Medical tech company StarFish lays off some Saanich, Toronto staff: CEO

StarFish in Saanich has laid off nearly a dozen full-time workers amid global tariff and trade tensions, according to the medical tech company’s founder and CEO.

“So that resulted in 11 people, full-time, that we had to lay off today, unfortunately, and another few that were holding on to less than full-time hours,” said CEO Scott Phillips in an interview with CHEK News. The layoffs were made Wednesday.

It’s a cut of about 10 per cent of the workforce at StarFish in Saanich, which is at 455 Boleskine Rd. and, up until today, employed 115 people, Phillips says.

The company, around for 26 years, is a contract services firm that designs cutting-edge medical products for other organizations. In fact, StarFish is “one of the largest companies in this space in North America,” Phillips said.

“Very high technology things. Diagnosing cancer, doing surgeries inside their eyes, delivering drugs to their brain, stuff like that.”

Market uncertainties

The CEO told CHEK News in January that tariffs would be difficult to implement on their business, as only 10 per cent of their revenue comes from products.

But ongoing uncertainty in the investment market has altered the situation.

StarFish has conducted tens of millions of deals with U.S. companies, which often subsequently sell the products to other countries, Phillips says, but declining “generally North America-wide conditions” have hampered business.

“We sell mostly to the U.S., so the investment climate hasn’t been strong for a couple years. We’ve been waiting for the market to get warmer, which we expected this year, but due to other uncertainties that rolled into the investment climate in the last couple months, it still hasn’t been that positive,” Phillips said Wednesday.

“So we made the decision to right-size ourselves to the market, so that we can be resilient enough to deal with whatever other turbulence comes our way,” he said.

“This whole regime of tariffs between all the countries actually does not serve this industry well at all, but with change comes opportunity … Our ideal scenario is there’s (no tariffs), because our clients want to sell all over the world.”

He’s remaining hopeful about future opportunities.

“Canada can actually be an important place for American companies that want to sell into Europe, cause they’ll have counter-tariffs, right? So we think we can be highly agile and resilient to whatever the regime is,” he said.

‘Light cut’ across all departments

Phillips says today a “similar number” of staff were also laid off at StarFish in Toronto, where the cuts will be “more noticeable” as fewer people work from the office there.

He says the recent layoffs, including in Saanich, were in various departments.

“We have engineers, we have quality people, we have facilities people, we have accountants, we have regulatory people, we’ve got manufacturing people. It’s sort of a light cut across all of it. Still noticeable, of course, because we’ve been a very stable company for a long time,” Phillips said during a Zoom call.

“So it’s sad for us, but it’s by no means a drastic restructuring of the company or anything like that. We’re going to be fine, our clients are strong, but we couldn’t continue to hold on to that much capacity,” he added.

“We’ll find a way to be successful regardless.”

He says StarFish hires “very carefully” and is proud of its workforce, adding, “It’s always sad to lose anybody … and we’ll help them find other opportunities as well and support them that way. Especially Victoria, it’s not a big city, so what goes around comes around, we like to support people to be successful.”

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