About Chris

Mr. Collins graduated UMass Amherst, cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering in 1993.  The deep recession of the early ‘90s required an unusual approach to securing a first job; thus began his first marketing effort.  First, Chris developed a profile of firms that were likely to hire a newly minted chemical engineer (by region, size, permit type, etc), then he obtained a copy of the EPA’s master database through a Freedom of Information Act request.  Chris launched his first direct mail campaign with over 500 resumes sent to small manufacturers through the southeastern US.  One of those resumes found its way to Petroferm, Inc. – a fledgling specialty chemicals firm with annual revenues of approximately $7 million USD, located in Jacksonville, Florida - and Chris soon joined on as their 21st employee.

Petroferm’s revenues grew by a factor of ten while the number of employees increased approximately six-fold over the following seven years.  In this dynamic environment, Chris gained experience in a wide range in business functions, from sales and sales management, to marketing and product development, to acquisitions and post merger integration.  As early as 1995, he took the lead in innovating products and services for unmet market needs, and spearheading their commercialization.  Chris led innovation and marketing efforts for products serving end-use markets as diverse as circuit board fabrication, integrated circuit packaging, metal finishing, and medical device manufacture; he wore a lot of hats as his professional growth mirrored Petroferm’s rapid expansion.

Chris left Petroferm to join the industry-leading technology and innovation practice at Arthur D. Little consulting in Cambridge, Massachusetts – a global, technology-based consulting firm founded in 1886 whose principals were recognized experts across a wide range of industries. As a project manager, he combined his entrepreneurial experience from Petroferm with the best practices and methodologies of Arthur D. Little.  Chris organized and led project teams and ran programs that produced quality deliverables, on-time and on-budget, in such diverse technological spaces as software, chemical weapons detection, extruder technology, and medical devices.  As part of ADL, Mr. Collins guided clients toward business models which maximized the opportunities for their technologies, aligned their product and service portfolios with market pull, and placed appropriate value on their technologies based on their competitive position in the marketplace.

Christopher Collins Consulting was born with the bankruptcy of Arthur D. Little. A former client from ADL hired Chris to lead the product launch of a novel treatment for wound care. He joined their team for a six-month deployment in Reykjavik, Iceland working with clinicians, engineers, and regulatory staff to translate clinical needs into marketing specifications, engineering specifications, and marketing proofs. Success in this assignment led to a marketing and product development assignment for wound care products with a Boston area firm. Later, some of the principals from the Reykjavik project joined a start-up firm in Christchurch New Zealand where they asked Chris to join them in a reprise of thier earlier work together.

In the fall of 2006 Chris joined Energy Sciences; a small, Boston area firm making electron beam processors - particle accelerators used to alter the properties of polymers.  He led new business development by identifying new, commercially viable, applications for electron beams – a mature, but underutilized technology. Chris’ market research identified opportunities to serve emerging consumer markets in China, and he secured the first customer there for food packaging applications.  Chris also found ways to leverage the unique physics of the electron beam to create new, differentiable products in growth markets.