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Making a Crucial Hiring Decision: Woodie Neiss and Kenny Kramm

Woodie and Kenny’s Story: The story of FlavoRx centers on Kenny Kramm’s second daughter, Hadley. When little Hadley developed cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder that required her to take medicine four times a day, Kenny began to understand how unpalatable medicine can be.

Kenny was in the family pharmacy business with his father. So the Kramms experimented with concentrated banana flavorings to disguise the taste of Hadley’s medication, and it helped her to swallow the stuff and keep it down. After her condition finally stabilized, Kenny realized that making medicine taste better could benefit patients of any age.

Kenny recruited Woodie Neiss, his brother-in-law, from a successful Silicon Valley firm to help launch FlavoRx. Soon the company was providing pharmacies across the country with a system for adding 42 different flavors, from cherry to pina colada, to more than 300 medications in liquid, powder or pill form – all without altering the safety or effectiveness of the drugs.

More than 40 million prescriptions have been consumed with the help of FlavoRx, with sales growing from $4.8 million in 2004 to $7.6 million in 2005. And Woodie and Kenny are poised to take FlavoRx to the next level of growth with some huge new opportunities. For one thing, they began tapping into a new market in 2005 by launching EQ, an effervescing tablet that turns ordinary water into an energy drink. The all-natural tablet in several flavors includes essential vitamins and gingko biloba, an herbal mainstay of many popular energy drinks.

“We decided we needed to differentiate ourselves,” Woodie says, “and this represents a big growth market.”

Woodie and Kenny’s Key Move: Making a Crucial Hiring Decision

Having a heart for Hadley provided the initial motivation for FlavoRx’s co-founders. Starting with a great product idea, understanding their market, and demonstrating persistence boosted the company’s chances.

But Woodie says that FlavoRx wouldn’t have gotten such huge penetration of the crucial chain-pharmacy market - the key to its recent meteoric growth - if they hadn’t hired Ashton Maaraba. He joined FlavoRx as a vice president in 2001, and ended up lighting a candle under FlavoRx’s sales operation. He quickly landed deals with a roster of giants in pharmacy retailing, including Rite-Aid, CVS, Walgreen’s, Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart.

“We gave him an opportunity to prove something,” Woodie says, and Ashton “went out and lived up to the promise.”

Ashton’s success proves what a difference that just one fantastic hire can make for a very small company – and underscores the importance of bringing only the right person on board for the really significant, business-building jobs.

Woodie didn’t know back then how important Ashton’s hiring would end up being. Initially he was looking to bring on a new salesman who could pitch FlavoRx to doctors and pharmacists, not someone who could go to the pharmacy chains. But because FlavoRx had only seven employees at the time, and because getting its story out to health-care decision-makers would lay the foundation for the company’s growth, Woody realized he had to get the absolute right person for this job.

But it wouldn’t be easy. Woodie was looking for “someone who could communicate well, someone who could convince people to try something new, and someone who could really educate people about solving a problem that wasn’t being addressed effectively.” FlavoRx had “a solution to a universal problem,” Woodie says, “and we planned on taking it around the world. We wanted someone who could help us get there faster.”

In other words, FlavoRx was looking for a hotshot salesman? “Yes,” Woodie says. But not necessarily the seemingly obvious candidate for such a job: a successful, experienced “detailer” who was used to selling pharmaceuticals.

“We didn’t want someone coming in here and saying, ‘Glaxo pays $80K, and I get an expense account and a Rolls-Royce and a Rolex,” Woodie explains. “We wanted someone who was entrepreneurial and could think and grow with us – someone who could build his own personal success with us.”

Of course, getting somebody wet behind the ears in the medical field could have posed a big risk for FlavoRx. But Woodie was determined to go in that direction and began trolling for candidates in online job sites. Ashton’s indication of interest in the job, and his resume, was one of dozens that Woodie simply passed over at first.

After all, Ashton had been trained as a lawyer, and at the time he was working as international sales director for an online business-to-business company.  He was only 26 years old. So his qualifications didn’t exactly scream “Take me!” to FlavoRx. But after researching FlavoRx, Ashton made up his mind that he would be the pursuer. He wrote and called Woodie a few times. “His persistence,” Woodie says, “got him an interview.”

In the interview, Ashton made a strong case for himself. He did know the field a bit because his father was a doctor, he told them. He saw the potential for FlavoRx to become a major success, he told Woodie, and he wanted to help build a great organization. Knowing that FlavoRx wanted to expand its sales enterprise, Ashton impressed upon Woodie that organization and establishing structures was his forte.

“I made them a promise,” Ashton says. “I said, ‘Try me out, and if you don’t like what you see, let me go quickly.’ But I was determined to prove that you didn’t need a standard Merck or Pfizer rap to do this – just a passion and desire to do the job.”

Woodie went with his gut and brought Ashton on board, and his impact was immediate. He pored over Tony Robbins CDs to help learn salesmanship and became a natural “closer.” And Ashton immediately set up the structure that he’d promised for organizing FlavoRx’s medical-sales efforts. Within two months, he was bringing two new subordinates into the company.

“It was when he was training them that we truly realized the potential that Ashton had,” Woodie says. “Sometimes he was perceived as a slave driver. But it was that aggressive energy, combined with his organizational and other skills, that built a division which – at its height – had 17 people under him talking to doctors and visiting pharmacies.”

Woodie and Kenny promoted Ashton to a vice presidency and set him to work with FlavoRx’s existing sales vice president, a pharmacy-retail veteran, on the company’s newest and most important task: breaking down the doors of big pharmacy chains to get their business. And sure enough, Ashton helped entice and close a deal with one huge retailer after another.

“You have to be confident,” Ashton says. “When you’re working with chains like Walgreen’s and Wal-Mart, you’re not sitting with guys who don’t know what they’re doing. You have to prove to them that you have a viable combination of product, corporation and team that’s going to make it work.”

Woodie and Kenny’s Bonus Insight

FlavoRx’s reaction to fears about an avian-flu pandemic proves that opportunism can be a good thing for companies and their customers.

Woodie and Kenny announced that FlavoRx was boosting production by more than 30% in mid-2006 as U.S.-government authorities prepared for a potential pandemic by stockpiling Tamiflu, the best bird-flu remedy. It tastes especially nasty, but FlavoRx has the perfect solution for that problem.