YFP 084: How to Build a Following Through Amazing Content


How to Build a Following Through Amazing Content

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Church, YFP Team Member, interviews Brandon Dyson, co-founder of TL;DR Pharmacy, about how to build a following through amazing content on this side hustle series. TL;DR Pharmacy is a website that simplifies dense clinical topics and provides resources to help student pharmacists, residents, and new practitioners.

About Today’s Guest

Brandon Dyson, co-founder of TL;DR Pharmacy, a website that simplifies dense clinical topics and provides resources to help student pharmacists, residents, and new practitioners. He also is the pharmacy manager of a community oncology practice, and a passionate pharmacy educator.

Summary

Tim Church interviews Brandon Dyson, PharmD on this side hustle series episode. Brandon Dyson has a number of side hustles that diversify his streams of income, all of which he’s passionate about and enjoys doing. Brandon’s main side hustle is the website TL;DR Pharmacy which is a platform that shares blogs, resources and cheat sheets for pharmacists, residents, new practitioners and others in medical professions. Working with long-time friend Sam and team member Steph, TL;DR Pharmacy aims to create approachable, digestible content in their products that break down some otherwise tough material. Their audience continues to grow with the intentional, well-crafted products and blogs they publish.

The website has been up and running for a couple of years and the TL;DR Pharmacy team has found that they bring in the most revenue through product generation. These products, like ebooks and cheat sheets, are relevant clinical pearls and lessons from their experiences that have been transformed into everything you need to know about said subject. Brandon also brings in money through affiliate partnerships and donations. The website is a host for a number of blogs written by the team. These blog posts are carefully crafted, as are all of their products, to ensure the best product is delivered to their community.

In addition to TL;DR Pharmacy, Brandon has a number of other side hustles. He teaches an online course through Georgetown University School of Nursing and also has recently published 100 Strong Residency Interview Questions, Answers, and Rationales with Tony Guerra, which is an incredible guide for anyone on the journey to land a residency position.

Although Brandon has a lot on his plate, making time for his family and finding that balance between work and life is incredibly important to him. He reminds everyone that TL;DR Pharmacy was built hour by hour when he was able to make time to work on it. He also shares that if you are going to pursue a side hustle, you have to be passionate about it and enjoy it.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: What’s up, everyone? And welcome to Episode 084. We are doing back-to-back side hustle episodes, as you said you wanted to hear more of these stories. So big shoutout to the YFP Facebook group for helping us with ideas and topics for 2019. Looking back at the first episode I did that introduced the side hustle series, I discussed the concept from the book, “The Go-Giver,” that your income is determined by the number of people you serve and how well you serve them. Now, this is something that I truly believe in and really felt this permeate throughout the interview with our guest today. So today on the show, we’ve got Brandon Dyson, who is the co-founder of TLDR Pharmacy, a website that simplifies dense clinical topics and provides resources to help student pharmacists, residents and new practitioners. He’s also a pharmacy manager of a community oncology practice and a passionate pharmacy educator. Let’s go ahead and jump into the interview.

Tim Church: Brandon, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Brandon Dyson: Hey, Tim, thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.

Tim Church: Well, I want to first say thanks also for the guest post that you did for us a few months back called “Money Talks: The Price of the Pharmacy Residency Quest.” This has been an extremely popular post, and it’s just a great topic. So if you haven’t checked it out, I highly encourage you as it breaks down all the anticipated costs from going to Midyear and interviewing for different residency locations. So it’s a really great tool. I think you did an awesome job putting that together, so thank you for that.

Brandon Dyson: Of course. Really, it came out of how I dumbfounded I was going through it. I’m like, oh my God, this is awful like in terms of how much of a hit financially, you know, I took, we all took getting ready for it. And then as I’ve been a preceptor and dealing with working with students and finding out, oh, you’re going to interview at 10 different locations? Like, you know, which I understand, but boy, that’s expensive.

Tim Church: Yeah, exactly. And I think sometimes, like if you’re still dealing with loan money, that it may not feel that real or you’re just kind of in the mindset of like, I’m going to do whatever it takes to apply to as many as places. But it really can add up, and obviously, you talk a lot about that in the full “Mastering the Match” ebook that you have, which this is a part of that. Could you talk just briefly about what that tool is?

Brandon Dyson: “Mastering the Match?” Sure. To me, it’s what I wish existed when I was applying for residency. And I’ve been very involved in that process on both sides now. I went through it myself, obviously, and same with Sam and Steph, who helped us write it as well. And kind of what it is is start-to-finish, like here are all of the things that you can do to make yourself the most competitive applicant possible while also trying to tell you about hey, by the way, make sure you save a few thousand dollars up for interviews and for getting to Midyear and everything like that. It’s really just our start to finish, what we think is the best way, like it’ll go through how to interview and what to expect on your interview and how to make your CV and your cover letter and your presentation that you give during your interview, how to make them as effective as possible to just give guidance because there’s not a lot of it out there. There’s some schools that will have like a small resi-prep or residency boot camp, but not every school has that. And not every student, some people work or have a family and don’t have the time to do that. So it’s another option.

Tim Church: Yeah, and I love how you guys did this because you really broke it down into different phases, you know, before Midyear, during Midyear and after with the residency. So it’s really a nice chronological order of how you would approach pursuing a residency. So not only is the content awesome, but the way you guys organized it I think is really cool too. Well, I’m excited to talk about you, your role as a pharmacist and what you’re doing in your full-time job, but I’m going to switch things up a little bit, and I want to get right into your side hustle, the side businesses that you’re doing. So what is TLDR Pharmacy? And how did you get started with this?

Brandon Dyson: OK, so TLDR Pharmacy is — it’s in keeping with the trend, but it’s what I wish existed when I was in pharmacy school. I constantly — and I think most students genuinely want to learn this material. They want to understand it. They want to be able to know what’s relevant. Like they want to be able to tell patients and actually help people. And it’s so hard to read a medical journal and understand it, and it’s so hard to ask a professor, “Hey, I don’t understand this. Could you explain it?” And then be told to go read the book or something, you know? Go read the pero. And what I wanted was an accessible, readable, this is the way it works. And it’s kind of like it started just as a summary of stuff of what Sam and I, what we learned, like and how we understood things. And it’s still that, I mean, that’s still the part of it. It’s just it’s kind of grown from there, which has been really cool.

Tim Church: And so what does TLDR stand for? So for people that don’t know what that abbreviation is because I’ll be honest — and you guys listening are probably like, duh, like you should have known that — but I actually didn’t know what that stood for until I learned more about the business and what you guys do.

Brandon Dyson: Yeah, no, it’s actually a common question that I get emailed, which we’ve tried to address with our About page, but who reads About pages? So it stands for Too Long, Didn’t Read, which if you ever hang out on Reddit or any chat forum, it’s a way to either one, I wrote this really long-winded post, here’s the TLDR, here’s the summary of it. Or you know, you can see it used rudely as well where someone might write a long-winded post, and then one of the commenters will just say “TLDR.” So it’s sort of a tongue-and-cheek thing for us because some of our posts are quite — I mean, we’ve got posts that are 12,000 words long on this site. So some of them are very long. But it’s shorter than the chest guidelines, right? So it’s like.

Tim Church: Yeah, exactly. And so just to kind of summarize, you know, what TLDR Pharmacy is, I mean, it’s obviously, it’s a blog, it’s a platform where you’re sharing a lot of clinical pearls and information with the majority of it is actually free, right?
Brandon Dyson: Yeah. Greater than 98%, I would say, is free. It’s all just posts on the website and emails that I send out.

Tim Church: And if you guys haven’t checked this out, I think it’s just an amazing resource out there. But one of the things that I really admire about the work that you and Sam do is that not only is your content amazing because you really take the time to break it down and put al the most important pieces of information on any clinical topic, but you do it in a way that’s really fun. So there aren’t that many — I can’t read the pero and see a Star Wars meme come up in the book. So you know, really for me, I really enjoy kind of getting some of that humor and entertainment that you tie into it.

Brandon Dyson: And I think that helps you remember it, right? Like humans in general — I’m kind of generalizing — but we learn through stories. Right? Like think of the most memorable, like oh, I’ll never forget that because I saw it in this patient or I remember my professor telling me about this and saying, “Oh, and a patient died because this happened,” you know what I mean? You remember that because it’s a story. And if I can break down HIV management or whatever it is, you know, and throw in relevant stories or even just throwing in Star Wars memes, you know, you remember it. It’s something to hang onto, you know, that’s not just a sea of abbreviations and words and like chemical names and stuff like that.

Tim Church: Exactly. And I think there’s just so many blog out there, whether it’s pharmacy or non-pharmacy related where the content is just kind of surface-level, you know, you get through it maybe in just a minute, maybe even less. But one of the things — and as you kind of join your community, what I love is you basically put out there is that every piece of content we put out there, we are trying to wow you. We’re trying to make it so memorable that each post is a quality post that you’re actually going to take away a good chunk of information. And so I think that is such a cool thing that you guys do, and that’s why I think you’ve been — one of the reasons you’ve probably been so successful.

Brandon Dyson: I mean, I think that’s part of it. I agree. I’m not trying to give you — I’m long-winded, you’ve probably already been able to tell that, you know — but I’m not trying to give you a 500-word, despite our TLDR name, because you can’t adequately cover it.

Tim Church: Right, right.

Brandon Dyson: I try to do it in as few of words as possible. I’m not trying to throw out beautiful prose or anything, but 500 words is not enough to teach you every possible thing about Warfarin, right? We have a post that we just put up, you know, it’s over 9,000 words long. I feel like we’re still barely touching Warfarin. And it’s like, it just is what it is. It’s long, but we took the time. It took us months to write that to really go through, write it, edit it, make sure it was readable, make sure it was approachable. You know, it takes a long time, which is why we don’t post every day or even every week because it just, it takes too long. Future goals, maybe, but we need to have a staff of writers to get to that point.

Tim Church: Yeah, I mean, you guys just do a fantastic job. And I just, I love the quality of everything that you guys put out there. I think what’s cool is, like you mentioned, like 98% of the content which you guys have on there is free. I mean, which is great. So it’s a great resource for students, for residents, but even practicing pharmacists who need a refresher on a particular topic that’s really important, especially where pharmacists are involved a lot. So I think that is so cool, and I love the tagline that you guys have, “Get better at pharmacy.” That’s what we’re all about.

Brandon Dyson: I appreciate that. Thank you.

Tim Church: So Brandon, let’s break down a little bit on how TLDR Pharmacy makes money. Because even though you guys are providing a lot of free content, it is an online business for you and your partner Sam that manage it. Can you break down how you guys are making money?

Brandon Dyson: Yeah, absolutely. So one — I’ll start with how we don’t make money, which is via ads and things like that. So I don’t anticipate you’re ever going to read a sponsored post or have ads for Viagra or something popping up across any of our pages. And that’s just a choice because I hate dealing with those. They slow down, like I don’t like them on pages, and that’s just us doing our user experience. I’ve actually been emailed by representatives at Google or some big ad place, saying, “You could make blah, blah, blah with the traffic that your site gets,” and I’m just like, I don’t want to make money that way. So we don’t make money that way. How we make money primarily is through product generation, which we talked about “Mastering the Match,” so that’s an ebook that you can purchase to help you get into residency, right? Like my rule is if we’re going to charge you money for it, you’re going to get ridiculous level quality stuff. Like I don’t want your money, especially if you’re a student. Most of our audience are students or new practitioners. I don’t want to separate you from your money unless it’s going to be really worth your while. So we’ve written an ebook. Currently, we have “Mastering the Match.” We have another ebook called “Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual,” which is a guide to pharmacy school and doing well and setting yourself up well with it. And then we make cheat sheets as well, which are study guides, basically. We’ve got an HIV cheat sheet or an oncology cheat sheet or an anticoagulation cheat sheet. And what we try to do with these is take every relevant clinical pearl, monitoring piece, like they’ve really grown to be a lot more comprehensive. Our HIV cheat sheet is 16 pages long now, which is more or less like you can’t even call it a sheet. But it’s like everything that — as of this recording, it’s basically like everything that’s relevant for you to know about HIV pharmacotherapy, including opportunities (?). So again, it’s what is the product that I want to make? What do I want? And I’m looking for everything’s in one spot, here’s for HIV, here’s preferred regimens, here’s the clinical pearls for each, here’s the renal dose adjustments if there are any. Here’s opportunistic infections and what I need to start prophylaxing for them or when I treat them, for how long do I treat them, what are the drug interactions, what are those. Like it’s what do I think of in a product? Or what do I want in a product? Sam and I were both — I’m not going to get braggart or anything — but we were both very successful academically in school, and I think part of that is the way our brains work and organize this information. I just have a way of thinking. I can predict test questions. And my brain works that way, so I know how to study, and that goes into cheat sheet generation as well. It’s like, I just — it’s like my mutant. If I was in X-Men, this would be my mutant power. It’s like, oh, they’re going to ask about the alcohol dehydrogenases for a back of ear or the HLA, like it just — I don’t know why, I just notice these things. So that’s kind of the bulk of where we get it is through product for our income. And then we also, we’re affiliates for a few of Alex Barker’s courses or your YFP courses, we’re affiliates for.

Tim Church: Yeah, you make money off of us as well, which we appreciate that. But I think I’ve talked about on this side hustle series before that I think with a affiliate income, sometimes gets a bad rep, but truthfully, when you’re promoting products, everything that you have on your resources page, you even told me that there’s things that you believe in and you know are going to provide value to people. You’re not just pushing anything on there, you’re trying to direct them.

Brandon Dyson: Right. I think if I wanted to squeeze every penny that I could out of TLDR Pharmacy, you know, it would be different, right? But that’s not my primary, that’s not our goal. It’s to provide a resource that we wish existed. It’s to create something that we think should be there. As your site grows, it’s the fun little law, but it gets more and more expensive to run a website as it grows in popularity. I’m sure you know, it grows as your traffic grows. Your expenses go up right along with it. So we need to make money, and obviously, we take hours and hours and hours of our life to make these free articles.

Tim Church: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that too, Brandon, because one of the things that you guys do on your site, which I think is fair and reasonable because of the quality of the content that you guys produce is that you actually ask for donations. You know, which is not something that I commonly see, but just for all the reasons you just mentioned, you know, obviously it takes a lot of time, and it takes money to operate a website and to continue to produce this. So what has your experience been with that?

Brandon Dyson: I try not to go out of my — it’s one of those things — like again, especially if I’m going to separate a student from their money, I try not to be too much with it, so to speak. I want you to get something really valuable in return, which arguably, the blog posts are. But we do have a sort of a team of subscribers, so to speak, for donations or people that do one-off donations. And we welcome them, we love them, of course. We can’t even explain how much we appreciate that. You have two different options. You can just give a one-off donation, or you can subscribe for a few dollars a month, basically, $3 a month or $15 a month or $7 a month I think are the price points we have. And I mean, that’s a great way to support us — I like to compare it to a cup of coffee. For a cup of coffee a month, you can kind of help us exist, basically. But I try not to go too much. It’s down on the footer of the website, you know, and I mention it in one or two emails that you get when you sign up for the website. But other than that, I try not to blast it too much because generally, I’m kind of, hey, we made this new product that you can buy. This is a great way to support us too.

Tim Church: Right, right. So when you kind of break down the cheat sheets that you have and also “Mastering the Match,” and the “Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual,” what out of those products is actually producing the majority of the income? What’s the breakdown?

Brandon Dyson: Cheat sheets is definitely the majority. It might just be because we have more of them or maybe there’s more of a demand for them. We have them at various price points, anything from $4-19, depending on how comprehensive the sheet gets. And so I think that opens it up. And we also, you get a free cheat sheet just by joining our email list. So if you sign up, you get an antibiotic cheat sheet, which is kind of the thing that birthed that whole product line for us. And it’s been immensely popular, so it’s like, you get this for free. And I think a lot of people see that and are like, “Wow, this is amazing,” and then are willing to give up more, you know? And I think another reason cheat sheets work for us, I think, is that we have nurses and we have physicians and we have practicing pharmacists that follow us. The physician doesn’t give two shakes about getting a pharmacy residency, you know? But he might want to know about like all of the drug hurdles for (inaudible) management or something. So there’s I think a wider audience with the cheat sheets as well.

Tim Church: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s easy to see that what you guys are producing, especially the premium content that you guys charge for, is to that same level of quality that you’re doing with your blog posts. So that’s what’s really cool, and that’s why I tell a lot of people that you need to check that out because you’re going to get that value for what you’re paying. And what’s cool is, I mean, you’re obviously charging not very much in terms of exchange for that great value. So I think that’s really cool how you guys have that set up. Now, you mentioned that obviously, it takes time to run a website, it takes resources. Talk a little bit about your partnership with Sam and how do you guys kind of — how does TLDR function in terms of who’s having different responsibilities?

Brandon Dyson: So we work phenomenally well together, and for most things, either one of us could pick up seamlessly for the other. For most things. But we each have our sort of niches, like we each have our specialties. Sam’s specialty is one, the technology piece. And we’re a simple-to-run website. We use Squarespace, like there’s not a lot of coding or intense stuff that needs to happen. But there is a lot of stuff that integrations with email and with our sales platform that’s a lot of stuff that goes on on the back end that Sam is just phenomenally good at. I’m a lot better at just typing words into the computer box thing and hitting a submit button or whatever. So I do a lot more of the — to date, I’ve typed the vast majority of posts on the website. But now, we have Steph, who we brought on board with us. And she helps out with a lot of that, editing, guest posting, keeping stuff on the site at top quality. Sam has done a lot more of the back-end computer work, but Sam has written posts on the site. And in the early days, they were both kind of co-written by both of us. Like in the first 6-8 months of the site being active, there was probably equal doses of me and Sam. And then we started kind of the natural course of the website. We had no idea what we were doing in terms of like when we launched. We were just like, this is a thing that should exist, you know, and we kind of figured out how to make money with it or at least how to have it pay for itself. It took a long time before I would say we broke even. But it happened just through people emailing us, talking to people and experimenting with different things.

Tim Church: Well, I think that’s so cool, the partnership that you guys have. It really just does sound like you play off each other’s strengths to support the business and to make it be successful. So where did the inspiration come from for you guys to start this website and to make this great content?

Brandon Dyson: So honestly, it’s hard to remember kind of where it started. It started just with — Sam and I, we both went to the same pharmacy school. We went to Howard University, which is in Washington, D.C. He graduated a year below me. I was class of 2013, he was 2014. But both of us were pretty active in school, and both of us, I think importantly, tutored every single year of school. We were both — and in our fourth year, we were the “chief tutor,” the powerhead of this thing, very lucky, in fact. We were paid to give tutorials to our students, which was the class below us, basically. Not phenomenally well, but we were able to make a little bit of money by essentially studying your notes from last year and then tutoring the class below you, which trust me, re-going over your therapeutics notes, you know, year after year, helps you phenomenally with both the NAPLEX and with eventually creating a website called TLDR Pharmacy because you’ve been over it a number of times.

Tim Church: Right, right.

Brandon Dyson: So I think that was the biggest part of it is that we are both just kind of naturally interested in teaching and educating. We were both good at it — again, not to put too much — we enjoyed doing it, and we were able to — I think I said, we were good at taking exams. If we’re nothing else, we’re good at knowing which material is testable and what not to worry about. And so we were able to focus tutorials on study here, maybe study this if you have time, probably just forget about it and if there is a question, take the loss on it, so to speak. So you know, we both also did residency in D.C., different sites, but we talked and kept in touch throughout. And eventually, we just — it’s really hard. We talked about, we pivoted. We were going to make mobile apps at one point in time. Maybe one day, we still will. But like initially, we started getting together to talk because we were going to think about making some pharmacy-related apps. That was like the thing that we wanted to do. And it’s really hard to put an exact time where we somehow ended up being a blog, you know.

Tim Church: When did the first blog post go up?

Brandon Dyson: March 2016 is when I would say — I think it’s March 8 is our birthday. We may have had posts up a couple of days before that because, you know, if you launch, you have to launch with a couple of posts and the books. So I think it’s March 8, 2016 is our birthday. So yeah, we just did that and it’s really, really slow-going when you launch a website. Maybe you guys didn’t have quite that experience, but.

Tim Church: No, it is. It’s a growing process. And like you said, I think it takes so much sweat equity just to deliver great content, especially if you’re going to do it in multiple different formats and just the time to make quality content. I think it’s easy just to write short blog posts, which is what a lot of websites do. But to take the time to do the research to put it in, it is very, very time-consuming. And I think sometimes, even in the beginning, I don’t know if you felt this way — I know Tim Ulbrich, he has talked about it before that, you know, even though the intent in the beginning is not to monetize, per say, it’s really just to deliver quality content, but I think there does come a point where you’re questioning —

Brandon Dyson: Why am I doing this?
Tim Church: Will I ever actually make money from all this time that I’m putting in, right?

Brandon Dyson: Yeah. Luckily, it can be really cheap to start a website, right? Like it doesn’t cost that much, especially if you don’t have much of an email. Like there’s free options for getting an email server, you know. Like there’s plenty of different ways that you can do it. And you can do it really cheaply. And we did. We did the bare minimum. We got registered as an LLC in the state of Texas. I live in Texas, Sam’s currently in Virginia. Turns out Texas was much more cost effective to do it that way, so we did it that way. Another side hustle is that I teach online. I teach for Georgetown University School of Nursing. I’m a faculty there, I teach pharmacy or pharmacotherapy or whatever. But point being is that I have an .edu email address, and you can get a student discount for a few years on your website hosting through Squarespace, so we did that. Like we did everything to help us make ends meet, so to speak. So you can start it for less than $1,000 I think pretty easily.

Tim Church: It’s a matter of putting in the time and sticking with it because I think a lot of times, you underestimate what it’s going to take to maintain but also just to continually generate new content, quality content, all the time, right? Especially if you have a full-time job, which we’re going to get into that in a little bit. But I want to shift gears. So bottom line, TLDR Pharmacy, you’ve got to check it out. Get better at pharmacy, that’s the bottom line. So the other side hustle that you’ve got going on, as you just mentioned, is that you teach an online pharmacology class. So this is kind of aside from the website, something that you do. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

Brandon Dyson: Yeah. So my residency was done at Georgetown University Hospital in D.C. And you know, they don’t have a pharmacy school, but they do have a med school and a nursing school. And there was a teaching certificate of my residency. So part of that was to give a lecture, a couple lectures, for the nursing school. And they had recently, right before I came there, maybe a year it was in the making — but they had taken their NP for their Nurse Practitioner school, and they made it online. So their undergraduate portion was, and I believe still is, in person. But their nurse practitioner school that they have is all online. And I was offered — my residency director was working with them on that, so he was part of it. But I was able, I was offered, hey, are you interested in teaching? And it’s a great gig. I love it. And it still helps me write because I’m still going through pharmacology three times a year. Right? We go through and there’s three semesters in a year, basically. So I go through that, it’s once a week. I give a two-hour lecture, basically. And it’s like a Q&A. It’s a neat setup. They have pre-recorded lectures that they watch and reading assignments and all of that. And then I’m kind of like a TA where I just come in and, you know, like we go through — I have a lecture called CNS, like I go through everything from Parkinson’s to depression to Alzheimer’s. Like it’s insane to think about how much we lop into a two-hour lecture for them. But that’s kind of how it works. And it’s a really enjoyable — I love doing it. We just wrapped up the semester, literally this week, actually.

Tim Church: And how long did you say you’ve been doing that?

Brandon Dyson: Since residency, so I graduated residency in 2014. And I started pretty much immediately after that. So three times a year, three semesters a year, ever since.

