January 2023 – Your Financial Pharmacist

YFP 292: How & Why One Pharmacist Started a Functional Medicine Organization for Pharmacists

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

This week, Dr. Lauren Castle, founder of Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance, discusses how her experiences working with Walmart in influencer marketing and personal branding helped prepare her for growing her business, why she started FMPhA to integrate pharmacists into functional medicine, and her transition from employee to entrepreneur.

About Today’s Guest

Dr. Lauren Castle is the founder and CEO of the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance (FMPhA.org), the first association representing pharmacists in functional medicine. FMPhA supports members practicing functional medicine across all pharmacy settings by uniting leaders in the field to provide continuing education, training, networking, and advocacy.

Lauren also serves as a functional medicine consultant pharmacist with the PharmToTable Team and maintains a part time practice as a retail pharmacist. She received her Doctor of Pharmacy from Ohio Northern University in 2013 and her Master of Science in human nutrition and functional medicine from the University of Western States in 2018. Lauren has also studied with the Institute for Functional Medicine and Functional Medicine University and became an Applied Functional Medicine Certified (AFMC) practitioner through the School of Applied Functional Medicine in 2022.

To download a free Functional Medicine Pharmacist Checklist, visit FMPhA.org/newsletter.

Episode Summary

This week on the YFP Podcast, YFP Co-Founder & CEO, Tim Ulbrich, PharmD, welcomes Dr. Lauren Castle, founder of the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance, to the show. Tim and Lauren discuss how her experiences working with Walmart helped to prepare her to create her business, why she started the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance (FMPhA), and her transition from employee to entrepreneur. Lauren shares what led her to pharmacy and how an internship with Walmart unexpectedly changed her life plans in the best way. After graduating from pharmacy school, Lauren had always planned to become a pharmacy owner. She planned to use her internship with Walmart to see something the opposite of her chosen path. While working with Walmart, Lauren quickly learned that even in a huge company, she could stand out and make a difference. After working on special projects for the home office, Lauren realized she didn’t want to put her dream in the hands of something else. Recognizing the value of her ideas, she started the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance.

She explains how social media and networking benefitted her career and how consistently sharing her story and message of food as medicine helped to catapult her to a market director position. Listeners will hear about Lauren’s personal experience and how it led her to pursue her passion for functional medicine, ultimately forming FMPhA. She shares what FMPhA looks like today, the importance of advocacy for the profession of pharmacy in the space, and how pharmacists can differentiate themselves in functional medicine.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] TU: Hey, everybody. Tim Ulbrich here, and thank you for listening to the YFP Podcast, where each week we strive to inspire and encourage you on your path towards achieving financial freedom.

This week, I welcome the Founder of the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance, Dr. Lauren Castle. During the show, we discuss how her experiences working with Walmart in influencer marketing personal branding helped prepare her for growing her business, why she started the FMPhA to integrate pharmacists into functional medicine and functional medicine in the pharmacy, and how she planned for the transition over five years from employee to entrepreneur.

Now, before we jump into the show, I recognize that many listeners may not be aware of what the team at YFP Planning does in working one-on-one with more than 280 households in 40-plus states. YFP Planning offers fee-only high-touch financial planning that is customized for the pharmacy professional. If you’re interested in learning more about how working one-on-one with a certified financial planner may help you achieve your financial goals, you can book a free discovery call by visiting yfpplanning.com. Whether or not YFP Planning’s financial planning services are a good fit for you, know that we appreciate your support of this podcast and our mission to help pharmacists achieve financial freedom.

Okay, let’s jump into my interview with Dr. Lauren Castle.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:17] TU: Lauren, welcome to the show.

[00:01:18] LC: Thank you so much for having me, Tim.

[00:01:20] TU: So this episode has been a long time in the making. We’ve crossed paths for many years now through Ohio Pharmacy Association and other circles. We share our alma mater, Ohio Northern, so go Polar Bears.

[00:01:34] LC: Yep.

[00:01:34] TU: So let’s start there with your career path into pharmacy, what led you into the profession, and how you ultimately landed the work that you’ve been doing with Walmart really for over the last 10 years now.

[00:01:46] LC: Sure. So like many people, I decided I wanted to go to pharmacy school. When I was in high school, I actually had started working in an independent pharmacy in Monroe, Michigan, and absolutely loved it. So I thought for sure I was going to go to pharmacy school and become a pharmacy owner whenever I graduated.

I ultimately ended up meeting my husband while I was in school, and that is what led me to pursue a different internship. I thought to myself what better time to just get some totally different experience. I’ve already got my path laid out. I know what I want to do. But just in case, I’ll check out the exact opposite of an independent pharmacy, right? Like the largest company in the world.

So I joined Walmart. That summer, I just completely fell in love with it. It still felt like I owned my own pharmacy in a sense. But yet I had all of these resources and all of this capacity to literally influence millions of people. I kind of figured that out because I shared a little story on their sort of social media Internet company website about Walmart’s 50th anniversary and my experience as an intern. I didn’t really think anyone would read it or care. But that story actually got picked up, and it was published in our home office newsletters.

So like our president of health and wellness at the time had read it and sent it down to my supervisors, and that was sort of the aha moment for me that I realized I’m just one person in a company of over two million employees worldwide, and I actually can make a difference. So that was sort of the theme of these last 12 years that I’ve really been able to continue on with.

[00:03:25] TU: I love that, starting with the concept of let me use the internship. For some, it might be experiential rotations as an opportunity to see something different. I often share with students, if I had to go back and do anything different pharmacy school, it would be to really reevaluate those precious summer internships and then those 9 or 10 months of experiential rotations because the safe plays are always going to be there, right? What a unique opportunity, where you have a month or a summer that you can see something that’s completely different and, obviously, building relationships and having different experiences. Those more traditional opportunities will be there but such unique time to see those things, and so cool to hear you take advantage of those.

Let’s talk about some of those experiences with Walmart a little bit more because – No disrespect in any way to pharmacists that are out there working the bench day in and day out. But that was not your gig with Walmart. Certainly, you’ve done that. But as you look at your experiences with Walmart, it’s very, I would say, nontraditional in those experiences with Walmart, in terms of – You alluded to some of that with some of the posts that you were sharing early on that got picked up. Nationally, you’ve had some experiences working with them, more in that influencer marketing, personal branding, wellness side of things.

Tell us about those experiences because I suspect, as we’ll talk about more of the work that you’re doing with the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance here in a little bit, those experiences were really critical to the work that you’re doing now as well.

[00:04:59] LC: They certainly are. I mentioned, even from the very beginning, I started sharing my story in the company. I think no matter what company you’re working for, there’s actually a book I’ve recently read that talks about how purpose is more than a side hustle, and it’s actually the way you show up for other people every day. So it doesn’t matter what type of role you’re in. If you’re in a nine-to-five job, if you’re working as an entrepreneur, you’re living your purpose every day, and you can tell your story in whatever role that you’re in.

For me, that really looked like sharing what I was doing on social media and sharing little bits of how I work as a pharmacist for the company. Ultimately, that is what led to some additional opportunities that I had to get promoted. So networking, of course, is huge. A lot of times, people will say it’s not what you do, but it’s more around like who you know. So for me, I was always trying to reach out and connect with people on LinkedIn. So every market director, when I was an intern, I was connected with them. They knew who I was. They knew my name. They knew my face. I would show up, like you mentioned, Ohio Pharmacists Association meetings. Make sure that I was involved in professional activities as a pharmacist.

That networking is really what led me to get promoted to a pharmacy manager to a clinical pharmacist manager whenever we actually moved to Michigan and ultimately to a market director. So five years after graduation, I became a market health and wellness director, which was sort of my big goal as an intern once I joined Walmart. That role was incredible, and I learned so much, just from managing teams, managing people, really managing a business, right? Yet again, continuing to share my story on social media.

At the time, I had also started getting into functional medicine. So now, this was a new aspect of the story I was telling and also was picked up and seen by people at our home office. That was the moment that really kind of catapulted things to what my real dream was, right? I’d already met this milestone from just a, “Oh, I got promoted. I’m a market director. This is awesome,” to, “Well. Now, I want to go work at our home office. I want to go to Arkansas. I want to go and really make a difference for the company.”

I didn’t know what that was going to look like. But as I was talking about functional medicine and how I really felt like it aligned with some of the things Walmart does around helping people save money and live better, and you really do have everything that you need to live a healthy life at an affordable price in the stores. So that was the theme. That was the message I was sharing. I, ultimately, ended up getting to meet our president of health and wellness, and this was back in 2019. He was a fellow Ohioan, so he came out and visited. We sat down and, as we were eating lunch, started talking about this concept of food as medicine.

They were like, “This is awesome. We think this is a great idea. We would love for you to come out and share more and see how this would integrate with Walmart Health,” which at the time, they were just starting to build those as primary care centers. So I didn’t really think anything of it. I was like, “Okay, yeah. Cool. That’d be awesome. Would love to come out.” A couple weeks later, I got a phone call, and they’re like, “Hey, we need you to come out like this week to meet Steuart Walton of the Walton family.”

[00:08:46] TU: The Waltons. Yep. Yeah.

[00:08:47] LC: Like that’s one of those calls that you never expect to get in your life. But it was my dream, right? Like as I was sitting here, trying to figure out like how am I going to get to home office, what am I going to do, you just keep taking the next step, right? You just keep living your purpose. Ultimately, that’s going to all come together.

So I spent three months out there on a special project, basically looking at how we would integrate nutrition in with the services that we have in health and wellness. As we were getting ready to pick out our first store, it was kind of the end of the year. There was some leadership changes. They sort of paused all the projects and said, “We’re going to hold off for a little bit.”

2020 hits and, of course, the whole world shuts down, and it’s COVID. So silver lining, of course, is that we would have never been able to do a lot of the things we wanted to do anyways. That also was the moment for me that I realized this has been an amazing journey with Walmart. But I also realized that I can’t put my dreams in someone else’s hand. So that was the moment that I came home, and I actually started my LLC for the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance too.

[00:10:07] TU: I love that. So much to unpack there. But I think one of the things you just shared, which we’ll come back and talk about your journey, really growing the Functional Medicine Alliance, spending more and more time on that, is not necessary putting your own dream in someone else’s hands. But also recognizing that the experiences that you do have working for someone else can be so valuable and catapulting what you’re working on. Also, just the experiences, the network, all of what you shared.

But when I hear your success in, ultimately, getting to that point where you’re going to meet someone from the Walton’s family, what comes to mind is that the reason that moment happened is because you, for years, were consistently showing up and providing value. Then the compound effect of that just worked its magic, as it always does, if you’re consistently showing up providing value. That’s value in person and in the work that you’re doing every day. That’s value in developing your personal brand and helping other people, staying connected and in-person meetings, virtual meetings on LinkedIn and other things.

I think we sometimes lose sight of that when we see someone who has gotten to the point of launching a business, or they’ve grown a following of whatever number of followers on LinkedIn, and they’ve got a great personal brand. It’s been a decade in the making, right? It started with that leap of faith, if you will, that you took as an intern to say, “Hey, I’m going to post this out there. Maybe somebody thinks this is interesting. Maybe it’s not.” But I know the value in showing, sharing my story. I know the value of showing up every day and providing value. It might be that in any one day, maybe there’s not an obvious like ROI on that. But over time, consistently, that really can take off.

So let’s talk 2017, if I’m correct. 2017, you actually started the Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance, and we’ll link to that in the show notes, FMPhA.org. I’m curious, before we get into kind of why you decided to go that pathway with starting the alliance to really have the impact in functional medicine, where does your personal interest in functional medicine and this concept of food is medicine, where does that come from?

[00:12:13] LC: Absolutely. So as I mentioned, I had become a clinical pharmacy manager when we lived in Michigan, and Michigan is where we discovered functional medicine. So my husband and I, he also was working in a pretty high-level job for a big company and was having a ton of health issues, super stressed, had struggled with losing weight, couldn’t sleep, had got issues, just felt terrible all the time.

As a pharmacist, I thought I was doing everything right to help him try to feel better. But at the end of the day, I kind of said, “I think if you go to the doctor, they’re just going to hand you a bunch of pills, and it’s not going to help you all that much. It’s just going to cover up these side effects.” I don’t know what is wrong. It seems like we’re doing everything right, and nothing seems to be working.

We got a flyer on our doorstep for a integrative wellness center. It basically listed all these side effects and symptoms. I just handed it to Seth, and I said, “Babe, this is you on paper. You have all of these problems. So whatever these people do, I think should go check out this seminar that they’re doing this weekend and see what this functional medicine stuff is all about.” So he went to the seminar, ended up signing up for this program. We paid $5,000 out of pocket to work with these people for, basically, 12 weeks. It sort of included everything. So it had all of these different labs that we didn’t learn about in pharmacy school, supplements that I had never heard of, and this elimination diet, where we, basically, were going to cut out most of the foods that we were still eating that we thought were healthy like whole wheat bread and skim milk and, basically, eat this sort of paleo style of a diet.

Within just a few weeks, he was feeling so much better. Pretty much all the symptoms dropped off, and he lost 20 pounds. It was just like incredible. So as I continued reading more about functional medicine, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio was actually starting a center for functional medicine that same year. So to me, that was sort of the moment that I was like, “All right, I think there’s something to this functional medicine stuff, and Cleveland clinic’s doing it. So it’s got to be pretty reputable.”

I decided at that point, I really think this is the future for healthcare and for pharmacy. But I knew also at the time, I was looking into other degree programs, so I did not do a residency after pharmacy school. At that point, I was a clinical pharmacist, but I was looking to get promoted to market director. So I was looking at MBA programs, things like that. I decided, well, maybe I’ll look into programs for this functional medicine stuff.

There was one master’s program in the US that was in conjunction with the Institute for Functional Medicine, and that, of course, is also who Cleveland Clinic was working with. So I figured, all right, this sounds like it’s pretty reputable, right? So I ended up enrolling in that master’s program and was still working as a clinical pharmacist. We had just gotten engaged. We were planning a wedding, really burning the candle at both ends. But I was loving it. I just – Everything made so much sense.

As I was starting to learn all of this new functional medicine knowledge, I started talking to other pharmacists about it. So Melody Hartzler, who you’ve interviewed on the show before, her and I reconnected. She had gotten into this through her own health journeys. Other people that I had gone to school with or had met through pharmacy conferences were getting into this space. I started to realize that we all need to come together. Like we need to form a little community and stay in touch and figure out what this is going to look like for the profession.

That was sort of where the Facebook came from, was just this idea of like, “Let’s get together. Let’s kind of bring everyone in this space and start collaborating.” I was also starting to teach other pharmacists. So Ohio Pharmacists Association had me do a CE presentation in 2017, and that was sort of the start of it. So we introduced the Facebook group. We did the CE, recorded it. That same year, I also got invited to speak at the Michigan Pharmacists Association. In those, basically, four months, I decided to actually create a website and post my story on there and not have it just be a Facebook group. But actually set up FMPhA.org, which I always give credit to Alex Barker, another friend of the YFP team because he’s the one who told me like, “Why don’t you just make an organization?” I’m like, “I can’t make a pharmacy organization.”

[00:17:18] TU: I remember I was talking about that back in 2017. I just loved that concept. It was such a nontraditional way to think about how to influence this space and really how to try to meet many people, instead of – I mean, sure, you can meet with people one on one and have a great impact. But how can you be an aggregate of the pharmacists that are practicing functional medicine and bring them together? So, yeah, I love that idea. That’s a great one.

Just so I’m understanding, the actual formation of FMPhA as a business, you mentioned just a few moments ago forming the LLC. When you started the Facebook group, when you’re providing CE, when you actually built the website, at that point, you hadn’t yet formed the business. Is that correct?

[00:18:00] LC: Nope, no business whatsoever, and I never set out to make any money off of this. It was truly just a – I believe in this so much, and I want to bring other pharmacists into it, that I’m just going to start sharing these resources that I’m learning and trying to connect with more people and bring us all together.

So, yeah, it wasn’t until the Facebook group continued to grow, and we went from 30 people at the very beginning to 500 people. So then 2018, the next year, I was at Institute for Functional Medicine conference and was talking to their leadership. I’m like, “Oh, we have 500 pharmacists and a Facebook group. They want to do functional medicine. How do we actually get them more involved in the care team?”

