YFP 148: How One Couple Got Started in Real Estate Investing


How One Couple Got Started in Real Estate Investing

Jenny and Myke White join Tim Ulbrich to share their journey into real estate investing. They talk about why they feel like real estate investing is a good fit for them, how they got themselves financially ready to purchase their first property, the good and the bad of owning an investment property and future goals they have for building their portfolio.

About Today’s Guests

Jenny and Myke are both originally from Colorado Springs, CO; they’ve been together for the past 10 years and married for the last 6. Jenny attended Creighton University through the distance program and was awarded her PharmD in 2017. During her time as a student, she interned at Multicare Auburn Medical Center. After graduating, she completed a PGY1 residency at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, WA and then went on to take a position as a night pharmacist at Multicare Covington Medical Center. Currently, Jenny is working as an assistant professor at William Carey’s School of Pharmacy in Biloxi, MS. She divides her time at Keesler Medical Center, her clinical practice site where she practices as an ambulatory care pharmacist. Myke has been serving in the United States Air Force for the past 12 years. Five and a half years were spent at Luke AFB, AZ, where he worked as a Project Manager. He was the IT contact for both new facility construction projects and renovations, ensuring that customer and contractor support was above reproach, and milestones were met. Five and a half more years were spent at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA, where he worked Client Systems, which is usually referred to as the “Geek Squad of the Air Force”. He is currently a Technical Training Instructor at Keesler AFB, where he trains both recent Basic Military Training graduates and re-trainees before they begin their career as Client Systems Technicians.

With Jenny being a new graduate, the thought of paying down school loans was always in the back of her mind. Her night shift schedule really allowed her to start researching ways to create more income besides just working additional hours. During this time, she stumbled across Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which completely changed her mindset on building wealth and developed her new focus of creating passive income through real estate. After sharing her vision with Myke, he also became fascinated in beginning this journey to change their life trajectory in a major way. Shortly after finding this new passion for real estate, they received military orders to Mississippi. This initially came as a huge shock to them, but it truly was a blessing in disguise. Selling their house in Washington’s hot and expensive housing market gave them an opportunity to benefit in Mississippi’s much more affordable housing market. Jenny and Myke hit the ground running to find an investment property in August 2019 and were able to close on their first duplex that December.

They have 3 dogs, enjoy fitness, and love to travel.

Summary

Jenny and Myke recently moved to Mississippi from Washington state. They had planned to stay in Washington for a couple of more years, however, Myke, who joined the Air Force in 2007, received orders to move.

Jenny, a pharmacist, brings the student loans to the table in their relationship and felt responsible to find a way to bring more money in to pay them off. After pharmacy school, Jenny worked a 7 on/7 off schedule which allowed her to work per diem at two other hospitals. She wanted to figure out how to increase their cash flow and create passive income instead of having to work more hours. After readying Rich Dad, Poor Dad she realized that she could become a pharmacist real estate investor.

The couple works with Tim Baker, one of YFP’s CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS™, and he suggested that she take the PSLF route in paying off her loans after hearing their financial goals. Jenny and Myke started focusing on saving money for a down payment on a real estate investment property with the extra money they had each month. They were also able to use the capital gains from selling their house in Washington to help with purchase their first property.

Myke shares that they dove into real estate investing because they can positively help other people while bringing in cash each month. They also want to be good landlords and take care of others. They closed on their first duplex in December 2019 and currently have one side rented. In this episode, they share what they’ve learned in the real estate investment process so far and what their future plans are.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited to have on the show this week Jenny and Myke White to talk about their journey with real estate investing. Now, we have heard loud and clear from the YFP community that you want to hear more stories from those in the beginning stages of real estate investing. And this episode is intended to do just that, to share their journey into real estate investing, how they got themselves financially ready to go, what types of investing they’re doing, how it is going, lessons learned, and where they’re going from here. So Jenny and Myke, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.

Jenny White: Yeah, thanks for having us, Tim.

Myke White: Tim, it’s a pleasure.

Tim Ulbrich: Well let’s start with some introductions. Jenny, you first. And then Myke. Talk to us a little bit about your background, your careers and the work that you’re doing right now.

Jenny White: OK, so my name’s Jenny White, and I’m the pharmacist in this marriage. And so we actually met Tim Ulbrich through the other Tim, who’s been our financial advisor for the past year. I was starting my pharmacy career in Washington state, where I worked as an intern. I was actually part of Creighton’s distance program. And so once I graduated, I did my PGY1 residency at Providence St. Peter and then went on to work for about a year with multicare as an overnight pharmacist, so working in the ED and primarily MedSurg. And then we kind of had a change of plans, so we were in Washington for about six years during my whole time being a pharmacy student and then my pharmacy career. And then Myke, who will introduce himself here shortly, is in the Air Force, and we got orders to Mississippi, which changed things dramatically for us. ANd so now I’m actually an assistant professor at William Carey University. And so I split my time being a faculty member for the pharmacy school and then working at Keesler Air Force Base as an ambulatory care pharmacist.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Thank you. Myke, go ahead.

Myke White: So my name is Myke White, I like Jenny said am in the Air Force. I joined in 2007. I started out in Arizona as a IT project manager. So I handled a lot of the high-dollar initiatives throughout the installation, whether it was new constructions or renovations, anything that needed communications, meaning network capability, computer servers. We were all up in it. So I was there for almost six years, made our way to Washington where I was a client systems technician, so I mainly focused on computer and end user devices. And I liked it. We were there for almost six years, and honestly, our plan was to stay for probably a couple more years, get Jenny established and maybe even try to get overseas if we could. And then actually came back from holiday exodus in 2018, and I realized that we got orders. And of course when you look at your orders, it just says that you’re notified or you were selected for orders. It doesn’t exactly tell you where you’re going. So I was excited because on my preference list, I had nothing but overseas. So I’m like yes, we’re going to get that opportunity to get overseas. And I checked, and I saw that we’re going to Keesler. And of course, I had to break the news to Jenny. And she was obviously not happy. But at the end of the day, we had to deal with what we were given. So now we’re here. And it’s actually not as bad as I ever would have thought. You know, it’s opened up quite a bit of opportunities for us. And hopefully they continue as long as we’re here.

Tim Ulbrich: I think the Mississippi folk listening will be glad to hear you say it’s not as bad as you had thought. And what a change, I mean, Pacific Northwest to Mississippi. We talked about before we hit record, you know, home being Colorado. So lots of transition for sure. But I’m excited, I know one of the goals that you all have going forward is sort of the flexibility and the freedom with travel and doing things that you love, especially as time in the military eventually wraps up and having more options, which is I think where real investing in the financial plan fits in so well. So Myke, I want to start with really a broad question about your financial plan as a couple and how real estate investing fits in. And the reason I want to start here is that I see many pharmacists, especially new practitioners, really struggling to get started with real estate investing. One, they want to do it but they don’t know how to get started because, you know, of course they’re balancing six figures of student loan debt, perhaps the need to build up reserves for a rainy day fund, getting rid of credit card debt, trying to prioritize other goals such as investing, home buying, wedding, starting a family, the list goes on and on, right? So tell us a little bit about for the two of you — and obviously in your work with Tim Baker as well I’m sure this has been part of the discussion — how has real estate investing been able to come up and bubble up as a priority among all the other things that you’re trying to work on?

Myke White: So starting from the beginning, honestly, I had not necessarily an interest but I just didn’t know better when it came to real estate just because you know, you have that typical mindset of people where there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of money involved, there’s a lot of things that people don’t know so they kind of just put it off, that’s not for me type thing. And of course once Jenny was introduced to YFP and in the midst of all of that, Bigger Pockets and I mean, her entrepreneurial spirit anyway, she kind of found out about everything. And then she kind of sold it to me. So of course I was a little bit apprehensive at first. I was like, eh, I don’t think so. But then after I started reading a few things, looking at a few different articles and of course read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” I think that’s when my whole mindset shifted. And I was like, OK, maybe we can do something different, we can stop this 9-5 mindset and think outside the box and figure out ways that our money can work for us and benefit us in the long run. So I think once we started that, we kind of started to zero in on our different priorities and how real estate can feed that. And also leaving Washington, we of course sold our house. And we ended up making quite a bit of capital, extra capital, in order for us to start to kick things off once we got to Mississippi. So we’re able to pay down quite a bit of our debt, we’re able to establish our nest egg or our real estate venture. So I think once we got to that point and once we got settled in Mississippi, we’re kind of able to set our priorities and get that going. But as far as right now, our plan is again to — so I retire in about eight years. So for us to kind of get established now, get smart on everything, establish our connects and different things and get that going. We of course got our first property. Obviously our goal is to get at least 1-2 properties at minimum a year until we get to the point where the cash flow is supplementing at least one of our salaries so we don’t have to worry about working.

Tim Ulbrich: So Jenny, you must have done an awesome job selling him well. I mean, hearing Myke go from “I’m unsure of this” to “We’re going to be getting at least 1-2 properties a year,” that gets me fired up. And isn’t it amazing — I mean, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” had that same effect on me. And I recommend, I feel like it should be required reading throughout multiple times. It’s not one of those things you read once either. I feel like you pick up something new each time. But it’s a mindset book. It just makes you think differently about money, especially if something like real estate investing, small business, wasn’t a part of how you grew up. Jenny, talk to us for a moment about student loans because I’m guessing many people are listening saying, “My gosh. Like I would love to get started with real estate investing.” But you know, we know the average indebtedness is about $170,000 across the country for today’s graduates. So for you all, talk to us about the student loan position and then your repayment strategy and how that has played into allowing you to be able to prioritize real estate investing while you’re also facing student loan debt.

Jenny White: Yeah. So for us, student loan debt is definitely something that I think triggered this looking out for other options. So obviously when I went to school, pharmacy was my passion. Like I absolutely love it. I love what I do, I love hospital, I love ambulatory care, I love all realms of it. But once I was working as an overnight pharmacist, I’m like, yes, I finally made it. I’ve got that consistent salary, I’m making money. And we were paying down some of the debt that we had accumulated. And mind you, so Myke, he doesn’t bring this debt to the table. Like this is strictly mine. I know there’s a lot of people that are two pharmacists or other debt. Like this is all mine. So in my mind, I was almost thinking like, I have to get rid of this. So I kept looking at other things. I looked at side hustles and I was trying to figure out how we could do — how we could continue to pay it off because my first goal was I wanted to try to pay off all of the student debt because I was like, let’s just get this out of our way. Like I don’t want to deal with this anymore. But then after I’d talked to Tim and I was like, OK, I did sign up for PSLF because I was like, this is kind of my backup, if like in a couple years I realize like I’m not getting this paid down quickly enough then I could always fall back on PSLF and draw back on the payments and try to decrease them. The other thing that I noticed too was that like when I was working, I had the 7-on, 7-off working night shift, which was amazing. But it also gave me the opportunity to work per diem. And so I was working per diem at two hospitals. And then I was like looking at my paycheck, and I was just like holy cow, like so much of my money is getting taken away for taxes. And so I was like, there has to be something else, which is when I found “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” which I recommend that book to every single person. It’s $5 on Amazon. There is like no reason, especially now in the quarantine, that you can’t read it because that completely shifted it where I was like, this is right, they’re taking all of my hard-earned money for taxes and using it for whatever they use taxes for. But like how can I hold onto more of my money? And then that’s where it really shifted to thinking about cash flow, passive income, and then we kind of shifted focus on like instead of paying down all the debt, let’s focus on saving up as much as we can to get down payments for houses.

Tim Ulbrich: I love it. And I think that strategy of PSLF here is really an important part because as our listeners know well, now if you’re pursuing PSLF, which right now doesn’t get sweeter than it is, right? We’ve got a bonus time period here of $0 PSLF-qualifying payments because of the CARES Act. But the PSLF strategy, you know, if that’s what you’re in is minimize payments, maximize forgiveness. And here, that allows additional cash flow to be freed up to be able to focus on things like real estate investing. And I think it’s a good reminder of the interconnectedness of all the parts of a financial plan and how someone like a coach can really help you balance those out and think about them where it’s often easy just to get siloed in the one part of the financial plan. So Jenny, talk to us a little bit about the month-to-month rhythm for you guys. I know if you’re working with Tim Baker, it likely means he’s talked about a budget and the spending plan and obviously I would assume that’s a key part here based on the goals that you have. What does this look like month-to-month and week-to-week for you and Myke in terms of how you’re able to account for income and expenses and ensure you’re able to fund and prioritize the goals that you guys have?

Jenny White: Yeah, so for us, Tim Baker has been a huge resource to us, and we’ve definitely learned a lot from him and kind of managing our finances as well as Tom, who is the budget guy for Tim. And so we’ve been working with him. So we really had to kind of focus in our spending. And we actually run a budget now, which is something that we didn’t really do before and we kind of just would pay our bills but we really wouldn’t look at our spending. And now when we do that, we’re like, holy cow, we spent this much money going out to eat, we spent this much money on groceries. And so it really opened our eyes, and so we try to make sure that we’re cognizant of that. So that was kind of a big thing. But even for kind of getting in the ball rolling for the real estate thing, a lot of it was just learning. And Myke and I are still doing that. We have tons of books from Bigger Pockets that we’re reading, we listen to podcasts, and we also — the thing with Bigger Pockets is that they have so many great resources. So one thing that a lot of people don’t realize too is they think like, I can’t get started in real estate because I don’t know everything. But start learning now so that you can get the ball rolling so that when you’re ready, then you’re good to go. So like we started in January of 2019. This is when I really started. And then you know, early in the year, then Myke really got involved. And so we were listening to all the podcasts, reading all the books. But they have a calculator on Bigger Pockets that you can use to like really dial in like your properties. But you have to practice it to be able to like see what a good deal is versus what isn’t a good deal. And so from the time that we started doing that, we were practicing probably from like March ‘til May-June timeframe before we got there so that when we actually got to Mississippi, we were ready to roll because we could actually pull in those numbers, we knew what we were looking for, we knew what made sense, and we weren’t trying to scramble and wonder if this was a good deal.

Tim Ulbrich: I love that. And I love your passion for learning because I think what happens here, what my wife and I have found is when you’re listening to podcasts, when you’re reading books, when you’re analyzing deals, running calculators, you can’t stop thinking about it, right? And then you kind of start talking about it more. And then you find yourself driving down the street and you’re like, ooh, I wonder if that would be a good property? Does that beat the 1% Rule?

Jenny White: Yep.

Tim Ulbrich: And it’s top of mind. And then it gets cemented as a priority, and I think it starts to build that confidence so that as Bigger Pockets talks about all the time, great resource, that first deal is the hardest deal. You’ve got to get over the hump.

Jenny White: Yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: And you’re never going to feel fully confident, fully ready. You’re going to make mistakes. We’ll talk about some of those along the way. And that’s OK. But you’ve got to get started. In that, of course, making sure you’re doing so in a way that fits in with the rest of your financial goals. So Myke, before we talk about the first property, why real estate investing? You know, I know our listeners are probably thinking about, OK, I could be maxing out 401k’s and 403b’s and HSAs and Roth IRAs, I could invest in a brokerage account. What is it specifically about real estate investing that intrigues you maybe equally or even more so than other areas and options for investing?

Myke White: For real estate, for us, obviously the bonus is money, is that cash flow. But it’s also helping people. And a lot of people don’t necessarily always think about that. They think, OK, this guy is huge into real estate. He’s in it all for the money. But a lot of money don’t realize that you’re helping people’s situation. And I feel like we’re seeing that firsthand with the property that we currently have. There is a tenant in there that, I mean, doesn’t necessarily have the best situation. But I feel like, you know, us being her landlords, we’re kind of seeing our focus shift from OK, it’s not about the money, it’s about making sure that they’re good. So if they’re good, that means that you’re good. So that’s kind of how we see it. Obviously like the money’s nice. That leads to other things. But at the end of the day, you’re helping those people. So I think that’s something that you don’t necessarily see in a lot of other forms of investment.

Jenny White: And I think too is sometimes landlords kind of can get a bad rap, and that’s not something that we’re striving for. You know, we actually want to provide a property. And we’ve had a lot of things that have already popped up that the property manager prior to us taking over this property didn’t take care of, but we’re taking care of it because it’s the right thing to do. And overall, she’s a great tenant. And we want to keep her long-term. And so by Myke saying like, you know, being good landlords and helping them out and even with like COVID-19 right now, making adjustments to payments, doing what we can. I think that’s going to help us keep her long-term, which is what we want because that helps with cash flow too. Turnover can get you quite a bit if you’re not careful.

Tim Ulbrich: I’m so glad you said that. You know, I’ve learned firsthand with the property my wife and I recently purchased, the cost of vacancy or turnover that leads to vacancy or obviously repairs that need to be done then because of damages or other things. But in tandem, it’s not just the numbers. Obviously you’re in a position to help, and I love that heart and passion to do that, especially during a difficult time like this. So Jenny, walk us through the first property. A duplex, tell us about it, where it is, what it looked like, kind of general numbers, and why the duplex is where you decided to start versus a single family home or even doing something like a house hack. What was the strategy and thinking there?

Jenny White: Yeah, so when we got to Mississippi, one, we were coming from Washington state where single family homes are easily not like even great, but they’re between $200,000-300,000 for like bare minimum. We came to Mississippi and we’re looking at like $60,000-100,000. We’re like, holy cow. So then when we started looking at properties, duplexes were popping up, which like in Washington are probably close to $500,000 where here, you can get them for under $200,000. And we were just like, we can’t believe this. So we started looking at both because to us, it was important just to make sure that the numbers made sense. And so we looked at both, and we probably looked at a good 10-15 properties, ran numbers on close to 50-60. And actually, our first deal fell through. So we had put down — or we had gone under contract for an initial duplex, which had two tenants in it. And we were planning on keeping them. Then some issues happened with the electrical boxes being in inappropriate places, so they were going to be expensive fixes for us. And then once we continued down the process, our appraisal came back down low, which would have been great for us, but the seller wasn’t willing to go down. And so we ended up losing out on that duplex because we couldn’t come to an agreement on terms and all that. And so at that point, that was like September timeframe and Myke and I were pretty bummed out because we were literally a couple days away from closing before it fell through. And so it had been over a month of working, getting inspections done. So we were really bummed. So we started going back to the drawing board and were looking at more properties when I actually went with our realtor — and we had a great realtor who was very investor-friendly. So she went with us, you know, even in the evenings, anytime she was like available to go with us. And so Myke actually didn’t even see the property until we actually had purchased it because I went with the realtor and it was listed for $125,000 for a duplex there was two tenants in. On the unit side A, it has some repairs that are needed but nothing bad. Unit B was a Section 8 tenant that had been there for about eight years, had really demolished the place. Like I mean, you walked in there and you could see like the smoke. It was just like everywhere. Everything was caked in dirt, it was pretty run down. And so we knew — I knew that it was going to need a lot of fixing up. So I told Myke, I was like, well let’s keep looking. We’ll keep an eye on that. It’s listed too high. We kept looking and I just kind of got like a gut feeling, and I was like, let’s just take a chance. And like our realtor had let us know that their realtor had kind of mentioned that the person who was selling was an older guy. He was just trying to get rid of the property. So then I went to look at the purchase information, I saw that he had purchased it back in 2009, paid $60,000 for it. So I was like, he’s got his money in and he’s made tons of money already. So I was like, let’s just try lowballing. I was like, let’s just take a chance, we’ll see what happens. They had said they were already evicting Unit B and they were going to get rid of her. So I was like, OK, if we can make that part of the contract, then that would be great. So it was listed for $125,000, and I said, “Let’s offer $60,000.” And so most people would think that I was crazy, which it was a little bit. My realtor even — our realtor even said, “Either they’re going to ignore you. Or they might come back with an offer.” She’s like, “That’s pretty low.” She’s like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I said, “That’s fine.” I was like $60,000, we’ll pay closing costs, let’s see what happens. So it took — what? — about like a day and they came back and they said, “We’ll sell it for $85,000.” Yeah. So it was huge for us. Their realtor was actually really smart because at the same time, she said, “We’ll take $85,000, but we’re dropping the price to $92,000 on the MLS.” So that day, they got multiple offers from it dropping that much. But we had said, “We’re like, we’ll take it for $85,000. We’ll go.”

Tim Ulbrich: I love that. And you know, speaking of the cost difference from Pacific Northwest to Mississippi, there you go. If anybody’s hearing that, they’re probably like, “What number? Say that again. How much for a duplex?” But you know, when you talk about the 1% Rule as just a general example, when you’re talking about two units for $85,000, the math is pretty quick. I don’t really have the details, but I know just with those numbers it’s probably a good deal based on that. So you know, area matters. And I think this is important for our listeners to hear because some people might be in an area where they say, “The numbers don’t work. I live in Seattle. I live in Columbus. I live in wherever.” And so being open to out-of-state, out-of-area investing I think is really important. Actually, Bigger Pockets has a book out specifically on long distance real estate investing, which is a great read. It’s something I’ve done. And as I understand it, you all are thinking about bringing in other people that are out-of-area but see your market as an opportunity, correct?

Jenny White: Yeah. That’s something that we want to do.

Myke White: Yeah, so even when we were in Washington, obviously we wanted to try to get the ball rolling. But there would have been no way. It would have been out of our price range. So of course it’s comfortable. It’s convenient to stay in your own personal market. But sometimes you might need to consider venturing into other areas just to see what the environment is there. If you know people that invest in that particular market, you know, ask them how the climate’s been for maybe the past few months or couple years, even, and kind of go at it that way because yeah. Like I said, coming here has opened up a lot of doors and opportunities and as much as we really wanted to get into real estate, it wouldn’t have happened — it wouldn’t have happened at least as quick if we weren’t here.

Jenny White: And so we have people who are from Washington and Colorado who are interested. And I mean, getting into a partnership is kind of nerve-wracking as is. But that’s why we’ve talked to people that we knew we were interested, people that we trust, and we’re in the process of kind of like working out what those contracts would look like because basically, Myke and I are tapped on capital because we put our down payment down, we made the repairs to the other side, so it might take us a little while to pull our capital back out through the BRRRR method or just save up enough money to make that happen. And so we’ve talked to a couple people and said, you know, “You bring the funding for the down payment. We own the place 50-50 and there’s different ways to work it out with your financing. But then we can property — we’ll be the property managers for it.” And that also is a big thing that people don’t want to do, they don’t want to deal with the headache of being a landlord. And so we’re like, OK, if it’s in our area, we keep our duplexes within a certain radius for us to be able to get to, we manage that portion of it and then you get your payment every month, you get your cash flow, we both are building equity, we have this and we can figure out what we do with it down the line. But it’s an opportunity for people to get involved in real estate. And again, some people don’t want to learn the process either. So that’s another thing is we’re invested in learning in this process and managing it and being hands-on. So we’ll gladly work with people if they want to give us the money to do it.

Myke White: Yeah, so prime example, I mean, my dad came down here to visit about a month ago. And he had of course known that we were doing our thing with our duplex. And so of course, what better way to kind of tell him what we’re dealing with than actually show him the duplex, show him or at least explain to him the process so we could get there, the money involved. And really, we gave him like the short and simple version to kind of be like, oh, that sounds pretty interesting. That sounds like something I would maybe want to get involved with. So obviously, you know, you hear a lot of times when it comes to these type of things, don’t involve family, you don’t want to mess up the dynamic. And I was very reluctant, even though Jenny asked me quite a few times, “Just ask your family. Ask your mom and dad if they want to throw some capital at us.” And I’m like, no because if the crap hits the fan and something happens, I don’t want to be looked at or affect our relationship. But the way that we kind of conveyed it to my dad, he was excited about it, he told my mom. He was like, “Look, we want to make this happen. So if there’s any properties that you see come across your desk, let us know. And we’ll see if we want to provide a little bit of capital. So that’s like the best case scenario, honestly. And I know that whatever we give them, they know that we already did our due diligence and running the numbers and making sure it works for us before pulling the trigger.

Tim Ulbrich: I love the creativity there because you know — and I think as you all are discovering, like I think it certainly can be tricky with family and friends. But with really good agreements in place and good conversations and just very honest conversations about hey, there’s risk and we need to all understand what worst case scenario is. And I’ve done some investing with somebody else where I think they’ve done a really, really good job of that to say, “Hey, I care enough about you that I want you to fully understand the risk and be transparent because this relationship is first. So as long as we’re all on the same page about the risks as well as the opportunities, then we can clearly communicate that and document it.” I think that that’s reasonable. So I love the creativity because what I hear you saying is that the rate-limiting step for you guys growing your portfolio at 1-2 units a year — and I’m guessing if we talked a year from now that number might be 2-4, 3-5, whatever — is that you know, obviously you’ve got to have the capital. And I think it’s important to you all that you aren’t being overleveraged and that you can have equity in these homes. So it just takes time to build up a down payment. I mean, even when you were talking about an $85,000 property, if you’re putting a significant chunk down to get good financing and to make sure you’re not overleveraged, it just takes time to save to do that. But if you guys can put in sweat equity and bring other people in that maybe have the capital interest and don’t want to put in the sweat equity, you can essentially have the equity in the property without necessarily needing as much of the capital. And I love that creativity for you guys moving forward. So that makes a whole lot of sense. So Myke, tell me a little bit about the other side of this. You know, I think sometimes we talk about real estate investing and we talk about it like it’s roses, rainbows and cupcakes. But there’s another side of it as well, right? And that’s the — we all have stories of this didn’t go as planned or I thought this was going to happen or oh my gosh, I didn’t realize this. Talk to us a little bit about with this property what those moments were for you guys.

Myke White: Yes. Of course, like Jenny said, in regards to our duplex, I did not see the property until we had already got it. And so it was already 10 times better than it looked when she went there for the initial walkthrough because all the furniture was gone, of course the tenants were gone, the carpet was actually ripped up already.

Jenny White: Thank goodness because it was gross.

Myke White: There was a lot of that smoke smell. So I just walked in and — of course we had seen a bunch of other properties along the way that were not that great. And so I was like, OK, I feel like I’ve seen it all at this point. But I was sorely mistaken. So I walked in, yeah, it was really bad. And I was like, we’ve got a lot of work ahead. And luckily, we do have, you know, that support system and we do have our realtor that knows quite a few people that can do the handiwork. But we also have friends that can assist when needed. So we’re like, OK, maybe we can knock this out and do it on our own. But yeah, it was — once we got into it, we realized how much work it was. So we first started out by trying to get rid of that smoke smell because it was everywhere. And we knew a lot of it was absorbed into the walls. So we had done a little bit of research and we had found a solution that we got from Home Depot to literally just scrub the walls.

Jenny White: And we had white towels that were coming back black and brown and like we’ve been trying to document our journey too so we have like the videos on my Instagram and I post them to my Facebook just so people can see like what we’ve been doing.

Myke White: Yeah, so we were able to get some small stuff done. But literally, it was that first day — matter of fact, it was probably that first hour of that first day that we realized, OK, we might need to get some — we might need backup. So we called it a day and we looked into different contractors that could do at least a little bit of work for us. And so we had decided on one. They were able to get in pretty quickly and they replaced the flooring, they painted the walls and did a few annoying things. So right now as it sits, the duplex is almost OK. But I feel like anything else that needs to be done, we can do. But that’s just kind of the expectation. You’re never typically going to find a property that’s ready to go. And you know, it’s expected that you’re going to have to put a little bit of work in. You’re not always going to have the luxury of having that support system or having that realtor that just happens to know the handyman or the AC guy or the electrician. So sometimes it’s what needs to happen in order for you to make some progression.

Jenny White: But we learned too along the way that a lot of things, when we decided we were first going to do it, we’re like this is great because our tenant, the one that stayed, her rent covers our entire mortgage. So we’re like, OK, we can take a little bit of time with this, which is why we wanted to do it. Then we realized we both work full-time jobs, getting this done on the weekends and like evenings, it was taking up too much time. So realistically, with us delaying the nice rent money that we’re losing by not having a tenant in there, so we were like, we need to just get this fixed up, which I mean, we’ve had delays and life happens and things happen, so it’s still going. But that was again, when we purchased our original — when we made the decision to purchase this property, knowing that her rent covered our mortgage, it’s not anything that we’re losing money on, which is very good in our scenario. But we were like, we’re going to have this done by February. It didn’t get done by February. Then in February, like great, we’re going to get this done, then we had a delay on our appliances. We were still having trouble with the smoke smell, so we had to have the AC guy come in to do more repairs. And so now, it’s about ready and now COVID-19’s going on. And so we’ll see how long it takes us to get into — get a renter into that property.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Jenny White: But that’s again, when you buy, buy smart and don’t overleverage yourself because, you know, we’re still in an OK position right now. So we’re just kind of biding our time.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think that’s a good reminder that what’s coming to me as you were talking of especially on the first property, buy smart, don’t overleverage. You know, when I heard you say one half of the total rent of the duplex covered your payment, that gives you margin right out of the gates, right? So if timing goes on, if an expense comes up you’re not aware of or doing this for the first time, we didn’t realize this or this, you’ve already got options and you have a little bit of wiggle room. So and I love — just kind of bringing this all full circle — I love as we think about the future of investing for you guys and why you’re doing this, connecting this all the way back to having some flexibility and options, diversifying your income, generating additional revenue streams so you guys can pursue travel and other passions and hobbies that you guys have. I also hear kind of a desire and a heart for giving and doing other things that you have options to do. So what a cool story, and I’m so grateful that you both took the time to come on the show to share this. And I think it’s going to help many people that are thinking about hey, I’d love to do this but I just don’t know where to get started. So I appreciate both of you taking the time to come onto the podcast this week.
Jenny White: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Myke White: Thanks for the opportunity.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 145: How Samm Built DocStation to Increase Value-Based Care


How Samm Built DocStation to Increase Value-Based Care

Samm Anderegg is on a mission to fix healthcare through his company DocStation. DocStation a software platform for healthcare teams, enabling pharmacists to provide value-based care to patients. Samm talks about his shift from a traditional career path to starting his own company and how his work with DocStation aligns with his vision for the future of pharmacy practice.

About Today’s Guest

Samm Anderegg is Chief Executive Officer at DocStation, a software platform for healthcare teams, enabling pharmacists to provide value-based care to patients. After graduating with distinction from the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, he completed post-graduate residency training and a combined Master’s degree program specializing in Health-System Pharmacy Administration at the University of Kansas. Anderegg spent two years working in oncology and ambulatory care management at Augusta University Health System in Georgia before founding DocStation.

Summary

Samm Anderegg is the CEO of DocStation, a software platform for healthcare teams that enables pharmacists to provide value-based care to patients. After graduating with distinction from the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, he completed post-graduate residency training and a combined Master’s degree program specializing in Health-System Pharmacy Administration at the University of Kansas. Samm spent two years working in oncology and ambulatory care management at Augusta University Health System in Georgia before founding DocStation.

While he was working at Augusta University Health System, Samm saw that there were a lot of barriers to do things and that it was hard to justify the value of pharmacists and their services. He saw this as an opportunity to build a tool for pharmacists from the ground up and decided to leave his secure job to focus on his passion.

Before quitting, Samm had to assess his financial risk as he’d be leaving a six-figure salary behind and suddenly not have an income. He knew that he could eliminate some of his expenses, make minimum payments on his student loans and use his savings if needed. Luckily, he was able to get paid hourly for an IT job he’d been doing project work for which gave him the income he needed to live.

Samm found Josh, a software engineer, who became the other half of DocStation. Together they created a care management platform and electronic record system built for pharmacists. As the profession of pharmacy is changing, Samm knew that a single record system was needed to bring pharmacists into this new age. Now, it’s a tool for value-based care connecting health plans to pharmacists so they can be paid for their services.

DocStation is currently used in the Midwest across 7 states with 300 pharmacies, 700 pharmacy users, 1 major health plan and has 32,000 patients.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. It’s a pleasure to welcome onto the show Samm Anderegg, CEO of DocStation. Samm, excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Samm Anderegg: Tim, thanks so much for allowing me to be here.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. So let’s start off and talk a little bit about your career path into pharmacy, why you went into pharmacy, and ultimately why you decided to go on and complete what is known as a fairly intensive training path of a PGY1-PGY2 combined MS in healthcare administration.

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, it started really simple. Grew up in small town Iowa and had friends and family that worked in my small hometown and had a cousin that flew the coop and went to university and got into pharmacy. And so I was a younger cousin, I looked up to all my older cousins, and you know, I was very interested in math and science. And I wanted to put that to use, so I think the big thing is, you know, knowing that you want to be interacting and helping people in the most simple sense and how do you make a career or profession out of that? And went to the University of Iowa, kind of debated between medicine and pharmacy but ultimately chose pharmacy and I’m sure glad I did it.

Tim Ulbrich: So then you make the decision and a program that’s near and dear to my heart, I direct this program at Ohio State, the combined PGY1-PGY2 MS degree, obviously a very niched, focused pathway, very intensive. You know, you’re full-time resident, full-time student. So there certainly is some strategic decisions that go into making that move. So what was it that drew you into that focus of administrative pharmacy training?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, I think as you journey down this path that is your career, you’re constantly checking in with yourself and asking yourself, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And after I made that hurdle into pharmacy, it was then, you know, how can I blend my interest in what I believe that my skill set is to be fulfilled in my career? And you know, originally I thought being like in a primary care clinic and taking care of patients and building those relationships would be the way to go, but I realized that you can make a larger impact on a greater scale, be a little bit more creative, which I felt like — or what I held important — you could do that in an administrative role or a management role as the leader. And you know, I had some really great mentors at the University of Iowa that directed me to these administrative residencies, and I knew it was going to be a rough two years, but I’m a glutton for punishment, so I was a little bit excited about that as well. So that led me down the path and again, it’s just one of those decisions that you make along the way and wanted to keep myself versatile, so that’s the route I took.

Tim Ulbrich: So talk us through the work that you did after completing the combined residency and MS but before DocStation. So we’ll get there in a little bit about how you started that, what the work is you’re doing there. But what happened in between after you finished up the administrative training?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, I think, you know, again, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to be when I grew up, even after residency, right? And so I was looking for full-time positions in which I could, you know, lead a team, but the responsibilities were broad, meaning they weren’t specialized in necessarily operations or clinical management. And so I took a service line job. It was at the Medical College of Georgia. I was one manager on a team of five others with a director. And so a large amount of responsibilities, had about 18 FTEs. And you know, I was curious, I wanted to build things, create things, and really make an impact in that first job. And it was a great fit for me.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. So eight years of training, so your pre-pharmacy, your pharmacy work, your administrative residency two years plus the MS degree, several years of experience, and then you make the decision that you’re going to walk away from that and start your own, start your own company. And that, of course, would be the work that you’re doing with DocStation. So tell us a little bit about that decision and how you’re able to reconcile walking away from I guess what you could say is somewhat something known and secure to then starting your own company.

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, when I made the decision on the first job, again, going back to that creativity piece and the ability to really build things, so the job was great for the first like two and a half years is how long I lasted there. Learned a lot, implemented a lot, but I didn’t realize how much that creativity was important to me. And so after you get quite a few things done, you start getting — you start pulling back the layers of the onion and realizing that there are a lot of barriers, you know? You cross quite a few in those first two and a half years and build a lot of great relationships, but there’s some just political, structural, operational barriers to be able to do new things like if you want to implement a new software or if you want to hire more FTEs, you know the ROI is there, but it’s not just a matter of convincing someone or showing them value, it’s things that are out of your scope of influence. So I was a little frustrated by that and I think what it came down to is we were trying to implement clinical services in the ambulatory care. And you know, built proposals, submitted them one year after the next, but what I realized is it’s really hard to justify that value. And looking around for all the like different clinical tools, pharmacy documentation tools that were able to do that, there just weren’t any. And so going back to that creative piece, I was like, you know, I’ve learned a little bit, enough, throughout my career to know that there’s an opportunity here to build a tool for pharmacists from the ground up. It sounds crazy when you say that if you’re in a position to be a manager, but the more you keep thinking about it, right, and I’m sitting here burned out in my job a little bit, working hard, still enjoying it but knowing that I don’t want to do it for the next 20 years of my life. So I spent a lot of time thinking and debating, but ultimately it just becomes more and more real the more you think about it. And when you look at the other people that have started companies, you know, they’re just like you and I. They’re just regular people. They were just willing to take that risk. And so then it became analyzing the risk and the financial piece, how do I actually do this? So you know, I kind of went from there and jumped off the ledge.

Tim Ulbrich: So let’s talk about that for a moment before I jump into exactly what is DocStation, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve with that, but talk us through, talk our listeners through how you did analyze that risk. I think that’s something that often, people are thinking about as oh, maybe I’ve got a great idea or I see people like Samm doing some cool stuff, but I can’t imagine walking away from my known six-figure job or I’ve got lots of student loan debt, got all these issues to deal with. So how did you walk through that risk and really try to objectively evaluate what the risk and the opportunity was?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, so I think even before I got to that point, it was making sure I found something that I was extremely passionate about, right? It hit all of my boxes like the technology piece, the creativity piece, the leadership piece and really building something, creating something out of nothing. I was extremely motivated to try this out at the beginning, right? And it’s, you know, the risk at that point is really just time risks. So I was working a full-time job, and I would go home in the evenings — you know, eat dinner, throw something in the microwave really quick, and then spend the next five or six hours just reading and listening to podcasts and trying to absorb as much information as possible, building out financial models, like whatever I could do to validate whether this was going to be a viable business or not. And you know, as that progressed, that got into a couple months’ worth of time where I was like running on no sleep basically to the point where I knew there was an opportunity there, it was just a matter of whether I wanted to take that next step of risk and ultimately decided that if I wanted to, what would I need to change? And I just needed to create more time. I needed to create more time for myself and really, the only way to do that was to eliminate those 40-60 hours a week that was my full-time job as a pharmacy manager. So you know, analyzed how I would do that and happy to kind of walk through those steps as well. I know a lot of people have ideas. It’s like, how do I actually put this into action? But the first thing is the risk of time. And that’s a good test to make sure that you are passionate about it if you’re willing to stay up until 2, 3 in the morning doing those things because you love it so much.

