How to Scale a Service Business to 2,500 People: Lessons From Real Chemistry Founder Jim Weiss

Jim Weiss started Real Chemistry as a one-person shop. Twenty-five years later it employs about 2,500 people around the world and has helped launch cancer drugs and vaccines along with treatments for a long list of other conditions. Jim is now the company's founder and chairman, and he advises a range of companies and organizations.

Real Chemistry is an integrated marketing and communications firm for healthcare companies bringing new products to market. Jim describes the job as translating heavy science and regulatory language into something most people can understand. You need to know enough science to be dangerous, he says, and not much more.

In this episode, Jim talks about what actually drove the company's growth, why he refused to measure the work by media impressions, and what changed when he stopped being CEO.

Alignment keeps the formation flying

Jim says he learned most of what he knows about running a business by the time he was eight. His father was an eye doctor who opened practices across Pennsylvania. His mother took over her father's oil distributorship. He watched both of them run businesses up close.

Asked what made the growth possible, his first answer was finding people with similar values. In his view, alignment runs deeper than strategy. It has to reach people's values and, eventually, how they share in the financial results. He compares a well-run company to geese or an Air Force sortie flying in formation, with everyone working from their strengths toward the same point.

His own talent, he says, is getting people to work together, and that mattered more as the company grew. "The more people you add into any company, you've got to create coordination. Otherwise, you're gonna have the Tower of Babel."

Scaling also meant giving up on a fully flat structure. Jim isn't a fan of org charts, but at some size you need to know who leads the formation and who flies in positions two and three. Beyond structure, the biggest factors were hiring the best people and picking the right clients. A client that isn't aligned with the firm creates noise that people don't want to work through.

Let clients pull you into new work

Early on, Real Chemistry chased clients who had never heard of it. The turning point came from clients who were happy with the work and asked a simple question: can you also do this? When that happened, Jim went out and either hired the capability or bought a company that had it.

That kind of growth, driven by client demand, beat pushing new services onto clients who hadn't asked. The best relationships started on the ground floor and grew as the client grew, and some now span decades. When a client didn't like something, the team fixed it fast.

One of the company's values, posted as a hashtag back when that was the fashion, was simply "no assholes." Nobody like that works at Real Chemistry, and the firm won't work for them either.

Tie every project to a KPI the CEO cares about

Marketing can drift into activity that looks busy and proves nothing. Jim pushed hard the other way. Real Chemistry used data and analytics up front to target narrowly, because reaching the parent of a child with cystic fibrosis is nothing like reaching someone considering a GLP-1 for weight loss.

Then the firm measured against the client's own business numbers, such as how many patients started a therapy after a campaign and how many were still on it later. Jim's standing rule with clients was not to communicate, build a brand or promote anything unless it supported a business objective the CEO and C-suite cared about. Media impressions were easy. Stock price and revenue were the measures that mattered.

He traces this to his own background. Before founding the company he was a client, so he built the firm around how clients think.

For leadership teams working on a strategic plan, the lesson carries over directly. Tie the plan to the few measures that actually move the business, and you become outcome-oriented instead of activity-oriented.

From CEO to chairman

Moving into the chairman role was its own transition. As CEO, Jim had the last word. As chairman and advisor, people don't have to listen to him. He describes the change as going from direct impact to influence, and compares his role now to the moon affecting the tides.

The best advice, in his view, is advice people act on without quite knowing where it came from, because it has become their idea. He practiced that as CEO too, working across a wide range of personalities.

Give your people ownership

The advice Jim gives most business owners, himself included, is to give people ownership. Literally give them stock if you can. People with skin in the game act differently from people who see themselves as employees.

He's candid about why. Staff at Real Chemistry used to ask whether they were just working to make Jim richer. Sharing in the success answered that question, and Jim counts it as another key to the company's growth. Where real equity isn't possible, he says even a sense of ownership helps people feel pride and excitement when the company wins.

Be like water

Real Chemistry was once called W2O Group, and the name came from the idea of being like water: in flow with clients, and able to adapt and carve new tributaries when needed. When Anthony raised the Bruce Lee line about water during the conversation, Jim pointed out it had been built into the company's name all along.

What Jim is working on now

Jim hosts the Get Real podcast, which covers health topics from a lay person's perspective and draws on his own health experiences. The show recently joined iHeart. He also recently launched Music and Medicine with opera singer Renée Fleming and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. The program runs through the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and funds research into how music affects health, particularly mental health.

You can find Jim on LinkedIn as founder and chairman of Real Chemistry.

Listen to the full episode

Watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Enjoyed this episode? Please rate and subscribe to the Strategy and Leadership Podcast wherever you listen.

Work with Anthony Taylor

Anthony Taylor, Founder and Principal of SME Strategy, works with mid-market leadership teams to get aligned on a single destination and build a strategic plan they'll actually execute.

Book a conversation with Anthony →

Prefer to start on your own? Take the One Destination Alignment Scorecard.