Because at the time, IFM really didn’t have any resources that were geared towards pharmacist. It was mostly towards physicians, and so they didn’t even know what to do with us, right? Just like a lot of the medical profession, it’s sort of like the pharmacist’s role is very misunderstood and kind of left behind or left out of the picture. So that was sort of the next step that I was like, “Okay. Well, how can we start to work with other organizations?”

Then in 2019 is when I ended up going out to do the special project. Kind of coming back from there, I had also spoken with another pharmacist, Jerrica Dodd, and she was the one who then gave me the push of like, “Lauren, you got to monetize this thing. You have got to start actually setting up a business and really taking this seriously because you’re sitting on a goldmine in a sense because people are hungry for this. They want this.” Yeah, that was – We were at a functional medicine symposium, and I had someone that asked me, “How do I become a member? How do I join? How do I sign up today?” I was like –

[00:19:56] TU: Let me figure that out.

[00:19:57] LC: I will get back to you.

[00:19:59] TU: But, Lauren, what I really liked about this, I don’t want to lose that there was at least two years until that point of, okay, how can I monetize this? We’re providing value. It’s growing, which there should be. Jerrica is correct. As you’re building something that’s providing value to others, like there’s a fair price that can and should – We charge for that. But you focus on providing value first.

Pat Flynn talks about that, one of my favorite podcasts and a blog that really influenced my journey early on in the Smart Passive Income Podcast. He talks about the value of really focusing on providing resources, providing value, building your community, really making the deposits in the bank, and doing that authentically. The business will grow from there over time. I think your story is such a cool example of that.

Before we talk more about the actual transition and how and when you made that transition to spend more of your time working on the business and less of the time on the W-2 side of things, tell us more about what does FMPhA look like today, in terms of you went through this journey of, okay, we need to monetize this. Is it a membership model? Is it they’re paying for certain resources and being a part of the community? What does it look like in terms of the business today?

[00:21:17] LC: Absolutely. So today, it is a membership, much like many pharmacy organizations that you can join. We’re bringing together pharmacist and community through the Facebook still, of course, which is a free resource. But really, the advocacy piece is sort of what’s most important to me. We partner with a few different organizations in functional medicine, one being the Institute for Functional Medicine. So when you join, you have the option to also add on IFM membership at basically a discounted rate. We also were able to work with them to get a 20% discount on their trainings, which one of the top questions that we get asked is, “Okay, I’m interested in functional medicine. Where do I get training? Do I need to get certified?” So the answer is you don’t have to get certified. But certainly, just like with any type of training, having that additional credential is going to speak for itself, in terms of working with other providers.

We really were wanting to get more pharmacists into that organization. So part of that was how can we make it more affordable because, again, it’s not cheap. A lot of these certifications are upwards of 10 or even $20,000. So that was kind of our first big step. We also worked with them to actually get the word pharmacist listed as a provider type, right? So it’s the little things to some of these organizations that mean a lot to us as pharmacists and to the profession.

So those are some of the things we do. We also work with A4M, which is the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. We also have discounted rates on their training programs as well. So those are sort of the big two training programs that we’ve partnered with. Then we’re actually working on launching our very first course for members, so Functional Medicine Pharmacists boot camp will be launching in January, as of the time of this recording. That’s really the culmination of all of these seven-plus years of working in functional medicine, trying to figure out how do we actually do this as pharmacists, and answering a lot of those frequently asked questions around training and how to implement it and what types of jobs you might be able to find or create for yourself, and really just putting all of those pieces together.

The last couple of services that we also offer, of course, is with CE. We have a few different partners there. At the time, again, when I got into this, there was no CE for pharmacists in functional medicine. Now, we’ve got a couple of different partners that we work with that are offering functional medicine CE. So that’s another area. Then, of course, we have our annual meet up in conjunction with functionalmedicinece.com. We have our meet up there every year, usually in the fall. So in-person events, it’s been really great to get back together with people and actually, again, bring that networking together because you never know who you’re going to meet and where they’re at in their journey and how they might be able to help you as well.

[00:24:23] TU: Yeah. One of the things I’m curious to get your opinion on is from an outsider’s perspective, kind of following the functional medicine movement, seeing more pharmacists, clinicians start to dabble in this space, I think, for really good reasons, I’m not seeing a lot of differentiation. As I’ve talked to a couple of people that are starting up a business of which I know very little about functional medicine, but I’m looking at it from a business perspective, what really is glaring to me at first is like why you, why your services. There’s not like a compelling differentiation that I’m seeing there.

So as someone who, I think, spent a lot of time building a strong personal brand, doing influencer marketing, really building a niche of what you’re doing out there, and understands the importance of that differentiation, what advice would you have someone for – That’s listening and say, “Hey, I’m really interested in functional medicine, about how they might differentiate themselves in this space and what they’re offering.”

[00:25:19] LC: Yeah. So I think you bring up a good point, and that was sort of another reason that I finally kind of pulled everything together into this boot camp course is that I had a lot of pharmacists that were coming and saying, “I’m studying functional medicine, and I want to figure out how to use it.” I think everyone, somehow or another, because, of course, a lot of this really picked up steam during COVID in 2020, and virtual or telehealth became kind of the norm for a little while, and so a lot of people assumed that like, “Oh, if I’m a pharmacist, I can quit my pharmacist job and launch a virtual functional medicine practice and become a millionaire.”

[00:25:59] TU: Patients will be flooding and scheduling left and right.

[00:26:01] LC: Yes. They – Yeah, exactly. For some people, they can do that. For a lot of people, it’s not that simple. So what I really try to work with pharmacists to understand is that there’s no one way to practice functional medicine. It’s just a lens through which you are going to use your pharmacist license. So more often than not, if you want to do a virtual practice, yes, we can help connect you with the resources that you need to set that up. But is that really the way that you want to serve your patients?

If you’re someone who isn’t necessarily a big fan of social media and putting your face out there and having to tell your story over and over and over every single day to try and attract patients in a virtual practice, what about considering working with a physician in your local practice, right? What about a chiropractor? What about an independent pharmacy? Do you have a compounding pharmacy somewhere? There’s all of these other pharmacy settings where functional medicine can be an additional service that you bring to the table to provide to reach those patients that really need it the most, right? So it’s really about figuring out your skill sets and what areas of pharmacy you are most passionate about and then thinking about how you can apply a functional medicine approach to whatever that is.

For a lot of people, it might be figuring out how to set up a collaborative practice agreement, so you can practice at the top of your license. Or it might be walking into an independent pharmacy and seeing if you can get a job as a pharmacist there, leading their health and wellness programs. So lots of different options to think about before you just kind of go and quit the day job and start trying to launch a virtual practice.

[00:28:03] TU: Let’s shift gears here and talk about the transition that you’ve made from employee to entrepreneur, at least where you’re spending more the majority of your time now focused on Functional Medicine Pharmacists Alliance. You had this to, say, a few months ago on LinkedIn. You said, “It took five years to get here. But it feels amazing to finally have the time and space to pursue this fully.”

It hit me right after I got back from the DiversifyRx hat I had used up all my PTO in the nine-to-five job in order to attend pharmacy conferences this year. So I did the math. I realized I could work part time for the same salary and then turned in my resignation. Tell us more about what led you. I mean, I’m sure you’ve thought about this moment several times. But what was it specifically that you said, “Hey, this is the moment. I’m ready.”?

[00:28:48] LC: Yeah. So to provide a little more background, at the time, earlier this summer, I was working for a company called Brand Networks. So I mentioned before, I sort of had been burning the candle at both ends for a number of years, working as a market health and wellness director. Of course, COVID happened. I was also a caregiver for my mom who, ultimately, passed away last year.

After that moment, I actually had taken a 12-week leave from my market director job that my boss had suggested to me like, “Hey, Lauren. You have gone through a lot. And if you need to take some time away, you can do that.” So just one more thing to consider about before you leave your job, have you used all of the resources available for your own health and your mental health? So for me, I took those 12 weeks. I went through intensive outpatient therapy. I really got to kind of heal from a lot of that trauma and also found this new path in social media marketing with this company. So I was able to work remotely from home for a year. Still working as just a part-time peer and pharmacist, a couple shifts a month.

Then kind of the nine-to-five was in the social media marketing, which yet, again, was sort of another very intentional choice of I know that I want to grow FMPhA, which now is a business, and I still have a lot to learn about running a company online. So what a great opportunity to be able to actually work kind of on the inside of running marketing for the world’s largest company? I probably can learn a few things, so great experience, amazing team, super fun role.

But, yes, I was having to take time off in order to actually go to pharmacy conferences, which were finally kind of starting back up again in 2021. So I was doing a lot of traveling. Even though I was in a remote role, I still didn’t really have flexible hours. Like I still had to be available from nine to five. So as I was taking all of this time off, it hit me because we were planning for our pharmacy symposium in the fall, and I wasn’t going to have the PTO to take to go to my own conference.

[00:31:13] TU: Your own event.

[00:31:14] LC: I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay.” So that was the moment that, like I said, I really just sat down and did the math. It was like, “I think it’s time. I think it’s time.” So my market director had actually reached back out to me, the one who backfilled my position that I had trained and said, “Hey, I’ve got a store open. If you want to come back, whatever hours you want to work, we can make it work.” So I was like, “Yeah. I think I’m going to be a 48-hour pharmacist.” It was another one of those moments where it’s like, if you would have told intern Walmart pharmacy Lauren that she was going to only work 24 hours a week as a pharmacist one day, I would have thought that like something horrible happened, and I was like disabled. Like, “Oh, my gosh. Why can I only work 24 hours a week as a pharmacist? That’s terrible.”

But it took a lot of like unlearning to finally see that like, “Oh, yeah. There’s more to life than working 40 hours a week for your company. You can actually have your own life and work part time, still have a good salary and full-time benefits, and do all these other things that you’re passionate about.”

[00:32:29] TU: I love the story. As you’re still working part time, obviously able to focus more full time on the business, but you’re able to do that. Why? Well, because you left with really good relationships. Well, you haven’t left technically, but you had really good relationships. Somebody who’s coming forward, obviously, they saw your wellbeing as a priority. Let’s take some time off, refocus. We value you as an individual, also as an employee. Then, hey, what hours do you want? It’s like, “What? Come again.” Like, “So I can build this business and focus on that, but still be able to maintain some type of a financial base.”

I want to emphasize that because if we hit rewind here for a moment, 2017, FMPhA became a thing, right? Here we are in 2022, five years later, this is much more of an off-ramp than it is diving into the deep end. I want to say that emphatically because I have the opportunity to talk with a lot of pharmacists throughout the year that are thinking about different business ideas. I can tell they feel this internal restlessness and pressure, much of which, I think, is externally influenced. They see what other people are doing like Lauren, like other entrepreneurs we featured on the podcast. But they don’t know the whole backstory of this was years in the making, and it’s still in the making before there’s potentially a full-time transition to the business.

I share a similar story of working in an academic role for about six, seven years, while I was starting the business until I made that transition full time. I think that’s more of the norm than it is not, and I think there’s really good financial reasons to do that. I think there’s really good other reasons. You mentioned that as you’re working for that new firm here in the last year and a half, two years that, wow, I can get some really good experiences with one of the biggest companies in the world that, obviously, you’re able to now draw from the value of those experiences and what you’re building.

So I think there’s so much to take away there as, again, thinking about this more of a transition, more as an off-ramp, slow and steady, being patient, which is hard, and less about jumping into the deep end. So –

[00:34:38] LC: One thing to add there too from a financial standpoint is that was something that we really thought about throughout this journey, right? Because for me, I’m still planning ahead. One of the beautiful benefits of being a market health wellness director is, of course, the golden handcuffs, the stock options, those types of things. So for me, I knew it was like, “Okay, I need to stay with Walmart to really maximize the value of what they provided me as part of my compensation and really think outside the box of, oh, yeah, I don’t have to completely leave the company. I can still work part time and run everything through our ethics department and make sure that like, yes, you can be a pharmacist, and you can work as a contractor employee for Walmart, doing social media.” Like look for the and opportunities there because those are things that are going to, from a financial standpoint, really make more of the work I want to do a possibility.

So we’re kind of planning that out, as we think ahead of like, yeah, I still have another year that I definitely need to stay employed with Walmart. So what can I do to make the most of that time before I even consider leaving in the future? Do I even want to? Do I still want to drop back down from 48 hours to being truly part time hourly again? Then you start thinking about some of the bigger questions, right? Or like, “Oh, yeah. Well, what are we going to do for insurance and some of those things?”

[00:36:14] TU: Retirement. Yeah, exactly.

[00:36:15] LC: All the things you have to think about in terms of starting a business or leaving a job, especially when for us, my spouse actually had left his job as well, right? So we mentioned that that was a big root cause of his health issues. The case for leaving the job, sometimes that is the solution. But sometimes, it’s not. So really think about that, evaluate it, and think about all the options. So for us, it looked like one of us leaving the job, one of us transitioning the job.

[00:36:51] TU: This is so great. Look for the and opportunities. I think there’s – When people are building something, there’s a lot of internal pressure, where you kind of fall into this trap, I think. I know I felt this for a period of time of like there’s option A, or there’s option B. Either I’m not working on the business, or I’m going full time in the business. But there’s always more options. There’s always more options. I think it’s having the creativity to see what those may be as well.

I want to wrap up by asking you two questions that I’m adopting and stealing from Tim Ferriss who ask great questions on his podcast. The first question is if you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to all 300,000-plus pharmacists in the US, what would that billboard say, and why would it say that?

[00:37:36] LC: So I think for me, what I always like to tell pharmacists that are kind of interested in this functional medicine or maybe they’re starting to hear about it is, yes, there is a better way than a pill for every ill. That is the sort of mindset that we’re all sort of stuck in whenever we’re still in a traditional pharmacist role of whether it’s dispensing in retail or being a clinical pharmacist and working on making sure everyone’s meeting the guidelines to the tee. It’s always about like adding another pill and making sure that they’re on all the right medications.

But I think through COVID, we’ve, obviously, seen that lifestyle plays such a big role in our patient’s health. So how can you start to think about ways to incorporate lifestyle, medicine, functional medicine into your patient’s health? Because, ultimately, I think that’s where the future of healthcare really lies, and a lot of times you kind of have to start with yourself too. Start to evaluate, where you can make some of these changes in your own health and your family’s health and talking to your friends about it. Then just continue growing from there and building out sort of that muscle of starting to have those conversations.

[00:38:54] TU: Yeah. I think what intrigues me so much about functional medicine is like it so much of the focus on let’s actually get to the root cause, and that takes time. I think if we take a step back and take off our bias of being trained in a doctorate program and being trained as a healthcare practitioner, we live in a system that is a for-profit healthcare system that incentivizes efficiency. It does not incentivize taking more time and not dispensing products that aren’t going to have revenue associated, right?

So I think we just have to ask ourselves always. We should be asking ourselves, kind of look at the status quo and what we’re doing. Why are we doing it, and is it the best option that’s out there and potentially available? It’s the same thing. You talked about a little bit your personal journey and some time off and some of what I heard there, like the inner work that was being done. That takes time, a lot of time. It’s easier to prescribe a medication and to see a physician for 30 minutes. But like that work is so important, obviously, for long-term benefits, for quality of life, for optimizing who you are individually as well. So it’s just such a good reminder, I think, of like what are the incentives that are out there, and are they appropriately aligned for what we’re looking at.

My second question here for you is what is one of the best or most worthwhile investments that you have ever made? It could be an investment of money. It could be investment of time, energy, in a training resource. What would you say that is?

[00:40:19] LC: Yeah. I think that overall, FMPhA has been one big investment. Rather than it just being like a business, it’s been this journey, this kind of life work of, yes, investing in the beginning money to go back to school and get a master’s degree and not take out more loans to do it, going and doing more training with different functional medicine schools for the sake of, hey, I want to be able to actually tell people my honest opinion of these programs. So I’m going to spend my own money to test them out, again, before I even have a full-on business or am being compensated to do these things. I think about the time.

My husband and I, we were just celebrating Thanksgiving together. Of course, I was also doing a Black Friday promotion. So he made a comment of, “Hey, all of your discretionary time seems to go into FMPhA, and you’re spending a lot of time on this.” I was like, “Well, yeah, I am. But at the end of that Black Friday promotion, it sort of all paid off, right?” Because then he was able to see, “Oh, yeah. This is what you’ve been building for five years, right?”

