Commercial thinking, years before you have a commercial team

I'm Heather Aspras, founder of Kavros Advisors and a fractional Chief Commercial Officer for biotech. I spent more than two decades in biopharma commercial strategy, across new product planning, pre-launch strategy, and commercial build-out across therapeutic areas including oncology, vaccines, and advanced therapies.

For all these years, I kept seeing the same thing over and over again. The choices that ultimately determine the commercial success of a product get made a long time before a commercial team exists, and many of them are difficult or expensive to reverse.

Why I Started Kavros

I started Kavros to change that.

The name is my grandmother's maiden name. Her parents came here from Greece, and she was born in the US, into a country none of them had ever seen. They brought what they knew, learned the rest, and built on ground they had never stood on before. I named the practice for her because it's a reminder of what it takes to build something that hasn't existed before.

The biotechs I partner with are doing a version of the same thing, carving out new space with first-in-class mechanisms, therapies delivered in ways the health system isn't set up for yet, and patient populations that don't exist as markets yet. The playbooks that exist were written for other products. They take you part of the way, and then you're in whitespace. What carries you through the rest is a set of proven commercial approaches and the judgment to know which of them still apply, which need to be adapted, and which have to be reinvented for the situation in front of you.

I left big pharma to do this work where it counts most. Large organizations are already formed. The commercial model is set, and the room to change the trajectory of an asset is narrow. Biotechs are still taking shape. The decisions are still open. Time inside a smaller company confirmed what I'd suspected for years: commercial thinking is needed far earlier than most companies bring it in.

What I Believe

Commercial success isn't determined at launch. It's won, or lost, years earlier, in the quality of the decisions a company makes when uncertainty is highest and the existing playbooks weren't written for this.

The evidence usually shows up when it's too late. The company ends up with a launch that peaks well below what the asset could have delivered. The commercial team spends its first year diagnosing a problem that was created three years earlier, in a decision nobody flagged as commercial at the time. The next round is harder to raise than it should have been.

The most expensive version I've watched is the peak forecast everyone wanted to believe. A company becomes convinced an asset will reach a number the market, the data, and the competitive set never supported, and then allocates years of investment to try to achieve it instead of to another asset that deserved it.

It works the other way too. One time I was brought into a business development evaluation before the company had acquired anything, early enough that the commercial case could still affect the decision. I surfaced commercial challenges with the asset that would have severely limited its potential, and in the end the company passed on the opportunity. Here's the part that stays with me. Sometimes the most important commercial decisions are the ones you don't pursue. Nothing launched, there was nothing to point to afterward, and it remains one of the most valuable commercial decisions I've been part of.

Who I Work With

If you're a scientific founder or a CEO dealing with commercial questions you've never had to answer before, you don't need a full commercial department yet. You need experienced commercial judgment in the room while the answers can still change where the company ends up.

This is exactly why Kavros exists. The model is deliberately fractional and embedded to fit the moment you're in, working alongside your leadership team on the decisions that matter most.

If you're facing one of those decisions, let's talk.