Date: Jul 16, 2012 Author: Chuck Soder Source: Crain's Cleveland Business (
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Al Hawkins is following a fairly simple career path.
After his job is done at Milo Biotechnology LLC, he'll start another company. Then another and another.
"I don't want to be doing anything else," he said "I like creating new companies."
Today, Mr. Hawkins is both CEO at Milo Biotechnology, a startup testing a treatment for muscular dystrophy, and a part-time CEO-in-Residence at BioEnterprise Corp., where he provides assistance to other biomedical companies in Northeast Ohio.
When BioEnterprise recruited him to move back home from Boston, they told him that his main job would be to find a technology, turn it into a company and leave the Cleveland-based nonprofit to focus on building the business, which he'll eventually do if Milo Biotechnology can raise venture capital.
Mr. Hawkins was amazed that someone would pay him to hunt for a company to start. He also liked the idea of being able to help the region he came from rebuild its economy.
"That's a long-term goal," he said. "I will be here until I die."
A native of Columbia Station, Mr. Hawkins graduated from Lake Ridge Academy in nearby North Ridgeville before earning a bachelor's degree in economics from Emory University in Atlanta in 1996. Although he spent some time working for an insurance company, he never was keen on joining a major corporation. That attitude was reinforced by a professor he had while studying for his MBA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"He made it seem like it was OK to not want to work for a big company," he said.
There, he helped write business plans for professors trying to turn ideas into products, which led him and a partner to found Agave Group New Venture Consulting, which focused on startups and investors. They also founded TFX Bioscience, but the startup's technology — which was meant to fight bioterror pathogens and protect plants from disease — didn't work as expected.
In 2007, he became director of new ventures at Boston University, where he helped faculty start companies and managed the university's business incubator and venture capital fund.
Mr. Hawkins is an intelligent, creative and thorough person, said Bill Leimkuehler, chief operating officer of medical device maker Biolectrics LLC of Elyria. He noted how Mr. Hawkins looked at all sorts of technologies before settling on Milo Biotechnology's muscular dystrophy therapy.
"He'll analyze a problem many times over and find an optimal solution before acting," he said.
He lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife, Jill, and their 4-year-old son, Leo. He enjoys hiking in the ravine that separates the suburb from Shaker Heights and playing pingpong in his basement.