Tim Ulbrich: I’m so glad you said that too because I think that’s a common theme. I know I felt it when I was starting the work with YFP, but you hear it so often among business owners that are working full-time and then they start their own company simultaneously is that they will talk about it as if you hear the hours and you’re like, oh my gosh, it’s exhausting. But that person is so passionate about the idea that they don’t see that same level of exhaustion. You know, they’re so eager to learn and so eager to jump in and really see is this viable and how do I learn more about the industry and what’s happening? Talk me through more of the financial risk. You mentioned the time piece. I hear you there. But I’m guessing many are listening saying, you know, “How do I go from $120,000 to nothing?” You know, we know many business owners as you start, obviously you’re investing a lot back in the business. How did you assess the actual financial risks and what you might need to change, you know, if anything, to make that a reality?

Samm Anderegg: Yep. So I think I was about two and a half years into my job, so I was two and a half years into being used to that type of salary, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Samm Anderegg: And you know, I definitely like spent money to travel and do things like that, but I didn’t build everything into my day-to-day life where it would be really hard to untangle all of that stuff. It’s still hard, don’t get me wrong. It’s hard for anyone to do that, but what I — I looked at my savings account, how much of an emergency fund did I really have left and how much did I think, how long did I think that that would last? I looked at basically my primary income going to $0, so how do I make up — like what is it that I need to cover the bare minimum, right? What costs can I cut? It was really like a full-on slash of everything. I discontinued all my subscriptions, I eliminated my rent and figured, OK, I could stay with some friends for a little while while I figure this out. I put my student loans down to minimum payments. I was paying more than double what I owed. So did that exercise and then came up with a number, a monthly number that I needed to make up. And what I didn’t mention in my background is, you know, since like about 2010, I was involved in health IT, specifically on the pharmacy side. And so it started off as a project and eventually grew into through residency, I worked on this project. And then when I took that first job, they started paying me a little bit hourly for my expertise I had developed over the last three years, so there was work there. So an opportunity to do more hours and again, I was working on my own thing and full-time job, so I didn’t really have any time to dedicate to that. But that was an opportunity. I just basically said, “Hey, if you need me to do this, here’s how much I need per month,” and was able to negotiate that. So and you know, that was kind of like an opportunity and timing type thing. But I think, you know, whatever you’re doing, you’re trying to figure out any way you can make up that income, whether it’s passive income, whether it’s if you’re partner is willing to help you out in the meantime, if you want to start building up that savings account, that emergency fund early on, you know, lots of different options. It just depends on your situation. And that was mine.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think if I could add there too, Samm — I don’t know if you felt much of this — I know for me and a conversation my wife and I often have and really finding value in talking to other people because when you’re in it, it’s hard to see it. But I think often, I project the risk to be greater than it really is. And when you take a step back and you think about, OK, your training, if things were to fall flat in 6 or 12 months, it’s not like you’re not going to have options. You’ve got a network, you’ve got lots of training, right? So really taking a step back to say, not only for your individual financial plan what is true risk, but also career-wise, you know, play out the worst case scenario. And then if that’s the worst thing that could happen, which is likely to be unimaginable, OK, anything else, what’s really the risk that’s associated with that? One question I have for you, when you talked about coming home in the evenings and spending 5-6 hours, you know, really learning more about the business side, doing some modeling, how much of that learning was industry-specific to the area that you wanted to do with DocStation, and how much of it was more in kind of the business side of it and starting up a business and all that was entailed in doing that?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, none of it was industry-specific or pharmacy-specific, even healthcare-specific. And you know, you kind of start searching to see if there’s anyone out there talking about that in our particular field, but there’s just really not. And I thought, you know, when I first — a little bit disappointed at first, but then you realize that if you’re going to make this work for healthcare, for pharmacy or whatever, it’s industry-agnostic. Building a business, building a startup, there are different rules that you have to play by. And I think it’s better to learn from people that have done it in different industries and then figure out how that applies to healthcare and to pharmacy. And there are some nuances in the healthcare space that don’t apply to social media marketing, e-commerce and things like that. But those are the little things that you pick up along the way and fit into your puzzle as you go forward.

Tim Ulbrich: So let’s talk about and transition to DocStation. What is it? Why is it important? And what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve with DocStation?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, so DocStation is a care management platform or an Electronic Health Record built for pharmacists. The big thing that we’re trying to do is in the community pharmacy space, you know, the business model for the last dozens of years, decades, right, has been built on dispensing prescriptions and the administrative fees that come along with that and the margin that we make on the actual product. And just within the last two or three years, extreme pressure that is putting that at risk, putting pharmacies at risk. And so, I don’t know, I just kind of saw that, you know, you see every other product that has the ability to be shipped, delivered to people’s door in two days, so what’s going to happen to our profession? And so you know, I looked at community pharmacy, there’s really no one, clinical record or EHR system that folks use that’s built specifically to bring pharmacy to the new age and the clinical age, and that was the gap that I was trying to fill. And so I experimented with a lot of different ways to get started. Like the main thing is like, how are you going to bring in money for this business, right? Where’s your revenue going to come from? And thought pharmacies at first, but you know, the more you look at the market, the more you look at healthcare outside of pharmacy. Everything is moving to value-based care.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Samm Anderegg: And the folks that are going to make the most money in that type of equation are the health plans. They’re going to have the most value from that, right? And so we began to talk to health plans about that. And so the idea, the product itself, has evolved over time. You know, it started as like an EHR you sell to pharmacists as like a subscription fee. And now, it’s really a tool for value-based care or value-based pharmacy, connecting health plans directly with pharmacies to facilitate value-based care models.

Tim Ulbrich: So help our listeners understand how that differentiates from others that have been in the space for awhile. So I remember wrapping up residency in 2008. Here in Ohio, we had a big Medicaid MTM contract that came to be, lots of excitement around community pharmacists, community pharmacies getting involved in Medication Therapy Management services, lots of frustrations that were also happening because the caseload really wasn’t significant enough at the time — obviously, a lot has changed — significant enough at the time to be able to efficiently operationalize it in a store. So you saw these models evolving to where you’d have one clinical pharmacist going around to multiple stores trying to do these cases. Is it really viable? Is it something you can justify continuing? So the MTM delivery and a care platform at the community pharmacy has been around for awhile. It certainly has its challenges. So what is the work that you’re doing at DocStation? How does it differ from those existing platforms?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, I think going back to how is pharmacy unique, right? You mentioned MTM. Because we have this burden, and now I’m seeing it as an opportunity that we haven’t been classified as providers under the Social Security Act, you know, we didn’t fall down the typical path that physicians at hospitals did, meaning billing fee for service CPT codes.

Tim Ulbrich: Right.

Samm Anderegg: So we have been fighting tooth and nail for any sort of reimbursement for clinical services. And we’ve been very resourceful, so part of Medicare Part D passing was MTM was mandated, right? But MTM is a specific segment or specific way that pharmacists can get paid for services, and it’s wildly different than billing a CPT code for chronic care management. And that’s also wildly different from contracting directly with an outpatient physician’s office to help them improve quality measures. So you mentioned the big thing was how do we get our caseload up to make this actually a viable business for me to open a practice, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Yep, yep.

Samm Anderegg: And so our belief is that if you build a tool that’s robust enough to incorporate all these different clinical revenue opportunities, and you take all of the administrative burden away, you leave the pharmacist with the simple message of take care of the patient and you’ll get paid. You’ll get paid enough to have a stable income, provide for your family, and if you’re ambitious, you know, build a large clinical practice out of it. And so that’s what we’re aiming to do and that’s why I believe that we’re different.

Tim Ulbrich: So what is holding this back from scaling? You know, I feel like one of the things that I’ve always struggled with thinking through the evolution of the community pharmacist’s role beyond the dispensing prescriptions is we seem to have pockets and pilots and areas of success, but we have yet to really see something scale. So in your world, what is preventing that from happening? And you know, is this a solution that can help that scaling happen?

Samm Anderegg: Great question. Well, getting into it, people told me this a million times. Software takes a heck of a lot longer to build than you think it’s going to, right? And that’s true. But regardless, healthcare and pharmacy and all of the different segments or ways to get reimbursed are incredibly complex, like way more complex than really any other industry. And that’s one of those unique things about healthcare. It would take two or three years to build out a clinical billing tool that works really well, designed well, and people are going to use it over and over again. And that’s just one segment, right? Then you’ve got to look at MTM, and then you’ve got to look at direct contracting and all these different things. And all the while, the market’s emerging and requirements are changing. And so you know, I think the first thing is just picking a specialty to start in. Where do you want to start that you think you’re going to generate enough interest and engagement from users and it’s going to fund your business so that you can grow and add new tooling to it? And so you know, I think that’s — the biggest barrier is just, you know, building a HIPPA-compliant, cloud-based platform that’s usable and applicable to a large group of pharmacies and pharmacists that find it useful. And then I think the next thing is really, you know, the marketing and adoption piece. And so how do you — again, this is not anything that I was taught in pharmacy school or residency — but how do you market a software product to a buyer who is really a health plan? Like enterprise sales is, again, not in our textbooks. So figuring out how to do that, what type of people you need on the team, what the strategy is, it’s incredibly complex. And sales cycles, again, thinking about healthcare, sales cycles are 18-24 months. That just means that’s how long it takes from the first conversation you have with a potential customer to actually closing a contract. You know, probably one of the worst industries to try to do that in. And a lot of people are doing it and figuring it out, and we are too. It just takes time.

Tim Ulbrich: It takes time. I want to think through this a little bit more from the user standpoint as well as from your standpoint from the business end. Obviously those are connected, but if we have somebody listening who’s at the frontlines in a community pharmacy and they’re hearing this and they’re like, “Yes. This is what I’ve been looking for, what I want to do,” how do they get this off the ground? I mean, are you working with the payer and then you reach out to the pharmacies that the payer is working with? Or can the pharmacy drive that up through you guys to then initiate the payer contracts? How would somebody listening, thinking about this, begin to put in place how they might operationalize it?

Samm Anderegg: This is awesome. I love talking about this stuff. I’m glad you’re asking these questions because there’s things that we’ve been asking ourselves for a really long time. And what I would say — and again, at this point in time, if we were to do this interview 12 months from now, the answer would probably be different.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Samm Anderegg: But at this point in time, we know that if we have a health plan that’s a partner, and they want to pay pharmacists for services, they just don’t know how to roll out that program, and sign up the pharmacies and make sure they’re credentialed and facilitate the payment. We know that we can walk into a health plan and provide a turnkey solution in the next 30 days. And we know that pharmacists will sign up for our platform and use our platform to get paid with that type of model because we’re doing it in the Midwest, we’re doing it across seven states, 300 pharmacies, 700 pharmacy users, one major health plan. And we’re eager to repeat that. We just need a pharmacy partner, someone at a payer that’s like, yeah, I like what these guys are doing and I believe in it. And on the other end, if you’re a pharmacist, right, you’re like, OK, I don’t know how I can help you with that if you don’t have a contact on the payer side. But on the pharmacy end, what we’re thinking is hey, if we build a tool that provides enough value like it creates more efficiency or it brings you new types of data, it helps you do things easier than other software that you’re using today or maybe you’re paying for software that does something that we can replace at no cost, right? We want to give you our tool for free. Like you can go to the website right now, sign up, we can get you basically turned in less than 24 hours. And you have access to the software. The main barrier right now is OK, now I’ve got to enter my patients in manually, hand type them in just as if you were starting with a brand new EHR. And we’re working to automate that to transfer your patients over automatically. But the key is if our tool is good enough, use it to be efficient, get data to show your value, and that makes the conversations a heck of a lot easier when you do approach your payer or whoever in your region, say, “Hey, you know, I’d really like to provide care for your members, your patients, and you’re going to get value when I do that. And let me show you why.” It helps you fuel your pitch to continue to grow your business. So that’s the second side of the coin.

Tim Ulbrich: So the website, just so you mentioned that, DocStation.co, DocStation.co if you want to go there and check it out, learn more. And I think just to build off of what you said, I mean, to me, the way we — as I hear and understand this, obviously you know much better than I do — but as we think about scaling this, it really needs uptake. I mean, it needs uptake from the payer side, it needs uptake from the pharmacy side. So part of my hope in sharing your story — not only sharing your entrepreneurial journey but also we know that we have a lot of listeners all across the country that might have some of these relationships or their pharmacies may be interested. And I’m hopeful we can see some momentum there. So you mentioned seven states, 300+ pharmacies. How many — you mentioned the payer — how many patients thus far have you served or you’re working with?

Samm Anderegg: So it’s roughly 32,000 patients.

Tim Ulbrich: OK, awesome. And then on the other side — I mentioned I wanted to talk about it from the pharmacist’s side — from the business side of it, as you’re willing to share, talk to use a little bit more about — obviously not specific numbers — but how you think about this from a, OK, at the end of the day, we’ve got to generate revenue. There’s a business model here. So what does that look like in terms of the payer relationships and how you build out a viable business model.

Samm Anderegg: Right. So when you’re in startup land, two ways to bring in money. And by bring in money, it means you’re on a fast track to grow your company, right? So you need to — really the biggest expense is hiring people. So hiring software engineers to build the product, expand the product, new features, maybe build it a little bit faster, but speed is usually not correlated with FTEs in that sense. And so you know, you could sell or you could fundraise. And I think what most people see on Twitter and in the news and on the show Silicon Valley is like you go out there and you raise multiple millions of dollars at these sky-high valuations that just seem fake. And that still goes on to a certain sense today, but it’s really hard for someone who’s coming out of healthcare with no previous experience starting a traditional technology company to say, “I’m a subject matter expert and I’ve got this really great idea that is really complicated to explain, but you should write us a check for $2 million.” That’s tough. It was really tough, and I wasn’t able to do it to get started. And so you know, you start looking at on the customer side and you look at health plans. And so what we’ve done is at first, it was bootstrapping. I drained down my savings account to basically $0, my cofounder did the same. I was able to convince my cofounder to take that risk as well. That was the first step. And then when you close your first customer, you’re saying, “OK. We’re bringing in x amount of money. How many people can we afford to hire?” And it’s really about understanding what — and these are different financial terms from the everyday life or everyday business — it’s about your runway and your burn rate. How much are you spending? How quick? And when are you going to die? And how do you make sure that you’ve got enough cash on hand to continue to extend that timeline? And you’re up — all the while, you’re weighing a lot of different factors. OK, if I fundraise from this group, do I trust them? Do I want to work with them for the next 10 years? Because you’re basically getting married to them. And they’re going to take a significant portion of equity in your company, and they’re going to have a board seat. And so there’s lots of things to calculate and understand and weigh. But you’re doing this pretty much daily, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Samm Anderegg: And so yeah, you know, we’re going hard on the sales and the customer thing. We believe that our product’s at a place right now where it’s going to generate immediate value for a health plan. And we’re working on that on the pharmacy side too. I believe the tool is really great. We need pharmacists to tell us, hey, this is what’s missing. I would use this if. And all the while, you’re looking at that bank account every day and you’re saying, OK, how much time have we got? How much time we got? How much time we got? Until you’re ready to pull the trigger and find an alternative source of funding. So that’s the current situation, man.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think just hearing you talk, you know, kind of bringing this full circle, it goes back to you better be doing something that you love here and you’re passionate about, you believe in, because when you’re talking about things like drain your bank account, going into partnerships, cofounders, challenges that come — I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change any of it for the world and if you have that itch and desire and passion about something, you just can’t ignore it. You know as well as I do, you’re going down this path regardless. You can’t stop it. But it better be down something you love because it’s going to have a lot of implications. And I even think on the money side, I’ve been listening to a lot of The Pitch podcast on Gimlet Media, and great stuff. But you know, kind of that fundraising side, and I think often we think of this glorious side of raising money, but there’s also this other side of you have lots of opinions now, you’ve got baggage that comes with that, you’re obviously giving up equity, so you know, there’s pros and cons to that. And obviously you guys decided to try to cash flow as much as you can up front and obviously there’s challenges with that as well. Talk to me for a moment about a cofounder as well as the first hires. I think that’s a lot we don’t hear about in the business trajectory and growth. We hear a lot of the glorious parts of you start something, you got a cool idea, you’re doing your own business, and that’s like cool. What we don’t talk about is some of that next phase challenges I would say like bringing on partners or even hiring your first employee at the expense of paying yourself because you really feel like that’s what you need. So what was that decision like? You know, was it a cofounder from the beginning? Was it somebody you brought on later? And how did you make that decision of what would be additional benefit obviously that they would bring perhaps and a different expertise?

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, I think my administrative training in management, you did some hiring with that. You know, in my first job, I hired quite a few people. But when it comes to starting something from the ground up and your cofounder is really like a first hire but so much more than that, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Samm Anderegg: There’s so much more risk in choosing the wrong person, especially with that cofounder situation. So you know, when you’re looking at startups and the most successful ones and how they got started, it’s like, you know, these people have been friends since childhood and one ran off to be a software engineer and the other got her MBA and they circled back and found this great idea and they built a $1 billion company. I didn’t have any of those types of friends. And you know, you just — what I’ve learned is you just talk about to everyone that you know. And you know, I had some friends in pharmacy that were interested and ultimately, I needed the skillset that I needed to complement my own was on the software engineering side. Right? You need someone to actually build the product. And so what I did is I knew that this is a person that I wanted to — really, I needed a friend, a friend that seemed like a childhood friend that I knew that was willing to — we could go through tough times together and come out on top and someone that was really empathetic and caring and like understood, you know, the risk and really be in it together. So what you have to do is when you’re meeting somebody blind, which I did — I met like four or five different people that I did some projects with, right? You start with a project, see how that project goes, how you really work together, and then spend time with them personally too to talk through things to see if you’re a match. And so yeah, I found Josh in Austin. I looked everywhere. But met him, met his wife Rachel and you know, I feel like I’m a member of their family now and vice versa. And so you’ve just got to be careful and do as much testing as you can. And I think the people that I met before Josh, it didn’t feel right, but I kind of wanted to continue to try to make it work. But you know, when we did meet up and start working together, you could feel it, you know? It felt right. It felt like it fit.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think you often hear about the negative side of partnerships. I know I did. I grew up in a small business family where a partnership went bad, you know, in a family business, so I felt like I heard very much of that side. But I think you don’t hear as much of the positives that can come — and I know speaking from personal experience, sounds like for you as well, I could not imagine going at it alone. And I think if you find that right relationship or fit, what you can get in terms of not only different expertise, perspective, but I think it’s a classic example of two are better than one alone. And I think you get a duplicate effect when you have really the right fit and the different expertise that two people can bring. When I think about a CEO role, I think about things like obviously strategic direction of the business, you’re thinking about the leading the team, and I know you’ve got a team that works with you and that presents its own set of opportunities and challenges. You think about business development, strategic relationships, really being the face of the company, which one, is very different than anything we’ve ever trained for in school or even in the residency you went through but also is very different than likely the role you started out with in the company where you’re really in the weeds on the product side. So talk to me about that transition to that role, maybe struggles you’ve had or how you’ve effectively made that transition where you can kind of take more of that global perspective and when you have other people on board, really serving in that CEO role of driving the strategic direction of the company, allowing the other people to be in the weeds on the other parts.

Samm Anderegg: Yeah. It’s — you learn as you go is the big thing. I know that’s general, it’s not really great advice by any means. But you do. And I think intuitively, you know it’s all about focus. What is the most important thing that you need to do? What is the biggest thing that’s blocking you from taking the next step? That’s what it is at the very early stage. And so the first one was OK, finding a cofounder because I knew I couldn’t fundraise and I knew it would take too long to code. So once I found Josh, it was like OK, what’s the next thing? Well, we need to build something that people will buy. And so you know, we built a prototype and helped work on that. And at the very beginning stage, I was like helping out with the back end architecture and used my whatever I borrowed from Microsoft Access skills that I learned in residency. Like you know, trying to build the database. It didn’t go well. I’m not in that position anymore. I’m not — but you know, you just, priorities change and new things come up and they shift. And at the early stage, it’s really on a monthly basis, maybe. But as your business grows and you bring on new people and you start delegating some responsibilities, things get more complex. I hate to say it. They get more complex, and you’re trying to figure out where can I make the most impact this week?

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Samm Anderegg: Or this quarter. And a lot of it — and every company is a little bit different, depending on who you have on the team, what your roles are and what your biggest, what you’re trying to accomplish. But where I fit in now is really sales and leadership and building a team. We went through this accelerator program called TechStars. It’s like a three-month residency program, if you want to put it in pharmacy terms, for young startup companies to try to give you the skills on the tech side. Yeah, it was exactly what we needed at that point in time. But the biggest lesson I took away about the CEO role is when things get so complex and hazy, it’s like you have three responsibilities: vision, people, and funding.

Tim Ulbrich: Oh, so good. Yep.

Samm Anderegg: So that, you know, I can sigh and relax a little bit when I remind myself that.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep. I love that. And that’s a good reminder, reminder for me. It’s just such a shift from the roles that we’re used to, either in our day job or the way we’ve been trained. And I’ve been following along your newsletter. And I think I can see that you’re doing an awesome job of that with your team and really focusing on the team aspect of it. So one question I have for you is about the future — kind of combines the future of the business and the future of the profession. You know, as I understand your product is really focusing on leveraging the community pharmacist to be able to interact with patients and provide the service that they’re trained to do and connecting the payers to pharmacies to do this. Two ways of looking at this: One is that this is an area that’s being disrupted. Will community pharmacy — obviously I’m being dramatic here — will community pharmacy exist in terms of the brick-and-mortar? There’s disruptors like Amazon, PillPack, others that are gaining in the space. Margins are being cut, we’ve got PBM issues, DIR fees, all these things. Will that model exist? And therefore, what’s the threat potentially depending on that model? The other way of looking at that is that you’ve got in this brick-and-mortar pharmacy world, we’re the most successful healthcare professional in the country. So we are theoretically placed and ready to be in the prime position to do exactly what you’re trying to do and grow. So I’m guessing this dichotomy is something you think about often in terms of the disruptions happening in the industry but also simultaneously the opportunity that exists with your business model. So talk us through how you envision that and how you think through that.

Samm Anderegg: Yeah, man, I think you hit the nail on the head. And you’re not being dramatic at all. You know, I’ve been talking about this for years and more critically in the past couple years. We’ve got a lot of industry pressure going on, specifically in the community pharmacy setting. And so you know, we’ve got this coronavirus thing happening right now, and it’s like, man, you know, we could have got out ahead of this, in front of this, and people were downplaying it. I think we’re in the same situation in pharmacy. Right? Like if you realize that there are pressures, if you don’t feel them, if you’re not a business owner or community pharmacy owner and you’re not writing the tens of thousands of dollars in checks back to the PBM for these DIR fees, and you see your volume decreasing as people are shifting to mail-order or PBMs are requiring mail-order, man, it’s rough out there. And it’s going to happen quick. But you know, what I — going back to your second point is it is an opportunity. But we have to be ready, right? And the biggest missing piece that I saw and really, another huge reason to start the company, is that let’s say this happened in a more positive light. Let’s say either federal government gave us provider status tomorrow. And all of a sudden, pharmacists could be reimbursed in the same rate as physicians for the services that were within their scope of practice determined by their state. OK, what next? Right? And I don’t think most people who are advocating for this have a good answer for that.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s exactly right. Yep.

Samm Anderegg: And so you know, we — these negative pressures are — they’re being applied. It’s a little bit longer term, just not kind of an instantaneous need. But we still have that gap, and so that’s what we’re trying to build in this tool. And DocStation is we want to be able to hand this piece of software over to a pharmacist and say, “Alright, provider status gets passed tomorrow or your business starts taking a hit and you need a new clinical revenue stream, here you go. Sign up, start providing care, and money will get deposited in your bank account.” So you know, it’s inevitable. Like our profession is going to change.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Samm Anderegg: And we need to do everything that we can to start preparing for that. I think a lot of entities are, they’re preaching that word, but we’ve got to be in this together you guys.

Tim Ulbrich: I agree, and I think your point is so spot-on that we’ve been spending so much time talking about things like the acquisition of provider status. And we talk a lot here in Ohio and I think nationwide as well that without payment, without contracts, that’s really a symbolic move. And I think the question is how do you operationalize it and not only how do you operationalize it, but are we ready and are we willing and wanting to operationalize it as a profession? And I think the research, a lot of the research and work that hasn’t been done is I know living in the academic circles, living in the association circles, it’s all talked about in a positive tone. But I don’t think that’s representative of how everyone feels about it for good reasons of the challenges they’re facing on the frontlines. And I really want to give a shoutout here, I think some of the work that we’re doing in Ohio, the Ohio Pharmacists Association, my colleagues at Ohio State, Jen Rhodes, Stu Badey, Michael Murphy, Christine Mason, they are asking these questions and really having some of this conversation and doing the work talking about how do we actually operationalize provider status, Bridget Groves at OPA, and really get past just that symbolic passing of the legislation. And I think the work that you’re doing at DocStation so nicely aligns with that as well. Last question I have for you, kind of a fun, light-hearted one, you know, here you are, obviously in this CEO role of DocStation, thinking about the future of the profession, the vision. What are you drawing from? What are you reading, what are you listening to where you draw some of your inspiration and get some of the knowledge that inspires the work that you do?

Samm Anderegg: That’s a great question. Depends on the time and what current issue or stage or what’s most important when I try to find a book that is loosely related to that. And even if I pick up a random book, a lot of times, the timing is right. But you know, at the beginning, there’s a couple books that I took from, Y Combinator Startup School has founders come in and lecture, like successful ones and they mention they’re reading this. And so “Crossing the Chasm” was probably one of the most influential books that I read. It’s about marketing, it’s about introducing a new product to a market and who you need to target. That was huge. Another one, I thought I knew tech, but I didn’t understand what tech really was on a large scale, on a global scale. And so “Behind the Cloud,” which was written by the founder of SalesForce in San Francisco. That was a really influential book. And recently, you know, now that we’ve progressed a little bit as a company and we’re trying to build a sustainable business that is durable for years, I went back to the basics and picked up Jim Collin’s “Good to Great,” and man, what a great read that is about research-based and gives you the right tools and things to focus on and helps you simplify it. That has been the most impactful one lately. And I’ll throw in one more if that’s OK.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure. Absolutely.

Samm Anderegg: Yeah. If you’re starting a business, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz of Andresen-Horowitz is like my pacifier. Like if something’s going wrong, or it’s just a slog, you’re in that rut, which you do, you go in ruts and then you have peaks. But man, that is — he just does a great job of not telling you here’s 10 steps to building a successful company but here’s what it’s really like and here’s how messy it is and here’s what happened to us, here’s what we did in those scenarios. So you know, when you think times are tough, you know you’re not alone reading that book. So yeah, I highly recommend that.

Tim Ulbrich: We’ll link to all three of those in the show notes. I’ve got two new ones to add to my reading list, “Crossing the Chasm” and “The Hard Things about Hard Things” and then rereading “Good to Great.” So good reminder on those. Two part question to wrap up here, Samm. Where can our listeners go to learn more about DocStation, the work that you’re doing? And then how can they get involved as well if they’ve heard something today and they say, I want to be a part of this.

Samm Anderegg: Yep. Easiest way to get in touch is go to the website, DocStation.co. There’s a “Get Started” button in the top right. Click that, fill out the form. And I know that seems like rudimentary or like not very personal, but it notifies us directly and notifies me directly. And so we’ve got a great couple people that watch that, monitor that 24/7. Response rate is in like three minutes. And so we’ll reach out to you directly. And then we’ll become personal, I promise you. That’s the easiest way to do it.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Samm, thank you so much for taking the time, for sharing your journey. I know you’ve inspired me and I have a feeling will do the same for many of our listeners. So thank you very much.
Samm Anderegg: Thanks, Tim. It was a pleasure.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 143: How Using Your Creativity Can Spark a Six-Figure Business


How Using Your Creativity Can Spark a Six-Figure Business: Art by Stephanie Roberts

Stephanie Roberts, PharmD joins Tim Church to share how she went from full-time pharmacist to full-time mixed media artist after an Instagram influencer shared her pill petri art and made it go viral.

About Today’s Guest

Stephanie grew up in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, a small rural town named Prestonsburg with less than 5,000 people. From as early as she can remember, her go-to response to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was to be an artist. Growing up as a straight A, high achieving student, there wasn’t a terrible amount of encouragement to follow your dreams if our dreams were outside the tidy box of medical field/law/etc. Stephanie learned to think like most adults surrounding her that being an artist wasn’t a “real job” or career and never thought much of it past elementary school. Art has never left her though and even as she studied and made her way through undergrad (Georgetown College) and then into pharmacy school (University of Appalachia), she was always making and painting as a creative outlet.

After graduation, Stephanie managed a couple different retail chains for a few years (PIC at CVS and Meijer), and finally landed an amazing opportunity as staff pharmacist at the University of Kentucky, opening a new retail location for them in their newest pavilion on the medical campus. At this point she had been out of school for 4 years, married with a one-year old and art was mostly a distant memory. A few years into her new position, she leaped at the opportunity when a 30 hour / 3 days a week (still considered “full-time” for benefits purposes) was offered to her, within the same pharmacy. The extra days off gave her more time with my children (up to 2 boys at this point!) and time to take up a small amount of creativity again.

The work was enough to take up every minute of her spare time but still, she was only dreaming of making art her full-time job. Until July 2019 when her resin coasters with medications suspended inside — what she has named “pill petri” — went viral. This whacky combo she created on a whim combining her love of epoxy resin and her career in medicine, became the tipping point that truly began a whole new life for her. The business was more than she could handle and she worked literally all day and night. Stephanie hired help, all either technicians or interns from her pharmacy, and together they fulfilled orders. She started an online shop that she would stock with hundreds of coasters just for it to sell out within 2 minutes with each release. After the most exhausting 2 months of her life working 2 full-time jobs, she finally took the leap and became a full-time artist still working 1 day each week in the same pharmacy. While the income from art has far surpassed her pharmacy salary, she continues to work to retain her pharmacy knowledge and stay fresh in the profession.

Summary

Stephanie Roberts joins Tim Church on this week’s podcast episode to talk about her amazing transition from full-time pharmacist to full-time artist. Stephanie always loved art growing up and kept creating during college as a hobby. After graduation Stephanie started working with CVS, became manager and then got her own store. After that, she worked at a Meijer in her town and then decided to work at a new pharmacy at University of Kentucky hospital which she absolutely loves.

Three years ago, Stephanie started taking interest in different artists she likes and felt inspired to create more, so she did. Working with epoxy resin was really popular and she was interested in it, so she dove in, researched different techniques and started to create art pieces. She posted pictures of the pieces she made on Instagram but never put a price on them and finally decided to one day. When she did, it sold within 10 minutes. At the end of 2018, she started to make pill petri dish coasters and sell them on Instagram. In July 2019, a very popular Instagram account (@things.i.bought.and.liked) shared the pill petri coasters Stephanie makes and it made her go viral and ultimately changed her life. She had hundreds of orders come in and she couldn’t take all of them. A month after, she spoke with her pharmacy manager about going down to one day a week so she could focus on her art business.

Now, Stepanie earns more money with her art business than she would with a full-time pharmacist salary. She makes different art pieces like wall panel geodes, ocean pieces, pill petri coasters and has a commission list several months out. Every Sunday at 9 pm she opens her shop. No matter how much she lists, Stephanie sells out in two minutes.

Stephanie has brought in help from people in her pharmacy circle to aid her in making the pill petri coasters, her most popular piece. She hopes to hire a full-time employee in the future and loves that she’s able to spend more time with her three children, have a flexible schedule and do something she truly loves.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Stephanie, thanks so much for stopping by and being part of this side hustle edition.

Stephanie Roberts: I am super excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Tim Church: Well, shoutout to my wife for kind of getting this episode started because she reached out to me probably about a month or so ago from the time of recording this and said, “Hey, do you know who this Stephanie person is? She’s got some really cool art, and she’s a pharmacist. And I actually have one of her pieces of artwork as my cell phone background. And I think you should reach out.”

Stephanie Roberts: That is crazy. It doesn’t surprise me, but you didn’t tell me that ahead of time because, I mean, I think most of my audience is women. And I have men messaging me saying, “My wife really wants your art. Can I get it for a surprise for her?” So I feel like it comes from the females. So that’s really funny you said that.

Tim Church: That’s so cool. Well, I can’t wait to dig into the art and all the things that you’re doing in addition to pharmacy. But I want to start out with a couple icebreakers because I think it would be fun. So Stephanie, you have to sing karaoke. What song are you picking?

Stephanie Roberts: Probably anything Reba McIntyre. I think you can hear the southern accent in there, but I love me some Reba.

Tim Church: OK. And what’s — any specific one?

Stephanie Roberts: Probably “Fancy.”

Tim Church: OK.

Stephanie Roberts: I don’t know if you even know Reba, but —

Tim Church: Oh, I know Reba.

Stephanie Roberts: Right. I mean, and I’m not a big country listener. But I mean, I’ve loved Reba from the time I was little. And I have the red hair and everything, so it works.

Tim Church: Now, I did pick up the southern accent a little bit. Where are you from?

Stephanie Roberts: Kentucky. From eastern Kentucky, from the mountains. And I’m central Kentucky now. But the accent is still with me.

Tim Church: Oh, cool. Alright, I’ve got one more for you. You have to delete all but three apps from your phone. Which ones are you keeping?

Stephanie Roberts: Well, I have to keep Instagram because that’s my bread and butter. Let’s see, what else do I really use? Don’t care much for Facebook, but I guess I do still use it. And then a photo editing, again, that’s a big — I have so many photo apps, I don’t know if I could choose one. But that’s big for me and the business.

Tim Church: Cool. Well I like that. And I knew Instagram was going to be one of them, but I was curious what the others are going to be. Maybe your email, right, so you can still communicate with people that want to order?

Stephanie Roberts: Oh, I don’t know. It’s good and bad. The email folders are full, the DMs are full on Instagram. I can’t say I’m doing great at the communication. But I’m grateful for it. But yeah, I’m not too great at it.

Tim Church: Well, I want to start out with you talking about your career path as a pharmacist because obviously this show is about side hustles and how you’ve been able to grow a business. But obviously, that was not where you started. You started out as a pharmacist. So I want to hear about that.

Stephanie Roberts: Oh, OK. Well, so not the most interesting career path, but I always knew I would be in retail pharmacy. So before I had even graduated pharmacy school, I had done an interview with CVS. And they hired me on the spot. And that just seemed like a great, you know, right-out-of-school job for me. I don’t think I had planned too much into where I wanted to be, which is great if you don’t have big expectations, then you won’t get let down. So I started with CVS and quickly became manager with CVS. I floated around and then I got my own store. And from there, that was still — it was a big commute for me. I was commuting about one and a half hours, so that was pretty exhausting when you drive an hour and a half and you have a 14-hour day and you drive an hour and a half back and then you do it again the next day. So another grocery store pharmacy that was in my actual town in Lexington, Kentucky, called me because they were looking for a manager that already had experience. And so I snapped up working at Myer because that was in town where I actually lived. And so I was with Myer for a period of time and then I had a customer that would come in all the time, and he was kind of a retired pharmacist. He had worked with Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, and he was getting his license in Kentucky. He didn’t really love it; he didn’t want to, but his wife was urging him to just so he could work part-time with the University of Kentucky. And that’s where his wife was a pharmacist too. Hey Jeff, if you’re listening. And he told me they were opening a new pharmacy. And I mean, he was just — he was so nice. I wasn’t even looking for another job, but he was like, “You really, really should look into it.” So I did, and I’ve been at UK ever since. It’s retail pharmacy, but it is completely different than what most people think of retail pharmacy. And it’s been awesome. I mean, I’ve said many times, if we ever moved out, I could never do old-school retail pharmacy ever again. It’s, you know, it sometimes can be the worst of the worst. But at UK, we do a lot for the employees and stuff but mostly with the inpatient, we have a program called Meds to Beds that delivers all the medications to the patients before they’re leaving, we service a lot of our transplant patients, we continue to do their medications through mail order, we have a specialty pharmacy. It’s just — and importantly, no drive through, which is a big win for retail pharmacy. But it’s so interesting. No day is ever the same as the last. It’s just — it’s really cool. It’s been eye-opening. I’ve learned a lot. I mean, I’ve learned about medications that are probably learned about in pharmacy school, I don’t even remember, but I’ve had to relearn them because they are fast movers whereas you wouldn’t have even seen them in your normal or average retail pharmacy. So that’s where I still am today one day a week. And I really love it there. I love the people and I love the way they run their pharmacy. And they give you plenty of help. We have so many pharmacists and so many technicians working together. And it’s so great to be able to bounce off any questions, bounce them off another pharmacist or anything when you’re just unsure of something where I wasn’t used to having that before. So yeah, that’s where I am today.

Tim Church: Wow. It sounds like you’re in a much better environment and that you really have a positive working atmosphere with your colleagues and just the things that you’re able to do. What are some of the other things that you like about it compared to other traditional pharmacy models?

Stephanie Roberts: Kind of like what I said about we’re not traditional in the way that we don’t have the drive-through. We don’t have a lot of people coming — not a lot coming outside into our pharmacy as in like outside of the hospital because we’re doing a lot of discharges, a lot of the prescriptions for the patients inside plus the employees and their families. So we really get to know our patients. We don’t see a lot of drug-seeking behavior, which I saw a lot in retail pharmacy. You know, that was kind of a fear, sometimes a safety concern when you’re working until 10 at night and, you know, other pharmacies have been robbed or things just look suspicious in the store. And I don’t really have that fear at UK, kind of in the heart of the hospital and if you wanted to take something from the pharmacy, you’re going to kind of have a long run to get out and pass security into a waiting car. You know what I mean? So it’s — I love that for even safety concerns. We’ve become a 24/7 pharmacy now. That just started about a year ago. So if you even have to work overnight, it’s a great place to be. So in those terms, everything’s interesting, everything’s different. Interesting also means you have new sets of problems and things when it comes to mail order and maybe people didn’t ask for their medications in time, so you’re calling a courier to drive it to them across the state because you don’t want any of your organ transplants to lose their well-earned organ. But it’s always interesting. I just can’t even compare it to any retail pharmacy I had experience with before. It’s pretty cool.

