Pioneer Surgical Technology of Marquette started as a medical-technology startup almost two decades ago, with a single product idea. Today, it employs hundreds of workers, has several offices and plants, and is now planning to open its first international facility in Ireland.
Upper Peninsula Second Wave writer Kim Hoyum sat down with the company's CEO, Jeff Millin, at Pioneer's headquarters in Marquette, to talk about where the company is headed in the new decade to come and to tell the story of how Pioneer has flourished in the U.P.
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Editor's note: This is not a full-length transcript, but an edited and shortened version of the interview)
Q: Tell me about the company's beginnings, and how it's changed since then.Millin: We started in 1992, and there were four founders: Dr. Matthew Songer, his father Robert Songer, myself, and a gentleman named Larry Mosca.
The general idea was providing products of a higher quality with surgeon-driven innovation. We went to various companies, and basically did distribution partnerships, where we would build the product and they would sell it. Then, fast-forward about 10 or 11 years, and we went into the spine market. Now, we've added biologics into that, and acquired two companies, Encelle in North Carolina, and Angstrom Medica, a Massachusetts-based company, and combined them together in our biologics products division.
Q: Originally, the name associated with the company was very much Matthew Songer. Now it's you. What was that transition like?Millin: A couple of years ago. It's kind of the natural progression that a business goes through. Dr. Songer is a very talented entrepreneur, and very much thrives in the entrepreneurial environment--you can see that he's already started up another company,
Frontier Medical Devices. But as a company becomes bigger and bigger, it evolves, and it becomes not as entrepreneurial. Pioneer has over 300 employees, we've got five or six offices, we've got three manufacturing locations, we're a big firm.
Q: It has grown phenomenally from the original product; now you even have a European division. What does the future look like now?Millin: From a future standpoint, I think there are a couple of things that are a little unclear. How will health care reform affect innovation? But overall, the world health care market is growing. Our markets in China are growing, our markets in Europe are growing, and our markets in South America are growing. So worldwide, we're really starting to grow our business, and that will continue to drive innovation.
I think the other thing is that the aging population really is demanding a high quality of life. In 1950, the geriatric quality of life was a little bit lower. Whereas today, you go out on the golf course, and 70-year-olds are playing golf, and they want to keep that ability, and we want to help provide that.
Q: You're looking at China, South America, Europe. And you're opening a plant in Ireland?Millin: We're currently looking at opening a manufacturing plant in Ireland, for European markets. And the issue there is that products that are exported from the U.S. to China, western Asia, or Japan, all have to have U.S. regulatory approval. If you have European regulatory approval, and you ship from Europe, it's OK. There are certain products that just are not popular in the U.S., if they're not the standard of care. But they're very popular in Europe. We just don't have U.S. regulatory approval for these; so if you want to sell those products in China, or India, then you have to provide a manufacturing base that's not in the U.S.
Q: Tell me a little bit more about what you would consider the driving factors behind Pioneer's growth.Millin: In orthopedics, for the last 20 or 25 years, everyone has said the future is two ways: it's minimally-invasive surgery, so, for example, I want to have the absolute minimum damage to the body during surgery that I can. The other major trend is going to be biologics.
Drugs are a great example; every drug has a side effect. But if I can somehow flip a switch in the body, using biologics, so that the body uses its own healing mechanism, then I don't have these side effects. So when Pioneer bought Encelle and Angstrom Medica, this was very much on our minds, how to create a product that uses the body's own healing mechanisms. And we're not there yet. The product that will get us there is in development.
Our biologics products really just pave the way for the body to do what it does best. Like when you break a bone, whether it's for surgery or falling down skiing, your body's natural response is to fix it. It does that already. All we want to do is make sure all the elements are there, biologically, to make it work.
Q: Tell me about your background, personally. Where are you from, and how did you get into Pioneer?Millin: I grew up in Niles, Michigan. I came up here and went to school for biology. After that, I got the opportunity to help Pioneer with business plans and initial startup. I'm a Northern Michigan graduate, and then I got my MBA from Northwestern.
Q: Pioneer could be located in many other places. Why not move to an urban center? Why keep it here?Millin: I would say a couple of things. One, we have a very high quality work force. The thing about Yoopers is they have a wonderful tenacity, and a desire to do whatever they do, very well. Then, having a factory this size in Marquette, Michigan, versus having a factory this size in Chicago, or in one of the major urban centers, it's cost-effective to be here. If you think about the size of our products, too, you can put them in a UPS box and ship them.
And I think that the third thing is, you want to have community support for something like this. And if you're in New York City, or you're in Chicago, can the community really support individual businesses? I mean, it's hard.
The community and Northern Michigan University have all been really supportive. In 1996 we were really struggling with training workers. We have very high-tech equipment and advanced processes, so, how do you bring somebody in and train them on a piece of equipment that costs a quarter of a million dollars?
So we went to Northern, sat down with them and said, 'We need a program that trains workers.' And that program's been going for 11 or 12 years now, and I think we've hired about 40 people out of that program. You get partnerships in a small community. In a large community -- and it's not the community's fault -- it's just difficult for them to do.
Q: What do you think the U.P could or should do to either build homegrown businesses or attract outside medical tech companies like Pioneer?Millin: It really is kind of a very slow process whereby the expertise comes into the community, and then the entrepreneurial spirit takes over and develops it further.
I think from the U.P.'s standpoint, the question is how you invest in incubator-style growth. A good example of something I think is a wonderful, wonderful idea, is that Northern is now actually doing a business plan competition. They're doing the right thing and they're starting something. I think it's much easier to seed a business, to start a business and help it grow, than it is to attract a business already established in North Carolina or in Chicago and try to get them to move here. It's very difficult to get them to move.
Q: Talk a little bit about where you want to take the company from here? What's that new vision? Millin: Well, going forward, I think for one, you're going to have to deal with the cost of health care issue. What we want to start to look at and focus on in the future is evidence-based medicine. To say, this works, and it's cost-effective. Because a lot of times people talk about lowering the cost of medicine, but they don't really talk about specifics. If you have a person with debilitating low back pain, they cannot work. If you can provide a solution that gets them back to work, you want to do that in a cost-effective way, and you want the social cost to be the lowest.
Q: Great. Anything else you'd like to add?Millin: Whenever people ask me what I want, if I could have a wish, it would be to have five more Pioneers in this industrial park, because the more successful businesses we have, the more successful we will all be.
Kim Hoyum is a freelance writer based in the Upper Peninsula. Her credits include contributor to Geek Girl on the Street as well as a regular writer for several weekly and monthly publications. Hoyum is a graduate of Northern Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in writing.