Tim Church: And how’s your contract for that work? Is it an annual basis?

Brandon Dyson: No, it’s done per semester. Or yeah. You’re lopped on for 14 weeks at a time, basically.

Tim Church: And so they basically just keep renewing that because you must be doing a pretty darn good job for to continue with that.

Brandon Dyson: My students that we just finished with — and honestly, I had no idea but very touching — but they told me that there’s like a private group or whatever for students to talk about the whole curriculum. And they said like one, my class is like the — mine specifically is one of the most highly sought out — I feel like I’m bragging now.

Tim Church: Go ahead, go ahead. Brag. This is your opportunity.

Brandon Dyson: It was like the most humbling — it was such a cool thing. They’re like, “Yeah, everyone talks about, you’ve got to have his class, got to have his class.” And they said that it fills up in less than a minute, basically. Like my section is full in less than a minute.

Tim Church: Wow.

Brandon Dyson: There’s like — I don’t know — it just, I was touched. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said. You’re like, come here guys, hug me. Cyberhug. So that was really cool. But it’s very rewarding. And I always learn something too because the neat thing about teaching nurse practitioners is that many of them have been practicing way longer than I’ve been a pharmacist. You know, they’ve been a nurse for a long time. They’re just now going back to get their NP, so there’s always some labor and delivery, something where I’m less familiar with drugs there, or like I’ll learn random facts like we all know alteplase used for strokes, cathflo, right? But it’s used for frostbite management in colder parts of the world and an off-label thing. They actually give them cathflo or alteplase for if you get frostbite. Random facts like that that I would never pick up on. So fun stuff.

Tim Church: That’s awesome. So it sounds like it is a very rewarding experience and just a cool opportunity for you to share some of your knowledge. But obviously also, you get paid for doing that, right?

Brandon Dyson: Oh yeah, absolutely. As much as I love doing, I would not do that without payment.

Tim Church: What is the income from that look like?

Brandon Dyson: I mean, it’s good. I make a few thousand dollars a semester doing it. I think I’m averaging about $1,000 a month doing that right now is where I’m at with them. So it’s great for a couple hours a week. You know, obviously, there’s additional work. There’s emails that I answer, there’s tests, there’s things like that. But if you were to break it down hourly for the amount of time I spend actively on that class, like I would make way more than I do in my day job. It’s just I only do it a couple hours a week.

Tim Church: Right, right. That’s cool. I mean, that’s a nice chunk of additional income coming in. So with that and the website, and then I know you got another project that you just put out, which is awesome. And I’m just looking on here on Amazon right now, so “100 Strong Residency Interview Questions and Answers” that you co-wrote with Tony Guerra, which is a No. 1 new release in educational professional development. So first off, congratulations.

Brandon Dyson: Thank you, thank you.

Tim Church: A much needed resource because I’m looking at that, I’m like, OK, where was that when I was applying to residency and going through it? But that is, you know, such a cool thing that you guys recently put out. And I’m excited for you guys. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Brandon Dyson: Yeah. That was Tony’s idea, honestly. I call him like the Yoda of producing audio books and pharmacy now. He’s like really getting good at it. But I’ve worked with Tony, I’ve been on his podcast a few times, and we’ve chatted back and forth for a few years now and worked together before, and it just was a great idea. It’s residency season, we’re like, hey, let’s knock this thing out. My stance is that once you’re — the hardest thing in residency is getting an interview. But like the next hardest thing, you know, once you’ve made past that cut, is like most people don’t realize that what the interview’s really about, you know?
Tim Church: And can get intense. And it can get intense. For those of you that haven’t gone through the process, like especially the ones that ask you — like I got asked a lot of really tough clinical questions I wasn’t prepared for.

Brandon Dyson: Right. And it’s good to know, like having sat on the other side of that table, what we’re really looking for. And it’s not necessarily that — I don’t care that you’re a clinical expert because you can learn that. But I want to see if you’re going to make up some answer, right? Or I’m going to see how you crumble under pressure, like if you go through the scrutiny of attending physician that asks you why. Like the reason you’re getting those targeted questions, you know, most of them at least, are not necessarily, OK, well he’s just not clinical enough for this residency. Like that’s not the point. The point of them is to assess how you react to questions like that, if that makes sense. And that’s what this book is covering, stuff like that.

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Tim Church: Yeah, I think it’s just a great resource to have that many questions that are available all in one place. I’ve seen other resources that are kind of mix-and-match, here and there, different places, so I think it’s kind of cool. And I hope people actually use it as like a mock interview too. I think that would be pretty cool to use it that way.
Brandon Dyson: Yeah. And I think that’s part of what we’re going for. I mean, like it’s geared toward residents, don’t get me wrong. It’s 100 strong residency questions, right? But these are standard job interview questions, especially if you’re going to be in the field of pharmacy. Some of the questions, you know, you could go apply to be a server at Applebee’s, and you’ll get asked the same questions, right? Or some variation of it. Some of them are just those situational interview — tell me about a time that you had a conflict, you know, like it’s the same thing, just applied to pharmacy. It’s a book that will benefit you, period. We go through the question, we give you a sample answer, and we tell you why that answer’s good from the perspective of people that listen to interviews just like this all the time, you know? So it’s, I think, a really helpful book. And we did a really cool giveaway when we first got it launched on Amazon. We just gave it away free for a day. And it was probably the reason it became a No. 1 is we gave away — over 2,100 people I think downloaded it or something. So that was really cool.

Tim Church: Wow. That’s impressive. That’s awesome. Probably a combination of the audience that you built but just the genuine interest in this topic. I know you guys are coming out also, there’s going to be an audio version. That’s on its way?

Brandon Dyson: Yeah, that’s — I guess by the time this podcast airs, it’ll be out. We’re within a couple of weeks, basically. It’s submitted to Amazon or to Audible, so it’s just a matter of waiting for the Bezos approval, and then we’ll kind of go from there, you know. So that’s kind of cool. And the audio book is really helpful. You can listen to that in your car on your way to the interview, right? Or on the plane ride if you’re flying to an interview or anything like that and just kind of really help yourself prepare that way. I listen to audiobooks all the time, so it’s a great way to absorb content, you know, especially if you’re not a visual learner or whatever.

Tim Church: Definitely. Well, and I think there’s so much available time when you’re in your car or doing mindless activities where you can really multitask with the audiobook, so I’m a believer as well. So what I want to know is you’ve got a lot of businesses, a lot of things going in that are bringing in this additional income. But what is your strategy on how you’re allocating that? Are you specifying this additional income as going to different place than what your full-time income is? Or how are you doing that?
Brandon Dyson: No, that’s a great question. To me, it’s all the same pot. Like I’m the sole income earner for the family. I’ve got a family of four. A new family of four, for that matter, 2 months old is our youngest right now. And I understand the points of separating and mentally, at least, I do. But to me, it’s also all going in the same pot. And so I use it to help us meet our financial goals. You know, we’ve got a house that always needs updating, right, or something breaks or we also for the longest time, we lived in a 700-square foot apartment. So when we finally bought a real house, I mean, it’s still not furnished. So we have things like that, but I’ve also, you know, I graduated with just over $200,000 in student loans, which I’ve got down in the 90s now, so we’re working on that. But I don’t want to sacrifice retirement, so we’re contributing there. You know what I mean? So it’s a matter of like in my ideal world, I would be like, maxed out in all possible retirement contributions, IRA, 401k, etc. while paying down extra on loans and things like that and maybe having a little bit of fun money for buying a couch for upstairs or something like that for the house.
Tim Church: Right.

Brandon Dyson: But we need a piece of furniture so there’s a place to sit somewhere upstairs. So it kind of just, to me, all goes into things like that. And then it’s just a matter of prioritizing what’s most important with my wife, myself, like we make that decision. We meet together somewhat regularly and kind of say, OK, next little windfall we get, you know, we’re going to spend x amount on this, we’re going to do this with x amount, and we kind of make the decision that way.

Tim Church: That’s great. I mean, that’s cool that you guys work together, you already have a plan in place for this additional income as it comes in. So obviously, we talk a lot about that in “Seven Figure,” but I think it’s important because sometimes, people will treat the newfound money differently. But I was almost like setting you up for that. You passed, by the way, Brandon.

Brandon Dyson: Yes. I read “Seven Figure.”

Tim Church: No, but that’s cool. And I think that really is the key is just knowing what your plan of attack is. So I mean, a lot of people, when they talk to me about side hustles and things like that, I mean, they always talk about how difficult it can be to manage a full-time job and your personal life. And obviously, you’re doing a lot of things. I mean, we just went through, I mean, different books, eguides, the website, you know, I guess first off, you know, what is your full-time job as a pharmacist? And then how are you managing all of these side hustles with that job and then also your personal life?
Brandon Dyson: Yeah, that’s sort of a — struggle is not the right word, but it’s definitely an endless, you know, battle let’s call it. That sounds like a struggle too. But it’s something I think about a lot. So my full-time job, I’m a pharmacy manager. I’m an oncology specialist, if you get official into what I do in the real world, so to speak, so I’m a pharmacy manager of an outpatient infusion clinic. And we’re also a retail pharmacy. So one of the benefits of this — and I actually just transitioned. I was in a hospital working forever as an oncology pharmacist but just inpatient generalist, so to speak, up until literally about six months ago, this opportunity came up. So transitioned, it’s a big year of transitions for us between having a child and changing jobs and everything like that. But the cool thing about this is that it’s much more banker hours, so to speak, in terms of pharmacy, you know? Like my job is now Monday to Friday, no evenings, weekends or holidays, which coming from hospital work is just like a godsend, especially growing a family. So that’s excellent. In terms of finding the other time, it just requires a lot of scheduling with my wife to make, well, we know when I’m teaching. It’s the same night every time. I try to get the same time slot so that that’s always consistent. OK, I teach on Thursdays or whatever. I think the key, the key to it, you know, in terms of making TLDR and doing ebooks or whatever else it is, it’s doing things that you’re passionate about. I’m just not a person that sits around and watches a lot of TV. I’m not judging anyone that does or anything, I just don’t do it. It doesn’t interest me as much. I watch a show with my wife, and we like to watch movies, but if I’m given free time, I’m probably going to read or I might want to work on — like it’s fun to me to produce things, like to make a website. I love the juxtaposition of putting Star Wars references in — I crack myself up with my own stuff all the time. Like and it just is fun for me to do. I don’t know why. Because I’m a nerd like that, I guess.

Tim Church: I’m pumped because I did a webinar for the APhA member this week, and you inspired me. So I had to put one in there. It wasn’t a Star Wars. I think it was like a Full House one.

Brandon Dyson: Oh, perfect.

Tim Church: But it seemed to work. But I was like, oh, Brandon would be proud of that.

Brandon Dyson: So proud. Yeah, it’s just — you have to enjoy it. Like I enjoy doing TLDR. If I didn’t — I mean, I was not paid for TLDR Pharmacy for a very long time, I assure you. And it kept going because I enjoy doing it. And I’m not retiring or anything any time soon, but it does bring home money for me now. And that’s also incredibly — you know, there’s nothing more rewarding to me than creating something. Like TLDR Pharmacy is like a diary in so many ways for me, you know? You put that out there, you try to make something of value and having complete strangers give you credit card information for it and then tell you about how excellent it was and how much it helped them do this. And I don’t think I would have passed the NAPLEX without this. Like I can’t tell you how gratifying it is, just the reach that we have. It’s amazing. I love it. And I would do it for free. But I’m happy to be paid for it too, you know?

Tim Church: Of course, of course.

Brandon Dyson: So I think that’s really on balance. I try to be — ironically, for me, having a family, I think actually made me more productive, in a certain sense. Only in that there’s this thing called Parkinson’s Law, which is the amount of time that it takes you to do something will expand to fit the amount of time, you know, the amount of space that you give to do it. I just have less time now, you know? I really want to spend time with my family. I don’t want to be one of those fathers that’s hovering over the computer not paying attention to his kids, saying, “Daddy’s got to write.” That’s not going to be me either. I just have less time, so when I do have an hour or two hours, I’ve got to be really intentional about it. And I think ironically, it helps me, I find myself that I’m not scrolling Facebook now, you know? And I would never have guessed that, but I think it helps. It makes me, OK, I have to focus. And that’s kind of how I fit it in. Do stuff that’s interesting to me.

Tim Church: So it sounds like it’s making you much more intentional about how you’re scheduling that time and making sure that you’re doing what you need to do for the website and your projects but also making sure that there’s quality time there. Is there any specific timeframes or in a given week, do you work in the morning? In the evening? Weekends? Like what seems to work best for you?
Brandon Dyson: So up until the 2-month-old, until Baby 2 came, I was a religious up at 5, work on TLDR or whatever else I was doing, you know, for a couple of hours, and then go to work. As anyone with small children can attest, that schedule — my youngest son does not care about that schedule at all. Neither does my oldest, for that matter. So it’s much more now, less regular. I still try to get up early. But I’m not waking up at 5, at least not right now because I probably slept terribly, and so I need that extra hour or so. So I’m sleeping until 6. And I try to work on stuff, and most mornings, I’ll be able to get an hour in before I have to start getting ready for work. So I’m getting about an hour most mornings. Unless I have a specific deadline with TLDR, which is great when it’s your own business, you don’t really have a specific deadline with it unless you set one internally. So unless I have a specific deadline, I don’t do a lot at night unless it’s I’ll respond to emails, catch up on emails at nighttime and stuff like that. We do get a lot of emails from people because we encourage it. I enjoy connecting with people, so I put that on myself. But I enjoy that too. Weekends are hit-or-miss. If there’s time, like during naptime for the kids, I’ll spend a couple hours doing something then. But you know, otherwise, I just try to spend time with my wife or family or do things like that. That stuff’s important too and without that, then none of the TLDR stuff really could happen, right? I couldn’t do it without the support of my wife. And our relationship wouldn’t work without putting in those dividends too, so to speak.

Tim Church: I hope she listens to this. You’re going to score some major points there, Brandon.

Brandon Dyson: Almost guaranteed she won’t. But I’ll tell her to. This one, you’ve got to.

Tim Church: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, that’s awesome. And thanks for sharing that because I think a lot of people are a little overwhelmed, or just the idea of trying to take on something else beyond their full-time job and their personal life, it can just be pretty tough to think about and to actually put some kind of a vision into reality.

Brandon Dyson: If I could say just one piece to help with that is that especially in the early days of TLDR Pharmacy, like everything had — we published well over 100,000 words. I counted, again, because I’m a nerd like that. And it all happened one hour at a time. You know? Like it does not have to be — like you can build a great thing one hour at a time. It will take a lot longer than eight hours at a time, but like TLDR Pharmacy, even still is primarily between — because Sam’s a father as well, you know. Like we all have full-time jobs. It’s built one or two hours at a time. And then if you make remarkable content or you make a reason for people to come, and it grows, and you can grow with it as well. But it’s, you know, it’s a side hustle. It truly is a side hustle. We do it when we have the free time for it.

Tim Church: Yeah, that is so good, what you just said. I mean, I love that. One hour at a time can turn into something pretty outstanding, pretty remarkable. And really, when you were talking about that, it kind of brought me to mind “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, which is taking small, consistent actions over time just have these astronomical results. And I think that’s so cool because even if it takes awhile to get things there, just that consistency can really pay off over time.

Brandon Dyson: Yeah, when we launched, we would get 100 people a week, you know, or sometimes 200. No, 100 a month was probably good for us when we first launched the site. And we hit over 40,000 a month now and still growing, you know? Like it’s just one hour at a time. The reach you can have is amazing.

Tim Church: Well, Brandon, as we wrap up here, what advice would you give to other pharmacists or even students out there who have an interest in becoming an entrepreneur or starting a side hustle?

Brandon Dyson: One, I think it’s one of the greatest things you can do. I don’t want to get doomsday on our job outlook, so to speak, but you’ve got to have something to set yourself apart. TLDR Pharmacy is really fun, but it helped me get my current job. You know, the people interviewing, two of the pharmacists had known and downloaded cheat sheets from the site that I was interviewing with. So I’m like, whoa, that’s weird.

Tim Church: Wow, that’s awesome.

Brandon Dyson: But it’s something you’re known for. And the way I look at it, it’s a multifaceted effect for your career, like being into entrepreneurship. This is I’m speaking to a blog. I mean, it could be any side hustle. But one, you’re giving yourself a little bit of buffer with your income. If I were to lose my day job — knock on wood — I’ve got a couple of other streams of income that while would not be enough to cover all of my expenses, help. Right? Like it can really help as you start looking for a new job, you know. You’ve made yourself a little bit more resilient so that you’re not 100% dependent on this one job. And that’s especially true as you hear, oh, well this pharmacy’s cut down to 32 hours or whatever it might be. Or the starting salaries are dropping. Again, I’m not trying to get doomsday or whatever. But having additional income streams helps protect you from that and is part of a safety plan. If you want to go the route of a blog or any other sort of entrepreneur, your key thing is providing value to people and being your own unique voice. I think TLDR works because it’s our personality. You’re hearing Sam and I when you read these posts. Like it’s just us being us. Same with Steph. Steph is so into Star Wars. All of her posts have so much Star Wars. And like it’s just be you. Like we stand out, we are different than DiPiro (?) because we do things like that.

Tim Church: Yeah, I don’t see — I don’t remember there being any like memes in DiPiro.

Brandon Dyson: Gimbel. (?) Go to Gimbel had something, right? So I think, you know, the other is just to learn. Like I do enjoy learning about entrepreneurship. So I read a lot. I read books, you know, I’ve invested heavily in learning how to write, to write better and to communicate more effectively. So it’s like you’re investing in yourself. And I did that within the guise of helping TLDR Pharmacy, but you know, the cover letter — for this job that I currently took, I wrote the cover letter for it in like 30 minutes. And I was like, wow, that’s really good. I’m done. You know? And that happened because I write all the time now. It’s just through practice. So it’s like, all of these skills build up. I’ve taken courses on sales copywriting, for example. One, because it’s interesting. It’s an interesting science that I never thought about in terms of how do you effectively write sales copy or write copy. But two, it makes you communicate more effectively. You know? You have to put the bare minimum, and that gets fed into every single post on TLDR Pharmacy, even when I’m not selling you. I’m communicating very clearly and effectively with you. And like all of these skills build on each other. You learn a little bit about entrepreneurship and about how a business works. And now, all of a sudden I’m the manager of a pharmacy. I didn’t have necessarily prior experience, but this just kind of dropped in my lap, you know? Different things open up. Like this wasn’t part of my five-year plan. I don’t even really have a five-year plan. I just kind of work on what I think are interesting things that are going to improve me in some way and see where the wind takes me, so to speak.

Tim Church: Well, that is so cool. And I appreciate you sharing that because, you know, any way you look at it, when you’re relying on one source of income, one stream of income, you’re certainly there’s always a risk there, no matter what kind of job that you have. So I think that’s cool, like what you said about having multiple streams and making it work but also just the ability to develop those different skills can help you in many different ways. So I think that’s really cool. Well, I just want to close up here, Brandon, but just want to say thank you so much for No. 1, coming on the show, but just your commitment to the pharmacy profession. I mean, one of the things that really has stood out with your content but just you as a person is just how authentic you are and that commitment that you have to really help people and see them succeed. So I know that people are going to be better off because they’ve interacted with you, whether that’s on a personal level or whether it’s through the content that you’ve delivered. So just thank you for all that you do.

Brandon Dyson: I really appreciate that, Tim. Thank you so much.

Tim Church: Now, if you want to reach out to Brandon, you can check out his TLDRPharmacy.com. But if somebody wants to get in touch with you personally, where can they go, Brandon?
Brandon Dyson: You can email me also, just it’s at [email protected].

Tim Church: Awesome. Thank you so much, Brandon. It’s been a pleasure.

Brandon Dyson: Thank you, Tim.

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YFP 083: You Know Where the Weight Room Is?: TJ’s Rise to Becoming an Entrepreneur


You Know Where the Weight Room Is?: TJ’s Rise to Becoming an Entrepreneur

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Church, YFP team member, leads another edition of the Side Hustle Series where he talks about ways you can create additional streams of income to reach your financial goals faster. This episode features Dr. TJ Allan, a pharmacist and entrepreneur who owns three gyms and is now teaching others how to open their own gym.

About Today’s Guest

TJ is a pharmacist, father, husband, and entrepreneur that enjoys fitness, arguing about the NBA, visiting Disney, and discussing all things business.

Summary

TJ Allan graduated from St. Louis College of Medicine in 2007 with not only a passion for pharmacy, but also for entrepreneurship. While in college TJ didn’t take on large expenses and was very conscious about his purchases and lifestyle. After he graduated, he began working for Walgreens. He was making a good salary and had benefits, however, he jumped on an opportunity to work as a local pharmacist in his small town so that he could become an entrepreneur.

He was living with his parents at the time and drove the same car he did while in college to keep his expenses low. This allowed TJ to save money to use for his business ventures. He opened his first gym, Ageless, in his hometown and broke even by the end of two weeks. He only had to put up $70-80,000 to start. Although several people said that the gym wouldn’t be open long because of its location and the success rate of gyms in general, his optimistic personality reminded him that he could have success. He continued to open two other gyms (a studio gym and spin gym) which have both been successful and are still open.

Ageless, which follows a 24 hour model with classes and only needs 40 hours of staffing each week, brings in $125,000 in revenue with a net profit of 40-45%. Each month, TJ makes $3,000 to $4,000 from Ageless as passive income, however he invests it directly back into the business. Collectively, the other two gyms bring in $90,000 of profit each year.

Of course, TJ has had several failures along the way, but these have taught him so much. He’s learned the importance of marketing and now follows a lean startup method.

TJ has created a work and life balance allowing him to be present for his wife and young daughter. He also has worked to create efficient business models so that he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time running the other businesses. With a block method of scheduling, he works on certain projects each day while also continuing to work as a pharmacist in his hometown.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: What’s up, everyone? And welcome to Episode 083 of the podcast. I’m really excited about today’s guest to kick off the first side hustle episode of the year. I think you’re really going to enjoy hearing his story. On the first episode of 2019, the other Tims talked about setting financial goals and how important they are to having a successful year. For some of you, one of those goals may be to finally start that business or project that you’ve been thinking about. If that’s you, I really want to encourage you to think about those next steps to make that vision become a reality. And if you need some inspiration, you definitely don’t want to miss out on TJ’s story. So Dr. TJ Allan, he’s a pharmacist and entrepreneur who owns three gyms and is now teaching others how to open their own gym. He’s also a father, enjoys arguing about the NBA, visiting Disney and discussing all things business. Let’s go ahead and jump right into the interview.

Tim Church: TJ, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and for being a part of this side hustle edition.

TJ Allan: No problem. Thanks for having me.

Tim Church: OK, being a gym owner, I have to ask you this question before we go on. If there were no royalty issues to worry about, and I could have put on any song for you as you walk up to the mic for this recording, what would it be?

TJ Allan: Right now, I’m a Cardi B man. I don’t have a workout unless Cardi B’s on my iPod.

Tim Church: Wow, is that mandatory in all of your gyms too? That they’re playing that?

TJ Allan: The workout doesn’t count unless there’s Cardi B playing at some point in time during it.

Tim Church: Oh, that’s awesome. I was going to say, I thought maybe you’d go old school, but that’s cool. I like that. Well, I’m really excited to discuss your entrepreneurial and how you came to acquire three gyms. But before we do that, can you talk a little bit about your career path as a pharmacist?