Now, kind of entering this next phase for the organization of actually having courses and potentially a podcast next year and, again, putting out more of this value for other people. It has been this labor of love. At the same time, it’s fulfilling, right? It’s what I love to do, and I feel like this is what I’m here to do. So I think FMPhA has sort of been like one big investment with money, but time, and of course energy. So now, it’s like, “All right, how do we find the balance of being a functional medicine pharmacist, CEO, and founder, but then also still having time for life?”

I think that’s probably what most people are starting to sort of see functional medicine or any type of consulting role as a pharmacist is sort of this opportunity to reevaluate what’s most important to you. Again, from like a purpose standpoint, this is the book that Ivan was reading. In it, it just sums it up so perfectly, that perfect purpose is more than a side hustle. It’s not something you turn on or off, depending on the situation or the conversation you find yourself in. Purpose is the unique way you show up every moment of every day to make life better for others. You have a purpose, and you can live it out on a full-time basis.

[00:43:04] TU: I love that.

[00:43:03] LC: So I just feel like when you think about investing, everyone’s going to be investing their time, their money, their energy into something. You get to choose what that’s going to look like.

[00:43:17] TU: I love that. We’ll link for those that aren’t watching the video. Lauren just shared Purpose Is More Than a Side Hustle. It was the book. We’ll link to that in the show notes, if folks want to check that out. Lauren, this has been fantastic. I knew it would be. So glad to have you on the show. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s been a long time in the making. Where is the best place that individuals can go to learn more about FMPhA, as well as to follow your journey?

[00:43:39] LC: So FMPhA.org is our main website. You can also find me on drlaurencastle.com. I’m @drlaurencastle on every single social media platform, so happy to connect with everyone there.

[00:43:54] TU: Awesome. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

[00:43:57] LC: Thanks for having me again, Tim.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:43:59] TU: As we conclude this week’s podcast, an important reminder that the content on this show is provided to you for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for investment or any other advice. Information in the podcast and corresponding materials should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any investment or related financial products. We urge listeners to consult with a financial advisor with respect to any investment.

Furthermore, the information contained in our archived newsletters, blog posts, and podcasts is not updated and may not be accurate at the time you listen to it on the podcast. Opinions and analyses expressed herein are solely those of Your Financial Pharmacist, unless otherwise noted, and constitute judgments as of the dates published. Such information may contain forward-looking statements that are not intended to be guarantees of future events. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. For more information, please visit yourfinancialpharmacist.com/disclaimer.

Thank you, again, for your support of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast. Have a great rest of your week.

[END]

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YFP 291: Redefining Retirement with Professor Emeritus David Zgarrick, PhD

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

Dr. David Zgarrick, a Professor Emeritus of Northeastern University, discusses redefining retirement. He shares why he views the next phase of life as a preferment phase of his career, why he started planning financially early in his career, and advice for new grads facing the financial headwind of competing priorities including student loans, saving for the future, and buying a home.

About Today’s Guest

David P. Zgarrick, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeastern University. His prior positions include Associate Dean of Faculty at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Acting Dean of Northeastern’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chair of the Northeastern’s Department of Pharmacy and Health Systems Sciences; John R. Ellis Distinguished Chair of Pharmacy Practice at Drake University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences; and Vice-chair of Pharmacy Practice at Midwestern University Chicago College of Pharmacy. He is a licensed pharmacist, receiving a BS in Pharmacy from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a MS and Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Administration from The Ohio State University. Dr. Zgarrick taught pharmacy practice management and entrepreneurship in the health sciences. His scholarly interests include pharmacy workforce research, pharmacy management and operations, pharmacy education, and development of post-graduate programs. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed manuscripts and abstracts, is co-editor of the textbook Pharmacy Management: Essentials for All Practice Settings (5th Ed), and authored the book Getting Started as a Pharmacy Faculty Member. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pharmacy Teaching, Executive Associate Editor of Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning, and an editorial board member of Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy. Dr. Zgarrick is active in many professional organizations, including the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) and the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). He served on AACP’s Board of Directors for 12 years, including as Treasurer from 2016 – 2022. Dr. Zgarrick also serves on the Board of Visitors for the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy, the Board of Grants for the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education, and is a Fellow of the American Pharmacists Association.

Episode Summary

This week on the YFP Podcast, YFP Co-Founder & CEO, Tim Ulbrich, PharmD, welcomes Dr. David Zgarrick, a Professor Emeritus of Northeastern University, to the show to discuss redefining retirement. Some highlights from the episode include Dr. Zgarrick sharing his views on his next phase in life, after 30+ years in academia, as a preferment phase of his career. He shares how and why he started planning for his financial future early on in his life and career and hands down advice for new pharmacy graduates facing competing financial priorities. Throughout the discussion, listeners will hear Dr. Zgarrick speak on standout moments from his pharmacy career, the impact his financial choices have had on that journey, and ultimately his decision to enter this preferment stage of his career. He shares excitement for retirement and this next phase of his life, what he means by a preferment phase, and how retirement can be an opportunity to experience a rich, fulfilling life outside of pharmacy without the guilt of competing responsibilities. Listen for helpful advice Dr. Zgarrick took from his financial advisor regarding his first year of retirement and how factoring in a cross-country move played a role in his retirement and financial plan.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] TU: Hey everybody, Tim Ulbrich here, and thank you for listening to the YFP podcast, where each week we strive to inspire and encourage you on your path towards achieving financial freedom.

This week, I had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. David Zgarrick, a professor emeritus of Northeastern University College of Pharmacy. Some of my favorite moments from the show including hearing Dave share why he views the next phase of life after 30-plus years in Academia not as retirement but rather as a preferment phase of his career. How and why he started planning financially early in his career to put himself in a position of having choice? And advice he has for new grads that are facing the financial headwind of many competing financial priorities, including student loan debt, buying a home and saving for the future.

Now, before we jump into the show, I recognize that many listeners may not be aware of what the team at YFP planning does and working one-on-one with more than 280 households in 40-plus states. YFP planning offers fee-only high-touch financial planning that is customized to the pharmacy professional. If you’re interested in learning more about how working one-on-one with a certified financial planner may help you achieve your financial goals, you can book a free discovery call at yfpplanning.com.

Whether or not YFP planning’s financial planning services are a good fit for you, know that we appreciate your support of this podcast and our mission to help pharmacists achieve financial freedom.

Okay, let’s jump on my interview with professor emeritus Dr. Dave Zgarrick.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:29] TU: Dave, welcome to the show.

[00:01:30] Dr. DZ: Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here, Tim.

[00:01:33] TU: Well, I’m really excited uh to have you on to dig into your professional journey and the impact that finances has had throughout your journey so that you could retire or perhaps better said, as we’ll talk about, take a half-time break at the age of 57. And you and I have known each other for several years through the academic circles. And when I saw your post on LinkedIn about entering this next phase, I knew that your story would have such a great impact on our community. So, thanks so much for coming on the show.

[00:02:00] Dr. DZ: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really great to be here. And it’s great to think about half time. It was interesting, I’m a Green Bay Packers Fan. You’re a Buffalo Bills fan. Just thinking about half time. We’re about halfway through the NFL season. It’s time to make some adjustments. And I think both the Packers and Bills will have some adjustments to make. And so, we can talk about how we make financial adjustments as well.

[00:02:22] TU: I love that. I love that. Let’s start with your pharmacy career. When did that Journey begin and what drew you into the profession to begin with?

[00:02:31] Dr. DZ: I’m from an interesting community. I’m from Marshfield, Wisconsin, which is a relatively small community in Central Wisconsin. But it’s a very unique community and that Marshfield has a very large medical center. It’s the Marshfield Clinic. It has now the Marshall Medical Center.

I grew up with health and healthcare even though no one in my family was a healthcare professional. My father was an administrator for a dairy corporation. My mother is an educator. She taught special education. I was not brought up in a healthcare background. But I had lots of friends and knew lots of people that were in the healthcare space.

And as I was going through high school, I was thinking about health and healthcare a lot and thinking about wanting to go down that pathway. I was reasonably good at all the things they tell you you’re supposed to be good at in high school, math and science, and communications and all those things.

I had honestly probably was thinking first about medicine at the time. I was going to go to medical school. I guess, in some ways I was very fortunate. I went to a career day seminar and one of the speakers that came to that career day seminar was someone from the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy. And talked a little bit about pharmacy and what pharmacists did and so forth. And pharmacy hit a good spot.

And again, I’ll give my parents credit. They were very pragmatic with me when it came to where are you going to go to college? And what are you going to major in college? That kind of stuff. And they were said, “You know, you can go to college anywhere you want. And you can major in anything you want so long as you can support yourself when you’re done.”

And to that end, pharmacy seemed it was a great at the time. Keep in mind. It was a five-year BS degree at the time, which was a great fit. Because in some ways I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to learn all these things that are going to help me if I go to medical school. Become a physician. I’m going to learn a lot about drugs, and a lot about health and health care and so forth.” Worst case scenario, if I don’t get medical school, I could be a pharmacist and I’ll be able to support myself.

I’ll say two things happened along the way. One, I recognized that being a physician wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And especially the pathway towards becoming a physician. It’s not just medical school, of course. It’s residency and training and everything that that life brings. And then I also learned that there’s so much more to pharmacy than I had envisioned there was. Probably many people, when you start down this path. Growing up in Central Wisconsin, honestly, my only connection with pharmacy was with community pharmacy.

I saw people, primarily men, wearing white coats working behind counters and seeing them take big bottles of pills and put them into little bottles of pills. And didn’t think that much more of it. Obviously, as I learned so much more of about not only what the role of pharmacy was at that time but what we were seeing it begin to evolve to. Towards not just dispensing medications, of course, but really using our knowledge and expertise to help maximize the benefits from medication therapy.

I was fortunate. I had some really good experiences along the way. I hooked up with folks that were doing research in a variety of different ways. I spent one summer doing medical research working in a lab. And honestly said to myself, “That’s not what I wanted to do.”

But I spent more time doing research with social administrative scientists and learning about the kinds of questions that they asked. My parents will tell you I am one of those people that always ask questions. I was one of those always kids that always asked, “Why? Why? Why?”

And as you can imagine, parents, you being a parent yourself, you’re probably – at a certain point, you just want to tell your kids go figure it out yourself. Because, honestly, that’s what we do as researchers. We ask questions and we have the tools to be able to learn how to figure it out ourselves.

Now, my questions I was very interested in asking were honestly about pharmacists themselves. The work they do. How they’re rewarded for that? What their ambitions are? Where they see themselves going with their careers? As a pharmacy workforce researcher, my interest is very much in who pharmacists are and what they want to do with that pathway.

And so, I got my pharmacy degree from Wisconsin. I went and worked as a community pharmacist for several years. Worked for a company that’s called Shopko. Unfortunately, Shopko is no longer with us. But many of us probably remember what Shopko was. And for a number of years, they were a great place to work with because I really used my knowledge as a pharmacist and as a pharmacy manager working for Shopko.

But then went back to – went to Ohio State for graduate school. That was a good place to be able to go to be able to learn the research tools that I needed to have to be able to do the research that I do is. As well as to get more experience with teaching and educating.

I had gotten some experiences as a teaching assistant, as an undergraduate student at Wisconsin already. But then at Ohio State, I got even more experience and learned what it was like to be in part of a classroom of 100 students and have to be prepared and have to help students understand how does their knowledge of this particular topic fit into a bigger picture of all of the things that we expect them to know as a pharmacist?

As I finished up my graduate work, I had options. I could go work for the pharmaceutical industry. I could go work with a managed care organization. I could work with wholesalers like Cardinal, or McKesson, or Bergen or something like that. There were lots of options.

Ultimately, I chose the academic path because I really enjoyed that ability to not just continue to do research but to connect with students and to really – it felt that I could have the biggest impact in my profession. And ultimately, the biggest impact on patients by continuing to train and help educate the next future generations of people that are going to go into pharmacy.

[00:09:00] TU: I love that, Dave. And you would ultimately spend 30-plus years across three different institutions in that area of work and I know have had an impact on so many other colleagues that you’ve crossed path with, obviously, the thousands probably of students that you worked with over the years.

[00:09:17] Dr. DZ: It’s interesting. At this point of one’s career when – yeah, one naturally does kind of look back at those types of things. And I started adding up the numbers between the institutions I’ve taught. And I’ve been the professor of probably close to 5,000 students over the years. I’m editor of a textbook and I work with several others on that book as well that I know is used in most colleges of pharmacy in the United States. And including not many colleges of pharmacy across the world. And so, it’s kind of cool to think about how one has an impact not necessarily even just directly like we are used to with our patients. But that indirect impact that the work that we do can be used by so many people.

[00:10:01] TU: One of the reasons I was so excited for this interview, Dave, is that I think there’s often a perception around retirement that folks might be limping towards that line. Or begrudgingly working late in their career. Or there’s a lot of energy around early retirement. But often, I think that’s with the context of that someone may not necessarily be enjoying the work that they’re doing.

And what’s really interesting about your story is the great career you have had. The fulfillment and joy you had in your work. The impact you had on many others. But also, this excitement around the next phase of life. And to me, that is what – when we talk about preferred retirement, when we talk about what retirement may look like and the vision of like that, that to me is the success I know that I’m yearning for, is to have an option and choice, of course. But also, to look back and feel like, “Wow! I love the time that I had and the impact and the opportunities I had.”

And you shared something really interesting on LinkedIn. You said that, “While I may have concluded the pharmacy educator phase of my career, I certainly don’t think of myself as being done.” And to borrow a phrase from Lucinda Main, someone we both know. You said you’re entering the preferment phase of your career. Fortunate to have the luxury of choosing what you’d like to do. Who I’d like to do it with? And taking the time to figure it all out. I love that, the preferment phase. Talk to us more about what that means to you.

[00:11:31] Dr. DZ: Thank you so much, because I feel so fortunate to be able to be at this phase of my career. And I want to share my wife, Michelle, who’s also a pharmacist who I met in graduate school at Ohio State. She has also started at her preferment phase as well. She was a pharmacist. Worked in the hospitals and outpatient oncology settings for many years. And has decided to start her preferment stage at this point with us.

But, no. I think when one thinks about getting to this stage in a career, I mean, there’s been so much that’s been rewarding and interesting about the work that I do. But like anyone, none of our career paths or jobs are perfect. They all come with sometimes things that we would just assume not be doing. Or the longer we’ve been doing something, we get to know ourselves pretty well.

And I say to myself, “Well, these are things that I really like that I’m really interested in.” And then there’s other parts of my job that I’m doing that, “Well, I’m not so interested in those things.” And I’m just doing them because at a certain point you kind of feel you have to. And I guess this is, again, a good position to be able to be in.

When one thinks about preferment, I mean, yes, I stepped off in academia what we call the tenure track. I was a tenured full professor, which in many respects is the ideal position. It’s the golden ring that many people go towards. This idea that you have a lifetime contract. And I was very fortunate to have a lifetime contract at a leading university and was well-compensated for what I did. I’m very fortunate to have been in that position.

That said, if you’re staying in that position, you’re going to keep doing all of those things essentially for the rest of your career. And I just kind of said to myself, “Maybe not.” Maybe there are other things I’d like to do. Again, there’s things I like doing. There’s things that I don’t like doing. And then there’s this whole outside of my job life, the things that make me, so to speak, that I kind of wanted to think I’d like to be able to do them without feeling guilty that I should be doing something else. And so, no, I decided that this was a good point in my life to be able to make this type of change.

[00:14:01] TU: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think – No pressure, Dave. But I think you and maybe Lucinda should work on a book on the preferment phase. Because I think – and we try to find this balance. But we focus so heavily on the dollars and cents, right? Really important. We got to have enough to cover our needs and the goals we have. Whatever those may be. But we tend to overlook both in retirement as well as throughout our careers. What does it mean to live a rich life? Not just dollars and cents. But at the end of the day, money is a tool, right?

[00:14:34] Dr. DZ: Oh, exactly. Exactly. I couldn’t agree with you more. Money is a means to an end. It is not an end in and of itself. The same as our career. We have to think of our career path as a means to an end. Not the end in and itself.

