When Sid Backstrom joined G-Con Manufacturing in College Station, the prefabricated pod manufacturer of mobile cleanrooms had only eight employees. As the company grew, so did the cost for benefits. That’s when Backstrom says he decided to shop around for a solution, and it’s when he discovered G&A Partners.
“We realized we needed something different in terms of HR,” he says. “The cost we were seeing was expanding tremendously. G&A really checked every box that we had. We felt like G&A had the most comprehensive set of solutions and benefits.”
Backstrom is the vice president of business management for G-Con. Today, the company has 260 employees helping to build cleanrooms to ship to drug manufacturers who need a pristine environment in which to test the efficacy and results of different therapeutic drugs. The pods are constructed, outfitted, and tested at G-Con’s College Station location, and then they are shipped to the client’s location, tested once more, and then left for the client to conduct their business.
“When you need a cleanroom, you’re going to be buying a construction project,” Backstrom says. “With pods, you actually are buying a cleanroom as a piece of equipment. Sometimes we can shave a year to 18 months off [the client’s] time delivering [its therapeutics] to patients, and that’s a story we like to be a part of.”
Backstrom says he appreciated G&A’s team-based approach to business right away because it melded perfectly with G-Con’s vision and mission.
“Knowing that there’s that expertise on board allows me to delegate some things I wouldn’t normally be able to delegate and made our jobs a lot easier,” he says. “To have a full team behind you—whether you’re a small business like we were when we originally started, or a larger business—it really streamlines the whole HR and benefits functions, and I can’t recommend it enough.”
