R. Scott Jones and the business of starting again

In June 2009, R. Scott Jones entered AFP Imaging through a transaction worth $1.5 million. BioWave Innovations and ComVest Capital were providing growth capital and debt restructuring. Jones, BioWave's managing director, would become chairman. AFP's founders, David Vozick and Donald Rabinovitch, would stay on the board and keep their executive roles. The company was changing its financial arrangements without emptying the room of the people who had built it.

It is a useful opening to Jones's career because it has so little of the usual founding mythology. There is an established business. There are existing obligations. There are people with long histories at the same table. Then there is an incoming chairman, whose arrival is attached to a specific sum and a specific piece of work. A boardroom can accommodate several ambitions; the balance sheet insists that somebody count them.

Jones is now chairman and CEO of Intravascular Imaging Incorporated, or i3. Before that, he held executive roles at GE Medical Systems, PharMerica, Accentia, Symphony and Cantel. His career offers a concrete way to look at business leadership: through appointments, acquisitions, financing arrangements and changes in distribution. The interesting question is how those different assignments fit together. Their common ground is the work of carrying an organization into its next phase.

Six thousand colleagues, then a succession

By the time Cantel appointed him president and CEO in December 2006, Jones had already led Symphony Health Services. His tenure there ran from October 2004 to December 2006. Symphony employed more than 6,000 people and was acquired by RehabCare Group in July 2006. Earlier, from July 2001 to June 2003, he had served as president and CEO of Accentia. He had also worked as chief operating officer at PharMerica.

The numbers matter because they give the titles some weight. An organization with thousands of employees has a different working scale from a young company organized around a research collaboration. There are more people between a decision and its execution. Jones's later move into i3 puts those two kinds of assignment within one career. The distance between them is more revealing than another repetition of the letters CEO.

At Cantel, he was succeeding James P. Reilly, who had been president and CEO since 1989. The appointment followed a national search. Jones started on December 18, 2006, and was to join the board on January 1, 2007. That sequence makes this a succession story as well as a hiring story. A long-serving executive was leaving, an incoming one was taking responsibility, and the company had to keep operating through the handover. The calendar, as ever, offered no intermission.

The arithmetic behind the announcement

During Jones's tenure, Cantel reported fiscal 2007 sales of $219.044 million, compared with $192.179 million in fiscal 2006. The reported increase was 14 percent. For the fourth quarter, sales rose 25 percent, from $50.140 million to $62.513 million. These are company results for defined periods, with the work of an entire organization behind them. They provide a view of the business he was leading, rather than a personal scorecard.

Jones's comments at the time connected investment with growth and the subsequent task of improving profitability. In June 2007 he also discussed the acquisition of a GE Water & Process Technologies business, describing acquisitions that complemented existing operations and allowed product line extensions. The emphasis was on how an acquired business would fit. That is a more exacting proposition than simply buying something and announcing that the company has become larger.

One sentence from the same announcement is especially plain: “We are also investing in marketing and sales resources to further enhance our core growth.” It brings the discussion back to the commercial organization. Transactions were part of the story, alongside the resources needed to sell. Read together, the figures and the statement show the vocabulary of his assignment at that moment: investment, complementary businesses, sales capacity and profitability. Each term has a practical consequence beyond the announcement.

An ending, followed by another beginning

Jones resigned as Cantel's CEO, president and a director on April 23, 2008. The following year brought the AFP investment and chairmanship. Put side by side, those dates resist a tidy career story in which every title simply grows bigger than the previous one. One role ended. Another began with a smaller transaction and an established company's financing needs. The work changed shape. By July 10, 2009, an AFP corporate filing carried Jones’s signature as chairman of the board, confirming that the new assignment was underway.

AFP's June 2009 announcement described both growth capital and debt restructuring. Those phrases belong together. Money for expansion and the arrangement of existing obligations are separate considerations, even when they arrive in the same deal. Jones's incoming position connected him to both. His appointment as chairman was also distinct from the operating titles retained by the founders. The announcement made that division of responsibility explicit.

The distinction became visible again in September, when Rabinovitch retired after more than three decades with the company. AFP said his responsibilities would move to other members of the executive team and that the president's position would remain unfilled at that time. In his farewell statement, Jones recognized Rabinovitch's contribution to building the international business. A transition had arrived, and the company chose to redistribute the work rather than immediately replace the title.

A sale that changed the route to market

By 2012, Jones was chairman of ImageWorks, the business associated with AFP. In February that year, ImageWorks announced an agreement in principle to sell its NewTom division to Cefla. The amount was undisclosed. The planned sale would change sales and service responsibilities, while ImageWorks would retain exclusive distribution rights for the NewTom product in veterinary applications. The announcement also said sale proceeds would be applied to recapitalizing its debt facility.

The company's other brands were outside that transaction. Jones described the next commercial focus as working through a network of more than 3,000 dealers and distributors across over 46 countries. That detail gives the transaction its business meaning. The story extends beyond an asset changing hands to the route by which the remaining business would reach its customers.

For a reader following Jones across companies, this is another variation on the same practical problem: what belongs inside the organization, what should be transferred, and which relationships carry the business forward? The 2012 plan was an announced agreement, so its details belong to that moment. Even within that limit, it shows how much of an executive's work can concern the arrangement around a product. Distribution is a long word for the short question of how something gets sold.

Distribution is a long word for the short question of how something gets sold.

From this profile

Back among the builders

At i3, Jones works alongside co-founders Farouc A. Jaffer and Vasilis Ntziachristos, with Philipp Rauschendorfer as chief scientific officer. The company grew from a collaboration involving Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and the Technical University of Munich. Its leadership therefore brings research and business experience into the same organization. Jones's earlier corporate assignments are part of what he brings to that combination.

In July 2022, i3 announced the launch of Series A financing. Jones was identified as chairman and CEO in that announcement. By LSI USA 2025, he was presenting the company in an investment conference setting; the presentation is listed in LSI's video library. Those are distinct public milestones: a financing initiative, followed later by an appearance before the industry investment community. Neither needs to be embellished into a story of inevitable success.

There is a circular quality to this stage of his career. At AFP, the financing announcement introduced him into a business with founders still in place. At i3, he again appears alongside founders, with commercial leadership as his role. The companies and circumstances differ, but the juxtaposition is instructive. Experience accumulated inside larger organizations has a place beside people building a younger one. Seniority can become useful when it is attached to a present assignment.

A seat beside the river

The career also includes a smaller, local institution. Jones served on the board of the Norwalk River Watershed Association from 2011 to July 2016. The association's spring 2013 newsletter lists Scott Jones among its directors. His work there included developing a Responsible Business Network to encourage stewardship of the river. In a career marked by international businesses and corporate transactions, this was a commitment to a particular place.

There is no need to turn that board service into a grand theory of his character. It is interesting on its own terms. A watershed association brings a business executive into an organization concerned with a river and its surrounding communities. The Responsible Business Network connected the two settings directly: local stewardship and relationships with businesses. The scale was different again, and the connection was practical.

Jones's current base is Wilton, Connecticut. From there, his professional story reaches back through large employers, public company succession, an investment-backed chairmanship and international distribution. Today it continues at i3. The throughline is a series of identifiable assignments, each with its own people, scale and next decision. The $1.5 million deal that brought him to AFP remains a useful scene to keep in mind: founders staying, a chairman arriving, and a business preparing to begin another chapter.