Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin

Animal Health Firm Sees Steady Growth

by Deborah Blagg

After gaining experience in strategy consulting, M&As, systems engineering, and running a multibillion-dollar refrigeration company, Jonathan Ayers (MBA ‘83) has come full circle to a job that relates to his Yale undergraduate major in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Since 2002, Ayers has been chairman and CEO of IDEXX, a Maine-based firm that develops diagnostics and information technology for veterinarians, as well as testing technologies that ensure safe water, milk, and livestock production. According to the Portland Press Herald (December 19, 2010), the company’s revenues have grown from $380 million to more than $1 billion during Ayers’s tenure, and IDEXX staff has doubled to nearly 5,000 employees in more than 65 locations across the globe.

While Ayers leaves the lab work to others, his scientific background has helped him understand customers’ challenges and needs. In charting IDEXX’s winning growth strategy, he says his HBS training and past experience in larger companies helped him “know what this company would look like as a bigger business.” Ayers particularly remembers first-year Marketing with Professor John Quelch. “It was a tough course, but the combination of analytical and intuitive reasoning we practiced has been invaluable in growing a company.” Looking to the future, Ayers currently is envisioning what IDEXX would look like as a $2 billion firm.

Even with IDEXX’s leap in size, it is still small enough so that Ayers can enjoy being “closer to the customer and to innovation” than he was in his previous job as president of Carrier Corporation, a division of United Technologies. He also relishes being “pure play” in one industry—animal health—which he describes as “a target-rich environment for continued innovation and growth.” “In contrast to being a division of a diversified corporation, we succeed or fail in our own market on our own merits,” notes Ayers, whose company currently helps more than 50,000 veterinary practices worldwide advance medical care, improve productivity, and increase profitability.

In the Press Herald report, Ayers described himself as a “principles-based leader”. “Our purpose is to create exceptional long-term value for customers, employees, and shareholders by enhancing the health and well-being of pets, livestock, and people,” he elaborates.

“Our employees like working here because they feel good about what we contribute to the world,” adds Ayers, who concedes that feeling good isn’t difficult in a company with a bright future. “Work is always more fun when you’re growing!”