Again, when I stepped back and thought about that, I think about my family. And it was difficult sometimes especially during the pandemic. I mean, my family was back in the midwest, in Wisconsin, in Chicago and so forth. And there was a long time where we literally couldn’t travel to go see them. My wife’s family was in Ohio. The same thing. My wife was working at a hospital and they’ve literally told her, “Well, if you leave the state of Massachusetts to go visit your family, you have to quarantine for two weeks before you come back to work. And that, just for a long time, wasn’t viable for either of us.

We started thinking about our families. We started thinking about the things we enjoy doing. I mean, I enjoy skiing. I enjoy getting out on my bike and going on rides and that kind of stuff. And some of the mental type things that we all like doing and so forth. The things that honestly make us us.

I look to this point of life that we’ve entered now where it’s giving us more space and time to be able to do that and not feel like, “Oh, I’ve got to do this job aspect of my job or that aspect of my job.” I mean, we’ve figured out ways to be able to manage that.

[00:16:09] TU: One thing I mentioned to you before we recorded is I’m reading right now a book called Retirement Stepping Stones by Tony Hixson. We’ll link to that in the show notes. And this was recommended to me by a shared colleague that really John [inaudible 00:16:23] said, “Hey, Tim you got to read this book,” to really have perspective on what he and I were talking about at the time, which is more this concept of life planning. Again, need the dollars and cents. But also, what are the goals? What’s the vision we have to live life well?

And Tony Hickson, in this book, talks about retirement not as a finish line but how we need to be thinking about as a half time. And I love that. Because what do we do at halftime, right? You already kind of mentioned it when our Bills and Packers played. You adjust. You adjust and you have a plan.

Yes, it’s been informed a little bit by what’s been happening. But it’s a time to reset, to look ahead and to make sure we have a plan. We don’t just go out into the third quarter and hope it’s going to work out, right?

My question for you is it’s clear to me, Dave, when I hear you talk talking about investment of more time with family, with the outdoors, and skiing and traveling. That there’s these other goals. But there’s been thought and intention behind this transition. And talk us through that a little bit more and how you and your wife got to this decision point and ultimately painted the picture of what this vision would look like.

[00:17:28] Dr. DZ: Yeah, I think for many of us – I mean, in some ways, it’s been a conversation we’ve thought about for a long time. I mean, we knew from this point that we started working that someday we were going to retire. We weren’t just going to stay chained to our desks, or to our hospitals, or universities forever and ever.

We knew that that day was going to come. We didn’t necessarily know when that was going to be. But we started saving and thinking accordingly for that knowing that it would come. And so, there was an aspect of having a financial plan that we started to put in place.

Moving forward, I’ll say, like many people, we did get to the pandemic and kind of said to ourselves, “As our jobs were changing and our careers were changing, are these changes we wanted to make –” I mean, in some ways we made them because we had to. We all adjusted and so forth. But did we want to continue down this pathway? And I think we put some thought and energy into this.

And then now, I’m going to say we also sat down with a financial advisor. And actually, I’m going to mention just a little bit thinking about finances. Because, of course, there is a financial aspect to be able to make these decisions. Like I said, my wife and I had started saving. And we are savers. That’s part of our culture.

I remember one time you posted on one of your blogs or something, what’s the most fun thing one can do when you’ve got some extra money? And I think I remember my comment to that post was save it. And to some people that might not seem the most exciting thing in the world. But when I can take that money and put it in the bank, that tells me that I’m going to have that for – I’m going to be able to make decisions in a future based on having made that decision now to save that money. And it’s going to give me options that I know other people might not have if they didn’t save that money.

Like I said, we were pretty good savers. That said, we didn’t have – let’s say, we didn’t have a sense of when halftime was or how we were actually going to go about making that decision. And so, in some ways I was really fortunate that a financial planner, so to speak, somewhat fell into my lab.

My parents had set up a life insurance policy for me when I was born. Like, many families do with their kids. And it was a whole life policy that had a relatively small cash value. But let’s just say a number of years later somebody from that company reached out to me and said, “Have you thought about your retirement and retirement planning?” And for years I just kind of put them off thinking, “Oh, you’re just somebody trying to sell me more insurance or something like that.” And didn’t pay much attention to them.

But then, ultimately, we just kind of – I’ll give him credit for his persistence. But every year, he came back and touched base. How’s things going and all that kind of stuff? And then ultimately kind of said – it kind of hit me that, “Yeah, I could really benefit the perspective from somebody like this.”

Because like I said, I’ve done – I’m a pretty informed investor so to speak. I’ve done a pretty good job of saving and thinking about where my money was going to go, and making our money work the best for us and all that kind of stuff. But that still doesn’t give us necessarily a sense of when can you say it’s half time? And when can you make that decision?

Tom, our financial advisor, really helped us with that thought process. And I’ll say I remember this very well because it was January 2021. We’d all been living through the pandemic for the better part of that year. And he just kind of sat down with us and said, “Well, okay, given what you’ve saved to this point, if you guys decided today if you wanted to not continue to do the jobs you’re doing right now and start living off of your savings based on the lifestyle that you have, of course. The spending patterns that you have and everything. He told us, essentially, you could live within – you could live to be 95 and you have a 95% chance of not running out of money. And we kind of thought to ourselves, “Wow! That’s a really good thing to hear.”

And just having that conversation really kind of opened up our eyes to, “Well, what could we do? What are the things?” Not so much the things that we felt like we had to do, but what do we want to do? Where could we go from here? And I think that’s where we really started saying, “Okay, this is – we’re going to start moving down this path.”

I mean, I didn’t – needless to say, didn’t immediately go to my boss and say I’m leaving. We had a very good conversation about how this was going to look. And honestly, it was more than a year and a half after I had that conversation. I didn’t officially retire from Northeastern until this past August. We had that conversation. My wife had that conversation with her folks at our hospital. And then we started planning for what our next phase of our life is going to be.

We started thinking where do we want to be? Do we want to stay in the Northeast? Or do we want to start thinking about other parts of the country that we might want to live in and so forth? We landed on Denver is where we decided we wanted to be. We started going through the work of preparing to sell our places in the Northeast and find a place to live in Colorado.

And I’m going to add real estate to that mix of your financial picture that you go through in making these decisions about what your total financial picture is. Because we’ve always thought of our homes not just as a place to live but as an investment that we are going to buy and hopefully sell for more than we paid for them at some point.

But we went ahead and started making those decisions and putting that into motion. And as of last March, or this past March, we made the move from Boston to Denver. nd I’ve been very happy that we made that move. It’s worked out very well for us.

[00:23:59] TU: Let me ask for, I suspect, some pre-retirees that are listening thinking, “Ugh! Dave, I love the story and the journey.” Maybe they even look at their numbers and say, “I think it’s there.” But then they are living the reality of 8%,9% inflation, market volatility. There’s so much discussion out there of when you retire and what the market’s doing can have a long-term impact on returns and how you mitigate that risk around retirement. Talk us through – for you, obviously, we can plan scenarios. I don’t know if any of us were planning for this type of inflation volatility.

[00:24:35] Dr. DZ: Well, that’s a really good point. And believe me, I’ve had some thoughts about what we’ve gone through and in terms of the timing. I mean, when I think about even what the environment was back in early 2021 where in some ways, yeah, the stock market was starting to come back pretty strong at that time. Inflation was still pretty low. Interest rates were really low.

One of the things – Needless to say, we go into an environment now. One of the things my financial advisor advised us of. And I can’t begin to tell you what a good piece of advice this was, was to be reasonably liquid going into what essentially will be your first year of – I’ll keep using the word preferment because I’m just not convinced that I’m retired.

But he said, “Basically, you want to have a year’s worth of spending money, liquids, such that you don’t have to sell stocks in order to be able to have money to live on essentially.”

And I’ll say this, it was actually relatively easy for us to be able to do that not just with some of our financial instruments that we had been using. We used them for a variety of instruments. I mean, from equity, to bonds and other types of things that everyone else uses. But again, this was the aspect of buying and selling real estate. We owned two properties outright in Massachusetts – one in Massachusetts. One in Maine. And when we sold those, we were able to purchase a home in Denver, as well as have a little bit of cash on hand.

And having that cash on hand has made things a lot easier. Now, no one likes 8%, 9% inflation of course. And it’s certainly taken a little bit of a bite out of that cash at hand. But it’s also saved us from having to go and sell stocks at a time where stocks have taken like in the past year – What? A 20% dive.

The one thing, thinking about stocks – I mean, I have confidence that the markets will come back. I’ve seen markets go down before and they’ve always come back. And looking at our economy and the things that underpin it, the market will come back. I don’t know exactly when and how it will. If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t be doing the preferment thing. I’d be making a lot more money as a financial advisor.

But anyway – but I had that confidence that it will. And with that confidence I know that essentially the way we have things structured, this combination of different assets that we’re utilizing to be able to make these decisions. It’s not just one type of asset class that you look at. It’s not just your 401k, for example. There’s a variety of different ways that we can get to what we’re doing.

And you know what? Another thing, just to get to think about this preferment thing, too. I mean, preferment does not mean not working or no income. It’s likely going to mean different types of things. I mean, I’ll say, as I’ve moved into this phase, I’m doing what most of us would call consulting work. I’m working with a couple of different universities right now. I want to add some teaching stuff. I want to add some more administrative stuff. Helping them deal with some issues that they’re dealing with and so forth.

And, again, just utilizing the expertise that I’ve developed over the years to be able to do some things. I mean, it’s bringing in a small amount of income. Definitely not as much as I was making when I was working full-time. But that’s okay. I don’t need as much as I was working full-time.

My wife’s in the same position. I mean, she is a pharmacist. She could go back and work as a pharmacist. I mean, especially right now, there’s lots of demand. She could. I don’t actually know if that’s really what she wants to do. She’s been telling me that her next job may be working at a Trader Joe’s. And for her, that, again, this could be the perfect thing for her.

[00:29:02] TU: Store discount. Bonus. Right?

[00:29:03] Dr. DZ: Exactly. Exactly. Believe me, that comes in handy. But again, that’s the sense of my wife and I were both very money pharmacists. We were well-compensated people. We were not hurting for income. But I just took a step back and said, “I don’t need or even want to live my life where I have to depend on having that level of income for the rest of my life. I just looked at it and said, “I can do the things I want to do and live a very good life on not having that level of income.”

[00:29:44] TU: Yeah. And that takes me – Dave, I’ve been thinking as you’re talking, you’ve said several things that have caught my attention. Your somewhat inherent behavior around saving. Really, this mindset around, “If I had an option to spend extra money, I’d save it because I could think about the growth and delay gratification into the future.” And those are a sneak peek into a mindset around how we think about and how we handle our money.

And it feels like, as you’re talking, that this is something that has been ingrained in you for a long time either through personal interest, research, family experience, whatever may be the case.

[00:30:20] Dr. DZ: We were talking a little bit about this before we came online. I mean, it’s almost fair to say I’ve been thinking about this essentially from the time I was born. Because I was born into a family of savers essentially. I like to use the example of my folks – again, like I said, my father was an accountant who went to work in the dairy industry in Wisconsin. And my mother was a teacher. Between the two of them, they had a decent middle-class income, of course, and everything. But again, always saved. Part of it was to be able to save to send myself and my two brothers to college, which again I cannot begin to tell you how fortunate I was to be able to have parents who had saved for our college education and then gave us that ability to be able to start our lives without the debt that I know that many of our students have today as they’re getting that education. That, again, I know that I was so fortunate. And I’m very thankful to my parents for that.

But even more than that, it created a mindset in me that I saw what they did to be able to not only to provide a college education for me and my brothers, but to create the life for themselves as well. And my dad also retired at the age of 57. And now, – And again, retirement for him wasn’t retirement. It was. And I’ll still say is. Because my dad’s 82-years-old and is still doing this. It’s very much preferment.

My dad was – Like I said, he’s an account who had always specialized in tax. And while he was working in the dairy industry, he started doing people’s taxes during tax season. And then when he decided he didn’t want to work in the dairy industry anymore, he just said, “Well, what am I going to do?” He just essentially start – his side gig has been doing taxes. And he still has about 200 clients to this day, including myself.

[00:32:32] TU: In his 80s, right?

[00:32:32] Dr. DZ: In his 80s. It is that – I’ll say for this. It’s that great mental thing for him. It keeps him very engaged. A matter of fact, every year, this time of year actually, he goes back to tax school. It’s like a one-week seminar that he goes and learns about like, “Okay, what are all the new tax codes?” and all the new things that he needs to be able to work with people as a tax advisor on and all that kind of stuff.

And so, every year he goes to just that. And every year he shares it with me and tells me what I should be doing and how I should be preparing myself financially and that kind of stuff. But again, I just give so much credit to my parents because they had instilled in me mindsets about the value of saving and about just think about your finances really is just another one of our tools in our toolbox so to speak. It’s not an end of in itself. It’s a means to an end.

We have money and we manage our money because we want to be able to live a life that’s meaningful to us. And however that is, I’m not here to judge how one spends their money or what one does with their money. So long as you’ve got the money to be able to do it, that’s our choices. It’s your choices to be able to do that how you wish. But it’s just having those tools and having that mindset to be able to make those decisions has been a really great thing.

I remember probably likely somebody we both know, Karen [inaudible 00:34:13]. I went to graduate school with Karen back at Ohio State. She introduced me back, and I want to say this was probably 1990, 1991, to this little financial tool called Quicken.

And I have to think back. Back in 1990, ’91, I don’t know if you remember the Macintosh computers that were literally like these cubes. And so, I got one of the first versions of Quicken for Mac that was – it started – And honestly, it was this way of tracking your finances. Tracking how you use your money. Doing the checkbook thing but doing it on the register on Quicken and everything. And then the fact that it keeps track of everything.

I mean, I’m pretty proud to say now, I – what is it now? 30 some years later, I have – I still use Quicken to this day. And I have a record of my financial transactions that goes back over 30 years. And that’s been valuable to me. I mean, I can’t say that I go back and look at every transaction from 1992. But it does tell me when – let’s say if my financial advisor wanted to know, “What kind of money do you need to live on?” so to speak. Well, I had that data. I could get those answers relatively easily. And that’s been – Again, one of my bits of advice is whether it be Quicken or any of the other tools out there that help us get in that picture of ourselves financially, utilize those tools. I say I probably put one to two hours every other week into managing my various aspects of my finances. And for me, that’s always been time very well spent.

[00:36:14] TU: Yes. Yeah. And the consistency and compound effect of that is huge over time. And it’s interesting, you’re talking about tools and Quicken. Here in 2022, obviously, there are more tools than ever, apps, that will help us, software tools. But I would argue, some of the mindset and behavior, it is getting harder and harder just because of all the things that are competing –

[00:36:39] Dr. DZ: Or time and attention.

[00:36:40] TU: Yeah, tracking, easier execution I think is even becoming a little bit harder. Let me ask you one final question. I know we have some new practitioners that are listening. You obviously work closely with students and new grads as well. But folks that are feeling the headwind financially despite obviously making a good income, having a good potential for their income into the future but they’re facing large student loan debts. They’re looking at potentially the housing market and wanting to buy a home in this market. Inflation. Tim and Dave, you’re telling me I need to start saving early and max out my retirement accounts. I need an emergency fund. I need to get rid of my credit card debt. Just overwhelming, right? What advice would you have for those folks about some of the early wins and behaviors and habits that they can employ?

[00:37:32] Dr. DZ: I think you nailed it right there. Early wins. One step at a time. Rather than getting overwhelmed by all of these things that are hitting you. Focus on one thing that you can do that you can impact.

Yeah, a good example would be like my wife. Or my wife and I, shortly after we got married, she did have a little bit of college loan debt. And she was somebody – she had gotten a bachelor’s degree. She went to graduate school. And then she decided to go to pharmacy school. And so, it took her a little longer to go down that path. And she had a little bit of financial debt. We decided to focus – to prioritize on paying down that debt. It was the highest interest debt that we had.

And we did the things that we had to, which in the short term, yeah, everyone probably meant making some sacrifices. There were some vacations we didn’t go on. Maybe we bought the used car rather than the new car or something like that. There are all the little things that one does to be able to then have a little bit more money to put in the areas that you want to prioritize.

