In this episode of the Pharmacy Innovators series hosted by Dr. Corrie Sanders, we meet Dr. Aaron Emmel, a pharmacist with a diverse career path.
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Episode Summary
In this latest episode of the Pharmacy Innovators series hosted by Dr. Corrie Sanders, we meet Dr. Aaron Emmel, a pharmacist with a diverse career path.
Dr. Emmel shares how open doors and opportunities led him on a journey from a community pharmacist to executive health system leadership and the pharmaceutical industry to entrepreneurship. With many lessons learned along the way, Dr. Emmel reflects on trusting his intuition, leaning on mentors, working hard and staying curious. Throughout his journey, he explored other income streams, including real estate investing, consulting and eventually launching Pharmacy Tech Scholar, an online education program for pharmacy technicians.
Dr. Emmel’s career journey exemplifies the extraordinary versatility and potential of a PharmD.
About Today’s Guest
Aaron Emmel graduated with his Doctor of Pharmacy Degree from the University of Florida in 2007. After a short stint as a staff pharmacist at Walgreens, he was afforded an opportunity to work as a clinical pharmacist at his local community hospital. He developed a passion for critical care medicine and spent years as the dedicated ICU pharmacist. In 2015, he earned his Masters in Healthcare Administration from the University of North Florida. With a goal of moving into executive health system leadership, he transitioned into a role as the Director of the Clinically Integrated Network and ACO owned by the hospital and local physicians. He served in this role until 2018, when he made the decision to transition into the pharmaceutical industry where we worked in Medical Affairs roles until his decision to end employment in 2024.
Aaron launched his first business, SmarterMeds, in 2010. Focusing on MTM services, he learned many lessons on entrepreneurship and business before abandoning the effort in 2012. He first began consulting in 2014, and significantly increased this work following his departure from the hospital in 2018. In 2020, he launched Pharmacy Tech Scholar, an online education program for individuals interested in becoming certified pharmacy technicians. He also invests in real estate.
Aaron has been married to his high school sweetheart, Allison, since 2010. They have two amazing daughters, aged 8 and 11. In his spare time, Aaron loves traveling with the family, fishing, exercising, and fueling his coffee obsession.
Key Points from the Episode
- Dr. Aaron Emmel’s Career Journey [0:00]
- Dr. Emmel’s Early Career and Decision to Leave Retail Pharmacy [3:38]
- Transition to Pharmaceutical Industry and Consulting [6:48]
- Financial Decisions and Career Transitions [11:44]
- Building and Diversifying Financial Portfolio [30:06]
- Final Thoughts and Advice for Listeners [1:01:16]
Episode Highlights
“I’m just so grateful that I’ve had an interesting journey and I’ve been able to do so many different things. I’ve met so many amazing people along the way. So when I reflect on this, I’m just so grateful for everything that’s happened, and I’m excited for what’s to come, because I feel like I’m always trying something new and navigating things, maybe accidentally, just the right way.” – Dr. Aaron Emmel [1:58]
“I’m not out there to make, you know, a bazillion dollars and live on a mountain somewhere. I mean my mindset at this point has become one of, I want to be prepared for anything. I could be in a position to retire pretty soon, if I really wanted to, but that’s not what I want. I want to be able to weather any storm, and I want my family to be set no matter what. That’s what’s driving me. – Dr. Aaron Emmel [29:46]
“I do good work because I want to do good work. But there’s other ancillary benefits that come from that, just aside from just doing well in your employee role and growing that career ladder.” -Dr. Aaron Emmel [32:54]
“Being brave enough to make tough decisions that you know are in your best interest, always try to do things the best that you can. And the other important lesson that I’ve learned is to do them for the right reasons.” -Dr. Aaron Emmel [42:51]
“I didn’t have enough of an altruistic mindset at the time, but I’ve literally built my career ever since then on the concept of trying to do the right thing for people. So if you do all that and you do it well, opportunities come”. – Dr. Aaron Emmel [43:42]
“With all these inflection points in my journey, it has had just as much, if not more, to do with the other people around me than it’s had to do with me. And I definitely come to understand that better now.” -Dr. Aaron Emmel [1:01:45]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode
- YFP+
- https://pharmacytechscholar.com
- https://themedicineguy.com
- Aaron Emmel, PharmD on LinkedIn
- Dr. Emmel on X
- Corrie Sanders, Huna Health on Instagram
- Subscribe to the YFP Newsletter
- YFP Planning
- Tim Ulbrich on LinkedIn
- YFP on Instagram
- YFP Facebook Group
- Your Financial Pharmacist
- YFP Disclaimer
- YFP Newsletter
Episode Transcript
Corrie Sanders 00:00
Hi YFP community. Corrie Sanders here, host of the Pharmacy Innovators Segment of the YFP Podcast. Pharmacy Innovators is designed for pharmacists navigating the entrepreneurial journey. In this series, we feature stories and strategies that help guide current and aspiring pharmacy entrepreneurs. Today, we have Dr. Aaron Emmel, whose unique career pathway and experience highlights the true flexibility of a PharmD. After graduating with his Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Florida in 2007 and a short stint as a community pharmacist, he was afforded an opportunity to work as a clinical pharmacist at his local community hospital, where he specialized in critical care. After earning his master’s in healthcare administration from the University of North Florida, he transitioned to Executive Health System Leadership. He then made a large career shift by leaving clinical practice for the pharmacy industry, where he simultaneously started various businesses and consulting while expanding his investment portfolio. In 2020, he launched Pharmacy Tech Scholar, an online education program for individuals interested in becoming certified pharmacy technicians. Today, we speak to Dr. Emmel about the importance of mentorship and decision making and building unique and valuable skill sets in each chapter of his career. But what really stands out to me the most in my discussion with Dr Emmel is his passion for helping others by problem solving through the lens of a pharmacist. I’m sure you all will enjoy the true diversity of D.r Emmel’s path. So let’s jump right into our conversation.
Corrie Sanders 01:31
Well, Aaron, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. We’re excited to have you here!
Dr. Aaron Emmel 01:35
Yeah, thanks for having me. Corrie, I’m flattered. Hopefully my story adds something to the podcast.
