Medical Equipment Developer Business Plan

The founders of Medquip, Inc. are Eric Smith and Timothy R. Jones. Eric will serve the company as Vice-President of Research & Development. Tim will serve as Vice-President of Corporate Development. Their biographies follow in the Management Team section.

Several key people are actively being sought. These are summarized in Management Team Gaps.

Organizational Structure

Medquip, Inc. will have a CEO to be recruited (see Management Team Gaps) who will have Eric Smith reporting to him as well as Timothy R. Jones and a V.P. of Sales and Marketing (see Management Team Gaps).

Eric will handle responsibility for R&D, design, compliance, and initial manufacturing and sourcing.

Tim will handle strategic growth plans, capitalization, and serve as CFO initially.

Reporting to Eric will be additional design engineers and compliance documentation personnel. Some of these tasks can also be handled by outside consultants in the early going. The ramp-up of essential personnel and tasks are included in the Personnel Plan that follows.

Management Team

Eric Smith (40)

BS, Mechanical Engineering, M.I.T., 1980

Eric Smith began his training in mechanical engineering at MIT and has a broad background in leading edge medical, semiconductor, biotechnology, and cleanroom product design and management. Creatively integrating technologies from diverse fields and transforming these elements into world class product solutions is his specialty. He has spent the past two years developing two medical devices, a full visibility ligating band dispenser and a revolutionary tissue dissolving lysis technology. Recent accomplishments include innovations for the Boston Scientific Speedband multiple ligating band dispenser. He was also responsible for the mechanism design of the Boston Scientific Corp. Alliance esophageal balloon inflation device through their supplier, ACT Medical Corp. Both devices have rapidly attained significantly greater than a 50% world market share for Boston Scientific Corp. Smith pioneered the application of high-energy particle beams to titanium hip and knee implants to increase their life by a factor of ten and for this work received an Industrial Research and Development IR100 award for one of the 100 best technology products. He initiated the development of a peritoneal dialysis system for Millipore Corporation, which incorporated ultra pure water and sterile connection technologies. Earlier research and development on the first Nitinol blood clot filter at Harvard Medical School was in cooperation with Dr. Morris Simon. Mr. Smith also was a founder of ABS, Inc., in 1995, a bio remediation products company currently manufacturing and cross licensing technology sold worldwide.

Ten United States Patents have been issued to Smith to date. Several more have also been granted internationally. A total of sixty-four subsequent United States patents granted to corporations including IBM, Medtronics, Northrop Grumman, Applied Materials, Eaton, Hitachi, and others cite these ten patents granted to Smith, a strong indication of the strategic significance of his diverse body of work. A number of biotechnology patent applications are currently being prosecuted in the United States and in several other countries. Patents issued to Smith include a medical X-ray system, clean room laminar airflow systems, chemical and thermal transfer processes, and robotic mechanisms for semiconductor and medical particle accelerators used worldwide by leading corporations such as Intel, IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Motorola. A detailed list is below.

Mr. Smith has led new product developments for the past 17 years as Director of Engineering and Technology and various Research and Development positions. He led the systems design team for a $3 million production particle accelerator with a $50 million product development budget as Mechanical Systems Manager for Varian Associates, a large multinational technology corporation. He has managed an international staff of engineers and successfully transferred leading edge technology from Far East joint venture partners. His responsibilities have also included manufacturing management for a supplier of critical production equipment to IBM, Intel, and Eastman Kodak CD. Systems plagued by months of installation, rework, and errors performed flawlessly the first time and every time at Intel wafer fabrication cleanrooms after Smith re-designed the product and assumed full manufacturing responsibility.

An invited speaker at a worldwide technical conference in Kyoto, Japan, publications include a recent cover story for “Cleanrooms” magazine, and numerous technical articles related to high purity manufacturing, robotics, heat transfer, and mechanism designs.

United States Patent Numbers and Titles Currently Issued to Eric Smith as inventor:

5040484 Apparatus for retaining wafers [Semiconductor].
4997606 Methods and apparatus for fabricating a high purity thermally-conductive polymer.
4927438 Horizontal laminar air flow work station [Semiconductor and medical applications].
4899059 Disk scanning apparatus for batch ion implanters.
4836733 Wafer transfer system [Robot].
4832781 Methods and apparatus for thermal transfer with a semiconductor wafer in a vacuum.
4817556 Apparatus for retaining wafers.
4580058 Scanning treatment apparatus [Application: human hip and knee implants].
4531821 Item transporting [medical X-ray].

Timothy R. Jones (50)

BBA, Marketing, U. of Notre Dame, 1970
MBA, Finance, Executive Program, Loyola University, 1972

Mr. Jones has more than 27 years of business management experience. He is the founder of Plinth Capital in Ourtown, USA. He has successfully assisted early stage companies in capital formation, strategic planning, and business growth. His background includes management positions with two Fortune 500 companies, Lever Brothers Company, and the LCR Division of Squibb, Inc. Mr. Jones has previously been an executive in three start-up ventures and one turn-around.

His experience includes working with two investment banking firms, one that focused on privately held companies and the other on early stage publicly traded companies in development stage. Additionally, the management team of Medquip, Inc. includes a physician advisory board which is already being assembled. The Board of Directors is currently open.

Management Team Gaps

An experienced CEO is actively being sought. Timothy Jones is presently conducting the search. The desired profile is for a CEO experienced in the medical device arena, ideally who was part of a previous start-up venture that grew to exceed a minimum of $20 million in sales and had a successful exit strategy.

The CEO will help to identify and bring in a VP of Sales and Marketing.

Eric Smith is actively searching for design engineers and consultants. Several have been identified and are available.

Personnel Plan

The Personnel Plan chronicles the growth of the organization to 31 employees in the first three years. The third year could require a few additional people besides those indicated especially if sales reach or exceed $20 million. Production assembly people are grouped together at approx. $15k per person. Payroll costs and benefits are pegged at 22% although they could be lower in Puerto Rico.