Turning cells to sales

Sol Graham builds cutting-edge business by giving researchers what they need

Friday, March 17, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Sol Graham, founder of Quality Biological Inc., spoke at the African American Chamber of Commerce of Montgomery County’s black history month event last month at Montgomery College. He encouraged prospective entrepreneurs to, among other things, safeguard their credit rating to ensure they qualify for capital investments for their businesses. Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Graham’s mother made education a priority — she would even take his place working in the fields so he could go to school on some days.

‘‘The way I looked at it, I was a farmer, and was used to using my hands and growing stuff,” says Graham, founder, president and CEO of Quality Biological Inc. ‘‘This was just a matter of growing cells on glass rather than growing plants out of the ground.”

Graham, 63, cultivated his career in microbiology by taking courses while in the Navy in San Diego, Charleston, S.C., and the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. He worked for companies in Rockville before starting his own business in 1983 and QBI now has annual revenues of between $5 million and $8 million, with 30 employees.

The company provides products for pharmaceutical and bioscience companies, including genomics, antibiotics, DNA reagents and products for stem cell culture, as well as basic supplies such as centrifuge tubes and cell culture dishes.

The Business Gazette talked to Graham recently about his journey from farm life to the bioscience industry.

Are some of your clients working on the avian flu or researching vaccines for chemical hazards, bio-terror stuff?

Oh yes, absolutely. Our clientele are pretty much everyone involved in the infectious disease arena throughout the area. Our client base is [the National Institutes of Health], Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, George Washington, as well as the private pharmaceutical companies as well as the biotech firms. I’d say we’ve touched most of the firms as they have actually developed or grown up in this area.

As far as biotechs, yes, I like to say I grew up with the industry since back in the ’60s, working with researchers doing work in virology, to microbiology and now to molecular biology. The terms have changed, but the work has all been pretty much in the same field ... they’re just going at it in a more precise way, as researchers have actually proven its efficacy going forward.

What we do is work in the area of providing tools for researchers. When you talk about DNA and this being DNA alley, certainly we have worked to provide the researcher with reagents for them. Reagents are the chemicals that are put together in a formula to do testing ... not necessarily testing for disease, but testing researchers are doing in order to come up with things that will treat a disease or find out the cause of a disease.

And you have clients outside the area also?

Oh yes, we ship all over the world. Our major client base is in this area but we service folks all over the world.

Where are you from in Georgia?

I come out of one of the poorest counties in the state of Georgia, called Telfair County. I grew up on my father’s farm that was actually started by my great-grandfather, who was a slave. My great-grandfather and his brother, after slavery was abolished, bought up blocks of land, about 100 acres around there. So I come out of an area they actually settled after the Civil War, called Grahamtown. My mother still lives in a house on that land.

What kind of crops did you have?

Anything that would make money. Tobacco, cotton, peanuts, corn for the animals ... and we mostly grew our own food.

So you had to work the fields before you went to school and when you came back?

Yes, I can tell you it was hard work, but it was just a way of life to us and we didn’t see it as hard work. There were five of us. And my mother was so adamant about us going to school.

I can recall as a young man just turning 13,14, my father would always insist on us getting the plowing done. So in the spring when you start cultivating, to plant, if we had rain or something and we didn’t keep up with the plowing, that means that if you had a [good day to plow] you had to miss school. That’s just the way it was, because the farm came first.

I can recall my father leaving the house to work on jobs in order to keep things going, because things would be getting tight, and he would leave me to plow that day. When my father would leave, my mother would walk up behind me and touch me on the back and say, ‘‘Boy, go get ready for school.” She plowed all day until I came back from school and my father never knew I went to school. That’s how bad she wanted us to get an education.

What was the first thing you wanted to do for a career?

It’s funny, because my brother always said he wanted to be a businessperson and I always wanted to be an educator. And it’s weird because my brother turned out to be an educator and I turned out to be the businessman.

I thought I was going to college, but we didn’t have money for that at the time. I eventually asked my father to sign me up for the military and I decided on the Navy, because it was the only service that came close to promising me what I was asking for, which was some kind of schooling. And I had an inkling to see California and the Navy said they would send me to San Diego for training.

In those days, if you know your history, most of us [blacks] had been stewards [cooks, mess hall workers] in the Navy. I was trained as a hospital corpsman [assisting health professionals in treating and preventing disease] and started working in hospitals, because the Navy was trying to integrate in areas where they had never used black sailors.