Corrie Sanders 01:41
I’m sure it will. So before we dive in too deep, why don’t you give our listeners a little bit of background. So describe your path in pharmacy. Where’d you go to pharmacy school? What kind of training do you have? And just a general overview of your career to this point.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 01:58
Yeah. Okay, so where do I start? I will say up front, I’m just so grateful that I’ve had an interesting journey and I’ve been able to do so many different things. I’ve met so many amazing people along the way. So when I reflect on this, I’m just so grateful for everything that’s happened, and I’m excited for what’s to come, because I feel like I’ve always trying something new and navigating things, maybe accidentally, just the right way. But I went to the University of Florida, so I graduated with my Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 2007. I was, I think, the second class that did remote campuses at UF so I actually went to a campus in Jacksonville, Florida, met some awesome classmates that are still close friends of mine to this day. Here we are almost 20 years now after graduating, but all throughout pharmacy school, I worked at Walgreens as a technician/pharmacy intern. I’m sure we’ll talk about this in more detail. But with that, you know, I was kind of, I don’t want to say indoctrinated, because, you know, people have made great careers out of working at Walgreens, but I had bought into, you know, the long term career path with them, and took all the tuition assistance, and when I graduated, thought that that was going to be my career. And I’m ambitious young man. At the time, I kind of saw a path for myself, growing in the business sense, so I took the sign on bonus as soon as I graduated and worked for them as a staff pharmacist. But thankfully, after that, I had a couple of months later, a phone call from my local hospital where I did many of my clinical rotations, and they offered me a job to come there and work as a pharmacist, which at the time, I was starting to feel like I had made the wrong decision. Couldn’t have been better timing, and we can dive deeper into this, but to have that opportunity without doing a residency, I knew it was now or never. So I made that transition then, and had the wonderful opportunity to end up specializing in critical care, which to this day, is my clinical passion. I worked almost 10 years as the critical care pharmacist at Flagler Hospital in St Augustine, and I don’t know that we have time in this podcast where come with that, but that was by far my most professionally rewarding work. And I often fantasize one day about going back. I don’t know if that’ll be possible this many years later at this point, but just had an amazing career as a critical care pharmacist. Got to do a lot of really cool things at the institution and really drive some pretty substantial change in their ICU practice and even in the pharmacy practice in general, and I had some mentors that I looked up to in terms of what they had done in their careers and their health systems. But again, you know, kind of ambition driving me to think I’ve got a long career path ahead of me. What am I going to do with my life? I don’t see myself being a critical care pharmacist forever, and it’s a stressful job. And starts the way on you mentally, at least it did for me. So I went back and got my master’s in health administration, and kind of thought of having a goal that maybe one day I’ll be the CEO of a hospital. So that was the path I started to pursue almost 10 years in to having worked as the critical care pharmacist. So once I got that degree, I had always been pitching business ideas and thoughts to the hospital leadership, and I started asking for more and more responsibility. So they gave me a really cool opportunity to take a dual role as the Assistant Director of Pharmacy and then as the Director of Quality for their clinically integrated network, which essentially functioned as an accountable care organization, and I built their entire quality program, all the claims analytics that went along with that, all the infrastructure necessary to execute quality reporting for the entity. And it wasn’t long in that role where they really saw the opportunity for me to grow and take on all the administrative leadership for that organization. So I became the Director of the organization, handled everything from physician relations to finances and contracting, continued to oversee the quality program, and for that two year period, just had an incredible professional growth and sense of just learning about healthcare administration, working very closely with payers, and working very closely to oversee population health in the community and working with the physicians to do that. So that role was amazing in that sense, but it drove me into the ground. I mean, it was tons of work. You know, 60 plus hours a week, missing many evenings at home to be in physician committee meetings, lots of stress, because the organization, just as all community health systems in the past five years have experienced, for sure, just struggled financially. So I started to get the feeling that that wasn’t a long term path I wanted to pursue. And I had, you know, my mentor in that role, who was my boss, had gone on to be an executive member of the leadership team for the healthcare system. I saw what that was like for him. I didn’t want that for myself. So again, I kind of hit this inflection point where I saw the need to maybe pivot one more time. And I had just as many clinical pharmacists, you know, they get friends that go to the pharmaceutical industry and work in medical affairs and hear about how wonderful that job is. And I had so many people that left clinical practice that went and did that either came to see me in their role, you know, to kind of to do their opinion leader meeting, you know, requirements, or they’d call me and just tell me how amazing that job was. I never thought I’d work for the pharmaceutical industry, because at the time, I was always the clinical pharmacist that gave everybody from industry a hard time when they’d come in and try to detail people. And you know, to me, that was, quote, The Dark Side, just like that perception exists amongst many of us in the pharmacy world. But I, you know, thought, why don’t I give it a try? Let me see what it’s like. I was always afraid of the travel, but I did it. So in 2018 I moved into a role with Otsuka pharmaceuticals as they were building the Medical Affairs field team for new indication they were getting in rare diseases and kidney diseases. And again, it was just a great growth for me. I got to experience something new, meet a ton of different people, learn about the pharmaceutical industry. Got rid of a lot of the misconceptions I had about it, and really thrived in that role for six years. So I worked for that company for a while. I pivoted and took a director field role with another company shortly after, or five years later, and then at the same time, I had started some additional side ventures. We haven’t even gotten into my all my side businesses over the years, as I’m trying to keep all this story straight, but that it just became very difficult for me to handle everything else I had been doing on the side. So I stepped away from the director role. I took another just individual contributor role with another company as an MSL, but even that individual contributor role, I just couldn’t fulfill, you know, the duties of that role in my opinion, everybody thought I was doing a great job, but I didn’t feel that I was doing good service to the company or myself for my business ventures and other reasons too. I saw the need to leave employment, and I made that decision professionally earlier this year. And again, we’ll dive much deeper into all that, especially the finances and considerations that went into that, but that would be probably too long of a summary professional career as a pharmacist. Um, and at the moment, I would consider myself, you know, still a pharmacist, because I’ll always be a pharmacist. I do think I will be going back at some point to do something professionally as a pharmacist, and more than I’m doing right now with with my education business for pharmacy technicians and the consulting work that I’m doing. So yeah.
