Getting Real with Corey Veverka — Total Validation Services

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Welcome to the show. We're talking this is another Getting Real episode, talking with an entrepreneur about their journey and how their leadership has developed and grown. And I think you'll hear some things for yourself in all of this. Hi everyone, my name's Bill Gallagher. I'm the host of the show and your friendly neighborhood Scaling Coach. You can find hundreds of episodes like these with entrepreneurs, other coaches, the gurus and experts, the authors that make up the world of scaling up all@scalingcoach.com there's also show notes, tools, links, special offers, that kind of thing, even a free copy of the book Scaling up right there@scaling coach.com these getting real episodes on our podcast and live streams explore how leadership has shaped our leaders over time through the growth of their business. What lucky breaks have they had? How have they negotiated the breakdown, the surprises along the way, and what has frightened or even embarrassed them? What do they regret and what do they wish they could tell their younger selves? This episode is sponsored by the Bay Area Entrepreneurs Organization Chapters, commonly known as eor. Our member led organization is the best place for entrepreneurs to find peers to connect and learn and grow with. And I'm really proud personally and have been a member for EO for over 20 years now and through several different companies. The EO members in the Bay Area chapters are supported and connected to over 14,000 around the world, giving them access to a whole world of entrepreneurship. If you'd like to apply for membership or to get more information, just visit eonetwork.org or drop us a line and I'll hook you up. So listen in now. Now as we talk with Corey Viverka. Corey, how are you?

Great. How are you doing, Bill?

I'm good. I like that we zoomed in there. Look a little scary there for a minute. Corey is in the Bay Area also and you're currently president of the San Francisco chapter, right?

That is correct, yes. Been took over in July and got another six months and it's been a great journey so far.

Yeah, not long to go now on the, on the downslope.

Yeah, a little bit. Little bit, yeah.

So I'm excited to have you on the show. I'd like you to tell a little bit about like your how did you first become an entrepreneur? What had you developed this affliction? And then we'll talk kind of about some lessons that you've had along the way. So first off, tell our listener viewers about the business and then go back to the beginning, Right? Sure.

So our company, Total Validation Services we support biotech and drug manufacturers in making sure that their manufacturing facilities meet regulatory requirements. So our jobs come in when a new manufacturing facility is built and they have to show the FDA and other regulatory agencies that it's working the way it's supposed to. So we produce all that documentation to do that. So it's usually right on the back end of construction projects. So we work with engineers.

Once they've built a facility, you're essentially validating that they built it in the right way.

Exactly, yes.

Not the ongoing production.

We do a little bit of that every once in a while because there's always changes to that and every change that you make has to be validated. So we do have ongoing work with clients as well. But the majority of that ongoing work, most clients, most drug producers do in house. It's the capital intensive work with new construction where they need outside resources and we provide teams to do that.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So it's more people intensive and it's about the review of those things.

Yes, exactly, exactly. So it's understanding how the manufacturing process works, how the equipment that controls the environment, the equipment that controls the air handlers, the cleaning processes, all of that, that goes into making sure that you have safe, effective drugs, that when you either inject him or take a pill, whatever it is, that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

I've coached a couple companies in biotech and supplements and things like that and testing and, you know, there's a great deal of rigor there, even if it's for something that seems as less serious like. But anything that you're going to put in your mouth, just in your body, we want to know that not only is it good, but all the stuff that makes it is done in the right way. And it's, it's serious work.

Many layers that go into it. Yes.

Talk to us about where you grew up, how did you grow up? Where did you grow up? Like that kind of thing. And where do you think that this idea that you should be an entrepreneur hit you?

So I grew up all over. My parents were academics, basically, and so we followed a lot of their academic pursuits. So was born in St. Louis, moved to New York City. That's where my mom got her PhD at Columbia, moved to Boston for a teaching job, moved to Kansas City for another teaching job, and then kind of settled in and around high school in Philadelphia, where my mom was teaching at Villanova University, which is where I ended up going. So that was always nice to go Run over and say hi to mom every once in a while. I was an engineer out of going into school at Dylan Opus. I was a mechanical engineer. We didn't grow up with much. We were pretty shoestring growing up.

