Part I | Medical Device Sales: The Rocket That Crashed Into The Moon

This article, by Charlie Johnson, originally appeared on massdevice.com, on August 17th, 2012.  Johnson is a Leadership Practice Consultant at TIGI, a facilitator of multiple Leadership Programs, and the former vice president at the United States Surgical Corp. He has worked with clients from the Pacific Rim to Europe developing and delivering Leadership development programs to over 1500 people from 40 different companies.

My Front Row Seat at the U.S. Surgical Corp.

From 1989 to 1997 I had a front row seat on the rocketship called U.S. Surgical Corp. My ticket for the ride was punched in 1982, when I started as a sales rep at U.S. Surgical. I was fortunate enough to work through the ranks to senior director of sales and later became a VP of sales, responsible for half of the U.S. Over my more than 15 years with the firm, we went from just over $100 million in annual sales to $1.4 billion by 1997, the year before Tyco Healthcare acquired us for $3.3 billion.

In a series of posts in the coming weeks here at MassDevice.com (where I’m a founding investor), I’d like to talk about the medical device company that shaped my professional career. (I’m no longer affiliated with U.S. Surgical or its eventual parent, Covidien. Anything I write about has long since passed.)

In hindsight, the U.S. Surgical story seems to me to be a textbook case study about the strength of innovation and the power of a dynamic and aggressive sales force

I still contend to this day that U.S. Surgical had one of the best sales forces in the world. We created great wealth for our company and our shareholders. The company changed the face of surgery with the “Green Berets of wound closure” leading the way, aggressively marketing to surgeons and training thousands of physicians along the way.

It was a rocketship ride, but we ignored the perils of our own success. Eventually the arrogant belief that our growth would never stop infected the company and hit us where it counted. We didn’t see it at the time, but that rocketship we were riding flew directly into the moon.

Boosting Sales and Taking Names

U.S. Surgical was founded on the principles of innovation and education. Our founder, Leon Hirsch, owned a dry-cleaning equipment business. He had no college education or medical background, but he had the idea that you could use staplers in surgery. While it wasn’t a new concept, staplers weren’t widely used then in medicine in the U.S. Like all good bootstrapping stories, Hirsch built a prototype in his basement, which he used to raise the seed funding for the company.

By the time I arrived, U.S. Surgical was a $100 million company. Like Hirsch, I had no experience in medicine. In fact, I was a rug salesman, but after going though the company’s rigorous training process, I quickly jumped into the world of medical device sales.

For those first 5 years, we grew sales organically at a decent clip, but it wasn’t until 1987 when things really started cooking. That’s when we released the first disposable trocar, as well as 4 other products targeted at the OB/GYN market.

Hirsch espoused the idea that the future of surgery was through 10-millimeter trocar cannulas, rather than large open incisions. The problem was that we didn’t have any instruments that went through the trocars for performing those surgeries.

Click here to read Part II: Medical Device Sales: The Rocket That Crashed Into The Moon