BY: ANDREA TIMPANO
“Do whatever you want to do. All I want to know is you're the best at [it].”
Many years have since come and gone, but Dr. Brijinder Minhas still remembers the advice his father, an accomplished Stanford alum with a PhD in economics, gave him when he was first beginning his undergraduate studies.
It’s a sentiment Minhas has taken to heart—first as an embryologist turned IVF lab director and, later, as part owner of New Leaders In Fertility & Endocrinology, the fertility clinic he helmed alongside longtime friend and business partner, Dr. Barry Ripps. Now, in keeping with the guidance his father imparted all those years ago, he’s on to a new (and decidedly unexpected) role: investment banker. Yes, after 30-plus years of practicing embryology and making “a lot, lot, lot of babies,” he says with a smile, Minhas now earns a living as vice president of healthcare at MidCap Advisors—the very firm he and Ripps retained to help them sell their own practice in 2022.
“It's amazing what we [set] out to do and what we end up doing during a lifetime,” the Chicago resident says of his unique resume. “Opportunity presents itself and then you have to make a decision and say, ‘Hey, do I have it?’ And if you have it, you give it your all.”
“Opportunity presents itself and then you have to make a decision and say, ‘Hey, do I have it?’ And if you have it, you give it your all.”
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“Explain this to me”
For Minhas, you could say the road to becoming an investment banker began in the mid 1980s, when he first launched his career in IVF. The budding scientist had recently finished a PhD in reproductive physiology at Texas A&M, and had since taken a job creating transgenic rabbits, mice, pigs, and goats for a small biotech company. That’s when, by chance, he met Dr. Mel Dodson: a co-chair of the human IVF program at Baylor College of Medicine “Mel said, ‘I need someone like you. You're wasting your time. Come and work with me,’” Minhas recalls. So he did, following Dodson to East Tennessee University, where in 1986 he helped make his first IVF baby—just eight years after the birth of Louise Brown.
The next phase of his career would be just as productive. By the early aughts, Minhas had held posts everywhere from the University of Tennessee Memphis and Chicago’s Center for Human Reproduction to IntegraMed. It was during his time at the latter—where he served as regional scientific director and then vice president of operations—that Minhas says he got his first “taste of business” thanks to new P&L responsibilities.
“I had no business training, so I called up the chief accountant and said, ‘I don't understand this. Explain this to me.’ He told me, ‘You don’t have to worry about it,’” Minhas says.
Dissatisfied with the response, Minhas felt inspired to go back to school for his MBA, which he earned at Northern Illinois University in 1999. “I spent 73 Saturdays getting my [degree],” he recalls, “And then I called our chief accountant back up and I said, ‘Thank you very much, but no one will ever say to me that you don't understand this.”
Outside of work, Dr. Brijinder Minhas enjoys spending time with his 2-year-old granddaughter, Ruby.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Brijinder Minhas.
“I had no business training, so I called up the chief accountant and said, ‘I don't understand this. Explain this to me.”
Lab Director Turned Practice Owner
Armed with his new degree, Minhas left the company in 2000. Before long, he linked up with Dr. Ripps, an REI physician and aspiring practice owner. As Minhas tells it, the pair—who first became colleagues in the early ‘90s at the University of Tennessee Memphis—entered their business partnership rather easily. “We were very close family friends. [At the time] he had little kids and I had little kids growing up. And so he says, ‘Come on, let's work together. We shook hands and said we're 50-50 partners,” Minhas explains, noting that he ran the lab and business while Ripps functioned as medical director. “And that’s how I got equity [in a practice]. It was as simple as that.”
The two would go on to work together until 2022 when they sold the company—something Minhas says that, by that time, he and Ripps had been considering for a while. “For about seven years, we'd been talking about all this consolidation taking place in the industry,” he says. “There were a lot of people moving around and making inquiries. We spoke to some people, but nothing really came together.” That is, of course, until MidCap Advisors came into the picture. After Ripps met and “clicked with” MidCap VP Bob Goodman, Minhas says, the business partners decided to hire the firm as their investment banker.
After the deal was done, though, Minhas had another choice to make. “That's when I [said] I've been doing this since 1986,” he says. “I decided it was time to do something different.”
But what? Luckily, the healthcare vet didn’t have to wait long to find out.
“I've been doing this since 1986. I decided it was time to do something different.”
Dr. Minhas joined MidCap Advisors as vice president of healthcare in 2023.
“We’re going to turn you into an investment banker”
Not unlike his chance encounter with Mel Dodson back in the 1980s, Minhas’ foray into investment banking seems a little like fate. Shortly after the sale of his practice, he received a surprising offer from MidCap’s Goodman and Scott Yoder, the firm’s managing director.
“I was very involved with the whole transaction—getting ready for it and the whole bit,” Minhas says. “After the deal was done, Bob and Scott asked me, what are you gonna do now? I said I hadn't figured that out yet. And they said, ‘Well, come and work with us. We're going to turn you into an investment banker.”
Minhas—who turns 70 next year—says the transition has been stress-free. Perhaps that’s because he hasn’t completely left the IVF world behind; he is, after all, regularly working with fertility clinics in his new role. He’s also got that MBA under his belt, a tool which he says “gave him the learning to ask the right questions and appreciate the answers.”
Even so, Minhas is quick to credit his MidCap colleagues with helping him—and the healthcare clients they serve—find success. “Bob has been in the healthcare industry for over 50 years, Scott's been CFO for 16 years with a lot of experience in healthcare, and I've spent my whole life in healthcare. We all compliment each other a lot,” he says. “Clients in the marketplace—folks who are interested in aligning with strategic partners—I think they see that.”
Looking ahead, Minhas says he’s excited about continuing to bring his years of embryology expertise to investment banking. He’s also keeping an eye on advancements in IVF, even if from a different vantage point. “When I started in the field, our success rates were around less than 2%. Now with PGT, we're talking about 65%. That's huge,” he says. “There’s a ton of stuff that we don't know yet … [but] we'll keep moving forward. It’s a fantastic field—and it's just going to grow.”
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