Corrie Sanders 10:26
That’s a great summary to at least kind of set the stage for where this conversation is going to flow, the many different aspects and transitions that you’ve made into the career. So just to summarize it for the listeners too, to paint a picture of where we’re going. But started in community pharmacy, transition to inpatient pharmacy, where you worked your way up through the leadership chain, and then making another career pivot into industry, which I can’t wait to talk about that, but then ultimately switching to consulting and really starting your own business. So diving full time into entrepreneurship, and I’m sure the wide variety of things that you had done prior to that were able to give you a really steady foundation as to what you wanted your business to look like, and different financial considerations and all that experience, I’m sure, came into play in a really positive way for you. So let’s break this down into the smaller chunks, so we can really dive into the details. I know you started in community pharmacy. You said you were a technician at Walgreens for a couple years through pharmacy school, and I know there was some financial incentive to stay on board as a community pharmacist once you had graduated. So can we dive into some of those benefits that that company had offered, and then ultimately you made a pretty quick shift into inpatient pharmacy, so talking about the benefits of community pharmacy, and then ultimately that really quick flip into to inpatient and kind of the decisions that went into that, if you could elaborate a little more.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 11:59
I’ll be happy to. You know, when I was going to school, I will say my financial mindset and my financial education was not very sound. I thought it was. It certainly wasn’t. There’s so many mistakes that I’m just so grateful I can share them with my children now. But you know, I was of the mindset that it was ridiculous to do a residency, because why would somebody in their financial life take one to two additional years where they’re not able to earn a substantial income after investing all the time and money into pharmacy school? A very, very short sighted mindset, by the way, if, if, if I didn’t know how my career was going to pan out and I had to do it all over again, I would certainly have done a residency, no doubt about it. I’m fortunate things worked out the way they did when I didn’t. But you know, I was kind of committing myself that I wanted to earn as much money as I could, as fast as possible. And at the time, the salaries that pharmacists were earning in community pharmacies, for the most part, were substantially higher than they were in hospital pharmacies, at least in terms of what those dollars look like for a student who wasn’t making much money at the time. So I’m thinking, why would I earn $20 to $30,000 annually less a year to work at a hospital, when I could just make that much more money in the community and not have to do a residency to be competitive. So that was the mindset that drove me to do that, and I was ignoring all the subliminal things I was feeling, especially as I started to go through my clinical rotations. And I loved all of the clinical rotations I did, and I don’t feel like I was a great pharmacy student. I probably was just going through the motions at the time as just kind of a young guy that just wanted to get out and make a great living. I have learned so much since then, and you know, I certainly have a much different mindset when it comes to learning now and what the pharmacy career is all about, and the role of the pharmacist. I was ignoring all that because I was so focused on the dollars. And at the same time, I was living a life that was not financially healthy at all, you know. So it was kind of a really terrible path I was leading myself down, and I wasn’t happy, you know, with the day to day work that I was doing at the community retail pharmacy level. And again, I was kind of trying to ignore that, because I was so focused on the finances. So, you know, after having gone through all the clinical rotations and knowing what experiences I enjoyed and what I didn’t, and then committing myself when I got done to work for Walgreens, and this is nothing again, I’m not throwing shade on Walgreens in this podcast, but it was just my personal experience and feelings. I just wasn’t happy, and I really started acknowledge that a little bit more when pharmacy school was over and I was working as a pharmacist, and I’m getting those first paychecks, and those paychecks weren’t really satisfying enough to warrant, you know, the experience I was having in the work. So I definitely had regrets, and I was so grateful when I got that call from the director of Pharmacy at Flagler. And I will tell you, this to me, was the most important inflection point in my professional career, by far, was the decision to leave retail pharmacy, to go to the hospital to do that. And you got to realize at the time, I did the stupid stuff that so many pharmacy students do. I had bought a house, bought a car, taken out all these loans before I even graduated, right? So, you know, I was in a negative net worth situation that took me a long time to dig out of, and then I’m faced with the decision that, okay, I’m going to take a at the time, I think it was about a $30,000 a year pay cut to leave retail, to go work for the hospital, and I had to write Walgreens at check for all the money I took, you know, because there was a fulfillment criteria for that tuition assistance and the sign on bonus. So I don’t even remember the dollar figure at the time, but it was $30 to $40,000 and at the time, that was a whole lot of money that I didn’t have. So, you know, I borrowed money to pay them back, and it felt like financial suicide at the time. And I will tell you from my personal experience since then, might have had a wonderful career that I never would have had had I not made that decision, and as I learned better financial management over the years, that singular decision has probably also put me in a financial situation now I never would have been in before in a positive way. I didn’t know it at the time, but all the opportunities that have come to me since then would have never come had I not gained the different experiences I did along this journey. And it all goes back to that decision.
Corrie Sanders 17:14
Yeah, I think that that’s a really great point. Is that as pharmacists and really calculating the risk and reward for some of these financial decisions that we make, or just career decisions in general, it is always really easy to look at the dollar, because that’s such an objective measure of success. But often I feel like pharmacists just have their blinders on and they’re looking at a very shortstarted, sighted mindset of, what’s my next step? Where is the paycheck coming from, but not seeing the long term implications of what is this risk going to play out in the long term? What is my career path going to look like long term? What are the opportunities that are going to exist for me in a certain role long term. So you’ve done a very good job of elaborating and eloquently explaining why this decision was so important and what this inflection point meant for you. So I want to again highlight the short sighted mindset that you said that you had with the financial decision and the career decision that you made, and how you just hadn’t trusted your gut. So it’s great that you had the opportunity to make that transition so early on in your career, but then talking about that tuition assistance program, so that was huge, that you were getting some assistance, and that you had to sign on bonus with this job, and you still decided to walk away and to pivot into something different, which ultimately changed the trajectory of your career. So kudos to you. As a very young pharmacist for, I guess, being prompted to move in a different direction.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 18:45
So I had help with that, by the way, so the encouragement of my girlfriend at the time now my wife, my high school sweetheart, she was right there to support me, and she could see and feel what I was experiencing, so she knew what was best for me and my peers and one of my biggest mentors, even to this day. So I did a lot of my rotations at the St Vincent’s Hospital System in Jacksonville. There was a wonderful pharmacy director there. He’s been retiring now for quite a bit of time, but Jim Makava, I did a couple of my rotations at his health system, and I was blown away by what they had been able to accomplish as a community health system, not an academic health system, but the level of clinical pharmacy services they had just blew me away. So I knew right away that was somebody I needed to maintain a relationship with and look up to. So he helped guide me in that decision, too. I called him many times as I was trying to decide what to do, and he helped, you know, he didn’t tell me what to do, but he asked me all the right questions to make me realize what I needed to do, and I had my one of my best friends that I met in pharmacy school had the same exact scenario as me, and we both went through this together. And I can’t speak for him, but he made the same decision I did, and he’s now a systems director for ascension at this at the systems level, and he’s had a wonderful pharmacy career, brilliant individual. So we both benefited, I think, from going through this pain together, the fortitude to make the decision now.
