kick-off, with two vendors qualified, MSAs and SOWs negotiated, a financial model and pricing, and five leads already in the pipeline. It was also the company's first use of agile contracting, and I took part in negotiations with procurement directors from PPD, newly acquired, and other Thermo Fisher divisions.