So, whether it’d be paying down student loan debt, or sitting to make a down payment on a house, or all the other things. I mean, the great news is, as pharmacists, we are relatively high-income folks. We have access to funds. It’s just a matter of how we decide to utilize those funds.

But, yeah, should focus on that one thing. Don’t get overwhelmed by all of the different things and thinking to myself, “Oh, gosh. There’s so much going on here. How am I going to handle all of this?” You can handle things. Do one thing at a time. Then use that leverage, that success you have in doing one thing. So, then go do the next thing.

[00:39:22] TU: Yeah, I love that, Dave. I talk a lot with new practitioners about that early momentum. And while any one financial decision or win may not feel monumental in the moment, it’s the compound effect in the momentum that comes from that over time. And there’s a natural excitement of like, “Okay, small win. What’s next?” Another win, what’s next? What’s next? And you look back three, five, ten years later, and some of those behaviors start to really compound and add up over time.

[00:39:49] Dr. DZ: Oh, that’s the one thing. I remember back, I was thinking in high school, you learn about compound interest. And the idea that interest builds on interest builds on interest. And again, I think about 30, 40 years into my career span, so to speak. The decisions we made very early on are definitely paying dividends today and how they do things.

Now, that said, I also don’t want to turn off or upset your readers who maybe aren’t that young anymore or maybe thinking of themselves, “Gee! I didn’t do that when I was you know 25-years-old. What am I going to do?” It’s never too late to start. And there’s a lot that one can do to make good financial decisions even – again, another really good habit I picked up from my parents is while I have credit cards and use them liberally, it’s with the sense of never – my dad just instilled in me. You will pay off your credit card in full every month. You will never carry a balance on these cards.

And that’s, again, always just been part of my mindset, that I use a credit card. I get that bill out of it every – Actually, I don’t even get a bill obviously. Everything’s electronic these days. And honestly, it’s automatically withdrawn from my checking account. But I – essentially, I use the credit that’s available. Credit is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m not one of these people who will say never use credit cards. Or don’t take out interests. And don’t take out loans. I mean, heck, a lot of us, the reality is we wouldn’t go to college. We wouldn’t be able to buy a home if we didn’t take out debt. Debt can and is a good thing. It just has to be used in balance with everything else. Because if it’s not in balance, it will take over in a not so good way.

[00:41:55] TU: Well, this has been fantastic. I knew it would. And it’s delivered. And I’m excited to get this out to our community. And really excited, Dave, for you in this next phase of your preferment. I think I’m going to adopt that term.

[00:42:09] Dr. DZ: That’s a great thing. I do think Lucinda and I should get together and write a book on preferment. But as always, one of the great things about being an educator is – you know, Tim, is you – it’s not just the impact you make on students when they’re in your classroom. It’s the impact you see as their careers move forward.

And I’ve been so blessed and fortunate to be able to stay in touch with many of my former students and not only see the successes they’re having and the things that they’re achieving in their lives, but to be able to share what we’re all doing and so forth. And to that end, I hope some of my former students are out there and are seeing this. And I would love to be able to stay in touch if there are things that I can share more with your listeners about how one prepares to get to the point in this life. The thing, decisions that we make as we get to this point.

I will still say, keeping on our football analogy, it’s still half time. And my wife and I are sitting in the locker room still making those plans for what we’re going to go out and do in the third quarter. And just like I’m offering advice to some folks. I’m also appreciating advice from people who have been down this pathway ourselves. And whether it’d be books or whether it’d be other folks that have made similar decisions to what we have. There’s a lot to learn. And to me, that’s always been the best part about the academic path, is it’s not the teaching. It’s the learning.

[00:43:45] TU: Absolutely.

[00:43:46] Dr. DZ: And the more that we can learn, the better off we’ll all be.

[00:43:49] TU: Well, that’s great. We’ll link to, in the show notes, your LinkedIn if folks aren’t already connecting with you. I know that’s a way they can reach out. All right. Thanks again, Dave. I really appreciate it.

[00:43:58] Dr. DZ: Thank you. Appreciate it a lot. Thank you very much.

[OUTRO]

[00:44:01] TU: As we conclude this week’s podcast, an important reminder that the content on this show is provided to you for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for investment or any other advice. Information in the podcast and corresponding materials should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any investment or related financial products. We urge listeners to consult with a financial advisor with respect to any investment.

Furthermore, the information contained in our archived newsletters, blog posts and podcasts is not updated and may not be accurate at the time you listen to it on the podcast. Opinions and analyses expressed herein are solely those of your financial pharmacists unless otherwise noted, and constitute judgments as of the date publish. Such information may contain forward-looking statements are not intended to be guarantees of future events. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. For more information, please visit yourfinancialpharmacists.com/disclaimer.

Thank you again for your support of the Your Financial Pharmacists podcast. Have a great rest of your week.

[END]

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YFP 290: Getting Ready for Tax Season

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

Sean Richards, CPA, EA returns to the podcast to discuss difference between tax planning and tax preparation, how effective tax planning can prevent costly mistakes, tax changes for 2023, and the basics of YFP’s Comprehensive Tax Planning.

About Today’s Guest

Sean Richards, CPA, EA, received his undergraduate degree in Corporate Finance and Accounting, as well as his Master of Accountancy, from Bentley University in Waltham, MA. Sean has been a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) since 2015 and received his Enrolled Agent certification earlier this year. Prior to joining the YFP team, Sean was the Senior Treasury Manager at PRA Group, a global debt buyer based in Norfolk, VA. He began his career at American Tower Corporation where, over 10 years, he held several positions in audit, treasury, and accounting. As the Director of YFP Tax, Sean focuses on broadening the company’s existing tax planning and preparation operations, as well as developing and launching new accounting offerings, including bookkeeping, payroll, and fractional CFO services.

Episode Summary

This week on the YFP Podcast, YFP Co-Founder & CEO, Tim Ulbrich, PharmD, welcomes Sean Richards, CPA, EA, back to the podcast to discuss getting ready for tax season. In their conversation, Tim and Sean discuss the difference between tax planning and tax preparation, how effective tax planning can prevent costly mistakes, tax changes for 2023, and the basics of YFP Comprehensive Tax Planning. Listeners will hear ways to prevent costly mistakes during tax filing season, including building a strategy around PSLF, nuances of real estate investing, and the impact of a side hustle or additional business income. Sean explains that the best way to avoid these mistakes would be through proactive tax planning throughout the year, but in particular, before tax season. Tim leads the conversation to the differences between tax planning and tax preparation, plus various tax changes for the 2023 tax filing season and into the future. Sean shares resources and information on changes to charitable contributions, energy credits, and clean energy credits. Sean closes out the conversation with an introduction to YFP Tax, the new YFP Tax website, and the various services available to clients including YFP’s Comprehensive Tax Planning (CTP), what it is, and the type of client the service would be a good fit for.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] TU: Hey, everybody. Tim Ulbrich here, and welcome to this week’s episode of the YFP Podcast, where each week we strive to inspire and encourage you on your path towards achieving financial freedom.

Now, aside from being pharmacists with a passion for personal finance, there’s something else that you and I have in common, and that’s that we have to file our taxes each year. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Tim, it’s only January, and the tax filing deadline is still a few months away. 95 days to be exact, in case you’re counting. Do I need to start thinking about taxes right now?

I get it. But the truth is that now is an important time to shift gears and start thinking about the strategies that you can use to optimize your tax situation, and that’s why I’m excited to welcome back onto the show YFP Director of Tax, Sean Richards, to talk through getting ready for tax season. We discuss on this episode the difference between tax planning and tax preparation and how effective tax planning can prevent costly mistakes. To learn more about the services offered by YFP Tax, you can visit yfptax.com.

Now, whether you’re looking for help with your individual taxes, business taxes, or both, YFP’s comprehensive tax planning combines traditional filing with our proactive year-round planning process. All right, let’s jump into my interview with YFP Director of Tax, Sean Richards.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:22] TU: Sean, welcome back to the show.

[00:01:24] SR: Thanks for having me, and I’m excited to be here before we get into tax season, while I actually still have a chance to get on the pod and talk to you.

[00:01:31] TU: Absolutely.

[00:01:32] SR: Catch me in a couple of weeks, and I’m probably going to ignore all of your calls and everything. So get me while you have me.

[00:01:37] TU: Tis the season indeed. We had you on episode 283 not too long ago. We talked about how to optimize your tax situation as a pharmacy professional. We’ll link to that in the show notes for folks that want to go back to that. But as you mentioned, here we are in the midst of tax season, this episode going live right around the middle of January. Sean, this is about the time where we start to see those tax forms coming in the mail. I don’t know. Folks maybe are like me, where I start to pile those up on my desk. Maybe clutter the –

[00:02:06] SR: [inaudible 00:02:06] or whatever.

[00:02:09] TU: Clutter the countertop a little bit. It’s that visual reminder that we’re going to be filing our taxes. One of the things we’re going to talk about here today, not only what are some things that folks can do to, hopefully, have a smooth tax filing season, but also how can we be strategizing and planning, hopefully, year round and not necessarily just house on fire when we go to file our taxes each April.

So we’re going to talk in really a few different parts. Number one, what are some of the ways that folks can prevent some of the costly mistakes during filing this season? What are some most common mistakes that you see? We’ll then talk about some of the differences between tax preparation and tax planning. Then we’ll talk about some of the changes that folks need to be aware of for both this tax filing season, some of those coming from the Inflation Reduction Act, and then also some of the things that folks can be looking out for into the future. So I’m ready if you’re ready. Should we do this?

[00:03:07] SR: I’m always ready. Like I said, this is the most ready I’ll be for a while. So here we go.

[00:03:12] TU: So let’s jump into some of the costly mistakes that folks may find themselves making during the filing season. Obviously, we want to avoid this if we can. You recently wrote a blog post on this topic. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But give us some of the examples, as you’ve been talking with many pharmacists that are interacting with YFP Tax, many pharmacy clients. What are some of these examples of mistakes that are being made that if we had some more proactive planning, perhaps we could prevent it?

[00:03:43] SR: Yeah, and thanks for bringing up that blog post because that really gets into the nature of how a lot of these kind of arise and can be prevented. Not to give everything away about that, but the idea of the whole thing is really just sort of being able to go back in time, if you could, right? In a lot of circumstances in life, it would be nice to be able to get a redo and be able to go back and kind of get a mulligan, if you will. But with a lot of things in life, you can’t do that, and taxes are one of those things.

So I would say the biggest examples where I see pharmacists or anybody really making mistakes when it comes to taxes is not planning ahead and kind of looking back and saying, “Oh boy. I wish I had done that.” So that time that you had a great year, and you made a ton of money, and maybe you’ve had a side gig going, and you had so much cash that you didn’t know what to do with it. But then you come to the end of the year and you didn’t have that cash anymore when your actual tax bill comes due. So, “Oh, I wish I could have put some of that money aside, done a projection, see what I’m going to owe at the end of the year.” Maybe make estimated tax payments if you apply for something like that.

Or something like, “Hey, real estate’s hot right now.” You bought up a place. You fixed it up. You finally sold it. You hit that peak before interest rates went up, and now you’re sitting there going, “Oh, my goodness. I have to pay taxes on all those capital gains.” What are some things you could have done to maybe make different improvements to the house or take advantage of those improvements against your bases when you’re calculating the taxes? Or, “Hey, maybe I could have invested in some solar property or something.” Take advantage of some of those credits that we’ll talk about with the Inflation Reduction Act. So things of that nature.

A big one with pharmacists is loan forgiveness, right? PSLF. If you’re looking at this, and you’re saying you did your taxes, and you’re going to apply for forgiveness in the future and say, “Oh, maybe I could have filed separate for my spouse last year. If I had done this a little bit differently, then maybe I could have had some more of my loans forgiven.” So it tends to always be an – I’m not going to say always, but there tends to be a common recurring theme of if I just planned ahead, and I could go back in time and change these things, maybe that problem wouldn’t be there.

But actually, now that I think about it, I had a personal situation. I like to bring this one up because it’s near and dear to me and if I can ever prevent folks from having the same thing. I know, early in my career, I was lucky enough to have RSUs given, granted to me, and I was a young budding accountant and went to do my taxes and paid the capital gains and said, “Okay, that’s fine. I understand. I cashed them in. I have my capital gains.”

It wasn’t until I was looking at it a little bit down the line and talking to some of my colleagues that I realized I didn’t actually account for that properly. I had already paid taxes on some of that, and then I went and basically double-counted and paid again. So RSUs are one of those things. I know a lot of pharmacists get them. They get excited about them. If you don’t really pay attention or you don’t talk to somebody who knows what they’re doing with these things, you can end up double paying, and the IRS certainly won’t reach out and let you know that you did that. You have to find that on your own.

[00:06:44] TU: Yeah. Sean, to that point, we’ve worked with a lot of the pharmaceutical industry fellowship programs, and as a result, have a handful of those that are in pharmaceutical industry as clients, whether it’s on the planning side or on the tax side. So this is something that we see come up a lot about trying to understand what are RSUs, and what are some of those tax implications. Certainly, student loans, you mentioned PSLF strategy. It’s a big one in our community, real estate. We’ve got a whole separate podcast dedicated to that topic. So of course, that can be something that’s top of mind.

Then the first one you mentioned is something, Sean, I know I’m seeing and hearing more and more of. We featured many pharmacists on the show that are beginning to monetize their clinical expertise in a variety of different ways, whether that’s a business, whether that’s a side hustle, or perhaps a side hustle that turned into a business. As you mentioned, often there’s that new income that’s coming in. By the time we get around to filing, we’re maybe putting that income back into use in the business or other expenses that come up. Then there’s that surprise tax bill. So, yes, we’re doing good. We’re growing the business. We’re achieving that goal of monetizing whatever we’d been working on. But are we proactively planning for, obviously, the tax bill that’s going to be due? How can we plan for that throughout the year? So great examples I know that will touch many people that are listening.

The next question then is what is the antidote to these mistakes? You mentioned a couple times you were sharing that really that more proactive tax planning, not just necessarily looking at that point of filing, where we’re looking backwards, but really thinking strategically throughout the year can help us not only prevent these mistakes, but also optimize our overall tax strategy. So define for us the difference of tax planning versus tax preparation, and why it’s so important that we understand how these two are so different.

[00:08:36] SR: Sure. So tax preparation is the traditional what you think of with taxes. It’s, hey, you go to your account at the end of the year. You hand them a big box of receipts and say, “Here’s all the stuff.” All the things that you were just talking about you get in the mail, you put a little pile on the table, you bring it to your accountant and say, “These are what I have. This is what I did last year. Get my taxes done for me.”

That also is the traditional area where people kind of are fearful about taxes or have that stress like, “Oh, my goodness. Am I going to owe something?” Or even getting a big refund can be a good thing. But at the same time, you just gave the government an interest free loan for however long, right? I mean, getting a big refund, there’s probably a pretty good chance you could have done something better with that cash. So that’s typically the surprise or the idea I was talking about like, “Oh, goodness. I wish I had done that in the middle of the year in July,” something like that.

That’s tax preparation, and it’s not inherently a bad thing. It needs to get done. Again, it’s what most people are familiar with, whether it’s going to an accountant or going on to TurboTax yourself and getting it done. But that also, again, is where a lot of these stresses tend to come from. On the flip side of that is this idea of tax planning. So that is not just thinking about taxes at the end of the year, but making sure that you’re keeping them top of mind throughout the course of the year, and you’re synergizing your tax strategy with your overall financial strategy.

One thing I want to be clear about is I don’t want people sitting there all day long thinking about tax because, I mean, maybe I want to do that. But a lot of people don’t, and that’s not what we’re getting at with tax planning. It’s not where you’re sitting there all day long and how is this going to impact my taxes? It’s just making sure that when you’re making decisions, that it’s not something that you’re thinking about in April or next filing season. But it’s something that is in your mind. So, hey, I’m thinking about buying a property at the end of the year. What will those implications be from a tax standpoint? Or I’ve been working this side gig. Should I be putting cash aside and trying to plan ahead and everything?

