Nick Green jokes that it wasn’t a hard decision to leave a Toronto-area company to become chief executive of Avid Bioservices Inc.
“Going from minus 25 to 90 degrees and sunny?” laughed the British native in a recent interview with the Business Journal. “Orange County is not a bad place to come and live.”
The Business Journal last week profiled Tustin-based Avid (Nasdaq: CDMO), which has grown revenue 80% increase over a two-year span. Since Green was named as CEO in June 2020, the company’s shares have increased more than fourfold to a $1.8 billion market cap.
The Business Journal ran out of space in last week’s print edition to tell the backstory about the executive who’s building what he calls the only publicly quoted, pure-play biologics contract manufacturer in North America. Here’s some extra details.
Forklift Driver
Green never saw himself ending up in biologic manufacturing—certainly not in America.
Growing up in working-class England, Green initially envisioned himself taking over his father’s textile factory.
He pursued chemistry at the Queen Mary University of London thinking it would help him get a job with Dow Chemical. Green earned his MBA from the University of Huddersfield.
In the late 1970s, he began work at a chemistry venture his father was involved with.
“When I arrived at his company, he threw me a set of keys,” Green said. “I thought they were for the company car, but it turned out to be a forklift truck.”
There, he started work from the bottom, maintaining boilers and vacuum pumps.
“I spent the first 15 years hating him for what he did to me, and I’ve probably spent the last 20 thanking him for it,” he said.
Eventually, Green built one of the first contract drug manufacturing facilities (CDMO) in the world.
In the past 30 years, Green has headed 31 global pharmaceutical facilities in nine countries on four continents.
At every company he’s worked at, he’s grown compounded annual growth rate by at least 20%.
“I love growing businesses,” he said. “It’s what I’ve done most of my life.”
Most recently, he was chief executive of Therapure Biopharma, a biopharmaceutical company based in Mississauga, a city bordering Toronto on Lake Ontario.
When he considered a new job, Green was leaning towards the eastern U.S. coastal states where he’s worked before while his wife preferred somewhere between San Diego and Los Angeles.
“I’m a massive fan of the United States,” he said. “I think it’s the best place in the world to live and work. It’s one of those countries that gives people opportunities.
“Every time you take a risk, there’s a certain potential for failure. Certainly, back in Europe, I always got the feeling that if you failed once, that was it. In America, people can brush themselves off again and have another crack.”
Today, he and his wife resides in San Juan Capistrano. On the weekends, they enjoy sailing to Catalina and the Channel Islands on their 63-foot Hallberg sailboat.
$350M Goal
Green is responsible for growing Avid’s annual sales from $59 million when he arrived to an estimated $350 million within a few years.
While drug manufacturing may be 5% to 10% cheaper in places like China, the pandemic has caused drug company executives to realize the fragility of their supply chains and they want to keep more of their manufacturing within North America, he said.
“This is as good a factory as I’ve come across,” Green said during a tour of his Tustin facility, which is undergoing an expansion.
Avid recently announced plans to build a new facility in Costa Mesa to handle a different type of work; see the Oct. 25 print edition for more.