Tim Church: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a great place to be if you’re a pharmacist. And like you said, it’s not only — it’s challenging, but it’s interesting. And you’ve got a great support team to help you along the way. So I think that’s really cool. Now, people listening may have just picked that up and said, “Stephanie, how are you only working one day a week?” And obviously some people choose to work part-time and they choose to work as-needed, but you know, you’re working one a day a week. And obviously as we were talking about before the podcast started that that’s not how it always was. So let’s jump into how Art by Stephanie got started because obviously that’s part of the story and how you’re working one day a week.

Stephanie Roberts: Right. And it seems kind of counterintuitive when I say I’ve got this wonderful job and now it’s, you know, down to one day a week by choice because I’ve decided to do something else. But I really loved it if I was going to do pharmacy full-time forever. And who knows? One day I might go back to full-time. But that’s where I would want to be. But the art kind of fell into my lap. So I’ve always loved art since I was a little girl, that was always my go-to when somebody asked me what I wanted to be, it was going to be an artist. But you know, as you grow up, not usually — people don’t usually encourage that as a career because let’s get real, there’s not a lot of artists we know that are doing it as a full-time career and paying all the bills. I’m not trying to say I’m special in any way, but you know, it’s not something parents usually encourage their kids to do. I have awesome parents, wonderful parents. So I’ve always done it as a hobby on the side, kind of always did it through undergraduate. As I became a pharmacist, it was something that was probably let go of for a few years. I got married, graduated from pharmacy school the next year, a few years later we had our first of three kids, and so you know, life was pretty busy. And probably about three years ago, I think through Instagram and YouTube and things like that, I started really taking interest in some artists that I love. I think Justin Gaffrey is one of my first artists I ever just like fell in love with his paintings. They’re really textured, and I’m just a texture lover. I love when paintings or art just like jump off the canvas. So I really loved Justin Gaffrey. A few others that I just watched and realized they were — they had a career. I mean, they were doing great. And a lot of their interest was through Instagram. And not that even in my head at that point was I saying, oh, I could become an artist one day. It’s just like I felt inspired to create. So I did. And I would share pictures. And still, I wasn’t trying to go after anything. I was just enjoying it and it was a great creative outlet. So I did that for a few years. It really started with paintings at first. And then I think epoxy resin kind of just like hit the art scene and everybody just started getting resin and I was really interested in that. So I started resin work and kind of 50-50 between painting and resin work. And one day, I just decided after a few years of this and just posting pictures, never trying to get sales, not pushing anything, I just wanted to create and share what I was doing, I decided to put a price in the text of the picture on Instagram, just wondering, you know, I feel awkward asking somebody how much something is. So maybe other people feel awkward too. You know? You’re afraid to get that answer, “Oh, it’s $10,000,” and you’re like, oh, that’s not in my price range. I mean, I just don’t even think I could ask another artist. It’s crazy sometimes. So that’s why I thought I’ll put a price on this and see if anybody’s interested. And it sold within five or 10 minutes. And I was like, well, that was really cool. So I just continued to do that. And I think that was one of my — it was a resin piece and I called it geode, and it’s like an art panel, and it’s stained glass and it’s resin and it’s different pigments and metallics and things like that. And so it was a geode.

Tim Church: And how much was your first piece that you sold on Instagram? How much did you sell it for?

Stephanie Roberts: It was $150.

Tim Church: $150. And how much did that first piece, like in terms of the materials, how much did it cost you to build that particular piece? And then how long did it take you to make it?

Stephanie Roberts: I would say in material cost, probably under $40. I’m thinking as for time, it probably took me five or six hours because it was one of my first ones I had ever made, so everything was troubleshooting and figuring out how to do this and that, which is something I can do a lot quicker after, you know, 100 of those at this point. But yeah. So I really wasn’t doing a cost analysis on my hourly wage or anything like that. I just thought there’s nobody that’s going to want to spend more than $150 probably. Nobody is even going to want to spend $150. That’s what I’m going to price it at because I was happy to keep it. And if nobody wanted it, I was happy to keep it. So yeah, that probably wasn’t my best cost analysis. But it was still great. It was still a profit, and it kind of went on from there.

Tim Church: I mean, that’s really exciting. So what’s going through your head, though, either in the moments before you put it up to say you’re putting it up for sale or even the week or the month before you decided to do that. What’s going through your mind?

Stephanie Roberts: You could probably ask my husband because I talk a lot, but he’s probably not listening. But I mean, at that point, I was like this is really cool. I could make more of these and I could do this and if I had so many a week, it would equal this. You know, it’s probably like, OK sure, but how many people are going to buy these? But you know, in my head I was just like, I’m going to make more and I’m going to put more price on them. I’m going to see if people want to commission these. Still not in the frame of mind like oh, this is going to be a full-time career. But a side hustle, yes. Did I need a side hustle? No. But I was, you know, I loved what I was doing. And if people were going to pay me to do it, that’s all the better reason why I would do it and, you know, not be helping with cooking or cleaning in the house or something. You know, it gives you more reason to do this hobby when you’re getting paid for it. You feel a little bit better about spending your time on it. So yeah, it wasn’t much later — I think that was about like October of that year. And this was 2018. And by November or December, I had made what I went viral for is the pill petri, which is on coasters, resin coasters, with over-the-counter medications in them. And I had put those — I just shared a picture of them on a pharmacy moms group, and I got more orders than I could handle. You know?

Tim Church: Wow.

Stephanie Roberts: It was kind of near Christmastime and everybody wanted them either for themselves or for a friend. And I mean, I’m not saying it was a million orders by any means, but I wasn’t prepared to even make 50 at a time at that point. And you know, maybe I had an order for 100. So that was pretty cool.

Tim Church: That had to been awesome to really validate that what you were doing was something that was very desirable that people wanted.

Stephanie Roberts: Yeah. It was really exciting. I mean, I still, still didn’t — I was not in the frame of mind that this was going to go anywhere, that I would keep creating and I would probably still sell on the side always, maybe people would ask me to do commissions and different work, and I was happy to do it. But it was a dream. Sure, you could ask me, “Would you want to do this full-time?” Yes. But I mean, that was a big dream. It didn’t feel like reality that that could happen.

Tim Church: Do you think that because you just focused on the art and using it as a creative outlet, something that you enjoy doing without the initial intention of monetizing, do you think that that mindset has eventually helped you along the way as to where you are now in terms of making, actually earning income from it?

Stephanie Roberts: Oh yeah. 100%. I don’t think I could have started out saying, “I want to do this for money,” and went anywhere with it. It was because I loved it, it was a passion, I was learning from other artists on the Internet and wanting to do what they did. You know, different techniques and stuff. And I mean, I worked on a lot of things that just went straight into the garbage. You know? It was just for fun. Yeah, I don’t — if I had started out this was all about money and this was all, you know, I don’t think I would have went anywhere with it.

Tim Church: So talk a little bit about what the actual products that you’re selling, you went into it a little bit with the petri dishes, but obviously we’re on a podcast so need to be as descriptive as possible. We’ll definitely share some pictures once this gets posted. But can you talk a little bit about what you’re actually creating? What’s selling the most? What’s the most popular?

Stephanie Roberts: Yeah, sure. So probably earlier — this timeframe that we’re talking about, it was earlier that summer I was working with the epoxy resin, which is a liquid that you mix and then you pour and then it cures to a hard clear kind of glass-like or acrylic end result. And being the dork that I am, I had some pills around, over-the-counter medicines, and I was like, wouldn’t this be so funny? So I put the medications into — it’s a silicone mold that you put your resin into if you’re using a mold. And I made a coaster out of them. It’s like a 4-inch diameter coaster, and it just looks like the pills are suspended in the resin. It takes a few layers to do this. So I had made that that summer, I posted pictures of it. Again, I wasn’t doing any prices back then, so it’s not like anybody even asked about, “Hey, can I buy this?” And it was later that year that — I don’t even remember, I don’t know what the genesis of it was, why I decided hey, I should make a bunch of these. But for some reason, maybe it was just being in that pharmacist moms group, I thought, this could be something that other dorks like me — and I’m just kidding — but you know, other pharmacy nerds might like too. So you know, I put it out there, this is what I’m doing if anybody would like it. And it was very well received. So those are kind of like coasters, like I said, and then I make a little bigger 6-inch diameter. It came about several months later, and I put letters and words and funny quotes in those. And I put funny quotes in the coasters now too. So a lot of customers will — especially in the beginning when I had more time to take requests, they would request, “Hey, could you do this with pink? Can you do this with black? Can you do it with glitter?” And I was happy to do anything anybody asked for. And then every time I would post a picture, there would be 300 other people that agreed with that person, man, we really want them in that color too. And it always led to a new variation of what we call the pill petri. And so now there’s maybe four or five different colors or glitters or clear, whatever, pill petris that I do. And somebody’s always asking for something different. But besides just the pill petri, I still do what I call the geodes, which are wall panels that you put on the wall and those are the resin and the stained glass and the crystals. I do these ocean pieces. Some people send me shells that they’ve collected on family vacations, things like that, and I’ve included the shells in their ocean art. And again, that’s with resin. And then it looks really realistic and pretty cool, I think. But I’ve also done pill art that hangs on the wall as well. So I kind of jump all around, which is exactly what my ADD loves is doing a little bit of everything. And honestly, what I went viral for, the pill petri, can start to feel like a manufacturing process after a while. It doesn’t really get my creative juices flowing all the time, and while it’s my bread and butter, I really try to do some other things in between to really feel like I’m using my full potential, whatever that is. But yeah. A little bit of everything. I still paint, I still have requests for paintings. I have a commission list that’s into March at the moment for a wall art that’s not just the pill coasters that I get recognized the most for. But there’s still a lot of people requesting wall art of different kinds, whatever that may be, the geodes, the oceans, paintings, pill art. Yeah. It’s kind of wild.

Tim Church: Yeah. I was going to ask you, because I feel like every time I check out your Instagram profile — which is awesome, by the way — I mean, even if you’re not going to purchase anything, I think you need to just go and visit it because you’re going to have a lot of fun. And there’s so many cool designs that are on there, some of which appear to be edible. But they are not, correct?

Stephanie Roberts: Thank you, yes. Yeah, those would be the textured paintings that I love to do. And I use piping bags like you would if you were decorating a cake to make a lot of the ones that you’re talking about that edible with the flowers and things like that and pellet knives and things. But yeah, I just, I love art that looks like it’s just jumping off the wall.

Tim Church: But some of the petri dishes, they actually have real candy in there as part of the design, right?

Stephanie Roberts: Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah, no, I have the candy coasters and things too. And I’m even collaborating soon with a big sprinkle company because the sprinkles I think have been my favorite, which is kind of full circle in my life just because I’m addicted to sweets and sugar. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. And I grew up loving ice cream just covered with sprinkles, almost as many sprinkles as you had ice cream. And I would get gallons — I mean, just huge containers of it in my stocking for Christmas. That was like a gift my parents — I remember my grandmother giving me sprinkles as a gift. I mean, that was a gift that people would give me. I mean, that says you have an addiction, right there. But so it’s kind of cool that’s full circle that I’m doing the coasters with the sprinkles and other candy in them and things like that because truly, that’s just who I am, addicted to sugar. So that’s kind of fun for me too, just another side of my personality to be using in art as well.

Tim Church: So one of the things I noticed, I feel like every time I go to your profile and I go on your shopify, everything is sold out. So I was going to ask you, what’s going on with that?

Stephanie Roberts: Well, it’s really funny you say that. But I usually have a shop opening and I’ve kind of — it’s kind of become a Sunday tradition and I’ve kind of stuck with that Sunday, it kind of worked for me, at 9 p.m., I don’t know, it just worked out to be a good time. And no matter how much I put in the shop, it sells out in two minutes or less. And it’s crazy. But people still ask me like, can’t you just have your shop open all the time and just take orders all the time? Or somebody will say, “Can’t you get a real website?” And I’m just like, I don’t know what a real website is versus my shopify account, but it’s not going to increase how much product I have to sell, which I don’t think always registers with people. But if I just had it open to take, you know, requests too, I don’t know how to humbly say this, but I mean, it would be a year’s worth of orders because I can see how many people are on there at shop time when it opens versus how many people get an order through. And you know, they want to take preorders and things like that, and I don’t want for their safety and for mine, I don’t want to take preorders that are six months in advance, which some people say they’re willing to wait when you don’t know what could happen in life, happen to me, happen to my family, my house. I don’t want to hold your money in preorder status. So I like to just sell either what I have or what I can make within the week. And it seems to be working out really, really well. Right before Christmastime, about a month before Christmas, was my biggest preorder I ever did just so people would know whether they got an order in or if they should be shopping for something else if it was a gift for somebody. And that’s why I did it at that time. So it was in November, and I took how many orders I guesstimated I could do in the month before Christmas, and I was exhausted. And even then with to me, the huge amount that I put in the shop, it was still sold out in two minutes.

Tim Church: Wow.

Stephanie Roberts: So that’s just — it’s just — I mean, it’s crazy.

Tim Church: I mean, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. I was wondering if this was like a marketing tactic you were using. But it actually is the fact that you would be too overwhelmed with the amount of orders that’s coming through, which is — I think it’s a good problem to have, right?

Stephanie Roberts: Yeah. I never in 1 million years would I ever dream I had this problem. I mean, in my most earnest hopes and desires, I was like, oh, I think I could push out this many a week and that equates to this much money and that’s almost equal to pharmacy. And oh, we could cut back on things and I could become a full-time artist. I mean, never, ever, ever, ever, did I think this would be “a problem” that I would have that things would sell out. So and that — just to back up, I know I’m jumping everywhere. But last July, things changed when somebody on Instagram shared the art she had purchased. And her Instagram name is @thingsIboughtandliked. And when she bought it from me, I didn’t know who she was. But apparently she was the Oprah of Instagram. And when she shared — I mean, she only shares things that she purchased with her own money and she likes it. That’s the title of her Instagram, that’s exactly what she does. When she shared it, my life completely changed. That night, I had probably — oh gosh, I don’t know because I never did get through all the messages — like 400 or 500 messages. She shared about 9 p.m. my time. She’s in Texas. At 4 a.m., I decided to go to bed after answering as many messages as I could because I thought, well, this is the only rush I’ll ever get in my life. Like I better take every message and every order I could. But even by 4 a.m., I hadn’t got through even half of the orders. And so from her sharing that, I mean, thank God for her. That’s when life changed. So that was in July, and by maybe a month — not even a month later — I had talked to my manager about going down to one day a week and becoming a full-time artist. It was that life-changing. It was crazy.

Tim Church: Wow. So at that point when she shared that, how many hours were you working?

Stephanie Roberts: I was a 30-hour pharmacist at that point. So I was working three 10-hour days a week, which is amazing. And back when I took that — so when I started at UK, I was your regular 5 day a week, 40-hour person, kind of banker’s hours. And then a few years into it, they knew I was interested in going to 30 hours, which is still full-time benefits, and that’s what I took on. And at that point, I was doing some more art on the side, and it was like oh, this is great. I’ll have more time for art and just feeling like the human that I want to be, a little bit of everything. And if I’m going to be a good mom, obviously that was more time for kids too. So you know, it was — everything was great. But so I was 30 hours when she changed my life. And yeah. I realized burning the candle at both ends, I wasn’t sleeping, I was working around the clock to fulfill these orders, you know, it was — self-care didn’t happen for like four months. It was crazy. So I knew something had to end. Either I had to just give it up and I can’t be the person that can fulfill all these orders or I can, and I’ve got to let go of pharmacy, which was very scary when the whole family is on my insurance because the hospital has amazing insurance and benefits and things like that. And my husband has benefits, but you just can’t compare to how awesome the hospital benefits are. So it was scary, and it was something we had to weigh as a family and what we’re losing, what we’re gaining, pretty cool to be at home whenever the kids do need me because definitely the mom guilt has added up over the years. Every time they’re sick, my husband’s job is he has the best job ever and he’s flexible and he can be there for them. But man, it really hurts when you can’t be there when they’re sick. So now I can. I can be there for the kids and just so many other benefits. So that’s where we are. And I have the most supportive husband — this would never happen without the husband I have. Like I can imagine there’s a good percentage out there that would kind of be like, let it go, Stephanie. You know, you’ve got a great job — which I did. Pharmacy was great. Let’s count our blessings, let’s move on with what we have. But he’s been really supportive, and I’ve had some really pie in the sky dreams, and he’s just kind of like, go for it. I think you can do it. And without him, again, I just — without support, I don’t know how you could do it. So I’m thankful for that too. And he’s had to — when I was saying that I was burning the candle on both ends, I mean, he’s a wonderful father. But he really had to step up his game even more and really do a lot of the home things with the kids and everything it takes to run a family and a home. And he enabled me to be able to just devote everything I could to both jobs and stuff. So pretty awesome.

Tim Church: Yeah, I mean, that’s just wild how one post, and a bazillion orders come through and everything changes and no longer is pharmacy your full-time gig but now it becomes the other way around. And I think for a lot of people, that maybe they want to make that transition or do that change, but there’s obviously a lot of fear that goes behind that. Like you mentioned, obviously the healthcare benefits, that’s one, and being able to afford healthcare when that’s something that’s part of your employer benefit package. But then also, are you going to continue to get orders like that? Is it going to continue to have a demand? Or is it a one-time spurt like that? I think that probably had to be going through your mind at that time as you’re making that decision with your husband with how you’re going to proceed.

Stephanie Roberts: Oh yeah. I mean, looking back at it, I don’t really know how we made that decision. Why did we really think it would continue? I don’t know. I mean, there was kind of markers where you’d say, yeah, it looks like people will continue. But we didn’t know. This was only a few months later, but I still look back and think, why did we really think it was safe to make that jump? I don’t know, but thank God it was. And it’s continued to be — it probably took me 10 shop openings to be like, you know, every time before it opens, are people still going to be there? Are they still going to shop? Are they still going to buy things? And now I feel confident they’re going to be there because they’re in my DMs, they’re in my messages, they’re saying, “When is the next shop opening?” And I feel confident. And I might even feel confident like that it will continue for a year, but I don’t know what the future holds. I’m hopeful. But like I said before, and maybe this was while we weren’t recording, but you know, I hate to let go of pharmacy in case I need to get back into it. It’s an amazing safety net. I can’t think of a lot of people, you know, that I’ve learned about over the years, amazing authors and artists of every variation that have held onto their side job for as long as they could while they were still trying to make it. I don’t know of any side job that was as great as pharmacy is, so it was — I mean, I’m so happy that’s my safety net, even if I had to go back to the trenches of some retail pharmacy that I would prefer not to work in. It’s still a blessing, it’s still there, it’s still wonderful. So yeah. I just kind of pinch myself every day that this is happening.

Tim Church: I mean, it’s incredible. I mean, I just, I’m sitting here behind the mic like, I’m just so fascinated and intrigued with your story and how you made that jump but also how you continue to make it happen and just the demand being there. I mean, it’s just wild. So I think a lot of people are probably thinking, alright, Stephanie, you basically said you’re crushing it right now. You can’t even hold your shop open for more than a couple minutes before you sell out of your business. Can you give us just an estimate — I mean, how much are you actually earning in the business? And is it comparable to what you were making full-time as a pharmacist?

Stephanie Roberts: I think my husband wishes I was a little bit better with numbers and keeping up with things like that, but Shopify and having that online presence has really helped me to see that and see my profits and, you know, tax season is going to be really interesting this year as we figure out what we’re doing with a new business. But after this year, hopefully we are more informed about everything we need to do better next year. But yeah, it’s doing better than pharmacy. I think I would have made that jump even if it was maybe doing a little bit less than pharmacy. I think we could have handled that in our finances. I have, again, my husband has a Master’s in business and education that I don’t even understand. But you know, so he’s wonderful to have around. I call him the CFO. But yeah, it’s doing better than pharmacy, which is a huge surprise. I would go ahead and estimate that it’s going to be over six figures this year. And I mean, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know that I could ask for more. So —

Tim Church: I mean, that’s incredible right there because I mean, I know there’s a lot of people that obviously are doing — designing art and doing creative works. And I think they dream of even getting remotely close to what you’re making. And so the fact that you’ve been able to do it and replicate the process and continue to have — there’s a need out there, obviously, for people that want your designs. I mean, that’s just incredible.

Stephanie Roberts: It is incredible because who would have even thought outside of the pharmacy network I was going to find an audience for pill petri? But I mean, it far surpasses just people in the medical field anymore. I mean, there’s all the nice, fancy blog influencers, I mean, Instagram influencers and things like that. Again, other people buy it and then share it. And it’s — I would have never imagined that somebody that wasn’t in pharmacy or medicine period would want these. So I mean, yeah, just crazy. And I feel humbled by it but also feel like gosh, I look at some people that are just so talented and I wonder if their sales are like this or they’re close to this and things like that. I don’t feel worthy of it. But it’s — I’m grateful. And it’s been a really fun ride. So yeah. I put my time in at least. I may not be as wonderfully talented as they are, but I have definitely worked my butt off. I can say that. I have put the time in for sure.

Tim Church: It’s easy to tell that. And like you said, coming from your initial motivations for even pursuing art were way beyond the ability to monetize it. So I mean, I think that’s really cool. Now obviously, you’re the secret sauce of the business and creating these awesome designs. But does anybody help you with different aspects of it?

Stephanie Roberts: I have been bringing in more people, and they are to help with it. Like I said, the coasters at this point are — it’s almost like manufacturing. We make hundreds a week, and it is probably more time-intensive than anybody ever assumes when it comes to how many layers of resin you pour and putting the pills in, creating the capsules we make with the glitter and the sprinkles inside, I mean, I have thousands of those we make. So it’s not just buying over-the-counter drugs, but it’s making the glitter capsules that are kind of, again, the secret sauce that people are just like, where do you buy those? We don’t buy them. We make them. So the people I have helping me, funny enough, are technicians I’ve recruited, interns I’ve recruited, and somebody just started for me recently as one of my fellow pharmacist’s daughters. So it’s been kept close to home. I hope to hire somebody really full-time and, you know, become more of an assistant. I always tell people when I say, “Do you want to come over and help?” I mean, obviously, they get reimbursed. But you know, it’s not the most fun. But you know, we try to make it fun. It’s just time-consuming and we listen to our podcasts and we watch TV on the iPad or do whatever. So we keep it as lively as we can. And it’s not boring. It’s not the most fun. But it’s, you know, it’s better than on your worst day in pharmacy for sure. You know, the days when insurance is down and you know the customers don’t understand that and somebody’s sick and the very worst days, you’re like, yeah, you know, at my worst I may be a little bit bored on some occasions. But yeah, it’s still pretty great. I like the day-to-day

Tim Church: What about an accountant or a lawyer to help with some of the legal issues with the business? Anything — any of those people supporting you?

Stephanie Roberts: Well, I don’t have a lawyer that I have kept on staff or anything like that. But in the beginning, before we jumped this as a full-time career, my husband said, “You really need to figure out if this is legal. Legal, legal, legal.” I had kind of already been doing it, but he’s just like, you can’t jump to this full-time — and I had researched it on my own as much as I could to make sure everything was OK. So I think I contacted three different pharmacy lawyers that I knew of. So they were pharmacists plus attorneys. And they were all gracious enough — I mean, just on a friend basis looking into it for me. And nobody could find any reason why this would be, you know, illegal. Again, they’re over-the-counter medications, there’s no prescription medications in there. People shouldn’t be able to get — I mean, to get into the resin to get into a medication, you would have to use a drill. And by the time you got down to the pill, it’s going to be obliterated. So you know, good luck trying to get that Tylenol out of there to take it, but I don’t think it’s going to hurt anybody.

Tim Church: I was going to go for the Sour Patch Kid or the Swedish fish.

Stephanie Roberts: Oh, OK. Yeah, I mean, just swallow the coaster whole. That would probably easier to do than to get down to those. And on the gummies too, I mean, I’ve covered those with like shellac-type substances. So yeah. You’re not going to want them. So definitely have an accountant that will be helping us with our first tax season as a sole proprietorship this year. Plan on becoming an LLC. Should have done that last year, but time definitely got away from me. LLC I think would be much more beneficial. But yes, an accountant is a must. I don’t think we would do this on our own. Not yet. Maybe in the future. Probably not. But — and I hope I never need a lawyer, other than the initial, “Hey, is this legal?” I hope I don’t need another one for any reason.

Tim Church: But one of the things along the lines I was going to ask was, do you have any patents or other protections on your designs?

Stephanie Roberts: I have looked into patents, and patents on art are pretty difficult. You can get them, but then you have to enforce them. And when I get into something, I really — I get into 175%. So I have done every online course and researched other entrepreneurs in every field and even people like — I think it’s Sarah Blakely that does the Spanx brand. As a male, I don’t know if you’re aware, but I mean, Spanx is a huge brand. So maybe at this point you know what that is. But I mean, even on her designs, she said she had patents and people were ripping it off here and there. And she’s like, you know, I didn’t have enough time, I didn’t care enough, really, to go after every one of them. I just was focused on what I was doing. And that girl is into making billions these days. So there’s a lot of stories kind of like hers that make me believe there’s copycats. I already have copycats. And I try to just see it as flattery. They’re not doing as much. But —

Tim Church: Their shops are open, right?

Stephanie Roberts: Yeah, yeah, their shops are open all the time, just like — yeah, exactly. But yeah, I think I’m just going to keep my blinders on and keep trying to do what I’m doing and always stay ahead of them. That’s kind of one thing, it’s kind of motivated me to always stay ahead and be thinking of more, not to get comfortable or same like, you know, looking ahead, maybe we could assume I have some business in the future. But let’s not always assume. Let’s just work and earn that business and keep your clientele and keep the customers coming back for more. So it has motivated me in that way to not get comfortable and say, this is easy-peasy from here on out. No. I need to always be doing more. So that’s pretty cool.

Tim Church: So Stephanie, what advice would you give other pharmacists out there who have other interests and passions beyond pharmacy that maybe have the potential to be monetized?

Stephanie Roberts: I don’t know if I would say, jump into it. But you can do it. I mean, I just, I really think if you have a passion and a will — I saw this quote I think just two days ago, and it’s so simple. But it just really hit home for me, and it was just like, “I don’t know how, but I’m going to do it.” I mean, it was something like that. But I don’t know how, but I’ll make it happen. And it’s just like yeah, that’s exactly what it is. I don’t always know the how, but I’m going to figure it out and I’m going to do it. And I think anybody can. I think as I’ve entered my 30s and the more I’ve listened to and digested all these wonderful podcasts that exist that interview all these amazing entrepreneurs and people doing — it’s just like, you can do it. I mean, it’s amazing you can do it, how you can think outside the box and really make it happen. Growing up, I just really didn’t do that. It just seemed like degree all the way and that’s all you can do. And now I really want to educate my kids on — I mean, college is wonderful and I hope they go to college, but there’s so much more outside of that with being creative thinkers and finding a solution to a problem and that’s how some of the best inventions are made. I would just say if you’re really into it and you have a passion for it, do it. I don’t think money is always the best motivator. I think after awhile, you would get — you’re going to be exhausted and give up if it’s only about the money because I know from experience if this had only been about the money, oh, I would have given up a long time ago. It’s been exhausting. It’s been hard. But like I said, with three little kids at home, it’s not been easy. But I wanted it. So I kept on going. And I went days with only three hours of sleep every night. And that really takes a toll on you. But I wanted it. So I was going to keep on going. And I don’t think if you’re doing it only for the money that you would push through all the time. So you know, if you find something you’re passionate about, go for it.

Tim Church: I love that. Well said, Stephanie. Well thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your story, really looking forward to hear how you continue to just explode this business. And I look forward to the day when you’re shop’s open and possibly I can order something for my wife. But also I like the coasters too, so even though you said you’re catering to a lot of women out there, I definitely think that there’s some really cool designs that you’ve done, especially if you’re a pharmacist or have that background that are really cool to have in your house. So I would encourage you to check out some of the designs. So if someone wants to reach out to you or learn more about what you’re doing and Art by Stephanie, what’s the best place to go?

Stephanie Roberts: Well thank you so much. And I have made some male designs for some male pharmacists and some doctors that did not have glitter pills in them. That’s all it takes. You just subtract those out, and it’s a male coaster. But Instagram is the best place to find me, and it’s pretty simple, but it’s @artbystephanieroberts. And you can get everything you need from there. The link is in the profile for my shop. Again, that’s most Sundays. But you know, @artbystephanieroberts on Instagram, you can find my email from there. And that’s really the place to go.

Tim Church: Thank you for listening to this episode. And as always, if you liked the content and want to hear more side hustle and pharmacist entrepreneur stories, please leave us a review on the Apple podcasts app or whatever player you use so we can get the message out and help other pharmacists on their financial journey. Just a reminder, if you want to win some of Stephanie’s art, follow @YourFinancialPharmacist and @artbystephanieroberts on Instagram and then comment on our audiogram post that’s going to be posted on Instagram Friday, March 13. And you’ve got one week to do this, and we will announce the winner the following week on Friday, March 20.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 142: Scripting Your Dream Career with Dr. Adam Martin


Scripting Your Dream Career with Dr. Adam Martin

Dr. Adam Martin joins Tim Ulbrich on the show to discuss his most recent book Gen-Z Pharmacist: Dominate Pharmacy School & Script Your Dream Career.

Dr. Martin is the founder of The Fit Pharmacist, host of The Fit Pharmacist Healthcare Podcast and a two-time author.

About Today’s Guest

Dr. Adam Martin works with people to write their script for success using proper nutrition, stress management, and the power of a positive attitude. He earned his doctorate of pharmacy degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, and with over 7 years of experience working full-time in the community pharmacy setting, he’s passionate about empowering other pharmacists and pharmacy students to put the health back into healthcare through leading by example in their professional practice to not only live their best lives, but to inspire others along the way to do the same. He pairs his PharmD with his expertise as a certified personal trainer and nutrition consultant to guide self-care back into healthcare.

Dr. Martin is the founder of The Fit Pharmacist, LLC. As a National Speakers Association (NSA) Professional Speaker, Adam’s core passion is traveling to pharmacy schools across the world to speak to pharmacy students, sharing practical plans of action that will empower them to maximize their careers and create a competitive edge in the profession to maximize their success and degree of impact.

He has made his life’s work showing people how to take control of their overall wellness, sharing SimpleSolutions through his writing for numerous pharmacy publications including PharmacyTimes magazine, and is the author of the best-selling book Rx: You: The Pharmacist’s Survival Guide for Managing Stress & Fitting in Fitness as well as the forthcoming book Gen-Z Pharmacist: Dominate Pharmacy School & Script Your Dream Career.

He is the host of The Fit Pharmacist Healthcare Podcast, sharing successes and practical strategies from the most successful minds in the profession of pharmacy with a new episode released every week. You can subscribe and learn more here: https://thefitpharmacist.com/podcast

With a passion for learning and serving his patients, he’s an inaugural member of the Pennsylvania Pharmacists Association’s Leadership Excellence and Advocacy Development (LEAD) program, and strives to serval the global community of pharmacy as a medical missionary, having served in Honduras and Panama as a pharmacist in the field. In 2019, he was named the “Most Influential Pharmacist” by SingleCare’s Best of the Best Pharmacy Awards.

You can connect with him on Instagram

Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn: @FitPharmFam

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thefitpharmacist

Summary

In this episode, Dr. Adam Martin digs into his reason for writing his most recent book the Gen-Z Pharmacist: Dominate Pharmacy School & Script Your Dream Career and key points in it.

Adam explains that the number one problem he heard other pharmacists say was that they were never taught how to be a pharmacist. Although they were extensively trained in medicine and other essential knowledge that lays the PharmD groundwork, they didn’t know how to enter the workforce, interact with their colleagues, develop their career, or attend conferences. Essentially, pharmacists entering the workforce already felt behind.

Adam identified this problem and knew that something needed to be done. He’s very passionate about giving back to pharmacy programs and wanted to make a lasting impact on students. He decided to focus on what isn’t taught in a PharmD program but needs to be known. Over a four year period, Adam wrote his second book, Gen-Z Pharmacist: Dominate Pharmacy School & Script Your Dream Career.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is about your prescription to dominate pharmacy school. Topics like clarifying your why, molding your mindset and networking are discussed. Part two delves into how to script your career. This section consists of 22 expert interviews with some of the best pharmacists in their niche. In this section, pharmacy students ask seasoned pharmacists what they would have done differently in the pharmacy school and their career to get to where they are today but faster.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited to welcome Dr. Adam Martin back on the show to talk about his most recent book, “Gen Z Pharmacist: Dominate pharmacy school and script your dream career.” Dr. Martin was previously on the show back on Episode 091 with Tim Church as a part of our side hustle series where he talked about how to become a fit pharmacist. Now, for those who don’t already know Adam, honestly, I’m not really sure how that’s the case as he’s everywhere having a positive impact, now internationally as well on so many so early in his career. His mindset, positivity and energy for helping inspire others to be the best version of themselves is second to none. I’ve been blessed to get to know Adam over the past couple years, and he’s inspired me and I’m confident will do the same for those listening today. Adam, welcome back to the show.

Adam Martin: Dr. Tim, it is a pleasure to be back, my man.

Tim Ulbrich: So glad to have you. It’s great to have you back in front of the YFP community, and it’s an exciting time for you with the recent book launch we’ll talk more about on the show as well as getting back from an international speaking gig. Tell us more.

Adam Martin: Yeah, man, so that was a blast. I actually just got back from speaking in Ireland at two pharmacy schools. So I was invited to speak on a mental health symposium in the city of Cork, Ireland. So flew into Dublin and then drove to Cork. And in Ireland, there’s three schools of pharmacy. So a little background: The healthcare system in Ireland is roughly three years behind that of the rest of the world. So just to paint a scenario for you, if someone has a mental health crisis, let’s say they have suicidal thoughts and they go to their provider, at that point, there is a 6-8 week waiting period for them to get any kind of treatment.

Tim Ulbrich: Gees.

Adam Martin: That paired with the fact that there’s a lot of stigma and no one’s talking about mental health is what’s prompted the creation of this symposium. So I was invited to speak. It was the first time ever in the country. All three schools of pharmacy were there. There were about 250 pharmacy students from the country. I spoke along with psychiatrists and pharmacists doing groundbreaking research to advance mental health. And it was the first time that there was a gathering to talk about mental health resources available and how to break down that stigma and lead to a positive impact. And the other thing that was fun — and I didn’t know this until shortly before the talk — is Irish people tend to be somewhat reserved. So they’re not used to my speaking style, and if you ever heard me speak, it is not a talk. It is an experience.

Tim Ulbrich: You bring it. You bring it.

Adam Martin: Yes. So I get everyone engaged, I get literally people up dancing in the talk. So they — the words that they used was “bloody brilliant.”

Tim Ulbrich: Bloody brilliant.

Adam Martin: It was a blast, man. And then I went the next day to speak at Trinity College at Dublin all about self-care, specifically for combating burnout that we’re facing in our profession because we hear about that all the time here in the States, but this is something that’s global. So it was an honor to be a voice representing pharmacy from the United States to talk about that in Ireland and bring what I’ve been working on here over there.

Tim Ulbrich: What an awesome experience. I mean, we talk about opportunity meeting the interest, the passion you have, the impact that you want to have. But just to be able to have that experience in Ireland, I followed you on Instagram throughout that journey. It looked like you were having a blast while you were there. So not only that, but you’ve got a second book out as well. I mean, how does that feel? We’ll reflect more on the details of the book and some of the concepts in there, but man, as you’re on the back end, the journey of writing a book is intense. I’ve joked with many, I’ve done it one, I’m not sure I’m going to do it again.

Adam Martin: Yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: But you’ve done it twice now. I mean, how does it feel to be on the back end of it?

Adam Martin: Oh man, so this actually is a funny — it leads me to a podcast that I did with a really world-renowned author. His name is Michael Lozier. And if you ever heard of the law of attraction, there’s a book called “Law of Attraction.” And it is a phenomenal read about mindset. But when I was interviewing him, I said, “Oh, I love your book. I’ve read it like five times, listened to it.” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s funny. I wrote it 100 times.” And at the time, I laughed. But after writing my second book, I was like, that is so true. So yeah, man, it’s a lot of revision and that’s really what people need to know is if you’re thinking about writing a book, really doing anything, the first draft is going to be trash. So you have to get started and dive into that process. And it’s fun. You learn, you get insight as you go. But that won’t happen until you get started. So that’s my learning experience and turned into piece of advice for anyone considering going down that path.

Tim Ulbrich: I think that’s great advice, and I think for many that have the aspirations of writing a book, they see a finished product and they think, oh my gosh, it’s so overwhelming, I’m never going to get there. But as you and I both know, to your point, the first draft often you look back at and you’re like, what was I thinking? You know, in terms of what I had here. But just the small compound effect, you write a few hundred words a day, you keep at it, and you get a draft on paper, you make revisions, you get feedback from others, and you start to refine your message and see what’s resonating.

Adam Martin: Absolutely.

Tim Ulbrich: So let’s talk about the book in detail. Again, the title is “Gen Z Pharmacist: Dominate pharmacy school and script your career.” Our listeners can learn more and get a copy at FitPharmacist.com/book. Now, three things that I love about this book as I had a chance to get a sneak preview from Adam: No. 1 — and I’ve shared this with you already — I think it’s really written in a way that is easy to understand, it’s digestable, and it’s written by someone who really has been through this journey. You know, you’ve walked the walk. And I think you’re doing a great job of teaching it. And I think it’s written in a way that it’s action-oriented is really the second piece that I love is that you can’t blow through this book. I think you’ve done a really nice job of you’re talking about some big things in the text in terms of mindset, you talk about leadership and time management, all these different concepts, and you really do a great job of forcing the reader to stop, reflect, and actually have space in the book where they can do some activities to think about that. I thought that was awesome. And then the second part of the book, which you called “Script Your Career: Experts speak,” you’ve got I think 20-something I think different experts that you have examples and stories from that I think really just showcases not only the journey you’ve had but also others. And so the thought that went behind this, you know, I think often when I see people that publish multiple books, you think, man, what are they pumping out? How quick are they doing it? What’s the quality? The intentionality here was awesome, and I think you did a really wonderful job. And I’m excited to talk more about this. So let’s start with why. What was the need? I mean, you’ve got your first book that was out, I see a copy in the book here as we’re recording.

