8 minute read
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For some, their future is something that sneaks up on them when they least expect it, a sudden culmination of many small steps that did not immediately appear to lead anywhere. For others, the future and the success it brings, are the result of a childhood dream and years of hard work in making it happen.
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For William Rowe, his future is now his present, thanks to a desire to be more than one man.
“I’ve always wanted to be in charge of something bigger than myself, to run something substantial, watch it grow and use my creativity to help it along,” he explains. As president and CEO of Nutrasource Diagnostics he’s built a company that allows him to do these things and at the same time enjoy the freedom that comes with being in control of his situation.
“It’s refreshing, it’s liberating. I love the fl exibility of being able to make decisions and not having to wait on some kind of bureaucracy for the decision-making process. And just watching your ideas grow and become reality is very rewarding.”
Although he says his youth wasn’t one that would indicate he’d become a successful businessman, he did have a specifi c outlook on things.
“I just always looked at situations from a creativity perspective,” he says. “I always found myself analyzing how to do things better or in a different way to optimize or maximize them.”
After growing up and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo, Rowe settled into a job in corporate development at Waterloo, focusing on fundraising and attracting corporate dollars. He stayed there for four years before leaving to take a similar job in the science and engineering department at the University of Guelph.
Although he never touched the science directly, Rowe gained valuable hands-on experience in the business of science and engineering, experience that made him comfortable with moving from corporate development to running a business.
It was while he was at the University of Guelph in 2002 that a colleague, Dr. Bruce Holub, approached him with an idea about a unique blood test that the idea behind Nutrasource Diagnostics began to take shape.
“A private lab group had developed this test and he and I had a rapport or relationship prior to that and he brought it to me to see if this was something we wanted to commercialize and make available,” Rowe says.
After examining and running business scenarios on the test for a few weeks, Rowe decided it was fi t to be commercialized. Given the name Omega Score, this test was the fi rst offering Nutrasource would release to the market.
The Omega Score test is designed to determine the Omega-3 levels in an individual’s blood. The results can help determine whether a person should take supplements to boost his or her Omega-3 levels.
It also allows those who take it to correlate their readings with accepted values for heart disease risk and death from heart attack risk. This gives them a chance to screen themselves in advance, allowing them a chance to reduce those risks through dietary or lifestyle changes.
From 2002 to 2004, Rowe ran Nutrasource as a “hobby shop” while he continued his job in corporate development with the University of Guelph, where he had been since 2000.
By January 2004, the Omega Score test had become so successful that Nutrasource was simply too big to remain a side business.
“It got to the point where its success, along
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with the success of other things we added on, in terms of revenue streams, grew to the point where it warranted my full-time attention,” Rowe says.
In addition to turning Nutrasource into a fulltime business, Rowe also licensed the Omega Score test to Life Labs, then known as MDS Laboratory Services, which now offers it to consumers across Canada through their physicians. The company has since grown in size by leaps and bounds, with an over fourfold increase in staff in the past three years alone. What started with only the Omega Score test has since grown to encompass over 30 product lines in four different areas: human clinical trials, regulatory consulting, product analytics and human diagnostics. And with different sectors comes different business models.
“We’re now a CRO for clinical trials and regulatory work,” explains Rowe. “In the product analytics and human diagnostics work, our commercialization model is to take what other companies have developed in the lab and make it commercially available for their benefit and for our own.”
Nutrasource’s human clinical trials division designs and conducts clinical trials. This work is done on the behalf of its sponsor clients, who seek to prove its products work in humans and provide a specified health outcome. In the regulatory branch, the work features analyzing different regulatory jurisdictions, such as the EU or the US. This can also encompass working to get products registered with Health Canada. The product analytics department tests products in order to confirm the label’s claims. This includes testing for any heavy metals or other contaminants, as well as for stability, shelf life and overall nutritional content. For human diagnostics, the work is ultimately more personal. This division works on tests that help people determine the levels of various biomarkers in their blood. Examples of these biomarkers include Omega-3 and Vitamin D.
The single underlying theme in all four segments of Nutrasource’s work is nonpharmaceutical active ingredients. This means all the products with which the company works feature naturally-occurring active ingredients, be they in foods, beverages, supplements, homeopathic remedies or cosmetics. All this work is part of Rowe’s overall goal for the company, a vision he has had since the beginning.
“The vision hasn’t changed from the original outset. We want to be the world leader in providing evidence-based wellness for individual healthcare practitioners and the food, beverage and nutrition industry. We want to provide the science that validates the prevention model.”
Indeed, Rowe believes his goal for the company is already well on its way to being attained.
“I already see us as a world leader from the standpoint of a full solution for companies who want to commercialize new product or further validate existing product using evidence-based wellness as a model.”
The prevention model Rowe seeks to validate is that where healthcare is focused on preventing illness rather than treating it when it arises. It’s based on the idea that a healthy lifestyle now can prevent large healthcare bills in the future. It is also the model Rowe sees used across the globe and developing a toehold in North America.
“I think in Eastern countries such as China and India, there’s a lot more credence put on the prevention model. And I think in North America, that’s certainly a big emerging trend.”
He believes if people were to practice preventive healthcare, they would enjoy longer and healthier lives.
“And they can’t do that if they’re not healthy, whether through chronic conditions, terminal illness or pain. And so the healthier they are, and they want to be proactive about that, the better their lifestyle as they age.”
Rowe is also enthused by the work Nutrasource does and how it gives a direct financial benefit to ordinary consumers by helping them offset their medical costs through being proactive.
“And I think the kind of work that we’re doing here, where we’re demonstrating how natural health products that are very inexpensive can be used to really reduce risks in a lot of major disease categories, is just fascinating work.”
This fascinating work has driven Rowe to want to improve and contribute to the healthcare system. He acknowledges the politics involved with healthcare, but is keenly aware that without changes, governments may find themselves in serious financial deficits in the future.
“So I think it’s a fascinating political discussion on how much does the prevention model save, does it save anything? Is it better for the economy to have a Canadian citizen living a rich full healthy life for a longer period of time or is it more costly? Is it better for the economy to have somebody sick after the age of 40 and be bedridden until they’re 90 and be dependent on various meds and treatment and be dependent on the healthcare system?”
He may not have all the answers, but Rowe knows the debate is needed and he will be paying close attention to what both sides have to say. His experience has given him the knowledge of what is needed to make a successful jump from the lab to the marketplace. It’s more than simply having an idea, he says, adding he has found scientists and engineers will often wait too long before realizing they have a product they can sell.
He says the best thing they can do is to take a product that is good enough and start selling it.
“You can always come out with ‘next generation’ or ‘new and improved’ or whatever you want to call it downstream, when your new idea for your product is ready.”
Selling when a product is ready, but not yet perfect, can only help new entrepreneurs in the long run, Rowe says. The knowledge and feedback available in the marketplace can give entrepreneurs the information they need to improve their offerings.
“But if you never get out of the back room, or never get out of the lab, you’re just going to continue chasing your own tail. At some point you have to start selling.”
As co-founder, president and CEO, Rowe has his finger on the pulse of the company. He continues to work to grow the company while not losing sight of his original vision, a role that has remained almost unchanged since those early days in 2002 when it all began.
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