One analogy, if you’ve ever heard me on the pod, I think I talked about this before. If you’ve ever talked to me in person, you’re probably sick of hearing this one. But I often compare it to tax preparation at the end of the year. It’s like a film editor versus tax planning. It’s like a film director who can kind of change things over the course of the year. A new analogy I’ll kind of introduce this time around, I’m really into cooking. So what I found it to be is tax planning is sort of like reading the recipe, prepping your ingredients, getting everything kind of ready to go. Like you watch these tasty videos. They all have everything measured out, and they’re just pouring it in at the time, and it’s all kind of ready.

Versus tax preparation is the last step of getting everything plated and putting it all together. Would you want to do all that piece, without having done any of the prep work to begin with? Are you going to try to throw everything together when you haven’t even cut the potatoes or anything yet? No. I mean, ideally, if you’re preparing a meal, you want to also plan, cut the things, read the recipe, and just have a good idea throughout the course of the thing. So that’ll be my new analogy going forward maybe until I get sick of cooking, and then I can come up with something else.

[00:11:35] TU: I’m smiling because I can totally see you this past weekend cooking and thinking, “Oh, I’ve got another analogy for how I’m going to explain tax planning versus tax preparation.”

[00:11:45] SR: Exactly. I was probably panicking and realize I didn’t cut something ahead of time that I needed to put in and was saying, “Oh, my goodness. If I had just done that ahead of time and made the connection there.” Most likely, this would happen.

[00:11:55] TU: Yeah. I think you’ve given some really good examples, Sean. I was thinking about this this morning. Even when I was working a W-2 job, a pretty simple tax return, pre-kids, there still was this kind of underlying feeling of like, “Am I really optimizing everything?” What I don’t know, I don’t know. Number one, yeah, I could do the TurboTax. I could do the H&R Block. I could figure that out. But how is this really interfacing with the rest of the financial plan? Then, obviously, over time, as things become more complicated, more than one income perhaps or rental properties or children enter the equation, changes of income throughout the year, all these different scenarios where there’s some real time adjustments that you want to make, as well as how can we look at all these things across the plan to make sure we’re optimizing this in the best way we can.

Sean, you know this because you’re my phone a friend on the tax side. But probably once a week, once every other week, it’s a, “Hey, I’ve got this notice. I’ve got this question. What about this? What’s it looking as we’re thinking about the estimated payment, whether it’s on the business income or question related to the real estate piece?” So there’s just so many things going on, and I feel like I have a high level understanding. But there’s a whole another layer of depth that, obviously, you and others with this expertise have and can really advise people to be thinking across the entirety of what’s going on with the taxes and the financial plan. But also looking at how can we be more proactive than just simply doing the filing each year.

[00:13:24] SR: Yep, I agree. The thing is, is that taxes often become a stressor for folks because they don’t plan ahead. That’s the biggest thing is that you go to your mailbox, and you see a letter, and it says the IRS on the top, and you immediately get this fear in your head. It’s because you think, “Oh, what did I do wrong? Or what should I have done otherwise,” or something like that.

I mean, it really just comes down to if you are thinking about these things proactively, if you have sort of that phone a friend that you can reach out to throughout the course of the year, you’re not going to be worried when the time comes because you’ll say, “I already talked to him about that. I already know what this is going to be. Oh, this letter from the IRS is just the refund check that I’m expecting to come back from them.” It’s not going to be that fear anymore.

[00:14:02] TU: So let’s shift gears and talk about some of the tax changes that individuals should be aware of. I think one of the main advantages in working with a professional is that you as the individual don’t have to sift through all the changes that are happening and understand the implications to your own plan. You can get the CliffsNotes version of that or someone that’s looking out for you and, obviously, has an understanding of your individual situation.

Sean, my understanding is there are some changes that folks should be aware of that impact this filing season. Then there’s also some other changes on the horizon that will impact things in the future. Tell us more.

[00:14:36] SR: Yeah. I mean, at this stage of the game, I don’t want to say it’s too late. It’s almost never too late to do really anything. But given that we’re getting into January of 2023 now, not a whole lot to talk about for 2022, but just a couple things to keep top of mind for folks, especially because it’s questions that people may have when they’re talking to their accountant about, “Hey, this looks a little different than last year.”

So one big thing that will probably be glaring to a lot of folks is there was a $300 above the line, we call it, credit for charitable deductions that has happened for the past couple of years. So that basically, even if you’re not itemizing your deductions, if you’ve made charitable contributions, you were able to take $300 of that as a credit, that is sort of a no more going forward. So in order to take those charitable contributions, you’re going to have to itemize your deductions.

Again, I just want to point that one out because I know a lot of people, it was right there on the front of the – On the form. So a lot of people will probably think, “Hey, what happened to that?” But that also brings up a good point that you always want to – Another reason why working with a tax professional stay on top of these things is really helpful because different states, different jurisdictions all have different rules when it comes to these things. I know I was just talking about charitable contributions, for example. In the state of Arizona, that’s actually something where you’re able to make donations up until the filing date. Sort of like you can traditionally with IRA accounts when you think of on the federal side of things.

That’s another reason why I say even though it might seem like it’s too late, it’s not always too late, and you really want to keep in mind that different states and different jurisdictions have different kind of rules with that.

[00:16:05] TU: Which is why, Sean, you love the Ohio jurisdiction and the [inaudible 00:16:09], right? Isn’t that your favorite?

[00:16:11] SR: Yeah. Love would be one word that I could use to describe it. I would definitely say that that’s one of them. It keeps me on top of my game. I could say that too. I’m running out of nice things to say. But, yep, sure, we’ll go with that.

Sticking on the subject of sort of top of mind 2022, things to keep in mind, one of them – This is not so much of a, hey, it’s something that you can still do now, just something that you’re going to want to really be careful of, especially when you’re talking to your accountant and probably trying to argue. Hey, how come I’m not getting the credit for this or something? You alluded to the Inflation Reduction Act. So that was the act that President Biden signed back in August. So a lot of changes to a lot of things, specifically, energy credits, things of that nature. A good number of changes to keep an eye on there.

A big one is the Residential Clean Energy Credit. So that is traditionally – Forgive me, I can’t think of the old name. They keep changing the names of these things. But keep in mind solar, geothermal, that type of thing, really the renewable energy sources. So that was supposed to drop down to a 26% credit in 2022. That bumped back up to 30% in 2022, and that’s going to go all the way out through 2032. So that’s a good one to keep in mind.

Electric cars, that’s another one, very important. So as of – The date on this one is August 16th. So if you bought a car before August 16th of last year, electric car, sort of the old rules, I won’t get into those. You’re probably familiar with them. If you bought a car beginning August 16th and through the end of last year, an electric car, there’s a final assembly requirement where your vehicle must have been assembled in North America. Those rules apply as of August 16th of last year, so something definitely to keep in mind there.

Then going forward into 2023, if you purchase a car in this year going forward, there’s not only final assembly rules, but there’s mineral sourcing rules. There’s sort of battery component rules. So a lot stricter requirements there. We can link to – The Department of Energy has a good list where you can kind of put in your VIN and see if your vehicle qualifies and what it is. But the long story short there is it’s $7,500 credit going forward. But again, you want to keep those dates in mind whenever you purchase the vehicle. So it’s kind of one of those things to keep in mind now.

That’s a good segue into 2023. So again, closing the door in 2022, a lot of good things heading into 2023, specifically around those energy credits. We talked about new – Or electric vehicles. We talked about new electric vehicles. But starting this year might bring a lot of people into the used market here, so used electric vehicles. That will be a new credit, 30% up to 4k of those. So that’s something definitely to look forward to.

Energy credits, again, not so much on the solar geothermal side, but more on the, hey, I got new doors, new windows, the typical sort of regular household improvements. You’re probably familiar with those being a $500 lifetime credit. That starting this year going forward is actually going to be a $1,200 annual credit, so that is quite the jump there. Definitely some new restrictions and everything to keep an eye on. Obviously, you want to talk to an accountant about all that kind of stuff. But that’s a very big jump from $500 a lifetime to $1,200 a year. So definitely want to take advantage of that going forward.

[00:19:34] TU: Is that one that if I invest, I don’t know, $10,000 in new windows, that you can disperse that credit over several years? Or is it within the year of purchase for 1,200, right? Because a lot of those examples you gave, windows, doors, roofs, etc. are, obviously, going to be fairly significant expenses.

[00:19:54] SR: Yeah. It’s in the year that you actually dole out the cash that you get the credit back. In a lot of cases, these credits are nonrefundable. So what that means is that if you, at the end of the day, don’t owe anything or don’t have any taxes to offset, you don’t get that credit back for you. So refundable credit basically means, hey, if I actually offset all of my taxes and still then get some, you’ll actually get that back as a refund.

A lot of these energy credits, you just want to take a look at all of them. I won’t get into which of which. But some of those are nonrefundable, meaning they’ll offset your taxes that year but not going forward.

[00:20:30] TU: Which is another great example of planning, right?

[00:20:31] SR: Of planning. Exactly, exactly right. You beat me to it, where if you’re making a big capital purchase, you say, “All right, I’m putting in these new windows or I’m getting this solar. I’m finally getting it done,” you want to make sure you have the taxes to offset. Maybe you sell some of those investments that you’ve had for a while. Take on some of those capital gains. Use the credits to offset it or – That’s where that tax planning definitely comes into play. Absolutely. You’re taking my job, man.

[00:20:56] TU: Sorry. It was a good example. I was just thinking about all – Obviously, a large percent of our community may be doing home improvement projects, other things. This is a common one, I think, will be coming up.

[00:21:05] SR: Absolutely. Yep. But, yeah, I mean, sticking to this year, I don’t want to say it was a boring year. Every year from a tax standpoint is exciting in my mind. But the biggest thing I would say outside of the energy stuff, the name of the game has been inflation. So obviously, inflation is top of mind for a lot of folks. So a lot of inflation-related changes going into next year, and what does that mean? Mostly means limits are going up for a lot of things.

So 401(k), deferral limits. That was up $2,000. That’ll be 2,500 this year. Catch up deposits also up 1,000, so that’ll be $7,500 this year. IRA contributions went up $500, so that’s $6,500 this year. The catch up stayed the same on that, but similarly, inflation. So starting next year, 2024, that will be indexed to inflation. That’s another one there. Tax brackets, so all the tax brackets were bumped up a bit due to inflation. I’m not going to get into the specifics of which one. Each of those, each of the limits are there. The overall story is that you basically can make more money before you bump into that next bracket.

But the one thing I really want to hone in on there is a lot of people don’t really – I don’t want to say don’t understand the concept of tax brackets. But a lot of people think, “Oh, I don’t want to make another $1,000 because that’s going to bump me into the next bracket. Or how’s that affect me? Is that going to put me the next tax bracket? Or how’s that look with everything?” I just want to make sure a lot of folks on here understand the idea of incremental dollars being taxed at that next bracket. So what does that mean?

If you’re right on the edge, and you make an extra $100 that bumps you into that next tax bracket, that $100 will be at the new tax rate. The rest of your cash is all getting taxed at the rates that you were before. So I don’t want anybody here who’s got two job offers on the table and saying, “I don’t want to take this higher one because it’s going to put me in the next tax bracket.” That’s not how it works. It’s only going to be a couple extra dollars. I know that’s a big scary one. So that’s where you hear about effective rates and everything. There’s a lot we can get into there, but I just don’t want to scare folks any more than they already are.

[00:23:07] TU: Sean, it reminded me as you’re talking. I’m sure many folks listening are familiar with the Schitt’s Creek episode, where David is talking about the tax-write offs and the things that he’s buying because they’re tax-write off, right? This –

[00:23:20] SR: Write-off, yeah.

[00:23:20] TU: It’s like we need an episode on the incremental approach. I mean, you hear that all the time of like, “Oh, I don’t want to go in the next tax bracket. Or if I earn additional money, I’m going to go into that.” I think a lot of that may come from the misunderstanding of how that works in terms of the incremental approach.

[00:23:37] SR: Exactly, right. You’d never want to turn down more cash. I think we had talked about before. But even though it might not seem like the best thing, a bigger tax bill at the end of the day generally means that you actually did better that year.

[00:23:49] TU: Yeah. Well, this is great stuff, Sean, and I want to transition. One of things we’re really excited about as we head into this tax filing season is that for new clients of YFP Tax, we’re really putting a stake in the ground that we’re not doing filing only. One of the reasons we got to that decision point was everything that we’re talking about right here, which is that we really feel like tax when done well is really proactive. It’s strategic, and we’re thinking about this year round so that we can optimize that situation. Yes, filing is a part of that, of course, but we really need to be thinking more strategically.

So that’s one of the reasons that we are really excited, Sean, to be introducing YFP’s what we’re calling CTP, comprehensive tax planning. Tell us more about what it is, who is it for, and potentially who is it not for as well.

[00:24:39] SR: Yeah. So comprehensive tax planning is – It’s a lot of what we had talked about before, right? So the idea of really synergizing your tax strategy with the rest of your financial strategy. It’s something where you’re touching base with us throughout the course of the year, and it really depends on what your individual needs are. It’s not something where we’re saying, “Hey. Every Friday at five o’clock, we’re all getting on the call. It’s the YFP Tax happy hour. We’re all going to talk about taxes and everything.” That’s not what this is all about. It’s really for everybody to look at their own situation and say, “Hey, I’m looking for more guidance on my withholdings.” Maybe it’s something where we’re meeting a couple times a year to talk about, “Hey, I have this new side job. I think I have to make estimated payments now. Can we talk about what that looks like?”

Or maybe it’s something where I have a real estate property that I’m thinking about purchasing at the end of the year, but I don’t even want to begin to go down that path until I can talk about what are the implications here. What if I rent it out a couple days a year? What if I rent it out 100 days a year? How’s that look? Can I live there? What are the tax implications? So it’s really for folks who want to not wait until the end of the year, like I said, and say, “Hey, here’s my box of receipts. I’ll see you next April. Get my stuff done,” and who really want to be able to sleep at night when it comes to taxes and don’t want to open up their mailbox and say, “Oh, no. It’s the IRS. What could this possibly be?”

[00:26:01] TU: Sean, if I’m interested in learning more about the comprehensive tax planning or perhaps even ready to get started, where’s the best place that I should go?

[00:26:09] SR: So the best place to go would be yfptax.com. So that’s our new and improved website we launched recently. It has a lot of different resources on there. It has the blog that you mentioned before, a lot of videos that we posted throughout the course of the year with some of these updates and some of these new tax laws that we’re talking about. It really has a breakdown of all the different services that we have.

So whether it’s the comprehensive tax planning, CTP, that we’re talking about here, or maybe you have a side gig and you’re interested in doing some bookkeeping for that. We offer bookkeeping services, all the way from, “Hey, I just have a couple of contractors I need to do payroll for,” all the way up through what we call our fractional CFO service, which is more of the, “Hey, let’s sit down. Let’s talk strategy about my business. Let’s put some forecasts and budgeting together and everything.” That website will have a great starting point to get you started.

But from there, you can get in touch with me. I’ll answer any questions you have. We can get on the phone. If you want to look at my face, we can get a Zoom call together. Or I’m happy to talk via email, answer any questions. So you can reach me personally at [email protected]. Again, you can also go to www.ypftax.com. You’ll get links to me. You’ll get links to all the things that we’re talking about here. That’s the best place to start.

What I would say is, definitely, if you’re interested, don’t wait. We’re getting into tax season. I know that I’m biased to say that, but I think you’re going to lose a lot of us in a couple of weeks. So might be not a bad time to hop on there and take a look.

[00:27:34] TU: Don’t wait indeed. This is really the – Now, I’m not going to say quiet. You guys got a lot of stuff going on, but really the lull before the storm that is the tax season and then, obviously, some hibernation of rest and recovery thereafter. So make sure to head on over to yfptax.com. Lots more information there. As Sean mentioned, you can reach out to him directly to set up a call, get some more information. If you’re ready to get going, you can also click on a complete a quick form. You can get started. But all the information is there on the website.

Sean, thanks so much, and we look forward to hearing from you after tax season.

[00:28:06] SR: Thank you. Yeah. It’s definitely the calm before the storm. But like I said, it’s sort of like if you watch the weather channel before a hurricane. Even though it’s the calm, everybody’s still prepping and getting ready and everything. Then once it’s all said and done, yeah, it’ll be nice to touch base in May once everything’s kind of a little bit calmer.

[00:28:23] TU: Great stuff. Thanks, Sean.

