>> My name is Leonard Mazur, and I'm an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical field.
I've had companies that I've started, and I've been an entrepreneur for about the past 20 years
with focus in specialty pharmaceuticals, which is pharmaceutical drugs
that are either manufactured or marketed for prescriptions
by physician specialties, for the most part.
But I've strayed from that also occasionally.
I progressed in a series of positions in a marketing area
that started as a market research analyst.
I became an assistant product manager, product manager, marketing manager,
and then ultimately I was in strategic planning and acquisitions.
And I got into really doing something
that I thought was a tremendous contribution to the company at that time.
And that was the company had acquired a small ophthalmic pharmaceutical business,
and that business made prescription eye drops.
It was doing about 10 million dollars in revenue at the time.
And the CO of the company wanted to turn it into a 100 million dollar company within 5 years.
That was the objective.
And so he turned to me and said you're no longer in the marketing department.
You're now going to be in strategic planning, and you're going to figure out how
to grow this business and you're going to start buying the companies that are in this field.
So what I did is, I spent the better of probably
about 3 months putting together a 100 page strategic plan and I rechristened the company.
I redefined it.
I said it was no longer an ophthalmic pharmaceutical company.
It was going to become an eye care company.
So as a result, that company was going to be called CooperVision.
What happened there, is in about a 6 to 7 year time frame,
it became a 700 million dollar company and 1 of the world's largest eye care companies.
I was there for 10 years.
And it really shaped me in terms of who I was professionally, how I looked at things,
how I analyzed things, how to think about how you want to progress a business,
how you want to grow a business, what are the pitfalls.
It was an excellent training ground.
And as I said, it was sink or swim.
So you learned everything on your own.
There was no formal training manual.
There was no formal training program.
There was nothing.
So you just did it.