Join us as we delve into a detailed discussion with Volpi’s CEO – Christoph Bohli. His career journey, beginning as an auditor at Ernst & Young and culminating in his current leadership role at Volpi, exemplifies inspiration and tenacity. As we unpack his professional trajectory, we will uncover Volpi’s strategic evolution, distinct market values, and the vibrant company culture that fuels its success. Prepare for an immersive journey into leadership and strategic innovation dynamics in the first of several conversations with Volpi’s leadership.
Q: You became the CEO of Volpi a year ago after serving as our Chief Financial Officer for three years and Co-CEO for two years. Can you share a brief overview of your professional journey that led you to become the CEO of Volpi?
A: My basic education was in business administration. I started out at Ernst & Young as an auditor. Realizing I prefer a forward-looking perspective on business and that auditing will always be about looking at the past, I became a stock market sell-side analyst. With great interest, I covered several industry sectors, including luxury and consumer goods. An important step was joining Berenberg Bank, one of the oldest banks in the world, just as it was starting up its new investment banking business. Here I learned to bring a start-up to international relevance. Later I moved into sales and became responsible for Swiss equity sales and all capital market transactions at Credit Suisse, Switzerland. In parallel, when Max Kunz acquired Volpi in 2007, I became the board’s chairman.
Then in 2017, we did an in-depth study of In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) and Life Science markets and decided to realign the company’s focus to what it is today. At the same time, we decided to invest significantly in expansion and target double-digit annual sales growth. The new direction was so attractive that I made a life-changing decision to join the daily business as CFO in 2018.
By 2022, after being Co-CEO with Max Kunz, I became CEO, responsible for daily business operations and management, while Max Kunz is focused on customer relationships and strategy.
Q: What are the goals for the company for the next one to three years?
A: In the coming years, we want to become the world’s leading optical measurement and data analytics solution provider for our In Vitro Diagnostic and Human Life Science research customers. We have a business model that supports that. Volpi delivers specific customized solutions for market-leading companies or selected start-ups. The collaboration can be initiated either at a very early stage for the development of a new product or it could be an optimization solution for an existing product. The unique solutions cover the entire life cycle and always include manufacturing by Volpi.
Q: What makes Volpi exceptional as a business and a project partner?
A: We start very early in a project to closely understand the needs of our customers and what the application requires, delivering meaningful insights and results to our customers early on. Given our focus on projects, there is a unique depth of experience. Volpi has worked on over two dozen projects in the past four years; this diversity and experience are significantly more than many of our customers have accumulated in the last 15 to 20 years.
Just as important is recruiting the right people, worldwide industry-leading experts in their disciplines to create Volpi customer solutions. Our offices are close to the world’s best universities and industrial clusters. In Switzerland and the DACH region, we have a fantastic talent pool.
Once we agree on common project goals, we try to achieve the highest customer value. It can be either a very high-tech optical solution or a cost-effective solution that generates the required data as quickly as possible in a point-of-care system.
Another aspect is integrating and evaluating the various data in all the processes. It is becoming increasingly important. It affects the customers’ solutions, and it also affects the required skills of our R&D employees.
Q: What else do you think makes Volpi unique?
A: Something else unique is the combination of this optical R&D focus and Volpi’s manufacturing offering. As the trusted advisor and the innovation partner, we work with our customers over the entire product life cycle. It involves requirements definition very early on, best practices in operations and design transfer.
Through operational excellence, we have superior processes, know-how and skilled resources to achieve exceptional results, including total cost of quality in manufacturing and after-sales service.
Our unceasing ambition is to create the highest quality deliverables and provide value to our customers. It is evident in our manufacturing process and the range of associated services. When it comes to understanding the root causes of manufacturing yield issues or field issues and implementing corrective action, it is important to have reliable partners who understand both application and the instrument.
Q: Where is the company heading?
A: Looking ahead, Volpi will continue to invest significantly in tools and infrastructure. Most importantly, we are hiring and training our people to proactively serve our customers with the newest solutions in the best possible way.
An important milestone for the internal infrastructure and to support further scalable growth is the launch of our new ERP at the beginning of 2024. In addition, we are investing in our application and assay testing capabilities. Bringing a new assay platform technology to the market always comes with high technical risks. The combination of biochemistry consumables, optical modules and increasingly more algorithms must work together seamlessly.
It is often complex to derive the different subsystems for a new assay platform. The technical requirements and the risk can be challenging to identify with a paper study. Therefore, we offer rapid breadboarding and application-testing solutions early on to investigate the signal chain rapidly, derive technical requirements and analyze design tradeoffs. These efforts reduce the technical risk and accelerate customers’ time to market. In the next newsletters, we will provide more details.
Q: How would you describe our company’s culture?
A: We offer a motivating environment for our employees’ professional and personal development. For instance, Agile is not only a working method for us, but also effectively mirrors how important each employee’s contribution is. It reflects the mutual bond between the company and employees. Each employee can and should contribute on their level and function to bring decisive ideas and be influential.
We are proud to employ very experienced people from multiple disciplines. We have employees from over 30 countries, and we have always been able to promote from within, enabling internal people to have a career.
Volpi has the ambition to become the leading solution provider for optical measurement and data analytics for IVD and Life Science companies. This can only be achieved when employees and management have a common vision. We believe that the operational strategy and implementation must strongly involve employees.
Company culture is such a vital topic that it deserves a longer discussion. In our next editions, we will discuss how the relationship between customers, partners and employees is guided by the three core values: entrepreneurship, excellence and empathy.