TJ Allan: Yeah, because I think it’s really important to talk about that because there’s so much right now in this entrepreneurial world ripping on college and saying, if you want to go open these businesses, you don’t need college, it’s a waste of money, everything else like that. You know, I can honestly say that without college and without going through the pharmacy route, I don’t think I would be where I’m at with my entrepreneurial stage, without it. So I had actually attended St. Louis College of Pharmacy, graduated in 2007. I got involved in pharmacy, I had my sister’s boyfriend at the time had just graduated from there when I was a junior in high school, so it was on my radar. I was really big into sports, so I was trying to kind of figure out, do I want to do sports, do I want to go into something educational? And I was passionate about helping people is what I would kind of say. And I was also looking for a job that was secure, that paid well, and there was plenty of opportunities around. So of course, pharmacy was a viable option. And it was also nice that it was 45 minutes from my house. So that’s kind of how I got started. I love St. Louis College of Pharmacy. It was a great college. I enjoy pharmacy. People always say, you’ve got all these businesses, you’re doing all these, why don’t you just do this stuff full-time? Why are you still in the pharmacy? I like pharmacy. There’s really nothing right now I can say bad about the pharmacy world other than of people outside the pharmacy world ripping on it. But from my perspective, pharmacy has given me everything that I have right now.

Tim Church: Yeah, that’s awesome, TJ. And thanks for sharing that because I do agree that there is a lot of negativity, and I think it depends on kind of the environment that you’re in, the employers that you work for, but I think there are so many great opportunities to not only have a job and a position, but one that you feel fulfilled and feel like you are truly making a difference. So can you talk about your current role as a pharmacist and what you’re doing?

TJ Allan: Yeah. So right after I graduated pharmacy school, you know, I knew I wanted to move back home. I was a small town kid. My hometown and where I was born and raised has 3,200 people. I went to St. Louis, I’d been to other things, I don’t like the big city. So I knew I was going to come back to a hometown. At that point in time, 2007, you know, opportunities were everywhere. CVS was offering still the $40,000 sign-on bonus. I could go anywhere. I had actually signed on with Walgreens. And at that time, I was a floating pharmacist, so I was picking up shifts. I mean, I was working 60 hours a week, there were so many shifts available. So it was nice. So I stayed at Walgreens for about a year, maybe a little bit less than a year. And I had that entrepreneurial itch. I knew I wanted to get in something, open my own business, but I knew that being at Walgreens probably wasn’t going to allow me to do that because my hours were sporadic, when I was at work, I had literally no access to my cell phone or anything else. So I started looking for a job that would allow me to chase my entrepreneurial dreams but also allow me to still be in the pharmacy industry. And just by coincidence, the pharmacy was located in my hometown that I’d actually sent a letter to the owner my sixth year of pharmacy school, saying that I wanted to buy it, the pharmacist in charge job opened up at Sullivan’s Drugs. So I, of course, jumped on it and interviewed with them, did really well during the interview, but I was really kind of candid with I talked to them, you know, I’m coming back here at this small pharmacy because I want to also chase these entrepreneurial dreams that I have. So there are going to be days where I’m going to have to miss, I may not be able to work five days a week, I may have to take some personal calls during my shift, I may have to have Internet access during my shift. And he was fine with it. I mean, he was looking for somebody, but I told him, I said, “I’ll give 100%. I love pharmacy, but I also need to do this stuff.” So of course, there was a salary difference coming and going from Walgreens to a small, independent pharmacy. And there was also a benefits difference. So I mean, I took a hit. I went from Walgreens, I think at that time, I was making about $125,000 a year. And I started back there at $100,000, maybe $98,000 a year. Walgreens, of course, you had all the benefits back there. At that point in time, when I signed on, there was no retirement package, there was no IRA, anything like that, there was no health benefits. I was paying my own health insurance. So it was a hit, but it was a sacrifice that I was willing to make because I saw my long-term goals.

Tim Church: Was that a tough transition at first, taking that cut that you did?

TJ Allan: Not so much because, you know, I read a really good book. I got lucky. My sixth year in pharmacy — actually, fifth year in pharmacy school, I had a professor, Dr. Kenneth Shafenmeier (?), and he was kind of our business professor. And he really kind of took me under the wing and really explained things because he knew I kind of had a passion for the business side of things, he knew I wanted to be in an independent pharmacy or possibly even own one. So he had kind of always led me money-wise to the right things and the right books and everything else like that. So like the first book I read was “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” by Robert — and I’ll probably butcher his name — but like Kowaski (Kiyosaki), is how I think you pronounce it. And you know, people have their opinions on that book. Some people say it’s awful, and the investment advice in there is horrible, outdated, etc. And that may very well be. I’m not here to argue that. But I will think what it did for me — and I think it will do it for a lot of pharmacy students that they need to read — is that it gave me the mindset of what do I spend my money on? Am I buying assets, which I had no idea what they really were at the time in pharmacy school. I was just trying to get by organic chemistry and that kind of stuff. Or am I buying these expenses? You know, am I buying a new car? So for me, I always kept my expenses to a minimum. At that point in time, when I was working for Walgreens and making $125,000 a year, and I’m still living with my parents, and I’m still driving the same car that I had in pharmacy school. So I never had these extravagant expenses like when you first get out of pharmacy school, I mean, you go from making $10,000 a year to $125,000 a year. Of course, the first thing you want to go buy is a brand new car. And it’s usually $50,000-60,000. I mean, you’re going probably for a BMW or a Mercedes, something like that. When you’ve suffered six years of pharmacy school and really worked your tail off, you want to be rewarded. I was never interested in that because I was just always interested in a business. So I looked at every expense I had was, man, what if I put that money in a business? What could it do? I mean, that was kind of my passion, that was always kind of my hobby was these businesses. I was never into cars, houses, that was not my thing. Those just didn’t really ever entice me. So for me, going from $130,000 to $100,000 at the independent pharmacy wasn’t really a big issue because I didn’t have those expenses.

Tim Church: And too, it sounds like you kind of had the vision and where you were going and the opportunities were going to be there by making that transition. So I think that’s pretty cool. I want to take a step back because what you said is pretty interesting because if you would have said what you did in the interview process to even another independent owner or somebody else to say, “Hey, I’m taking this job because I want to have the ability to work on some side hustles and other businesses, and I may even take calls during my shifts and things like that,” I mean, what was that dynamic like? Because I’m just picturing here like that if you were to say that, I have a feeling most employers probably would not like hearing that or probably would sort of turn away at that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

TJ Allan: Yeah, you know, I probably wouldn’t have — I know I wouldn’t have said that if I didn’t do my homework prior to. But I had known — like I said, in 2007, pharmacy market was all over. I mean, there was opportunities everywhere. I mean, jobs, they were struggling to fill spots for pharmacists. So I knew I had an advantage with this because I knew what Walgreens and CVS was paying, and I knew what this guy was paying. So I knew he was going to struggle getting someone to come to this small town at that pay rate as a pharmacist, and especially a decent, good pharmacist. So I knew had an advantage there. And I also kind of made it seem like, we had — I left this out. I should have mentioned this earlier. But during the interview process, you know, we had a handshake agreement when I left that I wanted to buy his pharmacy. And that’s kind of how I sold it, you know, I’m going to be doing all this stuff on the side, but I guarantee you I’m going to be giving 100% because I want to own this pharmacy when he retires. At that point in time, he’s about 66 years old. Now, he’s 70-something years old. So I think that’s what kind of sold it to him was he knew I was interested, he knew I was passionate, he knew I was going to give it all my all. But he also knew his pharmacy only did on an average day, 150-160 scripts a day. So there was a lot of time of just standing around. And he knew that. He was smart enough to know that. And he was smart enough to know, hey, I’m not going to be sitting here taking a phone call when I got six people waiting on me. But there was a lot of downtime that I could be working on that stuff. So I think that’s kind of why it worked because like, yeah, you say that at Walgreens, you say that at CVS.

Tim Church: Yeah, hit the road, Jack, right?

TJ Allan: It’s going to be a handshake and, OK, we’ll get back to you. So I mean, those three things right there: knowing there was a huge gap in pharmacists and knowing that I wanted to — knowing that there was a lot of downtime and knowing that I really wanted to buy that pharmacy I think is kind of what sold that.

Tim Church: Wow. That’s a really cool story right there. So at what point in your pharmacy career, you talked about reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and kind of using that as a way to figure out how you’re going to acquire assets, right? And not just liabilities. I mean, at what point did you say, “You know what, I really want to do something beyond pharmacy or something where I have more control and the ability to really dictate kind of that additional income that I could bring in?”
TJ Allan: It was about three months into Walgreens. And I know there’s a lot of people that bash Walgreens, and I honestly can’t say anything bad about my Walgreens experience. I had a lot of good pharmacists, I had a ton of good technicians, really great pharmacy supervisors, I enjoyed the majority of the stores I was at. The problem I had with Walgreens was the problem I think everyone has with their employer. You only get paid if you’re there. So I knew, I was going to be $125,000 and have these 2% raises over the year or whatever the raises are now at Walgreens, and that’s the only way I was going to increase my money unless I want to take extra shifts and of course, it’s tied to me being there. So I knew right away, within three months, you know, if I want to make more money and I want to kind of break those chains from making money and having to be there, it had to be, you know, the entrepreneurial route.

Tim Church: Wow, that is just a cool vision. And I think a lot of people, they get that vision, but not everybody acts on it. I hear a lot of stories of people wanting to make a change, they have ideas for a business, but they never go out and actually do it. But beyond kind of getting additional income and not having to always trade your time for money, did you have any other motivations for wanting to pursue something else and starting a business?

TJ Allan: Yeah, you know, this is going to sound weird. No, I was an athlete in school, and I love sports. But you know, I always had this creative kind of thing. I always wished I could sing or play the piano or I was really good at art. I just had this always — envied these creators. And I think that’s maybe why I went more so with entrepreneur because it’s something I can create, it’s something I have control over, you know? I think entrepreneurs are amazing and probably not given enough credit for the creativity because they take something in their brain that they think could benefit the world, and they put it in action, and then it becomes concrete and tangible. And then people enjoy it. You know, Walt Disney is kind of one of my idols. Walt Disney had this amazing, amazing imagination. And then he turned that imagination into concrete, tangible things that people just love. You know, I’m a Disney fanatic, my family’s a Disney fanatic, we go three or four times a year. But it’s —

Tim Church: DisneyWorld or DisneyLand?

TJ Allan: Both. We go — usually, two or three times a year, we go to DisneyWorld. My wife does the marathons. And then we, in fact, just got back from DisneyLand three weeks ago. And then we’re going to DisneyWorld here in another month.

Tim Church: Oh, that’s awesome. I was just at the food and wine festival, and it was amazing. Great experience.

TJ Allan: And honestly, I go there for a lot of inspiration. Disney is one of those companies — Disney’s like Nike. You watch those companies, you can learn so much, even if you’re in this small mom-and-pop shop in rural Illinois with 3,200 people, there’s so much I can learn every time I go to Disney about how they interact, how they create this experience. So yeah, for me, it’s more about creating an experience and creativity. The money’s nice, and you know, you always have to chase the money because if you don’t make money, you don’t have a business. But really, creating some and creating that experience and creating those bonding experiences with your customers, I think that’s kind of what I’m always after.

Tim Church: So talk about what you’re doing right now. You know, I’ve kind of laid some seeds earlier that you’re owning multiple gyms. So how did that come into play? How did you start that?

TJ Allan: So you know, I kind of got lucky. You know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs don’t put enough emphasis on luck, the role of luck in their success. So I have had luck. And so the first gym I opened up was in my hometown there. The gym had just closed, it was a Curves, it was a women’s only. And kind of me and some friends got together and we were like, man, we wish we would have a gym in town. I was like, you know, Dr. Schafenmeier was in my ear, he always was trying to tell me, start a business. Even when it’s a hobby, start a business because you learn so much when you start a business, and so much of starting a business will help you in pharmacy and will help you in your personal life too. So I told them, I said, “I’ll open a gym. If it fails or if it doesn’t do well, it’s a tax write-off for me. I don’t care. But you know, I’ll open a gym.” So I got lucky, found a business that was — or a building, I should say — the owner really wanted to get rid of, bought the building, bought some equipment, opened up. And honestly, it was a success from Day 1. We broke even by the end of the first month. I was really, by the end of within two weeks, and we really have not had a unprofitable month since we opened almost 10 years ago.

Tim Church: Wow. That is awesome. What’s the name of that gym?

TJ Allan: That’s Ageless. So that’s the one that’s in Gillespie. So yeah.

Tim Church: Is that a trademark name? I love the name.

TJ Allan: People always ask me, where did I get this name? And it’s funny, at the time, my fifth year in pharmacy school, we had this elective. It an osteoarthritis elective, and the teacher, one of our assignments was, you know, create some kind of business or entrepreneurial thing that could help patients. And mine was a gym, of course. And at the time, I really had no interest in opening a gym or even thinking about that. But I named it in my paper Ageless. I put how osteoarthritis, getting people stronger, these lifestyle modifications can really help people, even with osteoarthritis. And so we kind of just used that and yeah. I haven’t trademarked it yet, you know, my lawyer’s on me about doing it. I honestly just haven’t just because I’ve been involved in so many other things. It just always kind of slipped my mind every time I try doing it.

Tim Church: Well, I love it. I think it’s a cool name. So how much capital did you have to throw in to get this thing started?

TJ Allan: So that’s the tricky thing. When most people think gyms, I think that people think I’m a lot more successful than I am. Because when most people think of gyms, they think of these big, huge, golden gyms, Planet Fitness, these ones that cost multi — $2 or $3 million just to start. My building cost $65,000 at the time. I put 20% down. The gym equipment to put inside the building was right around about $50,000-60,000, so I only had to put up about $75,000-80,000 to begin with. And really, cash-wise, I only had to put about $25,000-30,000. Everything else was on loans. So I really didn’t have to put up that much. Tim Robbins talks a lot about asymmetrical risk, reading his books or any of the investing stuff he talks about with these asymmetrical risks, and that’s kind of how I always looked at, you know, how much cash do I have to put up? What does this mean to me? And I always kind of — this is a weird thing to say — but you say, “I’ll put up enough cash for a car. Would I rather have a car or would I rather just invest this in a business?” And that’s kind of how I look at it. So about $50,000, $60,000 is the most cash I’ll ever put in a business initially just because of the risk.

Tim Church: Was that tough? I mean, because I think a lot of people listening are probably like, wow, I don’t know that No. 1, I could come up with that amount. But even if I could, throwing that all into a gym, you know, from somebody else’s perspective, you could say, wow, that seems pretty risky. What were your thoughts behind that? Like did you have any anxiety about putting that much in?

TJ Allan: I honestly didn’t. And I think it’s 1, I’m an extremely optimistic person. I live in a world of abundance that I think I’ve always thought that, that anyone — and that’s kind of what with my clients at the gym, I believe in everything. Anyone can have success. So failing never really went through to me. For me, losing that money never kind of crossed my mind. But I mean, I had the cash, like I said, my expenses were minimal. I was living with my parents, I was still driving the car that I had in college. So I accrued no new expenses once I graduated pharmacy school. So I go from making about $10,000 a year in a part-time job as a pharmacy tech sixth year to $125,000 a year at Walgreens. And I mean, I worked every shift I could at Walgreens because I knew I needed to have a nest egg if I wanted to do some kind of business. The second thing you look at — and this is what people often forget — is even with that, my building, I could have resold and got my $65,000 back guaranteed. I mean, I got a steal on that building. And even with my equipment, I wouldn’t have been able to sell my gym equipment back for a thing, but I would have got 50 cents, 70 cents on the dollar. So all in all, if it would have failed, worst case scenario, I would have only lost maybe $10,000 max? You know, that’s — to me, that was worth the risk.

Tim Church: Got you. So I think that’s awesome because it sounds like you decided, hey, I’m going all-in. And basically, your perception was that I’m OK with that risk. I’m OK with going in head first because, you know, I believe that I’m going to make this work. And if it doesn’t, you know, I’ve got somewhat of a contingency plan. But it sounds like you were never planning for that. It sounds like you were planning to be successful, and you were going to make it work.

TJ Allan: Yeah, I was. And I guess I shouldn’t have said I didn’t have a contingency plan, because I did. Because I knew that I could always sell the building, I could always sell the equipment back, and at max, I would lose $10,000. But I always go back to a thing, you know, if I wasn’t opening these businesses, I would have probably wasted that money. I probably would have went out and bought a BMW or I probably would have went out and started building a house or something like that that I would have sunk that money over there instead of in the business. So I think that kind of helped me a little bit too.

Tim Church: So you mentioned that essentially, even from month 1, that you’ve either broke even or the business has been profitable. We’re talking still about your gym, Ageless.

TJ Allan: Yes.

Tim Church: I mean, obviously, there are gyms all around the country that are not successful. And I’ve seen many that close just after a few months. So what would you say — what is the secret sauce that you’re injecting into the business to, you know, make it successful, make people to come and to use the facility and getting more customers and retaining customers?

TJ Allan: Yeah, that’s a good question. And if it was one thing, it would be real easy. That’s a good question. It’s a really hard question because if I could narrow it down to one thing — but I don’t think I can. I found a location, an environment, where this gym thrives. You know, most people overlook small towns. Most people have never been in a town of 3,200 people. So most people, this has never been even on their, you know, plan. So I found this small town that most people assume wouldn’t even be able to sustain a gym, and I’ve made it work. And I’ve made it work because I’ve built this efficient model of a gym, and that’s kind of what’s made it succeed underneath the engine. But really, what’s kept it profitable has been the community we’ve created. You know, we’re all about community. When you’re only 3,200 people, it’s a small town, it’s people who take pride in their community, they all live there because they love the people that live there because there’s not a lot of opportunities in small towns. There’s not a lot of job opportunities in small towns. There’s not a lot of businesses in small towns where you can go and enjoy a lot of things to do. I mean, people stay in small towns usually because of the people. But that’s kind of always been our focus. We realize people live in small towns because people enjoy the people in small towns. So our focus has always been on the people. And if you can make the people happy, you can create that community kind of feel, you’ll do well and you shouldn’t have to ever close your doors.

Tim Church: So did you ever have anybody recommend against you doing this or say, “TJ, you’re crazy for going all in on this?” Did you ever have anybody?
TJ Allan: Absolutely. The few biggest business guys in Gillespie that I’m actually friends with, one builds new homes and has been very successful, and he’s about 55. And then there was another one, I went to both of them, kind of gave them my idea, both told me I’m crazy. They said, “You’re in pharmacy. Open a pharmacy. Why would you not open something in the pharmacy? These pharmacies are making bank and everything else.” So they’re going on, they said, “Don’t do this. You can’t sustain it.” So the first bank I go to to talk about the loan, talk about my idea and everything else, they tell me the exact same thing. “You know, you’re in a town of only 3,200, you’re just not going to succeed, TJ. It’s a nice idea, and it would be a great thing for the community, but it’s not going to be making money.” And even then when I went to City Council when we were going to expand, I remember the first thing they told me when I told them we were expanding — my first building was about 2,500 square feet, and then we were going to build this building that was about 8,000 square feet — and one of the first aldermen told me, “What are we going to do in two years when you have to close your doors, and we have this 8,000-square foot that we can’t get rid of?” You know, that was kind of the negativity that’s surrounding the gym.

Tim Church: And so talk about — obviously, Ageless has been very successful, that’s your first one that you opened. And how did you decide, OK, it’s time to expand, it’s time to get some other gyms up and running?

TJ Allan: Well, Ageless’ expansion was always based on our members. You know, listening to their feedback, hearing what they have to say, and then looking at our numbers and putting the math. Math, putting a pen to paper and kind of figuring it out. So we’ve always expanded the Ageless, so we went from about 2,500 square foot to where we’re at now, about 8,000-9,000 square feet. And we’ll probably stick to 8,000 or 9,000 square feet. I don’t see an expansion in our future, but who knows? So then it came down to, you know what, I’m still working as a pharmacist, still — everything that Ageless made, it was nice, and this is why I always recommend that people opening a business but keeping their day job because what that has allowed me to do is use my pharmacist salary for my personal expenses, but then any profit that I’ve ever made from Ageless has always went into either opening new businesses or just investing. So I’ve never had to touch any of that or reinvesting in Ageless, which has made it nice. So I’ve always looked at, you know, at the end of the year, here’s the profit from Ageless, what do I want to do with it? And then that’s allowed me to invest in other businesses, it’s allowed me to open other businesses, and it’s allowed me to open some businesses that have failed, unfortunately. But you have to take that risk.
Tim Church: So talk about those other businesses that are up and running currently.

TJ Allan: OK. So you know, in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” he has this good cashflow quadrant. And he talk about the first cashflow quadrant that most people are in are employed. They work for somebody, they’re tied to their job. They don’t make any other money if they’re not actually at their job. Then the second quadrant is self-employment. So that’s a little bit better employment but still, at the same point in time, you may be self-employed, but still, your business isn’t making money unless you’re there. And then it comes down to an actual business owner. And a business owner is one who doesn’t necessarily have to be there to make money. His employees actually run the business, and he works there, but he doesn’t have to work there if he doesn’t want to. And the fourth one is kind of where you eventually want to be as an investor, where you don’t have to do anything except give money and get a return on it. So I’ve kind of followed that, tried to follow that. But unfortunately, you just can’t start as an investor. You kind of have to work your way up. So that’s kind of what Ageless has allowed me, as an employee of Walgreens and Sullivan’s, which has given me money. And then I started to open a business, which I would never say I was self-employed because I always worked for the pharmacy, and I never had to actually work at a gym. And then I became business owner. And now, I’m almost to the point where I’m just an investor in things. So what I’ve always just taken this Ageless money, and I’ve partnered with two other co-owners in a town about 60 minutes from us, and we’ve opened a studio gym. Then a year and a half later, that was doing well enough that we decided we were going to open a pay-per-class, like a spin gym only. And then I’ve tried some other things that haven’t done well. But those have been my two other successes have been those other two gyms there.

Tim Church: And have those been profitable most months, just like Ageless has been?
TJ Allan: They have. Now, they took a little bit longer to get to a break-even point. It’s primarily because of the models I use. The studio gyms, of course there’s a longer sales cycle. It’s easy for someone to walk in Ageless and buy a $29 a month membership. I mean, that’s not a hard decision for most. But with these studio gyms, it’s a different model. And when you’re charging $99, $139 as your smallest packages, that’s a bigger decision for people. So it’s a longer sales cycle, so it takes a little bit longer to get to that break-even point. So by about Month — I think three and a half months in, we hit our break-even point for that to where we weren’t having to invest any more money of ours into it to keep it afloat. Now, the spin gym, which is a pay-per-class thing, that was almost profitable from Month 1. In fact, I think it was profitable Month 1. If not, it was for sure profitable Month 2 because again, that was a low-cost, low-barrier offer. It was $15 for a class, so that wasn’t a hard decision for most. So you know, those two have been successful pretty much from the get-go, I would say, and still are successful to this day.

Tim Church: Wow, that’s incredible that you basically had to inject capital in the beginning, but they have been so successful that you haven’t had to put any more in since then because you’ve been able to make it work with the personnel and the way it’s been managed, so I think that is really cool. And obviously, that’s not the case for a lot of other businesses, you need to inject capital periodically in order to keep it afloat, even, but also to expand and to get to the point where you need to be. So I think that’s a cool feature of what you’re doing right now.