Corrie Sanders 20:28
It certainly helps not to go through things by yourself in any chapter of life, especially something as as drastic as this, to really change the trajectory of your career so early on. So something else I want to highlight too is that you had mentioned having a pretty significant lifestyle creep up to this point. So you’re spending money that you don’t have. You know, you’re looking at the what the paychecks are going to look like, but your financial literacy is not matching what’s going in and out of your bank account. So also, for our pharmacy student listeners, I think it is so important to highlight how necessary it is to be financially literate and educated as you’re making some of these decisions very early on in your career, especially with the significant loan burden that a pharmacist generally has. So that was a, I’m sure, a tough learning lesson for you, but ultimately set you up for Financial Success down the line when you were able to reflect on on some of those changes.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 21:19
Yeah, it did. I mean, the education that came from that invaluable. Sometimes I look back and I’m like, Oh man, like, I’m in a great place now, and I’m grateful for that. But how much of a better place would I be in had I done things a little better for that 10 year period?
Corrie Sanders 21:38
So then Aaron, I want to move from making that initial career transition so switching from community pharmacy being given the opportunity to navigate your way into inpatient and then ultimately staying within the Flagler Institution for a significant amount of time, working your way from a staff pharmacist to a clinical pharmacist, up through the leadership team and then your next big career transition is moving from the hospital setting to pharmacy industry. And you said something to me earlier that really struck a chord with me was that, you know, a lot of pharmacists call industry the dark side of pharmacy, or going to the dark side, or some of the misconceptions that you had. So let’s talk a little bit about that decision. And I know in your initial summary of your career that you were just talking about the work life balance at the hospital setting, but I really just want to dive into the financial implications of that transition, and then what ultimately went behind making the jump from the hospital setting to the industry setting?
Dr. Aaron Emmel 22:47
So the biggest impetus, I would say, for me, making that change had everything to do with work life balance, you know. So if I rewind the clock to late 2017 as I’m thinking, I’m going to have to make a pivot. I’ve got a one year old, and I have a three year old, soon to be four year old at the time. So I’ve got little girls. I’m realizing the importance of being present and the fleeting nature of this point in time that you know, I didn’t want to miss out on and also, it wasn’t just the time to it was the level of stress and and the impact of that stress on my behavior and, wellbeing at home, and, you know, me and me and my wife, Allison, we had many talks about this. We knew this wasn’t sustainable. Sustainable both from just a family time together standpoint and from a health of our family unit standpoint. So that decision I made to go to industry based purely on that. I mean, I was all in. So I had, I had a game plan for all the jobs I was going to apply to, you know, a game plan for how I was going to interview and get in front of people. I didn’t have any other factors. I mean, I knew I was going to do this, my assumption at the time, because I was an executive director at the tail end of this period. So I’m making a pretty good salary that at the health system level, and I’ve got great benefits. I mean, I’m getting like, 36 days paid off a year, you know, all the ancillary benefits that come with being at the director level at the hospital. I didn’t think I was going to be able to match that, to go and just be an individual contributor, medical science liaison to start in the industry. So I made that decision, thinking, once again, I’m going to be taking a pay cut. Well, when I interviewed for my first job, I didn’t negotiate at all, and I got an offer after the interview, and it was a pay increase, and the benefits were incredible. I couldn’t believe it. I just never forget I stepped outside to take the call from HR, and they gave me the offer. And I came back in. I misunderstood at first, and I said, Wait, it’s this much, you know. When I came in and told Allison, I said, you’re not going to believe the offer I just got to come do this. And she’s like, well, you’re going to do it anyway. You better do it now. So I will say, from a financial standpoint, I was committed to do it yet again, because I wanted to just have a different experience and a work/life balance and be more present at home. But it turned out to actually be an improvement financially. And importantly, I will tell you, it gave me the time and energy to be able to do additional things as well. And again, while making the decision to go to from retail to clinical was the single most important decision in my entire professional career, this decision and just the way that things happened, completely changed my life financially. And it’s not because I made, you know, 10% more going from the director role to industry, but because of everything else that came with it. So I had done consulting before, and I My mind’s always racing. I’ve always got ideas. So I would always chase you know, opportunities and make pitches for doing these short term consulting arrangements, but when I left, there was nobody to fill my shoe my shoes at the hospital, then nobody that understood how to run the quality program. So they asked me if I’d be willing to stay on as a consultant to advise them and help them run the operations to execute the quality program requirements. I got approval from my new employer to allow me to do that, and that additional consulting income that I got for doing that, which, by the way, from a time in to dollar amount ratio at the time, I felt bad because I just didn’t understand how these things were valued, and I my business education has increased substantially since then, but I wasn’t making all that much less than I was getting paid, you know, as an employee, to essentially work five to 10 hours a month as a consultant. And that was income that was not factored into our budget so that additional money allowed me the opportunity to invest, invest in a new business, and put away money that we would have never put away before. So you know, I had done so much financial damage to myself in pharmacy school in the 10 years it took to dig me out of that hole, I hardly had a positive net worth, even going into that transition, and my life financially changed afterwards, because of everything else that came from being able to do things in addition to my employment.
Corrie Sanders 27:52
And that’s great reflection to hear. I love that you said, you know, you made this transition, not just for yourself, but for the overall health of your family unit. I think that that’s just a great lens to view any career transition through. Is not just looking at the professional aspect of it, but thinking again of the bigger picture and the others that are affected by your career. And I do want to give you kudos to I think you’re doing a great job of shifting your identity as a pharmacist, which I don’t think a lot of people do. They become so tied to: “I am a critical care pharmacist, and that is where I’m going to hang my hat for the rest of my career.” But you’ve done such a great job of not only being flexible throughout different positions, but really stepping back and taking a look at the bigger lens of your your career and what that ultimately means to your family. So I think looking at the logistics and the nitty gritty of that transition too – really helpful to know where the flow of some of those funds went. So you mentioned, you know, you put yourself in a pretty bad spot early on, but being able to leverage some of these new opportunities to give yourself some stable financial footing, and then what a great way, even if it wasn’t intentional, but to be able to capitalize on having a consultant position on top of a new position. So when you’ve already made a little bit of a career transition, but being able to dabble in consulting so early on. So how long did you maintain that consulting piece, and then ultimately, what has that turned into, if anything at this point?
