10-year Plan

What process do you use with your team to create a shared vision of the future?

You know, it is a process. As you're aware, many companies, the strategy of the company is owned by not only the leadership of the company or board of directors, and we sort of take this really seriously. About two, three years ago, we sat with a white sheet of paper with our board at a two-day retreat. And we said, "Let's imagine what Veracyte could look like 10 years from now." And we decided we wanted to pass a 10-year vision, because it takes a long time to build these products, get them to the market, build revenue. And if you're not looking out 10 years, you actually might miss the opportunity to achieve that.

So we laid out multiple different scenarios of what success could look like. And together, we decided that Veracyte was at a great place three years ago to move forward to become one of the first genomic testing companies to take our tests to patients all over the world, build a global enterprise. And then over the next year, we had to benchmark what were the things that we would need to do different to be able to achieve that. So we evaluated technology, looking at many different ways that we could take our test to the global market. We then chose the pathway that we thought was going to be the most successful. We went after securing the rights actually to that pathway of choice. We were able to successfully negotiate that. We announced an acquisition in that regard at the end of 2019. And all along this pathway, our employees, our board, our leadership was pointing to the fact that this was done to achieve the steps forward in our seven year vision as a company.

About a month ago, we announced another acquisition that actually takes us even further toward that 10-year vision. So again, it's building the visuals, it's showing and telling everyone how all the pieces fit together, where you are in the journey, and reminding them of where you're trying to get. Employees love being part of that process. And then they all can see where the projects that they're focused on working on every day, how that fits into the bigger picture. It's really inspiring.