842: Realizing the Potential of Data at Scale | Ross Muken, CFO, Sophia Genetics

It was after Ross Muken had been gainfully roaming the corridors of equity research for more than a dozen years that the acquisition of his firm administered a dose of operations insight that began to feed his aspirations to become a CFO.

At the time, Muken was a top research analyst for ISI Group, an independent, research-driven trading firm that had begun to attract the attention of a number of the investment banking world’s largest banks—including Evercore, which in August 2014 acquired ISI and its 28 research analysts covering 345 companies in 10 major industry sectors.

“It was through this process that I saw what needs to happen when you integrate two businesses and need to drive cost synergies and margin expansion,” recalls Muken, who that point was helping to spearhead the firm’s healthcare and life sciences realm, an area of research that was enjoying some added luster due to a recent boom in biotech.

Along the way, Muken says, it became apparent that the 20-plus-percent operating margins that management was targeting for the newly merged entity would be a bigger challenge than expected.

“It couldn’t just be the cost side of the equation—what was going to get us there was new revenue streams,” remarks Muken, who reports that the firm began evaluating possibilities in a number of untapped “adjacent markets” before formulating a strategic investment inside the equity capital markets business.

“We had committed to the Street that we’d meet these margin targets, so putting in additional costs didn’t feel great, but our view was to be tactical and take some cost out but then reinvest those dollars to achieve higher margins,” comments Muken, who doesn’t hesitate to share the outcome.

“This paid back tenfold, and we were able to build a very large revenue base with better margins in this new business, which allowed us to get to our margin targets without shrinking headcount,” says Muken, who today credits the tactical move with more than margin expansion.

He explains: “We had to take a strategy that made sense on paper and then have it make sense to shareholders from a numbers standpoint—and it was because of this experience that I decided to move to the operations side of things.” –Jack Sweeney