If I told you we can take $12 million dollars and turn it into $100 million in just four years, you might think I’m blowing smoke, selling snake oil, or just plain deluded. But it is true and the proof was celebrated today in Kalamazoo.

Local leaders joined Gov. Granholm at a ribbon cutting for one of the companies that grew from our 2003 endeavors to retain scientists when Pfizer closed facilities in Kalamazoo. Kalexsyn’s new headquarters, a $4.5 million 20,000 sq. ft. facility, will house its 31 life science technology staff including four Pfizer senior chemists soon to come aboard. The company’s revenue growth in just four years has reached $3.5 million. And they expect to increase their chemist employment base from 16 to 70.

Kalexsyn is one of 18 companies formed and now growing as a result of collaborative and community response. Michigan’s $12 million — $5 million to create the Bioscience Commercialization Center, $5 million to the SW Michigan Innovation Center SmartZone, and $2 million for Company Formation Loans – generated about $100 million in investments in Kalamazoo life sciences ventures. The area is home to four venture capital funds with assets of $50 million when none existed there before.

Kalexsyn is the first of these technology businesses to pay off its loan. Each of the other 17 is operationally sound and current on its loan payments. They have created 220 direct new jobs and an additional 400-plus new, indirect jobs in the region.

There is a strong lesson in this page of Michigan economic history. Strong leadership, energized and focused in a collaborative spirit, enables genuinely fantastic results. It’s also how you grow $100 million from $12 million in four short years.

Tagged as: economic diversification, Economic Growth, venture capital

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