When everything has to happen at once

The challenge

The organisation faced a dilemma: It had to build the organisation and sell its services before the facility existed to deliver them. Construction, commercial pipeline development, hiring, and operational readiness were all running in parallel – each with hard sequencing dependencies and little room to recover from mistiming.

There was no integrated view of how these workstreams connected. In cell therapy, where customer lead times routinely exceed a year, this gap carried concrete commercial risk: Arrive at launch without a pipeline and the facility opens underutilised.

Strategic positioning added further complication. The executive team was reluctant to rule out opportunities in a rapidly evolving market – understandable, but risky. Broad positioning meant diffuse capability investment, unclear hiring profiles, and a commercial story that was hard to land with early customers who needed specificity before they would commit.

Without a clear organisational development plan (ODP), the organisation risked arriving at launch having built the wrong organisation for the strategy.

How we helped

We began with a two-day facilitated offsite for the full executive leadership team, designed to surface misaligned assumptions, establish shared priorities, and define the design principles that would govern the ODP.

Over the following weeks, we detailed the foundation for the ODP across two workstreams. We ran focused working sessions with internal stakeholders to map dependencies and operational constraints that executive-level planning tends to miss. In parallel, we benchmarked international peer CDMOs, speaking directly with leaders who had navigated comparable ramp-ups, to pressure-test our assumptions.

We consolidated all inputs into a four-year organisational development plan with activity sequencing, milestones, and initiative briefs. To ensure organisational anchoring and disciplined execution, we developed supporting governance and facilitation tools.

Outcome

A roadmap the organisation could act on

The ODP gave the organisation a single reference point for key scaling decisions. Vision, mission, and supporting strategic choices, outlining how to compete, which capabilities to build, and which initiatives to prioritise, were codified for the first time. Leadership left the engagement aligned; the organisation had a roadmap it could actually use.

Phased ramp-up grounded in operational reality

A detailed hiring plan covering 28 distinct roles, aligned to facility milestones, commercial pipeline build-up, and operational inflection points. Executive leadership team members each received a personalised agenda - five priority themes per year - so individual focus areas reflected organisational priorities.

Initiative portfolio with execution briefs

30+ initiative briefs defining objectives, owners, dependencies, and success criteria across four workstreams, synchronised on a single timeline. Decision gates were built in, enabling disciplined execution without locking the organisation into a static plan.

What moved the needle

The executive team moved from broad ambition to a concrete roadmap. But three specific choices made the difference between a plan that would be used and one that would quickly become obsolete.

Force strategic choices before detailed planning begins The leadership team had been deferring difficult positioning decisions - on which customers to prioritise, which capabilities to build first, and what kind of organisation this was actually trying to become. Resolving these at the offsite meant every subsequent planning decision had a clear basis.

Make dependencies visible Several critical workstreams were moving in parallel with hard sequencing constraints between them. Bringing these timelines together onto a single map exposed risks that were invisible when each workstream was managed separately - and gave leadership a shared view of how organisational growth needed to unfold.

Build the governance before the project ends The most common failure mode in this kind of work is a plan that loses its owner the moment the engagement closes. Designing the governance structures - owner, cadences, change process - as part of the deliverable, not as an afterthought, is what gave the ODP a practical chance of remaining a live management tool.

Partner

Daniel Schmidt

Daniel works with life science executives to design strategies, operating models, and transformation programs. He brings both functional depth and board-level perspectives, helping senior leaders navigate complexity and make clear choices. He formerly led the life science practice at Deloitte Denmark.

Daniel holds a B.Sc. in International Business and an M.Sc. in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School.

Selected experience

TA strategy for immunology portfolio
Strategy for application and value realisation of AI across R&D
Business model design for new innovative business unit
Global digital transformation across commercial functions

Book meeting

Principal

Florian Preis

Florian is a life science strategist supporting pharma and biotech leaders shape therapeutic area and launch performance. He is an expert in translating global strategic direction into market-level execution, and in the operating models that make it hold. He works hypothesis-led and close to the client, bringing a point of view early and sharpening it through rigorous analysis.

Florian holds an M.Sc. in Advanced Economics and Finance from Copenhagen Business School, CBS. He brings experience from both strategy consulting and the pharmaceutical industry.