Making the Smart Career Moves

Starting out, Christopher Savage was not looking for a career in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet now, he serves as Inizio Engage’s chief of staff and managing director for Propensity4, Inizio’s data and insights provider for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry.

He originally studied animal science, and initially planned to either enter the veterinary field or work in research. However, while researching these fields, he says he discovered the pharmaceutical side of the industry. Already feeling drawn to helping people, Savage says he felt that pharma and biotech would offer him the opportunity to do so more broadly, rather than focusing on day-to-day care for either animals or people.

He previously worked at Merck, a place he says people joined to work for 35 to 40 years. Ironically, it was the culture of looking at things long-term that shaped his philosophy and resulted in him leaving Merck, which at the time had about 100,000 employees, to join Vynamic, where he would be the company’s 35th employee.

“Going from Merck to a 35-person organization was quite a shift,” he says. “Building the business from that size really came down to two things: finding and retaining the best talent, and serving clients exceptionally well.”

He continues, “Vynamic gave preferential hiring consideration to people we knew, trusted, and had existing relationships with. On the client side, AstraZeneca was one of my first accounts, and the goal was simple: Do really good work. As a company of 35, our entire business was built on relationships and trust. That meant being a trusted partner. Bold in how we worked, but humble, and treating our clients' business as if it were our own.”

This approach, he explains, allowed him to build relationships over time and follow clients as they moved up and through the industry. While at Vynamic, he began building a years-long relationship with AstraZeneca. According to him, he became so familiar with the company that he had more institutional knowledge than some of his clients who actually worked at AstraZeneca. That’s how deep a relationship he looked to build with his clients.

Playing the long game

Savage explains, “In a lot of organizations, people move companies or roles every 18 to 24 months. For me, it comes down to two things: loyalty and the belief that you can have a tremendous impact when you stick around. You build an understanding not just of what's happening today, but of what has worked in the past. You start to have a long-term influence on the organization and the people in it.”

He continues, “The relationships I've built through mentorship mean a great deal to me. I'd been out of the Vynamic side of the business for 5½ years, and I still have biweekly calls with one person I mentored and monthly calls with another. I still get calls from people I worked with five or six years ago asking for career advice. Yes, you can make more money by moving around every 18 months, but I'm more focused on the impact I can have on an organization and the people within it.”

When asked to describe his leadership style, Savage says that he’s direct, trusting, and demanding. However, he also tries to keep a fun atmosphere at the office. This style is being demonstrated today at Propensity4, where the organization has doubled its employee count and revenue in 2 years, modernized its technology stack, evolved several of its offerings, and has a gold “employee of the month” chain and pendant, which is used to celebrate, loudly, the success of the team every month.

He’s also genuinely concerned about building up his employees’ skills. He says that it’s important to be honest with employees about where they are at the moment and where they’re headed. His mentorship conversations often start by trying to understand a team member’s broader purpose in life, and then helping them identify how work at Propensity4 or elsewhere will best serve that purpose.

Setting high standards

When asked about mentors throughout his career, Savage says he had a very influential leader during his time at Vynamic.

“A gentleman named Anthony Balsamo had one of the biggest impacts on me. He had incredibly high expectations,” he says. “I can still remember the specific standards he held for how we built PowerPoint presentations, how we told stories, how we communicated with clients and set ourselves up for success. But he did all of that while being genuinely engaging and willing to invest time in the people around him. He didn't take himself too seriously, and he brought energy and fun into every room.”

He continues, “That's something I try to carry forward. If we're going to spend 30% to 50% of our lives in a work environment, we should enjoy it. That doesn't mean making light of serious situations; it means applying the right level of intensity when it's needed, and not manufacturing stress where it isn't.”