The Nearshoring Edge in San Diego's Pharmaceutical Scene

Sam.

Foreign. Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm Brian Sampson, your host and a veteran in the nearshore space. Very excited about today's episode. If you're working in the life sciences space, you're already near shoring. You're considering near shoring. We've got a special treat for you. Our guest, Christy Brown is an expert at both of those based out of San Diego. Christy is very well connected with the life sciences world and she's done nearshoring for quite some time too. Before we jump into it, I want to thank our sponsor, Plug Technologies, Plugg Tech. Plug is a great way to connect talent from all over Latin America to growing U.S. companies. All right, let's get into it. Christy, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Christy, you've lived in San Diego for some time. So what does it mean to live in that part of the country and your exposure to Latin culture?

Yeah, I mean, it's. We moved out here in 2014. My husband is a Marine and so the. We got moved out here because he was stationed down at Miramar. So we moved from Colorado. And obviously San Diego is not a terrible place to live. Weather is good and I really like it. And it's nice in our field of work doing near shoring that we're 30 minutes down the road from Tijuana as well. So that is really nice for a lot of the San Diego based companies that I work with.

Yeah. How prevalent is Spanish in San Diego and help us maybe understand the relationship between Tijuana, San Diego and this broader metro?

Well, I think it's what, 137,000 people cross the border between San Diego and Tijuana every day. So it's, I mean, it's very. The culture affinity. Cultural affinity is like very much aligned. There's a lot of Spanish speakers and versus working for outsourcing in some place like India or a different place. The cultural affinity is very, very much aligned. And there's a lot of people in Tiwanavator. Their English is very good and a lot of speakers in San Diego love stuff.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Just a detour here. Are you a fan of Mexican food and do you have any particular favorites?

My mom's side of the family is all Mexican Latina. My grandmother's last name was Montoya. So I grew up on Mexican food and yeah, love it. They've got some good food down here as well as in Tijuana. Go down the border in 30 minutes and get some Great food.

Yeah. There's nothing like fish tacos from San Diego.

Yeah, exactly.

So also being in San Diego, for those who haven't been, could you just give like a kind of a macro idea of how big the life sciences medical device, you know, pharma, just give like a broad understanding for, for those that haven't, you know, driven on five and you know, all the other freeways, like how big is it? UC San Diego, all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean they've got a, they've got a very large hub of life science companies here in San Diego. Obviously Illumina is one of like the biggest employers out here and some really great companies that are doing awesome things to eradicate cancer and deal with diabetes and help with a lot of the aspects of that. So it's a large hub.

Yeah. When I think of like the San Francisco Bay area, it's software, tech, AI, but when you get down Orange county, it's a lot of medical devices. And then as you go further south, a lot of these life sciences companies. Can you give us a sense there's like hundreds, maybe thousands of companies just dedicated to the space, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I've had the privilege of working with some of those companies that are doing things like I said, one of the companies that I worked with just last year, their mission is literally to eradicate cancer. I mean they have things that are detecting it at stage one instead of stage four so that we can treat it earlier. So it's really cool. The types of stuff that people are working on down here. It's life changing.

Yeah, it's very mission driven. Right? Yeah. It's not just about the next app to get food. It's life saving stuff.

Exactly. That's my background. I come from a background in pharmaceuticals. I worked for Eli Lilly for a decade and so I'm really passionate about that. I know with our company we place a lot of different positions. I mean, some of them are BPO positions, some of them are virtual medical assistants, some of them are life science companies. I mean marketing, operations, finance, you name it, like we can do it. But my passion really lies in that field of life science. So I do a lot with those types of companies.

