spend too much time lamenting, but he’s already figured out how he’s going to get up before he even hits the ground.” Prior to his interview for the internship, Lajaunie gave Cooper this advice: Buy a decent pair of dress shoes. Black athletic shoes would not suffice.
Balancing ambition and family Life’s a lot about luck and timing. Cooper is quick to admit that. After his internship, he became a Zyber sales representative in Florida and broke the company’s first-month sales record. He transferred to New Orleans and increased his region’s sales by more than 300 percent. Quickly, he climbed the ladder, gaining experience in training, hiring, development and quality control. By the time he was named Pernix’s CEO, he was working grueling hours, always armed with a tenacious attitude, determined not to let down people who had taken a big chance on him. He was spending as many weeks on the road as at home and was often seeing his two children only when Stacey, who met and married Cooper while at Nicholls, says it’s been fun watching her husband he kissed them good night.
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get wrapped around their 2-year-old daughter Carsyn’s finger. On the weekends, Cooper and Colson, 4, enjoy jet-skiing, watching Nickelodeon and playing soccer.
Others spend too much time lamenting, but he’s already figured out how
and she doesn’t have a possessive personality,” Cooper says. “I knew that I’d have to go the extra mile in life, which meant working late, dinners and meetings out of town. I realized that Stacey was a partner who could really help me live the life I wanted to live.” Within six months of dating exclusively, Cooper proposed to Stacey, and they married in 2001, while both were still undergraduates. “At first, we lived in the married dorms at Nicholls,” says Stacey, a former Colonelette dancer. “I cried the first time I walked in. The refrigerator was held together by duct tape.” The couple eventually received a newer fridge and dressed up their small space with stick tile and carpet. While Cooper finished his graduate degree, Stacey taught at Labadieville Middle School and became a counselor at R.J. Vial Elementary School in Paradis. Since then, she’s put her career on hold to raise their son Colson, 4, and daughter, Carsyn, 2. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Cooper has been this successful,” she says. “He has always had that drive about him. People are just drawn to him.” Lately, Cooper spends more time at home. He recalls the exact moment when he realized that his work-life balance was out of whack. Colson,
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he’s going to get up before he even hits the ground.
His absences were nothing new to his eversupportive wife, Stacey Barbaro Collins (BA ’02, MEd ’04). In fact, he had to cancel their first date — a Delta Zeta sorority social — because he was traveling to an away game with the football team. A mutual friend tried to set them up numerous times before the couple actually met on a random night at Rox’s Bar in downtown Thibodaux. “Two of the first things I noticed about Stacey were that she doesn’t take herself too seriously
then 3, asked Stacey if his daddy was coming over to visit tonight. “He didn’t realize I lived there,” Cooper says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. I’m not that guy, am I?’ At that point, I started bringing in more support and delegating. As a result, we’ve hired some great people, and I have breakfast and dinner with my kids when I am not traveling.”
Charting the future Cooper now spends less time reviewing sales reports and more time focusing on business development. Pernix doesn’t develop new drugs; rather it buys drugs that other companies haven’t been able to make successful. Think of it like flipping houses, except Pernix doesn’t sell the drugs off after making them profitable. For example, in 2009, Pernix bought a drug for $450,000. Although the 60 sales reps at the original company hadn’t had much success, 24 of Pernix’s reps generated $15 million in product sales within a year. In addition to finding good acquisitions for his $250 million company, Cooper has some unique expansion plans. The goal is for Pernix to become a horizontally integrated company that offers brand-name, generic and over-the-counter The
COLONEL SPRING 2012
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