I hope there is not a character limit...
Let us start with the most recent actions by the executive committee, lead by three CEOs, one actually doing the work in the CRO, and the other two leading Emmes' tech company, called Veridix AI.
Emmes just had another RIF, letting go of "just 2%" of the workforce. The kicker here is that this cowardly executive group waited to conduct these layoffs one day after closing the employee survey. As with most CROs, they're laying off staff in the U.S. and offshoring the work to India. In this instance, the entire U.S. TMF team was let go and the entire TMF workforce is now in India.
This comes after Project Propel resulted in Emmes' first layoffs in it's 47+ year history this past January, along with an insistence that the large layoffs then were necessary to right the ship and would prevent future reductions. So it is interesting to compare the last two years against the company's previous 40, when we used to have 13% profit-sharing, annual bonuses paid on-time, annual performance increases, exceptional healthcare benefits and unlimited leave before the current cadre of executives came in. Oh, that's right, Emmes is now owned by private equity, that explains 99% of that.
During a town hall meeting, the chairman emphasized that they attempted to place U.S. TMF employees elsewhere in the company where possible, but I guess that they forgot that employees have various outlets to talk about what really happened. In fact, the executives have whinged about employees discussing company business of sites like Glassdoor and Reddit, saying they'd rather have employees raise these concerns internally or during town halls. They conveniently forget the new corporate culture of retaliatory behavior, which especially prevalent in the India office, but cannot compare to the behavior of the chairman and his friends whom he has placed in CEO or senior leadership roles.
Let's also focus on the revenues, which was a heavy topic during the town hall. The CFO went to a great effort to make it seem like he was simplifying how revenue works, especially a contract or award won this year paying out more significantly in years two or three of the contract. This is basic knowledge for anyone who's ever worked in a CRO, but he conveniently left out that the revenue goals and the EBITA goals he's so focused on came from him and the senior executives based on prior year's awards. Any missed targets are a direct result of their failure to calculate prior year's calculations against this year's awards and contract payouts. If it's as simple as he made it out to be, the layoffs should've come in their ranks for failing to achieve their own goals. But let's face it, failure to achieve goals and consequences never affect executives. Instead, the people in the CRO, actually doing the work face the consequences, and are now laid off and left to navigate the worst life sciences jobs market in years, especially heading into the holiday season.
Lets talk about money in a different way, because they wouldn't answer questions during the town hall about where it's going. They talked glowingly about awards in biopharma, and initiatives they have in the tech company, Veridix. But what they're not talking about is how the CRO is paying for dead weight in the Veridix group. All the focus in the CRO is towards work being billable - and they moved the data management group from the CRO to Veridix. This is clever because data management should be CRO work, so they've essentially stolen the data management component to fund AI initiatives in Veridix, which are vaporware. If it were selling and had even half of the excitement in the industry the chairman and Veridix CEO claim, then they'd be patting themselves on the back the revenues generated by Veridix. Because they're very eager to congratulate themselves for anything else they do, so we have to assume by their reluctance to share Veridix income that it's just not happening, and the CRO is funding Veridix entirely. The CRO employees suffer from layoffs, overworked employees and exceptionally unrealistic goals set by executives while Veridix staff costs the company.
What we have now is a company struggling to earn wins outside of the recent acquisition of VaxTrials. Leaning on established relationships at the NIH for government funding while they invest the CRO's efforts into the money pit they call Veridix - and perhaps a healthly overhead fund for meetings held at expensive Bethesda hotels and the outrageous amount of alcohol found in the executive conference room kitchen. Which also explains some of their decisions...