For those that haven't worked in that particular space before, maybe we'll, we'll start with pharma, for example. Like my background, I've worked a lot in the venture funded software tech world. So this is a kind of a foreign world for me. You know, pharma, life science and so forth. Maybe just take Pharma, for example, like, how are these companies organized? You know, you've got scientists, you've got regulatory people, operations, it. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, I mean, you hit it on the. On the nail there. That's kind of how things, you know, we have pipelines and, you know, it takes a long time, you know, 10 years to get a product to market and billion dollars, you know, and so they're working on a lot of that type of stuff. And especially with the pandemic, I think they're trying to tighten up that timeline to get things going faster. We saw that with COVID But of course, you have to make sure that the medications that we're giving have trials and periods of time where we make sure that they're safe for patients. But, yeah, I worked sales. I was a senior sales rep for them for a decade. And I tend to take a different approach than most salespeople. I'm not your typical salesperson. I would go into some of my doctor's offices and tell them, you know, you probably shouldn't use my product. And, you know, they look at me like I had four heads, like, why are you telling me to prescribe your product? Is that how you get paid? And I'm like, yeah, but I don't think it's the right product for that patient. And here's why. And so you gain a lot of credibility by just making sure that you stay focused on the fact that there's a patient at the end of the line of that stuff. That's important. It's a real person that you're affecting.

Sticking with pharma for a second, before we get into the other related fields with the organization of these companies, you know, I'm thinking like the scientists, for example, they're. They're generally like on site, in the lab. You've got clean rooms, you know, beakers and all this stuff. How about the rest of the organization are those roles that you see are also like, they've got to be. There are the roles that have to be. There are roles that you think could be more remote?

No, I mean, you're right. There. There are a lot of science scientists and stuff that are working on those organizations. People with boots on ground that are, you know, doing the pipetting and the testing of these products. But I mean, if you. If you think about it, they. I mean, even, you know, I worked with a company that was a clothing company, and they needed, you know, engineers. So of course, there. They need these people to help them scale and bring product to market faster and to have, you know, the ability to tap into nearshore software developers, engineers working in the background on, you know, maybe version two of something or, you know, things of that sort. It's really helpful because it allows them to scale and those products that are coming to market faster. Like we just talked about really important products that are affecting real patients that need them. We dealt with a lot of software developers and engineers, for sure.

Yeah. What are things that maybe a pharmaceutical company might be worried about if they were, it was the first time, and they were going to offshore or nearshore, not have their developers right in the office? Maybe help us understand the regulatory landscape and stuff? Yeah.

I think that in all honesty, I've done more work with life science and medical supply companies than pharma companies. But the things that they think about are they need to be able to make sure that their personal protected information is secure. There's secure VPNs, there's HIPAA compliance, and you know, we, we do that all with plug, where we're able to, we understand that, we speak that language, we understand the importance of it and also understand that like, it's important to be in compliance with local employment laws and things of that sort as well. So that's very, very important for the medical industry to make sure that those things openly tight.

So, you know, there's confidentiality, there's invention, IP protection, things like that. I'd imagine these are big items for these types of companies.

And I've found that the companies that I work with, they really need to know that we understand that this isn't just throwing around roles. And, you know, sometimes people think, okay, well if I send a roll over to Mexico, how are you gonna, how are you gonna keep that all tight? And we take that really seriously. So I think happy with the bunch.

Yeah. So speaking of Mexico, because of the, you know, there's such a big concentration like we talked about in San Diego. Is there maybe like a counterpart location in Mexico? You know, whether it's Guadalajara or Mexico City, is there a concentration of life science workers there?

Yeah, I mean, there are quite a few that are in Tijuana, but there's also Guadalajara, Monterey and throughout Latin America. I mean, sometimes when somebody's looking for a Ruby on Rails engineer, you gotta hit Brazil. You know, there's. It's interesting the segments of engineers that kind of are higher populated in certain areas. That's what's been good. And the people that I work with at PUG have lived in those places or do live in those places like Nicaragua or you know, places like that where it's Argentina, you know, they walk the streets, they talk the talk and they know what they're talking about, which I think gives people a little bit of.