[00:28:24] SR: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:28:25] TU: As we conclude this week’s podcast, an important reminder that the content on this show is provided to you for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for investment or any other advice. Information in the podcast and corresponding materials should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any investment or related financial products. We urge listeners to consult with a financial advisor with respect to any investment.

Thank you, again, for your support of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast. Have a great rest of your week.

[END]

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YFP 289: Building Pricklee with Pharmacy Entrepreneur Kun Yang

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

Kun Yang, a pharmacist and Co-Founder & CEO of Pricklee Cactus Water, shares how and when he knew the entrepreneurial path was right for him. In this episode, he discusses the experience of being on Shark Tank, where he effectively navigated a negotiation with two sharks that led to a deal, and the most important skills he has had to acquire as an entrepreneur leading a growing company.

About Today’s Guest

Kun Yang is a recent dad and pharmacist-turned-CPG entrepreneur. He grew up in Canada but has spent his professional life in the United States, where he is building his business, Pricklee Cactus Water, with some incredible humans who want to make the world a better place.

Pricklee is on a mission to inspire people to be resilient like the cactus through health, happiness, and sustainability. The refreshing cactus waters are made from the drought-tolerant prickly pear cactus and packed with antioxidants, electrolytes, and vitamin C, with 50% less sugar than coconut water. It’s 100% refreshing, with 0% pricks.

Kun is passionate about brand building, CPG, leadership, founder stories, futurism, mental health, and all things wellness. He looks forward to connecting and learning from others that build businesses through conscious capitalism!

Episode Summary

This week on the YFP Podcast, YFP Co-Founder & CEO, Tim Ulbrich, PharmD, welcomes fellow pharmacist and Co-Founder & CEO of Pricklee Cactus Water, Kun Yang, to the show. Highlights from this episode include hearing Kun talk about how and when he knew that an entrepreneurial path was right for him, the experience of being on Shark Tank, and the skills he has had to acquire on his entrepreneurial journey leading a growing beverage company. The discussion begins with Kun sharing his start in pharmacy, his pharmacy education, the moment he realized that a traditional pharmacy path might not be right for him, and the surprising story of how he got started as an entrepreneur. Kun speaks on how Pricklee came to be, his experience navigating negotiation with two sharks on Shark Tank, and ultimately getting a deal for Pricklee. With the added attention from the show, Kun shares how Shark Tank positively impacted the business in unexpected ways. He discusses the power of having a mentor, the skills needed to be a true leader, how he views leadership, and how he is cultivating a culture of growth in his company. Listeners will also hear an interesting parallel between parenting and entrepreneurial leadership.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

On this week’s episode, I welcome fellow pharmacist and the Co-Founder and CEO of Pricklee Cactus Water, Kun Yang. Highlights from the show include hearing from Kun about how and when he knew the entrepreneurial path was right for him, what the experience was like being on Shark Tank, where he effectively navigated a negotiation with two sharks that led to a deal, and the skills that he has had to acquire that have been most important to his entrepreneurial journey and leading a growing beverage company.

Now, before we jump into today’s show, I recognize that many listeners may not be aware of what the team at YFP Planning does in working one-on-one with more than 250 households in 40-plus states. YFP Planning offers fee-only high-touch financial planning that is customized to the pharmacy professional. If you’re interested in learning more about how working one-on-one with a certified financial planner may help you achieve your financial goals, you can book a free discovery call at yfpplanning.com. Whether or not YFP Planning’s financial planning services are a good fit for you, know that we appreciate your support of this podcast and our mission to help pharmacists achieve financial freedom.

Okay, let’s jump into my interview with Kun, the Co-Founder and CEO of Pricklee Cactus Water.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:20] TU: Kun, welcome to the show.

[00:01:21] KY: Glad to be here, Tim. Nice to see you again.

[00:01:23] TU: So we had an interesting crossing of paths through a mutual connection in the biopharmaceutical industry space, where we’ve done some personal finance education with some of the fellowship programs. You spent the early part of your career, before working on Pricklee, in an industry role. So let’s start there. Tell us about your career path into pharmacy, where you went to school, and what led you to going down that path of industry.

[00:01:50] KY: Yeah. So I graduated from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy 2015. I have a lot of pride in my alma mater, and I think many people might relate to this. But it’s almost like the further removed you get, the more you realize how lucky really you were in that situation. But I had a chance to kind of go back this past year as the white coat speaker, and it just brought back a flood of just really incredible memories and just appreciation for just how difficult it is to be faculty and kind of lead the next generation of youth and just had a lot of proud moments to kind of know where we kind of came from in that space.

But I kind of grew up all over the place. I mostly grew up in Canada, and I always knew that I wanted to pursue health and wellness and many different components and also had a very, I guess, just entrepreneurial mindset to begin with. So I think pharmacy really kind of attracted me because fundamentally so much of pharmacy as an industry has been built upon independent business. Just the kind of skills that are required to be successful, to be able to socialize, to connect with your patients and provide value and help them lead healthier and better lives and be that trusted partner really kind of just gravitated to that profession.

As I entered pharmacy school, I think I realized that there was a lot of different ways that we could make an impact in society. Over time, as I learned more and more about all the incredible opportunities to affect population health and take all the skills that we were getting in pharmacy school and apply them in really creative ways, yeah, I just naturally gravitated towards more “nontraditional” roles. But I would just say that they were just roles that I think allowed us to flex additional skills that we didn’t know we had, and then eventually ended up pursuing a fellowship through MCPHS at Biogen in a sort of medical value-based outcomes type program, which is sort of a managed care-focused direction because I was very involved with AMCP and was very interested in the whole population, health management piece of that profession, going into graduation. Then through that, just really found myself appreciating and just developing a lot of incredible skills in the biotech pathway.

[00:03:57] TU: You and I talked maybe a week or two ago, and we’re talking about for those students that have that business or entrepreneur type of desire, I think the industry pathway is a natural one where there’s some exposure to that. But certainly, that’s still a step away from entrepreneurship and growing your own company, still a very different experience working within an organization, although, of course, less clinical and more business minded.

I’m curious, before we talk about Pricklee specifically, was there a moment during your fellowship or perhaps a moment in your first job where you looked around and you’re like, “Man, this just isn’t for me. I’ve got this entrepreneurial itch. I’ve got this pharmacy degree. Maybe I’ve been down this pathway, but like I don’t see myself doing this for 30 years.”

[00:04:43] KY: I think there were a lot of moments. When I look back, it wasn’t like I think one specific. I mean, I do have a specific moment that I’ll share, but I think there were a lot of feelings that I think that felt familiar to me, even in that moment, that I can kind of trace back and say, “Okay, this kind of makes a lot of sense.” So the moment really was walking into – I just finished our fellowship, and programming had started at a new company with a spinoff of our existing fellowship business. I kind of just walked in and had really, really fallen in deep appreciation for the opportunity and the people that I was working with.

But I think one of the days I kind of walked in, and I looked around, and this was still pretty early on in our journey, but something hit me that I had always thought that through all the different career changes and exploration of getting to that point that going this “non-traditional” path would have led me to move away from this feeling of “imposter syndrome” or feeling like everything that I was doing was actually getting more and more specific. It was because it was leading me to a point of clarity, right?

Really, over time, I realized that imposter syndrome and point of clarity had a lot to do with an understanding of who I wasn’t, as opposed to understanding of who I was. I think that’s something that probably a lot of us can relate to is growing up in your 20s and maybe sometimes early 30s, you have a lot of ideas of maybe what you don’t like to do, right? What are some of the things that don’t excite you? What are some of the general things that do excite you? But you may not really understand specifically why or what you’re really good at to allow you to succeed in those roles.

Again, all those feelings led to that one moment I walked in and looked around in this open office setting. I was kind of like, “Man, there’s a lot of incredibly talented and smart individuals around me. And if I work really, really hard here for another 15, 20 years, I can really be like one of them.” These were at the time, again, all my heroes I look up to that kind of forged the pathway for us before. I guess it hit me in that moment that there wasn’t a specific role that I could look at and say like that is exactly in specific what I wanted to do. I think that that was my – I call it a quarter life crisis moment of really all that imposter syndrome bubbling and kind of blowing up all at once, realizing that, wait a second, how could I have done all this and pursued all this specificity, only to feel this still in this moment? There’s not much more specificity I could pursue.

That was when it really kind of became an introspective question of like is there something outside of pharmacy that I could apply my skills to, still within the health and wellness space that we’re really passionate about, that I could find truth and clarity?

[00:07:17] TU: Where do you attribute – Obviously, you have an entrepreneurial spirit and desire. You’re pursuing that with the work that you’re doing at Pricklee, and I suspect this may not be the first venture and the last one that you’re going to do. Where do you attribute that entrepreneur spirit coming from?

[00:07:33] KY: It’s a really good question. I think it is family-driven in many, many ways, right? I’m a first generation American. My father actually immigrated over from China when I was one and then moved over to Canada when I was three and a half. To see kind of his journey and where he came from, where it was a small farm town that was – He was the first person in his entire family lineage to graduate high school and then did do college and all that stuff, and it wasn’t like there were resources around him.

So for him to kind of persevere and find a way through all that, pursue higher education, and then bring us over and provide, create a better life for his family, and then give us this opportunity then to live a really privileged life of education, of connectivity, of culture, of just growing up in North America, Canada, and the US, and really being shielded from a lot of that and realizing that, for me, a lot of the journey of getting to really, I guess, in many ways what I had initially idealize as the pinnacle of success, which was I think much more defined from a lower wealth generation value standpoint of like earning and salary and maybe comfort from a capitalistic standpoint. Getting to that point and realizing that it was much more than that, that was behind the growth that my father and sacrifices my father had made.

To look at that journey that he went on as a pretty entrepreneurial one himself, I think I got a lot of that same sort of mentality of like, okay, this still feels like the great opportunity has been presented. How can you take this opportunity and truly make a bigger impact? And take that opportunity and say if you have that privilege, and you have the connections and maybe the skill sets and the network to do more, to truly make an impact on society. Can you look introspectively and find authenticity in that journey to make that impact as positive and helpful as possible? So that’s really kind of where I think the initial energy came from.

[00:09:31] TU: I love that, Kun. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I think your alma mater could give them some credit, is light years ahead in terms of a focus around entrepreneurship and nontraditional career paths. They put some specific efforts in that area to really be intentional and brand themselves as such. But I’ve often thought like we recruit for someone who wants to be a pharmacist and that clinical type of a mindset and then hope we can apply some entrepreneurial principles on top of that. I almost wonder if we need to flip the script in that like you recruit people that have an entrepreneurial mindset or interest, and then pharmacy gets overlaid on top of that. It’s just a totally different shift in how someone is thinking.

I think what’s interesting about your journey, and I think there’s a lot of people that may feel some of that imposter syndrome or feel that tug and pull of like, “Hey, I have an interest in this or that, but my identity is in I have a PharmD, or I’ve done a fellowship, or I’ve done two years of residency.” We know the reality of the sunk cost fallacy of, “Hey, I’m $200,000 in, right? And I’m not going to pivot or take that risk.” So I just think there’s a really neat opportunity for our academic institutions to be able to take this up and see what we can do in terms of some of the disruption that’s happening in our profession and how can we, especially as we train the next generation of pharmacists, be a part of that. I think to Maryland’s credit, they’re making some progress in this area, which is pretty cool.

[00:10:56] KY: I think that that’s a very, very, very astute point. I would just say like still early on in my journey, so I imagine that my view on this and perspective will change over time. But I would say that what I found in our in our journey, where we’ve kind of really broken into multiple industries now and almost from the bottom up and try to find value in that, it really comes down to aligning the journey to some core set of values that are intrinsic to an individual. I think that that’s something that a lot of institutions have maybe not done effectively. I think, obviously, professionalism, and I think core behaviors of what a profession should look and act like are definitely important.

But I do think that sometimes a lot of students come into these professions with personal values that are maybe extremely different, right? These personal values are often shaped by households and maybe by your initial friend network, right? I guess the challenge of this is then if most people are within this way of, this mindset of thinking you go through life, really kind of reflecting the same values that you’ve kind of been around since you were a kid, right? Your parents’ values and the friends that you’ve kind of grown up with.

It’s really hard to break free from that, right? Because as you get more and more within a bubble of people in terms of the work that you do, your interests become even more specific. The challenges that you own become more specific. It’s probably very hard for an average pharmacist to relate to like the challenges that a construction worker, for example, would relate to day-to-day. So naturally, these worlds don’t collide as often as you would see, right? So what does that really result in? That results in people finding answers to like these bigger questions of like how do we become more entrepreneurial? Or what can we do with our pharmacy professions?

They find answers amongst their direct community. Why is that challenging? Well, it’s challenging because a lot of people that go into higher education, they come from families where maybe their parents didn’t do this, right? Or maybe this is now a wealth generation they’ve entered making pretty healthy salaries, where their parents didn’t have that luxury, right? So what happens is you’re not asking maybe your reference point of like what success looks like is anchored to people that have never had the type of wealth opportunity that you do now. So to find answers to the questions that like, well, what’s next? If we’ve hit our milestones of getting your house or like having children and doing these things that seemed like, pretty far reaching milestones previously, and you’re starting to trend in that direction, where it’s pretty feasible, then you start thinking, “Well, what’s next right?” Then the answers often become, okay, invest your money, do these things, and grow your wealth.

Then simultaneously, alright, who else would you ask? You ask your friends and your colleagues, who, again, were raised by the same kind of parents that you’ve been around. So it’s really hard to get answers to these bigger questions of how do you make more out of the way that our institutions are set up when a lot of the influence of what the values are in society are really limited to the same influences and values that you were raised with, right? So what I found is when you want to answer a question as big as what’s next, ask people that have done those things. So a lot of the mentors that I’ve met in my life that have made these tremendous impacts, I mean, they’ve built and exited companies, global companies. They’ve done these things. Time and time and again, you start to realize that oftentimes the value system changes from one of just wealth creation to one where you start to realize that your wealth is really a set of tools that you can leverage to create value for others and to create not just a better life for yourself but for your profession, for people around you, for anyone, right?

I think as you meet more and more successful people that have gone through that journey, you really feel that, and it’s not only just really inspiring to see that that’s really what people stand for at the end of the day, but that that’s what the world and the universe tends to reward in the long term.

[00:15:04] TU: It’s such a great point, and I’m reading right now Hangry by the GrubHub founder. It’s a great book. It reminds me a lot of Shoe Dog. It’s another great read on kind of an entrepreneurial startup story, that one, obviously, of Nike and Phil Knight. But he talks about in the GrubHub journey like his initial goal was like do this thing to be able to pay off student loans. Then it gets to this point where he raises $31 million, and he gives up a stake of a company, and then it’s like, “Oh, wow. This got like really real. And, obviously, I’m now exceeding that goal, and there’s on to something else.”

Then, obviously, at some point, he exits what will be a multibillion-dollar company, and then he’s kind of asking this question of like, alright, that wealth and, obviously, paying off that debt was a very small goal that wealth was achieved. But like I’m trying to find my identity back of like who am I, what do I want to be, what do I want to be my legacy and my contribution.

So let’s shift gears and talk about Pricklee. For those that aren’t familiar with Pricklee yet, and I hope they will become soon, if they’re not already or they haven’t tried the product, what is it, and how did the idea come to be?

[00:16:07] KY: Yeah. No, it’s definitely an interesting story. So Pricklee is a cactus water. It’s a delicious, refreshing cactus water made from really the most sustainable and resilient plant on the planet, the prickly pear cactus. It’s packed with electrolytes, antioxidants, vitamin C, that just offers superior and natural hydration. It’s about half the sugar and calories of a coconut water, and it’s really just good in smoothies by itself, mixed drinks, and really any which way you want to have it. So that’s really what Pricklee is.

We actually created Pricklee right in the middle, again, of our fellowship. Our co-founder, Mo, grew up in Lebanon, and his grandma used to make prickly pear mixed drinks, prickly pear just smoothies, prickly pear just hydration beverages all summer long. It’s his favorite thing going up with him and his siblings. So one day, when he was shopping at our local grocery store, and he saw prickly pears in the market, he was blasted with nostalgia. He’s like, “I have to bring this back to my friends.” So he shared it with us. We were just blown away by the taste.

