About Business Development Advisors, Inc.

About Business Development Advisors, Inc.2018-11-01T20:19:02+00:00

John Alexander has spent his entire career starting, building, acquiring and turning around businesses. For the first half of his career, he built experience in product development, corporate venture capital, Corporate Development and building internal start-ups within fortune 500 companies such as St. Jude Medical [now Abbott], Baxter Healthcare / Diagnostics [now Siemens AG] , W.R. Grace [now Fresinius and others acquirors of its businesses], General Electric, and Alcoa [previously Reynolds Aluminum].

Since 1996, he has provided his skills and experience in Corporate Development, Venture Investing, Business Creation, and Leadership Team Coaching to businesses across a range of markets and technologies but with particular emphasis across a wide range of medical technology.

In addition, Mr. Alexander has turned around 3 companies, the latest of which he lead as CEO after leading the turnaround, then raised $11 million which took the company to 23 filed & 1 issued patent, to projects/revenues with 9 major medical device customers.
Before beginning his consulting practice and running his first company, he held the following roles in the Fortune 500:

  • Vice President of Corporate Development for St. Jude Medical (StJM). He led M&A efforts which transformed StJM from a single product line, $200 million dollar company into an $840 million multiple platform company in 3 years.
  • Director of Business Development at Baxter Diagnostics, Mergers & Acquisitions at W.R. Grace & Co., and G.E. Venture Capital.

In addition, Mr. Alexander is Founder and Chairman of Twin Cities Angels, an angel investor investment firm which organizes angel capital and provided both education about thoughtful investing to its members and a well-considered process for making investment in emerging companies in the upper midwest. TCA is now on investing its third Fund as Twin Cities Angels III, LLC. Mr. Alexander has been active in improving access to capital by leading the business efforts resulting in the successful enactment of the Minnesota Angel Investor Tax Credit (and 3 subsequent revisions of that bill). In addition, he was appointed by the Governor to serve on the Science and Technology Council, serves on the Advisory Board for the Schutz School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas, and is an Executive in Residence at the University of Minnesota’s Medical Industry Leadership Institute {MILI}.
Mr. Alexander holds an MBA from Darden / University of Virginia, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering / Carnegie-Mellon University.

History

Business Development Advisors, Inc. (BDA) was created in 1996 to provide the extensive range of Corporate Development capabilities found in America’s best Fortune 1000 companies, but generally unavailable or unaffordable for early-stage or emerging, privately-held businesses, or divisions of large public companies.

Effective corporate development (known as business development when the company was born) often means the difference between success and failure in creating, building, turning-around, scaling, and addressing the surprises and challenges that confront every business from time-to-time: Businesses with even the best products, technologies, and people.

BDA provides the skills and experience necessary to be successful in:

  • Creating your business from concept through to critical mass
  • Building your business: Educating and expanding your team, technology, products, growing by acquisition.
  • Successfully addressing the unexpected which threatens your business or provides unique opportunities to grow
  • Developing and educating your team to they can achieve your companies goals
  • Advisors to support your Company’s need to address an opportunity, a persistent problem, improve it’s management process
  • Skills to accomplish these are not usually in house when first needed, or if the company is small or growing quickly, or if leadership it too close to the issue.

There are many reasons why an advisor/consultant might be the best alternative.

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