Background
L.E.K. Consulting had recently finished supporting a mid-cap specialty biopharma company in developing a credible growth strategy. After years of operating as a largely single-product company, the client was expanding into a more therapeutically diverse portfolio with ambitions to grow both its U.S. footprint and its international reach. The risk was a common one in specialty biopharma: The strategy outpaces the organization, and what should be a growth phase becomes an execution bottleneck.
Coming out of the strategic work, the client asked for additional support to transform the organization so it could deliver on the company’s new growth ambitions. To support a more growth-oriented and therapeutically diverse future, the organization needed to build new capabilities, enable growth and strengthen governance to manage a broader portfolio and operate efficiently both in the U.S. and internationally.
Approach: Identifying where growth would stall without intervention
The starting point was a rigorous benchmarking of peer organizational scale, structure and operating-model choices. We used this analysis to identify which structures had effectively supported growth and where others had been constrained by underinvestment, fragmentation or complex models.
Four main recommendations emerged.
Centralize selectively as you scale
As additional assets and therapeutic areas were added, the cost to operate parallel infrastructure across business units would increase sharply. Select activities (e.g., finance and learning and development) can be consolidated without negatively impacting their effectiveness.
Invest ahead of the portfolio
Business development, corporate project management and procurement were underpowered relative to where the portfolio was heading. These are capabilities with long lead times to build and are essential for driving the planned growth.
Streamline governance
Even before the addition of more assets and therapeutic areas, the compliance-driven culture had created bureaucracy that slowed down decision-making. Streamlining governance structures and pushing routine decision-making deeper into commercial and finance units would recover capacity without sacrificing oversight.
Standardize and automate tasks
Repetitive manual processes and the absence of a single source of truth across business insights and analytics, procurement, and logistics meant skilled people were spending significant time reconciling data rather than using it. Automation and standardization would redeploy that capacity toward growth-enabling work.
Result: A roadmap the board could act on
The result was a strategy-aligned operating model that addressed capability gaps and enabled cost-effective growth. We helped management translate its revised growth agenda into a more scalable organization with a clear set of priorities across structure, governance, processes and systems, as well as a transformation roadmap that could be taken to the board of directors.
The engagement reinforced the learning that getting the organization design wrong at the point of strategic transition is one of the most expensive mistakes a specialty biopharma company can make.
