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From a small home office in the founders’ unfinished attic to #1 Best Place to Work— BioProcure/Prendio has certainly evolved, but some things remain the same.
Boston Globe Big Night Live Award Ceremony, November 29, 2023. Left to Right: Sean Loughran, BioProcure Purchasing Manager, Jeannette Franklin, BioProcure/Prendio Sr. Marketing Manager, Christina Hem, Prendio Jr. Business Analyst, Tyler Mizenko, BioProcure/Prendio VP of Relationships and Business Development, Laura Stack, BioProcure/Prendio Co-Founder and COO, Vincent Bologna, BioProcure/Prendio Co-Founder and CEO, Marie Lodi, BioProcure/Prendio VP of HR, Brianna O’Brien, BioProcure Procurement Supervisor, Claire Buckley, BioProcure Customer Support Manager, and Daniel Simons, BioProcure/Prendio Financial Analyst
2023 has been a pivotal year for BioProcure and Prendio. This past October the companies announced a strategic investment from Primus Capital
to accelerate growth and innovation across all services and offerings. Now, just over a month later, we are sharing more exciting news: BioProcure/Prendio has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Massachusetts by the Boston Globe.
“When we heard that we’d been selected by the Globe as one of the Top Places to Work in Massachusetts, we were thrilled,” said Laura Stack, co-founder and COO of BioProcure and Prendio. “Winning #1 Best Place to Work in the mid-sized company category was a huge surprise!”
“I’m still surprised that we are considered a mid-sized company,” added Vincent Bologna, co-founder and CEO of BioProcure and Prendio. “In my mind, we’re just a small family business.”
It’s safe to say that many of BioProcure and Prendio’s team members would agree with Bologna on that point—and perhaps the tight-knit, family feel is one of the reasons for this win. Bologna and Stack—a husband and wife team who met on the job at Wang Laboratories and worked together professionally in various capacities in the following years—originally hired other immediate family members to help them as their business grew: daughters, sons-in-law, brothers, nieces and nephews.
“I remember how excited we were to hire our first non-family co-worker,” said Kara Rea, BioProcure and Prendio’s Marketing Manager and Bologna and Stack’s oldest daughter. “We had just moved into our first real office. It had three tiny little rooms, and we were like, wow! We’re an actual company now, this is all so official! Laura and I sat down to interview Johnna Worob, and the three of us were trying our best to come across as very professional. At one point Laura said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to be honest with you… You need to know that you’ll be the only one in here who isn’t related to everyone else.’ And Johnna was just like, ‘Oh, great. You guys are nuts, aren’t you?’ By the end of the interview we were all in tears laughing. Johnna’s been with us for almost eleven years now.”
Work meeting at the expanded Woburn office, 2017. Left to Right: Laura Stack, BioProcure/Prendio Co-Founder and COO, Lindsay Gross, BioProcure Procurement Supervisor, AZ Office, Jim Bukartek, Prendio Sr. Director of Product Success, and Vincent Bologna, BioProcure/Prendio Co-Founder and CEO
Hiring continued as demand for the life science procurement and accounts payable support services offered by BioProcure increased. In 2014 Sean Loughran, BioProcure’s Purchasing Manager, joined the team as a Procurement Specialist. Shortly afterward Tyler Mizenko, BioProcure/Prendio’s VP of Relationships and Business Development was hired as a Customer Support Intern. Laurie Martin was the company’s first Accounts Payable Specialist hire in 2015. After multiple promotions, she is now the Senior Manager of HRIS Benefits and Compliance for BioProcure/Prendio.
When the need for a specialized life science procurement tool became apparent in 2015, BioProcure had roughly 20 employees, all of whom were tapped to lend their experience in procurement and accounts payable for biotech companies in the effort to build a software to fit the specific needs of an expanding client base. Some of those employees ended up officially transitioning to the Prendio team—like sisters Christina and Amanda Hem, who started as Accounts Payable and Procurement Specialists, and have since been promoted to Prendio’s Junior Business Analyst and eCommerce Specialist, and Jim Bukartek, who was hired as a BioProcure Procurement Specialist in 2015 but quickly rose to Prendio leadership. This past month, Jim was promoted again to Senior Director of Product Success.
BioProcure and Prendio have a total of 186 employees as of this article’s release, working hybrid or in-person from the office headquarters in Woburn, MA, the Western office in Chandler, Arizona, and virtually from all over the United States. In 2024 another move is planned, to an even larger headquarters based in Burlington, MA.
It’s a big step up from the first company headquarters in the unfinished attic space of the couple’s home in Lexington, MA, where Bologna, Stack, and Rea worked long hours together while Laura’s brother Tim Stack placed orders remotely from upstate New York. “I’m pretty sure my desk was actually an old door balanced across two filing cabinets,” Rea remembers with a laugh. “A lot has changed in the last sixteen years!”
Kara Rea, BioProcure/Prendio Marketing Manager, pictured with office cat Suzi in 2009 in the original BioProcure headquarters in the attic of Bologna and Stack’s home
And while that statement is certainly true, some things—like the “BioProcure Way” philosophy, now solidified into seven core company values—have stayed very much the same. “We want to help facilitate success,” Bologna clarifies. “It’s the whole reason behind everything we do. We want to help labs and scientists succeed in their research. We want to help venture firms plant and grow new startups, to do whatever we can to conserve their resources so they can make important discoveries that will help people. But it doesn’t end with the clients. Our mission extends to each other–we want to see each other succeed. That’s why we love promoting from within, and why we’ve done that from the beginning. We want to support families with a great work/life balance. We want to be the kind of place where people feel included, and secure, and happy, where they know that if they work hard, their efforts won’t be wasted. That’s always been the goal.”
Vincent Bologna, BioProcure/Prendio Co-Founder and CEO, pictured with Suzi the office cat in the original BioProcure attic headquarters, 2009
According to the results of the employee survey conducted by the Boston Globe in April of 2023, BioProcure and Prendio are hitting that goal. The results showed that team members most often described the company as ‘inclusive’, ‘connected’, ‘supportive’, ‘positive’, ‘friendly’, and ‘motivating’. Others mentioned that BioProcure and Prendio are ‘customer-focused’, ‘compassionate’, and ‘value teamwork’.
There is another word that BioProcure/Prendio team members used repeatedly to describe their company in the survey results. You can probably guess by this point what the word is.
Family.
BioProcure and Prendio were presented with the Boston Globe award for #1 Best Place To Work in Massachusetts on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. Click here to read the featured article on the Globe website.