Dr. Aaron Emmel 29:26
So still do it, and I’ve done it for other institutions as well. So I would say at this point, from in my financial picture, and I had this discussion too with Tim, just about my my mindset now, and I don’t want to get too derailed, but I’m not out there to make, you know, a bazillion dollars and, you know, live on a mountain somewhere. I mean that my mindset at this point has become one of, I want to be prepared for anything I’ve. I could be in a position to retire pretty soon, if I really wanted to, but that’s not what I want. I want to be able to weather any storm, and I want my family to be set no matter what. So that’s kind of what’s driving me. And when I think of how to accomplish that, it’s just basically to make sure we’ve got enough income coming in, and a stable enough income where one income stream can go away or get hurt, but we’ve got enough other diverse forms of income coming in. So the way I view that is this consulting work, I found I’ve been able to string that along, and there’s many opportunities I could get after if I really wanted to. So that is a very important source of stable income for us at this point. We haven’t talked about the education business yet, but that one’s doing pretty good too. So that’s a nice right now, stable form of income. I view a lot of external threats to that, which is why I feel the need to diversify income from investments. And right now, I’m focused more on real estate as a better cash flowing vehicle for investing income. So I want to grow these three as much as I can, and that way we have a very diverse income stream coming in. So the consulting piece has been excellent. And the thing that I have learned about consulting and where these opportunities come from, they come from doing a good job and building really good relationships. And I hope not getting too sidetracked here, but I think it’s important for the listeners to know that there are so many consulting opportunities that exist out there if you had the reputation and the experience to be able to present them or capitalize on them. So the consulting opportunity I got from the hospital came because I did a really good job with the quality program, and I spoke well, and I built great relationships with everybody, and they knew I can fulfill that need very well. They can count on me to do it. That’s why that opportunity presented itself, and we’ve done really well. And I say we because my wife, Allison, helps with that. She’s a nurse, and she does a lot of the chart reviews and quality abstraction we do as part of the services we provide. So that’s one and because of word of mouth and the ability to reference some of the key stakeholders and physician leaders, additional opportunities come with that. The other thing, and it might be a little early to talk about this, but you know, I exited industry employed employment in industry just recently, but I’ve already had opportunities come up to consult for industry because of all the relationships that I built and the fact that I did a really good job while I was in it. And those may end up being quite a bit more substantial than the ones that existed from the health system. And it all came from just always remembering that you have to present yourself well. You have to do good work. I do good work because I want to do good work. But there’s other ancillary benefits that come from that, just aside from just doing well in your employee role and growing that career ladder, so to speak.
Corrie Sanders 33:07
I think that that’s honestly been an underlying theme throughout our conversation so far, is doing a great job in the position that you’re given and creating and cultivating those meaningful relationships and realizing your value within whatever company or institution, it is that you’re performing in and then being able to leverage that amount of skill and those relationships as you’re navigating through different chapters in your career. But also, I think that you’ve done a great job of not only maintaining those relationships, but tapping into mentors when you need to, and seeking guidance and advice on what you should do next, or people that have gone through this experience yourself, so you don’t feel like you’re moving through these decisions in a silo. You feel like you’ve got that level of support and level of knowledge where you’re able to confidently make a decision and pivot as needed. So I wanted to point out those underlying themes too, but now I want to dig into So you’ve now been in industry. You’re leveraging some of these relationships, but you’re also given a lot of flexibility to pursue some ancillary interests on the side. So you’ve now got your consulting business, and I want to dive too into some of your other the other ways, you’ve diversified your financial portfolio. So you started investing in real estate, and you’ve also started a business. So let’s talk about both of those things, when which one came first? How did that come about? I’ll kind of let you take the floor there with with how you’ve gotten to this, what seems to be like a three pronged financial diversification portfolio strategy.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 34:43
Sure. So I have always been, I would say an entrepreneur at heart, I mean, and that probably just comes from my nature. I never stop. I mean, I’m up hours before anybody else in the house. Just so I can think of ideas and do work. It’s not, you know, work directly related to the objectives I had as an employee or a consultant. So the wheels are always spinning. And, I mean, I had iterated a couple of things over the years. My first try was back in 2010 I started a business essentially to do medication, therapy, management services. We don’t need to get too deep into the details on that one learned a lot of lessons about you know, what you need to do to be successful. One of those being having a target market that’s interested in your service. But we could always revisit that if needed. The way I wanted to do it, in my mind, wasn’t one that was suited to the market at the time, which was a really important business lesson learned. I had started an analytics business too, as I was starting to do all of the health system quality stuff when I was still an employee to health system. Didn’t really have the bandwidth to do anything with that, but after working in industry for a year, things were going well. I loved the job I was doing well, as a family, we couldn’t believe what that was affording, in terms of just the flexibility and work life balance, the fact that I was able to perform so highly yet still have such a flexible schedule. And even with the travel, and at the time, I traveled a lot. I mean, I was trying to get out there and do really well on the role, but the flexibility of being present when I was home, oh my goodness. I mean, the time that I gained, you know, with my family, good quality time, just couldn’t believe how well that was going. But at the same time, I had this energy where I’m like, man, you know, I really have the bandwidth to do more. So I really saw the need to try something again. I said, Okay, well, what is my skill set? Where is there an opportunity in the market? And at the time, you know, it was the concept of online courses and stuff was a growing fad and kind of the side hustle industry, and I had read all those, you know, side hustle kind of books, and listened to podcasts and lean startup concepts and things like that. So I landed on, well, why don’t I develop an online course for something? And I tried to think of all of my hobbies and expertise, and, you know, really, where was there truly a market that I could attack. And I fell back to pharmacy. I said, Okay, you know, maybe I could create, like, a prep course for a pharmacy certification, like a board pharmacy specialties kind of thing. You know, there was already a few solutions out there, and that, to me, was probably a little more than I wanted to tackle in my mind. But then the one thing I did in my market research that stuck out to me was really an opportunity for pharmacy technician education, especially tailored towards helping somebody become a certified pharmacy technician. And there wasn’t a lot of competition specifically in that online market at the time, there were a couple players that had done a really good job, but I thought, you know, I’m so ambitious, and I always execute things really well, why don’t I get throw something together and give it a shot? So I spent about a year while I was employed, and I had a conversation with my employee and my direct line manager at the time. I said, Hey, I’m going to try to do this. We went through the official process of conflict of interest and all that. They allowed me to do it. So I built an online education program. I learned how to do computer code, I learned how to build and develop a website. I could we could have eight hours of a podcast of everything I’ve learned since in terms of running a business and operating a business in this kind of niche aspect. But, you know, I built the entire curriculum, I had a few people kind of advise me