So Christy, we talked about a lot of the regulatory concerns and so forth and things that companies need to be considering. What's an advantage for these companies then to nearshore? Like why, why would a life sciences company decide to nearshore part of their staff?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think that it makes my job in particular a lot easier that I work. My territory is here in the California region because I mean the time zone alignment is a huge thing. A lot of the people that I talk to are taking calls at 8 o', clock, 9 o' clock at night. So they're in the exact same time zone with Mexico again 30 minutes down the road. You've got the cultural affinity that makes a big difference. I've worked with other staffing companies previously and one thing that plug always gets right is they always vet to make sure that there's good English speaking skills. So, so that, that's not an issue with the communication across the engineers in the US and Mexico or in Latin America. So I'd say that that's probably a big thing. Those are, those are big pluses. And then of course affordability, you know, I mean they are super, super talented engineers. But if we're being honest, you can place two of those engineers for the price of what you could place for one engineer in the US and they're hard to come up with sometimes in the US it's hard to hire, it's hard to retain them. Google and Amazon are swiping up the best of them and paying them a good paycheck. So it's nice to be able to give these neighbors of ours in the Baja region or throughout Latin America an opportunity to work for US based upgrade. That's doing really nice and dense. Your life changes to them.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. You know, especially in the last few years where people can kind of choose where they want to live, right? San Diego, America's finest city. A lot of people would choose to live there if they could. And especially if they can make say a Bay Area or Seattle salary working from San Diego, you know, that's some kind of personal compensation arbitrage that they're taking advantage of.

And then they can also have boots on ground as well. Like so you were talking about, you know, that idea of a pharmaceutical company or Even, you know, when I was talking with one of the big pharma companies last year, they, they were talking about bringing their whole engineering team in from India. He was like, I can't tell you how expensive it is, how difficult it is to organize that, but we try to do it once a year and get them all. He's like, this would be incredible. They were in Northern California to have them Tijuana jump on a shuttle and be over here in no time.

Yeah, they're there. I mean, how long does it take to get from Tijuana Baja area to San Diego?

Well, where I am, I'm in the Rancho Santa Fe area and I can get Tijuana faster than I can get to the San Diego airport. So. So I think maybe the last time that I went down there was 30 minutes. I mean it's wow.

Incredible. Yeah, absolutely incredible. And then, you know, even some of the other cities you mentioned, like Guadalajara, quick, very quick flight, right? Direct flights, quick flights, super fast.

Yeah. And we can vet for, you know, the, the visas that they need in order to be able to cross the border or you know, sometimes they want them to come for onboarding for, you know, a couple weeks when they first start their position and things of that sort. So those things are all really easy for us to do as well.

So yeah. Now if you're a life sciences company, I'd imagine institutional knowledge, domain knowledge is a huge factor. So you really want to mitigate turnover, have strong retention. And in the world of us software engineers with remote work like you said, Amazon, Google sniffing around, they're recruiting any great engineers everywhere. Talk a little about the maybe attrition or retention that you've seen in Latin America. Is it better than the US and why or why not?

It is because there's not that, there's not that element that's sucking people up from those bigger companies. And also when we talk about cultural affinity, the Latin America culture is very, they're very loyal. So when they start something they tend to really stick to it and believe in it. Nutrition is a big thing, especially for these life experience companies because so much leaves the door when you know your senior engineer is like, I'm going to take a different position. And so I always encourage them to build teams of people so that you know, you have a balance of people that can kind of step up to the plate, learn from each other. Your juniors become mids pretty quickly, mids become seniors quickly. But we find that a lot of companies want us to prove out our value first and so they'll say, you get me one good senior and let me see what you can do. And then we get that right person in place and this is amazing. And they start to build a team around that, which is fine. I understand that completely. You know, they don't know us from hole in the wall, so we're happy to prove out our value. We're pretty confident that we can do it.

If you don't mind, maybe talk about a couple different of those staffing models. Maybe there's the leverage model where a company might have all their senior engineers in San Diego on site and then kind of all the horsepower supporting them might be near shore. The other model might be, they have senior engineers that are from Latin America that are doing a lot of the critical work. How should companies think about that?

