From Engineering to Entrepreneurship: Bruce Haghighat’s Formula for Success

“I started my career as a management consultant at Ernst & Young, one of the ‘Big Four’ management consulting firms,” the native of Princeton, NJ, explained. “With the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, I became focused on designing and developing computer systems that help clients operate their organization and processes more efficiently and effectively.”

Mr. Haghighat earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and had the technical expertise to function in that role. However, he wanted to bridge the gap between his technical and business knowledge.

“I realized that you really need that very specific business acumen to be able to do this—you could no longer just be a technical guru,” he explained. “To grow an organization, you need to understand the product, process, market, and competitive landscape, and how to sell, market, and advertise your solutions, services, and product offerings.”

That realization ultimately led him to pursue an M.B.A.—a degree that would provide both strategic insight and practical application.

“I picked The Peter J. Tobin College of Business,” he said. “The curriculum was robust, up-to-date, relevant, and in tune with the current business trends. Professors had hands-on industry experience, so they could link the theory or the topic area to a real-world example in the workplace. St. John’s gave me the tools necessary to advance my career.”

In 1994, Mr. Haghighat used the knowledge he gained from his M.B.A. to establish Tricore, Inc., a training agency focused in the pharmaceutical services industry. Within a few years, Tricore was working with major global pharmaceutical organizations in corporate training; skills development; and legal, compliance, and regulatory areas.

“Initially, we wrote medical content and created a web-based experience for our clients—which was very new back in the late 1990s,” he said. “It might not be considered innovative by today’s standards, but at the time it certainly was.”

Under his leadership, the company experienced exponential growth, underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions, and ultimately became part of Lumanity—an organization he was affiliated with consisting of more than 1,200 professionals with offices across the globe.

A self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Mr. Haghighat established the Octane Group in 2018, where he is Chief Executive Officer. A learning and development organization with offerings in the life sciences industry, Octane currently has offices in Princeton, NJ, and Irvine, CA, where he lives today.

“When a pharmaceutical company launches a new drug, they contract with us to do two levels of marketing and education around that product—one to educate the physicians and health-care providers, and the other to educate pharmaceutical companies’ sales representatives, account manager, and medical science liaisons.”

For its work, Octane has received several awards, including the Gold award from The Telly Awards, Horizon Interactive Awards, Hermes Creative Awards, the AVA Digital Award, DotCOMM Awards, and Summit Creative Awards. Additionally, Octane Learning was recently named a Watch List Sales Training and Enablement Company by Training Industry.

A father of two high school-aged children interested in life sciences, Mr. Haghighat and his wife have been encouraging them to focus their college studies in a technical field, such as biomedical engineering or computer science, and then pursue an M.B.A., just as they both did. “I’ll be the first to encourage my son, who is about to apply to different colleges, to apply to St. John’s because of my great experience there and the direct impact it had on my success.”