in terms of making sure that it was something that would meet standards for pharmacy technician education. That’s a whole other conversation as well. But as an online only program. It wasn’t something I was going to be able to get accredited by ASHP, but the pharmacy technician certification board didn’t have a limitation in providing just didactic online education. So I pursued that, built the curriculum, submitted everything into the PTCB, got the approval for the course to be recognized by them, to qualify people to take the pharmacy technician certification exam. And after a year of hard work, click the button to launch the website. And didn’t really have much of a marketing plan, other than learning things about search engine optimization and different digital advertisements you can do, and didn’t get much traction for a while, but after, you know, a lot of work in terms of trying to tune up the website and get more visibility on it, slowly started to gain some business to customer market share in terms of people finding the website and paying for the course to go on and get certified. And I did all that on the side, and I shouldn’t say side, because I learned real quick it was quite a commitment in the way that I wanted to do it, and that, I would say almost, kind of turned into my primary focus. At the same time, I wanted to meet all the obligations of being an employee, and I worked very hard for a few years to be able to do all that together, but here we are today, and I got myself through the consulting and the income from the business. Those two things alone are more than enough at the moment for me to just be able to do those and not be able and still be able real estate stuff as well.
Corrie Sanders 40:44
So that, and that’s a great lesson, I think, for viewers and listeners to hear, is that you really bootstrap the business together outside of your W2 job with, I mean, truly bootstrapping. I think a lot of pharmacists that make the pivot into entrepreneurship aren’t doing the level of detail with coding and SEO optimization and all these different things you had to do.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 41:04
I mean, bootstrap. I didn’t even count the hours that I put into this, but I did and it was with a true business owner mindset now and being in a completely different situation from a capital standpoint. I mean, that’s not always the best way to launch a business, but because I had the bandwidth and I just did it, I’m grateful I did, because not only was I able to do it at a relatively reasonable startup cost, but everything I learned along the process made me an extremely nimble business owner in this space, because now, I mean, I understand all these technical things. You know, I serve business to business clients now too. So I’ve got health systems and a few GPOs and educational institutions across the country that I’m doing group contracting with, and there’s a lot of vendor credentialing requirements that come from that. And now I know more about cyber and information security than I ever did before. I would have known all these things had not spent all the time to learn it as I was trying to figure out how to build and launch this.
Corrie Sanders 42:19
Which makes you even more valuable in a way that you probably never imagined.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 42:23
Over the years, that you know they want to do something similar and wanted guidance. I’ve had people ask me to be a business coach to help them be able to do that. I haven’t latched on to that because I feel at some point you know, you have to maintain some focus. I don’t want to throw too many things out there again. Yeah, it’s I would say my biggest take home that I can think of from the audience, other than just being brave enough to make tough decisions that you know are in your best interest, is to just always try to do things the best that you can, and do them in a sense too, that the other important lesson that I’ve learned is to do them for the right reasons, and that’s, you know, to be mission and vision focused, and to build genuine relationships with people, and to have a primary goal of helping other people more than anything else. And that was another mindset that I go back 20 years ago, where I’m focused on the money that wasn’t the right reason. I mean, I had stories I could tell you of some of the feedback I got from preceptors and, you know, education factor, educational faculty about, okay, do you really understand what the pharmacy role is supposed to be like? And I didn’t have enough of an altruistic mindset at the time, but I’ve literally built my career ever since then on the concept of trying to do the right thing for people. So do all that and you do it well, opportunities come. That’s one thing I’ve learned, yeah.
Corrie Sanders 44:00
And that’s a great, I mean, career lesson, but life lesson in general, too. And I want to back up just a little bit to make it clear. So you’re in this position where you’re doing some consulting, but you’re still within the industry, and the business that you built out on the side, or what became your full time business was Pharmacy Tech Scholar. So that’s what you’re building up this platform to ultimately provide education and certification courses to pharmacy technicians that can be purchased all online. So for our pharmacists that are listening, that do work with pharmacy technicians, I want to give you the opportunity to just elaborate a little bit more about this business. What is the goal of Pharmacy Tech Scholar, who are some potential clients and and how have you envisioned, you know, where the business is going in a way that’s understandable to the audience, and hopefully, if they need some of those services, is, how can they reach out to you.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 45:00
Awesome. I wasn’t even thinking of having any kind of talk here. But so the mission is simple. It’s to empower anybody to become a certified pharmacy technician. So the opportunity that I saw at the time, and the one that I believe in very strongly, this comes from my own financial experience as well is that there’s such a demand for pharmacy technicians right now, and there is a massive supply gap that exists today. It’s been going on for years now. I mean, I could I hear all these things from employers that contact me of how hard it is for them to find qualified pharmacy technicians, and there’s a major gap between from a pharmacy association perspective, on the type of training and preparation that you want for somebody to go out in the world and be a competent pharmacy technician and fulfill the level of scope of practice that role can provide and elevate, elevate the profession as a whole. It’s a lot of training and education. So you know, if you look at the ASHP accreditation model, as the gold standard for pharmacy technician education, which which I believe in, and I support, it is robust, and it’s extremely hard to attain that accreditation status. And if you’re not an employer, and you do this to recoup the cost of running that program, you got to charge quite a bit, whether you’re a vocational school or secondary educational institution, for somebody to go through a training program. And I just in my mind, it’s tough for me to see somebody invest, you know, the 1000s or 10s of 1000s of dollars that education might cost to get out and earn what a pharmacy technician earns, quite frankly. And there’s been a significant increase in the pharmacy technician wage, even over the past three years, if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But it’s still not one that’s equitable in terms of what the outlay would would need to be for that level of education and training to go out and make that money. So I’m trying to envision the path for what I’ve done and being able to fulfill at least the didactic component of the education that a pharmacy technician needs at a very low cost. And the whole goal of this is to empower anybody to do it without any financial constraint. So my goal is that somebody can, as an individual, take our program, then go on to take the pharmacy technician certification exam and get their certified pharmacy technician status, which in most states is kind of the barrier to entry that are lower to be able to register and get out into the world and start to get some on the job training. So that’s kind of the path that I see from an individual standpoint. If somebody wants to be a pharmacy technician, that’s a really efficient path to take. You get your didactic education in a very inexpensive manner. You get your rubber stamp. So you can go out and get employed, and the employer is going to take the impotence to give you that experiential training that you need. So that’s kind of, if I frame it from the individual or the aspiring pharmacy technicians perspective. That’s the vision that I have for where we fit into their journey. Now, what I envision in terms of going forward, how, how do we how do I our business. How does our business deliver that service and help meet the standard that the pharmacy profession