Well, I find that a lot of the life science companies that I work with are working on a, you know, version two or version three or version four or something. So I've seen probably, probably all of those models work differently for different companies. But I do see a lot of companies that are lobbying over projects to their engineers in Mexico or Latin America to work on that next version. And they work really in close alignment with their US Counterparts, but they're kind of working on the next version of something that may be coming to market. But I mean, everybody's different. I mean, we had one big pharma company, top five pharma companies that I was in touch with last year, and they had their whole team in India and they wanted to bring their team from India to Mexico for all the points that we were talking about earlier, affordability, the time zone alignment. So such. And they wanted just one, they wanted one senior and they said whoever's going to bring us in this incredible one senior engineer, we're going to bring them to Mexico and then we're going to start moving our teams there after that. And so they wanted their whole, they wanted a full team there that was working on their project. So everybody does things a little bit differently. But, you know, I like, that's what I like about Plug. They're really flexible and versatile when it comes to hiring and doing what people really need.

Christy, we've talked a lot about software today. In a lot of these worlds, there's firmware, hardware. Are these things that are also can be done off site or, you know, is software the most common to be nearshored?

I think it's probably the most common that we do, but for sure the other things we can do as well. You were mentioning. Yeah, and it's amazing. I mean, some of the companies that I've worked with are like. One of them was like a big up and coming athletic clothing brand. And I was talking to their CTO and I'm thinking, I really need software engineers. And I'm thinking of like, is it to build up their website or what are they looking to do? And he's like, kristen, every company needs software engineers. Every company needs, no matter who you are, everybody needs developers, everybody. Software engineers just made me think about it a little differently because it was off course from what I was typically dealing with in the life science area.

We're talking a lot about the budget aspect, which sounds kind of crazy because you think of these companies, they raise gobs of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, but a lot of that is on the. For R and D. And the more that a company can allocate to R and D, the better, you know, in this world. So maybe talk about some of the roles outside of software. Like you talked earlier about bpo, maybe administrative. Can you, can you give some specifics about other roles that companies might nearshore so then they can allocate their budget for stateside critical roles?

Yeah, I mean, we've done, we've done things with call center stuff, with virtual medical assistants. We've done things in the realms of even marketing and finance roles. I think predominantly what we've done is in the software arena or it a lot with just IT, software development, software engineering. But we also work with a lot of staffing companies as well, where they're looking to hire for their clients. And maybe their clients are having budgetary constraints and they want to look to nearshore, but they don't know how to do it. They don't know the compliance and the legalities and things. So they'll tap into us to help with finding some nearshore talent as well.

Yeah. Now, if I'm a CTO of a life sciences company, and I know you've talked to quite a few of them, what are some patterns of maybe things that are keeping them up at night? What are some of their biggest worries?

Yeah, I think they're just trying to stay on track and a timeline to get things developed faster. And so they need more horsepower in the engineering department of things. But they're also talking to their CFO who's saying, we don't have the money for this stuff. And I think that's where they start to come to us and say, wow, this could be a huge value. Because I know that this year I'm budgeted for this amount for my engineering capability, but I just can't find myself to the end of where I need to be with that much horsepower. And so when they come to us and think, gosh, it's, I could take the five engineers and turn it into 10 for the same amount of money. And they're highly talented and I'm getting really good quality work and there's not a language barrier. Why not? I mean, it's kind of a no brainer at some point I think nearshoring is definitely up and coming and people are really starting to notice.

Totally. Yeah. As we start to close out the show, back to the food for a second. Always a favorite topic of our listeners. Give us some of your favorite Mexican restaurants in, in San Diego.

Oh gosh, I don't even know where I would start. Javier's is really good. I really like that. But I mean, a lot of times I'm going down to Tijuana as well if I'm being honest. But yeah, a good, good chili rano. I will never pass it by. Sometimes even just the trucks, the food trucks easily are just amazing. You can find some really good street tacos or empanadas or.

Yeah, absolutely.

Good stuff.

Awesome. Well, Christy, this has been a blast. I think our audience learned a lot about the life sciences industry. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Well, thank you again for listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm your host, Brian Sampson and you can check us out@nearshorecafepodcast.com and lastly, another thanks to our sponsor, Plug Technologies, Plugg Tech. Great way to find talent all over Latin America, including life sciences for growing US Companies. Take care everyone. We'll see you next time.

Find me on LinkedIn.

Christy Brown on LinkedIn. All right, thanks everybody.

Take care.

Have a great day.