TJ Allan: Most definitely. And that’s kind of always been the business opportunities that I’ve looked at has kind of always been, you know, how long does it take to get to break-even point? How much capital — you know, people forget. People want to start a business, and what happens is they want to — especially a lot of gym owners, they come to me, and they want to start a gym. And what they always forget to factor in in their startup costs is those 3-6 months of operating expenses because they assume they’re going to hit the break-even point on Day 1. They’re going to open their door, and they’re going to get all this money coming in, and they’re going to be able to pay their monthly bills Month 1. Month 1, Day 1. And what happens is, usually, that’s not the case. Usually, you don’t hit that break-even point for 3-6 — and I shouldn’t even say usually because it depends on the industry — but man, it could take 6 months to hit the break-even point. And they always forget to factor that in, and that’s why they struggle. And that’s why a lot of gyms go out of business in a year because these owners use all their startup expenses initially buying equipment and just getting the building ready. And they start with their bank account at 0 on Month 1. And then, of course, they have to inject their business with their own cash, that runs low, and it just spirals out of control.

Tim Church: So is that something that you got information from other gym owners or your own research that you said, hey, if I’m going to do this, I really need to prepare and make sure that even if they don’t make money or are profitable in the beginning that I’m going to be OK and I’m not going to have to pull out?

TJ Allan: Exactly. And that’s what it was. And it really came down to research. It’s really doing as much research as possible prior to getting involved in these kind of things because these are big decisions. And a lot of people take, you know, opening a business kind of lightly, like, ‘Oh, I’ll get into it. It sounds fun.’ And it is fun. But there’s a lot of research, and it could get extremely stressful, and it could get extremely bad if you don’t do your research. Luckily, I did my research, and I knew the risks because there were still risks. And it still could have went south real easily. But I understood those, and I accepted those. And I kind of did as much as I can to minimize them.

Tim Church: Got you. So I think one of the big questions is now is you’ve got these gyms up and running, they’re profitable, they’re making money, but depending on the type of gym and what services and products are offered, there’s different ways in terms of ways people can make money from those services. So can you talk a little bit about how you’re actually making money? And also maybe a little bit of an insight as to how much you’re actually bringing in from these?

TJ Allan: Yeah. OK. So I’ll go with Ageless first. Like I said, the gyms I had are all different business models, so they make money a little bit differently and the amount of money they make is a little bit different too. With Ageless, we’re a traditional, 24-hour gym. If you know Snap Fitness, we’re basically like Snap Fitness, but we include classes. We have a little bit more all-inclusive than Snap Fitness. So Ageless is nice. And Ageless is a nice model, especially for someone that still wants to keep their existing job because it only requires about 40 hours of staffing a week, even though it’s open 24 hours. So it allows me — I mean, I spend I think about three hours a week working on stuff with Ageless, and a lot of the stuff, I really don’t need to work on. It’s just that I still enjoy it and working on the things. So in a small town, expenses are minimal. And that’s why I also like investing in small towns because there’s less risk. So people are kind of shocked, I just an interview with a business coach who does fitness. And he was kind of shocked — he’s from these big communities out in Connecticut, and he’s used to these monthly leases of $8,000-10,000 a month minimum, if not higher for these gyms. And when I told him, “You know what, we pay $2,000 a month, and we’re 8,000 square feet,” you know, he’s kind of shocked with that. But the model that we use, we’ve kind of built it to where we have this net profit percentage, right about 40% is kind of our goal we hit. So on average, if you look at our sales, it’s not impressive. But I tell people, you know, we do about $125,000 in revenue a year, nobody really blinks an eye. And they kind of just laugh and like, OK, whatever, you’re probably making $5,000 off of that. But we’re not. We’re actually making right about 40%, sometimes 45% if we can really get the efficiency built up a little bit. So anyway, so I make about $3,000-4,000 of passive income from Ageless alone a month.

Tim Church: And that’s what you’re actually bringing home? You’re actually bringing home?

TJ Allan: Yeah, so that’s what I’m actually profiting, yes. We do about $125,000, on a good year, we’ll do about $140,000-150,000 in revenue. On a down year, we’ll do $120,000-125,000. This upcoming year, in 2018, we’re probably going to hit about $120,000. We took some services off that we thought were taking up too much time and making it a little bit more inefficient, so our revenue’s going to be down. But our net profit percentage is going to be up because those things were more labor-intensive. So yeah, so what I would bring home, I bring home — and I shouldn’t say I bring home because I keep everything in the business — but if I needed it, I could bring home about $3,000-4,000 a month.

Tim Church: And then what about from the other gyms?

TJ Allan: The one gym is just over a year old, and the other gym is 2 years old, going to be 3 years old here, so it’s about 2.5 years old. So right now, I take nothing from there. I do have two co-owners, so right now, we’re on pace — between the two gyms combined — we’re on pace for about $300,000 in sales this year, $325,000 in sales this year. Of that, the profit would be, is going to be probably about $90,000. But we’re not going to touch any of that right now. So it’s hard for me to even say what I would bring home for that because that’s all being invested because we kind of have bigger plans for that gym. It’s in a larger community, it’s kind of a suburb of St. Louis that’s extremely wealthy, and we have some other ideas going along with that. So that I can’t say much. I know that to do this, we’ve been talking with a bank to put in a $1 million gym. We won’t have to put a penny down. So I’ll say that, so to get this loan and to put this $1 million gym, if we do decide to go that route, we won’t have to put a penny of our own money down. It will all be funded by those two gyms.

Tim Church: And I’m assuming that the income that you’re pulling in from Ageless, is that 100% just from new members and the retention of existing members and the fees that they pay?

TJ Allan: You’re exactly right. So what it is — how I talked about we removed some of those services, like we don’t offer personal training, per say. Everything that our revenue is built on is basically built on memberships. 95% of our revenue is from memberships, 5% is from waters, key tags, miscellaneous little classes we have or camps we have I guess is what you should call them. The 95% of it is just on memberships: new memberships, existing memberships. I can say that the model’s nice because it’s a subscription-based model, which right now is hot, and everybody’s trying to get this subscription-based model. That’s why you see basically a subscription-based service for everything under the sun, from razors to dog toys to everything because those are nice models to have because the cash flow is so nice. So that makes it nice. But more importantly from my perspective, is I own the building that Ageless is in. So it’s paying for itself. So I’m going to have this asset here in the next 10 years that last year, was appraised for about $550,000 that I really didn’t pay more than the $12,000 or $15,000 I initially put down on the first building for. So that’s why when you have this, because Ageless has just been paying this off for me the whole entire time.

Tim Church: And is that how you’re directing a lot of that cash that you’re getting every month? Like how are you breaking that additional income from Ageless, aside from what you’re making as a pharmacist?

TJ Allan: So Ageless is on its own separate bank account, so I keep everything in Ageless. So what I do, you know, I know some people would probably recommend starting making double mortgage payments, stuff like that, just because of course you’re paying interest on those payments and everything else like that. I’m not that way because I want to start new businesses. So I put — basically, what I do is I have these budgets for Ageless, whether it’s new equipment, there’s a budget for just monthly gym expenses, the new equipment purchases every year. And then I put everything else aside and put the profit at the end that we use for new businesses, whether it’s an expansion on Ageless or whether it’s some kind of new business to get into. So that’s kind of how I put Ageless. My whole goal with Ageless is never having to rely on that and allow that to build this nest egg for me.
Tim Church: Got you. So you’re not using any of that in terms for personal use, for debt paydown, student loans, or IRA contributions, anything like that.

TJ Allan: No. And I know you guys are probably going to call me an idiot for not doing that, but honestly, I haven’t. And it’s just because cash is king when it comes to business, and I like having a nest egg because if there’s an opportunity arise, I want to jump on it. For instance, I just — the other night, I was just watching TV, and I got a text message about a gym going up for sale in Litchfield, and the guy wanted to know if I was interested. You know, if you don’t have cash, it’s hard to play, and I’d miss out on that opportunity. And luckily, we have that cash set aside that hopefully we can take advantage if everything works out in these negotiations and be able to jump on the opportunity. So at times, I question myself whether I’m not making a smart decision by not either contributing to IRAs or paying this or that, whether it’s student loans or whether it’s the mortgage. But it’s just — I’m a business — I like business.

Tim Church: Well, I mean, obviously, you’re successful. So it’s not like you’re throwing that money away. You’re doing it with the anticipation that you’re going to continue to grow and expand. But I think a lot of people would look at that and say, ‘Well, what about other retirement accounts?’ Are you doing other things in addition, with your pharmacist salary so you’re kind of diversified in addition to what you’re doing with the businesses?

TJ Allan: Yeah, so what I do — so now, initially, my employer didn’t offer, Sullivan’s didn’t offer any kind of retirement package. Now, he does where he matches up to 4%, so of course I match him to 4%. And that’s just in a basic IRA. And then otherwise, by myself, I do index funds. That’s about it. I don’t make it real complicated. I kind of follow BogleHeads. It’s index funds, and that’s the extent.

Tim Church: That’s the KISS method, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid?

TJ Allan: Yes. Exactly.

Tim Church: Wow. So I mean, I just think that is so cool not only to hear that journey but the risks that you were willing to take, the ability to take a lot of heat from other people saying that it wasn’t going to be a good decision and just kind of persevere anyway. But you know, I think a lot of people may be listening and thinking, like obviously all entrepreneurial ventures are not successful. And it’s not the way that it happens. And I think John Maxwell said it best that the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. And I think that’s so true with entrepreneurship and I’ve certainly experienced this myself. But have you had any failures that you would say, TJ, prior to what you’ve done that’s been successful? Or even along the way as you’re doing some of these things that have been successful.

TJ Allan: Oh, most definitely. In fact, I probably have had more failures than I’ve had successes. You know, John Maxwell is of course correct. I started out, I think I always had that optimistic mindset because I always played baseball. In the game of baseball, you could be a really good hitter and you could only get a hit three out of 10 times. So seven out of those 10 times, you’re going to be a failure. But you’re still considered a really good hitter, even if you fail seven times. So that was always in the back of my mind when I started these entrepreneurial journeys. And again, it was Dr. Schafenmeier (?) who was always in my ear, who would always say, “You know what, you’re paying for experience is what you are.” You can’t look at a failure as you’re dumb or you can’t do this or you’re not made out for this. You need to learn from it. These are expensive teachings, but you need to. It’s the only way to really learn is to get your hands dirty and fail. So my first one I failed, I was actually still working for Walgreens. And this was kind of a weird business to start. But at the time, I’m 26-27, couples our age, my wife was fiancee at the time, we’re starting to have babies and everything else like that. And of course, we were always looking at what to give them, what to give them, and a lot of them would always joke, why don’t you bring us some over-the-counter pharmacy stuff that we should use for our kids. We don’t know what to get and everything else like that. So we actually created this Mommy Indeed baby basket. And it would have the Tylenol in there, the Desitin cream, all that stuff that a newborn would need eventually. And it would have little notes from the pharmacist saying, use this when this happens and stuff like that. So that was kind of our first business venture. And of course, it was a failure. But it was a good learning experience because it taught me a lot about marketing. And you know, you could have a really good product, but if you can’t market it, it’s useless. And then my second business venture, I actually partnered with a pharmacy student that I graduated with, and we created this dietary supplement. It was more of an energy-type supplement that we called — I think it was All Night IQ is what we called it at the time. It was really to help students kind of stay up and binge study for the night is what the goal of it was. And again, we each invested about $10,000 into it, and we lost everything. We could never — we thought just because our product was superior to any other product on the market, that we were going to be a success. And we virtually had zero marketing budget for it, and it was a failure. So from then on, I realized how marketing is extremely important. And if I don’t factor in a marketing budget initially or in my cost to acquire a customer, then I’m never going to have a success. So that’s how — then my next one was Ageless, and we did really well. And then right after Ageless, you know, we were doing really well, and Ageless was always built for the community. You know, I really enjoyed the community, I was born and raised in it, and I wanted to give back. So what we did is I had built — hired some programmers, and we had built this website that allowed small town businesses, small mom-and-pop shops on Main Street to basically put up an e-commerce store within minutes, and all the e-commerce stores would be on the website. So it was almost like a virtual mall. So what we wanted to do is basically give an advantage to these small mom-and-pop-type stores and give them this online presence that we thought they needed if they were going to survive the Walmarts and the Internet if they didn’t have it. And that was an expensive venture. That one, over the course — and I used all Ageless money, I didn’t have to use any of my own money on this, all the profit from Ageless went into this — and it ended up costing me about $20,000 or $25,000. And that taught me something really well is you — a really important lesson, and I wish I would have read the book “The Lean Startup” prior to that — is that you better go to your customers prior to and make sure this is something they want. You may think they need it, but they may not think they need it. And even though you think they need it, and you think it would definitely help them, if they don’t think they need it, I don’t care how great it is, they’re not going to jump on board. And we just couldn’t get anybody to jump on board. These small mom-and-pop shops, I finally realized, they don’t have an online presence because they don’t want one. And they don’t want to learn about one. So that was another failed one.

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Tim Church: And would you say that those have been key for helping you to drive your success forward?

TJ Allan: Oh, most definitely because the lessons I learned about marketing — I mean, I have a voracious appetite for reading. I read business books, marketing books, behavior psychology books, I mean, I’m constantly reading books. So usually, I’ll read about 40-50 books a year. And I love being — and even all the marketing books and everything that I read prior to it and all the business books I read too that always talked about cost to acquire a customer, don’t forget about that, and how important marketing is and having a marketing budget and all these marketing methods — even knowing that, it’s still a difference between knowing and doing. And it wasn’t until I did it and then failed that it really hit home that hey, marketing has to be a key, you have to build it around marketing. And then the second thing was the lean startup method.

Tim Church: That’s so good, TJ. And thanks for sharing that. Because I think a lot of times, people will look to others who are successful and it kind of looks like they’re an overnight sensation. But you don’t see the back end, what’s behind the curtain, what’s been going on and what hasn’t worked. And a lot of times, even the most successful people out there, they’ve failed hundreds of times before they’ve become who they are. So I think it’s just cool to highlight that. I appreciate you sharing that. So you talked a little bit earlier about the time that you were spending each week because I think a lot of times, people before they start a business or maybe they have an idea to pursue a side hustle, is they say, “You know, I’m working full-time as a pharmacist. I’m a mother, I’m a father, you know, I have a family. How am I supposed to manage that?” So can you talk a little bit about how do you practically manage all of these businesses and work as a pharmacist and be a husband and a father?

TJ Allan: You know, I’m kind of an organizational freak. I live on checklists. And another book that I was lucky to read very, very early was called “The E Myth.” The E Myth, Michael Gerber talks about systems and processes. So from Day 1, I always put in systems and processes in my life, in my businesses, everything like that, so everything kind of runs smoothly. So everything is kind of — there’s a system for everything. There’s a checklist for everything I do. On Mondays, I work on the Ageless stuff. On Tuesdays, we have this new venture going on, we’re going to coach other people on building new gyms, I work on that. On Wednesdays, I go back to work on Ageless stuff. On Thursdays, I look over the paperwork and the flow of our other two gyms’ stuff. And then on Fridays, I have this other other new venture that I partnered with somebody and we’re going to work on about marketing, marketing the Facebook ads. And I work on that. But everything’s kind of blocked off in blocks. And just everything is organized, and I think that’s the biggest thing. And people say they’re organized, but to me, if you don’t have it in a spreadsheet, you’re not organized. It’s one thing to say you’re organized, but it’s got to be in a spreadsheet. So everything I do is in a spreadsheet, everything I do has a checklist on it. And that’s what’s helped me to be able to do all this kind of stuff because I am a father. I have a little girl who’s 5 years old who I adore. And we play all the time. And that’s my purpose for living right now is to be able to play with her and have that time, and that’s why I kind of do a lot of this stuff so that it gives me time, that I’m not tied to pharmacy for the rest of my life. And I have a wife, and we travel, and you know, I like to workout on my own. And I have a lot of other hobbies and a lot of other things that require my attention. But I’m extremely organized, and that’s why I’m able to get it in.

Tim Church: Yeah, and it sounds like you’re just very intentional about it. So besides having a system in place, you know, you’re proactively saying, these are the days and these are the times, this is what’s going to happen, and this is how it’s going down, even before it actually happens. So I mean, I think that’s great. And a lot of people, like you talk about, they think they’re organized, but you know, I think the book that I read before called “The One Thing,” by Gary Keller, and he was talking about time blocking and how important it is that you need to put these things down as they take priority over everything. And unless there is an emergency, this is what’s going to happen.

TJ Allan: Yes. And that’s a great point because I love that book. And that’s probably even more important is being able to prioritize. If you cannot do that, I mean, a lot of people say they’re organized, they have 20 things listed down. But honestly, 18 of those things probably aren’t going to make that big of a difference. There was that 80-20 principle, and that’s kind of what I’ve always done is the 80-20 principle. What’s the highest priority? What’s going to give me the biggest bang for the buck and provide the biggest return? And so I think that’s even more critical than having your spreadsheet out.

Tim Church: TJ, you have shared just some amazing wisdom on this episode, and I’m so excited that we got to talk and you got to share your story. But as we kind of close out, what advice would you give to other pharmacists or even pharmacy students out there who have an interest in becoming an entrepreneur? What would you say to them?
TJ Allan: You know, I have pharmacy students, and we talk a lot about this with pharmacy students. You know, when I graduated in 2007, there was about 80 pharmacy schools. Today, I think there’s closer to about 140. We’re graduating about 15,000 new pharmacists a year. And the opportunities just are not there as much. And a lot of it has to do with acquisition, I mean, Walgreens, CVS, buying everybody out. We’ve had 1,100 independent pharmacies close their doors since 2011. We have all this automation going on now with these mail-order companies, telepharmacy, Amazon’s getting involved. So automation’s going to improve immensely over the next five years. And so and unfortunately, we’re still getting paid per pill we do. So I think it’s important that they look at these entrepreneurial ventures. I don’t want to say the outlook for our industry is bleak, but it’s not as great as it once was. So it’s important to expand your skill set. And that can be anything. A lot of people think, oh, you need all this money to start these businesses, you know, you don’t. With the internet and everything else like that, a blog, selling on Amazon — I talked to one pharmacist the other day, and he sells on Amazon. And he started selling on Amazon about a year, year and a half, and it’s taken him about 12 months, 13 months, to really start making kind of a profit on Amazon. But it was a learning experience for him, and he said the same thing as me. He saw kind of the outlook, and he didn’t think it was that great for him continuing to make $100,000-125,000 a year from pharmacy. He thought that there was really going to be a shrink. So he was looking for a different skill set, this was being able to sell on Amazon. So I think that’s really important to find these different skill sets in addition to pharmacy because there’s a lot out there that you can learn now on the internet and start these businesses for very minimal.

Tim Church: Right. And I think you highlighted such a great point that even though a couple of your businesses, you actually did put some capital, you injected what some people may consider quite a bit of money, but there are a lot of other businesses out there where what you’re investing is really sweat equity. It’s really your time, your energy, your focus. And maybe in the beginning, you’re not going to be able to bring home a revenue, and it may take time. But I think there are so many different opportunities out there, we don’t necessarily have to have a whole lot of cash to get started.

TJ Allan: Exactly. And that’s kind of my thing — and I was trying to use myself as a case study with this last year and a half. I dived deep into Facebook ads, and I have taken almost every course and paid for every little membership thing, really dove deep because I wanted to prove to people that you could start a business for very minimal. So in July, we started a business. And it’s basically we’re helping pharmacies build these Facebook ads for their pharmacies to get new patients, to deepen their relationship with current patients. But my goal behind this entire time was never to spend more than $150 a month on this business. And that’s kind of been my goal since Day 1. And so far, we’re growing. We haven’t had any paid customers yet, I wasn’t expecting a paid customer, this is a long-term process. I expect one here in the next two or three months. I have a few that are really interested and that we’re still talking to. But I mean, that was my whole thing was, you know, this can be done. And it can be done where you don’t have to spend even $2,000-3,000. It could be done for $100 or $150 for now.

Tim Church: Definitely. I totally agree. So TJ, if somebody wants to reach out to you to learn more about opening up a gym or more about your entrepreneurial journey, how can they get in touch with you?

TJ Allan: The easiest way, I’m connected to my email all the time. I can tell you to go to these websites that I have for each little business, but they all feed back into my email anyway. So if anyone ever has a question, I’m an open book. I’ll send you my P&L’s, I’ll answer any questions you have, I’ll help you in any way that I can. I love business, I love helping people start businesses, that’s kind of — I enjoy that kind of thing, so if somebody’s got that itch and somebody’s really got that drive, I’ll help you in any way that I can. So all you have to do is email me, it’s [email protected]. And like I said, I usually respond within a few hours at most.

Tim Church: Thank you, TJ. And we just really appreciate you coming on the show, telling your story, and I know that this is going to inspire. This is going to light the fire for some people to get going, to really start to act or think more about their entrepreneurship and their ideas that they want to bring to reality. So thank you, TJ.

TJ Allan: No problem. Thanks for having me.

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YFP 069: Carissa Explains it All: How One Pharmacist is Accelerating Her Financial Goals Through Rodan & Fields


 

Carissa Explains It All: How One Pharmacist is Accelerating Her Financial Goals Through Rodan & Fields

On Episode 069 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, Tim Church, YFP Team Member, hosts another edition of the Side Hustle Series featuring an interview with Dr. Crissy Mahl, a pharmacist and entrepreneur from Yuma, Arizona. Crissy talks about her pharmacy career path and how she became interested in entrepreneurship. She started working for Rodan and Fields and has created a significant side income.

In the Side Hustle Series, Tim talks about ways you can create additional streams of income to reach your financial goals faster and highlights pharmacists who are doing this to help you get inspired.

About Today’s Guest

Crissy graduated with her Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Findlay in 2012. After living in Ohio all her life, she moved to Yuma, Arizona and completed a PGY1 residency. She has a passion for acute care and hospital pharmacy and is now is one of her hospital’s biggest influencers and leaders. She also has a passion for empowering and inspiring others which is what lead her to become an entrepreneur.

Summary of Episode

On this episode, Dr. Crissy Mahl speaks about her pharmacy career and urge to travel which ultimately moved her from Ohio, where she lived all of her life, to Yuma, Arizona. She carries a passion for acute care and hospital pharmacy and currently works in a position where she is able to help create pharmacy jobs. To supplement her pharmacy income, Chrissy took on an entrepreneurial side hustle and started a business selling Rodan & Fields. In doing this, she’s learned how to fit her side hustle in with her full-time pharmacy career, allowing her to make larger payments on her debt and save for the future.

Crissy says that there are certain personality traits and characteristics that aid to the success this type of work. Her leadership skills as a preceptor to PGY1 students and Family Med residents matched with her personality and work ethic allow her to help navigate and balance her busy schedule. Crissy manages her time wisely, prioritizes well, and is incredibly focused on her business. She stopped watching television and even uses the “spare” time she has while walking or on an elevator to send emails and text messages that help fuel her business. By hustling around the clock, she has a goal set to retire by age 39.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Crissy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Carissa Mahl: Thank you for having me, Tim. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Tim Church: Awesome. Well, we’re glad to have you on. And I was really excited when you reached out to me on LinkedIn to inquire about Your Financial Pharmacist and just to talk about some of the ways that you’ve been working towards financial freedom.

Crissy Mahl: Absolutely. Honestly, I felt like your page was everything that I wish that I knew when I was in pharmacy school. Honestly, there’s so much when it comes to finances and student loans and all this other stuff, and it’s super overwhelming. And it’s even more overwhelming when you come out of school and you’re not really sure what way to turn. And so this side hustle topic is very dear to my heart, and I think it’s something important for people to consider and kind of learn about too.

Tim Church: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I thought it was really cool when we were talking that we actually share a similar background in that we grew up in Ohio, lived there our whole life, and then we said, hey, let’s go ahead and take off to a state pretty far away and really kind of go from there. So I want to — can you share a little bit about how that happened and why you made such a big move?