Then being in health care, we look at the benefits. That was really, really interesting as well. I think over time, we just realized like this is such an amazing opportunity to take a health and wellness platform, introduce an ingredient that meant something, significant to one of us, and then find ourselves in this, and that journey of really discovering authenticity through the creation of Pricklee, and figuring out that we could leverage the platform of the cactus to inspire people to be resilient. To really promote health, happiness, and sustainability became really what our core mission was. Then over time, really that mission manifested itself into a company that we now are privileged enough to be able to support and to grow every single day.

[00:17:47] TU: So I want to talk about your Shark Tank experience. You and your co-founder, Mo, also a pharmacist, appeared on Shark Tank, season 13, episode 22. We’ll link to it in the show notes, if folks want to go back and watch it. You were looking for $200,000 for 5% equity, which equates to a $4 million valuation. I want to talk about the numbers. But first, I want to hear about the experience. What was it like walking through those doors, and how did you prepare for that opportunity? Because as I’ll ask you in a moment, there were some instances in your responses with the sharks that it was clear you had done a lot of preparation. So I’m curious to hear how you went about that preparation.

[00:18:28] KY: Yeah. So we’d spent almost two years just sort of beta testing our product at farmer’s markets, figuring out how this whole industry worked. It was really, really something that just blew our minds because of how complex the industry was and the different aspects that went into it from D2C e-commerce, to retail, to supply chain, to operations, to production, to sales and marketing. I mean, there’s just so much to uncover, and it took us some time to really grapple around that. So we didn’t launch until February 2021.

Something to note of that is, I think, pharmacists and STEM individuals, specifically, are fantastic entrepreneurs because testing is so ingrained in our DNA. So we really went through it pretty – Really kind of taking our emotion out of it as much as we could. But in any case, we launched in February of ‘21. Within the first week, we’d run these Facebook ads and the production studio at Shark Tank, at SEMA, and these ads. So they reached out and were like, “Hey, you guys should apply.” We thought it was a complete scam. We had no idea this was real thing. But we pursued it. Next thing you knew, we had this gigantic application. It was like 40 pages. I mean, we were just spewing out all aspects of our life in this application.

This ended up being like a 16-month process from when we first [inaudible 00:19:44] to when we’d been filmed and then when we finally aired the following May. So it was probably the longest kept secret of our lives. When we started getting through the process, the team assigned us a production staff that really helped us kind of frame the pitch, prepare us for the kind of conversations that we’re going to have. A lot of that was just, again, an ongoing 16-month journey that eventually led to the air date on Mother’s Day weekend, actually May of 2022.

[00:20:15] TU: I’m curious. Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast of the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and he had talked about a moment in their business, which it took them eight years to get to a million dollars in revenue, and now they’re north of $600 million a year. So a very patient slow growth and then, obviously, more of an explosion of that over time. But he talked about this instance where, after a lot of persistence, they got on to Oprah, a huge opportunity, couldn’t hire enough people to have the phones ready after that went live. But they didn’t have a same experience when they went on The Ellen Show. It was actually very quiet after that, and part of that had to do with, obviously, people can more easily get in touch now than they could when they went back on a previous show with Oprah.

But I’m curious how defining of a moment was that? Or was that not in terms of that goes live, and the business changes?

[00:21:07] KY: Yeah. I mean, I definitely think it was it was a defining moment. I think a lot of companies find a lot of luck in different components. You kind of have to. I mean, timing luck, it’s in every company’s journey. Shark Tank has manifested as one of those things for us, for sure. We had been on this like interesting media tour. Leading up to Shark Tank, we had actually filmed TODAY Show in August, right before we had filmed Shark Tank in September. That was a pretty big deal. I mean, Al Roker drinking your product on air. I mean, sharing your story. We got some texts about it. But it wasn’t comparable to the Shark Tank experience.

I mean, I think there’s something societally and culturally relevant about Shark Tank in the connection that every person has with that being like some pinnacle of entrepreneurship and a goal, and a milestone I think a lot of people will look for in starting businesses. So I think that there’s something innately exciting about it. Still to this day, anytime people see our booth, our materials, see us out in public with Pricklee, like we definitely get people being like, “Oh, we saw you guys on Shark Tank.” We always – The number of times we’ve had to tell the story of like, “What was that like?” It’s definitely something that we’re passionate about. But it was definitely one of those things where that was absolutely Shark Tank.

[00:22:23] TU: Not once. I don’t think not once did you or Mo mentioned that you were a pharmacist on that show. Was that an intentional move?

[00:22:30] KY: I think we actually did but –

[00:22:32] TU: Oh, did you?

[00:22:32] KY: Well, so the time that you’re in there is quite a bit longer than what actually gets aired. We think we’ve been there for almost 45 minutes. It was cut to eight. They did a really good job of actually representing the conversation and negotiate the intent of it. But, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, they’re trying to put on a good show and trying to make it very, very snappy and quick.

It was funny. We had like a couple of our partners and friends actually fly in and put on cactus suits to like introduce the brand and the products, and that entire segment was cut out. So it was really funny. I mean, they were there. You saw them. But the whole dance sequence entrance, that was cut out. I guess they weren’t – I guess we just didn’t rehearse well enough, or like it wasn’t entertaining enough for dancers across the US. But, yeah, I know. We talked about it, I think, a couple of times. But definitely within the 45-minute segment, they cut that down to 8 minutes.

[00:23:22] TU: So one of the things Tim and I were talking about this, Tim, my partner at YFP last week, he does a lot of teaching on negotiation. One of the things that happened in the Shark Tank episode, at least, of the eight minutes that they filmed, is when Kevin – He went on this rant of, “I hate beverage deals. However, I like this product.” He ended up countering that. I think it was $200,000 for a 20% stake, instead of a 5% stake. Then you had a brilliant response, and you said something along the lines of how are we supposed to do that? Then you provide the rationale behind the how are we supposed to do that, in terms of needing the cash flow and so forth to grow and sustain the business, which is a textbook calibrated question or negotiation.

The book, How I Split the Difference, Chris Voss, he talks about this question precisely. So I assume you were prepared for that specific type of instance, where you had to negotiate. Was that fair?

[00:24:17] KY: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, no Shark Tank deal goes on air and comes out the way that it was presented. It was kind of incredible how textbook the negotiation went to how we had prepared. We expected them to go to 20%. We expected Kevin in negotiation and then go to a royalty deal [inaudible 00:24:34]. Then our whole bottom line was going to be to offer the initial deal at a 5% line of credit. So the fact that it played out to a tee was just mind-blowing, I think, in terms of the preparation of that and to feel like we were actually in control of the entire conversation was pretty.

One of our first actual adviser, Patrick Muldoon, who’s the previous CEO of Zola Coconut Water and Detour Bar, an incredibly brilliant guy. He was the one that, to your point, brought up Chris Voss, How I Split the Difference. We read that. We kind of really prepared. What happens when this likely scenario occurs that somebody’s – Let’s say you left with one truck, and you have an offer, and it’s 20%. The fact that, again, happened at that exact moment was really funny. This is a guy who’s gone through so many tough negotiations in this life and I think can really speak to experience with it. Just he kind of coaches the same thing.

Like at the end of the day, when you’re in a tough situation, I think that the best thing to do is ask questions, right? There, you’re faced with an impossible situation or impossible task or ask, which oftentimes is the case with Shark Tank. These deals are impossible deals. Yeah. Yeah. Like you ask the question of like, well, lean into their expertise and experience and figure out what is it that they’re looking for? Oftentimes, that opens up the conversation from seeming like your back against the wall, no counter. This is the final offer on the last shark, to then turning that into an actual conversation where that results in negotiation. That’s absolutely part of the game.

[00:26:01] TU: It’s interesting seeing Barbara jump back in. I didn’t see that coming. Then I thought it was cool that you guys got caught a little bit in the middle for the benefit of at least the show, where there’s, obviously, an ego play going on between the two of them that she – So that was fun to watch.

[00:26:17] KY: Yeah. We were like, “Was this about us?”

[00:26:19] TU: Right. Kun, I’m curious that as your role expands, obviously, you’re leading a rapidly growing beverage company. I don’t think any schooling, including a PharmD program and even one that has more of an entrepreneurship focus, I don’t think any schooling can prepare someone for the work and the leading that you’re doing now. I’m curious, what what skills, if you had to pick one or two, we just mentioned negotiation potentially one, what skills have you really had to develop and hone that have proven to be most valuable to you in terms of leading this company?

[00:26:52] KY: Well, it’s hard to boil that down. So I would say if it really comes down to it, I think leadership is definitely the one that has been the most difficult for me because I think – I mean, I don’t know. I think leadership is often put together as this package of people in roles, in “leadership positions,” and that’s oftentimes rewarded. There’s often momentum built around that, right? If somebody tends to be active and speak up, this tends to happen. But you really realize over time that it’s really not about that. It’s really about how do you serve the people, your constituents, your workers, your partners, your friends, your customers, and your vendors, everyone that you work with.

Again, finding a voice of authenticity and a mission that’s so much greater than the product that you’re selling, ultimately, at the end of the day, and making sure that that’s an authentic mission and a set of value systems that really represents the people that are truly behind this company because the company really is just a journey. It’s really a journey of humans coming together, bringing their talents, introducing their networks of other talented individuals to come through. So at the end of the day, does the product really matter? Or is it really the people that come together and make it come to life? I really kind of believe that latter certainly to some extent.

But that was a really hard thing to understand. Because I think the skills that – Again, the leadership skills that are oftentimes rewarded in a corporate setting are oftentimes selfish and ones where it’s like what are you good at. You tend to see this too with a lot of individuals that when they find themselves in conversations with senior leadership, for example, which oftentimes isn’t the case in a corporate American setting, I mean, most of the time, it’s jockeying of position of like, “This is what I’ve done. This is how I’m effective. This is what I lead.” It’s like that doesn’t really provide a lot of value in your conversation, right?

I mean, the ultimate value, understandably, for any business is to move forward as a company because that improves everyone’s livelihood and, ultimately, your customers’ livelihood, right? So I think when you look at it in that macro, you realize it’s not about the individual. It’s about the bigger piece of like what are we all working for and realizing that the individual growth journey will actually lead to overall growth in the business. But, again, if you come from a place where you’re thinking about your specific role in that, as opposed to looking top down on how do you truly create and cultivate a culture of growth, it’s really hard to understand how to take yourself out of that and turn it the other way around and reflect all of that growth towards others, while still finding that your personal growth journey is actually felt that.

So that was a really, really extensive journey that I’m still on, and I think there’s a lot of the people in my team and partners have been extremely patient with me through that. That I would say has been the hardest, most emotionally intelligently challenging thing and process that I think I still undergo, and I still just – I’m so in awe of people that have mastered that, and I see how they bring them to home to their families too. That’s really, I think, what keeps me excited about the growth journey in that specific way.

[00:30:14] TU: I love what you just said there, and I think you can relate to this as a relatively newer dad. But I think parenting and entrepreneurship, at least in my own journey, have really forced some of the most significant inner reflection, which can be humbling and painful sometimes in the moment of like – My kids, I love them to death. But parenting exposes every limitation I’ve ever had that I was able to hide.

I think entrepreneurship can do the same. But I think if you lean into that, as I hear you are, it’s such a rich and rewarding journey of what are the opportunities to grow and to develop and flourish and to really think about some of these bigger questions of, sure, there’s going to be opportunity to build some wealth and create jobs and provide a really cool company and a product that’s awesome and tastes great. I can attest to that. My boys and wife can attest to that that have tried the product as well.

But it’s bigger than that, right? It’s bigger than that, and you’re already talking about that. I think that bigger than that also enhances the product, and it makes it attractive to people that are using it and the team that is behind that. It’s energizing when you have that type of a mindset.

[00:31:21] KY: Oh, my gosh. You hit the nail on the head. I mean, that same mentality when you apply it, to your point, I mean, having a kid, immediately put somebody significantly ahead of you in terms of priorities. That is what you have to do with entrepreneurship too, right? It’s really just not about you. It’s about the people that you serve. I think when it comes to product that you hit the nail on the head. I mean, as soon as we launched our product, we already knew that we were selling a product, and we had to find authenticity in our journey to express a brand, and that’s exactly what it was.

It just so happened that we had – I had my daughter in that really existential brand, soul searching phase. So it actually really helped us internalize like what it meant to feel empathy for consumers in that way and build a brand that really spoke to their needs, as opposed to a brand that we wanted to express ourselves. Then finding a common ground of authenticity so that when we build everything, it feels like a true genuine expression of self, as opposed to here’s a list of factors and characteristics of this product that you should buy into.

Sort of I think there’s a really interesting tidbit on that that I’d love to share, which is growing up in STEM, we were kind of taught to look at data and place data at a level of gospel sometimes, right? Where like the higher the end, for example, the more statistically significant, the more correct this data point ends up being. That is absolutely true, and there’s obvious logical science built into that way of discerning data. Then simultaneously, you do have occasional situations where a clinical trial may fail. Yet you have individual patients that may be cured of cancer. Does it necessarily mean that the product is not good? Or was it not tested in the right patients? I mean, you start to answer a lot of these interesting questions.

But the reason I bring that up is because this comes back to the value system of health care, which is it’s interesting. Because within healthcare, we’re tasked to be compassionate to care for our patients, and there’s sometimes like a disconnect with the way that we think about our jobs and the way that that happens. Because when you look at datasets, you look and you’re taught to think that the higher the data set, the more accurate, the more useful this information is, almost to the point where an N of 1 becomes tossed away as meaningless.

The irony is as we’ve built in our consumer journey, we’ve put all of our efforts into appreciating the N of 1 because the N of 1 is actually the lived journey that every single human being on this planet is born into, like every single person goes through an end of one journey. Your journey is your journey. That’s it, your perspectives, people that you’re with. I mean, that’s uniquely yours. That’s what you’re born into. That’s what you die with. The fact that that’s held out important sometimes or the importance of that, the significance of that is lost in our way of appreciating that people aren’t data points, people are people.

If we sometimes look at that N of 1 in the context of a broader dataset and find appreciation in the outliers, you actually will find a lot more answers to those questions that you may not even know you’re asking for. That’s actually where entrepreneurship really, really has taught us is we don’t find a lot of value in our aggregated success. Aggregated success is just the status quo of what’s working. We have so much failure that there’s no real N of 1 failure that you’re looking to innovate on.

But occasionally, we get an N of 1 that just blows our mind. How did that happen? Like where’s that coming from? Why is that happening? That insight that we get, picking up the phone, talking to that one person, can shift business strategy in ways that are so significant and unlock opportunities that we’d never considered, and it’s because we value that N of 1. I think if we look at that in health care and truly ask those questions, those deeper questions of making sure we don’t lose that context in the scheme of pursuing greater science, I think we can probably affect the holistic health of patients in a greater way as an industry. So that’s something that, again, going back full circle to your question of institutions is something that, as a value system, we should probably try to find a way to embed in our curriculum.

[00:35:30] TU: Great insights, Kun. Really have enjoyed the conversation. I’m excited to get this out to the YFP community. Where is the best place that folks can go to connect with you and to get involved perhaps in Pricklee as well?

[00:35:43] KY: Yeah, absolutely. So you can find us – For myself, personally, you can find me on LinkedIn in just Kun, K-U-N, last name Yang, Y-A-N-G. Yeah, feel free to connect and reach out if you ever want to have a conversation. We’d love to meet other pharmacists and hear about your journeys.

Then also, it just so happens that we actually are just opening our seed investment round for Pricklee as well. So if that’s something of interest, please feel free to reach out and let us know if you have any questions or want to learn a little bit more about that opportunity as well.

[00:36:11] TU: Awesome. We’ll link to both the Pricklee site, as well as Kun’s LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Kun, thanks so much for taking time to come on the show. I appreciate it.

[00:36:19] KY: Yeah. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Tim. I had a great time.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:36:22] TU: As we conclude this week’s podcast, an important reminder that the content on this show is provided to you for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for investment or any other advice. Information in the podcast and corresponding materials should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any investment or related financial products. We urge listeners to consult with a financial advisor with respect to any investment.

Thank you, again, for your support of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast. Have a great rest of your week.

[END]

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Month: January 2023

YFP 292: How & Why One Pharmacist Started a Functional Medicine Organization for Pharmacists

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