Then I found myself shipped back to Charleston to work in a hospital. So here I was, having grown up in Georgia, in segregation, in a segregated school system, and I had been trying to get out of Jim Crow, and here I was in Charleston in 1961. So this was not my idea of joining the Navy and seeing the world. I had seen enough of that world.

Is that when you came here?

Well, I started looking at the bulletin board looking for any courses, training, any way to get out of there. And there was something for a school on learning about tissue culture. I had no idea what that was, but it was in Bethesda, Maryland, so I signed up and got picked.

At the time, in Charleston, I was a technician, scrubbing up with doctors doing surgery, on-the-job training to be an operating room technician. One of the most exciting things was one night we had to do open heart surgery on this baby. That is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. And I just got more and more interested in the medical field. And when I came here, for tissue culture school, the Navy was attempting to take cadavers and take skin and preserve it for grafts, and so forth, aboard ships.

As it turns out, that’s where I started meeting all the people who are responsible for where I am today.

After the Navy you worked for several companies in this area?

Yes, the company where I spent 17 years was Hem Research. We spent a lot of effort in providing cell cultures for people doing virology. The most exciting thing during my employment with HEM research was the contract to supply NASA with animal cells to test samples brought back from the first Moon landing. I consider that my contribution to the space program.

Then you started your company?

An opportunity came at Hem Research, when they decided to kill a division, for me to take that division and start a company. So I worked out an arrangement to actually buy out some of the equipment, for about $70,000, and I did that by also agreeing to be a seller of the inventory until it was depleted.

So I went out to loyal customers and told them of my plans and any number of them said, ‘‘You’re the only person we’ve dealt with, so we will give you a chance.” And my theory was I only need a chance.

Have you had offers to sell Quality Biological?

I wouldn’t say offers to sell — I would say I have had offers to steal my company. Of course they always say nobody’s company is worth what the owner thinks it’s worth.

As far as all the community service you’ve done, with your church and chambers and other organizations, you said that started with your family?

I think it’s family. Those committed to community, you find it goes back to family. My grandfather once said a man can’t ask for much out of life than to be blessed by God, loved by his family and respected by his community and when I thought about that, it sums up what a man’s life ought to be about.

And I tell my mother sometimes, ‘‘You put a curse on us.” Because we can’t say no to anybody. Because she’s still like that, believes that she needs to be involved in everything in the community that’s trying to help people.

What community service project are you most proud of?

The latest was trying to get Montgomery County to recognize it could do more for county-based small businesses. The committee [for the county’s Economic Advisory Council] that I chair worked for six or seven years to convince the county to set up its small-business procurement reserve program [which was established through council legislation and became effective in January].

There were always complaints by county small businesses that the county procurement system wasn’t friendly to them. So I am very happy that this bill passed. It did not pass with the size standards we hoped for, but we now have a program that will give more opportunities to small county businesses that are contributing to this county’s economic engine.

Sol Graham

Positions: Founder, president, CEO, Quality Biological Inc. of Gaithersburg, which provides products and supplies for pharmaceutical, bioscience and biotechnology companies and organizations.

Education: Associate’s degree, business management, Montgomery College.

Professional organizations: President, board of directors, Leadership Montgomery; member, board of directors, Sandy Spring Bank; member, Maryland Bioscience Alliance Steering Committee; Montgomery College Foundation; Macklin Business Institute, Montgmery College; Economic Advisory Council of Montgomery County; mentor, Montgomery County Business Mentorship Program; past member, board of directors, Montgomery General Hospital, Tech Council of Maryland.

Scholarships: Established Quality Biotechnology Scholarship Fund at Montgomery College for students interested in studying science and technology.

Community organizations: chair emeritus, trustee board, People’s Community Baptist Church; VIP Fund Raiser, Easter Seal Society.

Awards: Minority Small Business Award of Excellence, Small Business Administration; Minority Business Contractor Award of Excellence, Department of Health and Human Services; honorary associate of arts in public service, Montgomery College; Spirit of Free Enterprise Award, Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce; Community Service Spirit Award for Economic Empowerment, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority; Community Service Award, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Residence: Rockville.

Family: Wife, Dorothy.

Hobbies: Tennis, golf.