Adam Martin: Yeah, there it is.

Tim Ulbrich: What’s the need for a second book? What was the mission and the vision?

Adam Martin: Absolutely. So first off, thank you for the kind words, Tim. I really appreciate that. It means a lot coming from you. I have tremendous respect for you and all the work that you’ve done and the impact you’re making for pharmacy. And I think that’s why you and I resonate so well and why we’re joining forces, sneak preview, for something coming up later in the spring. But to answer your question, so I’ve worked first as a nutrition consultant, and I’ve been doing that since 2013. And my niche is pharmacy students and pharmacists. And you know, we talk about problems, struggles, things like that. And the No. 1 problem that I kept hearing was very similar to what we all faced when we graduated. And that is I was never taught how to be a pharmacist. Yes, I was taught all the knowledge and all of the medication information and all those essentials that laid the groundwork for what our PharmD is for. But when it comes time to actually entering the workforce, interacting with your colleagues and then also developing your career in an increasingly competitive industry, how do you leverage social media? And then there’s all this talk about personal branding. Oh yeah, and then there’s conferences. And then there’s all that stuff that you’re not taught about in a structured way. And you get out in the workforce and then you feel behind. And something that’s something that people were struggling with a lot. So I thought, man, something needs to be done about this. So you asked why a second book, but the fun fact is I actually started working on this book before my first book came out. So this book was a four-year process because I do work full-time in the community and run a business. So time was interesting. But as far as the reason why, that comes to innovation. And that’s a core belief and a core concept at University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, where I graduated, that being innovation, leadership, and excellence. So whenever I graduated, if you guys know my story, I was quite on the struggle bus to even get into pharmacy school.

Tim Ulbrich: Last seat, right? Last seat.

Adam Martin: Yeah. Last seat. Last one to get in, and no one in my class knew it. But I ended up being president of my class and all that other stuff. But because of that, and I worked so hard to get in, I was tremendously grateful for the opportunity and I had just such an amazing learning experience with phenomenal faculty and just great networking. So when I graduated, I started to think, man, I really need to give back. Like I need to get involved. So I started guest lecturing and helping some of my professors here and there. But working full-time, I would only be able to get in like when my schedules aligned, like once a semester. So that wasn’t really making a huge impact. Then I thought well, they asked for contributions financially, which is great, but I’m not a gazillionaire yet. But you know, after reading “Seven Figure Pharmacist,” it’s going to happen. Shameless plug. But you know, I don’t have enough money to make a huge impact with like a building or whatnot. So I thought, you know, how can I put this concept of innovation into practice? So I thought, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? What do people resonate with? And it’s writing and speaking. So I thought about what they don’t teach you in pharmacy school but what everyone needs in order to be a successful pharmacist. So I reached out to the dean and I said, “Hey, I thought about this idea of writing a book to complement pharmacy school. But before I do it, I just want to make sure that this doesn’t exist so I’m not spinning my wheels.” And she said, “No, it doesn’t exist.” So I was like, awesome. Well, what I want to do is I want to write a book helping students on this process so that when they graduate, they have the groundwork to hit the ground running. And what I want to do is reach out to 22 of the best pharmacists in their niche that are really crushing it. So like nuclear pharmacy, administration, dean of pharmacy school, how to get a residency if you want to get a PhD after pharmacy, all of those types of things. And what I want to do is I want to interview them and say right now, you are the best at what you do. And you’ve been doing this for years. If you knew you were going to end where you are now on your first day of pharmacy school, what would you do differently to get there faster? What organizations would you have joined? What publications, what meetings, all of those types of things. And that was my original idea. And she said, “That’s a great idea, but what if instead of you doing the interviews, you have pharmacy students do them so it’s not only a book for pharmacy students but written by pharmacy students.”

Tim Ulbrich: Love it.

Adam Martin: And it sounded great until I realized how to implement that. So you’ve got a dude that’s full-time community — and if you guys work in community, you know how rigid that structure is. I mean, we’ve got to submit our vacation requests like a year and a half advance. So you’ve got that. I’m running a business, diving into my speaking career, OK, and then you’ve got 22 super busy people that are crushing it and then you try to get pharmacy students who are in pharmacy school in leadership positions. So try to align those schedules 22 different times.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Adam Martin: And that turned into four years.

Tim Ulbrich: So Adam, what I hear there is a lot of persistence as well as certainly some good mentorship and folks that gave you insight into the book. But I think that last part, you know, interviewing 20-something folks that are crushing it in their respective careers, honestly, that alone could probably be a separate book, could be a separate resource, could be a separate podcast — not that you have free time. But really getting insights into folks, you know, that’s something that I often wonder is I love the concept of sitting down with somebody and just asking them about you know, what’s made you successful? What’s your routines, your habits? And there’s obviously a lot of networking to be had there but also to learn. And that was really a big takeaway for me as I read this book was man, I wish I would have had this in pharmacy school. I wish I would have had this available to me. I just think it’s an incredible, incredible resource. And I see so many connections between this and the financial piece.

Adam Martin: Oh yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: And again, sneak preview, excited we’re going to be collaborating on some things, more things going forward. But in the book — and we’ll talk here in a minute — you talk about clarifying your why and mindset and time management and developing an outside passion and leadership and mentorship and thinking about the long game. And the thread, so much of that for me depends on is your financial situation in a position that you can clearly focus on all of those things? Because what I hear from so many people is, yes, yes, yes, but hey, I’m in $200,000 of debt and I can’t see what’s beyond this $200,000 of debt. And so I think there’s so many connections here to having a sound financial base and having a good financial plan so that you can be able to focus on these things. And so to that point, Chapter 1, which I loved, you started with this concept of clarify your why, which is something we talk about on this show as it relates to one’s financial situation. But tell me more about what you mean in terms of this concept of clarifying your why.

Adam Martin: Absolutely. So with the book, there’s two parts. The second part we talked about are the interviews that we did. So what that is it’s looking Part 1, the concepts we explore and how people in the industry have put those into practice and are thriving because of it. So it’s kind of like, here’s the script and literally Part 1 is “Your Rx to Dominate Pharmacy School.” But then Part 2 is here’s people that did this, and here’s the result. So absolutely. And that comes down to two parts. So we want to impact patients. We want to have a way to help people enrich their lives. We can’t do that until we can do that for ourselves. So that’s why in the first part, there is self-mastery and then relationship building. So the reason that the first chapter is clarify your why is because in order to thrive in your business, in your personal endeavors, whatever that looks like for you, you will face adversity, you will face setbacks.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Adam Martin: Guaranteed.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Adam Martin: And if you only have a short-term goal like “I want to make a ton of money,” or “I want a name for myself” or whatever that is, you will fail every time. But if you have a why that is bigger than yourself, if you have a purpose that extends farther beyond you, you will be able to realign with that and stick through that and do what it takes to overcome those hurdles.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.
Adam Martin: For example, if you’re listening to this and you have kids, alright? When you’re sick, when you are exhausted, when you’ve got projects on the line, but your kid needs help, you do it anyway because it’s something bigger than yourself.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep, absolutely.

Adam Martin: It’s the same concept. So that’s why having a why that is clear, aligned with your goals and is bigger than you, making it about other people instead of just yourself, that’s the secret to staying at the long game because it is a process. And the thing you people have to realize is it’s not — and this is something that’s rampant in our profession being everyone Type A. I mean, I’m so Type A, my name starts with A. So I get it, y’all. Real talk. But you have to realize that it’s not going to be getting it right the first time. You can’t focus on being perfect. And we’re wired to think that way because literally as pharmacists, depending on your role, if you’re dispensing, one mistake could kill someone. That’s reality. So we take that thought process, and it translates into other areas of our life. So you have to shift your focus away from perfection and on progress because it’s a process not a one-and-done, and you have to realize that the value is on progress not perfection.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And if I could even add onto that, you know, Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors, would argue that you want to run from perfection. You want to fail often but quickly. And obviously, there’s places where you don’t want to fail and when you think about medication safety and other things. But you know, in terms of developing yourself as an individual, a road of perfection and a road of no challenges is one of the greatest fears I have for my children.

Adam Martin: Yep.

Tim Ulbrich: I don’t want them to have that, you know. They need to have adversity. They need to learn through that because as I reflect back even on a young career, like those moments, being in those, however painful they can be and however significant they seem in the moment, that’s really where the sweetness is happening. And to this concept of why, you know, again, to the listeners, the action-oriented nature of this book, I’m on page 6 here. Here I am, maybe I pick up your book and I feel like I’m just going to fly through this thing. And I’ve got to sit down and reflect on my why. And I can tell you that I recently did this activity to over 100 students in a personal finance course here at Ohio State, and I had them reflect on their why using some of the life planning questions we’ve talked about before on the podcast. And I will tell you through those responses, rarely have people thought about this question. And this is somewhat uncomfortable to think about. I think that’s good, that’s the purpose of the activity, you stop, you reflect. But again, I think it speaks to the nature of this book, you’re not just talking about this concept, you know, here I am on page 6 and I’ve already got to dig in and do some work, which is awesome.

Adam Martin: I love it, man. But yeah, to your point about the action-oriented nature of the book. And I’m an NSA professional speaker. And I tell people this at almost all my talks. I’m not a motivational speaker. I’m not here to pump you up. If you want to get pumped up, go to the gym. I’m here to literally make an impact and get you thinking to change your life and move the needle in the direction so that we can create momentum right now because when I leave, there’s two choices. I leave and a couple days later, you’re right back in your old habits.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah. Right.

Adam Martin: Or in the moment while I’m with you, we create an action plan so that you can just do simple steps to get the momentum moving. And that’s the key because I’m really good at bringing the energy and getting people in peak states of motivation. But unless you do something with that, nothing’s going to happen. So I took that same concept with the book. I talk about the concepts in simple terms to lay it down. But at the end of every chapter, there is a place to put that into practice specific to you, the reader, because all of us are different. We’re all at different places in our life. I’ve had pharmacists that have been graduated over 15 years saying, this book is starting to change my career. So while it’s catered to pharmacy students, it depends where you are in your career. And this really can impact anyone in the profession.

Tim Ulbrich: Well, and to that point, Adam, I mean, I’ve been out of school for 12 years. And I tried to hang onto my title of “new practitioner” as long as I could, but I don’t think I can use it anymore. But I think there’s something to learn here for everyone. I mean, to me, the mindset is you are always learning. So while I talk about your why all the time or I talk about mindset or time management, like, I don’t have all the answers. I mean, I always have something to learn in these areas. And I think this is another great resource that yes, it’s really geared toward pharmacy students, but I think many can learn beyond that. Now, Chapter 2, Mold Your Mindset. And I want to spend a few minutes talking about this because one of the things I love about you, Adam, is I feel like mindset, mindset, mindset. You know, I had a chance to meet with you in person on a couple occasions, and I strategically brought my son with me one time because I wanted him to see firsthand, you know, he might not be able to articulate it as 7 or 8 years, but being around people like you that have positivity, have mindset, you know, it’s a choice that you make despite circumstances that are around you, you know? It reminds me, I’m coaching first and second graders in basketball right now. And we’re learning a lesson on joy v. happiness.

Adam Martin: Ah.

Tim Ulbrich: And so this mindset thing, I want for a moment, give us some practical tips or strategies because I think you do this so well. And you talk about in the book as well that you’ve used or you’ve seen others successfully implement that helps to mold the mindset. You know, I think we all agree that having this mindset is incredibly important, but what are some things that folks can think about that either worked for you or that have worked for others?

Adam Martin: Absolutely. So it really comes down to what your focus is. So Bruce Lee once said, “As you think, so shall you become.” And it’s really a simple concept, but when you try to apply that to the organized chaos of pharmacy, it doesn’t seem so simple because you’ve got a lot of things. You’ve got doctor calls, you’ve got texts, you’ve got patient questions, you’ve got errors, you’ve got issues, all of that stuff. But you’ve got to put a smile on that face. How are you going to do that when you feel stressed and stretched too thin to even like have time to drink water or eat lunch during a break you don’t get or stand on your feet for 13 hours? How are you going to do that? How are you going to smile? How are you going to make it real? So it really comes down to the focus of how you’re going to conduct yourself at work or in your job and then also outside of work because if you’re having a stressful moment and you need to deal with that, that’s not really practical in the moment at a pharmacy because your patients are your priority.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Adam Martin: But if you don’t put in that work of self-growth and development outside, that’s really where it comes from. So to answer your question, what’s a simple tip? It’s really what you focus on. So in pharmacy, in life, there are two realities. There are things that you can control and there are things that you cannot control. And what we tend to do as Type A pharmacists is we like to just blur that line, like, oh, we’ll figure it out. We’ll make this work. So we’re wired as humans to focus on the negative, that’s what we’re wired to because that’s what kept us alive back in the primal age. And you guys probably listening to this, you probably see this happen. You have a win, something’s checked off the list, and it’s just gone. And now you’re focused on what’s the next problem I need to fix.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Adam Martin: And we get our focus set on problems we can’t fix. And if you just look on Facebook at a lot of the large pharmacy pages, that’s all you see is bickering and complaining about things you can’t necessarily control. And while they’re true and I’m not saying there’s no problems, there’s always room for improvement. And yes, there are some issues that we’re facing in our profession. If you focus on that long enough, that’s exactly what you’re going to get. That’s the mindset you’re going to have. That’s the emotion you’re going to create. And that is the action you’re going to interact with others as. So I’m not saying ignore problems, I’m not saying that if you go out in your garden and you see weeds, you close your eyes and say, “No weeds, no weeds, no weeds!” If you open your eyes, the weeds are still there. You’ve got to get down on your knees and yank those suckers out. But what I am saying is focus on the fact that you have the power to pull those weeds out.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Adam Martin: Focus on what you can control and focus on those wins. Look at where you can make an impact, both in your own life and in the life of your colleagues, partner and your patients.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think this is another great example, Adam, and you go on I think in Chapter 3 or 4 talking about self-care and again, bringing back the financial piece, being in a position of having a good mindset, being able to mold your mindset, you have to have other behaviors, other strategies in place to give yourself the opportunity to be there. You know, I think about the value of something like a morning routine for a community pharmacist who gets up, alarm clock goes off, you start checking your email, the day is crazy, you run into a 12-hour shift, and you walk into chaos and in the moment, maybe a floater left you a bunch of baggage from the night before, the phone starts ringing.

Adam Martin: No.

Tim Ulbrich: That day from the very beginning was set up to not necessarily be successful in terms of mindset. So what I like about — and for me, it’s been things like morning routines that include journaling and meditation and prayer and gratitude reflections. And you give some great examples here in the book as well. But I think this is a great area for folks to think about what works for them but starting your day with intentionality, No. 1, and really leaning on others and seeing what others are doing and seeing what ultimately will work for your plan as well. And you know, many have heard this said over and over again, find those that are doing things successful that you want to role model your behaviors after. Find out what they’re doing. And hint, many of those people are very willing to share what their successes are and to talk about it. And so I think really finding people that you look at and say, wow, they’ve really got a different attitude about the day, they’ve got a different mindset. Well, why is that? You know? Ask them some questions, learn about their behaviors and habits. And I think you do a really nice job in Chapter 2 talking about some ways that folks can do that.

Adam Martin: Thank you. But yeah, to your point, that’s absolutely spot-on. You’ve got to have those morning rituals. And it’s super important. But looking at — because what you said happens at the time of getting into work and there’s all these problems. And that’s a slippery slope with the mindset of looking at problems saying, oh, it’s going to be one of those days or, oh, this always happens to me. If you say things like that and believe things like that and say like, oh, I don’t have hours, I don’t have the time, blah, blah, blah, that’s what you’re going to look for. That’s what this concept plays out to be. But instead, if you ask the question of how is this happening for me and if you just change that just a little change in your mindset but specifically the questions you ask will determine the quality of your life. So I just want to harp that point because it’s huge at breaking that slippery slope of negativity.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And I’m going to jump ahead here a little bit in the book. My goal here is not that we would cover the book in its entirety.

Adam Martin: Oh yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: I want folks to pick it up and read it and take action themselves. But in Chapter 9, you talk about Nurture Your Networking. And as soon as I saw you make a connection between network and net worth, I said, “I’ve got to” — I mean, it’s a financial show. Got to ask him about them. It’s something we’ve talked about before, the power of networking. We had David Burkus on the show to talk about his book, “Friend of a Friend.” So talk to me about networking, the importance, the value and ultimately, you know, why a pharmacy student should be really strategically thinking about this and how they may feel like hey, I’m in a vulnerable position, I don’t really have much to contribute or share, you know, some practical strategies for how they can implement this.

Adam Martin: Excellent question. So the profession of pharmacy hinges on one concept: It’s all about relationships. And that is so true. And that applies to all areas of life, whatever profession, whatever niche you’re in. It’s all about relationships. And how many of you have heard pharmacy’s a small world? So that’s the truth. And you can either ignore it or ask how can I be resourceful with this fact, coming back to that question that you ask yourself. So a lot of times, to your question of how can people get started if they’re a pharmacy student or if they have this thinking of, oh, I haven’t started yet. And they get in that trap of comparison like, oh, well I don’t have a podcast or I don’t have a book or I don’t have Your Financial Pharmacist success, like who am I to say this and that? Don’t fall into that imposter syndrome.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Adam Martin: Every single person would be so grateful to learn from your experience. And in another chapter, I talk about the three levels of mentorship. And that is the concept that a lot of us think of as, oh, just get someone that has more degrees than the thermometer and learn everything that they know. And that’s mentorship. That’s one of three parts. The other part is having someone on your level that is looking to make progress. But the other part that so many people miss is the best way to learn is to teach. And while you might think that you’re not “there yet,” or you haven’t “made it,” whatever that means, you have people in your influence, in your school, in your company, that would love to learn your points that you’ve gone through, that are starting where you started a year or two ago. So the third part of mentorship is teaching someone who is starting where you started. While you might not think you have value, everyone has a story, everyone has experiences, and everybody wants a mentor. So by teaching that, it creates what I call the win-win-win framework. You can stock that so that you win, they win, and the people you serve win because both of you are rising together.

Tim Ulbrich: Love that. Great advice. So again, we’ve just hit on a couple high points here. I would encourage our listeners, check out a copy of the book, FitPharmacist.com/book. And as Adam mentioned, Part 1 is Your Prescription to Dominate Pharmacy School, ranging topics from why to mindset, self-care, time management, networking, mentorship, just so much wisdom here. And again, a resource I certainly wish I would have had in pharmacy school. And then Part 2, Script Your Career, experts speak, over 20 different experts sharing their career journey, stories and what’s allowed them to be successful in their own regards. And I think, Adam, before I wrap up with a couple questions here, I want to come full circle. You know, you alluded to this concept of making it, whatever that means. And I think bringing this all the way back to the beginning, this is why I loved that you started Chapter 1 with the why because all of this really goes back to this concept of what is the goal? You know, I think so many pharmacy students have this image of success in their mind or residents, they’re chasing something. But they haven’t stopped to think about what are they chasing? Why are they chasing? And do they really want to be chasing that?

Adam Martin: Absolutely.

Tim Ulbrich: And you know, this is where you see people I think often that may be 5, 7, 10 years out and maybe they finally got to whatever they had aspired to be, but they look up and say, “I’m burned out, I’m miserable. This isn’t what I thought I would be.” And I think it goes back to all the way to the beginning, taking time to stop and reflect and say, “Why? Why? What was the purpose to begin with?” And then you start to mold the plan around the why. So we often have people that approach us and say, “You know, I’ve got a really cool idea. I’d like to write a book. But my gosh, I have no idea where to start.” You mentioned four years. We might have scared them based on that statement. But talk to us about process. Like what was this like for you in terms of the daily, the weekly, the monthly rhythms to ultimately have something that you’re holding in hand and you’re distributing it? What was the process that you were able to implement to write the book?

Adam Martin: Yeah, so that comes to what we started this podcast talking about is you don’t want to be perfect the first time. You want to leverage your struggle to create your strength. And that’s really how my whole personal brand began, and that’s a whole other podcast that I think we did, actually. But the thing is is for me, one of my weaknesses is I get great ideas. And if I don’t write them down right away, they’re gone. And I don’t know if you ever resonate with this, but you’ll have a great idea and then like you get distracted and then you think, oh, what was that awesome idea? And you like think and think and think and it never comes back. So I learned quickly to avoid that pain of what was that golden nugget to writing things down. So I would just get ideas, whether it was driving to work or at home or whatever. Most of my ideas come from walking or in the shower. Real talk.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep. I’m with you there.

Adam Martin: So I would just write those down. And that’s literally how I started. I got these ideas and as I kept writing them down, I started to see the structure. I started to see how those aligned in a bigger picture. I would have — so I’m very active on Instagram @thefitpharmacist is the best place to reach me — but I would have people ask me questions through DM or commenting on my posts about struggles, about things they’ve been dealing with. And I kept seeing repeat questions. I was like, wow, there’s a need here. This needs to be addressed. So collectively, just taking notes and engaging with people and just being of service to others, that’s where this content, that’s where this concept came from. So a lot of people think, oh, you’ve got to sit down and crank it out and write 12 hours a day. No, guys. Like this book started from getting an idea and writing it down.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Adam Martin: Getting an idea and writing it down. Doing it over and over again and just looking at how can this be of value? And that’s how you start. It’s always a draft when you start. So why not start with one word?

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and this reminds me of one of my favorite books, “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, you know, which relates to finances but any goal, any project you’re working on, is small steps eventually over time result in big things. And I think that’s so true with writing, you know, you’ll see often people will do writing challenges, a few hundred words here or there. But it’s really true. It’s the habit, it’s the practice, and you surprise yourself. You look back and say, “Wow. I didn’t realize I could do this.” Then you start to shape it, you form it, it becomes a chapter. You beat it up, you get to Version 2, Version 3, and so on. But so much less intimidating than starting out and saying OK, I’m going to write a book from scratch. And I always encourage people, if there’s a topic you’re really passionate about, you know, start writing it down and posting things on LinkedIn and doing some other things. Then after 10 or 15 or 20 of those, you’ve got the beginnings of what could be a chapter or a section of a book or certainly could be a podcast or some other medium. Something I also want to point out to our listeners that are thinking about OK, so yes, Adam, you’ve written a book, but you’ve also built a brand. And sometimes I hate that word because I think it’s like we envision Adam as just like scheming in his house how to brand and market things. But the point I want to make here is that as I followed your journey for several years, you started in one place, which is a place I’m passionate about. You provided a value and service to others based on a pain point and a problem that needed to be solved and was one that you were passionate about. You didn’t start by thinking about how you were going to scheme a brand. You started by providing value, providing value, providing value, consistently, regularly, and from that, you’ve learned from the community what they’ve like, what they’ve resonated, what they’re passionate about, where you can provide a service. And so as you’re working then on a book, something like that, you’ve got a group that’s been following you and following your work because you have served them. And I think in my opinion, great businesses are formed off of serving individuals. And I’ve truly believed when you do that well, often the business will follow closely behind.

Adam Martin: 100%. And that comes back to your question about what’s the value of networking, and it’s what you just said. It’s all about relationships. So again, I like providing value in everything I say whether it’s a podcast or talking, so challenge to you, the listener. If you’re thinking about writing a book, if you’re thinking about doing any sort of endeavor whether starting or diving deeper, ask yourself two questions: What are you passionate about? And how can this help other people? Just like someone who thought, I’m passionate about investing and creating financial freedom, I see that there’s a problem with students coming out of pharmacy school at an average of $120,000 in debt, there is a need. I can help them based on my passion. Who am I describing, Tim?

Tim Ulbrich: Sounds familiar. Vaguely.

Adam Martin: Yeah, you. Exactly. And because of that, because you focused on that, you have built a brand that is so strong because it’s not based on scheming or how can I get a quick buck? It’s on how can I create relationships with people that have a need that I can solve based on my passion. And that concept, that’s your avenue. Mine’s the same with mindset and health. And I realize that our niches, you know, cross ways in a lot of different paths. And in speaking with you through the years, that’s what’s been so exciting with what’s coming up in the future because yes, self-care, self-development is great health and fitness-wise and creating that freedom, but then there’s also the financial piece. That’s the piece that together, creates the whole picture of the pharmacy student, of the pharmacist, to really be the best version of themselves so that they can dispense their full potential to those that they work with and serve.

Tim Ulbrich: And speaking of those paths crossing over, you and I have been scheming for a long time to figure out, man, how can we work together on a speaking engagement, something we both love doing, we’re passionate about inspiring others. And we’re excited to announce it’s finally going to happen this spring. Saturday, April 30, the Ohio Pharmacists Association annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, really excited. Great meeting that OPA puts on each and every year. They get a great draw of students and new practitioners and pharmacists and we’re excited to bring this topic. So for those that are attending the Ohio Pharmacists Association meeting or maybe perhaps we can inspire them to do that after hearing this, what can those attending expect to hear from our session? What can they take away?

Adam Martin: Absolutely. So real, practical tips on how to manage stress, fit in fitness and create financial freedom for your life. Those things are crushing our profession. They are stopping people from living their dream and leading to burnout, which is a huge epidemic. And by the way, not just here in the States, but I saw it in Ireland too. And that’s why there was a whole conference on self-care because there’s a need, because there’s advice out there. And I’m sure a lot of you resonate with this. It doesn’t seem practical, it’s not specific to our profession and/or taught by people that are actually in the trenches, facing these problems themselves. That’s why I’m really excited for this because I speak the truth, like I’ll talk and I’ll be like, “Hey, I just dealt with this issue yesterday working my 13-hour shift.” Tim, you got out of school with — like your transformation financially is tremendous and you write about that in “Seven Figure Pharmacist.” And that’s the real talk is we face these things ourselves. And we’re able to speak about them with such conviction and passion because we’ve overcome them and we want to help you do it too.

Tim Ulbrich: It’s going to be a lot of fun. Saturday, April 4. I said the 3rd. It’s actually Saturday, April 4. We’re on for 8:15 a.m. And I can tell you, I don’t think the coffee’s going to be needed when Dr. Adam Martin is in the room. So we’re going to bring a lot of energy. We’d love to see you there. You can register for the OPA annual meeting, learn more about the scheduled events, including this session, by visiting OhioPharmacists.org. So Adam, in addition to picking up a copy of the book, FitPharmacist.com/book, best way for our listeners to reach out to you and learn more about the work that you’re doing over the Fit Pharmacist?

Adam Martin: So the ‘gram is jam. So hit up Instagram, @thefitpharmacist, also on the Facebook page where I create many memes because laughter is the best medicine. So you can get all of your funny memes and gifs and everything else in between on The Fit Pharmacist. That’s Facebook, @FitPharmFam.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Always a pleasure, always inspired by the work that you’re doing. Excited for more collaborations in the future and to see what lies ahead and certainly greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this interview and to share your work with the YFP community.

Adam Martin: Hey, Tim, it’s an honor to be on here. Thank you so much for having me. I believe 100% in what you’re doing. And that’s why I’m super excited for this collab.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And to the YFP community, as always, we appreciate you joining us. And if you like what you heard on this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your shows each and every week. Again, thank you for joining us, and have a great rest of your week.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 137: How to Monetize Your Clinical Expertise


How to Monetize Your Clinical Expertise

Diana Isaacs joins Tim Church on this side hustle edition to talk about her journey in becoming an expert in diabetes and how she has been able to monetize her clinical expertise through speaking engagements, advisory boards, consulting projects and CE articles.

About Today’s Guest

Diana Isaacs, PharmD, BCPS, BC-ADM, BCACP, CDE is the Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Program Coordinator and Endocrinology Clinical Pharmacy Specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Diabetes Center. Her role includes clinical practice, teaching, and research. She provides medication management and runs a robust CGM shared medical appointment program.

Summary

Diana Isaacs shares how she monetizes her clinical expertise in diabetes on this side hustle edition.

Diana’s training after graduating college was in pharmacy practice and ambulatory care. She gained clinical expertise and took additional training to receive certifications and specializations. She fell in love with diabetes and started working more and more in the field. She now works as a Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Program Coordinator and Endocrinology Clinical Pharmacy Specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Diabetes Center. Diana was recently awarded the 2020 AADE Diabetes Educator of the Year.

Her passion for diabetes is palpable and has allowed her to become an expert in the field. When she’s working at night on her side hustle as a clinical diabetes expert, she doesn’t feel as though she’s working but more that she’s doing a hobby she loves. She’s monetized her passion and expertise in several ways, including speaking engagements and presentations, advisory boards, consulting projects and CE articles and courses. She earns the most from honorariums which varies between $500 to $3,000/event. Advisory boards come in occasionally and bring in between $1,000 to $2,5000/board. Diana receives $500 to $4,000/CE article and if she works on a consulting project she usually earns $1,000 to $2,500.

The biggest reason for her success has been her willingness to say yes to opportunities and to reach out to organizations or conferences in which she’s interested in speaking.

Diana says it’s hard to quantify how many hours she works, however she makes it happen! Her side hustle has increased over time so she didn’t feel the brunt of working several additional hours on top of her day job at once. She has a very supportive husband that works part-time and is able to take on more with the children and household tasks. She works at night after her children go to bed but takes off Saturdays and Sundays when she can to make sure she’s present for her children and husband.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Diana, thanks for stopping for and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Diana Isaacs: Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

Tim Church: I first want to congratulate you on your recent award. And that is the 2020 AADE Diabetes Educator of the Year. And this is an award that honors a diabetes educator who has made a special contribution to the field through dedication, innovation, and sensitivity in patient care. Now Diana, this is a really big deal, and I wanted to ask you, what does winning this award mean to you?

Diana Isaacs: Oh, well thanks. Yeah, it’s been a really exciting year. Winning this award has been tremendous. I mean, I’m so grateful to be recognized for it. And it’s definitely opened up a lot of opportunities for me in terms of it almost seemed like overnight, people were like, oh, she’s an expert in diabetes. And it’s given me a lot of new opportunities to pursue.

Tim Church: That’s great. And when was the last time a pharmacist won this award? Because this isn’t something specific to pharmacists. This is really anybody in the diabetes space.

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, that’s one of the things I really love about the organization AADE, the American Association of Diabetes Educators, is that it is, it’s a multidisciplinary. You’ve got nurses, nurse practitioners, DAs, exercise physiologists, you’ve got dieticians, you’ve really got everybody. And so it’s just — it’s really special I think to be recognized by all the different disciplines. And in terms of the last time a pharmacist, I think when I looked it was like 12 years. So it definitely had been a long time.

Tim Church: That is so cool. And it’s really awesome to see you being recognized because as we’re going to jump into, you really have done a lot for diabetes in terms of your scholarship activities and a lot of the committees and things that you’ve been on. So I’m excited to jump into that. But obviously getting this award is not something that happened by accident. So I want you to talk a little bit about your career path.
Diana Isaacs: Yeah, sure. So let’s see. Going all the way back, I graduated from SIUE, it’s about 10 — actually exactly 10 years ago now. I did a pharmacy practice residency with an emphasis in ambulatory care at the Philadelphia VA. And then I was really fortunate to get my first position as a clinical assistant professor with a practice site at the VA, getting to manage diabetes. And I think through that, I really was able to gain clinical expertise in managing different types of patients and seeing different types of things. And I pursued my certifications, like my CDE and the BCEDMs, I’m board-certified in advanced diabetes management. And really, I think one of the things that really stands out is I say yes. I definitely say yes to different opportunities and also seeking out whenever there was an opportunity to be able to speak at a meeting, whether a local program or anything, really trying to grow myself professionally.

Tim Church: So a lot of those opportunities, did you have to be very intentional about getting? Were some of those given to you?

Diana Isaacs: So that is a great question. So yeah, the golden ticket, right, is when you get one of those emails that says, “Hey, will you do this? And we’ll pay you all this money, and we’d like you to present here and write this.” Those emails come sometimes, and they have fortunately come more often since getting this award, but no. For the most part, I sought things out. When I saw that a meeting was accepting abstracts to be able to speak, I drew up an abstract and I submitted it. I, you know, submitted lots of proposals for lots of different things. I worked really, really hard. And some of the things stuck, and many times, they didn’t get accepted. But I kind of just kept trying.

Tim Church: And did you have any failures along the way when you submitted those proposals?

Diana Isaacs: Well, I don’t like to think of it as failure, right? Because you’re trying to think of it as you’re growing. But yeah, I like to think of it as like I throw 100 darts at a board, and two of them stick. And that’s great. I’ll pursue those two things. So yeah, I feel like I apply for lots of things. I’ve tried to really do a lot of different things and yeah, sometimes I don’t make it, they choose someone else, I don’t get it this time, but I just kind of keep trying. And I really try to keep my ears open for opportunities. That’s something I’ve been pretty good about paying attention, you know, sometimes you get those emails where it’s like, you can apply for this. Like for example, with the American Diabetes Association, they have these special interest groups. And I’ve been wanting to get involved with ADA, and so I applied for that. And I ended up being appointed as communication director for the pregnancy and reproductive health group. And that was just an opportunity that hey, I paid attention to my email, I filled out the application, I submitted it. And it worked out. So I think, you know, a lot of it is reading your emails and seeing what opportunities are out there.

Tim Church: At what point in your career did you realize that you had become an expert and really had authority in this space?

Diana Isaacs: So I don’t — I guess I’m still growing, and I like to think I’m still definitely growing and evolving and there’s so much to learn with diabetes that I don’t know if anyone is a full expert. But I think, you know, definitely earning this award this year has solidified some of my confidence. And I think over — especially in my current position, so right now, I’m at the Cleveland Clinic Diabetes Center. And I think in this space, I see such complex cases. I get to do so many cool things here that I think I just realized, you know, when I interact with other people that I am seeing a lot more, a lot more diverse things that I’m becoming an expert, I guess you could say.

Tim Church: So what would be some of the examples of complex cases or things that maybe most pharmacists kind of in an amb-care setting may not see every day?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so I get to do a lot of work with the post-kidney transplant population. And that’s a lot of fun. So there, we do a bunch of kidney transplants there. And unfortunately, our patients were kind of falling through the cracks. That was a need when I came here, that they weren’t getting good glycemic management right after that transplant. It was hard to get into endocrinology. So that’s a service that I took on. And now I see a lot of those patients. And so it’s just, it’s very interesting because they’re on high dose steroids, they’re tapering over a month’s time, they just had a transplant so they’re acutely sick. Many of them, even if they didn’t have diabetes before, now they have steroid-induced hyperglycemia, and it’s really an art to it because there’s no specific protocols. It’s really every person’s different, and you have to very closely manage it. And then in addition to that, sometimes you see the pancreas-kidney transplant. Like I have a patient this week, she had it, and you know, you would hope, right, the dream is that if you get a pancreas transplanted, you don’t need insulin anymore. But it doesn’t always work like that. They call it like angry pancreas. Like it takes some time for that new pancreas to adjust. So then we have her on Metformin and like we’re trying to see, are we doing a DPP4 inhibitor and what else are we going to do? And so it’s just — man, it’s a lot of cool stuff, a lot of cancer patients, a lot of just everything, like post-bariatric surgery, hypoglycemia, people doing keto and de-escalating therapy, lots of CGM, diabetes technology, insulin pumps, just lots of cool stuff here.

Tim Church: So it sounds like that the providers are how they come in through the clinic, they’re like if they’re complex or it’s going to be difficult, we just send them to Diana. Is that pretty close to how it works?

Diana Isaacs: So I am so fortunate. I work with like the most amazing doctors, and I have an amazing, amazing team. So what I try to do when coming here — because I was the first full-time pharmacist put into the diabetes center — was I tried to find where would I be most useful? And some of the areas I recognized that were one, we were underutilizing diabetes technology, so like insulin pump adjustments and getting more patients on CGM. And then the kidney transplant need was really two areas where I decided that I would really be best utilized, and so those are kind of niches that I’ve I guess developed. But yeah, I try to be helpful wherever I can for the team.

Tim Church: That’s really cool, and I think those are obviously niche areas within diabetes itself, but through the organization that you work for, obviously if those are very frequent types of patients that are coming in, there’s certainly going to be a need. And I think that’s really cool how you positioned yourself to basically say, what are the needs out there and how can I best be a part of this service and impact patient care in that way? So I think that’s really cool the approach that you took.

Diana Isaacs: Thanks. Yeah, and I try — you know, a lot of times, pharmacists will come and ask me what they can do and how they can get involved, and I think it’s really every place is unique and it’s about assessing the needs and making sure you’re not stepping on other people’s toes but you’re adding value to the team.

Tim Church: So besides kind of positioning yourself as an expert by taking on very difficult cases, very unique cases that many people may not see all the time, you know, one of the things I thought about prior to our interview was the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. And essentially, one of the conclusions of that book is that in order to become an expert, you need 10,000 hours. So a lot of people out there — obviously you don’t become an expert, you don’t become a member of the Beatles like overnight. The Beatles don’t become The Beatles overnight. It takes a lot of time and practice in order to get to that point. So what do you think about that in the context of your personal journey?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, hard work is required. I mean, I work hard. But the thing is, it’s not boring or tedious. I just, like I really love diabetes. And I love that I can use my skills in diabetes to be able to help people. Almost 10% of people now have diabetes. So wherever I am, I’m able to make an impact and to directly help people. And so like for me, I love doing it so much that I don’t think of it as work. Like if I am working on a project or I’ll do this stuff in the evenings, and I don’t really think about it because I’m enjoying doing it. But absolutely, like the hard work is necessary. And I think on one hand, that should be inspiring because it’s not that you have to have like some special secret skill or talent. Like every person or every pharmacist should know, like if they work hard enough in a certain area, they can become a clinical expert.

Tim Church: And I think too — and I think obviously, you’ve already kind of talked about this, but just that repetition of seeing the number of patients over and over and over, and you start to develop certain patterns. You know, obviously you’re going to have some complex cases that you’ve never seen before, but it’s almost kind of like it adds to the — your own repertoire of knowing OK, I’ve seen a patient like this in the past and this is how he or she has responded. And I’ve kind of instilled that in the training programs is when we take residents — because for those that don’t know, I also do primarily diabetes management, but I’m always pushing the residents and students to really see as many different types of patients as possible because that repetition is so key, even if it seems monotonous and tedious at the time.
Diana Isaacs: Yeah, and I think the great thing about kind of the ambulatory care environment too is you’re interacting, you’re communicating with different types of people. So you can always learn from every person. And so that’s really the art of it that makes it really unique and something — I have a lot of trainees, a lot of residents and students that I work with. And that’s something, you know, you can have two exact same clinical situations but what you do may be different depending on like the patient’s attitudes and other factors. So yeah, that communication and, like you said, repetition, is very helpful for navigating different situations.