So.

Growing up, I never really had an entrepreneurial bug. I knew I wanted to be more financially successful than my parents had been because we really didn't have much. So I knew that was something that I wanted. But I was going in through kind of the engineering track. I was figuring out, you know, I had a little bit of social skills, more than maybe some of the other engineers that I knew. So I was thinking more of like, in terms of leadership. I felt I had good leadership skills, maybe a little bit of sales. One of my superpowers is, is woo, is being able to move people. So I always felt that that was where my career would go into, in, in terms of leadership and, and sales. So career winded through a little bit of engineering work with some, with a big multinational engineering company, moved up into leadership there. And then I got wooed away from that big engineering company into a small company, TBS Total Validation Services, that I'm. That I now own. This was in 2001 or so. And similarly, this is a small company. We had about 20 people at the time. And I took on an operations role and also in a sales slash role on that side of things. And kind of mid-2015 or so or 2013, I should say. We, my. The owner of the company at that time said, hey, I'm looking to potentially exit. Would you be interested in buying me out? So we've, we've kind of figured out how to do that. Got an SBA loan. I brought on a business partner who actually worked at the company as well. So he's still my partner. And it was two years of very hard negotiations. But we did work out a buyout. And so it's been, it's been five years, a little over five years now.

If you, if you look at, back at that, was there a lucky break in there that you didn't realize that that made things easy, that that was not your own skill and brilliance?

Well, so me joining TVS was an unfortunate accident. The person that was supposed to be what that was being groomed to take over TVS by the previous owner died in a motorcycle accident, which is how they, how the previous owner reached out to me because I had been kind of known in the industry a little bit. He reached out to me and said, hey, come, come join me. And maybe one day you could you could take over as well. So it always had been kind of there as a. As a little bit of a carrot, but it took a while for it to. For me to grow into. Into that role. I was pretty young, but that was a little bit of something completely outside of my control.

Yeah.

And then the other thing that was a little bit. A little bit lucky, I guess, is we were hung up on financing. He didn't want to sell finance. I didn't have capital to purchase the shares of the company or assets. And I was just listening to sports radio, and there was a commercial from Comerica bank on. We do SBA loans and help companies buy finance. The purchase of companies. Oh, wow. Pick up the phone. And they were actually surprised that they got a lead out of a radio commercial. But that's how it all kind of started there.

Interesting. That's great. And we think about the connection of all those things. So talk about the biggest challenge that you've had so far.

Well, let's see. Certainly understanding the difference between leadership and ownership. And that was kind of a surprise because I had been kind of running the company in a lot of ways before and moving into an ownership role. It surprised me, the difference just in terms of approach, because the buck now stops just with me.

Right.

Before it was, I'd make a mistake and, you know, okay, you know, not a big deal. But the amplitude of decisions and the amplitude of the results really was surprising to me. There was a friend of mine, actually had turned me on to EO when I was going through this buyout process, and he said, he told me, when you become an entrepreneur, life is just magnified. Your highs are higher, your lows are lower. And I didn't quite get it until I kind of stepped into those shoes. And it's like, it's crisis one day and then celebrations the next day. Right. So that was certainly a surprise.

Yeah. And what do you think has been your biggest mistake so far?

Oh.

Or embarrassment or humbling moment.

Right. Yeah. Not keeping track of our expenses. That was like, when we first came on, when we first took over, we had a big project that we were rolling through. Cash was being generated, like, oh, this is great. We took everybody to Disneyland. And then, boy, the next year, I was like, why are numbers so low? And then we started, you know, adding up all these little things that we. That we thought, oh, that'd be nice. Oh, that'd be nice. And we were, you know, we're spending way more than we should have been.

So that took.

