For a lot of people, running your own laboratory is one of the most fulfilling and exciting ways to go into business after an education in the sciences. Labs do play a huge role in researching and developing all kinds of products and substances in modern industry, not to mention pharmaceuticals, and also have an important part in the healthcare system, especially when it comes to the diagnosis of a whole range of conditions. However, to run a lab, you need to be able to make money as well, and there are quite a few different ways to do that, as we’ll look at below.
Full-Service Labs
If you’re looking to get into the world of researching and testing things for commercial and business clients, then operating as a full-service lab lets you set up as a one-stop shop for all of your clients’ scientific needs. These labs manage entire projects from start to finish, from planning the work to delivering the final results, and typically work with companies that don’t have their own lab teams. Of course, it means needing a lot of resources and capacity to work, with your own skilled staff, reliable equipment, and trusted methodology to meet your clients ‘every expectation. In this role, your lab can act as a true research partner, often for a small number of clients, or even just one.
Fee-For-Service Testing
A lot of labs, instead, will focus on providing much more specific and focused testing. In this model, they tend to charge for a specific test or service on a per-sample basis. This makes your services a lot easier for clients to understand, allows for clearer pricing methods, and also makes it easier to scale your services to larger client needs or multiple clients at once. Success in this model tends to rely on your efficiency and consistency, ensuring that you’re able to provide reliable research results at speed. You don’t make as much money per client as you do when running a full-service lab, but you can become the trusted go-to provider for certain types of testing.
COA Analysis
One of the types of testing that is particularly important in certain industries is the ability to help clients earn Certificates of Analysis. By running a business that’s able to provide lab results & COAs, you can help clients confirm that their products meet the quality standards that match their industry and application. Rather than focusing on discovery or experimentation, this type of work is about testing to demonstrate that products meet regulatory needs. As such, care has to be taken to ensure thorough and careful documentation, as well as strict quality control to provide the most reliable, consistent, and accurate results. A lot of pharmaceutical or chemical companies will seek COA analysis to make sure that their products are good to ship to market.
Intellectual Property Services
The results of your research and testing for commercial partners can also be used to help them secure their intellectual property. If you’re working in R&D, you can provide documentation and research that can highlight your clients as the original inventors and owners of specific products or methodologies. By showcasing the innovative scientific processes or chemical structures that make up products across a range of industries, labs can help businesses generate the proof that their products and methods are unique and innovative, which can then help them protect their ideas so that other businesses can’t easily copy them.
Seeking Government And Institutional Grants
A lot of lab business owners will have a specific topic or specialization, or niche that they’re aiming to research, but it might not be to the benefit of a specific client. When the research better fits the advancement of the sciences in general, or has a broader social use, then you might seek the majority of your funding from grants provided by governmental agencies or other institutions. This can help labs that want to explore new ideas that may not have immediate commercial value. Grants can add a lot of credibility to your lab, but they also tend to involve a lot more paperwork and detailed reporting to ensure that grant money is being used for the reason it was provided.
Direct-To-Consumer Services
Many labs will also provide testing and analysis directly to individuals, rather than to businesses. This is often used in the world of preventative healthcare, where labs can provide detailed information on various aspects of the clients’ health, but other examples include things like genetic mapping that allows people to better see their ancestry. Alongside the scientific side of that work, labs in this field have to maintain customer support, data privacy, and ensure that they’re working within regulatory requirements that aren’t typically found in the standard commercial research world. It also requires a highly different marketing approach, as consumers tend to require a different kind of messaging compared to B2B clients. Being able to show your lab as a business to trust is important.
Consulting And Outreach
Your scientific expertise can extend your capabilities beyond the lab, as well. Lab businesses often act as advisors for companies, training teams to be more scientifically literate, supporting project planning in internal research, or even speaking at events in support of specific research topics or innovations. This type of work does take you away from the physical testing that most lab businesses are set up specifically for, but it does offer opportunities to broaden your revenue streams, while also helping to build your brand beyond your work in the lab. By presenting yourself as a thought leader and consultant outside of the lab, you can also bring a new level of validity and brand awareness to the lab, which may generate more clients down the line.
Only you can decide which business model best fits the lab that you want to run, whether it’s working with clients and sponsors, applying for grants to pursue your own research, or providing more direct services to businesses or healthcare providers.