Tim Church: So who or what really inspired you to become an expert? I can tell like just from your voice, obviously this is where you’re already passionate about. But is there anyone who inspired you to basically continue to achieve, continue to get to the next level?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah. So I want to highlight, so Jess Kerr, who is faculty at SIUE where I went to pharmacy school, was very inspiring. She was faculty and had a practice site — or still has a practice site at the VA. And I wanted to do what she did. I guess that passion I saw, she had that passion for helping people and I really wanted — she seemed so happy — and I really wanted to be that. I was very fortunate to get a position like that. I think something else that actually stands out is my math teacher, actually in high school. I had a really bad attitude about math. And I was like, fine, like this is too hard. Like I’m just getting C’s, like I don’t care. This is just way too hard, I don’t feel like doing it. But she invested all this time in me. And she encouraged me to have a positive mental attitude, PMA, and she said things like, “Dream it. Believe it. Achieve it.” And that really shifted things. Like I learned that my attitude really dictates how situations will turn out. And just through changing my mindset, having a positive attitude, things can go really well. So I turned myself around, I went from C’s to A’s. And I think that that message really stuck with me in a lot of different areas, not just pharmacy and diabetes but in other areas of my life too.

Tim Church: That’s really cool. And I think that a lot of people, they would not be where they are unless they heard some message, received some encouragement from somebody. So that’s cool. And I think it’s great that you highlighted those individuals. So obviously you’ve reached this expert status in managing diabetes and along with that comes some engagements and proposals and things where you can really show off those skills but also help other clinicians help patients. So talk about some of the ways that you were able to start monetizing your clinical expertise.

Diana Isaacs: Yeah. So it’s been exciting because I’ve done a lot of things over my career for free, put a lot of sweat and tears — not usually tears. But yeah, now I’m getting paid to actually speak and things like that. And I love — it happens to be that I love giving presentations. And so that now, you know, I get paid to give presentations. And part of actually what I’m doing with this Educator of the Year is I get to give presentations and then beyond the five that I will give and that I kind of already received an award for, I can do additional ones where they pay me and I’ve been able to set my price. And so that’s been exciting. And then another side benefit has been that industry has been interested in me too. So now I’m speaking for DexCom as well as I’m on the speakers bureau for Novo and for Zerus, and so that is very exciting.

Tim Church: So take a step back for the award, the Diabetes Educator of the Year, they’re already guaranteeing you five speaking spots? And are those individual speaking gigs, those are paid for? Is it one lump sum that they’re giving you?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so what happened is I got $5,000 up front for that. And in that, I agreed to speak at five places, which I got to choose — or places could request me, and then I got to choose from the list of people that requested me. And then beyond that five, then additional places can request me. But they won’t get the financial assistance. So they would have to pay for my travel and then pay for my honorarium on their own.

Tim Church: So besides speaking, what are some of the other ways you’ve been able to monetize?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so things like CE articles, so places like Pharmacy Times, Power Pack, they will basically — they will pay you to write CE articles or like give webinars. So that’s one thing I’ve been able to do. Also, like in the webinar and course development — so I actually do a lot of stuff with AADE. There’s a whole CGM course. And it’s going to be turning into a certificate. But I was involved in that. And so that’s led to a lot of honorariums along the way. We even most recently created videos for it on how to counsel on CGM. And so there’s been a good number of honorariums for that as well.

Tim Church: That’s great. So can you break down kind of the different ways you’re earning and what they would typically provide in terms of an honorarium? And that could be like a range.

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so it really varies a lot from place to place. Like some places, you do a local program, and you speak, and you get $1,500. And that’s to cover — it usually would be like a one-hour program. Depending on the company, sometimes they’ll give you the slides. And sometimes, they’ll have you pick from slides or they’ll let you put together slides, depending on how much freedom you have. Usually, many places will pay — if it’s not done that way, they’ll pay you an hourly rate and then they will pay for presentation development. So like usually, that honorarium ranges from I would say from $200-300 an hour. And so that would, you know, if it takes 10 hours to prepare, say that would be $2,500. And then the presentation itself usually will be like a $2,000 honorarium as well. So I would say like usually, when I speak, I’ll get anywhere form like $1,000 to $5,000. $5,000 being the best and not usually so normal. But that’s kind of a range. And then they pay for travel and hotel and all that, flight and all that good stuff. Recently, I was asked to speak as part of this diabetes program, which is training people for CDE. And that, I think we agreed on like $600 per hour of speaking. But that wouldn’t be prep time, that would probably just be like the time. So if I speak for five hours, then it’s $3,000. So that’s kind of for the speaking stuff, that’s usually how it works out.

Tim Church: And then have you been able to cross — I mean, obviously with AADE, ADA, those are multidisciplinary organizations — but have you gone and done presentations specifically for physicians, for nurse practitioners, physician assistants?

Diana Isaacs: Yes, so I was just recently asked to speak for like the dietician organization. So I think that’s beginning to happen. I was asked to speak also for ADA post-grad sessions, which is in early February. So that’s exciting because that’s an organization, there’s a lot more physicians in that organization. And of course, I do a lot of speaking AADE. So I think I’m starting to tap into these other organizations as well.

Tim Church: You mentioned to me before we jumped on the call that besides speaking, besides CE articles, some of the other ways you’ve been able to monetize have been being a part of advisory boards and then also consulting. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Diana Isaacs: Oh yeah. Advisory boards are like the greatest thing in the world. They’re usually like these — it’ll be like four hours and you’ll get paid like $250 an hour, plus if there was any travel. But the best is when they’re local, and you just like go for four hours and you get $1,000. Those are wonderful. I love when those happen. Other things, like for consulting, just different types of like writing or I get asked a lot of stuff about CGM type of stuff. Like now, I’ll be working on a supplement for the Diabetes Educator for InPen by Companion Medical, so stuff like that pays. Oh, recently I got asked to do this Medscape thing, which that sounds actually really cool. It’s like about time and range. And they’re — I guess it’s more kind of like an interview. They asked me to pick a nurse that I like working with, so I picked my favorite nurse. And we’re going to go I guess to like New York to film this brief thing. But that was like another kind of cool thing that I was like, oh, wow. That’s interesting. So all that stuff’s been cool. And I guess one of the things I’ve learned is, you know, I’ve done lots of things for free in my life. And I love doing it. So sometimes, it’s like easy to get to be like, oh yeah, I’ll just do this. But recently, I’ve tried to set my boundaries that hey, if someone’s asking for a good amount of my time, to make sure that I am getting paid fairly for my amount of time.

Tim Church: Sure, I mean, I think that’s absolutely reasonable. And you’ve done a lot of the things in the past to get to the point where you are where you weren’t necessarily compensated. But I think it’s incredible all the different ways you’ve been able to monetize. And obviously, along the way, you’re providing a lot of value, whether that be organizations or education that ultimately gets in the hands of patients itself, which is really cool. Can you break down in terms of percentages — so all of these different things that you’re doing to monetize — can you break down kind of what is the highest in terms of bringing in the revenue? Without specific amounts, just kind of what percentages does speaking bring in versus advisory boards, consulting, CE, etc.?

Diana Isaacs: So I think speaking definitely brings in — if it’s like a big program where — like I’ll give you another example. Like at AADE, I had a bunch of presentations, but then I had this one presentation, it was sponsored by Abbott. And so the honorarium was like $2,000. So that’s something that just brings in money, I feel like quickly, especially if it’s a topic that I’m pretty comfortable with. Like another example was a CE article that I did, it was also on CGM, and that paid $4,000. And so those are topics I’m very comfortable with. So those are easy and much faster, I guess, to earn the money. Other things, like writing sometimes. You know, writing can take awhile, so especially if it’s a topic you’re less familiar with. So now I try to stay in the diabetes realm. But I actually, like last year, I wrote an article about hyperhidrosis, which was not as familiar to me as other disease states. So that one took a little bit more time. So I guess what I’m saying is it’s hard to completely break it down. But I think for sure speaking, advisory boards pay a lot, but those are really unpredictable. So you know, I could have two advisory boards in one month or I can go almost a year without an advisory board. It’s just, it really depends on the needs of the company and what area they’re targeting and everything. So I think it just really varies. Another thing that brings in revenue, though, which is kind of cool, is speaker training. So whenever you speak for one of these companies, they want you to get trained. And so like that, that’s amazing because you get your hourly rate for a bunch of hours and you’re not presenting or anything, you’re just learning. And so that’s pretty cool.

Tim Church: How does that work?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so like with Dexcom, I was really fortunate because I missed the original training, and two people came out to me and like just trained me for four hours. And like I earned $1,000 and it was amazing. Other ones, like I’ve been invited now for this year to go to a Dexcom and to a Novo training. And so those, I’ll be flying out to like to Florida in the winter, so it’s not like it’s so bad. I think the other one’s California. But it’s just basically like a day, and they’ll be paid an hourly rate. And the good thing about those is it will be with other people on their speakers bureau. So the opportunity to interact — but those are really interesting because you learn more about their product. And so I mean, I just find it’s incredibly helpful and interesting, and I get to earn money. So it’s really awe — I mean, it’s really cool to get to do that kind of stuff.

Tim Church: Yeah, it sounds like you’re getting just a tremendous amount of opportunities, which is really cool. Would you say that now at the point of where you are that most of these opportunities are already being asked of you where you’re not having to reach out as much anymore to get them in motion?

Diana Isaacs: So yes and no. So yeah, like fortunately with the pharma stuff, that’s been really exciting. But I think it goes both ways because I was pretty interested in Zerus and definitely let them know that I was interested in being a consultant for them. I’m definitely getting asked more, but I’ll tell you, there’s still things I apply for. So I think it depends the caliber of what it is. I am, fortunately, getting asked a lot more. But there’s certain things that I — I’ll give you an example, OK? So this isn’t so like — this makes sense. So like ADA Standards of Care, I would like love more than anything to be on the committee that develops the standards of care, OK? So that’s something you have to apply for. So that is something that I hope to apply for and if I were to get selected for something like that, that would be like a career dream. So I think it goes both ways, maybe my dreams are even higher now than they were before. But yeah, I still, I’m open to new opportunities and still — will still apply for things.

Tim Church: So looking back, now that you’ve obviously been able to monetize, you’ve been able to bring in extra income, what are you doing with the additional income that you’re bringing in with your side hustle?

Diana Isaacs: That is also a great question. So honestly, I just live my — I don’t want to stress about money, and I think bringing in the extra money allows me to live a very comfortable life without stressing. I work very, very full-time between my regular job and all these extra consulting opportunities. My husband, fortunately, is able to work part-time, which is good because then someone is home more for the kids and I feel like we have more balance, and he’s able to take care of some more of the stuff at home. So I think for us, it’s just really about not having this stress, being able to buy what we want, and then whatever extra, college funds, all that good stuff.

Tim Church: Cool. So how much time do you think in most weeks you’re spending kind of on consulting and all these other activities that are outside of your scope of your full-time positon?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, that’s hard to quantify. I will say every Saturday, I completely disconnect and I am not using the phone, I’m not working, I’m like really just with the family. So I always have that day. And even Sundays, I try to really make family day. And I’m fortunate that I have a position that’s Monday through Friday so that I have my weekends off. I try really hard to do my extra work in the evenings when my kids go to sleep and like evening-weekend — or weekend-evenings. I try not to take too much time away when my kids are awake. It’s definitely a balancing act. I feel like I make it work. I don’t know. Maybe it seems like I work a lot, but I try — somehow, it all works.

Tim Church: I was going to ask you, what other tips do you have? Because I mean, you’re doing so much, you have a family, I mean, I think a lot of people when they think about the thought of taking on something in addition to their full-time job, it almost seems like it’s impossible.

Diana Isaacs: So I guess it’s built up like over time, so it hasn’t felt like oh, it’s this massive thing all at once except when I have an article that’s due and I waited until the last second to do it, which isn’t great. But I don’t know, I just, I don’t do — like I don’t watch TV really. I don’t go to movies, I try to minimize distractions. I’d like to say I’m perfect about social media, but I definitely like to post things on Twitter and stuff. But I try to really minimize the outside distractions. And when I am home with my family to really focus on my kids and not be distracted. And that way, when they go to bed, like I can really devote my time, you know, like whatever, from 8:30-10 on whatever I want to work on. So I just — and I think I just love what I do. I just love it so much that for me, it’s like my hobby, right? Like if someone else likes to paint or likes to do whatever, they would make time for that. So for me, this is kind of like my hobby. I just really enjoy it. And so I just — like I make time for it.

Tim Church: And it sounds like too that it sounds like your husband is very supportive in you doing these extra activities and things like that. And obviously, you said it makes it a little bit easier that he’s part-time. But would you say that he’s played a big role for you to be successful with all these other ventures?

Diana Isaacs: Oh my gosh, yes. Yeah. I mean, he’s the only reason that I can do what I do. He’s like really good at managing the kids, going grocery shopping, like he’s really on top of it, but also I have cleaning help. Like that’s a must. I definitely, I have cleaning help, a lot of cleaning help. So that’s another thing I use my money for lots of cleaning help. But yeah, I mean, you have to have that support. And he knows that I love doing this stuff, so he is supportive as long as I’m not out of town too much. And that’s the part I have to balance because all these speaking gigs, trying to just make sure — I like to be home on the weekends when I can and stuff. But yeah, it’s a balancing act, but it’s fun.

Tim Church: Well, Diana, this has been a great time. And obviously, it’s just cool to hear your passion in your voice. I mean, obviously, this is an area where you’ve become an expert and be able to impact not only clinicians but patients just in your full-time job but with all the work that you do. So what tips or suggestions would you have for others who want to become an expert in a particular clinical area?

Diana Isaacs: So this is going to go against all that burnout, resiliency talk that you hear. But just say yes. Like this whole thing about saying no to avoid burnout, I just, I disagree with it. And I think in order to be an expert, to have new opportunities, you’ve got to say yes. You’ve got to open yourself up to that because you never know, like when you say no because you’re worried, oh, it might overwhelm you, what you’re going to miss out on. And the thing is when you say no a lot, that really closes doors and people don’t want to ask you again. So I just, I like really encourage people to say yes or at least really, really think about it before being so quick to say no. And then the other thing is just look for those opportunities. Don’t expect that people are going to hand you things. You do have to work hard. It doesn’t happen overnight, but that’s OK. And just look for new opportunities.

Tim Church: Diana, if somebody wants to learn more about you and what you’re doing, what’s the best way to reach out?

Diana Isaacs: Yeah, so you can email me, you can find me on Twitter, @DianaMIsaacs. Yeah, I’d be happy to chat with anyone who’s interested in talking. So yeah, feel free to shoot me an email. If we’re going to one of the same meetings, we can meet up there. So yeah, happy to connect with anyone who’s interested.

Tim Church: Diana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your story and your tips and suggestions. It’s been a lot of fun.

Diana Isaacs: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 131: Secrets to Building a Successful Side Hustle


Secrets to Building a Successful Side Hustle

Eric Christianson joins Tim Church to talk about his business Med Ed 101. Eric discusses his why behind beginning his side hustle, how it allowed him to drop down to part-time from his traditional pharmacist role and how it helped him accelerate his financial goals.

About Today’s Guest

Eric Christianson is a clinical pharmacist passionate about patient safety, geriatrics, MTM, long term care, and helping pharmacists pass their board certification exam. He is the owner of the blog at www.meded101.com, a valuable resource for practicing healthcare professionals and students alike who are interested in learning more about the practical application of clinical pharmacy. He has also created Real Life Pharmacology, a podcast designed to teach pharmacology and provide some insight into the practice of clinical pharmacy. He has 2 wonderful children and the best wife in the world.

Summary

When Eric worked as a pharmacist consultant he recognized problems in long term care and soon discovered a passion for promoting pharmacy education. He started blogging and sharing content on social media fueled by his passion for getting this information out there. Eric quickly grew an audience and officially created an LLC, Med Ed 101. After building trust with his followers by sharing free content for so long, he decided to try to monetize the content he was creating.

Eric failed with his first attempt at monetizing his work and dug deep into what his audience was looking for. He realized that they wanted clinical content, case studies and board certification practice exams. He created a practice BCPS exam and also wrote Pharmacotherapy: Improving Medical Education Through Clinical Pharmacy Pearls, Case Studies and Common Sense. Eric has since expanded content both on his website and on Amazon.

When Eric began his side hustle, he had $145,000 in student loan debt. He was able to use the income from Med Ed 101 to get out of debt. Eric also experienced two professional instances where he was concerned about his full-time pharmacy job and was relieved to have extra money come in from his side hustle.

Med Ed 101 eventually brought in enough income to allow Eric to step down from his full-time pharmacy position and take on a part-time pharmacy job instead. Although he was losing benefits and insurance, focusing completely on Med Ed 101 has provided him with a lot of freedom. He has more time with his children and wife and more control of what he wants to do.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Eric Christianson: Hey, I appreciate the opportunity. It’s always fun to share experiences. And hopefully it’ll help give somebody out there a little entrepreneurial bug. We need it in the profession of pharmacy.

Tim Church: Definitely. Totally agree with you. Now before we kind of jump in, I know you’re a baseball fan because you mentioned you had to make sure that we recorded on a day that wasn’t a day when the Twins would be potentially playing. So question for you —

Eric Christianson: Yeah, that was a little bit of brutal optimism there. Deep down in my heart, I knew their pitching staff was not — they’re pitching staff isn’t where it needs to be. So if they could spend a little money and get a pitcher or two in, a starting pitcher, I think their prospects look a little better next year.

Tim Church: So question for you around that, Eric: If you were a major league relief pitcher, let’s say maybe for the Twins, what would your entrance theme song be?

Eric Christianson: Oh, gees. You know, I saw a really hilarious video. And I’ve got a couple little kids. If you get time, check it out on YouTube. But one batter had “Daddy Shark” going as his entry song. And the whole crowd just erupted and they were singing the whole song. I don’t know if that would be it, but gosh, that sure was funny to watch.

Tim Church: That’s good. I like that. Now, are you from Minnesota?

Eric Christianson: Yeah. Yep, grew up here. I was actually in North Dakota but moved when I was about 5, so yeah. Pretty much been here and grew up most of my life in Minnesota.

Tim Church: OK, great. Well, one of the reasons I was so excited to get you on the show is that you’ve been able to do something that I think many pharmacists out there are aspiring to achieve. And that is generating enough revenue from your business or side hustle so that you no longer have to work full-time in a traditional pharmacist role or just rely on that one sole income source. So in other words, you’ve been able to take your side hustle to the next level. And before we get into how you did that, I want you to talk a little bit about the business and how you’re serving others.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so I mean, just I guess starting a little bit from the beginning, I mean, I really had no intention I guess of making it a business. And I really just wanted to help educate long-term care nurses, things of that nature. And I think honestly that helped a lot that that was my mindset, that I was really just going to be here as a pharmacist online, providing education to people. And I think that initial mindset really helped me gain a lot of trust with people. And I don’t know, maybe I’m just dumber than everybody else, but I did the blog essentially for free — or paying to have a website, that type of thing — I did the blog for probably a year or year and a half before I really even pursued income and that type of thing. So I think — I don’t know if that was an error or a stroke of genius or what, but I think that that level of trust between me and the readers of the blog was really developed over that time period. And I think that really helped when it came to obviously trying to promote something and sell something. That was kind of a unique development in the initial stages.

Tim Church: So Eric, what’s the name of your business?

Eric Christianson: Med Ed 101.

Tim Church: And how would you describe kind of the basic function of the blog, the website? And how does Med Ed 101 make money?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, the basic function I guess of the website was to promote pharmacy education. And you know, I mentioned that initial development. I recognized a lot of problems in long-term care. And I would see these problems as a consultant pharmacist in long-term care facilities, I’d see these common recurring problems over and over again. And you know, I just kind of thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if I could share this on a big, open platform and everybody that I consult or facilities that I consult to could actually see it and learn from it so I don’t have to write all these recommendations and patients’ lives can be improved and better and patient safety and all that good stuff? So that’s really kind of how it initiated and developed. From that point, I really recognized through also social media channels, a Facebook page and Twitter feed, I recognized how many pharmacy folks were really coming for these case studies and things of that nature because the clinical thought process, especially if you’re in a busy community store, that type of thing, I mean, you’re not seeing lab work, you’re not seeing some of the other things that go into developing the clinical thought process. So definitely a lot of young pharmacists, pharmacy students, contacted me and said, “Hey, we just really appreciate these real-life scenarios, we appreciate kind of seeing what might happen, what can happen, common drug interactions,” and all those sorts of things. So I really developed an audience pretty quickly just by sharing some of those case studies on social media and obviously on the Internet through my website.

Tim Church: Obviously, there’s a need for great clinical content. And you saw that through the various channels that were there. How did you start to monetize that? And then what are the specific revenue sources that you have?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so this is a story for basically any entrepreneur and you know, I was probably a little embarrassed by it the first time. But basically created this PDF, “30 Medication Mistakes.” And it was a five- or 10-page PDF, that type of thing. And I thought it would be kind of interesting for people to read and recognize and some patient safety factors and important things there. And from that PDF, I was just like, “Ah, I could probably sell this, make a little bit of money.” So I think I put it up for sale for $5 or $10, you know, just a digital download type thing. I probably had 1,000 email subscribers, something like that. And I sold absolutely 0 in about three months. And so that really kind of brought me back to the drawing board. And it really allowed me to kind of ask the question, OK, what do people actually want? Why are people coming to my website? And I looked back through some of the emails I had gotten from people and things they were struggling with, things of that nature. A lot of it was the clinical content, you know, case problem solving, that type of information. And also, I had posted a couple of times about my experience and the challenge of obtaining board certification. And between those two things, my first two basically products, one was a practice exam for the BCPS exam, and the next thing I believe I released was basically a compilation of a lot of my most common case studies that you might actually see in clinical practice. And so one was a book on Amazon. And one was basically a digital download on my own website, a PDF file. And so those were really how me looking into generating revenue first initiated was through those two sources. Since that time, I’ve obviously expanded on the amount of content I have on my website. And I’ve expanded the amount of content I have on Amazon as well. And now, with the help of Tony Guerra, who I think you know, he took some of my early clinical books and turned them into audiobooks. And it’s a really cool medium, you know, that tons of people are using, obviously people probably that are listening to this podcast right now. And that’s — in my mind, that’s probably going to be another source of revenue and income in the future that I’m definitely going to focus on a little bit.

Tim Church: That’s really cool, Eric! And I like how you kind of started with what some people could look to as a failure or learning process when you kind of got crickets on your first product. And I want you to just talk about that a little bit. How did that feel coming out with something and first asking for money for something that you had created and then to really get no response? I mean, what did that feel like and how did that change your mindset going forward?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, it was definitely a tough thing. And I think when I look back on it, I think I probably put that up, and I think I probably waited two or three months. And obviously, like I said, didn’t make a sale. Honestly, I think it prevented me from taking the next step for a little while, just thinking like, oh, you know, maybe I don’t have what it takes or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing or what people want, that sort of thing. And yeah, it’s one of those things where you look back at it and it’s like, what if I did quit at that point? And not to be able to have some of this bigger income certainly I have now from the website and Amazon and book sales. You definitely think about that. So if you’re starting something, expect that you’re going to run into failures. I mean, it’s just inevitable when you’re doing something new. And that’s a really hard thing for pharmacists. I know it was a really hard thing specifically for me. You know, I did relatively well in school, I passed without issues. You know, when you’re a pharmacist and you talk to me, generally they’re like, “Oh, you must be really smart.” So it’s a common thing to feel that way. And when you talk to others and then you look at the business side of things and yeah, you have this totally epic failure, at least what it felt like at the time, but yeah. You just have to continue to keep pushing forward and try to learn from it as best you can.

Tim Church: One of my favorite books is John Maxwell, called “Failing Forward.” And kind of one of the essential quotes of the book is that the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. And I think that’s such a key thing because like you mentioned, that it’s easy to sort of give up and to take that and to look at it as wow, I don’t know what I’m doing, how am I going to start this business, how do I start from nothing even though I have some of these subscribers? And really look at that and take that and say, “OK. This was an experience. I was OK to go out and fail. And actually, that failure may have been beneficial moving forward in what you had developed down the course.” And I know that that’s really been helpful for me is to kind of look at that. But I think you really hit that there is that pharmacists in general do not look at failure always as a good friend or as John Maxwell says, looking at failure as your friend.

Eric Christianson: Yep. And that’s one thing I’ve done a couple talks recently at colleges of pharmacy. And one of the big things that I tell them and that I try to teach them is we’re so ingrained as pharmacists when we think about failure, instantly what comes to our mind is somebody gets hurt, somebody dies, or you get sued. I mean, those are the things that come to your mind when you think about making a mistake as a pharmacist. And I mean, that is absolutely I think ingrained into you throughout school and throughout your work life. And that is not an entrepreneurial mindset for sure.

Tim Church: No. No, definitely not. Now, could you break down the different products and resources you have right now? And kind of break down those percentages in terms of what’s bringing in revenue.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so it definitely is a little bit variable, I will say, because I’ve got some NAPLEX content, so obviously this time of year, there isn’t a ton of people taking NAPLEX. So that kind of drops off. And then you’ve got spring and fall testing periods for board certification materials. So you know, prior to the exam, 2-3 months prior to the exam up until the exam, that can kind of come and go a little bit as well. Amazon, I would say is probably in the ballpark of 40-50% of revenue. Website’s probably in that ballpark. And then Audible as well. And you know, I would say I work probably 2-3 days a week as a pharmacist still, doing some consulting and things of that nature, which I love to do and I always anticipate doing that. So that’s definitely a piece of the income equation. But just that side income to be able to step away from your full-time job and to be able to — this summer, I spent a lot of time with my kids going golfing and doing different activities that they like to do. And I mean, that’s really what I’m after as far as income and that type of thing. Initially I will say, I was — which is why I listen to you guys once in awhile and I love your stuff — I was $145,000 in debt I think, I think is what it started at. And yeah, I used any side income basically from the business to pay off, pay down on that extra debt, so that helped me get out of debt much, much sooner than I ever would just working kind of my standard, full-time pharmacy job. So always got to have something on the side. I do want to also mention I had two professional instances in my career where I did absolutely feel like my job was a little bit in question. And those were two big stimuli for me to continue to do the blog and to continue, keep going, creating different content and selling different content. So I don’t think I would be here talking to you today if it wasn’t for those two instances either. So that’s another important point I think to make to students, to young pharmacists, and especially in this job market too, especially when we’re talking about community and retail pharmacy. There is not a job that is secure. And creating that Plan B, starting that Plan B, there’s no reason not to do that today. And so I think that’s a really, really important thing to remember.

Tim Church: I definitely agree, Eric. And I think that no matter how secure a position that you think it is, there’s always a potential for change, whether that be political changes, just job market changes in general, so having an additional side income or just some other way that you’re bringing in revenue, is a really smart thing to do. Now in your particular case, I think you brought up some awesome points. And I think many people would agree that that side revenue has helped you pay off your student loans but also, it’s given you something that I think is probably the most important thing when we talk about side hustles and what this extra income. And for you, it sounds like what it’s boughten you is time. It’s really given you the time and the freedom to do some of the things that you want to do, such as spending more time with your family, with your kids. Talk a little bit about how you made that transition. Because as I mentioned in the beginning, you were able to go from a full-time, traditional pharmacist role now to only doing a couple days a week.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, that — honestly, that was probably one of the hardest professional conversations I’ve — and decisions that I’ve ever made. You know, I worked seven years long-term care consulting, assisted living consulting, a little bit of MTM kind of an independent consulting group, and then I joined on with a health system and worked as a clinic pharmacist, basically, right embedded in the primary care office. So really unique experience, great experience. And I mean, for a lot of pharmacists, that is absolutely the holy grail of jobs. And I did enjoy that job, but it was consuming a huge chunk of time. When I factored in the time that I needed to put into the website and blog, it just got to a point where financially it made sense to try to make that leap. One other factor that went into that was my wife, who stayed at home with our kids, she was going to go back to work as well. So there’s kind of a conglomerate of things going on that made it a little bit more tenable to make that jump. But that was a very, very difficult decision for sure. And you know, I maybe waited on it longer than I should have, you know, looking back. But I think, again, that’s kind of that pharmacist mindset being a little bit more conservative about things and trying to cover all your bases. But very, very difficult decision for sure. But definitely at this point do not regret that decision.

Tim Church: So what did your wife say when you first brought that to her attention?

Eric Christianson: She was pretty calm about it, actually. You know, she’s very, very trusting in my judgment and my decisions. She’s pretty level-headed when it comes to that type of stuff. I will say one interesting story. It’s a story I’ll never forget because it’s actually the first time I actually made $1 off the website. So I did this BCPS practice exam. And you know, I think I charged like $10 for it or something, you know, just ridiculously cheap because I wanted to make sure I sold some. And I remember seeing those first couple sales come through, and I was just absolutely jacked up. You know? And if I think about all the hours I spent and if I paid myself an hourly pharmacist wage for those hours, it’s like yeah, this doesn’t make any sense at all. But just the idea that I could go out for supper and potentially make $10, that was the coolest thing in the world to me, at least at that time. And so I made this, I’m so excited. And I’d been doing this, again, for a year and half, hadn’t made $1, and I’m doing it mornings, evenings, weekends, whatever. And I go to my wife, and I said, “I told you. I told you I wasn’t crazy.” And just instantly, as calm and cool, as collected, she says, “Well, you’re kind of a little bit crazy.” And I’m just like, like looking back at that, that is so true. I mean, you have to be a little bit crazy — and some people might call it crazy. I mean, looking back, it’s like, I mean, it was passion and it was energy for pharmacy and what we do. But that was just kind of a fun little story that I’ll never forget with my wife and the process of actually trying to generate some income off of the side business.

Tim Church: So at that point, when you had approached her and then actually finally made that switch and dropped the hours you were doing at your consulting job, how many months had you been consistently generating revenue from the site and from the books and resources?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, it was — I started making test prep material and books, I think it was early 2015, maybe in February-March 2015. And I, you know, definitely had seen that grown year-to-year. And so there was definitely a little bit of a track record. And I cut back out of my job 2018, just last year here. So I mean, I had at least a two-year track record, probably closer to three of showing that yes, you know, I’m seeing more people come to the website, I’m seeing more sales over time as you gain credibility and reputation and customer referrals and all that sort of stuff. So you know, they always talk about the overnight success, and that’s just not the way it works for the majority of people. And certainly my story is no different from that. It’s been a slow growth over time. So my wife was able to see that and say, “Hey, what could I do if I actually had more time to work on some of these other things, other projects, that I’ve wanted to pursue?”

Tim Church: So when you made that move, one of the practical questions that is popping up into my mind right now is did you lose your health coverage and other benefits that you had access to?

Eric Christianson: Yeah. Absolutely. That was by far the hardest decision with a family of four and definitely one that it’s like, oh my gosh, we’ve got to make sure that that expense is covered now. I think that probably prevents a lot of small, a lot of people from quitting their full-time job is health insurance coverage. I mean, it was $1,200-1,500 a month hit that we now have to come up with that money that we’re not getting through our employer.

Tim Church: So that wasn’t offered through your wife’s employer, then.

Eric Christianson: No. Nope, nope. Exactly. So yeah, that was a big hit that we basically had to make sure that we could cover. One other thing that I did — because I had paid off my student loans I think in 2017. So as a family, I definitely saw that there might be some point in time like that I want to cut back, so we definitely saved up some cash as well, you know, just worst-case scenario where I couldn’t figure out part-time work as a pharmacist for a little while or the business isn’t going as good or whatever the case might be. We definitely did stockpile some cash too, just to be on the safe side.

Tim Church: So Eric, you talked about the side income has helped you pay off your student loans and then eventually has allowed you to drop down to just a couple days a week. What are you doing now with the income each month that you’re receiving from the business besides just kind of taking care of monthly expenses, health insurance, that kind of thing.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, definitely life expenses for sure, making sure that’s taken care of. I am investing a little bit more in retirement than I used to be investing. So that’s definitely another thing there. You know, one thing as an entrepreneur you’ve got to pay attention to is taxes too, doing quarterly estimates and that type of thing. It’s like, you’ve got to pay attention and keep track of that. I think it was a year or two ago, I don’t know if I didn’t anticipate or didn’t do something the way I should have in my job change, but yeah, we ended up in $10,000 or $15,000. And it’s like yeah, if you’re not prepared for that or anticipating for that or planning for that, that’s definitely a good chunk of money to come up with for sure. So you know, the planning, strategizing, figuring out what to do. I have spent a little bit of money getting people to help on certain projects, that type of thing, as far as the business goes. I do market and advertise some on Facebook, specifically. I have been tempted to try other platforms as far as advertising goes, but I feel like I’ve probably got the best sense for doing Facebook ads, so I’ve done some of that with some of the extra revenue. We’ve paid down a little extra on our house as well. So I think that’s a goal for us maybe longer term, later in life. Minnesota and the north is very, very cold. I don’t know if you knew that or not.

Tim Church: I’m from Ohio, so I know a little bit about that, yeah.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah. I mean, plans certainly change, but our in-laws live down in Arizona, and it’s definitely nice visiting them in the middle of winter, I will assure you of that. So that’s definitely crossed our mind too to kind of plan and prepare for that when the kids are growing up.

Tim Church: So how are you investing your money? Is it through a brokerage account? Or did you open up a SEP?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so I’ve got through my part-time employer, I’m actually investing into their plan. They allow me to do that with some of the income that I make through their organization. So that income doesn’t run through my business. I’m basically their employee. So I do a lot of my investing through that income just because it’s pretty simple and pretty easy. So that’s just through their retirement account. That’s the primary mode. Also, HSA, Health Savings Account, making sure that I’m putting some money into there as well. Those are the two biggies.

Tim Church: Yeah, and the HSA I think is a great — what has been termed a “Stealth IRA” or retirement account because there’s a lot of tax advantages to that but also just a great way to cut down your Adjusted Gross Income while you’re putting it into aggressive funds without even considering it to be used for health expenses in the near future. So you’ve got kind of a couple options with it. So definitely I have one through my employer as well, and I think it’s a great option.

Eric Christianson: Yeah, definitely.

Tim Church: So who do you have that supports the business, whether they’re contractors, employees? Can you break down, tell me a little bit about that?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so I’ve got a gal that really helped me get the main MedEd101.com website up and going as far as some of the sale of digital products. Initially when I first started, I think that was part of the joy with it was figuring out things. It was maddening at some times, and sometimes you waste a little bit of money not knowing what you’re doing. But I think, you know, as pharmacists, we’re kind of learners. And we like to appreciate and learn some of those things. As I generated a little bit of income, definitely a website person to help out with stuff, I’ve had various odds and ends as far as book covers and design people and things like that. And then my wife has been a fantastic resource. She’s an administrative assistant by background. And you know, just formatting, editing, stuff like that, she’s been an amazing resource and helped the business a fair amount for sure. I wouldn’t be here without her either.

Tim Church: And then do you work closely with an accountant, an attorney?

Eric Christianson: Yeah. Yep. I’ve got a personal accountant here in our smaller town. And then attorney work, yeah, setting up the initial LLC and the other business documents, that type of thing, I worked with an attorney a couple times as well.

Tim Church: So Eric, as a fellow business owner, especially one that is involved with website and publishing content, I feel like there’s a million things that you could be doing at any given time. And just there’s always something that you could be doing. How do you spend most of your personal time in the business at this point?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, I’m typically creating content, whether that’s a blog post, a podcast, a video recording, a book. That’s really what I’ve grown accustomed to doing. It’s actually what I like doing, for the most part, at least a little bit every day. I can’t create content eight hours a day. That’s just insane to be able to — at least for me — to be able to try to do that. But it’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with 2-3 hours of good, solid, focused work in creating content and getting stuff done and how much you can accumulate by doing that day after day after day over a period of years. So definitely I’m the Chief, I guess, Content Creation person. And you know, that’s my biggest asset and I guess what I do in the business primarily to keep it running.

Tim Church: And then do you pass that on once you’ve created that to somebody to help put it on the website, maintain that, and then promote it on social media? Or is that also you doing that?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so with social media, I do use a tool called Meet Edgar. It’s an automation system. So that is part of my expenses. I think it’s $50-100 a month, somewhere in there. So that’s definitely a significant cost, a little bit of a cost. So that automates a lot of my posts and puts stuff out periodically. That’s the primary tool. I used to do that rather than sending it to a person or whatever. Yeah, I’m a little bit more on the automation side and trying to harness those technologies as much as I can.

Tim Church: Anything else you’ve done in the business to help automate processes and take time — reduce the time that you’re involved with it?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, so I recently — it wasn’t anything I did. It’s the hosting platform for my podcast. They actually provide transcriptions of my podcast — and maybe you guys certainly get all that done or get it done for free or pay somebody or whatever too — so that is definitely something I’m going to look at and maybe try to use going forward, just to help with utilizing some of the content that I’ve created, maybe organizing it a little bit better, making it look a little bit nicer and that type of thing.

Tim Church: Well Eric, you’ve certainly shared a lot of great information. And I think it’s just awesome advice for people wanting to get started with a side hustle or a business. And I think the bottom line is you just have to start and you have to not be afraid of failing. But I wanted to ask you, you sent me a photo of you giving a presentation. And the title of that presentation was, “Secrets to a Successful Side Hustle.” And I wanted to ask you, what is the summary of that? And what advice would you give to other pharmacists or even students out there who have an interest in entrepreneurship or starting a business?