wants to see for pharmacy technicians? So especially with this audience, if it’s mainly pharmacy professionals, you know, my goal is for us to be able to fulfill the didactic component of a fully accredited training program which needs to include simulated, experiential training. We’ve done a really good job building a very interactive and active, didactic learning experience because, you know, we have a multimodal learning system in our learning management or multi multimodal experience in our learning management system, from, you know, video lectures to self study material to we provide all the readings as well at no cost, student discussion board, interactive messaging with with me. I mean, I’m on hours every day communicating with all the students. We’ve got self study activities. We’ve got, like, different educational games and these different h5p modules on the site. So it’s a it’s a really holistic student experience from a didactic standpoint, and integrating a lot of active learning and adult learning principles. So what I like to think is that we’ve built pretty much the best experience you could get from a self study, self paced, online, didactic perspective, that would be a really nice supplement for any holistic training program. So it alleviates the burden from the employer, essentially, if you think about an employer based training program that didactic components covered, and then you can focus just on the simulation. An experiential piece of that, and the students are already going to have a good background of that technology to be able to then move on to those types of activities. Go back to my time at the hospital, you know, in the state of Florida, which is kind of ironic, because that’s where I’m at. It’s one of the states that you know that’s not enough. You have to complete an ASHP accredited program, or a fully, you know, accredited educational institution program. You can’t just do an online program and get certified. But at the hospital, we didn’t have the bandwidth to go out and pursue ASHP accreditation, and we had a really hard time sourcing pharmacy technicians because of that, and I believe that the hospital still struggles with that. I’ve been trying to think about how to approach them, to work out some kind of combo deal, but yeah, so that’s kind of what I’d say, is we can offer what I personally feel is the best didactic experiences you can get from an online self study program.
Corrie Sanders 50:58
It sounds like a really robust experience and a really, you know, detail oriented, hands on experiences that has a lot a lot of thought put behind it. I love, I think it’s so ironic, not only that you’re in Florida with whatever restrictions may exist for the technicians, but I love that you had worked your way so far from community pharmacy and then ultimately reflecting back to a service that can totally help community pharmacy, not only the inpatient setting too, with recruiting technicians, but in a way that can really serve the pharmacy industry as a whole with that gap in the market, and really seizing the product market fit for that specific opportunity with Pharmacy Tech Scholar. So once you’ve got that up and running as your side hustle, that’s now become a full time job at this point, when do you lean into real estate and divesting even further? Is that before or after the Pharmacy Tech Scholar component leveraging some of the other consulting salary or your salary as a hospital employee? What did that step look like with diversification of your finances and just in general, can you help paint a better picture of when you reached into some of these other avenues?
Dr. Aaron Emmel 52:07
Yeah, excellent question. And again, we don’t have enough time to get into all my financial thoughts and ideas at this point, but I will say I thought about investing in real estate probably starting about 2018, 2019, I didn’t really have the capital to do much at the time, and I’ve got a lot of opinions too, about all the, you know, flashy real estate podcasts and ideas about all these crafty ways to invest in Real Estate. But I started to build my education around that time, probably way too much. So I certainly suffered from analysis paralysis. So I mean, I probably consumed 50 to 100 books on real estate investing build all these financial models on the side, because I’m a geek like that. But it wasn’t until really a couple of years ago, that I started to set some real goals, because I didn’t really have the capital to do much until then, at least in addition to all the other investments I had, I didn’t want to be able to pull out any money that I already had invested. And the rationale in my mind, was, ultimately, I want to get to a point where it’s just the investments that that fund, you know, the expenses that we have as a family, not because I don’t want to work or do anything anymore, but that, to me, puts us in a position where we can weather the storm no matter what happens. And I just don’t think any of us know what the world’s going to look like in five to 10 years. Five to 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, and to me, the more I can do to put our family in a situation where we’ve got that buffer. I’m doing my job. So the problem that I saw was that most of my or all of my investments, are in these tax protected vehicles that come with substantial penalties if you tap into them. So, you know, 401K, 403b, 529, plans for the kids health savings accounts, I had built up a pretty good nest egg, I would say, for my age as of a few years ago. But they weren’t producing any cash flow I could realize. So I made the decision on my mind that all the excess income that I have now, I’m just going to start investing in the real estate assets that ultimately I can get to the point where they’re cash flowing. And it’s cash flow that I can realize. And there’s some tax advantages to that too. So there’s not like, a huge additional tax burden that would come from that. In fact, I’ve got a situation this, this last tax season, where it was highly advantageous the way I did a couple of the investments, but that was the thought process. I didn’t execute my first real estate investment until early last year. And help focus me, if we need to stop me and ask me questions If you need but I went through all the different asset classes of real estate in my research on where can I put money in a real estate investment vehicle that’s going to produce both a very safe return overall and will cash flow? And I had a hard time finding anything, and maybe because I didn’t have the bandwidth to do a ton of lead generation. I mean, the to really generate, you know, major opportunity leads is a lot of work and a lot of investment in marketing. And I’m doing all this on the side. I don’t want to create another full time job for myself. And, you know, I couldn’t find anything in my area on the MLS, whether it was a multifamily or single family residence that pInned out from an investment standpoint, that would meet my metric criteria, I started looking into commercial assets, same thing with everything that was on LoopNet or that you could publicly find for commercial properties. And it wasn’t until I met somebody to become one of my best friends, whose kid was in my my youngest daughter’s class, and told him about my aspirations to invest in real estate. And he was a commercial real estate developer, so we started bouncing a ton of ideas around, and made the decision last year to do a couple of investments out of town in South Carolina for some commercial properties. So I did a couple of investments up there as a partner in a venture LLC for two retail complexes in South Carolina. And both of those, and these are pretty large outlay what many people would consider to be high risk investments, but they were such great opportunities at such a low acquisition cost that there was so much buffer for things to go wrong, and things have gone wrong, and even though they’ve gone wrong, you know, we’re still standing to make a substantial double digit rate of return, whether we refinance those this year or dispose of them in the coming months, the coming years. Well, so lots of thoughts. I mean, there’s so many things I could discuss about that, but ultimately, I made the decision to do this more as a passive partner, because I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to really pursue an active real estate investment with a strategy that was going to generate an investment that performed well from the outset. I think there’s a big misperception in my opinion, of people that think they can just go out and buy a house or a duplex and it’s a good investment. If you’re looking at the market, and whether you’re paying all cash or you’re leveraging it, especially these current interest rate environments, you’re probably going to lose money, or you’re probably at least in the near term, without knowing where inflation is going to go, you’re better off putting that money even in a money market account right now, unless you’ve got a really sound investment and you really understand the capital requirements of what you’re doing.