Crissy Mahl: Absolutely. So I lived in Ohio all my life, moved to Yuma, Arizona about a little over five years now. So I went to pharmacy school in Ohio, the whole nine yards. I didn’t move until a few months ago after I had graduated pharmacy school. Ohio is where my whole family resides. It’s literally the only thing I know, honestly, because we didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up. So traveling really wasn’t something that I had ever done before, you know, venturing outside of my little heart of Ohio State was a little bit nerve-wracking, but it was something that I felt I really needed just, you know, for my own push to get outside my comfort zone. And that’s exactly what happened. I was definitely outside my comfort zone, but honestly, I love it here in Ohio — or in Arizona! And I mean, the weather is awesome. I am constantly cold, all the time, so Ohio was really not my jam when you get like nine months of winter. So yeah, this heat is — this is my jam.

Tim Church: I hear you, I hear you. That’s how I got — I moved down to Florida, and for me, it was kind of a temporary situation. But after I was here, it was kind of like, you know, this is it. This is where I want to be, at least for awhile.

Crissy Mahl: Yeah.

Tim Church: So what was the main driver for you to get out there? Was it for a particular job? Or did you know people out in Arizona?

Crissy Mahl: You know, to be honest with you, I had always felt this inner — I don’t know what you would call it — this calling, if you will, to just explore the world. And like I said, I’d never really been able to travel when I was younger or even in school, to be honest with you. In pharmacy school, I had an internship, I worked all the time, so I really didn’t travel even while in pharmacy school. But I always had this inner feeling of just wanting to explore the world and get out there and try something new. And when I had first graduated pharmacy school, I actually had applied for pharmacy positions in both Ohio and Arizona. And I just kind of picked Arizona because I’d been to Orlando once before in my life, and my hair doesn’t quite agree with humidity, so I knew that humidity couldn’t be a thing in my life. And so I was like, oh sure, yeah, Arizona. Like their licensure requirements are similar to Ohio and I could totally pull off getting a license there if I needed to. Kind of a long story short, I actually got a job at a hospital where I had done a lot of my last year of pharmacy school rotations at. And I felt very comfortable with it. I was doing something that, you know, I thought that I wanted to do, which was work as a pharmacist at a acute care hospital. But honestly, I was a little bit scared because I felt like I was too comfortable with what I was doing, and I had only worked there for a couple of months. And it kind of gave me this feeling of like is this really it? Like you know, is this the challenge? Is this what I’m going to do my whole life? And you know, I don’t know. I’m kind of weird in the fact that I like constant change. And I don’t do well with monotony. So I actually had went to Midyear in Vegas that year and met up — just to say hey — to the director of pharmacy and the assistant director of pharmacy at a hospital in Arizona that I had done a phone interview for. And I don’t know if you and anybody listening to this right now have encountered this situation, but I feel like whenever you’re applying for a pharmacy position, they want to fill it pretty much immediately. So that was kind of a problem I came across while I was putting in applications, just before actually graduating is that they wanted to fill the position quickly. And so a lot of the positions I had applied for were already taken by the time I graduated. And I said hey to them, and they were like, “You know what? We have a position, and we want to bring you out to Arizona just to see the place and have the experience.” And I was like, “Oh no, I’m fine. I have a job, it’s cool.” And they were like, “Well, we’ll bring you out and you can see what it’s like.” And I was like, “You know, actually, I’m thinking about going back and doing a residency. I feel a little bit too comfortable with what I’m doing, and I really want to get more clinical.” Long story short, they flew me out to Yuma, Arizona, in the month of February where it’s like hell froze over in Ohio and gorgeous in Yuma, Arizona. It’s like 70 degrees during the day and then in the morning, it’s like 50. Like it’s perfect. And so they probably set it up purposely that way. But essentially, I did my residency there for a year in Yuma, Arizona. Yes, I moved to Yuma, Arizona, after going to Midyear and meeting them. And ended up staying on as a pharmacist after residency.

Tim Church: Crissy, was that a tough transition between working as a pharmacist and then actually going back to do a residency?

Crissy Mahl: You know, honestly, it was so much easier. I feel like the first year that you have after graduating and you are a licensed pharmacist is when you learn so much, regardless of if you’re doing a residency or you’re going straight into a new position as a staff or clinical pharmacist. I just learned so much because you — I mean, I guess you do those things ishish to a degree in your last year of school, you know, during your rotations. But when you have to sign your name to all these things and you are now an independent, licensed pharmacist, there’s like this heavy weight on you to constantly overthink everything and all this stuff. But to be honest, I felt like doing a full year as a pharmacist before going into residency — while I understand how unconventional that is — it actually almost prepared me even more for the residency, giving me more of an advantage because honestly, I felt like I was actually training some of the pharmacists that I ended up being a resident under. Not to like an extreme degree, but I was able to actually like cover vacations for people. It was kind of weird. But I’m glad that I did it, and I’m glad that I went back.

Tim Church: I mean, I think that’s just, that’s a cool story because you don’t hear too many pharmacists who are actually working, practicing as a pharmacist and decide, you know what? I am going to go back and do that residency. And so I just really commend you for doing that because I think that when you’re set in a position, as you said, you kind of get comfortable to some degree. And for some people, that’s not the way that they like to feel and they like the challenge of learning new things.

Crissy Mahl: Yeah.

Tim Church: And I totally get that you were much more prepared because you had that experience under your belt. But one of the things that often comes up — and I’ve heard some of this from my colleagues is that you go from making a full pharmacist’s salary, and now you’re taking a huge pay cut for a year. Was that tough having to do that?

Crissy Mahl: Honestly, it wasn’t too terribly tough. And that doesn’t — probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I will start off by saying that I make much more working in Yuma, Arizona, than I did in Sandusky, Ohio, per hour. So the move alone pay difference, you know, there was that. Also, I had a lot of perks going to the residency here in Yuma, Arizona. They actually have — the hospital owns an apartment complex. And so I was able to stay in their apartment complex for the full year of my residency. And I think I paid like $300 a month in rent, which was like squadoosh. It’s like nothing. And then our residency here in Yuma, Arizona, actually compensated residents a lot more than almost any other residency I looked at. I can’t remember off the top of my head right now what it was, but honestly, I think it was not quite — it wasn’t even half of what I was making as a pharmacist in Ohio. Like it was more than half. And you know, I just — it’s one of those things where if you’ve ever just made a serious commitment in your life, whether it’s I’m going to pharmacy school and you get that acceptance letter and you just like, you’re all in and you are going to make this work and you’re going to do this. And you’re going to see it out until the end, it was something like that. I knew that residency was something that I needed to do if I wanted to be able to work in the position that I wanted. And I knew I had to just go all in, regardless. And you know, I was already kind of used to being a student and having no money, so you know, the one year that I actually was a pharmacist and making a pharmacist salary, it was kind of like a vacation, if you will. And then it was like, OK, go back to student mode.

Tim Church: Did you have to make any sacrifices for that year during the residency? You know, compared to the previous year when you were making the full salary?

Crissy Mahl: You know, I did share wifi with your neighbor. So the wifi was a little bit horrible. I didn’t update my phone every year like I was used to. Like if it fell on that year, I didn’t do it. Actually, the year that I moved to Arizona and was a resident, I just, I did a lot of quick trips to like Sedona and Page and just stayed at cheap hotels. So I mean, I totally made it work. Like I said, it’s like student living. You just know that you can’t go all out with vacations and stuff. And honestly, I feel like our compensation wasn’t too terribly bad. So I felt like I didn’t have to make too many compromises when it came to, you know, the normalcies of life as far as finances.

Tim Church: Sure. So talk about a little bit about your current position and what you’re doing at your full-time job.

Crissy Mahl: Sure. OK. So right now, I am a clinical pharmacist at a 400-bed hospital here in Yuma, Arizona. I literally do a little bit of everything, and most of that is due to the fact that I did my residency here. So as a PGY1 resident, I every month did a different rotation, including oncology, ICU, internal med, infectious disease, like you name it. And so literally, I mean the goal at the end of any residency, in my opinion, should be that once graduated, you should be able to fit in any of those roles confidently. And that’s what I was able to do. So they kind of fill me into almost any position in the hospital, in and outside of the hospital, that is needed. And I’ve actually created a lot of the positions that we have here at the hospital now, including our Tower 2, which is our cardiac unit. We now have a pharmacist position there, so I helped create that. I also helped create an additional staffing position for the evening shift. And let’s see — now it’s been almost two months — about two months ago I helped, me and my coworker created an IV room pharmacist position. And I was actually a IV technician back in my day, so I kind of already know 7.7 and compounding chemo and things like that. So today, I work in the ICU. And yesterday, I was the quality and safety pharmacist.

Tim Church: You’re doing it all.

Crissy Mahl: I know. When I was mentioning that I get a little bit of pharmacy ADD and you know, I don’t like monotony, this is pretty much like, this is pretty much best case scenario as far as getting to dabble into a little bit of everything. And you know, we’re talking now about starting a ER pharmacist position. And actually, our ER here in Yuma is the busiest ER in all of Arizona. So the fact that we don’t have a pharmacist down there yet is pretty surprising to me. So within the next couple of months, I’ll be rolling that out. And I’m super excited about that.

Tim Church: Wow, well you are just doing everything there. And you’re doing a lot. And it’s pretty cool because it sounds like you’re taking on a leadership role as well and helping to get these positions created and just advocating for pharmacy in the hospital.

Crissy Mahl: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I could consider myself — I don’t know if you’re like a Game of Thrones guru or anything — but I’m kind of like Tyrion. I don’t necessarily rule any kingdoms, if you will. But I’m kind of like the hand of the kings and give advice and help make things happen, which is kind of more my passion rather than being a boss, if you will.

Tim Church: And would you say that your going and doing the residency, do you feel that that was critical to be able to do a lot of what you’re doing today?

Crissy Mahl: You know, I do because one of the things that I really tried to make sure that I did during my residency was have experiences that I knew I wouldn’t be able to get as a staffing pharmacist. So for example, when I was doing my ICU rotation as a resident, I made sure that I asked to sit in on a open-heart surgery and then also be in the room when the patient comes up to the ICU and how the nurse handles all of the drips and you know, patient assessment scales and everything. I also followed respiratory therapy and how they adjust ventilation settings. And I even got to sit in on a patient who had a Passy Muir valve put on, which was pretty interesting and gross at the same time. I am so glad that people think that respiratory therapy is the bomb because I cannot handle that stuff. So I really feel like I got to not just get an angle of what a pharmacist does in a hospital setting, clinically, but also what the team approach and what they bring to patient care so that I can understand the process in a holistic manner rather than just constantly looking at it from my angle.

Tim Church: Sure, sure. I think that’s awesome, and thank you for sharing that story and just kind of how you got into that role with the residency. So before we kind of move into your side hustles, I want to ask you one more question. And that is, you know, in our profession, there seems to be a lot of negativity — and I know it depends on the job setting — but a lot of negativity around job satisfaction, just the profession. So I want to know, what do you like about being a pharmacist and about your job in general?

Crissy Mahl: Sure. So honestly, pharmacy wasn’t something that was on my radar when I was 5 years. When I was 5, I wanted to be a tornado chaser. When I was 8, I wanted to be an astronaut. And when I was 10, I wanted to be a veterinarian. You know, I don’t know if it’s because I just never really like knew anything pharmacy existed, but it got into my radar when I was in high school and had to sit down and be realistic about what a career required as far as schooling goes and how much to expect to get paid at that job. And for me, going to school for six years — and now they have the fast-track programs and everything where you can get done even sooner — but more or less, six years, and it paid $100,000+ per year, depending on where you work and what you do, obviously. But you know, I feel like there were other professions at the university that I went to. They obviously paid a little bit less than I did to go to that school because we had that College of Pharmacy tuition tacked on, but you know, at least I feel like I’m not in a position where it’s 100% impossible for me to pay off my student loans if I had only had my pharmacy job, but also pharmacy is growing in a lot of different ways, and one of the biggest things is outpatient services, so you know, oncology is huge right now. Anticoagulation, hypertension, diabetes, all of these clinics, they want to have pharmacy involvement. It’s big right now. And I have a hard time believing that we’re ever going to necessarily run out of different things to do. I know that there has been a concern regarding how many pharmacists are graduating every year and how many positions are available between those graduates and people transitioning in and out of jobs, but honestly, if you keep yourself competitive in a way of always learning and just kind of — I don’t know — having a personality where you are open and willing to work and go above and beyond, then I don’t know that you’d ever have a problem finding a job. You may have to, you know, go outside your comfort zone as far as location — that’s definitely something that I’ve seen, especially coming out of Ohio where we have — oh my gosh, I don’t even know how many.

Tim Church: Seven schools. There’s seven schools now, the last I checked, that’s how many. I don’t think there’s eight yet.

Crissy Mahl: Right. Yeah. And so you know, I remember it being rather competitive trying to find a hospital position in Ohio when I graduated. So I can only imagine how much harder it is now, especially if they’re doing any kind of cuts in the way of hospitals and retail and all that.

Tim Church: I think you’re definitely right, though, that it is competitive and that there are certain markets that are saturated, and there is concern with the number of pharmacy schools. But I think that’s even more incentive just to always keep yourself ahead of the curve in learning new skills and really making yourself incredibly valuable to the organization, the institution that you work for but also learning different ways on how you can provide value in patient care. So I think you really hit that. And I think it will be important too to see as there’s a lot of legislation going through to get provider status, to get more opportunities for pharmacists to bill, so that will be interesting to see kind of how that plays off. Well, let’s switch gears a little bit. So you’re working as a pharmacist, you’re creating all these positions, you’re loving it after you got through your PGY1 residency. How do you transition or how did you say, ‘You know what, I’m making pretty good money. I’m working as a pharmacist. But I’m looking for something else.’ What was your main motivation for pursuing a side hustle?

Crissy Mahl: That’s a really good question. So to be honest with you, my very first side hustle was something that was brought up to me by a coworker. You know, he had mentioned that he worked at a physical rehab hospital where he hooked up a couple of hours every weekend or holiday. It was super chill, he did patient interaction. And it was pretty low-key. And honestly, I wasn’t looking for anything super intense. I was just in my brain thinking, you know what? I could use a couple extra bucks, you know, like thousands of dollars every month going towards student loans and just not really seeing that number go down very much was a little bit depressing. So I was like, OK, yeah, like maybe I could do that. So I actually, that’s why I got into it. My very first side hustle was working as a PRN pharmacist at a local physical rehab hospital. And you know, honestly, at first, it was super chill. I knew half of the pharmacists who were working there, so it was easy and familiar. It was different than what I was already doing because it was a outpatient facility with a different workflow, so my job was essentially to literally face-to-face talk with patients about their home medications and what they were going to get discharged on and make sure that they have the education that they need and whatever paperwork is helpful to them in understanding, you know, what the plan of care is once they go home. So it felt very purposeful and, like I said, it was not very stressful. So it was just kind of nice to make that extra money.

refinance student loans

Tim Church: Sure. How many hours were you working there? What was typical when you were doing that side hustle?

Crissy Mahl: Typically, in the beginning, it was around probably six hours, which wasn’t bad because I got to sleep in, you know. Sleeping in is until like 7 o’clock. And then I would go in sometime around 9 o’clock and leave sometime around 3:30 and then, you know, maybe catch a movie or something with some friends afterward. But the problem came when we doubled in size and they were doing cuts left and right. Like they got rid of our HR department, they actually let go the technician that we had for — he worked there for more than 10 years. It was heartbreaking. And then — so literally I was doing technician, which means I was packaging medications, I was doing outdates, I was doing narcotic inventory, all these like things that are just not fun for me. And not only was I in charge of doing that, but I was also now taking care of twice as many patients. And the facility was now accepting patients at pretty much all hours of the day. So I would literally — I remember one time, I got a phone call from a physician — or no, it was from the nurse, bless her heart. She caught me at a bad time. But it was like 11:30 at night, and they needed Levaquin. And I’m just like, are you serious? You’re going to make me get up and go in and get you a Levaquin? When they probably already had a dose before they left the hospital that morning. And in that moment, I was just like, oh my gosh, I don’t want to do this anymore. Like, I was literally — I probably had one or — no, that’s a lie. I probably had two or three days off each month between those two jobs. And at the end, I was probably working 10- or 12-hour shifts every time I went in there. So it went from chill, six hours, you know, doing my thing to over the course of a year or two, now double the work, 10 to 12-hour shifts, getting yelled at for putting in so many hours and just stress, like ugh. I was crabby. Nobody liked me.

Tim Church: So it started out like it was a pretty good position starting out, but then it sounds like with all the extra work and the stress that it wasn’t worth the extra money that you were making in order to kind of accelerate the goals that you were looking at.

Crissy Mahl: Exactly. Yeah.

Tim Church: So how long did you work at that facility?

Crissy Mahl: I am not good at quitting. So I stayed at that facility longer than I wanted to, to be honest. I was there for probably close to three years. And it was probably halfway through there where I actually wanted to quit. And I didn’t have necessarily a backup plan because I was already used to that double income and couldn’t really afford, based on my plan for paying things off loan-wise, I couldn’t afford to just dip out. And so that’s kind of when I got into my second side hustle.

Tim Church: Yeah, so talk a little bit about that.

Crissy Mahl: So my second side hustle was something completely unexpected. Honestly, so I got into it because I wanted an eye cream. I was 29 years old, almost turning 30, and I wanted an eye cream. And I was talking with — this is going to sound so ridiculous — I was talking with a friend of a friend who was also a pharmacist. She’s from Arizona and lives in Wisconsin, and she was talking to me about, you know, what this particular side hustle did for her. And for her, she really, really wanted to be present for her kids at home. And she worked at a retail pharmacy location, and I know that the hours can be long and exhausting and just draining overall in retail in particular, and in my opinion. Maybe it’s just because retail isn’t my jam and it stressed me out more than maybe other people. But she was actually able to go down to only working two days a week with this side hustle. And so that impressed me, and I was like, I know how much a pharmacist makes, and you’re telling me that this side hustle is bringing in enough money that you can go down to working two days a week? That’s intriguing. So I joined the business with her. And within a couple of months, I think it was like less than three months, I was able to make back my initial investment in the business. After that, it was gains. And by, again, I suck at the quitting thing. So I could have quit at the rehab hospital a lot sooner than I did because I was actually to make more with this side hustle, with this business, after only five months than I made at the rehab hospital. So I was making more with this business than I was at the rehab hospital, and I was able to do it from home.

Tim Church: So talk a little bit about the actual business that you’re working for and what you’re actually doing.

Crissy Mahl: Awesome. I would love to. OK, so I am essentially paid to have conversations with people about the No. 1 skincare brand in North America. So I talk with people about their skincare concerns, and I also talk with people about the business opportunity. And I make a commission off of the skincare that people purchase through me, and I also make a commission off of the team that I build under me. So with this particular company, there are certain standards. You can’t just make money by sitting back and not doing anything. You actually have to be physically present in the business, working and like I said, building and coaching your team. Skincare isn’t necessarily something I was passionate about at all. Like literally, you’re talking to the chick who used a Neutrogena face makeup cloth before going to bed every night, and that’s it. Like that’s all my skincare routine included. And so once I got into this, it was kind of opening a whole new door of, you know, what skincare actually is and people started noticing my skin just after a couple of weeks. And that’s really when I saw the value in working with this particular company.

Tim Church: And what is the company that you’re working for, Chrissy?
Crissy Mahl: It’s called Rodan & Fields. Have you ever heard of it?

Tim Church: I have heard of that. And is it slang within the biz or is just on the street as R&F, also known as?

Crissy Mahl: No, R&F is like a thing. It’s their logo, it’s their — yeah.

Tim Church: OK.

Crissy Mahl: So that’s legit.

Tim Church: OK. I just didn’t know if you guys typically use that or you use the full name because I’ve kind of heard it both ways.

Crissy Mahl: Sure. So usually if somebody, if I’m bringing it up for the first time, I usually say Rodan & Fields because most people if I just say R&F are kind of like what? But sometimes, people will say, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. Tell me more.’

Tim Church: Right.

Crissy Mahl: And so that kind of opens up the door to me chatting with them.

Tim Church: So when you were talking about the different ways that you’re serving people and getting additional income, where is most of the income coming from? Is it from the products that you sell? Or is it from getting other people to work for the company?

Crissy Mahl: Sure. So to be honest with you, most of my personal paycheck comes from the products, the skincare products that I sell. However, with this business, that is not the same story for everybody. I know people who really were only interested in building a team. And so they made all their money through commissions on their team’s sales instead of, you know, necessarily selling product themselves to clients. So you can really work it either way. And I’m currently trying to find a balance between the two because I was very comfortable with the talking with people about the products in the beginning rather than the business. And so that’s kind of where I started. And the commission that we get for the products is always retail profit. And then after that, based on your position in the company, you can make, you know, 30%+ commission from product. As far as team-building, it again depends on your promotion within the company, but essentially, you can make 5% of your team’s sales up to six generations below you. So that’s where your residual income comes in. And that’s how people can make six, seven figures doing this business and literally retire them and their spouses in — I think most people like somewhere between like four and nine years. So it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, it definitely takes work, like anything other business building would. You definitely have to get uncomfortable and push yourself to do things that you normally wouldn’t do because entrepreneurship isn’t something that I ever saw myself doing necessarily. So this is definitely outside my comfort zone, but it’s really been just so rewarding because it’s so different than pharmacy. So much more different than pharmacy.

Tim Church: Was that hard, making that transition into something completely different and kind of shifting your mindset?

Crissy Mahl: You know, it wasn’t that much. It sounds really weird, but I think that because of my natural want to help other people make something extraordinary, whether that’s a pharmacy position or building their own business, that kind of ties in together. And then also, I kind of like to have things that I can call my own, whether that’s a project or whatever, whatever it is. So this thing that is my own is my business. And so I have — give or take — full control over where my business goes. If I put a lot of work into it, I’m going to see a lot of gain from it. If I don’t put a lot of work into it, you know, it can slide backwards. So I have some control over it as far as that goes and that kind of give me a feeling of — I don’t know — safety, if you will.

Tim Church: And I wanted to ask you, Chrissy, because a lot of these business models, sometimes there’s negative connotations with them. And there’s a lot of stories out there of people who are very unsuccessful actually when they’re in these kind of businesses. But what would you say has led you for you to be successful in doing this? Because clearly, you’ve mentioned that it is bringing some additional income and is helping you achieve your financial goals quicker so that you were able to really quit the rehab facility position that you had.

Crissy Mahl: Sure. Yes. So my story in this business is unique to me. I don’t think I’ve ever come across two people with the same story in this business. Some people go super fast, some people are a little slower. You know, some people literally don’t do anything. And honestly, it kind of depends on your mindset — and when I say kind of, it’s like it depends completely on your mindset. So are you willing to do the uncomfortable? Are you willing to put in the work? Are you willing to be coachable? You know, things like that. And honestly, pharmacists have a bit of an edge in this kind of business because we’re already viewed as a trusted resource to people. And so for me, I mean, people would — before I even joined this business, people would come to me all the time, specifically to me, and say, ‘I have this patient. I need your help. What should I do?’ Or, ‘I’m going to Spain, and I need to know what restaurant to go to. Which one do I go to?’ You know, they look to me because they trust my opinion is going to be honest and is going to be helpful and accurate. And so, honestly, the relationship that you have with people in general and the, I guess the personal brand that you have on yourself does impact how well you’ll do in the business, especially in the beginning. So again, pharmacists having that trustworthy, you know, reputation kind of really puts you at a good spot because again, people are going to come to you with their problems. And they expect that whatever you tell them is going to be true and honest.

