The handoff
Camille has been the executive assistant to the CEO of Halberd Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech, for nineteen months. For six of those months, she has also carried much of the operating mechanics of the company's investor work — a stretch of the calendar that the principal's office happened to be holding while the function was still forming inside the company.
Last month, the company hired its first Head of Investor Relations. The handoff is now underway. Six months of work that Camille had built into her week is moving, deliberately, to someone else's. She walks through how she's doing it — what she's choosing to give up cleanly, and what she's deliberately keeping.
"When the IR head arrives, the question is not what do I lose. The question is what do I get to give up. The framing matters."
What gets handed off cleanly
The investor database. The CRM. The follow-up cadence after every meeting. The shareholder letter drafting cycle. The internal reporting rhythm. All of these are systems Camille built; all of these now belong to the new hire. She has documented every one of them. The documentation is not a deliverable anyone asked for. She built it because she wanted the handoff to be clean.
"Documentation is how I take care of the next person in the seat," she says. "It is also how I prove to the founder that the work I did was real work."
What she's keeping
The standing one-on-one with the CEO on Monday mornings. The day-of choreography around any meeting that matters. The handful of relationships that, by accident of history, sit on her desk and not anyone else's. The small, unspoken cues of how the CEO actually moves through a week.
The keeping is intentional. "The IR head will run the function. I still run the principal. There is a difference, and the line between them is the thing I am most precise about right now."
"The thing I will not hand off is the part of the job that is about how my CEO actually works. That isn't an IR function. That is the executive office, and it stays where it is."
What nobody tells you about a clinical-stage roadshow
The technical content of a clinical-stage roadshow — the trial design, the regulatory pathway, the readout cadence — is the easy part. The CMO can do it. The CFO can do it. The CEO can do it. What nobody tells you, Camille says, is that the operating cadence of the roadshow is its own discipline, with its own logistics, its own cadence of handlers and analysts and conferences, and a JPM Healthcare week that exists as the operational climax of every biotech year.
"JPM is not a conference. JPM is a city-wide operating event that the entire biotech industry has agreed to hold simultaneously for one week every January," she says. "Forty meetings in five days. Three principals from the company. Six different hotels. Two different sets of hosted-dinner caterers. The operational complexity is somewhere between a wedding and a small political campaign."
What she'd outsource
"The JPM logistics," Camille says without hesitating. "Every biotech EA at every clinical-stage company in Cambridge is running the same operating event in the same week of the same year. Nobody has built the vendor for that. I have a list of forty people who would buy that vendor tomorrow if it existed."
Topics covered
- The IR-head handoff and what it changes for the EA
- Documentation as care for the next person in the seat
- The line between the IR function and the executive office
- JPM Healthcare as the operational climax of the biotech year