As a young biotech company, you are probably a team of exceptionally bright and capable individuals. You’ve accomplished a great deal and a promising future looms before you. Do you need to involve outsiders to help you with due diligence?

Absolutely. For several reasons. Here are three:

1. You Need a Complete and Diverse and Experienced Team

Imagine that you need to build a baseball team. You won’t be successful if you staff your team with nine pitchers. You need skilled players in all nine different roles.

Bringing a life sciences product to market requires a similar approach. A successful team cannot be entirely comprised of scientists. You need expertise across numerous functions. For success you need all the boxes checked!

Have you got all your bases covered? You can’t compete if you don’t. Find a consulting group that can easily integrate into your team and fill the gaps in your team’s experience. You might not need a lot of help and you might not need it for long, but you need to know what you don’t know, and what to do about it.

2. You Need the Benefit of Fresh Thinking

Due diligence partners bring the fresh thinking and perspective that can solve problems and reveal opportunities. It happens all the time. Here are just two real-world examples:

A company had a technology it was planning to deploy as a diagnostic in the imaging of certain cancers. An experienced consultant looked at the technology and noted that it could also be used to target drug delivery to tumors. The value of the technology and the company grew instantly.

Another company was working with a promising molecule, but first-pass metabolism by the liver was a problem. A consultant advised the team to try transdermal delivery. They did and the problem was solved.

How might you benefit from a new perspective on your work?

3. You Need to Reduce Your Risk

If large pharma is developing a product and that product fails, large pharma will not be out of business. It has other products in its pipeline. When you are a startup, you usually have just one product, possibly two. If it fails, your company probably fails. You can’t afford to skimp on due diligence.

Bring in good consultants. Engage them sooner rather than later. You’ll learn a lot and they’ll save you time and money in the long run. At the end of each day you will have far fewer reasons to worry.