Entrepreneur finds frozen niche
Sarasota Manatee Hearald Tribune
When Kate Grayson moved to town in the summer of 2004, she didn’t have many people in her career circle with whom to network.
The area was flush with Realtors and mortgage brokers feeding on the frenzy of the housing boom.
Grayson, on the other hand, was the operator of a cryogenic repository.
“When I say I have a cryogenic repository, people say, ‘Excuse me.’ ” she says. “It’s definitely a niche business and we stay under the radar.”
In a nutshell, Grayson’s business, Steelgate Inc., in southern Manatee County, stores blood, urine and tissue samples for pharmaceutical companies that are conducting clinical trials.
Samples from clinical trial patients are shipped to Steelgate’s facility in coolers packed with dry ice.
“They’ll find patients that meet the criteria for the drug they’re looking to develop,” Grayson says. “They’ll pull samples, whether it be urine or blood, and they’ll do tests on that to determine how their drug is working. After analysis the samples are frozen, then shipped to Steelgate.”
Grayson got the idea for her company while working in New York as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. A company Grayson was working with was frustrated it couldn’t find a simple storage facility — one that only stored samples and wasn’t involved in collecting and conducting tests on them. Grayson took that as her cue. “They said, ‘Isn’t there just a company that does the storage and isn’t involved in the clinical trials?’ ” Grayson recalls. “And I said at that time there wasn’t. So I said, ‘If I put a facility together would you be my first client?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Steelgate opened for business in April 2002 in New York. Grayson moved the company to Bradenton in 2004.
Since then, her staff has grown from two people to 17.
The company has rows of special freezers that store samples at temperatures as cold as minus 176 degrees Fahrenheit.
Given the delicate nature of the specimens and the research they support, many safeguards are put in place to ensure that proper temperatures are maintained, Grayson says. Even so, sometimes people question the wisdom of storing perishable materials in a state that is known as Hurricane Central.
“When we meet a potential new client, the question is always asked ‘Why do I want to store my samples in Bradenton, Florida when they have all these hurricanes?’” Grayson says. “I’ve always got to sell Florida — throughout the entire U.S. there are different types of natural disasters that we have no control over, at least with hurricanes we can thoroughly prepare and plan. . . . We’re in a secure facility that exceeds the latest building codes. We have incorporated redundant processes throughout our entire business model. We even have backup generators for the backup generators.”
Grayson says she enjoys her work, but acknowledges that it can be stressful, particularly when the sample is in the mail, so to speak.
She says it can be stressful if “a shipment is coming from Europe and it’s stuck in customs — things that are out of our control.
“Because we are proactively involved with our clients,” she adds, “once we receive notification of a shipment we are constantly tracking its progress.”