Eric Christianson: Oh, that’s a tough one. You’re asking me to sum up an hour-long presentation in about 30 seconds here. Probably one of the main points I remember telling folks about at that presentation that I think resonates a little bit is to really find something you enjoy because then it doesn’t really feel like work. And that’s really what I did with the blog initially. I mean, it was just for fun and just because I enjoyed doing it. And once you get into a public space, public forum, people start coming to you with all sorts of different ideas and things you should do. But it really takes — like I think you had mentioned earlier — it takes that initial action of actually doing something to figure out hey, do I actually enjoy this or not? So keep trying new things, think about if you’re at work, what do you really like to do at work? When do you notice that the time just flies in the day when you’re doing such and such? Think about those times where you’re happiest and you’re enjoying being able to be productive and getting things done at work. And try to recognize that and then utilize that as an area where you can be an expert, where you can share information if it’s something that you’re excited about and passionate about.

Tim Church: Any books or resources you would recommend for those interested or wanting to get started?

Eric Christianson: Yeah. I would say the podcast that really got me going — I think I listen to it probably every day — was “Entrepreneur on Fire.” I don’t listen to it much anymore, just because you hear the same recurring themes over and over and over again amongst successful businesspeople/entrepreneurs. And it’s really that sticktoitiveness, keep going, keep learning, keep applying, keep changing direction, continuing to evolve and adapt. But really that action piece is the No. 1 piece of advice. And that’s probably the main message I got from that podcast.

Tim Church: Well Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story, tips for building a successful side hustle. I know that our audience is going to be better off hearing your story and sharing that. So we really appreciate that. What’s the best way for someone to reach out to you to learn more about you or what you do?

Eric Christianson: Yeah, you can hit the “Contact” button at MedEd101.com. That’ll allow you to send me an email directly. I’m pretty active personally on LinkedIn, so Eric Christianson, PharmD pharmacist. You can find me on LinkedIn and connect with me there. Those are probably the two main places where you’re probably going to catch me the easiest.

Tim Church: Thanks again, Eric.

Eric Christianson: No problem. It was an honor to be on the podcast.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 126: Going Beyond Six Figures Through Medical Writing


Going Beyond Six Figures Through Medical Writing

Brittany Hoffmann-Eubanks, Founder and CEO of Banner Medical, joins Tim Church to share her side hustle journey in creating a company that’s on track to hit over $100,000 in revenue and what she did to get to this point.

About Today’s Guest

Brittany is the Founder and CEO of Banner Medical and a native of the Chicago-land-area in Illinois. Banner Medical combines her passion for writing with her medical background as a pharmacist; with the goal of improving patient outcomes through educating healthcare providers. Brittany is an expert in the development of needs assessments, continuing education, and scientific writing. With over a decade of experience in community pharmacy, Brittany tailors and delivers medical communication projects in any topic area in a balanced, accurate, and timely manner.

Brittany earned her Doctor of Pharmacy and Masters of Business Administration degrees from Drake University College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences in 2012. After graduate school, she completed a Post-Graduate-Year-1 Community Pharmacy Residency where she earned her teaching-and-learning certificate, dedicated herself to patient-centered pharmacy care, and learned the business of pharmacy. It was during her residency year that Brittany discovered her passion for education and desire to be an entrepreneur.

After residency training, Brittany accepted the role of pharmacist in charge and clinical pharmacist within the community pharmacy setting. Brittany also precepts student pharmacists helping to prepare them for their future careers as pharmacists. In her free time, Brittany loves to travel to new and exciting places with her husband and family, playing with her dogs, and singing. She is also very involved in her State Pharmacy Association where she serves as a Board Member, Journal Editor, and Co-chair of the Public Relations Committee. In 2018, Brittany was awarded the Edmond P. Barcus Distinguished Young Pharmacist Award for her service to the Illinois Pharmacists Association.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Brittany, thanks for stopping by and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited:

Tim Church: Well back in Episode 116, Tim Ulbrich talked with David Burkus, author of “Friend of a Friend.” He discussed how one and can and should grow their network and how to build key connections. And this really reminded me of how we met and ended up doing this podcast today. So do you mind talking about that story?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Sure. I was just looking to put my business into place with a website and kind of make everything official after unofficially starting my side hustle about four years ago. And so one of my connections that we met through a mutual friend, someone that I had been working with on my business. And I was like, “Man, I really want to get my website together, have a place where I can put my portfolio for prospective clients. Do you have any ideas?” And they’re like, “I have a person, and they’re a pharmacist.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s fantastic. Who knew that pharmacists do websites on the side?” So we were connected and got to talk to you, and I was really excited because you understood my vision of what I was looking for for the website and just turned out to be an awesome partnership. And I’m super excited with how things turned out. And we started talking about my business, and here we are in the podcast.

Tim Church: Yeah. It’s really fun. Is it OK if I mention who our mutual connection is?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Oh, for sure. I don’t think he’d mind.

Tim Church: Yeah, shoutout to Alex Barker. I think he knows everyone in the pharmacy profession, by the way. But a great guy and really cool opportunity that we got to meet through him. So Brittany, talk about your full-time pharmacist position and also your career path.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: So as a full-time pharmacist during my day job, as I like to call it, I’m a community pharmacist, and so I work as a pharmacy manager and clinical pharmacist with a large community pharmacy chain in the Chicagoland area. And as part of that role, I kind of wear a couple different hats of making sure that my pharmacy is running, we’re able to take care of our patients as well as managing my team and one of my passion of working with patients. So I do a lot of MTM with patients, Medication Therapy Management, hyperlipidemia management, diabetes, especially, and then also probably my favorite part of my job as a community pharmacist is the immunizations. So I’m travel health certified, I get to see people going all over the world. Traveling is a passion of mine, so that’s kind of the day-to-day job that I have in pharmacy. And then in terms of career path, I think I took probably a pretty traditional route. I went to Drake University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, got my Doctor of Pharmacy degree. Also did their dual program where I obtained my Master’s in Business Administration. And then after I graduated from college, went on to do a postgraduate Year 1 residency, community pharmacy residency, with the company that I now work for as well as Midwestern University in Chicago. And I loved my residency year. It was an opportunity just to immerse myself in direct patient care, learn about the business of pharmacy, do some ambulatory care projects on the side as well as obtain a teaching and learning certificate. And that’s kind of where my nontraditional pharmacy career that I have now happened by accident during that timeframe, my residency year. I didn’t jump into it right away. I just decided to work for a little bit and really just get my feet wet in being a pharmacy manager, helping take care of patients, really just immerse myself in community pharmacy before moving onto what I’m doing now, which is medical writing.

Tim Church: Yeah, so talk about how did that happen? Where did that vision come from during your residency and as you transitioned into your community pharmacy role?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, when people ask me about this story, I always share with them that my becoming an entrepreneur happened by accident. It was in my residency year that we were asked to write a continuing medical education written piece for a pharmacist to help educate them on a topic. And as part of that process, I received some really good feedback and just kind of got the wheel moving, so to speak, of is this something that I’m interested in? Could this be something I could do in the future? How can I earn some additional money on the side in addition to what I’m doing in my day job? I love to travel, as I said, and all of those student loans, trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Through that process of just trying to figure that out, what I was doing, what I wanted to do, I had a friend that I had worked with — I guess I should colleague that I worked with during my residency year who moved onto a different position with a large national publication, so I just reached out to them and said, “Hey, how do you get your content? I’m really interested in potentially doing more of this type of work. Do you take writers? Or how do you obtain new writers?” And that really kind of started it. And from there, I did my first project and just kind of morphed into what I am doing today with my full-fledged business.

Tim Church: So was that your first paid gig where you just reached out and you were looking for opportunities?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: It was. And actually, it’s kind of a funny story because they didn’t give me just one project. They actually gave me two to work on simultaneously. So it was a fun challenge, and actually the first project they’d given me to write about was a topic that I wasn’t an expert in. It was actually on pet medications, so it required me to just take a step back, think about what angle I wanted to attack it from, and go from there. It was such a great experience. It was an opportunity to get my feet wet and just really figure out how I wanted to move forward with this type of writing that I was interested in.

Tim Church: So how did that feel getting that first gig and actually getting paid to do it?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: It was exciting. I think oftentimes, we think about how can I make money on the side? And is it going to be worthwhile, so going to be that return on investment? Or what’s the opportunity cost? You know, what else could I be doing if I wasn’t doing this right now? And I think for me, the biggest piece of it was is that all it required was my computer and my time at that time. So it was easy for me and kind of exciting to be like, OK, I can go to my day job, come home, fit this into when I have time to do this and make some extra money on the side that I can either use to put towards traveling or I can add some extra funds to paying off my loans quicker.

Tim Church: And so those were the two biggest motivators, at least initially, for kind of pursuing this side hustle?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: It was for me. I knew — just to back up for a second, I came out of school with probably close to $250,000 in student loans, which is a ginormous amount of student loans. I’d done an undergrad degree first, so four years before I went on to Drake. Drake actually has a six-year program, and I didn’t go that route. I did the four years and then the additional four years. And in addition to that, added on a second degree where I obtained the MBA program and stayed during the summers to achieve that dual degree by the time I finished pharmacy school. So I knew going into that that it was going to be a lot more burdensome in terms of the cost factor. And so you know, having had that background with the MBA degree, looking at those amortization tables and the compounded interest, I was like, I’ve got to do something to get rid of this student debt as soon as possible. So I think paying that off as quickly as possible and having some extra funds was a big motivator in the beginning.
Tim Church: So your medical writing business is called Banner Medical. Talk a little bit about what your business specifically is all about, other than obviously we know it’s medical writing, but what is your mission of the business? And who are you specifically serving?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, that’s a great question. I appreciate you asking that. It’s probably the first question that everybody asks me of what is that? Or what is medical writing? So by now, I’ve gotten very good at explaining to people what it is that my company does. But essentially, if you were talking to a lot of the pharmacists out there and maybe other healthcare providers who are listening in your audience, it’s pretty simple. We write about medicine. And there’s a lot of different areas that encompass medical writing. It could be continuing medical education, it could be education grant writing, which is something that we now are experts and something that we’re typically sought out for with our writing for a needs assessment. It could be on the editorial side where we’re writing about maybe a new drug that came out or something that’s going on in the healthcare field. Or maybe even the academic scientific writing where we’re helping a company put together their manuscript for a journal submission or working with a pharmacy organization to spread some of their grant work that they’re doing. So it’s a wide, encompassing field. There’s a lot of different types of medical writing. And every business is going to excel in certain areas and have a focal point. So for me, the mission of my company, it really is a business-to-business company I would say. We serve many other businesses, helping them, whether it be through educational grant writing with the needs assessments that we do, but ultimately, it serves the patient and the healthcare provider in the end. And so for me, our mission at Banner Medical is really just to optimize that knowledge to improve clinical care or clinical outcomes for the patient. So if you think about it, when we’re writing these types of medical writing pieces, our goal is to help healthcare practitioners and clinicians, especially, make better clinical decision-making or improve their clinical decision-making so that they can ultimately take better care of their patients and improve the outcomes for them in the long run.

Tim Church: I love that, Brittany. And I think that’s so cool the way that you articulated that because it’s not just about the education piece of the healthcare provider but ultimately, what is going to happen as the end result of that education? I think that’s so great the way that you put that. So the businesses that you’re working with, is this primarily have pharmacists as the audience in terms of who’s reading this content and taking charge? Is it other healthcare providers? Is it a mix?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: So when I first started my business back in 2014, it was exclusively for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. And now, since we have been moving forward with expanding the business, we’ve moved into other clinicians as well. So for example, we now service regular physicians, we do non-physician clinicians like Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, really have gone beyond exclusively writing for pharmacists, which is really exciting for Banner Med because it opens up our opportunities, additional revenue streams and additional access to helping improve outcomes for patients.

Tim Church: Now you talked about initially reaching out and getting that gig or actually two gigs in the beginning. But how difficult has it been to acquire new clients and getting them on board? I mean, was it easy after you did the first couple and then you didn’t have to market as much? Or is that a constant thing that you’re doing in terms of getting new business?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: I think maybe the answer to your question is two-pronged. So when you have your own business, you spend a good amount of time working in your business as well as working on your business. And I think finding the right balance of that is really important, especially as you’re trying to grow and obtain new clients, especially. I think the biggest thing for Banner Med and me specifically is that it really comes down to the relationships that you build. So you always have to be making sure that you’re reaching out to new people, be it somebody you know through your network, just always be ready to have that elevator pitch, so to speak, when you meet someone knew and they may be interested or how you can help them or provide value to them for what they’re looking for. So to answer your question, I think for me, I spend a good amount of time each week looking for new prospective clients, now gotten to the point where a lot of times, people are reaching out to us now, seeking out our help, which is great. It’s taken a bit of time to get to that point, but I’m excited to be moving into that arena rather than having to constantly hustle to find new clients. And we have a group now of great core clients that are repeat business, which is fantastic because it makes it a little bit easier to not have to always constantly be looking for new work all the time to build those revenues. So to have repeat customers is really helpful too.

Tim Church: What percentage of the business right now is repeat customers?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: I’d say about 80% at this point in time is repeat customers. And then the other 20% is new clients that we’re working with that have either been referred to us or that we’re actively seeking out.

Tim Church: Great. So talk a little bit about what is the earning capacity for doing medical writing? Because one of the things that you mentioned was basically what you needed was a computer and you needed some time. And obviously, it takes time to do what you’re doing. But talk a little bit about how much you’re charging for the different pieces of medical writing and the different focus points that you have.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: So the revenue piece of it, of what you’re able to earn is to a degree, kind of limitless. It really just depends on the clients that you’re working with, what types of projects they’re asking you for as well as experience. And all of that kind of goes into the whole thing together. So there isn’t really like a strict fee that we charge for every single project. It’s always going to be individualized. But to give you an example, for this year alone, we’re on pace to be six figures this year, which is amazing compared to where I started when I had my first gig that I told you about where I was doing two projects and made about $700 for those two projects, which at the time was fantastic because it took me about two weeks to write the two different projects that I was asked for, and I made $700, which was really exciting at the time. Now, fast forward, it’s been a growth process over the last few years where I think year 2, we did a little bit over $10,000, and then it’s just gotten — the revenue stream has gotten bigger and better. So really, it just depends on how much you want to put into it and what types of projects you’re willing to take. And the other piece too that I think is really important, especially for new, aspiring writers is not to undervalue your work. You know, oftentimes, we’re afraid to charge a certain price or tell a client or a vendor that oh, I think this project’s probably going to be about $1,000 based upon the amount of work that you’re asking for and what you need whereas someone who is maybe less experienced and maybe has that fear of oh, $1,000, like can you afford that type of thing, they may undervalue themselves and say, oh, I’ll do that really big project for you for like $450. But at the end of the day, you’re putting so much time and effort into it that it doesn’t make financial sense. So it’s important to consider the type of work you’re doing, what’s being asked of you, and one of the biggest places I always start is I ask the client, do they have a budget? And what have they budgeted for this particular project to kind of help me determine if I’m going to be able to work with them within their budget or if we need to negotiate and talk about what the project fee should be.
Tim Church: Now Brittany, I’ve got to step back for a minute because you just nonchalantly said that your side business is earning about six figures on pace to do this year, which is really exciting and just pumps me up. And I think a lot of people who are listening are probably thinking, that’s incredible, No. 1. But No. 2, how have you been able to do that?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Well thank you. It’s been pretty exciting to see the business grow. And I’ve spent the last year working really hard to scale it. And frankly, I think a lot of the credit I would have to give to just working with Alex Barker through the coaching process for my business. And I’ve talked about this previously, but I think for me, it was initially when I thought about the idea of hiring a business coach, it seemed a little silly to me at first. But then I sat back and thought about it and I was like, well, we have coaches for a lot of other things that we do in our lives, sports, especially. So you know, why not for a business? This kind of makes sense. And initially, probably like a lot of other people who’ve maybe considered doing coaching wonder about the costs of it and is it going to be worth it and what’s the return on investment going to be? But I have to say, working with the Happy PharmD and Alex specifically just really helped push me to think outside of the box and how I wanted to expand this business and I was really worried about hiring someone because I was becoming that rate-limiting step, right? There was only so much I could do in the time that I wasn’t at work in order to build this business. I mentioned earlier about working in the business and on the business. And I was really tapped out for working in and on it. So in order for me to move forward and expand to where I wanted this business to grow, I had to get over that roadblock, so to speak. And Alex was instrumental in helping me do that and just kind of work through the process and figure out, OK, this is the fundamentals, this is where I started, this is where I want to be. How do I get to that next level? And I’m super grateful just for the time that I’ve spent and wish I probably would have done it sooner because it’s been amazing from last year to this year where I’m on pace now. And I think about oh man, what if I had done this in like year 2 or year 3 instead of waiting? But it’s been really exciting. And I think it’s a testament to how working with someone else to think about different factors in your business can really help you grow and move forward.

Tim Church: I think that’s such a key. I mean, we don’t know what we don’t know. And sometimes, it takes really that outside perspective to help get to that next level. What were the initial hesitations with working with a coach or just paying money out of pocket to do that?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, I think for me, it was just being comfortable with the amount that it was going to cost on a monthly basis and just thinking long-term of OK, well, I understand having a business background that you have to spend money in order to make money. But as I mentioned, paying off those student loans were really important to me, and my business at that point was — I was at kind of a fork in the road. Either I was going to go to the left or I was going to go to the right. And I just decided to just go full boar to the right and do something different and hope that the return on investment was there and that it paid off, and it has. Within the first six months of working with a business coach, I tripled my revenue, which was amazing to see that happen and just be a part of that and just have those small wins, and it really just helped invigorate me. And I never looked back, so to speak. And as a result of working with a coach for the business, it just helped me think about things from a different perspective, bringing on a new employee to the company. I now actually have three employees, which is really exciting compared to where I was just a year and a half ago where I was terrified of hiring one and how was that going to affect my business and the quality, which was really important to me to teach someone else how to do what I do and just working through all of those pieces to be where I am now. So it’s been a long journey, but it’s been exciting. Each new thing, just thinking about something differently, not letting analysis paralysis take over and just stopping me from moving forward with the things that I wanted to do.

Tim Church: That’s really exciting, Brittany. And you mentioned that you were the rate-limiting step in the business, and I think that’s really interesting to kind of realize and recognize that. And talk about how you brought on employees and what that process was like and kind of what are they doing day-to-day in the business right now?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, so for me, I really needed someone who could help me with some of the pieces that didn’t really require me in the writing process. So I decided that hiring a medical writing assistant made sense, someone that could help me with the research, going through all the different articles that we need for the evidence-based writing that we do. Can they help me basically go through the research and highlight the pieces that are important for the particular types of work that we’re doing? Can they help me with bibliography writing and going through all the different sources that we have and that we’re using? Just some of those basic tasks that didn’t necessarily require me or my writing as well as someone who maybe was interested in becoming a medical writer with my business. And so it’s kind of funny how it happened because I have a group of pharmacists now who are working for me. And I love working with them, anyone with an advanced degree is perfect typically for medical writing, although there are a lot of great non-advanced degree writers out there. So I don’t want to generalize. But for what we’re doing at Banner Med, it’s been awesome to be able to hire other pharmacists and bring them on. But now, it’s turned into kind of a whole new thing where we’re working one-on-one with them, teaching them how to write the different types of medical writing projects or pieces that we’re doing and really helping them go from medical writer — medical writing assistant to medical writer and just being able to see that process and where they start and how they’re growing and their individual goals that they have as it relates to their own professional growth as well as Banner Med has been really exciting. So I started in one place and ended up being in a totally new place as well as far as the business is concerned, so that piece has been exciting too just not only educating healthcare providers but also helping to mentor and educate new aspiring writers as well.

Tim Church: And how did you primarily find these additional writers? What were the channels that you used?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: So initially, this was one of the things that I think was kind of a hurdle for me to get over. In the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to go about that: Did I want to use a traditional place like Indeed or Monster or some of those places, the job boards that you think of when you’re going and looking? Or did I want to utilize a network and try to find people through that way? And I ended up actually utilizing a network, kind of a LinkedIn process of OK, I’m going to create an application, this is the qualities that I’m looking for, these are the things that are absolutely essential, these are the things that are ideal, and these are things that would be nice to have but aren’t necessarily required. I kind of went through that process, did a phone interview with them, made sure that they’re going to be a good fit for me, anyone that I work with, they ended up becoming like family to me. And my business is my baby, so to speak, so it’s really important to me that they’re just as passionate about writing. I can teach them a lot of the things that they need to know, but do they have good fundamentals? And so for us, we kind of went the more personal network route of utilizing LinkedIn and some other networking opportunities that made that process a lot easier. And now, believe it or not, just from some of the opportunities that I’ve had to spread the word about Banner Med, I actually have a lot of new aspiring writers that reach out to me now on a regular basis. And I’m always impressed by that. I think if you take the time to reach out to someone and tell them what value you can bring and how you’re interested in what they’re doing, then I can talk to that person a little bit more, find out what it is that they’re interested in, how they might be able to help us out or if it’s possible to work together. So there’s a couple — it’s changed from how we went about it in the beginning to how we do it now.

Tim Church: So are you still having a hand on each individual project? Or is your team taking certain project completely from start to finish?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yes, there are — it depends on where they are in terms of the training process, how long they’ve been working with us. Quality control for me and making sure that every project is still meeting Banner Med’s expectations is very important to me, so the writers that I’ve been working with are absolutely fantastic. I do have one full medical writer right now who takes a project from start to finish. And then I come in kind of in editor role as opposed to writer role and just go through everything, make sure it checks every box that the client was looking for, just kind of as that last piece before we send the project off. And then with my new writers, I do take on a more hands-on approach where I work with them directly, offer feedback, and probably have more of a writing role with those projects. So like I said, it kind of depends on the individual. But yes, I do typically still look at every single project that comes through for Banner Med, just making sure that it’s going to meet the client’s needs and that we’ve successfully put together the deliverable that they’re looking for.

Tim Church: And then depending on kind of what stage they are as a medical writer, does that also impact kind of their compensation for each project?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: It does. And unfortunately, in the medical writing world, there isn’t really a great compensation table, so to speak, where you can go and say, ‘OK, for this project, you’re going to make x amount of dollars,’ or, ‘This project, you’re going to make x amount of dollars.’ It’s really, for me, it’s a combination of their experience, their efficiency, their ability to write, along with what the total project cost is that we’re going to be receiving, the revenue that we’ve worked out with the client as well as my own just personal experience in terms of working with that individual of what the compensation’s going to be. But the one thing that’s really important to me is that the wage is always fair. And I strongly believe in that. I’ve gone back and advocated if a writer’s came back to me and said, “Hey, Brittany, you know what? This project took 10 extra hours more than we thought it was going to. And because of that, I had to spend all this extra time, x, y, z.” So in that case, you know, I have no problem going back to the client and saying, “Hey, you know what? We need to circle back on this project cost. These are some of the things that came up. Let’s talk about the compensation for this particular project and potentially renegotiate that.” Or I may even do that just on a personal level with that individual writer depending on how much extra time or effort that they had to put into it. So it’s a long answer to answer your question. But it’s so individualized that it’s impossible to say, OK, you’re going to do x and we’re going to pay you z every single time. It just really depends on the individual project.

Tim Church: So other than the payment to your employees for their assistance with the different projects that you receive, what are the other major costs of running your business?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: I think the other major costs really come down to some of the software programs that we use. There’s a particular reference product that we use that has saved just so much time and energy when it comes to doing the bibliographies for a lot of the different products that we use. So I would say primarily software would be the biggest expense that the business has on a day-to-day basis in terms of operating costs. Aside from that, there really isn’t a whole lot of extra overhead types of things. I mean, we have some of those fixed costs like internet and if we want to have meetings with all of us together, there may be particular software that we use to facilitate that process. So it just — I guess it really just kind of falls into that software, the things that make our job a little bit easier. All of my writers live in different parts of the country, so they’re all remote-based. And so it’s not like we’re just meeting up in an office, working together. We have to facilitate those online meetings in some way or fashion.

Tim Church: And do you guys meet together as a team to kind of help foster some of that mentorship that you’re providing?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, so we’re going to actually start doing that. Recently, we acquired two new employees that now make us a team of four. So I’m really excited about that. Prior to that, when I was working just with my medical writer that I’ve now had for almost a year, actually, you know, her and I would meet quarterly. Sometimes it would be on the phone, other times it would be through a video chat. But it’s really important for me to make sure that we’re not only discussing the projects that we’re working on but that I’m also helping them with their individual goals that they have, what things do they need help with, what is their biggest difficulty when it comes to the projects that we’re working on, and really just having that open communication, that feedback, so that we can keep improving and keep growing the business and help them move forward into new roles that they’re excited about or interested in or their particular topic. So yeah, I would say that group discussion, the mentorship, is really important for the business.

Tim Church: I think that is so cool how you continue to grow and bring other team members on. And it’s just really exciting to see that growth. I think one of the other burning questions that a lot of people probably listening right now, and including me, is how much time are you personally spending in the business? Because even though you have writers and you have some help, I mean, clearly you said that you’re still having a hands-on, even if it’s from an editorial perspective, but just on the business itself. So talk a little bit about that.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, it’s a significant amount of time. I’m definitely not going to sugarcoat that. Probably I’d say between my full-time job and this side hustle, which is probably can’t even categorize it as a side hustle anymore. Now it’s like a full hustle.

Tim Church: That’s right.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: I would probably say it’s easily like 80 hours per week. I’m definitely probably doing full-time on both right now. But you know, some of you guys may hear that and be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do that. There’s no way.’ You don’t have to do that to be in medical writing, right? You can pick the projects that you want to work on, you could do some extra money on the side if that’s what your goal is, or you can go full in like I’m doing. I think for me, I absolutely love this. And it doesn’t feel like work to me. So when I come home and I’m working on a project, it’s exciting to create this, to have my clients excited at the end of the day that they don’t have to spend hours upon hours redoing work and really come to us when they have those difficult projects or difficult topics that they know they need a good writer on. And I think that’s really important, and the biggest thing no matter what you choose is that at the end of the day, it’s awesome to make extra money on the side. But do you love the work that you’re doing? And if you don’t, then obviously you need to make a change or think about things differently. My grandfather always told me when I was a little girl, if you don’t like something, change it. And if you can’t change it, then change the way you think about it. And I’ve really just tried to use that as a guiding light for me in everything that I do. And this business is something that I absolutely love, so at the end of the day, even though I’m putting tons and tons of time into it right now, I know later on, it won’t be like that where I will have to spend as much time. But right now, we’re in that growing phase where it’s necessary. But I look forward to the days where I can step back a little bit and work on maybe some pet projects. But right now, it’s just fun and exciting to see things moving forward.

Tim Church: That’s so good, Brittany, and I think you just dropped a bunch of wisdom bombs in there, which was great. And what I want to know is because you’re doing so well and this is scaling, is this something that is going to take over your community pharmacist position? Is that going to cut back? What does that look like going forward?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Well, it’s hard to say right now. I absolutely love being a community pharmacist. I enjoy the patient interaction. I feel like to a degree, it helps me be a better writer, so to speak, in just being able to help patients navigate different difficult topics. In the community, I see people that are dealing with cancer, dealing with all kinds of just difficult types of long-term conditions or maybe it’s a short-term issue. So you know, I don’t know that I know the answer to that question right now, but I definitely know that I’m excited to see where things go in the future and depending on where the business takes me, you never know. This could be the final thing for me, or I may choose to scale back a little bit and do both. It’s hard to say right now, but I’m definitely excited for the future of what Banner Med can do.

Tim Church: You talked about you’re spending 80 hours many weeks out of the year trying to do both of your jobs, basically two full-time jobs.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah.

Tim Church: So one of the things that often comes up that people feel that time is that limiting factor to work on a passion project, a side hustle, or another job. What seems to work for you in terms of managing both of those but then also your personal life?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah. I get asked this question a lot, like how do you do it? And I think the biggest thing is that you have to be intentional about your time, right? So you know, if I’m working on a project, then I have to get rid of the distractors. I’m working specifically on that so that I can be focused and be efficient. But one of the things that I found during my residency year that was really helpful is just to schedule out my time. So my calendar — I’m that person that’s got thing color-coded and have a specific time I guess for everything. But that works for me. So I think the biggest thing — and everybody always says, oh, time management. But what does that actually mean, right? How do you put that into action? Are you the type of person that you need to work on something for 30 minutes and then take a five-minute break and then come back at it for another 30 minutes? You just really have to figure out what works for you. For me, scheduling my time, be it the time I’m going to work on projects or am I going to work out at 5 a.m. tomorrow? What time am I doing dinner with my husband, date night, etc.? It’s just really helpful for me to make sure. And then when that time comes up and I’m supposed to be working on that particular project during that time or whatever it is, make sure that you actually do it. I think that’s the biggest thing is just that follow through of whatever way that you find to manage your time, that you’re being consistent and that you follow through. Don’t say on Tuesday at 6 o’clock, I’m going to set time aside for my family and then be like, oh, sorry guys, this came up. I can’t do that. Like you need to honor those commitments and just stick with it.

Tim Church: I think that’s so true. There’s such power in that intentionality but then figuring out that system on how you’re going to actually execute. One of the things that you wrote to me before we jumped on the interview is that your husband has been one of your largest supporters. So I wanted to give him a shoutout because clearly, you seem to have written that with a lot of enthusiasm. And it seems like that’s probably necessary for the undertaking that you have.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Oh, 100%. I honestly couldn’t do what I’m doing right now without his support. I mean, just think about that for a second. You’re married to someone, you have committed to spending your life together with one another, and here I am going to work 40 hours during day, either work typically 8-4 or 2-10 at my job, and then when I come home, it’s like, “Hey, honey. Let’s have dinner. OK, I’m going to work again.” So I could totally understand him being frustrated or like what the heck, she has no time for me. But I think you know, we try to always schedule time with each other, which sounds very unromantic, I get that, but I’m in that phase right now with the business where these things have to happen, and I think he definitely understands that it’s a dream of mine, something that I’m pushing really hard for. And he’s just awesome. I can’t thank him enough for being super understanding about it, never gives me a hard time when I say, “Oh, I have this project I have to work on,” or, “Oh, I have this deadline.” He’s my biggest supporter, and I love him for that.

Tim Church: That is awesome. What’s his name?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: His name’s Matthew.

Tim Church: Matthew, you’re doing an awesome job. Keep supporting Brittany. So Brittany, one of the questions I think that often comes up — and I feel like especially with medical writing — but just in general with trying to start a business or a side hustle, one of the things that comes up is just how do I get started? How do I break in and get going? Because I think it’s easy to kind of sit back, hear your story, and obviously it’s taken a lot of hard work to get to the point where you are now, but what advice, what guidance would you give to somebody who’s just trying to start to break in?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, I get asked this question all the time, actually. And so much so that I am actually working on a new project that’s hopefully going to help new, aspiring medical writers solve that problem. So stay tuned. There’ll be more to come. But just in general, to answer your question, I think the biggest thing that people who are aspiring to be a medical writer have to think about is one, what type of writing do they want to do? Do you want to have a staff position? Do you want to be a freelancer? Although that isn’t my favorite way to characterize what it is that we’re doing, but it’s in the vernacular to describe this medical writing role when you’re not working full-time for a particular company. And then ask yourself what types of things do you like? What are you interested in? And then seek out those types of opportunities. This is a gig economy where you can seek out different projects, let people know what you’re interested in, and just make sure that you come in prepared too. We want to make sure that you’re not only just asking people but that you’re letting them know what it is that you can provide to them that’s of value because that’s the biggest thing when it comes to different companies is how can you provide that value to them?

Tim Church: Well said, Brittany. So if somebody wants to reach out to you to learn more about your business, what you’re doing, or maybe just needs a couple key pieces of encouragement about getting started, how can they do that?

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Yeah, so they can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks, can also find my email address on my website at www.BannerMedicalWriting.com. Either one of those is a great way to reach out to me. I love hearing from new people and talking about your story. So don’t hesitate to reach out. And if I can help you, I’m happy to do so.

Tim Church: Well, thank you again for coming on the show, sharing your story, and just really looking forward to hear about the progress as you continue to grow your business.

Brittany Hoffman-Eubanks: Thank you. I’m super excited. Thank you so much for having me. I hope that anyone who’s out there listening that if you’re really interested in being an entrepreneur, starting your own side hustle, start small with the things you can control. And you never know where things will take you.

Current Student Loan Refinance Offers

Advertising Disclosure

[wptb id="15454" not found ]

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 123: Leveraging Your Expertise to Start a Side Hustle


Leveraging Your Expertise to Start a Side Hustle

Dustin & Melody Hartzler talk about their healthcare side hustles, how these ventures have accelerated their financial goals, how they balance and prioritize their time, and how they work together as a couple when it comes to business and managing their personal finances.

About Today’s Guests

Dustin Hartzler is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic by day, where he helps business owners work all of the kinks out of their WooCommerce stores. If working with WordPress all day wasn’t enough, he spends time each week recording his WordPress podcast called Your Website Engineer (http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com). He enjoys helping people understand and use WordPress to its fullest capacity and spends time tinkering with code. When he’s not in front of the computer (which is rare), he enjoys spending time CrossFitting, reading and traveling. He lives in Dayton, OH with his wife, 5.5 year old daughter, and 2.5 year old son.

Dr. Melody L. Hartzler, PharmD, BCACP, BC-ADM, is a family medicine clinical pharmacist and Associate professor of pharmacy practice. Dr. Hartzler is a graduate from Ohio Northern Raabe College of Pharmacy. She completed her PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Residency with emphasis in Ambulatory Care at the Chalmers P. Wylie VA Ambulatory Care Center in Columbus, OH. Following residency, she joined faculty at Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and developed a collaborative practice in a family medicine residency program. She now serves part-time for Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and part-time as a clinical pharmacist at Western Medicine Family Physicians. Her primary practice interests are diabetes, IBS/IBD, and functional medicine. In her current clinical practice, she works collaboratively with her physicians through a consult agreements. She is board certified in both ambulatory care pharmacy as well as diabetes management. She is a nationally recognized speaker, who has presented 6 times at the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting, as well as numerous state and local programs. She is an active member of American Society of Health System-Pharmacists as well as state and local organizations. She is also is a current board member for the Ohio Pharmacist Association. Dr. Hartzler’s passion for functional medicine lead her to start her company PharmToTable, LLC; she blogs at PharmToTable.Life. Her newest adventure is FunctionalMedicineCE.Com, she is making quality continuing education for Functional Medicine convenient and affordable.

Summary

Dustin and Melody Hartzler share their career journeys and how they are leveraging their expertise to start a side hustle. They have created multiple side hustles built on needs they are seeing while also fulfilling creative outlets they crave. Melody works 3 days a week at Western Medicine Family Physicians and teaches at Cedarville part-time. At her office job, she focuses on diabetes medication, transitions of care, medical reconciliation and does functional medicine consultations. Dustin is an electrical engineer turned Happiness Engineer at Automattic where he supports customers set up their WooCommerce stores and websites.Together they have created two side hustles: Functional Medicine Continuing Education and Pharm to Table. This episode focuses on Functional Medicine Continuing Education.

Dustin and Melody share their roles in their businesses. Dustin is able to have a creative outlet by building websites for their businesses and Melody often brings new ideas to the table based on the needs she sees in the pharmacy and functional medicine fields. They often have business conversations while driving.

Melody dives into functional medicine, a break down of what it is, her personal story leading her to learn more about functional medicine and how she incorporates it into her office practice as well as in their side hustles.

They speak more about their business model and the costs behind getting websites like they have up and running. The couple also share their advice for getting started in a side hustle and the podcasts and books they help to inspire their journey.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited to welcome onto the show Dustin and Melody Hartzler, proud fellow alums of mine of Ohio Northern University to talk about their unique career journeys with multiple side hustles, which most recently culminated in the launch of FunctionalMedicineCE.com and a virtual symposium that they are launching on Nov. 9, 2019. This episode is an extension of the work, the excellent work, that Tim Church has been doing as a part of our YFP side hustle series where we talk about ways you can create additional streams of income to reach your financial goals faster and highlight pharmacists who are making this happen. Now, before we get started with today’s episode, I want to mention an awesome giveaway that we have going on this month in combination, in partnership with Brandon Dyson and the team over at TLDR Pharmacy. And this is the ultimate residency prep giveaway, and you can learn more and enroll in that giveaway to get yourself eligible over at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. Again, that’s YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. In this giveaway, the ultimate residency prep giveaway for five winners, we have a variety of resources, everything from interview prep, letter of intent prep, a pharmacy residency bootcamp from the Pharmacy Advisory Group, lots and lots of resources, including the forecast application fee that, of course, costs just over $100. So again, you can learn more at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. So Dustin and Melody, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.

Melody Hartzler: Thank you.

Dustin Hartzler: Hello, hello.

Tim Ulbrich: Well this has been a long time in the making, so excited to have you guys on the show. And we’re going to talk everything from business and side hustles to how do you guys effectively work together, what’s the purpose, what’s the goal, why are you doing these side hustles, so I’m excited to be able to have our community, our listeners, get exposure not only to the businesses that you’re working on but also a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of how the two of you operate and the success that you’ve had. So why don’t we start with each of you — Melody, I’ll start with you. And then Dustin, I’ll ask the same thing. Melody, can you start and tell us a little bit about your day job, what you’re doing every day as a clinical pharmacist? And then from there, we’ll jump later in the show about some of the side hustles.

Melody Hartzler: Sure. So three days a week, I work at Western Medicine Family Physicians, which is a private practice family physician office in the Dayton, Ohio, area. And then I also teach at Cedarville part-time, so I get the opportunity to still teach what I love, which is endocrinology and diabetes-focused. And also I am in charge of our residency teaching certificate program at Cedarville. So during the week at the office, I do a lot of diabetes management, also transitions of care, helping med reconciliation for post-hospital discharge patients. And then I do a lot of functional medicine consults too, which I think we’re going to get into later.

Tim Ulbrich: We are. And that was — part of wanting you to share that is I think often the value in a side hustle — most side hustles that often turn into successful businesses I think is where there is synergy between someone’s area of expertise in their day job and what they’re able to do. So split position, teaching as well as practice in functional medicine. Dustin, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on the work that you’re currently doing at Automatic as well as the previous work that you had in starting and owning your own business?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, absolutely. So I do work at Automatic now. I am on a support team, so I help people set up websites. And you might see where this is going here in a little bit, but I had a business when we moved to Dayton in 2010, I set up my own company because I wasn’t going to do my electrical engineering job, drive to a factory two hours away, and it just didn’t make sense. So I’m like, let’s see if I can start something here. And I started, and I had a business building websites for people. And so I have a lot of experience, 10 years almost, in just building websites and helping people get their websites set up. So that’s my primary focus, and that’s my primary day-to-day.

