Life at Blue Matter

Blue Matter’s Guiding Philosophy

Back in 2012, the founding partners of Blue Matter were busy launching the company.  Each of them had worked in life sciences consulting for quite some time and had experience in a wide range of consulting firms.  All that experience had taught them a lot.  Some experiences taught them how to do things the right way…and some taught them how not to do things.

They had learned about running efficient operations, the ins and outs of management consulting, how to lead and develop people, and a host of other things.  They had also seen people stretch themselves too thin, ignore work-life balance, become competitive with their own colleagues, and burn out in spectacular fashion.

So, their guiding philosophy when creating Blue Matter was simple:  Use all the good stuff they learned while avoiding the bad stuff they’d seen in the past.  The result is the Blue Matter culture that exists today; one based on doing interesting, meaningful work and on building a happy, tight-knit team.  Read on to learn a bit more about life at Blue Matter.

Interesting, Meaningful Work

Blue Matter focuses on developing commercial strategies for pharmaceutical and biotech therapies.  Our team is most often involved with therapies that are in development and being prepared for commercialization.  While we work across a range of therapeutic areas, we focus our efforts on oncology and on rare diseases.

As a result, the work we do is usually very interesting and highly meaningful.  It can be fascinating to work on cutting-edge immuno-oncology therapies that just might be able to cure some cancers!  It’s highly rewarding to help bring new rare disease therapies to market, especially when you realize that most rare diseases are genetic, disproportionately affect children, and have very limited therapeutic options.

To each of our projects, we try to bring a combination of “left-brain” and “right-brain” thinking.  Obviously, industry knowledge and analytical capabilities are critically important.  But we try to inject creativity, imagination, and fresh thinking into our work, as well.  That combination helps keep things fun and engaging.

The Blue Matter team is involved with some of the most cutting-edge, consequential new therapies in development.  Our clients love what we do for them, and 90% of our business comes from repeat clients.  We’re proud of the work we do, and the learning never stops!

Team Happiness and Camaraderie

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is crucial to building a happy and strong team.  Obviously, consulting can involve hard work and long hours.  However, the Blue Matter culture respects a healthy work-life balance and works hard to maintain that.

Blue Matter also works hard to foster an engaging, almost familial atmosphere in its offices.  After all, you can’t be happy at work if you don’t like the people you’re working with each day.

Each of our offices forms a pretty tight-knit group.  Organized team events, happy hours, and other social activities are common.  Informally, team members get together outside of work, too.  They even band together to participate in volunteer opportunities (and the company often pitches in to help).

Camaraderie within offices is one thing, but it’s also important to build team spirit across offices.  As a firm with 5 geographically diverse offices (San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin, and Zurich), this is important for Blue Matter.  To help build those connections, the company holds an annual, company-wide off-site meeting in an interesting location that changes every year.  There are also quarterly “all hands” calls, as well as regular regional forums. 

Team happiness is so important to Blue Matter, that we actually send a monthly Global Happiness Survey to make sure we’re staying on track.  There are more ingredients for building a happy team, such as professional development opportunities and the ability to be entrepreneurial.  We’ll cover those below. 

Professional Development and Advancement

In some firms, it’s “sink or swim.”  While it is important to hold people accountable for results, it’s also important to give people the tools and support they need to thrive.  Blue Matter invests heavily in doing that.

Every new hire is assigned a mentor when they join the firm.  That mentor does more than just show them where the restrooms are.  The mentor is a guide who helps get the new person oriented and off to a good start.  They also act as a confidant who meets with the new team member on a regular basis to make sure things are going well, answer any questions that come up, and help deal with any issues.  For a new team member, they can rest assured that their mentor will “have their back.”

We’ve also put a lot of resources into Blue Matter Academy (BMA), our in-house learning and development team.  BMA works hand-in-hand with a range of team members (consulting and internal) to create ongoing professional development programs for our team members.  Some programs focus on “hard” skills related to consulting and project delivery, like problem solving, meeting facilitation, project management, and more.  Others focus on “soft” skills like leadership, communication, and collaboration.  Still others focus on domain expertise, such as scientific updates in specific therapeutic areas.

As team members develop, we also want to them to advance their careers at Blue Matter.  Advancement pathways are well-marked and we help each team member build his or her own plan for reaching their goals.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Nobody wants to feel like a cog in a machine.  People want to know that their ideas matter and that those ideas might have a chance at blossoming into something great.  At Blue Matter, the team is encouraged to develop and share new ideas. 

If you think of a potential new service offering, or a new tool that can improve our services or efficiency, or a new best practice, then by all means share it!  While nothing is guaranteed, we might actually be able to adopt and implement it, with you right in the middle of it.  As an example, we recently launched a new sister company because someone on our team had a great idea!

Let’s Do This!

If you’re interested in joining the Blue Matter team, check out our current career opportunities.  We’d love to talk with you.