By Curt Cherewayko
Edward Wright spent most of his career managing luxury retail brands in Vancouver and, later, New York before taking a fresh turn in September 2006 by accepting the role of CEO of Vancouver’s CRH Medical Corp., which is No. 7 on this year’s Business in Vancouver list of the fastest-growing companies in B.C. (see page 24).
Using technology based on the O’Regan system, CRH claims to make the first disposable single-use device for hemorrhoid removal.
Between 2002 and 2005, Wright was president of watchmaker Baume & Mercier before being promoted by the company’s parent Richemont to executive vice-president of retail in North America for France-based jeweller and watchmaker Cartier – the largest brand in the Richemont group – in 2005.
After a little more than year with Cartier in New York, and with a wife and young family in tow, he decided to plant roots in his hometown of Vancouver.
BIV caught up with Wright to discuss how someone makes the leap from managing a luxury retail brand to promoting a hemorrhoid treatment.
For Wright, building a luxury brand and building a network of trained gastroenterologists boils down to the same thing: customer service.
I went to work for Birks Jewellers as a very young man and worked my way through their organization over 10 years, starting just as a store manager. In 1992, I started a distribution company of my own: Richemont was looking to establish one of their brands in Canada called Baume & Mercier, and I established distribution for it in Canada. I did that for Baume & Mercier for about six or seven years, building the brand in Canada, and then I was asked to move to New York in 2002 as the president of that brand for North America.
After a number of years in New York, I was moved to senior vice-president for Cartier in North America.
I was living in New York, travelling a couple hundred nights a year, building their business back and forth from Europe. It was a fantastic experience, and I garnered a lot of business experience and an understanding of how to integrate marketing, public relations along with logistics, distribution, finance – all of the different aspects of how a big business like that works.
I grew up here, and I had the desire to move back here with my wife and young children. I had a desire for more of a balance between my personal life and my professional life. I could clearly see that it was going to be a real compromise to my family if I was going to continue to do what I was doing. But I still wanted to identify an opportunity. I knew Tony Holler and Dean Linden [members of the CRH team], and CRH was in its infancy.
I had been pretty successful in luxury goods, but knew that luxury goods was not an option here for me in Vancouver. There was nothing in that industry here. I knew that I liked finance, and I liked the public markets.
There are approximately 20 million colonoscopies being performed every year in the U.S. The lion’s share of those are being done by gastroenterologists and in approximately 15% to 20% of those colonoscopies, patients are presenting symptoms that should be treated using our technology. Unfortunately, gastroenterologists, during their fellowship training, are not given any training on the treatment of hemorrhoids. As a result, gastroenterologists use a band-aid approach to the symptoms – encouraging patients to eat fibre or take a sitz bath or use an ointment.
Our patented device is very effective in the treatment of hemorrhoids and the fact that it’s disposable is something that is very important in defending against cross-contamination and things like that. We thought we could change the landscape of who could treat these hemorrhoids. We established a program to train gastroenterologists and doctors throughout the U.S., and we’ve been extremely effective in doing that, having trained 208 physicians and gastroenterologists in 208 practices.
Our training and technology also become a significant source of revenue for physicians – without adding any costs to their offices.
The business model that we’ve developed is clearly very different from anything that’s happening with other medical products. One of the things that we do, because of our search engine optimization tactics, is drive more than 20,000 potential patients a month to our website. We know based on analytics that we’re providing to the doctors in our online directory, who are trained to use our technology, around 1,200 new patients every month and growing.
In luxury goods, customer service is the pre-eminent element that differentiates you from anyone else.
In luxury goods, you always felt that the onus was on you – after providing your product to a third party – to also provide consumers to them through whatever marketing or public relations vehicles you were using. You were a partner with them in terms of providing them with potential customers. That’s what we try to do at CRH, whether it’s providing 24-hour physician support or co-op advertising – which is unheard of in the medical industry. It’s a new way of looking at us not just as a medical device company that supplies product to doctors. We partner with them and help them identify patients and drive patients to them. In turn, we can also sell more technology to them.
When I came here, we were on the retail model. We were opening clinics, hiring doctors and leasing space. We quickly came to realize that it was a very expensive model and, quite honestly, with no disrespect to physicians, they don’t like being managed or told what to do by businesspeople. Even if we had 100 clinics, we would still only be scratching the surface in terms of treating all the hemorrhoid patients in the U.S. We closed some clinics and we will close more. We’re moving our business to a wholesale model: now we’re training physicians who see the patients and symptoms themselves. And they have access to use our technology. The model we are moving toward is much better in terms of profitability.
I’m very proud of the fact that as a young guy running a little business in Vancouver and across Canada, that a global organization such as Richemont thought enough of me to ask me to relocate to New York to run their biggest brand in North America, Cartier.
As well, I’m proud of my wife’s and my involvement with the March of Dimes. We lost our first child Matthew at a very young age – he was prematurely born. The March of Dimes is very dedicated to helping find cures for premature birth. One of things my wife and I did while we were in New York was work quite closely with a number of adoption agencies, supporting them both personally and professionally through Baume & Mercier.
The downturn in the economy and stock market was the best thing for CRH, because instead of worrying about how our stock was perceived by others, we were forced to go into survival mode and to do the best thing for the business. As a result, we became completely committed to the wholesale side of our business. If the downturn had not happened, we would have continued to build out the clinic model, but in the long run we would have eventually had to go where we are now. The downturn was the impetus to very quickly understand that we had to stop spending money on a part of our business that wasn’t making sense.
Go and travel and do things in different places. I love it in Vancouver; I’ve had the ability in my mid-40s to come back here. But in terms of developing who you are and your business acumen, it’s absolutely essential that you get out of your comfort zone. When you move and you don’t know anyone, you have to extend the olive branch out every day and to learn to be open.
Vancouver
CEO: Edward Wright
Employees: N/A
Market cap: $60.1m
P/E ratio: N/A
EPS: $(0.05)
Sources: Stockwatch, TSX, globe investor