In this interview, Charlotte Bradshaw outlines why she founded Evrima Technologies, how it has grown eight-fold in the last six months, and how she is planning to expand the business in 2021.
- When you first launched Evrima Technologies, what were the key drivers?
The key driver for me to launch Evrima was to streamline clinical trials and remove the pain-staking manual processes for clinical researchers, which then has a positive impact on patient experience. Clinical trials are very complex and challenging to manage, it’s unlike any other industry, and is rife with inefficiencies across the value chain.
Not only that, but GPs are the most trusted source of information for patients when it comes to clinical research as a care option, yet they aren’t empowered to have these conversations and trawl through trial registries. The biggest challenge is finding patients for highly specific trial criteria. After years of facing these challenges first-hand, I founded Evrima to address this problem.
- How have your motivations and ambitions for the organisation changed over time?
I’ve always had an interest in productivity and process improvement, and what has kept me motivated through this journey is designing and implementing customer-driven solutions where we can make a difference to our customers, patients and GPs involved in clinical research.
As Australia increasingly becomes a key destination to conduct leading clinical research, I’ve been motivated to grow a talented team and foster creative thinking and a results-driven approach. For some patients, clinical trials may be the best or only options to access treatments that are not readily available, yet to get a new medicine on the market, it can take on average 10-12 years. For myself, and the Evrima team, we want to help change that and get these new medicines to patients who need them much faster. When I first started in clinical research almost 10 years ago, it wasn’t something people had really heard of but more recently, we’ve seen it evolve into an industry and new players entering the market, which keeps us motivated as well.
- What have been the biggest achievements to date?
In the last 6 months we’ve grown our sales pipeline 8x and connected thousands of people to trials across 30 locations in Australia and New Zealand. I am incredibly proud of the team who have rolled up their sleeves and achieved what we essentially had planned for 18-24 months in this time. We are well placed to achieve even bigger goals next year.
- What were the biggest hurdles and how did you overcome them?
I think for any entrepreneur there will always be challenges, there are some that can be fixed easily and others that take time. A key challenge as a first time founder is learning everything for the first time as a CEO and with skin in the game. There was no Plan B and after quitting my corporate job, I bootstrapped the business and was generating some revenue however the sales cycles in B2B and especially clinical trials can be incredibly long.
I was fortunate to be part of the HCF Catalyst Accelerator program cohort of 2019 and have some incredible advisors who have helped me along the way but it has boiled down to building relationships, doing the work and managing cash flow. Every dollar has to be scrutinised before being spent and you have to ensure payment terms are met else it can turn very quickly to a slippery slope. I have zero regrets though!
- How has the pandemic impacted the business and your business plans for 2021?
We have been fortunate to be able to adapt and support our clients with creative solutions, essentially we brought what was planned for 2022 forward which has been incredibly well received and today we had a client say “Can’t Evrima just run everything?”, which gives us the confidence and validation that being solutions-driven, really understanding our customers, and testing our assumptions early, has been the right approach.
In 2020, we have helped our clients navigate new territory and acted as their trusted guide, it has so far been a rollercoaster and each month we outperform the previous month.
Traditionally our industry would work on face to face relationship building and generating new business by attending flagship conferences. This year we only plan to attend one (virtually) yet business is growing at a rapid rate. I’m really excited for 2021 as we have some huge plans to implement new revenue streams, grow our team and create more opportunities for patients to connect with trial opportunities.
About the expert
Charlotte founded Evrima in early 2019 after facing the many challenges of patient recruitment first hand and recognising the need to bring general practice and clinical research together. She has a breadth of skills and experience ranging from project management, business development, and marketing in the corporate, not-for-profit and SME sectors. She has a mind for identifying customer-facing problems with a strong and passionate connection to the problem. In 2014, she founded and managed a digital patient recruitment agency, and has worked with local and international organisations advising and managing their patient recruitment requirements across a wide range of diseases and conditions. Charlotte is considered a subject matter expert in clinical trial patient recruitment and recently was a project lead for CT:IQ delivering industry recommendations for optimising clinical trial recruitment. She has a Bachelor of Liberal Studies (honours) and Diploma of Business.
Image description: Headshot of Charlotte wearing a white collared shirt and navy blazer. She has shoulder length brown hair and is smiling. A blurry building outline is in the background.
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