How Did You Do That?

After successfully growing and steering the $582 million sale of Madison-based Third Wave Technologies, Kevin Conroy went looking for another company to run. He found Exact Sciences — a struggling, publicly traded Massachusetts company with a DNA-based test for colon cancer that hadn’t been approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). When Kevin took over in April 2009, Exact Sciences had a handful of employees and a stock that was trading around $1 a share. Ten years later, the company has more than 2,000 employees, about 300 job openings, and a stock price that has reached into the high $90s. That colon cancer test, now called Cologuard , got FDA approval and has been used to screen more than 2 million people. Now, Exact Sciences is making progress on a non-invasive test for liver cancer and has others in the pipeline. Here are Kevin's three guiding principles that transformed Exact Sciences: 1. Defy convention "Exact Sciences wouldn’t be the company it is today if not for