Dr Jeff Cornwall

Anita at Small Business Trends has a great post on how independent coffee shops are more effective at listening to their customers. This is not only a good practice for coffee shop entrepreneurs like Jason at A Thought Over Coffee, but all small businesses. The ability to think like their customers is a key competitive advantage entrepreneurs have over their large corporate competitors since they are so much closer to their customers day-to-day as they run their businesses.

Here is Part II of this week’s COTC.

From time to time I have written about the importance of vacations or just time off for entrepreneurs. Judy Artunian at the NFIB web site offers their take on this topic.
“More often than not, the entrepreneurs who could stand to gain the most from taking a two-week vacation are often the ones who can’t bear to be away from their business for more than two days. If you’re having trouble breaking away for that leisurely trip to the Bahamas or to your brother’s lakefront cabin, it might be time to re-orient your thinking about vacations.”
She says it can be good for your company, good for your employees and good for your ability to deal with the stresses your venture keeps sending your way.
And as I also recommend, she says to make sure to really take time off.
“Eighty percent of small-business owners check e-mail or voice mail while they’re on vacation, according to the results of a recent survey conducted jointly by Thomas Industrial Network and the U. S. Small Business Administration; try not to be one of them. Too much checking in will dilute the regenerative powers of a vacation. Urge your staff to call you if they need help with a matter that can’t wait until you return, but stress to them that you need this time to decompress from the pressures of work.”
Before one vacation I told my staff that they should only call me if the office burns down (completely) or if someone would die if they didn’t contact me before I got back. (I still got two calls, but neither had anything to do with a fire or a potential death…..).

Jason at A Thought Over Coffee sheds some light on the chaos that can be a part of the start-up of a new venture, especially when it also involves moving half way across the country.

COTC will be presented in two parts this week. Find Part I here. Part II will be posted on Wednesday.

Pathfinder Therapeutics Inc. is a medical device company founded by a group of six clinical and academic professors from Vanderbilt and Washington Universities located in Nashville, TN.

“PTI’s mission is to develop innovative image-guided therapeutic applications that allow physicians to perform more efficient, accurate procedures and improve patient outcomes. Our vision includes the continuing development of a commercial image-guided surgical software platform on which we can build many innovative therapeutic applications can be researched, developed, evaluated in clinical trials, and cleared for sale by the FDA. As the founders have continued to do as scholars in presenting their academic research, we will always act with the utmost integrity and honesty in dealing with all of their stakeholders.”
The first commercial application under development by PTI is a image-guided liver surgical system. They currently have a working prototype of this system.

Image-guided surgery essentially describes using preoperatively acquired medical images as an interactive roadmap during a surgical procedure. Extensive phantom, animal and limited clinical experiments have been performed with the system and the results published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The working system will continue to be utilized in preliminary clinical investigations for liver applications over the next year. The goal in the first year of operations is to develop a clinical prototype that is ready for evaluation in a full-scale efficacy FDA clinical trial.
Dr. James Stefansic, the company’s COO, is the only founder working currently full-time for the business. Jim is doing this while also completing an MBA from Belmont’s Massey Graduate School. “It has been difficult to juggle all of my responsibilities, but fortunately there is some overlap between my work at Pathfinder and some class projects. I am certainly applying what I’ve learned in my courses from Belmont over the last three years. I am pleasantly surprised at how much my coursework transcends into the real world of business.”
The goal for PTI is to position it as an acquisition target, preferably to a large medical device company. They will most likely need to initiate sales and marketing channels before this occurs. Once the initial product has been sold to a larger company, the founders of PTI plan to develop other image-guided therapy applications from their software platform.
Jim has had to make adjustments during his transition from a university to their new venture’s start-up. “It is challenging to work with faculty members at Vanderbilt who were once on my dissertation committee. The setting is totally different and our roles have changed, but we all have respect for each other and the talents we bring to the table. I would not have quit my safe job at Vanderbilt to do this if I didn’t trust everyone involved, especially our President Bob Galloway. It is very exciting to take something that was once a project in the lab and bring it to the market as a medical device that can really improve people’s lives.”
One of the biggest adjestments for Jim has been the pace of his new life as an entrepreneur. “Most definitely is it related to the speed at which things move. Research can be a slow, tedious process and there are usually no hard deadlines in place that constrain your time to achieve a breakthrough result. With Pathfinder, however, our investors have the right to know developments on a week-by-week basis, and this is always in the back of my mind as we plan for the future. I still have freedom in doing my job, but it is certainly a different kind of freedom.”

16th century Russian Icon. Christus Rex