That took a couple years and now we're, you know, now we're doing a nice groove and doing the right thing and our numbers are looking much better. So. But yeah, not taking for granted expenses, not taking for granted revenue as well. We kind of coasted on making sure that. Thinking that projects and our clients would kind of keep on coming back. And there was, there was a few mistakes there that we took a few things for granted on relationships with some of our clients. So we'll make that mistake again.

Yeah. So not having your eye on all the different balls. Right. Letting something get out of hand and then impacting the client relationship.

Yeah, yeah, there was a little bit of. Certainly there's a bit of cockiness. I remember one of my biggest regrets was we have a real big client, Genentech. They're, you know, one of the founders and we had, we had a long relationship with them and there was. When I took over, I kind of, I was a little cocky with one of our clients and losing that relationship cost us quite a bit because I was, I was feeling good in my new shoes and I was thinking that, well, they should be just doing what I tell them to do. And I didn't manage a client relationship and took that for granted. And yeah, that's certainly hurt us.

How many people on your leadership team today and maybe like a size, like people size of the business right now?

Yeah, so we have about 30 total people that are on our team. We have of that 30 senior management, there's three of us. And then we have a mid level of project managers that we have another five people. And so those five people each have three or four depending on the, on the client reports below them. So. Yeah.

And how have you managed this last year? Company operations culture, the connection with people, clients doing the work. Talk to us about dealing with COVID.

Yeah, so there was a little bit of, you know, when it first came out, there's a bit of a scare for us because we couldn't, we were continuing to do work for our existing clients, but we couldn't put anybody new on site. Right. So nobody had figured out how because a lot of the work that we do, we have to be physically in the manufacturing facility to, to test and we can do some of the, some of the work remotely, but a lot of it we have to do on site. So they have shut down bringing anybody new on in, you know, April, May time frame or so. So we, we had to. There were a couple people that got put on the bench and so that, that was. So then figuring out with our Clients how to be safe getting some of those protocols in place. As our clients figured out their, their own protocols, fitting into those protocols was a challenge. And then we've all gotten comfortable with Zoom in terms of the way work that we do in terms of our own team. We started giving, you know, we, we did. Since we couldn't have our. Usually we have quarterly in person meetings. Right. So we, we moved to virtual meetings. We, we moved to sending gift baskets and you know, little chachkis here and there to get, make people feel a little good and those, and did some hand delivering of those. That was, that was nice and that kept people engaged. We're going to be doing some, we're going to be doing a virtual party here in the next few weeks as well for our team and bringing in some entertainment and trying to keep, keep people feeling engaged with what we're doing. We're trying, you know, without being able to physically touch people. It's. That part's hard. One thing we did have that's been really hard for us is hiring new people. We have a way that we, that we operate right. There's, there's stuff on the resume that you have experience on how to do things, but we have a particular way style that, that we try to adhere to and we've had two failures of bringing on, of hiring new people because we can't be there right with them to coach them and show them how tbs, the TBS way.

So this is, this is interesting. So just to complete the picture and make sure I heard it right, you're hiring new people now, onboarding new people now without seeing them so much face to face and then sending them to client sites.

That's correct. Usually we have a week or two of onboarding where we, you know, walk people around to different client sites. We have people interact and shadow our teammates so they learn how we do things. And without that and without the project manager and a leader sitting right next to them showing them how to do things and being able to ask questions and the barrier that Zoom creates of having to try to find your project manager online and ask a question question, it's, it's, it's made onboarding and really hard for us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you used any tools to document processes or create anything for the job?

Absolutely. We, we certainly have SOPs, standard operating procedures for everything that we do. So here's how you write a document and here's how you do this and, and that helps. But the, the face to face and you know, just, just being able to ask A question spontaneously has really slowed down that process quite a bit. Yeah, we have a whole library of procedures.

But how far and wide are you operating? Is it Bay Area, is it nationwide, is it worldwide?