Tim Church: So besides just being a pharmacist, kind of being a trusted figure, are there any other skills or experiences that you’ve had in pharmacy school or just throughout your professional experience that have helped you be successful?

Crissy Mahl: You know, some of it I probably knew and had experienced throughout pharmacy, and I just didn’t realize it and it hit me more head-on in this kind of business. So for example, different personality types, different learning styles. Even though I am a preceptor to the PGY1 pharmacy residents that we have now as well as I help out with the family medicine residents that we have at the hospital here too, you know, everybody learns a different way. But when you are coaching somebody on how to utilize this system and how to run a business and what works for me, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to do what you tell them to do. And that part can be a little bit frustrating, and you just have to know that it’s going to happen. Like, there’s going to be somebody who wants to do it their way, and you have to just let it happen. There is that — I have encountered that negative connotation about, oh, you’re in direct sales, like what are you doing? And to be honest with you, their opinion doesn’t pay my bills. And if it did, then I would care. But it doesn’t, so I don’t. And you have to have that mentality to get through it because if you care too much about what other people think of you, and if you don’t have a place that you can go to reset your mind and bring you back to you, then you won’t get through it. You have to be able to say, again, ‘I’m all in on this. This is going to work for me. I will make this work. These are my goals. This is my timeline. You know, this is exactly what I want to do.’ And you have to kind of make yourself a plan. Like with pharmacy school, you know you’re going to be in school for six years. You plan it out. Year one, year two, year three, done. So with this, I’m like, OK, personally, my goal is to retire myself at the age of 39, which is a huge goal. It’s scary. It sounds audacious because it is. But you know, you have to believe in yourself enough to know that if you have the grit and the persistence, the coachability, you can literally do whatever you want with this business.

Tim Church: Have you ever considered leaving pharmacy and doing this full-time? Or does pharmacy still have something that’s very central to you?

Crissy Mahl: You know, I have thought about that, which is flipping crazy to think about, honestly, because it’s like, are you serious? Like you just went to school for six years and did a residency, and you’re telling me that you would be willing to drop it and do this business. Like are you nuts? But to be honest, like, once you find that thing that makes you, that fills all the holes from a perspective of career, you know, you kind of just have to go with it. And again, if you have a plan, and it’s a legitimate plan, and you’re moving along with it, it’s hard to turn down. Like if and when I hit that goal of, you know, matching my income as a pharmacist through this company, when I’m 39 years old, how could I not consider it, you know? Like when you have an e-commerce type business — I love to travel now. I don’t think I mentioned that. But instead of working in a pharmacy on holidays and weekend — like I still work holidays and weekends at the hospital because hospitals never close. But I travel so much now, so much. And it’s something, as I mentioned before in the beginning of our conversation, that I really, really, really, really, really wanted to do. I wanted to explore the world and just, you know, take in the cultures and take in scenery and experiences and with this business, I’m able to do that. And so I feel like I have such a better work-life balance, which is honestly pretty much anybody I know would love to have.

Tim Church: Well, that’s what I was going to ask you, Chrissy. I mean, it sounds like, you know, in order to be successful, obviously you have to actually do work. You can’t just sit back and expect to get this residual income that you’ve been. But how do you practically manage your side hustle with your full-time job and your personal life?

Crissy Mahl: Yes. So to be honest, it was really hard at first because I didn’t quit that rehab hospital position right away, you know. So I was literally working two jobs with 2-3 days off every month, in addition to this business. And honestly, it’s just having the focus and utilizing your time wisely. So literally, every nook and cranny that I had in my day, I was doing my business. So if — this is going to sound dangerous, and I don’t recommend that anyone does it — but if you’re walking down a really long hallway in a hospital, I would literally be sending text messages to people and catching up on my messages because, you know, my business is pretty much virtual for the most part, so that’s how I kind of kept up with that. Also, I stopped watching TV, except for Game of Thrones, you can’t take away that. But I stopped watching TV. And my other half, he loves watching TV. So I would literally still be in the same room as him, but I would have my computer in front of me, and I would be doing work. So you know, instead of being I guess nonproductive with my relaxing time, I was actually working my business. I stopped saying no to things that didn’t really benefit me in achieving my goals. So honestly, there’s always a baby shower, there’s always a birthday party, there’s always something going on. And unless there was a legitimate networking opportunity for me or it was, you know, a best friend or an immediate, really close family member, I said no. If I had work to do, then I did work. You know, like any other job, if you don’t get your work done, then it doesn’t get done, and there’s nobody else there to do it, so you have to make the time. I also stopped doing a lot of extra overtime at my full-time position, which now I guess isn’t so much of a problem because when I was first there, we were extremely understaffed, and I was doing a lot of overtime. But I don’t really do overtime anymore. I come home, and I work my business. I mean, also, not only like texting when I’m walking down the hall of the hospital, but you know, texting on the toilet is totally a thing. Just make things work. I was going to make this work. If I am sitting and eating, then I am sitting, eating and texting or emailing or having a conversation with somebody quickly over the phone. You can make it work. And that’s one of the reasons why I really loved this particular company’s business model setup, that it works for busy people. People who are in this particular company, I mean, they excel. And by excel, I mean they’re amazing. They’re like the top of their company amazing at their primary breadwinning position at their careers. It’s pretty astounding because I just got back from New Orleans at our convention, and just seeing all these amazing people and what they’re accomplished, it’s pretty cool that they were able to accomplish something so extraordinary with a business, you know, when they had so much else going on.

Tim Church: Wow, so you basically, you’re not wasting any time going all in in order to really drive this income and get to that goal. But I think that’s cool that you’ve cut out TV and you’re really prioritizing all the things that are really important to you. And I think that’s something that I’ve even struggled with in my side hustles is trying to figure out, you know, what is the process or system that works?

Crissy Mahl: Yeah.

Tim Church: And one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting when I read in this book called, “The One Thing,” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan is talking about that whole work-life balance and how it’s really not the best way to view something that you actually should do. And I thought that just kind of blew my mind, like when they talked about that because it was basically saying that if you want to be completely balanced and equal in what you’re doing, then that really is how you’re going to be mediocre, that it actually leads to mediocrity. But rather what the reality is is that to be successful in something, sometimes you have to go all in. You have to be willing to do things that are uncomfortable to sacrifice some of the time that might be spending with family members or friends but then kind of shifting back at other times or different periods or seasons and kind of rebalance that in that sense. So it kind of sounds like that’s what it’s taken for you in order to do that. I mean, would that be something that’s fair to say?

Crissy Mahl: Yeah. I would say that’s totally fair to say. And actually, after you mentioned that, I remember reading this quote, and honestly, I can’t remember where I saw it or whose quote it was, but it said something to the effect of, if you are not obsessed with the process of what you’re doing, then you will be average. And it’s kind of true. Like I know people who are literally obsessed — and I call them nerds — with pharmacy. Like literally, I know a guy who on his honeymoon in Hawaii, read like I think it was a BCPS book or something. I’m like, are you flipping serious? Like you’re sitting on a beach in Hawaii, and you’re reading.

Tim Church: Was he still married after that?

Crissy Mahl: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Tim Church: Oh, OK.

Crissy Mahl: Right? She knew what she was getting into. But you know what I mean, and he is like somebody that I can ask any pharmacy question to, and he knows the answer right off the top of his head. I mean, he could probably literally tell me word-for-word, oh, well that study called blah blah blah said on page 3 that this that and the other thing. I’m like, oh my God, what? But if you’re obsessed with what you’re doing, like, you don’t even think about it. You just do it. And it shows, like you can tell when somebody is really into what they’re doing.

Tim Church: I totally agree. Well, Crissy, thank you so much again for coming on the show, talking about your story and your side hustles and some of your goals and aspirations. I think people are going to be better off hearing that, and hopefully that inspires some people to kind of pursue some of the things that they’ve always wanted to do or just really look at that. So again, we thank you. And if somebody wants to reach out to you or learn more about what you’re doing, how can they do that?

Crissy Mahl: Yes, so the best way to get ahold of me honestly is email. Email works perfectly, and you can reach me at [email protected]. So it’s Crissy Mahl at gmail.com. And I’d be more than happy to send you some information about what it is that this company is about, what I’m doing. Honestly, I’m not in the business to convince anybody of anything because I wouldn’t want anybody to do this business if it wasn’t right for them. And I want you to pick the side hustle that fits into your life and your family life best and what you’re trying to pursue.

Tim Church: Thank you, Crissy.

Crissy Mahl: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Tim. This was so fun.

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YFP Bonus Episode: How A Couple Left Their Careers to Travel the World


 

YFP Bonus Episode: How A Couple Left Their Careers to Travel the World

On this Bonus Episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, Tim Ulbrich, founder of Your Financial Pharmacist, interviews Matt and Nikki Javit from Passport Joy about their journey of walking away from their successful careers to travel the world full-time. Matt and Nikki talk about what inspired their journey, how they are managing to do this financially and travel tips and hacks they have learned along the way.

Summary of Episode

Matt and Nikki knew that they wanted to travel full-time before retirement and had been dreaming about the day they could do so. They took several exotic international trips together through Matt’s career as a technology services sales professional and met so many others traveling the world. This inspiration eventually sparked Matt to purchase a one-way ticket to Santiago, Chile turning their dreams into a reality.

Prior to their departure 18 months ago, Nikki worked as a clinical pharmacist for a number of years. She realized that she was solely identifying herself by her pharmacy career and came to the understanding that there was more to life than her job. Although she invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into her pharmacy career, she knows she will be able to step back into it if and when she feels ready. She hasn’t stopped reading and learning even though she isn’t practicing. Matt also left behind a successful sales career and is confident of an easy transition when he’s ready to return to the workforce.

Matt and Nikki worked diligently to pay off their student loan debt, as well as other debt they had accumulated, and saved so they could travel without thinking about any financial burdens. They travel with a set budget which allows them to explore places all around the world while connecting with different cultures, volunteering their time and, of course, making forever memories.

About Today’s Guests

Matt and Nikki Javit are currently traveling the world full-time with just a single backpack each after leaving the US in February 2017. They have been to places like Machu Picchu, the Galapagos Islands, and The Taj Mahal and amazing cities like Hong Kong, Venice, and Cape Town. During their travels, they find creative ways to keep down their costs, get involved in the communities, and network with locals while having a great time.

Before they left to travel full-time, they loved their careers in Indianapolis Indiana where Nikki was a clinical pharmacist and Matt was a Technology Services Sales Professional. They enjoyed hanging out with friends, spending quality time with family, and volunteering in the community but they loved to travel. So after dreaming about it for a while, they decided to take the leap of faith. They document all of their adventures and share travel tips to save time & money on their podcast and blog at PassportJoy.com.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Matt and Nikki, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, excited to have you and thank you for joining me while you’re in and traveling in Osaka, Japan. So thanks for coming on.

Nikki Javit: Thanks for having us.

Matt Javit: Thanks so much.

Tim Ulbrich: Well, I am so excited. And as I shared with you all before we jumped on the call today, I am inspired by your journey, following your podcast and your blog. And when I heard a little about your journey, what you’re doing, and I found out Nikki is a pharmacist, I said, ‘We have got to have them on the show to learn a little bit more about their journey.’ And also, shoutout to Tony Guerra who interviewed you recently who brought your journey to my attention. So as we get started here, I’m going to read a brief bio of who you are, your journey and what you’ve been doing. And then I’m going to have you introduce yourselves, and we’ll kick off the conversation from there. So Matt and Nikki Javit had stress-free lives in Indianapolis. They love hanging out with their friends, spending quality time with their family and making new connections in their vast network. They were both considered very successful in their careers, and they loved their bosses and coworkers. But the desire to travel full-time was already on their mind, and they knew the window would be soon closing to turn a dream into reality. So on February 21, 2017, with a single backpack each, they flew to Santiago, Chile with a one-way ticket that would start their journey around the world, checking off the bucket list locations like Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands, the Sistine Chapel and the Taj Majal, creating new and exciting lists every week on where they want to explore next. So again, thanks for joining. And Nikki, I just have to know — as I listened to your first episode and I heard you launch that background to tell the story, coming downstairs and you found out Matt had booked that one-way ticket, which became the fulfillment of a dream you had been talking about for a long period of time. What were your thoughts and your emotions when that day happened?

Nikki Javit: Well, the first time he came down, I thought to myself, we can reverse this situation. We had talked about this, and it was — I mean, it’s always been a dream of ours. We probably, prior to him purchasing that one-way ticket, had talked about it for at least 3-5 years. But it was always just a dream. It was something that was like, we would meet someone on vacation or meet someone well younger than us, and they were doing something like that, traveling the world, they’d left everything behind. And you know, for me, it was, wow, that would be so fun and amazing to be able to do something like that. And so Matt and I, while we were out amongst each other over dinner or at home in the privacy of our home, we had these conversations and say, ‘Oh my gosh, how cool would that be to travel around the world?’ Like get our affairs in order, figure out what we need to figure out at home, and then go travel for an extended period of time. And then when he told me that he purchased that one-way ticket, I kind of — it all just became like a reality for me, but I still in the back of my mind was like, holy crap. I’m working, we haven’t really laid out any solid plans for this. We’ve just been talking about it for so long. And not that I didn’t think he was serious, but I was just like, wow, now is the time. So yeah, it was kind of scary.

Tim Ulbrich: So Matt, I have to give you credit. That’s a bold husband move. I mean, I feel like in my household, I probably would get kicked out the door if I did that. So props to you. Obviously, you guys had been talking about, and we’ll get to that a little later. What I want to start with is for the audience and our community here, a little bit more about your background. Because I think for both of you, your background is very interesting in terms of your careers and the success that you had and obviously leaning to the decision to pick up and travel for several years. So Matt, share a little bit about your background, you know, I heard on the podcast, growing up in a military family and then some of the positions you’ve had since then. Share with our audience a little bit more about you.

Matt Javit: Yeah, thank you. So at a high level, moved around a bunch as a kid, went to three high schools. But I played basketball throughout that, so it was great and easy to get friends and meet new people. And it was a lot of fun. Played Division I basketball, so I had a Division I basketball scholarship out of high school but then ended up bouncing around, just because of playing time and situational stuff. Ended up going to four different undergrad colleges and finished at University of North Carolina Greensboro where I’m proud to say that I did graduate on time, though, and went to a fifth university to get my MBA and coached junior college basketball for two years. And then from there, started a clothing line, moved from Texas back to Indianapolis to do that with my brother. And at that time, I bartended at night and hustled during the day. And towards the end of that bartending, kind of running that bar for three years, met Nikki, and that changed the course of my life, obviously. Decided to get what was deemed a ‘real job’ in the mortgage industry and then did that for three years when I got a promotion to go out to Las Vegas to run an office for about a year of that while Nikki was finishing up her doctorate degree at Butler. And then I ended up coming back home because that’s when the recession hit. Came back home to Las Vegas after we’d lived apart for about a year. And was very fortunate and blessed to get hired by a technology company, a technology services, international technology services company, to do sales in that field, which was all brand new for me. I didn’t know anything about technology, but I did know how to sell at some level and then just cut my teeth, grinded really hard for two years, put in a ton of time and effort, and then finally hit my stride probably two and a half years in, and turned that into a wonderful run of nine years at that company, ending in five straight international sales achievement awards, which also fueled our love for travel because at the time, that took us to different parts of the world because those incentive trips were in exotic places like Chiang Mai, Thailand; Goa, India; Cape Town, South Africa; and Istanbul, Turkey.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I love that part of your story and the success you had at work and incentive trips that helped fuel your passion for travel. These weren’t Disney World trips, right? These were obviously seeing different parts of the world, which helped fuel that passion, which is cool. And Nikki, your background as a pharmacist and, you know, doing undergrad and then making that decision to go into pharmacy school — lay that background for us because I think that’s going to be important for our listeners to hear as we talk a little bit more about your decision to pick up and leave the profession of pharmacy. So how did you get into pharmacy? And then tell us a little bit about the work you did after graduating from Butler.

Nikki Javit: Yeah, so I grew up in Chicago. And then I went to undergraduate school at Indiana University Bloomington. And I studied biology. And I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to medical school or not, so I kind of just took a limbo year, so to speak, off. And in that limbo year, after I had graduated from undergrad, I moved from Bloomington to Indianapolis with a girlfriend I had lived with in school. And she was going to nursing school at IPUI, and I had to get a job to pay the bills. So I applied at a pharmacy, and I started working at a long-term care pharmacy with my biology degree, and I helped manage a long-term care pharmacy. And I knew at the time that I wasn’t done with school, and I had met a really wonderful mentor who I still talk to to this day, who was the pharmacist in charge of that long-term care pharmacy. And he really had great conversations with my about just my career path and what I wanted to do. He noticed that I really took an interest in my current situation, and he was the one that suggested to me that I apply to pharmacy school. I honestly had never even thought about it before. And my biggest concern was is that I had moved from Chicago to Bloomington then to Indianapolis, and I was like, I really don’t want to move to Lafayette and not know anyone. And he was like, why don’t you just apply to Butler? So I didn’t know that Butler had a pharmacy school, so I applied to Butler Pharmacy School, and I was accepted in as a transfer student. So that’s where, essentially, my journey began as a pharmacy student. During school, I worked, I got a job. I switched from the long-term care pharmacy and a lot of my friends that I met at Butler were working in retail pharmacy settings, and I just felt like I could learn a lot more that way. And so I got an intern job at CVS. So I interned throughout pharmacy school at CVS and then upon graduating Butler, I was a staff pharmacist for about a year and then transitioned into a pharmacy manager role for about two years before moving onto a hospital pharmacy position. I was just a little burnt out, I had a couple things happen to me during my time at my retail pharmacy, and I just felt that it was time for me to move on. So I started working at Indiana University, and I started at just basically a staff pharmacist, verifying orders, etc. And their program there is awesome and unique in the fact that it’s a teaching university. And they pair you up with clinical pharmacists and you can specialize in basically a patient population that you like. So they have ICU, they have organ transplant and then they’re associated with the Simon Cancer Center. And I really liked working with oncology patients, so I worked with oncology patients for two years solely. And then I was presented with an opportunity where IU Health was opening up a startup company. And they were having a brand-new specialty pharmacy. And I was asked if I would want to try to apply for the position because there was several other people that were interested in it. And so I interviewed for that, and I got that role. And I helped manage these specialty pharmacy and oncology patients, MS patients, and CF patients and a couple other subsets of patients, but essentially, prior to me living on this journey, my last role as a pharmacist was in an outpatient setting as a specialty pharmacist.

Tim Ulbrich: Got it. So you’ve got a successful career, you’ve got your doctorate degree, you’ve worked in community practice, you’ve worked in obviously you mentioned the long-term care connection initially, you end up in the specialty world. So I think the one thing our listeners are going to want to know that I want to know was you spend all this time, money, invest in the doctorate degree — and we’ll obviously talk a little bit more about your journey of traveling and what you’re doing now — but tell us about that decision, when you made that decision that I’m willing to pick up and leave this career, how hard was that decision? And what fears were you facing, if any, when you made that decision?

Nikki Javit: The decision, for me, was actually a very difficult one. I think it was more difficult for me than it was for Matt. I think I defined myself by my profession, and you know, for awhile, I think that I let that get the best of me. I remember having conversations with Matt and saying, you know, ‘I really do want to travel. I want to go around the world, and I know that now is the time. But I just fear if I walk away from my profession right now after everything that I’ve worked so hard, this is the ideal position that I want to be in, you know, that it’s just not a good thing.’ And you know, the conversations between Matt and I were, well, what makes you happy? It’s just like, does your job make you happy? Well yeah, it makes me happy. But what would make me happier would be is to travel the world with someone who also wants to travel the world with me. And the more I thought about it was is that no matter how long I step away from my profession, I’m always going to have my degree. Like no one can take that away from me. No one can take away from me that I went to school, that I have my doctorate in pharmacy. And yeah, there’s going to be people that are going to say, ‘You haven’t practiced pharmacy for x amount of years.’ But I still think that they can’t take away the fact that I’ve had, you know, 10 years of experience prior to that or I still do continuing education. And it’s not like I’m done reading. It’s not that the knowledge just goes away. And of course when I go back, I’ll be rusty if I choose to go back to that profession, but I think what happened was that I just let my career solely define who I was as a person when I don’t think that’s necessarily a healthy thing to do. There’s so much more to life than just what you do for a job. And once I got to that point and I was OK with that and letting go of that and realizing I can always come back, and I can always be a pharmacist or do something in healthcare, then I was OK with leaving.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s great, and that was part of what inspired me as I was listening and following your journey is seeing you be able to make that decision and obviously not that you don’t value what you’ve done education-wise because obviously, you do, but what I heard through the podcast is that your desire to enter pharmacy was a passion out of helping people. And as I was listening to the journey and what you’ve done, you’re finding a way to fill that bucket of helping people as you’re on this journey of traveling the world, right?

Nikki Javit: Exactly.

Tim Ulbrich: So Matt, talk me through — one thing that stuck out to me on the first episode of the Passport Joy podcast, which I’d highly recommend our audience and listeners check out, you talked about a trip to Cape Town where you met a couple from the Netherlands that were engaged in some long-term travel and that that interaction and that conversation had a profound impact on both of you in terms of the impact that it had on the journey that you’re taking today. So tell us a little bit more about that story and impact that it had for you and Nikki in deciding to take this journey of traveling the world for several years.

Matt Javit: Yeah, so we were in Cape Town, South Africa for one of the incentive trips, my final incentive trip. This would have been March of 2016. And there was a couple there — so essentially, there’s about 15 different executives, about 30 different sales professionals from around the world go to these incentive trips with our spouses. And part of that time is you get a great chance to interact with the people. And one of the couples there were from the Netherlands, and he was actually 30-31 years old. And we ended up hooking up one night and just having conversations over drinks, and they were telling us an amazing story of how they had traveled from — they actually did it a different way. They got a Land Cruiser, put a bed in the back, and drove from the Netherlands to I believe it was South Korea and then shipped the truck from South Korea to Vancouver, Canada and drove down to Patagonia, Chile. And over three or four hours listening to this guy tell the story and all the amazing tales along the way of these two years of traveling, it was just, it was so inspiring and it just moved me in a certain way. And prior to this, Nikki and I, we actually had written down goals of traveling the world. I’m a big goal-setter, I believe if you write things down, they become real and they can become achievable. So we had actually written down the goal of traveling the world probably for the last, I don’t know, 3.5-4 years as a far-reaching, in-the-future goal. But we were — at that point, we were getting closer and closer of financially being able to achieve it. So we come back from just having those drinks that night with that couple, and we got back to that room, and it was just one of those situations where we just looked at each other like, what else, what other signs do we need that this is possible and this is something that we should do? And then I took that and on the flight home, we probably had another week in Cape Town, and we enjoyed our time. And the flights home were always the hardest for me. Every time that we’d fly home from a week or two-week vacation that we were taking, or during these incentive trips from exotic places where the flights are anywhere from 8-12 hours long, that’s when I’m always grabbing the back of the seat where they have the map of all the locations around the world, and I’m just looking at that thing, thinking, OK, where are we going next? And this trip was just different. I just, I was just so moved by what I had heard, and I’m looking at that map, and I’m just saying like, let’s do this. Let’s see if we can pull this thing off. And like Nikki said, within six or eight weeks, that’s when I came down and told her I had booked that first trip because in my mind and looking at all our financial stuff, that we could do it. If we had a lot of things line up over the next 10 months, we could pull it off and feel confident when we left that we could do the journey right. So it was amazing, it felt really good that we could pull it off. And that was — I have since had a chance to circle back with him and tell him that he was the motivation of it. And it’s really cool to know that it was that one deciding thing that put us over the edge.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s awesome. And let’s go there and talk about your financial house and how getting that in order prior to your departure — you mentioned having a runway of time when you were making that decision before you actually left, and I think it’s important because I know as I was listening to your journey, in my mind, questions were swirling about student loans and just practically saving up for the move and how you’re making it work month-to-month and what about retirement and all the questions that I think sometimes are the barriers that can get in the way to us taking bold moves. So let’s talk through some of those, and let’s first talk about student loans. So Nikki, I heard you got through undergrad debt-free, but obviously I’m assuming a PharmD brought some student loans into the equation, so talk us through for both of you where student loans played a role and how you were able to manage those and get those to a point where you felt comfortable that they weren’t going to impede your ability to take this journey that you wanted to take.