Tim Ulbrich: So you’re title, Dustin, if I pulled this correctly from your LinkedIn profile, is a “happiness engineer.” What is that? I mean, what does the day-to-day of that look like?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so that’s just a name for our customer support team. And so our goal is to make everybody happy, I guess if you will. It’s mainly — it’s kind of a unique position in the fact that we’re not like a normal call center that says like, “Oh, you can only give them refunds if this, or you can only do this.” Like there’s so much flexibility in our jobs, like you know, if somebody has paid for a plugin or paid for something and it just doesn’t work, we can go outside their window to refund them or we give them extra time or give them free plugins. Like I’ve given customers who’ve spent thousands of dollars with us, just oh, this wasn’t working when you try to check out, it’s on me. Like it’s one of the cool things that we can do for our loyal customers and just try to make everybody, that experience when you’re building a website is so frustrating. And so our goal is to help people get what they need and to also just do it without having to ask for extra permission. Like, “Oh, can we give someone this $100 thing worth of value?” Just go ahead and do it, and everybody moves on with their lives.

Tim Ulbrich: So one of the things I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this and I don’t want to gloss over, Dustin, but you mentioned obviously you’re trained as an electrical engineer and you abandoned — for lack of a better word — abandoned that work, started your own company. You mentioned the long commute, but what other reasons, what other factors played into that decision in terms of leaving a career in a field that you had spent a lot of time obviously in training and becoming an expertise and deciding you want to go this route into web development?

Dustin Hartzler: I think the two things that stand out to me is one, I don’t like meetings. I worked at Whirlpool, and I would literally have like seven hours of meetings in an eight-hour day, plus have to do all my other work.

Melody Hartzler: He wouldn’t do well in academia either.

Tim Ulbrich: No, no, he would not.

Dustin Hartzler: And then I think the other thing was just the inspiration I was getting from listening to so many other business podcasts and people creating their own thing and doing their own thing, and the income level was — you were never capped. Whatever you could create, that’s how much money you could make. So I think those were kind of the two reasons besides the long commute. And honestly, I liked the commute more than the work because I got to listen to podcasts the whole way to and from work.

Tim Ulbrich: I love that. I mean, so the aversion of meetings and the advantage of not having a cap on your income certainly can be reasons to be able to start your own business. So I agree, though, Melody, academia would not be the environment for Dustin. You’ve got to love the meetings that are about the meetings. Those are my favorite types of meetings. So let’s jump in. And Melody, if you could start, and Dustin, feel free to chime in, you know, I’m always curious, obviously here we are on a personal finance podcast, but I think so much of people’s success in business or here in side hustles or side hustles that turn into businesses over time is really dependent on people having a solid financial base and foundation from which they can build. So tell us a little bit about your personal finance story and journey as an individual, as a couple, and how that has put you in a position to be strategic and on the offense when it comes to these business opportunities.

Melody Hartzler: Sure. So I probably didn’t have the best understanding of finances when we got married and even going into school. I had a lot of private loans that had a variable interest rate. So by the time 2008 came around, before the stock market crashed, some of those were at about 16% interest.

Tim Ulbrich: Wow.

Melody Hartzler: Yes. So we left, I graduated in 2009, and I had about $120,000 in debt plus an additional $12,000 that I ended up paying back to Walgreens about three years later. Maybe a little longer. And so from that point, we knew we had to pay it back, and we wanted to pay it back quickly. We really wanted to pay it back before we had kids. Dustin had a lot less, which he can talk about. But so I — even during residency, I wanted to pursue residency and I knew that I liked talking with people and I loved the idea of community pharmacy, but I knew that the way that it was going wasn’t going to work for me and my goals. And so I did my residency in an outpatient facility at the Columbus VA. And I didn’t have weekend responsibilities there, so on the weekends, just like every other resident in town, I was working on the weekends. So I worked at Walgreens every other weekend throughout my whole residency. So pretty much had four days off a month because I was working the other weekends. And you know, that helped us a lot because we were able to significantly increase even just that first year. If you think about four days a month of a retail pharmacist’s salary plus the residency salary, it almost was about the same.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Melody Hartzler: You know, when you got down to it. So that was a blessing to still be able to have that residency experience and then be able to get paid a separate position to help us dig out of that a little bit and then ended up having one of our cars died that year, and so we ended up having to use a lot of that to purchase a reliable car to get to those jobs. So and then Dustin, I can let him talk a little bit about his strategy when we were paying off loans. He was even paying them off when we were in Ada still at Ohio Northern, so my last two years of school, I worked as a head resident — actually three years, the last three years I was at ONU, I was the head resident. And so my room was free and we had the stipend plus we got a meal ticket. So here we got married and we’re living in an apartment on campus and going to the cafeteria as a married couple because that’s what made the most sense. I mean, we didn’t have our awakening on the whole health and nutrition thing at that point, so we were still OK with eating the food there. And so that was a big savings, we didn’t have a rent to pay for our first early years of marriage because of that. And so Dustin really was able to start driving down some of those high interest loans.

Tim Ulbrich: So Dustin, give us the strategy a little bit — and obviously chime in with your own financial position as well in terms of student loan debt. But those together when I hear 16% interest loans, were those just things you aggressively paid off? Did you guys refinance those? But in addition to that, what was the motivation for you that even while Melody was still in school that you obviously had very significant intentions of trying to aggressively pay those off. Tell us a little bit about that backstory.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so when I started — so I graduated. I’m two years older than Melody school-wise. And so I graduated two years earlier. And I had a full-time job, you know, a full salary engineer position, and I drove to and from work. And this was like right at the dawn of podcasts, believe it or not. And the iPod, video iPod is the first iPod with the thick wheel, and I felt like I could invest $300 in this Apple device so that I could play it through my car deck tape player.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Dustin Hartzler: To and from work. Like I was commuting an hour to and from Whirlpool. And I was like, well, I just want to learn about money. Like nobody ever teaches you about money. And so I got hooked on the Dave Ramsey Show, and all of a sudden things that he was saying was making sense. And we didn’t full out Dave Ramsey — like we took vacations while we were still in debt. Like we lived life, but we still were pretty aggressive with our student loans. But what happened was I ended up with like $20,000 in student loans. I throw that number out there like, oh, just $20,000. That’s still a lot. It’s not Monopoly money, like we paid it all back. But so I ended up — he was talking about creating a budget, and this was all before Dave Ramsey has his budgeting tools and stuff online. So I had an Excel spreadsheet, and I figured out — and I don’t know if this is true or not — but as an engineer, you’re always trying to figure out how you can save the most amount of money in interest. And so like we figured that it made more sense for Melody to take out new loans for the last couple years while we paid off her current loans. And so we had about three things we had to pay for: We paid for gas for my car to and from work. We paid for renter’s insurance. And I think we paid for like some groceries for breakfast and lunches for me. That was pretty much all of our bills. And so it was like every week, I figured out that if I wanted to spend $2,000 per month towards the loans, then I could spend $500 per week. And then that last week, whatever we had left in the month, we got that, that’s what got sent over to Sallie Mae at the time. And so that was kind of the strategy and the thought process. And was it the coolest life to live? No, not really. But looking back, our first two years of marriage, we lived on campus. And I mean, I got to do all the intramural sports and all that kind of stuff, and there were still a lot of friends that I had because I had just graduated. And so it was kind of cool, like it was a good jumpstart with such a weight around our ankles, if you will, with all of the loans that we had.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing like a good date night at the Macintosh cafeteria, right? At Ohio Northern University. I mean, what I love about that though is I love the intentionality, I love that Melody, you kind of admitted that you didn’t necessarily come in with the same appreciation for that and obviously had more debt, although that’s still well below the national average of what we’re seeing now even though it was a higher interest rate. But still were really, really aggressive. And I want to follow up on that and hear from the two of you. We talk a lot on this show about the importance of having a financial why. What is your motivator for why you even care about this topic of money to begin with? And we’ve preached over and over and over again that that’s going to be different for everyone. But if you can articulate that, especially as a couple if you can articulate that, I think it makes so many other parts of the financial plan easier to work through, such as the month-to-month budget and being on the same page and all the things that cause so much heartache and a lot of difficulty for people. So for the two of you, what’s the vision? What’s the dream? What’s the why when it comes to money in terms of why you wanted to be intentional in paying down the debt? And what’s the future hold in terms of why this topic of money matters?

Dustin Hartzler: I think the first thing that really comes to mind is like, I didn’t like paying people to use their money. I don’t know, like I had never had any credit, I had never — before, it was always like, “Oh, interest. That’s what the bank pays me.” And then when we see how much the interest is making, or how much we’re spending in interest, it just like takes your breath away almost. It’s like, wow, on our mortgage or whatever, that’s a lot of money just to spend to have used somebody else’s money. And so I think that’s kind of the driving force behind it, and then kind of looking out — and I do this a lot too with trying to figure out what happens the day comes and we don’t have our mortgage anymore, like look at all of the possibilities there. Like, oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, we could easily cash flow college for our children. Or oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, look how much money we would have to do these other things. So I think some of the why is just giving us the flexibility to do what we want. You think about it, and I told this to Melody, I don’t know, a few weeks ago or months ago, we were driving somewhere and I was like, “I am so glad that we do not have any student loans anymore.” With all of the things that we’re doing, the pieces of the puzzle, like you start tacking on $500, $1,000 here or there doing other things, we would rather spend instead of $1,000 to Sallie Mae to pay for education, like we would rather spend $1,000 to have our kids be more bilingual and go to a Spanish immersion preschool, which they do, and a kindergarten. So those are some of the kind of the things that I can think of right off the top of my head when it comes to financial motivators for us.

Melody Hartzler: The other thing too is that we’re Christians and we’re also passionate about giving and serving, and so we feel called to give back. It’s not really our money to begin with. And so how can we be a better steward of that? And so paying it down quicker as far as the debt that we had and even with our mortgage now is important to us so that we can be better stewards of the finances that we’re given and the opportunities that we have. We do give at least 10% of our incomes to our church and to various ministries in our community, even through the things I’m doing on the side hustles, the blogs and things like that. I also make it a priority to tithe those and things like that as well. So that’s important to us. Travel is also important to us. So I love, I’ve been to 49 out of 50 states. And so I grew up — and a lot of times, my parents didn’t have any super fancy we did, timeshare travel and different things like that where we’d cook most of our meals throughout the week, but hey, we were at the beach. And we did a lot of trips where we’d drive to the Grand Canyon or drive to Yellowstone and stopped at a lot of places along the way. And so I sort of got the travel bug and then like Dustin said, even when we were paying off debt, we were still traveling. So we went to Hawaii. My parents had gifted us two timeshare weeks out there that we were able to line up sort of back-to-back. But you know, when we were out there, we definitely used a Red Lobster gift card in Honolulu. And we totally ate peanut butter sandwiches at the feet of waterfalls. And so it was OK. We saw the beautiful creation that we were there to see. And obviously if we went back now, it would be a little bit different. But we laughed at that, and again, before our healthy food awaken, but we still have great memories of that. And even when we went to Europe before we got pregnant with our daughter, we went with another couple, we split Airbnb’s, so we weren’t out there spending — when I look at the Travel & Leisure magazine, I just sort of read it like, oh, this is beautiful. I’m never going to stay at these places. It has cool places to go, but never am I going to go on this place that costs $3,000 for the whole week just for one person. But yeah, so we really do want our kids to be exposed to travel, and that’s also important. And we like to — even each year, we like to go someplace by ourselves to sort of just disconnect from the day-to-day and I guess you could say the rat race sometimes. And then we like to take our family on a trip as well. So we just got back, actually, from St. John. But even within that, we went on Marriott points, and we got a good deal on flights. So it wasn’t like we’re just still — we’re still trying to be budget-friendly because we still are in debt with our mortgage and trying to be good stewards of our money.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think you guys have been great examples that you can enjoy something that both of you are very passionate about in terms of traveling and exposing your kids to that but also do it in a way that fits in your financial plan and is reasonable to do in terms of how much money you have. And what you all are going to remember, obviously, is the experience. Right? I mean, not necessarily using a Red Lobster card, although that’s a great story. I mean, the meals and the food and all that are good, but obviously the experience and the time you have with one another and with your family is going to be what you’re going to remember in the long run. So let’s talk business because I wanted to lay that foundation because as I mentioned on this show and I say often, being able to aggressively pursue business opportunities, whether it’s a side hustle, whether it’s investing in another business, whether it’s buying real estate, whatever it be, doing so when you have clarity on the things that we just talked about I think allows someone to be able to pursue that opportunity with confidence and to do it in a way that’s not going to add on stress. And I think that’s so important that we all know the stress that can come from our own financial situation. And when you think about things like debt and not having emergency savings and obviously you put kids into the picture and expenses go up and home prices, all those things, and if you want to then pursue business opportunities but you already have those stressors, obviously this could be one extra layer of stress rather than hopefully something that can produce additional income and also allow you to pursue something that you’re passionate about. So what I would like to do is talk through two businesses I know that you’ve worked on, and we’ll talk about the one a little bit more in detail that you’re getting ready to launch, the virtual symposium, the functional medicine CE, but I also want to talk about your other venture in farm-to-table. But before we jump into those two, help me understand — obviously, we’re going to talk about two pharmacy-specific oriented businesses, but Dustin, obviously you’re not a pharmacist. We’ve learned you’re an electrical engineer, you’ve got a web design background, so what is the role that each of you play when it comes to the business ventures that you’re working on?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so the thing about working at Automatic, it’s an awesome company. It’s the — WordPress.com is the company behind that, and there’s a specific little thing in my contract with them that I have a — it’s a conflict of interest for me to build websites for other people and charge money for it. I can out of the goodness of my heart for as many people as I’d like, but the time doesn’t really — I don’t really have the time to build websites for the goodness of my heart for many people. And so I think one of the really interesting things with that conflict of interest, you know, I was always trying to think like, OK, what can I do as my side hustle? Or what can I do that I’m really passionate about? But everything I’m passionate about is WordPress and websites, developing code and stuff like that. And so that’s one of the things that really, it was kind of once I started at Automatic back in 2013, it was like for a few months and a few years, it was like, well, I don’t have to do anything else. I’ve got this good-paying job, let’s not worry about it. But then that itch continues to be there. And then Melody comes up with these ideas, it’s like hmm. So I can build something for free, and I get revenue from it, essentially. So like I was talking to some people at we have an all-company meetup. It’s once per year; it was back in September. And I was telling people like, oh yeah, I built this. I was using WooCommerce and my wife is making all this money with this website. And they’re like, well don’t you mean you? And I was like, no. My wife is making all this money. So I think that’s a really good blend of what we can do as a couple because I can’t create that kind of thing on my own, mainly just because of the conflict of interest. Like had I — if I leave Automatic, I can go and do whatever I want. But I really like my job, and so this just gives me the opportunity, it scratches the itch of I get to build things but then I’m also getting the benefit of building this by as much as Melody can fill.

Tim Ulbrich: Hey Melody, I know how big of an asset that is, you know. For us, we have the magic bullet of Tim Church. You have the magic bullet of Dustin Hartzler that can do all of that. But the web design piece, the opt-ins, the lead magnets, the format, that can often consume people when they’re trying to just get their idea off the ground. So what an incredible resource. So building on that, it sounds like based on what Dustin said, you’re often coming with the vision, the idea, and then are you batting that back-and-forth with Dustin? Is he helping on the execution? Help me understand how you’re fleshing out a business idea that you come up with.

Melody Hartzler: Yeah, so normally, honestly, it’s a lot of conversations in the car when we’re driving places because if the kids are watching something on the iPad and you can’t do anything else when you’re driving, that’s when we have a lot of our business discussions. But I think a lot of times, it’s like, hey, this is what the need is that I’m seeing. And then like we’re just sort of going back-and-forth about how we can meet that need but also turn it into that side hustle and generate revenue from it.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Melody Hartzler: And so for example, with the functional medicine CE, I all the time was seeing people saying, “Hey, I want to learn more about functional medicine. Where can I go?” And there’s a lot of great organizations teaching about functional medicine. The challenge is not a lot of them are providing pharmacist CEs. So if people are looking to meet their Continuing Education requirements with this education, that wasn’t happening in a lot of those situations. And also, the conferences are sort of expensive. And so when you’re looking at Institute of Functional Medicine, which is a great organization, and I’m hopefully going to be — I want to go to their conference next year at some point. It’s a great organization, but there’s no pharmacist CE currently, and there’s also — it’s a couple thousand dollars, if not more because you’re talking plane travel and really nice hotel stay for five days. And that all adds up really quickly. And so you know, a lot of people are too like I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. What can I learn to before I get to the point where I want to spend a couple grand on this. And so a lot of the other functional medicine programs out there, there’s Functional Medicine University, which is a great site that’s a couple grand to do their certificate program, which is actually one of the lower cost ones for getting a whole certificate. But anyways, so if you’re talking like IFM, you’re talking maybe $20,000 by the time you’re done with all the things you need to do to get that certificate. So I thought, you know, there’s got to be a better way to do this. So with my background in education, I’ve developed a lot of Continuing Education as well over the years as a faculty member. And I thought, you know, we can teach people, and we don’t have to have them go anywhere. You know? We’ve got webinar, you can Zoom software, and the ability to work with — I work with CEI, which is a great CE company. And so the ladies there that I’ve worked with have been fabulous. And so I’d already been working with them a little bit, writing for them. And so I thought, you know what? I can do this but host it on my own site and then I can still pay them to certify the CE and get this sort of going. And so I started talking about this with Orthomolecular, there’s a pharmacist that works for Orthomolecular, which was like, hey, that’s a great idea. We could sponsor it. And I was like, awesome. And so you know, the more I talked about it, the more people started to say, OK, yeah, we can do this. And so I had a lot of support. The speakers that are speaking this time around are all awesome and have been sharing a lot about the conference, and so Lauren Castle (?) is the founder of FMPhA. It’s funny because I was on maternity leave with my son, I think, and I saw the flyer for OPA that year. And it was this Introduction to Functional Medicine. And I was like, who in the world is giving that talk? Here I am holding this baby. So I looked at it, and I looked her up and I called her and we started connecting, and so that’s been awhile now. It actually might have been when I was on maternity leave with Kinley now that I think about it, about five years ago. But then now she lives like 10 minutes down the street from me. So —

Tim Ulbrich: Small world.

Melody Hartzler: It is a small world. But it’s been fun to help encourage her and what she’s doing in the functional medicine world and also have her support for what I’m doing as well.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll link to this in the show notes as well, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. The first virtual symposium is starting on Nov. 9. So for those of you that are interested in the topic, obviously check it out. Also I would encourage for those of you have an educational idea that you’re batting around and wanting to get a feel for what a virtual symposium is, I would check that out as well. You guys did a great job with the website setup, Dustin. Nice work. And I think it looks really clean, you’ve got great speakers on there, and I think it’s a great model that others can look at and build off from as well. So let me — couple more questions. I want to dig into this business model a little bit further, but for those of our listeners that maybe aren’t as familiar with functional medicine, give us the down-low on what is functional medicine? And why is it a topic that you care so much about? And why as a pharmacist do you think you have a lot to offer in that space?

Melody Hartzler: Sure, that could be a whole hour conversation, so I’ll try to not do that. But so essentially, functional medicine is really looking at the root cause of disease. And so we do that really well when we talk about infectious disease, you know, we have a treatment, it gets rid of it, we’re gone. But as far as the chronic disease model in this country, when we think about chronic disease, we really don’t have a lot of cures for most of our chronic diseases. It’s just something we manage with symptom management, and I do that every day in my practice too. I manage diabetes with medications, but I also try to incorporate some of these functional medicine principles as well. But essentially, it’s acknowledging that patients are individuals too I think is a big component of it. So just because something works in the population health, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to work for this person sitting in front of you. And so trusting that what the patient is saying about their symptoms and using information that’s evidence-based is part of it, so it’s not like we’re just throwing these supplements that don’t have any science. It’s so much biochemistry, I wish I would have really paid a lot more attention in biochemistry. I give these reports, I do this one report from Genova Diagnostics called The NutriEval, and you literally get the kreb cycle printed out with all the different components of it of the patient’s actual body, and then it tells you what nutrients you need to make that cycle more efficient. And I was like, man I should have — and it seems like such a long time ago too. So it’s good — that’s why education, Continuing Education, is so important to try to keep brushing up on those skills. But I think the best example that I like to give is functional medicine approaches IBS. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not just constipation or diarrhea. Like there’s something causing it. But the drugs that we have both of those conditions, whether it’s IBSD or IBSC, are just symptom-managing drugs.

Tim Ulbrich: Right.

Melody Hartzler: They’re not actually correcting any of the issue. And so typically, IBSD is often caused by a dysbiosis or an imbalance in the microbiome, which is why we do now have a prescription agent that is an antibiotic. But there’s also challenges with that because it’s only 60-70% effective after one course. And so there’s other things that we have to think about. And then as far as constipation, we don’t really have anything that addresses a lot of the root cause. And so when we are looking at someone with IBS, we’re thinking about is there a potential pathogen that’s causing this? Is it a parasite? Is it a microbiome imbalance? Or is it inflammation? So even some of our IBS patients, their fecal count protectants (?) is really high, so there’s a lot of inflammation going on there even though you wouldn’t classify it necessarily diagnostically as IBD. And so looking at some of those things, is food intolerance related? And so we organize sort of our thoughts based on the patient. There’s this whole timeline piece of functional medicine. So they look back questions that we’re asking patients on our intake survey: Were they breast fed? Were they born prematurely? What kind of stressors did they have early in life? Was it parents went through a divorce and then all of a sudden these abdominal symptoms started to appear? And so there’s different points in your life that this cycle piece and the stressors also sort of turn over the epigenetics. So epigenetics is, you know, you have this genetic code at the beginning, but then the influences in your life turn on and turn off different things. And so everyone is unique in that aspect because we’ve all had different influences in our lives, whether that’s chemical or external stressors from family circumstances and things like that. So my stressor that led us to functional medicine was actually the birth of our daughter. So it was quite the experience, and we sort of planned for this natural birthing experience, and our doula was in jail, so that’s a podcast for another day.

Tim Ulbrich: Oh gees.

Melody Hartzler: So from that, it turned into a pretty stressful induction, long labor and the first five weeks of her life, she was super colicky and tongue-tied, and it took us awhile to realize that. And so all of that stress I think just sort of set my bad diet, probably poor microbiome balance, sort of over the top. And then, you know, about a year later, I started to have this abdominal pain that wasn’t going away. And everybody was like, oh, you’re fine. Yeah, basic interventions type things. Even then GI specialist was like, no, there’s no reason to scope you, you’re completely fine. I was like, well I literally have this pain every single day in the same exact spot. And so I finally found some functional medicine practitioners and turned out it was probably dysbiosis, probably CBO — I never actually did the breath test, which I don’t always do for our patients either — but did some of the comprehensive stool testing and took some antimicrobials. I even tried the laxin (?). It was a long journey, so it was about at that year point from her life for about a year and a half that we were still sort of going through the journey. I even went to the Cleveland Clinic Functional Medicine Institute. And I felt a lot better at that point, but I had finally made it on the waitlist, and so I was like, you know what? I’m going to go and learn from them. So let’s see what they have to tell me because at this point, I knew functional medicine was something that I wanted to incorporate, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that because I was working at the time in a federally qualified healthcare center, which was a little bit challenging because, you know, the cost of a lot of these interventions right now is really only available to people in the middle class and above. So I think some of the things other people are doing in this community to try to make these resources more available to the masses is awesome. So but at this point, it was challenging for us to do a lot of that testing. But there’s still a lot of basic things we can do, not only in community pharmacy but also in settings like that, you know, as far as testing vitamins and using probiotics and doing nutrient supplementations to help to heal the gut. And so even in that practice, looking back, there’s probably a lot more that I could be doing at the time, but I didn’t have enough experience to know what that was. And so — but anyways, so at about that time, it was right before, actually, we got pregnant with our son that we decided that I needed to go part-time with my faculty position. And that was coming from a lot of the stress with not only not knowing what was going on in my body and trying to — I was like, if I’m going to have another child, like I really need some extra time during the week. And I also in my head also had a lot of these ideas sort of out there, that I would like to do the blogs and stuff like that. And so made that decision and then started my part-time position with Cedarville and also at that time then, transferred offices to work in a different family medicine office, which that was really I think one of the pivotal points for my career because the family medicine physician that I work for is wonderful. And he is very open to a lot of these things, and so when myself and actually my best friend is one of my colleagues there who’s a nurse practitioner, and we sort of went to him together because he needed a new nurse practitioner. But we had also heard that he needed someone to manage his diabetes. And so I was like, well she may not want to manage diabetes, but I can do that. And she didn’t want to do something else, so we sat with together and sort of said, this is what we can do, that we both have this interest in functional medicine. And then fast forward to today, we have a functional medicine service that patients see her, sometimes they see me as part of that. And so we’re starting to be known in the Dayton area for our functional medicine service, so it’s pretty exciting. And so I really feel like had we not made that decision to go part-time, like that really wouldn’t have been where we would be landing right now. And so yeah. So it’s exciting and I really think the passion for sharing about functional medicine is because of that experience that I had as a patient, and I think that’s a lot of pharmacists that are involved in functional medicine had some kind of personal experience, whether it was them or it was their spouse going through something or their child. And even with our daughter, I’ve learned a lot about pediatric approaches to functional medicine through some of her journeys with allergies and asthma and things like that. And so a lot of my initial blog post that I have on farm-to-table are based on a lot of those topics that I was sort of walking through and researching anyways for our own personal health.

Tim Ulbrich: And what I love about this is one, just great example of — I think great businesses are made out of identifying a problem that needs to be solved that people actually care about, and you’ve checked that. Obviously, there’s lots of concerns people have out there about their own personal health and diet and exercise or not getting successful treatment plans with traditional medicine. It also has a combination of certainly your expertise, so an area of practice and an area that you’ve experienced firsthand, an area that brings your educational background as you’re looking at building CE and online courses and things like that. And then obviously, it has a personal component as well. So I think as people are out there hearing this, I think it’s just a great example of as you’re thinking about a business, you’re thinking about a side hustle, is there something out there — you mentioned you and Dustin talking in the car where you often say, OK, well, there’s a need here or there’s a problem that’s here, something that needs to be solved. That’s where it starts, and then it’s trying to figure out what is the solution? And is it a solution that you can bring value to based on your previous experience and personally? Or based on your experiences and expertise in what you do every day. So before I ask you a question about the business model of this, Dustin, as I look at the website, which again, is incredible, as I look at the website if I’m somebody listening to this podcast and thinking, oh, I have this idea and I need to build this site whether it’s a site for a CE program or whether it’s just a site for what they’re trying to do, I look at this and say No. 1, I could never do this. I don’t have time or this is way too expensive. So give us a ballpark. Like what would be involved here if somebody were building a site in terms of time and roughly expense to get something like this off the ground?

Dustin Hartzler: Sure. And this was one thing that — I mean, you mentioned it earlier. Like Melody’s able to do these things because she doesn’t have a lot of upfront tech costs because like that’s my thing. But honestly, I bought a — I didn’t do all the design, I didn’t have time for that either. But I bought a $20 theme online and I did some customizations and I did some things with it, and you need a website and you can get hosting for $5-10 per month or $50 a year or so. You can even go to WordPress.com. We’ll do a little promo there. But they have the ability for $100 a year or $300 per year, you can get live chat support and do all kinds of things online. And you can have somebody physically help you if you run into things like that. So I would say all in all, with my development time if you were to pay somebody to do it, I probably have 20 hours in the site and just because it was a lot of tinkering, and there’s probably 20 more hours of things that I want to do because I know — I want to be able to do this multiple times. Like that’s kind of our goal. We want to have this virtual symposium and then another one and another one. And a lot of the stuff that’s in there is kind of hard-coated. It’s like built right into the theme. And so if Melody needs to make a change, I have to do it. And I don’t want that, I want her to be able to do all the changes because I want to make it easier for me in the future. And so I don’t know, I would say you — if you would invest like $500, you could get a pretty decent website up and running to test a business idea or test a model out or something like that. You could go a lot less than that if you are a little bit techy and you’d rather do a little sweat equity if that’s something interesting to you. You know, a minimum if you bought a theme and you have some hosting, you could get by with about $100 investment. And so I think anywhere between the $100-500 could get you a pretty decent website up and running to start testing that idea out.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think that’s great. That’s what I want our audience to hear is that we’re not in an age where you have to be paying $10,000 or $20,000 to get your site off the ground, right? When you look at themes and you look at some of the things that are out there in terms of plug-and-play and what you can do with e-commerce, whether it’s them digging a little bit deep to read and learn on their own or ultimately hiring that out, it shouldn’t be an expense that is unbearable, even if they don’t have a Dustin Hartzler on their team. It should still be an opportunity they could pursue. So Melody, let me ask you a question or two in terms of the business model of this. And I want our audience to hear kind of your thought and vision of where this is starting and where this could go in the future. So I’m on the website right now, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. I see you have a symposium on Nov. 9, and I see you have a silver package, which essentially is the live option that people can tune in for seven hours of CE, it’s live only, $129 all the way up to a platinum pass, which gives them both the live as well as the video recording and then a post-conference networking. So what, as you were putting this together, what is the business model? What’s the goal in terms of running this? And I know there’s other virtual symposiums that have been out there that offer a free option and then they offer a buy-up option and then they’re promoting additional products and services. So as you started this way, why did you start this way? And where do you see this going in the future?

Melody Hartzler: So we started this way because looking at what other people were paying for functional medicine education, this is still much less than that. Even the weekend, I went on a Saturday-only symposium, that was Pharmacy CE in Indianapolis in September, which was great. But it was like the conference fee was $499 for the day. And then there was a discount code that got it to $299, but then we stayed at the Marriott downtown and the gas to drive there and a lot of people flew there, and so it added up to probably $1,000 pretty quickly for a lot of people. So we knew that — and there was I think 115 pharmacists that were there that day, and so I knew that if people are willing to fly across the country for this one day event, I feel like there’s enough people out there that would pay a fraction of that to be able to learn this information from people that are experts in the field. And so that was sort of the thought process by not having a free option upfront, and also I think the cost of the CE was part of that too and having to pay for accrediting the CE, AACP-accredited. And so we didn’t want to lose money on our first adventure in this, and so that’s part of the reason. We do offer discount codes, and we actually did make a YFP code as well. So if anyone’s listening to this and wants to sign up, YFP will get you 10% off. And so our future plan is to move forward with more of these virtual symposiums. And so our goal is to have three or four a year but then also eventually have a membership to the site where you would get all of those included in your membership throughout the year. So we’re looking at doing our second one probably late February, maybe early March, focusing on pain and inflammation. And we’re also going to try to have a session on CBD since that’s something that’s very popular right now and a lot of pharmacists have questions about because their patients are asking questions. And I think that’s the other thing about functional medicine that’s so important is whether or not you’re interested for yourself, a lot of your patients are interested and they’re asking you questions about way more herbal supplements and different products than they probably ever have. And so really being able to have the tools to answer some of those questions I think for a lot of people is important. I just kept hearing over and over, like hey, where do I get good information about this? And so I really just felt like we needed to try to provide that.

Tim Ulbrich: So when you think of threats to this, I think of the concept of how do you bulletproof your business, right? So you mentioned membership, which I’m guessing is maybe one answer to this, but what thoughts do you have in terms of the next person who comes on and says, “Well, I’m going to offer a free symposium, and I’m going to offer it for $79.” Like what’s the differential advantage that you see here? Because I think that’s an important aspect people need to think about when they’re working on a business idea is of course there will be competition, but what differential advantage do you have to this business model that you think will allow you to be successful in the long run?

Melody Hartzler: Well, that’s a good question. I think overall, the having a team of people of that have expertise in this subject, I mean, there’s a lot of people growing and learning more about functional medicine, so I anticipate that there’s going to be other opportunities. And I think the membership piece, we might morph into having a certificate program as well because I know a lot of pharmacists are looking for a lower cost certificate training program compared to some of the other options that are out there. I think developing a community is also important in trying to keep people engaged in your business versus looking at other places, and so I’m hoping that after this conference, we’re going to develop even just a Facebook group to start out with for people that all attended and just sort of stay connected and offering discounts for the next conferences for those that attended. And so I think trying to get the community built around it, I mean, you guys are a great example of that with the community that you’ve built around YFP. And so I think that’s really important to being able to continue to drive what you’re trying to do.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I really like that aspect. And I think the book that comes to mind if people want to learn more on that, one of the books that will never leave me that I always think back to is called “Tribes” by Seth Godin. He talks about exactly that concept of how do you build a community? Another article out there is around the concept of superfans and 1,000 superfans. But building a community that are passionate about this topic, which I’m guessing people are that are engaged here, either because of personal experience or because of the outcomes they see with patients that they’ve worked with and how do you create that platform and community that they can engage with each other all the time, throughout the entire year as well as these events that may happen throughout the year. So let’s jump into some fun questions to wrap up here. And we didn’t get to talk to as much but I want to reference our listeners to you also have another site you’ve worked on, which is Farm to Table, FarmtoTable.life, where they can learn more about the blog and the work that you’re doing over there. But I want to talk about some more of the fun, lighthearted questions on the business. And Dustin, I want to start with you because obviously, you’ve gone through this process of owning your own business. You started your own media company, and I’m sure there’s many people that are listening to this podcast that have some type of business aspiration, whether it’s big, small, medium, anywhere in between, they’ve identified maybe a problem that they see as unsolved, the process that could be done better or differently, or maybe there’s others that are just out there feeling stuck and they don’t even have an idea formulated but know they want to do something different. So from your experience of both starting a business and now working with Melody on this, what advice would you have to them in terms of next step that they may be able to take?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think it all really depends in your life is like, it depends on how much time you have. Like if you’re young, you’re right out of school, like you have so much time available to you that it’s kind of silly that you say you don’t have enough time. But I think really, the big thing is just spending some time thinking about it and just starting. Ask some people. Like when Melody figured out this thing was — she’s seen all these people commenting on Facebook and relationships and connections she has, like she saw the need there. If you find a need — you know, I found a need. I wanted it to help people have less horrible websites online, and that was a passion of mine to do that. But then also, I wanted to learn more about tech. And so the two things really came together for me, which was super nice. And so the advice is just start. I mean, it’s so hard to just start anything. But if you have a passion, you have an idea, like come up with a little thing that you can do. And I think the other thing that’s a big that was always a big thing for me was like, let’s just work on it for five minutes. Like five minutes goes by really, really fast when you’re working on something. And then all of a sudden it’s 10 minutes, and then it’s an hour. And then it’s like, wow, I spent a lot of time on this today, and I’ve made progress. I’m moving forward in the right direction.

Tim Ulbrich: And Melody, let me follow up with a different question. But you know, often people are interested in side hustles, of course, in part because they’re passionate about the idea and helping others but also the idea that there’s additional income that can be used for other financial goals and things that they’re working on. So for the two of you and your family, what are you hoping to do with the additional income that you’re earning through the business side hustle?

Melody Hartzler: Well, should I say the truth? Dustin wants a new pair of running shoes.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Melody Hartzler: We definitely want to invest back into the business as part of that. So anything from this first conference, honestly, we probably won’t do much with personally but invest into this concept and continue to grow it. We may set aside some for our emergency fund or car funds because our one car has got 245,000 miles on it and something is loud in the back that needs fixing bad. So there’s that. But you know, that’s part of the financial goals. And we’ve always driven used cars and we would still buy a used car with the next step, but that’s part of how we are able to afford travel and things like that. But I think also, we want to give. We’re going to be giving back to the people that are sharing about this conference too. And so all of our speakers that are promoting the conference have a specific code and even your code and whoever’s, we’re going to be giving a percentage back to those people because again, we want to create that community and everybody is a part of that for promoting this. And it’s not just our work that’s helping to spread the word.

Tim Ulbrich: And I want our community to hear from the two of you. I sense — and Dustin, you alluded to certain podcasts that you turned your car drives and your commute essentially into an additional education or two that you received along the way — I think it’s so important for our audience to hear, what are you reading? What have you read? What are you pulling inspiration from? So Dustin, let me start with you. Is there a book or a podcast or a resource that you would reference people to that was really helpful in your own journey?

Dustin Hartzler: I have so many of these. Like I could go on for hours. I’m looking at my podcast archive here, and I’ve got hundreds that I’m subscribed to and just listen to ones that are encouraging to me. The ones that — I’m still a Dave Ramsey subscriber. Like he just gives me inspiration like hey, look what you can do when you have your financial life in order. It’s all about you don’t make money to — how does he say it? He says something along the lines of like, you really want to — look how generous you can be when you have more money and you have your life in order. So that’s one of the things that I like. So the Dave Ramsey Show is one. I listen to a bunch of podcasts that are tech-related to give me inspiration of how I can become a better developer and how I can — some of the tech tools that I can do.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Dustin Hartzler: And then I’m also reading a book that was a recommendation from a podcast. But it’s called “PsychoCybernetics,” and it’s a book written by a guy, his name is Maxwell Maltz. And he’s an MD, and it was written a long time ago, before digital technology. And so it’s kind of a cool thing, it’s talking about your brain and how you can — some experiments of like thinking through the visual success. Like they did experiments with people shooting free throws. The first group — you shoot 20 free throws every day for a week and see the results at the end of the week. And you have one group that shoots 20 in the first day, and then shoots 20 on the last day and see how they have improved. And then the third group was like, they shot 20 on the first day and then they did nothing but imagine shooting 20 free throws every day. And then their percentage improved by 50-some percent, even though they never actually made a shot. So it’s kind of an interesting book. I’m still at the very beginning of it, but it gives me some inspiration of like, hey, here’s some things that it’s not all about your life and your circumstances, like how you think about things. And I think that’s really interesting.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, mindset and visualization. Those are great takeaways from that resource. Melody, how about you?
Melody Hartzler: So most of the podcasts that I listen to are functional medicine content podcasts. And so I really love Kara Fitzgerald’s New Frontiers in Functional Medicine. It is a good one that — she’s an MD, but she interviews people all over the country that are researchers, that are MDs, that are PhDs, that are clinicians, like doing the work of functional medicine, and goes through great protocols and just getting people’s opinions about different things and how they would treat things. Some of the people she interviews are even, you know, the lady I was listening to yesterday on my drive to Columbus for the OPA meeting was a nurse practitioner in New York that was treating a lot of weird patients and just gleaning insights from that. So I like those. I also love from a faith standpoint, “Dayton Women in the Word.” It is a local organization here. The podcast obviously airs wherever there is Internet, but it’s been a good, you know, like hey, I need to listen to something that’s about — get me away from all the business ideas because I’d drive to work and just think about all this stuff and what I need to do. But it helps keep me grounded in what my true purpose is. So obviously our church and things like that have podcasts. But sometimes I even forget to turn on the podcast when I get in the car because I — sometimes, I’ll use that time to pray and sort of reset my thought processes for the day and just pray over the people that I’m going to interact with.