Corrie Sanders 58:08
And again, it’s so nice to hear that one you had already kind of financially leveraged, you know, with all these different forms of income, the ability to start investing in real estate a little bit later in your career, but ultimately, the ability to do it in the way that you did came from another relationship that you had made and some more conversations that you had had with people that are like minded. So I want to point to a couple different things, and then we’ll try to summarize it all up and with some clean takeaways. But I think overall, just listening to your journey one, you are great at doing different ways of self reflection. I feel like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders with where am i right now and where do I want to be? And then, if those two things aren’t aligning, for whatever reason, you’re another great example of you know, there’s no perfect time for a shift. There’s no black or white idea of when you have to be a certain thing in the pharmacy profession, but being able to have a shift in mindset or a shift in your career at any point in time, just based on what feels right and doing the right thing and working really hard has opened yourself up for a lot of different opportunities. So to summarize things up, we started in community pharmacy. We pivoted to that inpatient setting, and then ultimately switching into industry, and once you had some financial leverage, really working on diversifying that financial portfolio, so then reaching into real estate, looking at some of those hard and soft skills that you had developed from different points in your career and leveraging those in a way that was financially advantageous, but being able to eventually walk away from a W2 job because of these different diversifications that you had built with both the business, Pharmacy Tech Scholar and then some consulting. So anything else that you know you want to highlight in your career that you think would be useful to our listeners that, before we summarize it even further?
Dr. Aaron Emmel 1:00:10
My goodness, there’s so many things. And again, if I, if I take your kind words about my my ability for reflection, I would say the other important lesson I’ve learned is to have, at least in my own history, the need to have a higher degree of respect for everybody else around you and the things that they know. So that was my other lesson that I’ve learned over time, and I’m on a continual path with this, is, you know, when I got out into the hospital and here I am. I think I’m so smart, I didn’t even do a residency. I mean, I know everything right, and I had that mindset. I was so judgmental if somebody didn’t review something, or they let this medication get verified, or, you know, I assume none of the physicians knew anything about anything they were prescribing, but I have since come to learn that I don’t know as much as I think I know. That’s still true today. I’m always trying to learn more, but I missed out, I think, on a lot of opportunities to learn from other people early on, because I had that brazen mindset, and I would say it served me well as the years have gone by to have a more grounded perspective that other people know a lot more than I thought they did, and probably more than I do, and the ability to learn from other people and having that mindset has really served me well. So that was my own personal thing. That’s probably too many of your readers, but I would say that to me, and you noted too, with all these inflection points in my journey has had just as much, if not more, to do with the other people around me than it’s had to do, and I definitely come to understand that better now, and that circle could have been much bigger, And I could have learned much more had I been a little more introspective, I would say, and empathetic as well with everybody else in my space.
Corrie Sanders 1:02:10
No, that’s so beautifully said. Everyone’s got something to teach you. It’s just whether you want to see it or not. And the last question Aaron that I’ll ask, we’ve talked about a lot of different resources that you tapped into, so mentorship from a very early point in your career, you talked about consuming a lot of books and a lot of podcasts. Is there any other useful vehicle in your entrepreneurship journey that you want to point out to the listeners? Anything that you tapped into, or maybe your most valuable resource to this date.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 1:02:44
Letting go of the fear of failure, I would say that’s a big one. And I’ve failed quite a bit, and I continue to fail, but every time you do that, it’s an opportunity to learn something, and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. That’s the other thing that I still struggle with today, we spoke before we started recording, about, you know, I’ve recognized the need to be more present socially, at least in terms of social media and stuff. And it’s got more to do with my, I guess, lack of like excitement around being that publicly visible. But if you want to succeed, I mean, you have to have a brand you know. You’ve got to be out there. You can’t be afraid of what other people think you know. And that’s something that I try all the time to let go of, and I still need to work on. It’s so important. If you’re going to be putting something out there that’s new, or putting something out there that’s going to compete, you’ve got to be fully behind it and fully visible, and you’ve got to be willing to just look stupid if you think that’s the way you’re going to look, but just put yourself out there.
Corrie Sanders 1:03:47
Well, on that note, Aaron, if people want to find you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Dr. Aaron Emmel 1:03:53
You can find me on LinkedIn, it’s AaronEmmel. No period. My tag on LinkedIn. I just now put up my own personal website again from many years back. So themedicineguy.com There’s no content on there as of this minute, but hopefully in the coming weeks, we’ll have some I’ll have some stuff on there as well. And that’s also my Twitter/X handles @themedicine guy. Haven’t been tweeting since 2020 but again, I’m going to try to get active.
Corrie Sanders 1:04:21
Well, that sounds great, and there’s this has been such a beautiful conversation, I feel like there’s a lot of great life lessons worked into a lot of this professional journey. So wanted to say thank you again for taking the time to be here with YFP, and wish you all the best. Thanks, Aaron.
Dr. Aaron Emmel 1:04:37
Thank you. Corrie. I really appreciate it.
Tim Ulbrich 1:04:41
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