Matt Javit: Yeah, so — I’m sorry, Tim, I’ll jump in on this — but it was a situation where it was an early — so where we got engaged, Nikki started school, and within our first year, she was in school, of marriage. And she had done four years in front of that.

Nikki Javit: Five.

Matt Javit: Five years in front of that. And I tell you what, man. It was one of those things where the financial loan system in America is just flawed. It’s so flawed.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Matt Javit: We would just look at these bills coming in, and this was a time where I had gone from making money and then the recession hit, housing crisis is what it is, so I wasn’t making any money. Then I started a new field where I was making severely underpaid. And Nikki was doing her part-time gig, she was amazing in that where she was going to school full-time and working 30 hours a week, which was unbelievable. So we really struggled for probably 2.5 years. We really haven’t talked about that at all to anybody. But it was a very difficult time for us. We stayed extremely minimal, we had a condo that we continue to live in for 15 years now. And at the time, we were paying her father rent on the condo. And we lived extremely, an extremely minimal lifestyle. So much that Nikki drove the same Toyota Corolla for 10 years. I drove a Ford Escape for at least 9 or 10 years.

Nikki Javit: At least 9, yeah.

Matt Javit: And I was in this new profession, and the student loans kept growing and growing and growing. And those things are unbelievable because the interest is what kills you.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Matt Javit: And what was (inaudible) was because I come from a financial background, I understand all this stuff, and I could break it all down, so I would work with Sallie Mae, and I would say, split all these loans up. I want them itemized, I want them split up, and I want to know where I should attack. And when you do that and you see that some of the loans are like 14% and 12%, it’s just unbelievable. So for any of your listeners, when it comes to financial freedom, that is — and I know you guys have spoken about this on your podcast — that’s the main thing is you’ve got to itemize those things. I’m not sure if they do it that way today, but you’ve got to understand where your biggest pains are coming from. And so that’s what we did. So we itemized those things. And I’m talking to an audience that understands all this. We walked out of that with I think it was $289,000.

Nikki Javit: Yeah, so I think it was $287,000 was the total. But we started paying back on my loans about two years into —

Matt Javit: We were doing the bare minimum.

Nikki Javit: The minimum, the bare minimum, just to make a dent.

Matt Javit: Yeah, because we got all of our other stuff out of the way as far as — like I said, the car payments were gone, we were living minimal. Like I said, we did travel much early in that phase. We were doing mostly like U.S.-based vacation trips until I hit my stride in my job. And then —

Nikki Javit: But we don’t, we never lived on credit cards. And I think that’s really important. Like if we went on a vacation, we had that money, and we paid that vacation off then, at the time that we did it. So if we were going to go to let’s say — I’m just going to pick a random place — San Diego, California, for a week, we would go to San Diego, and if it cost us $5,000 to take that, that $5,000 was already saved up. So we never, we never purchased things on credit cards ever. And if we did, we paid that off at the end of the month. And it was just to get travel points, it wasn’t because we needed to use credit cards, it was strictly just to get travel points. So when he says we lived minimal, it was really, we were only paying our bills. I was working to pay bills, and him the same way.

Matt Javit: Yeah, so we went through this cycle where, like I said, I was with that job for nine years. The first two years was extremely difficult, but everything began to line up for us because I hit my stride so I started making money. And my job, in full transparency, was a base commission and bonus. So I’m very much in the sales world where there’s not a ceiling when you’re doing technology service sales, so I could make nice pay. And then Nikki got a chance, she hit the workforce full-time, so then she was making great money at CVS. And then we just went about it, and we attacked it. And like I said, the breaking down, the itemizing of the loans, I think that because we did that the way we did, we could get rid of those the fastest way we could because if we kept them clumped up, those things are going to stick around forever. So we would just break these all down, and we would just attack them. When we paid off a loan, we would celebrate together. And it would be a big thing because I think at one point, there was maybe 14 different —

Nikki Javit: I had 14 different loans.

Matt Javit: 14 loans, so we would pay off the high one, and then we would celebrate, and we would just zone in on that next loan and we’d just keep going, keep going, keep going. And finally, we got them paid off, and then we could start working on our other things to help us get financially free. And then at that point obviously, Nikki was deeper in her career, I was in a situation where I was deep with my clients and making great money doing what I was doing. And it continued to just, we continued to accelerate and set bigger goals and work on skills. I’m real big on you build skills for yourself and not for your job. Just continue to get better as a human, whether it’s personally, spiritually or for whatever profession you’re focused on. So that’s how we spent a lot of time doing that stuff. And we just continued to grow and get better, and the compensation followed.

Tim Ulbrich: I don’t know if either of you have read “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, but what you were just saying, Matt and Nikki there, you know, your discipline but your cumulative hard effort and work and goal-setting and, you know, even the steps of itemizing loans. You know, I hate to throw Sallie Mae under the bus, but I’m going to since they inflicted a lot of pain on my life is that they, you know — I think that business, obviously there’s that effect where when everything is in one lump thing, and you can’t necessarily see all the details, it’s hard to get the motivation behind having a plan to take care of them. When you itemize them and you see how that interest is accruing, you see the different interest rates, like you all did, you then start to say, ‘OK, let’s put a plan together to pay off this $287,000 of debt. Let’s pay off one of these, let’s celebrate. Let’s pay off another, let’s celebrate it. And let’s keep moving on.’ And I think that, to me, is the essence of “The Compound Effect,” that it’s easy to look at a number like $287,000 and say, forget about it. It’s so big, I can’t even do anything about it. Whereas what I heard you did and your journey is say, let’s break this down. Let’s work together, let’s celebrate. And let’s get after this. And obviously, be appreciative of the income that you have and the ability to do that along the way. And so the question I have to ask here is that if you would have had that debt hanging around, if you would have not been able to live a minimalist lifestyle, if you would have chosen to buy a half a million dollar home, if you would have taken a different route, how would that have impacted your decision in terms of making this bold move to go on this journey to travel the world?

Matt Javit: It would have delayed it. We would have never left if we wouldn’t have gotten in a situation. Because the reality is is I was probably ready almost a year before.

Nikki Javit: Yeah.

Matt Javit: But Nikki wanted a number. She wanted a certain number that we had to have in our assets and our savings in order for us to go. Nikki’s a lot more conservative than I am. Because I’m in a mindset where I worked for — when I did the mortgages, I had zero-based payment. I was 100% commission. I’ve lived in a world where there’s nothing guaranteed. And so I’m comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with that mindset of, hey, if we don’t have any money in the bank, I’m alright with that. We can figure this thing out. Where she’s a lot more conservative and she gets really nervous about money and things like that. So we have a lot of these conversations, and we just got to a point where I got her to commit to a number, and I showed her how we could get to that number and put it all on paper so she could understand it, so she could be comfortable with us leaving. And then that’s when we made the decision. Without that, there was no way. We would have never left with loans and debt hanging over our head because it wouldn’t have been enjoyable. It would just be a different situation. So for me, I’m 42 now. And for us, I felt like it was my window was closing on the opportunity, but I still think we had room. If it would have took two or three more years to make it happen, we still would have been OK because this is definitely a dream and a goal of ours. We would have made it happen, but luckily we made it happen at the time where we’re enjoying it now, and I can get back into the workforce when I’m 44, 45. And I think that I’ll still have that value when I reenter out of the market for three years or so.

Tim Ulbrich: So month-to-month for you guys — I think you’re 18 months into this journey, correct?

Matt Javit: Yes.

Tim Ulbrich: OK. So month-to-month, what is your strategy for month-to-month, just making it, covering your expenses? Obviously, you’re living a minimalist lifestyle. I’m sure it sounds like you’ve got some good budgeting behaviors and practices, but are you finding, you know, work? I heard you reference workaways on the podcast. Are you purely living off savings? Are you getting creative with how you’re funding things? What does that look like month-to-month in terms of paying the expenses as you’re on the road?

Matt Javit: So yeah, we’re absolutely budgeting month-to-month. We’ve done a lot of creative things from Workaway that you described — that’s essentially volunteering our services to places — Workaway’s a website that has hosted certain places that you can stay at by volunteering your services, and they’ll give you a free place to stay and sometimes food as well. We’ve done house-sits with a website called Trusted Housesitters where we watched two cats in Zurich, Switzerland. They gave us, the owners of the home gave us a free place to stay. It ended up being a gorgeous house for three weeks while we just watched their cats.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s awesome.

Matt Javit: We’ve done extremely cheap Airbnb’s, hostels.

Nikki Javit: We have a budget when it comes to the places that we stay. And we know what we should be spending per month. And then when we search for Airbnb, we typically only stay in an Airbnb. In Asia, you can find budget hotels and not have to stay in a hostel. But we know what our budget is for an Airbnb, so we don’t really want to spend more than $50 a night. So when we scroll on the Airbnb website, we just look for places like that. And it’s funny because you can actually, when you’re in Asia, like if you go to Vietnam or Indonesia or, you know, other places in southeast Asia, there’s places that are $10 a night, and they’re absolutely amazing, like gorgeous, places that you wouldn’t even think would be that nice. But they are that price point, so we’ve saved by going to even just different areas of the world, by traveling —

Matt Javit: I mean, we were Paracas, Peru. We stayed there near the coastal place. But we stayed in a campsite. It was like a little cabin for like $12 a night. And we did that consciously, knowing that we’ve got to save money, we’ve got to — there’s going to be peaks and valleys. We knew Europe would be really expensive. So that was the whole mindset is, OK, some months we’re going to spend more, other months we’re not. And then be as smart as we can with the flights because those can really hit into the budget. And then dips and valleys when we’re thinking about going out certain nights. Like we’re in Japan, we’ve been eating at 7-11. You’d be surprised how amazing 7-11 is in Japan. It’s so good.

Nikki Javit: Yeah, that sounds absolutely disgusting.

Matt Javit: LIke nobody would think 7-11, but the good thing is I’ve watched enough foodie shows that they talk about the 7-11 all the time in Japan, that coming here, we were very open-minded. And now that we’re here, we’re like, OK, I get it now. It’s the whole culture, it’s amazing.

Nikki Javit: They make fresh sushi and fresh fruit salads and stuff. They have edamame in 7-11’s. It’s not like a 7-11.

Tim Ulbrich: Is it the same brand we know, 7-11? Or is it a different company?

Matt Javit: It’s the same brand, but I think it’s treated a little bit differently here. It is amazing. So doing things like that when we know that Japan is really expensive. But there’s things you have to cut back on in order for us not to crush our budget. But at the same time, getting a chance to get involved with the culture and see things, experience it, experience the realness of it and have a great time. And that’s the thing is when you do some of these alternative housing situations like a shared space on Airbnb, like where the host is there, and you’re just basically living in one of their rooms, but that also gives you the chance to talk to somebody, understand their culture a little bit better, see how they’re going about their day. And you come away with a different experience than staying in a hotel. And that’s what we set out to do. We didn’t want to travel for two years and just say, yeah, we went to hotels around the world, and it was great, we saw these sights and we saw the Taj Mahal. We wanted to come back changed, in a way. Like we loved who we were in our life in America, but it’s like, it’s an opportunity to put a chapter in our life that maybe changes the next chapter. And that’s what we were hoping to get out of it by all these different experiences and different cultures and get to know people and how they interact on the subway and just all the different things. I mean, I went to a baseball game this weekend in Osaka, and my mind was blown. I mean, I grew up an athlete, and just being around those people at a baseball game is — it just changed how I looked at their culture. So yeah, that’s our hope and that’s when it comes to budget, all of that plays together because it’s hard to month-by-month because now we just set out our plans for the next three months. So we had to book stuff in advance, we had to book a ton of little flights. And so it’s going to hit our budget in September, but then hopefully October and November are easier on the budget if that makes sense.

Tim Ulbrich: Right. Absolutely. So you’re 18 months into this journey, and as I was following along on the podcast, it seems like you’ve seen some of the most beautiful and incredible places in the world. So I want to know from both of you, what’s been your favorite stop so far, I guess if you had to choose one?

Nikki Javit: It’s so hard. So many people ask me this question, and I hate like just saying one. But my go-to is San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. So it’s in the middle of the dryest desert of the world, the Atacama Desert. And it’s like no other place I’ve ever been. The landscape changes just from a couple miles away. You can see geysers that are shooting out steam from the earth, you can see mountains and snow-capped volcanoes, there’s hot springs that you can swim in. I mean, it’s just neverending. There’s red rocks and lagoons and all types of things. It’s like an outdoor — like if you’re an outdoor person, and you just love nature in general, it is paradise. There’s salt flats that you can walk on that look like you’re walking on clear glass. It’s just, it’s phenomenal. They have some of the best stargazing — it’s actually the best stargazing in the entire world. And we were just able to do so many different things in four days. Like we were hiking, we were swimming in hot springs, we were climbing up mountains, we were spelunking in caves. I guess it was the first time I’d ever been to a place like that. I’ve been to California before and Colorado where you see the mountains, and you’re like, OK, I can go on a hike. But you can’t go on a hike and then take a half an hour car ride away and go swim in a hot spring and then drive an hour away from that and then go climb in some caves and walk on salt flats. So for me, it was just like mind-blowing. I just had never seen anything like it before.

Tim Ulbrich: What about for you, Matt?

Matt Javit: For me, it’s tough. So man, I loved Lisbon, Portugal. It might just be because of the people there and the time — we’ve gone now twice in the middle of June, and I just loved Lisbon. But India is just — India is just a different place on this planet. And it’s just, it’s so raw. And 1.3, 1.4 billion, it’s crazy, it’s chaotic, it’s definitely third-world in parts. But the love and just the kindness of the people and how amazing they are. It’s just like nothing else on the planet. And I’m just so intrigued by how people act and how they interact and how they view us and their thoughts and just the chances you get to really look at a part of the world that is so different. So that probably stands out the most to me is when it comes to travel and getting into a different culture, India really, it hits me because I had a lot of fun there. Vietnam is also one of those things that we talk about all the time that we just love. And we’re excited to get a chance to go back there. We’ve got some friends that are going to visit us there. So that’s, Vietnam is an absolute highlight. But it’s hard. Tim, it’s such a hard question because everything is just, has its own uniqueness. Now we’re in Japan. And oh my God, this is amazing. It is just so amazing. And we’ve got four more weeks here, and I could just see it turning into a place that we love. The language barrier is massive, but I think that with some studying or whatnot, you could figure out the phrases to get through the daily life. But yeah, it’s a hard question. But those are probably my highlights.

Tim Ulbrich: So I just have to know, you know, how is being together, traveling the world, sharing this journey — No. 1, do you guys ever get sick of each other and No. 2, how has this strengthened your marriage? Because obviously, I’m assuming it has, being on this journey together.

Nikki Javit: Yeah, so in the beginning, I think it was difficult for us just to figure out like a flow to our day because, you know, prior to us leaving, I had worked my job, I was gone during the day. And Matt was similar, I mean, he had a different schedule. He’d work during the day, and at night, sometimes he’d have to take out clients or he had conference calls. And we pretty much lived separate lives during the week. And on the weekends was our together time, time that we would spend to hang out and do whatever. And you know, I guess our extracurricular time was spent with me, if I wasn’t doing something with Matt, you know, hanging out doing girl stuff with my girlfriends or, you know, working out at my gym that we had at our home or just doing things that I guess kept me busy. And then now, all of a sudden you are with this person 24/7 365, and you’re in tight quarters in an unfamiliar space. And you heavily rely on each other because, you know, it’s like, I don’t know anyone here. So it’s not like I could call up a friend and be like, OK, I’m going to go hang out with this person tonight and go to dinner. But at the same time, you don’t always want to make your significant other think that, well, I need to hang out with you 24/7. So I don’t know. At first, it was hard. And we did, we fought — I mean, full disclosure, we would get in just like tiffs over dumb things. But I think it really stemmed from being frustrated I think from having to be in a tiny, tiny space. And by no means do we live in some huge mansion back at home, but at least we had separate quarters that we could go to. Like I could retreat to the living room and go watch Netflix. And Matt could go to his office and do his own thing. But now, it’s like sometimes, we are legit in something that just one room, and then there’s the bathroom. And so where do you go? So we found ways to, you know, kind of zen out, even if we have to be in the same room. So I’ll throw some headphones in, and I’ll listen to music or I’ll read a book. And even if I’m sitting in a different corner of a room and he’s still there, I’ll try just to get in my own little world. And sometimes I’ll go out and walk around and go for a walk or just go to the grocery store or just have that be my alone time. And then other times, you know, Matt, he’s real big on going on hikes by himself. And he likes to find a gym membership wherever we go or some sort of park where he can work out and do — he does this thing called Foundation training for his back, and so he’ll go and do that just to have some sort of alone time because I don’t really think that it’s healthy to be with someone 24/7, so that has definitely helped us. And I think it’s gotten a lot, it’s just gotten a lot better.

Matt Javit: Yeah, no, it is. It’s a long time, and most people don’t, most married couples — so we’re 13 years married now — don’t get to do what we’re doing until a later stage in life.

Tim Ulbrich: Right.

Matt Javit: And so then they don’t spend that much time together until they’re in their 60s or 70s. But so we’re definitely doing something that’s not, it’s pretty unique in the fact that we’re around each other 24/7. And I would be, Tim, back in my former life in Indianapolis, I would probably be considered a guy’s guy. So I had a lot of my buddies that I would hang around with, I’m a big sports nut, I like drinking bourbons with my buddies and just talking about stuff. But I definitely miss that. But I still text my buddies, call them, and I get a chance to interact with them. It’s not always easy, but it’s been amazing. To be able to see the world with somebody that I love and to be able to share those moments together and knowing that we’re going to be able to reflect on this at some point and understand how lucky and fortunate we are to be able to live this life, that all the positives outweigh any negatives. Yeah, it’s been a blast.

Tim Ulbrich: So what does the future hold? I mean, what’s the plan? You probably hate this question, maybe, but what’s the plan for, you know, I heard kind of a multi-year travel plan, you’re 18 months in, so I interpreted that to mean there’s a desired end date where you may come back stateside, reenter the workforce, you both alluded to that. But is there a chance that may not happen? Or have you kind of set a definitive end date? What’s the game plan going forward?

Matt Javit: As of now, May 2020 is the end date on paper as far as budget goes. What that means is we’re still working through some things. We both have some creative things we’re working on. We’re doing the podcast, we’re doing the blog site. If any of those outlets can turn into revenue streams, could that make the journey longer? Not sure. Are there things that could take us off the road personally? Probably, but we don’t like to think about those things.

Nikki Javit: Yeah.

Matt Javit: Because they’d be extremely negative. But so as of now, yeah, we’re 18 months in, we’re going to come back to the United States in May of 2019 and spend the summer visiting with friends and family and get a chance to explore the U.S. a little bit like we’ve been doing on the road and get a chance to hang out with different people in the States and accelerate some important milestones in some of our family’s lives and stuff like that. And then the hope is to go back out in September of 2019, see more of the world, explore some places that we thought we’d get a chance to see on our first trip out, but we didn’t. And then come back in May of 2020. And at that point, obviously we’re not going to get back to the States and decide what we’re going to do. We’ll understand. A lot of this will happen organically over the next 12 months or so that we’ll know that, OK, we’re going to reenter the workforce. And then we’ll start to line things up the four, five, six months prior to because that’s who we are. I mean, we’re both very career-focused, we love — and I’ll tell you something, that’s why we’re doing the podcast. That’s why we’re doing the blog. There’s something that’s built into humans that makes us want to give back. Either give back in a positive way either to inspire people or just the knowledge and hopefully to help people in some capacity or just give back to other humankind, you know what I mean? We’re just built that way. You can’t just cruise around the world and sit on beaches in Bali and hang out and drink cocktails all day and think that you’re going to improve as a human. It’s just not who we are. And I think Nikki and I are even at a — we didn’t grow up that way to do that. So even when we’re trying to relax, we always have massive “To Do” lists.

Nikki Javit: Yeah.

Matt Javit: The “To Do” lists are growing and growing. But the coolest part about it is is these creative projects we’re working on, we’re excited about them. It’s one of those things where we wake up every day, and we’re like, hey we’re going to do this and hey, let’s make sure we document that. Let’s go walk through the market and check out all these things. So it’s an amazing journey, and it’s a fun phase or a fun chapter. And we’re not really sure what that next chapter is yet. But no matter what, I think we’re going to really prepared for it, mentally, spiritually, physically. I think we’re going to be ready for that next chapter.

Tim Ulbrich: Well, you guys have done an awesome job with the podcast. So first of all, congratulations. I think the content that you’re bringing is awesome. I’ve enjoyed it. And I would just urge our community, check out PassportJoy.com to follow their journey on the blog, listen to the podcasts on whatever podcast subscription service that you use. And I think one of the things, Matt and Nikki, that I really enjoyed about the podcast is obviously, I’m not somebody who’s going to necessarily pick up for a year or two or three and travel, but what you’re talking about is applicable for long weekend getaways, a week vacation, you have an episode around financial security when you’re traveling that I really found interesting. And so I think for all of our audience, make sure you check out PassportJoy.com, listen to the podcast, check out the blog. You’ll hear their latest travel stories, tips to have amazing trips on a budget, hot locations you may not have heard of and how you can get involved and volunteer on the road. And I really appreciate, I would love to meet both of you when you get back stateside in Indianapolis, I’ll be in Columbus. So we’re not that far away. And you’ve inspire me personally and my wife to be thinking about, you know, traveling and how that can impact us as individuals and our family. So thank you for taking time to come on the show and to share your journey with the YFP community. We really appreciate it.

Nikki Javit: Thanks for having us so much.

Matt Javit: Thank you so much.

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YFP 063: Intro to the Side Hustle Series


 

Intro to the Side Hustle Series

Summary of Episode

On Episode 063 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, Tim Church, YFP Team Member, introduces a new segment called the Side Hustle Series to talk about ways pharmacists can create additional streams of income to reach financial goals faster and to highlight pharmacists who are doing this to help you get inspired. In previous episodes, topics about how to budget, limit and cut expenses, and being frugal have been talked about, but what hasn’t been discussed as much is increasing or maximizing income. As you may know, there is incredible buzz and interest around the topic of a side hustle for pharmacists and many have a side hustle to earn extra income and pursue other interests and passions.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: What’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 063, which is all about side hustles. Now, those of you listening may be thinking, who is this imposter and what happened to the other Tims? Well, don’t worry. They will return. I’m just giving them a break. They really do an incredible job, which is evident by all of your positive comments and feedback, and we truly appreciate that. Well, I’m the other Tim and have made a few appearances on the show over the past year, but I decided to take the lead on this topic of side hustles. That’s something that really interests me. We talked a lot in many episodes about how to budget, limit and cut expenses, and just being frugal in general, but not so much about increasing or maximizing income.