So 90% of our business is team based. So we have a project manager that's on site and we have three, four, five, six people that are reporting to that project manager for a client. So that work is on site. In these days they do. They're only on site when they need to be on site, but that's about half the time. The other time when they're writing reports or creating test scripts, they can do that from home. But so in the Bay Area we have, most of our employees are here in the Bay Area. For that we have a small percentage of our work where just because we have an MSA with a client, they say, hey, I need a person over here. Can you send us, you know, a person? And we do that every once in a while. So we have somebody in Cincinnati, we have somebody down in Southern California. You know that that's a small bit, but that's not our core business.

So I would think that new plants and facilities would get built all over the place and you'd have to send a team to somewhere for a while.

Yes, that is absolutely true. And there are bigger players in the market that have multi site and they handle a lot of the country. What makes us a bit unique is a, the Bay Area is expensive to live. The bill rates are high. So it's actually harder for our people to support in, in Kansas or in Ohio at our bill rates. But then conversely, getting people from outside to come work here, the cost of living and travel costs, if you're trying to bring people in here come, it becomes untenable. So our clients here in the Bay Area, which is really one of the hubs of the biotech drug industry, they need people here known and available to work right now. So that's, that's, that's our core business. That's our niche that we have. Yeah.

So talk about your family. Your parents are college professors. What do they think? Are they still alive?

Yeah, they both are. They were. My mom was 20, my dad was 22 when I was born. So they were very young, so very proud. And you know, I absolutely have a good relationship with them, but it's been.

Yeah.

The, they're still not great financially and I, you know, I help support them as much as possible and whenever there's, you know, flights like, oh, I'll pay for your flight and whatnot. So they're, they're certainly proud of what I've accomplished financially and business, career wise. And I'm proud of them for what they've accomplished in their careers as well. My dad ended up moving into social work so I have a lot of that built into me as well, of wanting to help people. And this is how I found through helping drug products come on site, come, come to market is one of the ways that I found that my career has been fulfilling as well because I've gotten to meet a lot of the people that are taking the drug products that are, that we're helping get out to market and that's quite satisfying for me.

And then talk about the integration, your family and your work, your leadership, how do you balance that? How, how is that going and how is that evolved?

So that's, it's interesting. So I have, I have one kid, they're 16 years old and you know, in virtual high school right now my wife Tanya works for the company as well. She works for TBS as well. She's a project manager and so her office is right next to mine and we're, we're talking shop, you know, until 9 o' clock at night a lot of times. So you know that the handoffs, the handoffs of taking care of, you know, orthodontist visits and taking care of school questions and whatnot. So we just do a lot of the handoff because a lot of times just in my role as CEO, a lot of times I'll have, I'll have bigger windows of time available than Tanya does as a project manager. As a project manager, she's got to be accountable to the client and she's got, she's got her team and then I'm some. A lot of times I do project and client work myself but that's usually, I'm usually more focused on TBS stuff in that role. So a lot of times I have more freedom to deal with more of the family type of issues. Gotta go around, get some groceries every once in a while. Yeah.

Yes, it's been an interesting year. Challenged parents, I think in, in more ways than one. If you could go back then and give your, your younger self some advice, what either at the beginning of the thing, your college year, at the business, college years, etc, what's the advice that you have for your younger self?

Learn how to negotiate, I think would be the. I was thinking about this question and yeah, when I, when I growing up not having any money in the family, there was nothing to negotiate for. So it was, you know, find I grew up trying to find deals and but there was, there was no negotiation that I ever had to do. And I think learning some of those negotiation skills that I that I ended up I took a class at Berkeley at UC Berkeley School on from Holly Shrath on negotiation techniques. And that was a real eye opener not only for in terms of negotiating with clients, negotiating with my boss and negotiating the purchase agreement. That could have gone a lot better if I had had more of those skills earlier in my career.

