Young Businessperson of the Year: David Slaughter | CEO, Orion Laboratories

By Holly Duchmann
Published: Mar 7, 2023

BATON ROUGE, LA - David Slaughter started Orion Laboratories in a garage office at the back of his home in 2017. Some six years later, Orion is now the largest independent laboratory in the state.

Though the Baton Rouge native had always wanted to start his own company, Slaughter was introduced to the health care industry through his wife, Rachael. After graduating from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 2007, Slaughter initially returned to Baton Rouge to start his career in real estate development.

After working for Commercial Properties Realty Trust for more than five years, Slaughter left the organization in 2014 to focus on his own projects, mostly developing medical offices in the Baton Rouge area. Around 2016, the laboratory his wife worked for took a “weird path” and she quit her job.

“I thought labs were in hospitals—I didn’t realize they were their own business,” Slaughter says. “But I saw how poorly some of the companies were being run.”

The pair decided to team up for a new venture—Rachael Slaughter would help provide phlebotomy services for labs, managing logistics and staffing for the clinics, while David Slaughter would arrange laboratory services for clients.

“It grew fast and I realized I had to make a choice,” David Slaughter says. “I can’t just do this at night—it’s a real company.”

In 2017, Slaughter stepped away from real estate completely and converted the 800-square-foot back garage of his home into an office to run Orion, with the staff being fully remote. As Orion grew, however, it struggled to find a good laboratory to process medical tests.

“We either had to go with a national group, that was often bureaucratic with bad turnaround times, or smaller labs that were too casual and run like a warehouse,” Slaughter says. “Pretty early on, I realized if we wanted it to provide the level of services we wanted, we needed to start our own lab.”

Orion rebranded to Orion Laboratories and opened its $1.2 million headquarters near the Towne Center in January 2019 with roughly a dozen employees. At the time, the company focused on processing bloodwork for patients, but Slaughter says it pivoted quickly once the pandemic broke out and the world seemingly came to a screeching halt.

“I remember not getting any blood samples because no doctors were doing bloodwork anymore,” recalls Slaughter. “Doing COVID tests—it was the only option we had—but it was frustrating at the time. We had been steadily growing.”

Orion began COVID testing for the movie industry in New Orleans and then expanded to testing area disability homes. Then, Slaughter closed a deal for Orion to coordinate weekly volunteer COVID testing at 201 public schools in Baton Rouge and Lafayette.

“We even started doing house calls—no one else was doing that,” Slaughter says. “The pandemic accelerated our growth by probably five years.”

Dr. Rubin Patel, CEO and founder of Baton Rouge-based Patient Plus Urgent Care, describes Slaughter as receptive to the needs of his partners and clients. Orion provided lab results during the peak of the pandemic within 24 to 48 hours for patients, Patel says.

“Due to David and Orion, we were one of the few urgent care clinics in the metropolitan area to provide travel PCR COVID tests for patients,” Patel says. “It was a dramatic business line for us. As a result of the quality and exceptional service they provided with our travel testing, we’ve switched the majority of our lab services to Orion.”

Around November 2021, Slaughter and the company began to be approached by various people encouraging Orion to become a third-party laboratory tester for the state’s medical marijuana program, testing samples to ensure products meet the state’s criteria.

“I initially said, ‘No way, that’s not in our 5-, 10- or 30-year plan at all,” Slaughter says.

But after conversations with some of Orion’s chemists and consultants from Colorado, Slaughter saw opportunity in the nascent industry and established a subsidiary company, Orion Therapeutics, in November 2022.

Orion’s expansion into medical marijuana is part of the company’s continued growth, leading to a new corporate headquarters and laboratory facility off Corporate Boulevard, which Slaughter describes as a necessary move for the organization.

Renovations on the 32,000-square-foot space in CitiPlace Centre II began last June and are expected to last through the summer.

The company has added roughly 80 employees since the pandemic but Slaughter says most of the original staff from the back of his house are still on the team including his wife, who serves as president of Orion Laboratories.

Moving forward, Slaughter wants Orion Laboratories to not only support the demands of the Baton Rouge market but also the surrounding region.

“There’s not a dominating lab near here—we want to be that,” Slaughter says. “People have tried to buy us, but that’s not what we want—we like what we do. … I still do our bookkeeping. I’d rather spend that money on something that would create value for our patients.”

Source:
https://www.businessreport.com/business/david-slaughter-young-businessperson-of-year-business-awards-2023