Jobless Chemists' Brainchlid: A 'Rent-A-Scientist' Agency

Five years ago, Bruce Culver had what seemed like a good job. Trained as a chemist, he had worked his way up the corporate ladder to become vice president for Applied Research Laboratories in Valencia, Calif. He was tired of the revolving door at the top that had brought in four different company presidents in five years, but he felt pretty secure and had no plans to leave. Then in June 1983, everything changed. The company’s president became the leader of a leveraged buyout. Culver was booted out. There was no joy in workville. “When you leave, you go with an awful lot of emotion. I was surprised. I was angry,” he says. Today, though, Culver, 43, is a very happy man and feels that in retrospect getting fired was a good thing. It led him to cofound, with former ARL colleague Raf Dahlquist, a sort of Rent-A-Scientist agency, of which Culver is president. The company, Lab Support Inc., is the first nationwide temporary employment agency for lab techs and other science professionals. In three years Lab Support has grown from a two-man operation based in Woodland Hills, Calif.—a suburb of Los Angeles—to a 55- person’ company with 10 offices sprinkled from Boston to San Diego. Although Culver won’t disclose the bottom line, he will say the company operates in the black. Dahlquist, 47, the company’s vice president, characterizes their business success as an American Dream-type story, but notes that realization of the dream took considerable doing. Before hitting on the idea for the company, Culver himself had to endure the agony of being an out-of -work chemist and used-to-be corporate vice president. He did it more calmly and methodically than many would. He moved a desk and telephone into a spare bedroom in the condominium he shares with his wife Donna, woke up each ‘morning at the usual time, put on a tie and settled at his desk to create a perfect resume, hunt down jobs through classified ads, and telephone friends to let them know he was in the job market. After two months, though, he was still hunting and not finding anything that met the description of his old job. “One thing scientists often get trapped into is thinking ‘I’m a microbiologist,’ or whatever. What they don’t realize is that after you get five or 10 or 15 years experience, you’ve developed a lot of other strengths,” he says. A month-long trip to Greece— already planned before he was fired—helped Culver see his other options. It allowed him time to do a self-assessment in which he determined his strengths and weaknesses, what he liked to do and what he didn’t like to do. “I came to the conclusion I didn’t want a job where I would pour my heart and soul into something and not get any equity out,” he says. So Culver went into consulting, helping companies draw up business and marketing plans when they were moving in or out of technical fields. About a year into it, he decided he could do better by creating a clearinghouse for scientific consultants. He called on Dahiquist, who had left ARL months before Culver to start a publishing business, and asked him to come in as a partner to start the clearinghouse. Dahlquist, who was finding publishing to be exactly the difficult business it is, joined Culver in the spring of 1985, and the two began collecting business cards and resumes and trying to match consultants with companies. They found, though, that there was another, greater unmet need. “What we discovered was that companies were interested in renting scientists on a temporary basis,” Culver recalls. “They’d say ‘We need people for three months,’ and we went ‘Gee, rent a chemist?”’ The idea at first seemed too offbeat to the two partners. But as they began exploring it, talking to lab managers and the like, they decided such a business could work. In fact, similar businesses, like ScienceTemps in Cranford,, N.J., operate on local and regional levels. But nobody had tried to go nationwide, and Culver and Dahlquist decided that was where they could break from the pack. They rewrote their business plan and started sending it around to venture capital firms, which were as a rule unenthusiastic about service-oriented businesses. Meanwhile, they continued pumping their own money into the business until they nearly exhausted all their resources. “We were originally funded by two hairstylists,” Culver says, referring to his wife, Donna, and Dahiquist’s wife, Karen. Their families and friends remained supportive throughout, he remembers, though “they [got] tired of hearing the same old stories: ‘It’s just around the corner. Wait until next week—I have this meeting.’ A Big Gamble Early startup of the company, with all of its uncertainties and potential menaces, was like riding in a speeding locomotive through a dense fog, according to Culver. “And we knew there was a ravine out in front of us. We didn’t know exactly where it was and we didn’t know if there was a bridge across it, but we couldn’t slow down,” he says. “It was a gamble that you have to take and, fortunately, in America they can’t put you in jail for being in debt.” The turning point was a million dollars of venture capital investment, delivered in installments beginning in January 1986. Culver says, “[We] were turned down by the biggest and finest investment banking firms and venture capital people” before finding the firm that finally put up money, Sierra Ventures, in Menlo Park, Calif." This life-saving transfusion allowed the company to open their 10 branch offices. In fact, Culver expects to open a half-dozen more next year. Lab Support, he says, is “trying to position itself as the main interface between scientific employers and employees.” The company maintains a database of resumes on about 16,000 scientists and technicians, of which Culver estimates less than 10% are actually actively seeking permanent jobs. “If somebody is working, we do not go in and solicit them out of one company into another,” Culver says. “As soon as we did that, we would kill ourselves because we would develop a reputation as a headhunter.” This year, Lab Support has placed about 1,500 scientists and technicians in temporary jobs that last an average of four months each. There is no charge to scientists and technicians who use Lab Support to find a job. There is a charge, though, to companies that hire through Lab Support. Like temp agencies in other fields, Lab Support picks up the tab for unemployment insurance and certain medi- cal benefits. Wide Range Culver estimates that about 30% to 40% of those hired temporarily end up with full-time jobs. The people using Lab Support to find jobs range from young scientists just out of college to retired scientists looking for post-retirement work. Lab Support staff—all of whom have a scientific background— spend most of their time hunting for and interviewing qualified people for jobs. At any given time, the number of jobs easily outnumbers the people looking. One reason for this is that industries across the board increasingly are relying on temporary employees to carry them through high production times, so they can easily unload those labor expenses when production is down. Another reason is that not enough scientists are being trained in the United States to meet industry’s demand. Unemployment among chemists alone averages between only 1% and 2%. Which means that now that Lab Support is blossoming and the worst is over, Culver’s unemployment looks like a bit of rare good luck. Kathryn Phillips is a freelance science writer in Pasadena, Calif.

Jobless Chemists' Brainchlid: A 'Rent-A-Scientist' Agency

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