Yeah, that's a good reminder. One of the things that I've gotten so much out of the EO organization is if there's some area whether it's negotiating or a purchase agreement or an employee stock plan or any number of things, having a group to sound things off with Reminder to our listeners that the episode is sponsored by the Bay Area Entrepreneurs Organization chapters and we're known as EO There. This is a member led organization that is a place for entrepreneurs to connect, learn, grow with each other, have some fun along the way, find somebody who shares their set of problems and perspective and be able to navigate their growth as an entrepreneur. I've been a member of this organization for over 20 years now through several different companies in a variety of leadership roles both in the Bay Area and around the world. And I've gotten so, so much out of it. So I, I know that all of our members are then connected to all of the education and peer groups and and then the broader network. We've got over 14,000 members around the world that, that just opens up everything. I've got a shipment stuck in customs in Indonesia. I could find a friend in Indonesia who could help me figure out somebody to go unstick that, that shipment. I my wife's visiting start on a couple day layover in Hong Kong. Let's see if there's something there for her to do and meet some interesting people. She had a fascinating evening. Or we need to make some new friends in one of the cities where we have a factory operation and a couple of suppliers in Jaipur in India. Boom. A whole network of people opens up. So wherever we are around the world, this huge network opens up who are immediately and instantly like connected and intimate and welcoming to us. If you'd like to get some more information or to apply to be a member, see if it's a fit for you. Go to eonetwork.org and you'll find everything you need to find there. Let's talk then about what you're dealing with now. So where are you going from Here, what are you driving towards? What's your bhag or your biggest long term goal and how's that going?

So one of the goals that I had set out was to expand throughout the West Coast. We've served clients in Portland that are basically offshoots of existing relationships that we have here in the Bay Area. And we've done work in San Diego, we've done, you know, we've done projects in San Diego, done projects in la, but we've never really set up an operation in another city on the West Coast. So one of the, one of the targets is to, is to make that happen. And we just signed a master services agreement with a client in Seattle which is actually is an unserved market. There are no, there's no validation companies that, that have offices really up in Seattle. So we're looking to use this, use this project as a, as an anchor to set up an operation up in Seattle. So having those, those two offices is certainly that something that we're working towards in the next couple years.

And so I imagine you're thinking a lot about how do I export and replicate culture across multiple offices now versus in one geographic area.

Absolutely. Without being able to travel and help set some of that up. At least in the short term this is going to be simply a project that we're doing for a client up there. But then as we get more freedom to travel, certainly thinking about finding the right leader to grow that office that we'll be able to share our culture, share the way that we operate because we do a really good job I think of executing projects. There's a lot of our competitors provide bodies that, you know, staff hog like an IT staffing company kind of model where give somebody, one person to two people here and you just give them a resume and they hire them for six months. And that's not what we do. We are. Yeah, yeah. So, so we've really nailed a lot of our tracking tools, a lot of our processes to fit specifically for capital projects. So that's the, that's the niche that we're really trying to fit and just execute the hell out of. So that exporting that culture and those practices and those procedures to another site is certainly going to be a challenge.

And as you think about it, what's your main challenge and like personally as a leader in navigating this next period of growth?

Yeah, so it's a finding the right people that I can work with to groom to be that leader that shares those values and then works with us if they're living in Seattle and running a team in Seattle that they have the right skills that I can help culture to mimic a lot of what's really what our core values are. So instilling that is going to be my biggest challenge and what my role is going to be is finding that person, coaching that person, helping that person find their team to execute as well. The nice thing so the upside out of COVID is that leads learn to work remotely. Much better. So the one thing that will be a little bit easier is that it'll be much more comfortable to share resources between the Bay Area and Seattle or wherever, wherever we are. So that's the one part that will be nice. And then the on site work becomes much, much easier to handle. A lot less of of the workload needs to be performed actually in Seattle. So that's one of the upsides that we're going to have.

Well, if our if any of our listeners or viewers would like to get in touch with Corey, you'll find Corey at TVS Inc. His company TVS Inc.com is the the website. It's there in the crawl in the show notes.

I want to.

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