Tim Ulbrich: Which is always important before you get home, especially with young children and kind of entering that space. So thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to share your journey. And I think it’s going to be an inspiration to many. And again, I would reference our listeners to FunctionalMedicineCE.com, virtual symposium beginning Nov. 9, as well as the work they’ve done over at FarmtoTable.life. So appreciate the time that you’ve taken. And as always, I would ask our listeners if you like what you heard on this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review in iTunes, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your shows each and every week. And as a last reminder, make sure to head on over to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. For those that are pursuing residency training and are going through that application process, we have the ultimate residency prep giveaway going on for the next couple weeks where we’re giving away over $349 value in resources to five different winners: information on residency interviews, how to effectively write letters of intent, we have a boot camp course, and a great resource from TLDR Pharmacy as well. So again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. And until next week, we appreciate you joining us.

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 121: Creating Another Stream of Income as an Airbnb Host


Creating Another Stream of Income as an Airbnb Host

Tim Church interviews Dr. Hillary Blackburn about how she’s monetizing her personal residence as an Airbnb host. Hillary has been able to earn thousands of dollars each year making this side hustle another consistent income stream for her and her husband.

Summary

Dr. Hillary Blackburn and her husband, Chad, have been monetizing their personal residence as hosts on Airbnb for the last five years. They use this additional income, which has totaled to over $40,000, as their travel fund. Hillary talks through what it’s like to be a host through Airbnb.

Hillary explains that Airbnb is like Uber for vacation rentals and says that it’s a great option for travelers, especially in areas where hotel prices are really high. Hillary and Chad rent their home in Nashville 14 times a year. Typically when the home is rented, they stay with family that happens to be in town or use that time to travel themselves.

Hillary explains that sometimes it’s difficult for her to share her personal space, but her husband doesn’t mind if people are there. Each year they re-evaluate whether they’d like to host their home on Airbnb and he reminds her that they can use the income for their travel fund so they don’t have to take any money out of other savings for their trips. Chad takes care of managing their profile, reservations and communicating with guests. Hillary says that this side hustle is easier on her than picking up shifts at a pharmacy.

Their home is a four bedroom, two bathroom house located in a really convenient area of the city and is generally rented out for about $600 a night. In the rental price, they’ve built in a cleaning fee and have their home cleaned by a maid once a month. The couple has friends that have bought second and third houses to host on Airbnb. Hillary explains that if you purchased a condo in Nashville and paid $2,000 in mortgage each month, you’d essentially be able to make that payment by renting it out for two weekends.

Hillary and Chad have had relatively good experiences renting their home on Airbnb. Although it’s sometimes difficult for her to allow strangers into her home, she takes precautions like locking her closet, locking the basement, and making sure certain valuables, including pictures, are secured. Her advice on becoming a host is to first use Airbnb as a guest and then simply go to the website to set up a host account.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. Thanks, Tim. It is great to be here.

Tim Church: Yeah, I think you’re one of the few guests who has made a repeat experience, so always happy to see that.

Hillary Blackburn: Well, glad to share some more updates and some other ways that I’ve been making a little extra income and hopefully will be a good thing to share with your listeners.

Tim Church: Awesome. Excited to hear about it. But before we kind of go there, knowing that you live in Nashville, this question has just been burning that I have to ask you. OK? You have to sing karaoke. What song are you picking?

Hillary Blackburn: Oh gosh. You know, I am not always a karaoke person. I’ll tell you what my husband always sings. It’s Big and Rich, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.”

Tim Church: Ooh, that’s a classic hit.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So I think he probably enjoys doing it more than me. I just like to be the backup dancers and things.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: But yes, lots of good music here in Nashville. Definitely come visit and we can check out some of the spots on Broadway.

Tim Church: Love to. Love it there. So it’s been about five months since the last time you were on the show. And before we talk about kind of a different way that we didn’t talk about before on how you’re earning some extra income, can you give us a little bit of an update about what’s happening with your career and your businesses?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So since May, I started an MBA course and have been doing that. That has been taking up a lot of my time. But it’s something that I had always wanted to do and really wasn’t going to commit to it if, you know, it was too expensive. Again, financial, that was a big barrier. So we have some really amazing programs here in Nashville. Vanderbilt has a very nationally recognized, Vanderbilt Owen School of Business, Belmont has a great MBA program. But I really didn’t want to commit to a $50,000-60,000 another degree already having a pharmacy degree. So found one that is online, so that’s scalable and very affordable and something that my employer was able to help finance as well. So just all wins on that front. And this one is self-paced and competency-based, so I hope to have it finished within six months. So having that existing experience in business over the past 10 years has been a lot to draw from but definitely learning in the key areas that I want to learn in. So that’s been a lot of what’s been keeping me busy. But as far as some of the other business things that I’ve been working on, of course still doing the Talk to Your Pharmacist podcast, and I do make some revenue from that. We’ve got two great sponsors, RxDestroyer, which is a drug disposal system, and Theraworks Relief, which is a topical pain foam, pain reliever. And then of course, I have just launched a new podcast called “The Natural Products Resource Center” focused on helping to educate our pharmacists and others about separating fact from fiction around natural products, particularly medical cannabis since that is certainly taking the medical community by surprise. And you know, I’ve got also a pharmacy residency boot camp online for those who are gearing up for residency. So that’s just a couple of recordings, sessions that I did last year and wanted to make those available for people at their own convenience, so it’s all online so kind of like the MBA, being able to take those chunks of learnings whenever it’s convenient for you and just kind of I was able to basically download all of these tips and things that I’ve crowdsourced from other residency directors and organizations that are actually doing the residency process. So they’re doing the recruiting and hiring, so what they’re looking for. And then just tips for navigating Midyear. So I have been staying busy, Tim.

Tim Church: I would say so. It sounds like it. I mean, I’m just blown away. I feel like you just keep mentioning new things that I don’t even know about by the time that we got on this recording. So that’s really exciting. So it sounds like the MBA is taking up quite a bit of time. How many classes are you taking at one time?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, so I take — the way this program, it’s Western Governors University, which is a nonprofit university started by 19 governors to really make higher ed really affordable. They set it up as six-month terms, so you can take as many classes as you want in one term. So if as soon as I pass one, then I’m going onto the next. So I’ve already hit leadership and communications and marketing, ethical leadership, accounting — accounting and financial management were definitely the areas that I’ve had to dig in and really study. But right now, my husband and I don’t have children, and so we can really — if we’re not traveling or doing something fun, which we love to do, we’re pretty buckled down on the weekends and can knock out 20-30 hours in a weekend of committing to studying.

Tim Church: So when a lot of people are binge-watching “Downton Abbey,” “Poldark,” other shows, you’re basically hustling, grinding it out, trying to not only further your education but also your businesses as well.

Hillary Blackburn: Right. Don’t ask me if you want to know the latest TV show. Although I did watch all of the “Outlander” series that are out. So I’m a big fan of “Outlander.”

Tim Church: OK, OK. Well, you mentioned to me after a call that we had a number of months back that hey, by the way, I also have another side hustle. And that’s kind of why we set this podcast up because I think it’s really a cool and somewhat I’d say — I don’t know if I want to say easy, but not as time-consuming as other things and other side hustles that are out there. But that is becoming an Airbnb host.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah.

Tim Church: Talk about what Airbnb is for those of the people out there that don’t know what it is, even though it’s been around for a number of years, and how do you become a host?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. So Airbnb, for those that are not familiar, it is basically like Uber for vacation rentals. So people are probably most familiar with VRBO or others. Well, Airbnb has basically helped any homeowner or apartment owner or whatnot, depending on, of course, whether your city and state allow it and whether you have to have any type of licenses and things. And if anyone has those types of questions, my husband navigated all of that. He had to go down and you’ve got to get your permit and there’s a fee for that. And then you have to take out taxes and all of those regulatory things. But Airbnb is such a great option not only for travelers — the very first experience I had with Airbnb was as a traveler. So we were going to Houston for a wedding and hotels were all really expensive. We wanted to be a little bit more affordable and booked a studio through Airbnb. And the great thing about Airbnb is that just like Uber or Lyft, there are ratings and reviews. So not only do you rate and review the accommodation, but you as a guest are being rated and reviewed. So it’s because of that review type of setup that, you know, that kind of I guess dissuades any of the fears that someone stranger is going to come into my house and mess it up because you do have that opportunity to review them. And so if you have a bad guest, you’re going to rate them bad, and they won’t ever be able to use the service again. And Airbnb does allow for you can put in for cleaning fees, you can set that into your price. You can also — they have a very hefty insurance package. And then if you notice anything that potentially does break or something, you can always charge the guest. So they have all of those things, insurances in place. But since we have been doing it with our own home for the past 5+ years, we really haven’t had any major issues. We are sensitive. We don’t let all the bachelorette parties come because we are in a residential area. And you know, we live here. It’s not a second property that we just have furnished. We actually live in the home and rent it out up to 14 times per year because after 14 times per year, then you have to start doing like the federal taxes. And for us, you know, usually it works out that if someone’s wanting to come stay, we are traveling anyway or we have family in town and we just can go and stay with them.

Tim Church: So Hillary, I want to back up just for one minute because I bet there are people listening right now and saying, ‘Hillary, are you kidding me that you are letting complete strangers stay in your own home?’

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. I am a little crazy, yes. So Tim, as I mentioned, I do have this love-hate relationship with Airbnb. So as a guest, I have loved being able to use it. Now, don’t get me wrong. If I’m traveling for work and then I’m probably going to use a hotel because work is paying for it. And I still try to be very frugal, of course, but there’s something about a hotel that you kind of know what you’re going to get. But there’s definitely some gems, some like really awesome houses. Or for instance, if you’re traveling to a city and you’ve got a big group, you could all rent out a big house and then you’re all together instead of being in a couple, you know, lots of different hotel rooms. So alright, getting back to letting people stay in our home, so my husband started doing it at our house before we got married. So he was an early adopter and had roommates, and it was a great way for them to rent out their fourth room for all these people that like to visit Nashville. And I actually did it a couple of times before we got married because I had a two-bedroom condo that the roommate, my roommate had moved out, and so I was letting people come in to that second room. I had my door locked but all of the general areas were fine. So once we got married, I’m like, OK, we’re not going to do Airbnb anymore. But it’s funny because if you start to think of your house as an asset that is just sitting here and not making any money, then that’s kind of the incentive that my husband uses. And then the way he gets me to do it is that that is our travel fund. So if anybody knows anything about me, they know that I love to travel, we love to travel together. We’ve been on some amazing trips. And a lot of the way that we’ve been able to do those is from this extra income. So we’re not using — we’re dual income, no kids, so we’re just trying to socket away for retirement, live off of one income. So we’re living off of mine. And so instead of having to steal from our retirement and our savings to do all of the amazing travel that we do, you know, we’ve got a trip to San Francisco coming up this week and then we’re going down to Mexico City in November with a group and hopefully we’re going to use our Southwest companion pass to go to Hawaii over Christmas. So those are just some of the things — but those are some of the big trips that we’ve kind of done all year. So we’re kind of all queueing those up for Q4 it seems.

Tim Church: So he knew exactly how to persuade you into this, right?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, you need to know your spouse. Exactly. So a lot of my friends, a lot, a lot of my friends would say, ‘Absolutely no way am I going to let somebody come into my house and stay here.’ And there are definitely times when I have had tears and we’ve had some — Chad and I have had some really difficult conversations. And it’s like every year, I’m like, never again. And then I’m like, oooh, but we want to go on this amazing trip. So it’s kind of like when I see the trip in mind, I’m like, OK, OK, we can do it.

Tim Church: And is that because just the thought of more strangers coming into the house? Or have you had some somewhat bad experiences that make you hesitant to continue on?

Hillary Blackburn: Well, I don’t know if this is just being a female, but you know, he operates very differently than I do. And he doesn’t mind if people are here at all. For me, I’m like, oh, this is my personal space. You know, this is our home, like I have all of my personal pictures, all of the furniture that we’ve gotten and different things. Like all my clothes, I do lock my closet, so that is something that I do. But you know, there’s certainly areas like my bathroom, I’m like, well, I definitely have toiletries out for guests, but people are nosy, so people could be like — but yeah. It’s just something that you kind of just have to get over. I was just listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Talking to Strangers,” and yeah. It’s like instead of just thinking that everybody is out for the bad, you’ve kind of got to think about air on the side of truth. And so I think just knowing that people want to be respectful, they’re coming to stay in your house, they know it’s a house. We do have house rules. There is a ratings system. We really haven’t had any — I think one time before we got married, we had some partiers. And the police were called once or twice during the whole weekend by our neighbors. So that was not ideal. And we’ve had maybe one other issue where we’ve had like a wine glass break, but they were cheap wine glasses. You know? And so I really haven’t had anything where like I’ve had a stain on a sofa or anything like that. But heck, if that happened, then you just charge them. And then you get a whole brand new sofa.

Tim Church: Right, there you go.

Hillary Blackburn: So part of me is like, well, before I really do a whole lot of any kind of redecorating, now’s the time. Once we have kids and everything, then that gets a little bit harder to do. So right now, we’re just really trying to utilize all of our resources and be good stewards of what we have.

Tim Church: Well I think the other thing too is that as a host, not everybody knows this, but you get up to a $1 million worth of property damage protection in case you need it.

Hillary Blackburn: Yes.

Tim Church: And so that is one of the things that I think can make it a little bit easier to let people be in your primary residence or whether you have another property, knowing that you do have some protections in place.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, exactly. And then on the flip side, if you are traveling, like to Nashville, for instance, the hotel prices are outrageous. There’s not enough hotels for all of the people who are wanting to visit. And you know, you can really get some great deals on Airbnb and make your vacation really affordable.

Tim Church: Definitely. I was going to get into that a little bit, but I think that’s one of the biggest reasons why it’s becoming so popular with the millennial generation. And I was looking at some statistics and that 30% of millennials, they’ve had a very positive opinion of the service. And about a quarter of them have stayed at least once in an Airbnb. And definitely I think it’s disrupting the hotel market to some degree because not only is it more economical in many cases, but I think also to especially some of the more exotic places or just different is that people get a really unique experience.

Hillary Blackburn: Exactly.

Tim Church: So let’s talk a little bit about the economics. You mentioned that your cap per year is 14 different reservations through the year. Is that correct?

Hillary Blackburn: Actually 14 nights. So I’m really not doing it that much.

Tim Church: 14 nights. OK.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. I mean, we have some friends here that have bought second and third properties. So a lot of people want to buy a second home and make money from that, put it on the rental market. You can honestly make more money on the Airbnb market than on the regular rental market. So say, you know, a Nashville rate for maybe a condo, two-bedroom condo, $2,000. Well, you could make that in two weekends if you were doing Airbnb. So you know, you don’t have that guarantee that it will be booked up all the time, but if you start getting a lot of great reviews, then you become a Superhost and then you get rated higher, and so people are going to find you. So that gets a little bit into the marketing of your Airbnb I guess. But we could talk more about that.

Tim Church: So are you pretty consistently booked for those nights?

Hillary Blackburn: Well, so we — since we only have like 14 nights, we leave open our calendar a little bit during spring and fall. We found that those are two of the biggest times of year. So fall being that we’re a mile away from Vanderbilt, lots of people come in wanting to stay during the fall. And then spring in Nashville is very fun. So that was just seven weekends or if we have a three-night stay or two three-night stays, then that’s five weekends. So yeah, we don’t have just 14 days out of the year. We’ll close off for the rest of the year. We have one more Airbnb at the end of the year — I mean, sorry — at the end of the month, and then we won’t do it again until 2020 if we do, which I feel like I’m getting more and more comfortable. Another thing, too — so we have Ring, which is basically I guess a webcam for your front door or something. I feel like I should be getting some royalties for all of these products that I’m promoting.

Tim Church: Yeah, exactly.

Hillary Blackburn: So Ring, we had that installed maybe about a year or so ago. And you can see when packages are dropped from Amazon, you know, a lot of time people have challenges with people stealing packages. We didn’t have that issue, but just for more security purposes, I obviously like privacy and security. And those are two values that I hold dearly. And so it’s just nice to be able to see like when there’s movement at your front door, you have a package, who’s at your door while you’re away. Maybe you’re traveling and on vacation, you want to see what’s going on at your house. Ring is great for that. But what I’ve found is that I have to turn off Ring when Airbnb guests come because for me, it’s like out of sight, out of mind. I don’t want to know who’s staying there, when they come and go, any of that. I let my husband handle all of that because otherwise, it just works me up into a tizzy. So he does all of the management for our Airbnb. He’s talking with the guest, he shows up and does a walk-through with them. Basically, I think once they know that you live there and it’s your home, then they’re going to treat it more respectfully. So he manages all of that. So that’s what we’ve found works for us.

Tim Church: So what does a typical night, what does it cost to stay in the Blackburn residence bnb? Actually, I was going to ask before you answer that, do you have a nickname for your Airbnb property?

Hillary Blackburn: Anchor Down.

Tim Church: Alright.

Hillary Blackburn: So since it’s close to Vanderbilt, it’s called Anchor Down because that’s kind of their motto or whatever because they’re the Commodores.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: So yeah. So also, Airbnb has an algorithm available. So they know when there are hot markets. So you know, maybe the Labor Day weekend, Vanderbilt-Georgia game, or other weekends, like the Draft. We were out of our house for the draft weekend too. Lots of people come in. So when those weekends hit, then the price goes up. So a typical price per night is usually around $600. And we have a four-bedroom, two-bath house. It is really conveniently located, you know, close to downtown, within the 440 Loop, it’s a beautiful Craftsman-style home. So it’s amazing. We were able, fortunate to have bought this in the downturn. So my husband bought it 10 years ago, so in 2009, and so of course, the property value has just increased over the past 10 years with Nashville being such a hot market. So hopefully when we’re ready to sell, we’ll be able to do well. But yeah, so usually, it could be anywhere around $600 a night. So once they take out taxes and things, like this past weekend, we made $1,200, yeah, just under $1,200. So not too —

Tim Church: So that was the profit to you?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, profit.

Tim Church: Wow.

Hillary Blackburn: So it’s way easier than me going and picking up a shift at a retail store, which I still work PRN but have not been doing that as much because I have all of these other things keeping me busy. But yeah, so for changing out the linen, I change out the linens, I change out the towels, I do lock my closet, he locks our basement. We pull out a few really personal pictures, make sure that our refrigerator is cleaned out. I don’t remove all the condiments and everything. I used to be way more intense about what I would clean out and what I wouldn’t. But honestly, sometimes people end up leaving us food. They’re like, ‘Oh, we have all this extra alcohol left and we’re flying out.’ We’re like, ‘Great.’ So yeah. I mean, it’s been something that we’ve been doing for almost five years. And you know, we’ve been able to really make some awesome memories traveling and not have to steal from our other funds.

Tim Church: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like yes, there are definitely some concerns and maybe some inconvenience around being a host and doing that.

Hillary Blackburn: Totally.

Tim Church: But the opportunities that being a host gives you and affords you really outweighs all of those other things and concerns. Would that be fair to say?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, I would say that. And eventually, are we always going to do Airbnb? Probably not. But for right now and the home that we’re in and the time in life that we’re in, it is a great way to make some extra income.

Tim Church: And so what would be a typical yearly earning that would actually be profit for being a host for your property?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So I guess anywhere like $8,400?

Tim Church: OK, OK. That’s a nice side hustle. And you said this — what year is this?

Hillary Blackburn: We’ve been married four and a half years. And he’s been doing it for six. And he actually did more than 14. They changed a lot of the rules. So I would say even conservatively with the 14 days, we’ve made $42,000 in five years.

Tim Church: So you really are making sure that your house is an asset.

Hillary Blackburn: We are, yes. And we get it cleaned. We have a maid that comes every month.

Tim Church: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is so you’re changing out some of the linens, but are you paying someone to come in and clean between every time there’s a guest?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes, but I already have a housekeeper come once a month just to help me keep everything clean.

Tim Church: So you mentioned kind of the average cost per night for your Airbnb. Does the Airbnb platform automatically adjust during those points where they think you can charge more?

Hillary Blackburn: It does.

Tim Church: Or is that something that happens automatically?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. So it’s just supply and demand.

Tim Church: So you don’t have to necessarily guess what the best price is going to be or trying to always go higher than what the standard or recommended amount would be.

Hillary Blackburn: Right. And they allow you to set your own price and, you know, you can also block your calendar for certain dates when you don’t want people to stay. You get to talk to the people or you hear they’re for a bachelorette party, and they’re like, ‘No, we’re here for a family reunion.’ We’re like, ‘Great. We love family reunions because the moms and the grandmoms always end up cleaning before they leave.’ So yeah. For the most part, it’s been really pretty great.

Tim Church: What tips would you have for people who are interested and maybe want to get started? And what should they avoid when they first become a host?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, I would just check out the Airbnb — you know, I would be a guest first, actually. I would totally start with being a guest. Check it out as a guest the next time you’re traveling, see how it works. It’s very easy. They even have an app, so you’re like literally texting and communicating with your host. So you get that experience, and then you basically just get on the Airbnb website. They have a different profile for you if you’re a host.

Tim Church: So one last question, Hillary. What do you do or what have you done to make the guest experience memorable? Is there anything special?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, one of the things that we do is you know, we have a guide, we put bottled waters by everyone’s bed, just making sure the house is clean and orderly, and then just being a really responsive host. So I think that we do all of that and have always had really great reviews.

Tim Church: And has that got you to that superhost status that you were talking about a little bit earlier?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, we did have superhose status but only doing it for 14 times out of the year, it’s kind of hard to maintain that.

Tim Church: Well Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on and sharing a really cool side hustle. I think it’s a great way to earn extra income, whether you’re using your own residence or whether you have an additional space or property because as you mentioned, it doesn’t take as much time as going out and working an 8-10 hour shift to pull that in. Now, obviously, it’s going to depend on where you live and kind of what the rates are. And if you’re interested in learning what your space or property would rent for, you can check out our Airbnb earnings estimator, and that’s at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/airbnb. So Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on the show. What is the best way for someone to reach out and contact you?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, so I am on all of the different platforms. So Instagram, @talktoyourpharmacist and Facebook @TalkToYourPharmacist, I have a page as well. Also pretty active on LinkedIn. You can search for me at Hillary Blackburn and then on Twitter @hilblackburn. Oh, and of course my website, www.pharmacyadvisory.com.

Tim Church: Well thank you so much, Hillary, and looking forward to all the work and what you have ahead.

Hillary Blackburn: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me back as a guest.

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]

YFP 118: What Would You Do With an Extra $1,000 a Month?


What Would You Do With an Extra $1,000 a Month?

On this week’s podcast episode, Tim Ulbrich takes you through an exercise to envision what you would do with an extra $1,000 a month and what steps you could take to make it a reality.

Summary

Tim Ulbrich flies solo on this week’s podcast episode to take you through an exercise to envision what you would you do with an extra $1,000 a month and what steps you would need to take to make it a reality.

The context behind this exercise comes from Andrew Yang, a 2020 Presidential Candidate. Yang proposes the Freedom Dividend, or Universal Basic Income, in which every U.S. citizen 18 years or older would receive $1,000 a month. Your Financial Pharmacist does not endorse Andrew Yang and does not want the focus of this episode to be about politics or the implementation of the Freedom Dividend, but instead encourages listeners to dive into the questions posed,

Tim begins by asking this question: What would you do with an extra $1,000 a month? The more you think about it or write your answers, the more that come to mind. Perhaps you’d put the money toward paying off debt or maybe you’d save it or donate it or invest it. Maybe you’d spread it over multiple competing priorities. Maybe you’d use the additional money to pay off your mortgage sooner. Tim shares several responses to this question from the YFP Facebook group in which he hears dreams, hope, peace of mind, and accelerated financial plans. In these responses, he also hears that some may feel that their goals, hopes and dreams are out of reach.

So, how can you change your financial position so that you have an extra $1,000 a month? Tim encourages a mindset shift from what if to how, from I hope so to how can I, from I wish to one step to make this happen is….

Tim explains that this fundamental mind shift may allow you to explore opportunities to bring in additional income that you may not have thought about before. He also suggests that the focus doesn’t have to be to gain $1,000 extra a month but instead aiming for $100 or $200. Refinancing your mortgage or student loans, taking on a side hustle, working extra shifts or moonlighting, trimming your spending, downsizing your home or selling a car you don’t really need, or asking for a raise are all potential avenues to help increase your income each month.

To close, Tim reshapes theses questions: 1) What will you do with an extra $1,000 a month and 2) When will it happen, what will it look like, and who will hold you accountable to get there? The team at YFP has created a lot of resources to help, including offering fee-only financial planning services with Tim Baker or Christina Slavonik, who are both Certified Financial Planners.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. And before we jump into today’s show, I’m excited to announce that we are going to be taking more of your questions on the podcast through a new segment we’re doing called Ask a YFP CFP. Yes, one of our CFPs, one of our Certified Financial Planners over at Your Financial Pharmacist, Tim Baker or Christina Slavonik, will be answering listener questions on a regular basis. So we’re ready for your questions. You can send them in by shooting us an email over at [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected]. And in the subject line, you can write, “Ask a YFP CFP.” Please don’t be shy. Likely if you’re thinking of a question, I’m sure many others of our listeners are thinking the same.

OK, so for this week, I’m flying solo to talk about two questions, two questions that I’m encouraging every listener to consider. No. 1, what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month? And No. 2, what steps do you need to take to make this a reality? Again, No. 1, what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month? And No. 2, what steps do you need to take to make this a reality?

So let’s start with some important context for where this idea, where these two questions are coming from. And I’m going to intentionally be very brief here as I have no intent for this episode to have a political slant, but rather I want to use an idea that was recently presented by one of the presidential candidates to help spark a conversation. So I’m not, YFP is not, endorsing this presidential candidate or his ideas. So I would ask that you fight the urge to rebuke the idea and rather embrace the exercise. This is a conversation that is not necessarily about the implementation of this candidate’s ideas but rather using this idea as an exercise to dream a little bit, to think about what would it look like if you were to get out of the rut that often we find ourselves in month-to-month and take a step back and dream about the bigger picture and the goals that you have as it relates to your financial plan.

So who am I talking about? What am I talking about? After watching one of the recent presidential debates, there was 10 candidates who were up on stage. One of those candidates was Andrew Yang. And he has out there a proposed Freedom Dividend. And essentially, this is a form of universal basic income, and what he’s proposing is that it would provide all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 with $1,000 per month. So again, that’s called the Freedom Dividend, and it’s a form of universal basic income. And he’s proposing to provide all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 with $1,000 per month, regardless of income, regardless of current financial situations.

So when I heard this, it got me thinking about what would I do with an extra $1,000 per month? So again, regardless of politics and whether or not you agree with this concept of a Freedom Dividend, this is a fun exercise that I think we can walk through together. And for those that want to learn about this concept, we’ll make sure to link to some information in the show notes.

So first question here: What would you do if you had an extra $1,000 per month? So regardless of the source, whether it was the Freedom Dividend, whether it was a major slashing of taxes that were to happen — obviously, that would have to be pretty major — whether it was a significant raise, whether it was investing in real estate, whether it was maybe starting your own business or starting a side hustle, maybe it’s walking into an inheritance. Whatever may be the case, regardless of how this came to be, the question here is what would you do if you had an extra $1,000 per month? And I want you to take a moment and think about this question. Now, for those that are driving, I don’t want you to think too hard. But for those that are listening at home, I want you to write it down. Again, what would you do if you had an extra $1,000 per month? And I think this question is an interesting one. And the more you think about it, I think you’ll find that similar to me, the more ideas that will come to be, the more ideas that will come to mind, dreams will get bigger and the excitement starts brewing.

So would you put it towards one area? Maybe it’s paying off student loans. Maybe it’s paying off a credit card or paying down a mortgage early. Maybe it’s saving for a rainy day or giving or putting more towards investing. So would you put it towards one of those areas, or would you try to spread it out over multiple priorities that you’re working on? I think it’s important to get specific here as when we talk about the second question, which is how will this become a reality? Getting specific will then put you in the mindset to begin to think about what would it look like, what would it feel like if this were to become a reality?

Now, I want you to think about — and as I mentioned, I want you to think about and ultimately ask yourself, how would you feel and how would this accelerate or change your financial plan? So for example, if you were wanting to put this money towards making extra mortgage payments, let’s say you currently have 20 years left on your mortgage and you put an extra $1,000 per month, run a calculator. What would that look like? How would that change your payoff date? And again, how would that make you feel?

So I posed this question to the YFP Facebook community this past weekend. And in short, it really was incredible to see the responses that were out there. And the engagement from that post really told me something about the power of asking questions such as this one, which allows you to dream a little bit about your financial plan. And here’s some of the responses that came in from the group.

Tyson said, “I’d put the $1,000, I’d put a little bit of it towards debt, charity, and save. It would take away the living paycheck-to-paycheck of life.”

Katie says, “We’d pay off medical and student loan debt.”

Isaac says, “I’d use it to kickstart my own company.”
AJ says, “Student loans, helping parents retire, and charity.”

Joe says, “I’d use it to enroll in online education to pursue my dream of becoming an animator. I refuse to go through a traditional school and put myself into a crazy amount of debt.”

Jacob says, “It would lower the risk of financial ruin and allow my wife and I to pursue several business ideas as well as construction projects around the house.”
Debbie says, “10% to my church, 70% to my debt, and 20% to travel.”

Beth says, “To pay off debt, pre-pay bills, home repairs, vocal lessons for a child, dental, vision, and savings. Definitely spend each month in my community,” with a heart.

Hartley says, “The first thing I would do is get a better vehicle. We currently have a quickly falling apart truck he drives to work, and I walk. My work is closer to where we live. Next I’d begin paying off debts, get my credit in order. And third, I’d put opening our business finally into the works.”

Rebecca says, “I’d pay off my house a lot faster and become debt-free sooner.”

Tiffany says, “I’d pay off personal, medical, and student debt, get my son into some activities, buy new shoes I’ve been putting off, put money into new house savings, retirement, and my son’s savings. Probably actually go on a vacation once a year, not cringe when I pay $200 for my son’s inhaler. Lots of stuff.”

Jimmy says, “12,000 a year plus $12,000 for my wife=$24,000 a year straight to debt. We save enough for projects, funds, and travel outside of this, so $24,000 would be a nice chunk to battle all debt and still enjoy the quality of life.”

Joe says, “I’d create more jobs as this would allow me to take more risks with my ideas without threatening my family’s security.”

And Holly says, “I’d pay off my house within three years and then travel and put away more for retirement.”

Robert says, “I would invest it in real estate.”

And Denise says, “If I had $1,000 per month, I would get long-awaited treatment for my injuries I had to put on hold while helping three injured daughters with medical issues. They are nearly grown, and treatment would allow me to have longevity and start working on dreams I could not work on while raising six children into adulthood alone, working two and three jobs, putting myself through school with minimal child support. Yes, I would heal first, then get an e-commerce business more profitable to fund my philanthropic endeavors.” Wow.

Do you hear what I hear in these responses and in reading between the lines when we asked the question, what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month? I hear dreams. I hear a sense of hope and excitement. I sense peace of mind that $1,000 would take off the edge, help people get caught up, help accelerate a plan or help to invest in starting a business. I hear people getting out of the month-to-month mindset and rut that is so easy for all of us to get stuck in, myself included. I hear people that have intentional goals in mind, who have thought of this. But I also hear in a sense that some feel those goals, hopes and dreams are out of reach, that there’s no different path than the one currently being taken. That short of something like the Freedom Dividend, these goals aren’t going to become a reality, which takes us to our second question. The first being we discussed what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month? The second question is how can you change your financial position so that you have an extra $1,000 per month?

So now that we have a sense of what the goal is with an extra $1,000 per month, I would challenge you to shift the mindset from ‘what if’ to ‘how,’ from ‘I hope to’ to ‘how can I,’ from ‘I wish’ to ‘what’s one step I can take today to,’ from ‘I hope the Freedom Dividend comes’ to ‘I’ll figure out my own Freedom Dividend, and if it comes, it will be a bonus.’ There’s a fundamental mindset shift in those statements. One that is a sense of waiting, one that’s a sense of hoping and dreaming but also has a sense that it may not become real. The other being a sense of action, a mindset of making that dream a reality. So again, how can you get an extra $1,000 a month is the second question that we’re reflecting on. Of course, we aren’t necessarily talking about a clean $1,000 per month. Maybe it’s that, but this is one example. Maybe it’s starting with $100 or $200 a month and going from there. As John Ackhoff says, one of my favorite authors and he that wrote the book “Start,” you just have to start. So maybe it’s $100. Maybe it’s $200. Maybe it is $1,000 that’s going to make this become a reality.

So how can you get an extra $1,000 per month? I want you to think about that question, reflect on that question, and write it down. Maybe it’s refinancing your mortgage or your student loans. We’re in historically low interest rates, and maybe that’s an area you haven’t reevaluated. Perhaps you bought a home, let’s say a year and a half, two years ago, at an interest rate of 4.5%. You might be able to get that down lower to 3%. Maybe you have student loans that are at 6-8%, and if refinancing is a good fit for you, there may be significant savings there that can happen month-to-month. So maybe it’s refinancing your mortgage or student loans. Maybe it’s starting a side hustle or a business. Maybe it’s picking up extra shifts with your employer if that’s an option or even moonlighting at another institution. Maybe it’s trimming your spending, and these be small cuts here or there, cutting the cable or lawn service. Or maybe, maybe it’s a more dramatic move like downsizing the home, selling the car, offloading the boat. Maybe it’s asking for a raise besides accepting cost of living adjustments. Really evaluating what value do you bring to your employer and really asking for appropriate compensation for that if you feel like that’s warranted. Maybe it’s spending a little to earn more, such as investing in real estate. But rather than just one of those, likely it’s a combination of one or more of these factors or others that I didn’t even list in that short list. I hope it’s a combination of both growing the income, growing the top line and cutting expenses because I think that’s where the magic happens. While cutting is good, I think cutting without a mindset for growth can be a dead end. And I think that’s important to say again: Cutting has its place. Cutting is important, and it can be good and it can be necessary, but cutting without a mindset for growth can be a dead end, can have a ceiling to what you’re able to achieve.

As with almost anything in life, I think this comes down to finding a balance. Here, we’re looking for that balance between what would it mean, how would it feel, what would it look like for you to achieve this goal that we’re talking about of what you would be doing with an extra $1,000 per month and balancing that against what would you be giving up. For example, if $1,000 per month is what you’re going to put toward paying off the mortgage and that would change your payoff time from let’s say 25 years to 15 years, so you cut 10 years off and you decide that in order to make that a reality, you’re going to pick up extra shifts and cut expenses to grow the top line, cut expenses, the question is, is it worth it? Is that extra time invested, that extra money earned and what comes potentially with a sacrifice of time, is it worth it to cut 10 years off your mortgage? And I think the answer is it depends. It depends on how much you value your time, how important it is to pay off the home early, and how much you enjoy the things that you’d be giving up. There’s no right answer here.

So let me wrap up our time together by reshaping the questions we started with and then letting you know how we, the YFP team and the YFP community, are here to help. So remember, we started with the question, what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month? And we followed that up with how can you change your financial position so that you’d have an extra $1,000 per month? So instead of what would you do with an extra $1,000 per month, I would encourage you to shift that to what will you do with an extra $1,000 per month? One implies a hope, a wish, a dream that may or may not become a reality. The second is a different mindset of a plan of making that come to be. And second, not just how you can change your financial position, but when will that happen? What will it look like? And who will be keeping you accountable in that process?

So in terms of YFP, how are we here to help as a team and as a community at large? First, we’re here to support you through a host of resources that we have on our website, everything from free guides, calculators, extensive blog posts on a variety of topics, your weekly podcasts such as the one that you’re listening to here right now. Our mission at YFP, you’ve heard us say it before, is to help you as the pharmacy professional on your path towards financial freedom. And we talk about that term financial freedom all the time. And for each person, I think that can mean something very different, something unique, and I’m hopeful that through this exercise today, you’re one step closer to determining what financial freedom means to you. Second, we can help you through our Facebook group, which is now more than 4,000 pharmacy professionals that are committed to helping one another on this journey towards financial freedom. This community is there to help, whether it’s to answer a question that you have or to give you a place to share a win or keep you accountable on your own journey. So if you’re not already part of the community, I hope you will join us over at the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group. And third, we at Your Financial Pharmacist offer fee-only comprehensive financial planning that is customized to the pharmacy professional. So whether you want to pay off your student loans, whether you want to make the right investment decisions, or you simply want to build a solid financial plan, our certified financial planners Tim Baker and Christina Slavonik are here to help you get your income working for you. And you can learn more about that at YFPPlanning.com. Again, that’s YFPPlanning.com.

So as we wrap up this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, we need your help in spreading the news about the revolution that is happening among pharmacy professionals that are committed to taking control of their financial future. And you can help us with this by helping others find our show that we release each and every week. And you can do that by leaving a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. As always, thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to having you join us again next week. Have a great rest of your week.

Recent Posts

[pt_view id=”f651872qnv”]