Pros
•It was a good place to work before Andy Brooks passed away. •Cosmetic (marketing) improvements. •Nicer color schemes and logo and website. •All of the little "bits and bobs" as the Brits like to say.
Cons
•After Andy Brooks' untimely passing, a B-team took his place. The biggest clients doing the most in revenue were all established prior to Andy's death in Q1 of 2021. Clients obtained in 2021 and 2022 and 2023 contribute less than 20% to overall revenue today. •The CEO has been a disaster for a company that had a tangible opportunity to compete in the space. When he took over, Sampled's credibility was still intact. The C-suite is far, far removed from the business. They did not maintain the client relationships that Andy started. They live in spreadsheets prepared by people who have no holistic sense of the operation. Leadership is big on empty buzzwords. The decline was evident as early as the summer of 2022 while their Powerpoint presentations showed double-digit growth at the same time. •Then they fired the veterans. The legacy wisdom exited along with them. Then more cuts came. And more cuts. And now they have decapitated their supervisory staff. It is essentially over. Those supervisors buffered an outdated LIMS and intractable, legacy processes with nothing but interference from upper management. They were, for all intents and purposes, indispensable to the daily operations of the business. All these terminations and lay offs are in sharp contrast to the equity that was promised to all of us. But you have to lay people off when your clients are moving there samples over to a competitor (Azenta) and your revenue is drying up.