As you may know, there’s an incredible buzz going around and interest around this topic of having a side hustle or side hustling. And there’s many pharmacists out there who are doing this to earn extra income and pursue other interests and passions. Some of our most popular episodes have been highlighting those who are working in some unique roles and pursuing non-pharmacy careers on the side — and I’ll definitely put those in the show notes. So because of this, we wanted to make this a regular series to continue to highlight these stories because we believe they’re truly inspiring and can help spark some creativity. So what the heck is a side hustle? Well, a very basic definition is a way to make extra cash beyond your main source of income. So really, that could be many different things that would fall under that. It could be something as simple as working a second pharmacy job besides your full-time gig, so working at a hospital while you’re working your full-time job as a community pharmacist or vice versa. Sometimes, people also refer to a side hustle as a passion project, something that they’re really called to pursue. And again, that could be something that’s not even pharmacy-related. For example, I know a pharmacist who has driven for uber on the side, and he absolutely loved the experience. Back in Episode 053, the other Tims interviewed Tony Guerra, and some of his side hustles include real estate, writing books, and podcasting. In Episode 009, we had Carrie Carlton on the show, and she discussed how she acquired 18 rental properties. So real estate has just been huge as a side hustle for her. My friend Alex Barker of TheHappyPharmD.com, who has been on the podcast a few times has been side hustling for a long time, doing many different things with providing career coaching to other pharmacists and creating online courses, just to name a few. He actually has turned his side hustle into a full-time job as he just recently had his last day at the VA hospital. So I want to shout out to Alex and just say congratulations. But the bottom line here is that there’s a lot of options out there.

So oftentimes, the questions comes up, why even pursue a side hustle? Pharmacists make a great salary, right? But I think a lot of people are interested in making more money, and that’s what it comes down to, what people really think about when that topic of side hustling comes up is I want to make extra money. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it, and that point is one of the major reasons why I pursued, started side hustles. But I think many times, it really goes deeper than that, and you have to ask yourself the question, Why do I want to make more money? I think there’s some current realities going on in our profession on why it really does make sense to consider a side hustle. Since 2011, the average debt-to-income ratio is rising as pharmacists’ salaries are not keeping pace with the rising student loan debt. And this means that more pharmacists are starting out in a worse financial position than pharmacists who have graduated in previous years. Traditional pharmacist positions also typically have a salary where it starts out high, but then small raises occur over time, typically based on some merit or time being spent there at the job or a combination of both. And furthermore, some companies are cutting pharmacists’ full-time hours. So instead of full-time being 40 hours or somewhere around there, it’s now down to 32 or something less. And that’s actually leading to some substantial pay cuts for pharmacists. So I don’t think you can ignore the reality of what’s happening with pharmacy jobs out there.

But besides that, I think a lot of people, the reason for wanting to pursue a side hustle is they want to accelerate their financial goals and get them done quicker. For example, student loans, obviously a big problem. And that was one of my main motivations is really getting these student loans out of my life a lot faster. A lot of people want to retire at an early age, and in order to do that, they have to save more money for retirement and invest more, and they have to get a side job in order to do that. Some people want to donate more money or help other family members and friends out financially. Perhaps you want to upgrade your lifestyle. A lot of people want to go out to better restaurants, go on better vacations, buy better clothes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But as we’ve talked about many times, there’s a tendency to live up to and even beyond your means, and so sometimes making more money can actually make your financial situation worse.

The other reason for wanting to pursue a side hustle or why you may consider it is that relying on one source of income can be risky. Although many pharmacists’ jobs are thought to be secure, with the changing job market, things are not what they used to be. And so the demand is not as high as it was. There’s still definitely a demand out there, but everybody is susceptible to losing a position. And so having a second stream of income or multiple streams of income can give you that additional layer of security.

Beyond some of the monetary reasons behind pursuing a side hustle, I really think the big one is passion. So something you truly feel passionate to work on that’s meaningful, that gives you the results or feeling of happiness and self-satisfaction. And oftentimes, that’s a great combination, that you’re working on a project or doing something that the end result may be that it provides you with some additional income but is something that really fires you up, something that gets you up in the morning.

So I want to spend a few minutes talking about my personal experience with side hustles. By no means am I the expert on this; there’s definitely a lot of pharmacists who I mentioned earlier that are bringing a lot more money and are a lot more successful, but I want to just give you a few tips on kind of how I started with this.

So why did I start exploring side hustles? This was a couple years after I started my full-time job and after I finished residency. And initially, my main motivation was getting extra cash so I could get in a better financial position. I came to this realization that I was broke and that student loan debt at the time was totaling about $200,000, which is a combination of undergrad and graduate school. And I had to make some changes to get myself in a better position. Now, of course I scaled back on spending. I got on a tight budget. But I was looking for some opportunities to maximize my income. So I really wanted to reach my financial goals faster, that was my main motivator, that’s why I wanted to do it.

Now, my full-time job is working as an ambulatory care specialist at the VA hospital, where I have clinics to manage, chronic diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure and a number of others. My schedule is 7:30-4 Monday through Friday. Most of the time that I have available for side hustling is in the evening and on the weekends. Sometimes I’ve heard in books people who do a lot of their side projects on the weekends, they’re called “Weekend Warriors.” So that’s kind of how I viewed myself during some points of time when I’ve been doing this. The easiest thing that I came across on what I could do to earn some extra income was just do some staffing, some in-patient staffing at the VA after I would finish my day as an am-care pharmacist. And so that was a really easy thing to do because literally, all I had to do was press a button and go down an elevator a couple floors and really start my side hustle there. So that was a really easy, very convenient way to get some extra cash. It wasn’t always that consistent but definitely was a great opportunity early on.

The other thing that has come up is some special projects where I was able to get overtime. And still occasionally, this happens. But the opportunities don’t come about as much as they used to. So while those things were definitely great, they weren’t consistent. So I wanted to get something where I could have a more reliable extra income coming in. And for the first year and a half, I didn’t have a Florida license because I had graduated from a school of pharmacy in Ohio, and so that kind of limited my other options of what I could do working as a licensed pharmacist in other areas. So eventually, I became licensed in Florida, and I started looking at other opportunities that I could do working at another hospital or community pharmacy nights or weekends. And it took me a couple months, but eventually, I was able to find an opportunity at a local hospital. And this was really great because they were very flexible with my schedule, as soon as I was done at the VA, I could come in and work for a couple hours in the evening. And really, weekends were available too. And so this was a great way to really put a big chunk of extra money every month towards my student loans. So I was easily bringing home an extra $1,000, sometimes $1,500 a month. And I thought this was just a great opportunity.

But what started happening was is after about a year and a half, I really was getting burned out by all these extra hours. So sometimes, I was working close to 60 hours a week. And the other thing was I wasn’t getting really excited about the work that I was doing. The other element that came into play was I got married during this transition when I was doing the extra staffing. And so it’s another element that came into it and made it a little bit more challenging because I was spending so much time working. So at that point, I kind of said, what else can I do? Or what are some other opportunities where I don’t have to physically be present and work all these additional hours but still try to figure out how to get some additional income?

Well, after I finished my residency program and through this time that I was working the hours at another hospital, I really became a voracious reader, focusing on the areas of personal growth, business, psychology and personal finance. And really, because of that, I developed an interest in trying to pursue other things than just a traditional pharmacist’s role. And that led me to my first side hustle sort of outside of just a traditional pharmacy role, which was book writing.

And so after I read a couple books on how to write books because the technical aspects were a little intimidating for me, I felt like I could give it a try. So given diabetes management is one of my specialties, I thought writing a book for patients was a great idea since I can only reach a limited amount of patients in my full-time job. I was so excited about this and thought I was going to sell this thing like crazy through Amazon, I wouldn’t have to do anything but look for the money to be deposited in my checking account. Well, long story short, that’s not what happened. And to this day, I still have not recouped the money that was invested into the book, which was really only about $1,000 since I went the self-publishing route. But what’s interesting though is that every couple months, one or two people will buy the paperback book or Kindle version, and that actually brings in a royalty of a couple dollars. So I get a good laugh out of that because of how far off my expectations were. But at the same time, I did the work once, and it still has the opportunity to bring in more income. And so this is obviously a much more passive stream of income than physically being present and working in a traditional pharmacy role like I was doing when the extra staffing.

Well, this failure with my diabetes book or what I’m going to call it, a learning project, was really important, though, because it kind of helped set the stage for my next project, which was writing “Seven Figure Pharmacist” with Tim Ulbrich. Now, that has actually brought in some consistent revenue every month. My first book gave me the confidence in the process of not only writing and getting all the pieces in order, but really to get from that vision to reality and figure out how to actually get a good reach and sell the book.

And so besides the book, my other side hustle — as probably you could have guessed — has been working with YFP, Your Financial Pharmacist team, creating content, managing the website, among a bunch of other things. And this is something that I’m truly passionate about, and I’ve believed in Tim Ulbrich’s mission since he started the company in 2015. As I shared on previous episodes, I struggled with my finances for awhile, so the idea and the opportunity to help others and help prevent them from making the same mistakes that I did is just a great experience and something that really does motivate me and want to continue to work on this project and work on this side hustle.

So that’s really a quick snapshot of my experiences that I’ve had with side hustles. And I mentioned that when I started off, really it was really mainly money. I was looking for additional income; it was the bottom line. I mean, it was a very cut-and-dry reason. I wanted to get my student loans paid off faster, so what can I do to get more income? But eventually, it really — passion has been a huge driver for me for a lot of the things that I’m doing.

So if you’ve thought about a side hustle or are thinking about what else can you do to bring in additional income or what can you do that is something that you’re very passionate about, what are some things that you can do to get started? So I think the easiest thing to consider is that if you’re really just looking for an additional stream of income, you don’t care how you do it, then obviously looking at other pharmacy jobs out there where you can do some shifts, maybe even at your own institution or organization where you work, looking at different special projects that they have, something that’s a different time than your main hours, I think that’s obviously, that’s an easy one. And that’s what I did. But if you’re thinking about something other than that, then here’s some questions I think you can consider.

The first one is what knowledge or experience do you have that others would find useful or valuable? So obviously, you have very high competency with pharmacy-related topics and things when you graduate, but everybody has a very unique background and experience. And I had a lot of pharmacists in my class that had other careers, even prior to pharmacy. And I think that has helped shape a lot of what they’re doing now. And I think that’s something that you really have to consider is to bring into the picture because it doesn’t always have to be something pharmacy-related or it could be a combination of something pharmacy-related and something that’s not. Is there a hobby or passion that you have that you could actually monetize it? So I think that’s another one to think about. And the other one is, are there problems out there that people are willing to pay to have solved? And I think this is a big one and just a great way to think about entrepreneurship in general. When I started getting interested in this idea of side hustles, I was listening a lot to the Smart Passive Income podcast by Pat Flynn. And he always makes a point of this, that when you’re looking at different businesses and opportunities that you’re really looking to solve people’s problems. Can you solve them better than what the options are available now? Or do you have new and innovative ways on how you can solve people’s problems? So I think that’s a great way to think about that.

And as I mentioned, there’s a number of different motivators for wanting to do a side hustle. Maybe purely financial, maybe some other reasons, but I also think you have to have the right mindset. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read over the past couple years is a book called “The Go-Giver” by Bob Berg. And in this book, there’s really a story that goes on, and he talks about a lot of different laws that apply. And one of them that really stood out to me is called the Law of Compensation. And that basically states that your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. So a lot of times, instead of asking the question, how do I make more money? I think a better question is, how can I provide more value to others? And by doing that and providing more value to others that the income eventually will come.

Now, if you’re looking to get some ideas for side hustles, I recommend you check out my friend Alex Barker. He has a post called, “53 Side Hustles Any Pharmacist Can Start Today.” And you can find that on his blog called TheHappyPharmD.com, and we’ll put that in the show notes. And in future episodes of the series, we’re going to talk about some more specific ideas and some things that you may not have even considered.

So moving forward with this series, I’m going to be interviewing other pharmacists who have a side hustle and really get into some of the details of what they’re doing, how they actually make money, how much money they’re making — when they’re comfortable with sharing that, of course — and how the heck they balance being a full-time pharmacist, having a personal life, and then also their side hustle. Because I think a lot of people manage this differently and depending on your personal situation and where you are, even the thought or the idea of doing something extra I think can be very daunting, especially if it’s something that you’re not truly passionate about. So I think it’ll be great to hear some of those experiences moving forward.

Now, if you have a side hustle and you want to be featured on the show, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Even if you’re in the beginning phases and just starting out, we would love to hear from you. So we’re really looking forward to hearing and learning about your stories in episodes to come. And so I’m just really excited about this series, so please if you have any comments or feedback, please reach out.

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YFP 059: Life After Debt Free…Now What?


 

On Episode 59 of Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, Tim Baker, founder of Script Financial and YFP Team Member, interviews Adam and Brittany Patterson. On Episode 31, Adam detailed how they paid off $211,000 of student loan debt in 26 months. Adam and Brittany are 2015 graduates from Auburn University Harrison School of Pharmacy. Brittany is a pharmacist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Adam is a pharmacist at Northeast Georgia Medical Center and Assistant Pharmacy Manager at Publix Pharmacy.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Baker: Adam and Brittany, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. How are you guys doing today?

Brittany Patterson: Good.

Adam Patterson: Great, thanks for having us.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Tim Baker: So I would say, Adam, and you did a good job on Episode 031 when you were last on detailing your amazing debt-free that you did and excellent job of calling out Brittany and giving her credit to this journey of paying back debt, but I’m so happy, Brittany, to bring you on and kind of hear your side of the story. That episode, in particular, has been a huge success. It’s actually our third most downloaded episode with almost 1,600 downloads. And I think it just resonates with a lot of pharmacists out there. So kind of if you would, tell us a little bit about yourself and walk us through kind of — Brittany, I guess I’m talking to you of this debt-free story and kind of recap, you know, how it came to be, how you got through it. And let’s go from there.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, so it’s great to be here. I know Adam talked a lot about our story. I guess he made it sound it like it was all nice and easy, but we really did have a big struggle, you know, those 2.4 years that we went through this. You know, we got that first letter, I guess six months when we got out, and it said, ‘Hey, great job finishing school, but you know, we need our money back.’ And that’s just something that we didn’t really talk about in school. And so we were texting all of our classmates, trying to figure out what they were going to do, and they didn’t know. And so we kind of bit the bullet and that’s why we just decided to refinance. Both of us came out working retail jobs, and so we refinanced, about a year into your retail, you got your job at the hospital. And that was hard because Adam was working night shift, and I was working day shift, so you know, he would be driving out of the neighborhood when I would be driving in the neighborhood. I think we would go three full days of not seeing each other. So it may sound real great, oh, only 2.4 years, but that was really — I mean, it felt very long when we were in the middle of it. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It was very hard work. But it was definitely hard work that paid off in the end. And we had that support of each other, we were on the same page with money. You know, that’s what we — when we just spoke recently to students, we told them that money is one of the biggest issues that couple fight about. And I feel like for us, that’s something that we never really have arguments about. We’re on the same page with money, and we’ve been kind of there since Day 1, knowing how we were going to refinance and everything. And so even though it’s been hard work, we’ve always been on the same page, and it’s definitely helped our marriage too throughout all of it.

Tim Baker: Yeah, it’s funny, when I was preparing for this episode, I went back and it’s one of the few times, actually, to go back as a listener. And I listened to Episode 031 again, and one of the things that Adam said was, smart decisions, hard work and sacrifices, those are really the three things that allowed us to propel you guys forward to pay off the debt. And another thing that Brittany, you mentioned was the refinance. I think you guys refinanced your rate of 6-7% over 10 years down to I think it was 4.25% over five years, kind of locking you into more of an aggressive payment process but also saving you about $65,000 in interest over the course of paying that off. So I guess for you guys, what has been since you paid off the loans, what’s been going on? Like what’s been the big driver of like where do you go from there? Like what’s been the big difference in life since the loans have been paid off?

Brittany Patterson: You know what’s funny is we were just talking about that this morning. I think we work more now than we did when we paying off loans.

Tim Baker: Really?

Adam Patterson: I can agree 100% with that.

Brittany Patterson: Yes. People are like, oh, your loans are paid off, you’re going to enjoy it so much. And I’m thinking, I think we work more now than we did then, but we’re so accustomed to it that it doesn’t seem like a big difference to us.

Adam Patterson: I think it’s about goal-driven too is setting your sights on what’s into the future and just trying to get there. But also, you have to enjoy every bit of it and take some time and have free time for yourself. But yeah, hustle’s been real. We’ve been hustling since we finished paying off loans, still keeping both jobs, Brittany’s been working a little bit extra too, and I work my full 70 and then turn around and pick up a whole other 44, 45 hours in my off week and then back around again, 70 hours again the next week. So it’s been nonstop.

Tim Baker: It’s funny though, because like I think what, you know, it’s kind of like the get-rich-quick schemes that are out there, one of the things I often say to clients and even when we’re speaking is, you know, the key here, especially if you want to retire early or if you want to get through the debt is a lot of it is just elbow grease and is just kind of putting your head down and working hard. There’s not a lot of fancy schemes or tricks. It’s about, you know, really maximizing income and being smart with, you know, budget. I know, Adam, you talked about how, you know, Mint.com was a big part of this. And Brittany, I know you are a Mint.com addict, it kind of is safe to say that.

Brittany Patterson: Yes.


Tim Baker: So and then just having that kind of 100% transparency between the two of you and really looking at it as your loans, but you know, so not much has changed. Obviously, I knew that you guys — and to kind of full disclosure here, you know, Adam mentioned he would be reaching out to me and Script Financial about working together. And you guys did in February, you kind of came on and became clients. And that’s why I have a little bit of an inside track to what’s been going on. But I was reviewing your finances, just in the time that you guys have come on, your net worth has grown exponentially. And it’s really just exciting to see because you guys obviously took a negative of the $211,000 and in two years and change, took that off the balance sheet. And now, you’re perpetuating that same type of mentality and really deploying your resources to your goals. So one of the things that you guys talked about when we did kind of the ‘find your way’ was experiences. And you guys took a vacation here recently. Where did you guys go? How was that?

Adam Patterson: We took a trip to Ireland. We went for a little under two weeks. It was breathtaking. It was amazing.

Brittany Patterson: So much fun.

Adam Patterson: Being able to cash flow pretty much everything and knowing you’re not having to worry about spending this, spending that, because you’ve worked hard, we’ve worked hard, we’ve saved for it. It’s a great payoff, treating yourself to something like that after you finish accomplishing one of those goals.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, we didn’t have to limit ourselves on the trip, which is nice. We weren’t afraid about not being able to afford a dinner or buying a souvenir because we knew that we worked hard before we went on this trip, and we were able to, you know, buy the things that we wanted to buy. We didn’t go overboard on things, but we just knew that we didn’t have to limit ourselves while we were there, which was really nice.

Tim Baker: Well, and I know kind of when we talk about your goals, obviously experiences is a big part of that. And you know, like when I look at some of the things that we’ve done, you know, as kind of just simple, you know, we’ll get to kind of your next big goal here in a bit, but obviously vacations, so having a travel fund, you know, a savings account that you can cash flow, having a, you know, obviously a fully funded emergency fund, having your home purchase fund, which is kind of the next big thing on the horizon, I think those are just naming the accounts the goals that are out there, you know, psychology says that that alone is a big win. And you know, for me as kind of working with you guys, I know that, you know, if the next trip is Australia or New Zealand or Germany or attending a sporting event to the Panthers or Steelers or Cooperstown, whatever those things are that we kind of outline, my job is to kind of help you make sure that this is the next on the docket and we’re cash flowing those appropriately. So walk me through, you know, since the debt was paid, why did you guys — what was the genesis around, hey, we need to work with a financial planner? What was the big driving force to kind of email me and contact me and say, ‘Hey, Tim, we want to see if working together is a good fit.’?

Adam Patterson: I would say the first thing that got us talking about it is — and I tell other people this too — is we went to school to be pharmacists. We understand certain things when it comes to financial stuff, but we’re not a professional in that. So seeking out professional help, it was our No. 1 goal, whether we should have started before we paid off loans or not, that’s up in the air, but we tell people all the time, it’s never too early to find a financial planner or somebody to help you with that because that’s what their profession is. For us, it was being a pharmacist, serving patients and things like that. So seeking out a financial planner, it was our next step, our next goal simply because we wanted somebody to give us more directive, be able to help balance more things in our life.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, and to hold us accountable. We know we do have a good income that comes in, but making sure we are putting that income towards our goals and making sure our budget is correct. Just we knew that you could help us more financially than we could help ourselves in that area.

Tim Baker: Well, and I think the other thing that I think resonates or resonated with me in the last story — I know, Brittany, like you just said, kind of confirms that is — I think one of the things that a lot of pharmacists do is they kind of drink that six-figure Kool Aid that says, hey, I come out, and I’m making x amount of dollars, I don’t really have to worry about the debt, it’ll take care of itself. And I think for you guys, and I know, you know, kind of the backdrop is Adam, you went through the Dave Ramsey — I’m not sure if both of you guys went through the Dave Ramsey stuff — but it was kind of this no-nonsense approach to paying off the debt. So talk to me, what’s the big thing right now that is kind of top of mind with where you want to take your financial plan and where we’re going? So I know the big one is the home purchase, right? So we’ve talked about this at length and what that looks like. So walk me through kind of where you guys currently are in that part of your financial plan and what you’ve learned thus far.

Adam Patterson: Right now, like you said, our next step is financially purchasing a home, working with you, setting up, figuring out what we can actually afford. I think that’s one of the biggest things and knowing that you’re not spending too much but you’re going to be comfortable. That’s something that we are working with you, getting approved, working with a bank to get approved. We have a real estate agent now, so we’re in the process of shopping for a home, whether it’s one month, two months, six months from now, we just know that we’re ready for it. And that’s what we’re doing right now is we’re continuing to work towards that goal.

Tim Baker: And I think, I think the idea was to be almost singularly focused on that, similar to what you were with the debt until you guys are moved into the house. And I know, Brittany, that’s kind of like, you want that to happen yesterday because you’re ready to make the purchase. But I think being smart about it and surrounding yourself with a team of people that have your best interests in mind. And I think sometimes that is lost in the home purchase process just because most people, most professionals are incentivized about how much you actually purchase in terms of the size of the house, but I think you guys are going about it, and I think when we went through, ‘Hey, what can we actually afford?’ it was with this discount that you guys are not going to be hustling like that for the rest of your life, you can actually afford something probably greater than you probably would be if you were kind of working consistently. But I think it’s been great working with you because I think you are very open to advice and kind of the education that surrounds a lot of these decisions. So from my end, it’s been awesome. And I think, you know, we see it a lot because I think your story resonates. So walk me through kind of what you’ve been doing speaking-wise since, you know, we’ve last had you on the podcast.

Brittany Patterson: I think — was it June, Adam?

Adam Patterson: Yeah, it was around June.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, in June, we went to the Alabama Pharmacy Association convention, and we were invited to come speak to the students there. So there were Stanford students, and there were also Auburn students. And we went in, and we had a whole PowerPoint presentation, and it was funny because I don’t think we spoke until about 7, 8 o’clock at night.

Adam Patterson: Yeah, it was 7 or 8.

Brittany Patterson: And it was after they’d all been to the pool, they were all outside, all having fun, and I’m thinking, there’s no way they’re going to want to sit in here and listen to us talk about finances at all. And we walked in there, gave our presentation, and they ate it up. I was shocked.

Adam Patterson: It’s just — it’s crazy when we’re presenting and seeing these students’ mouths drop just because we’re providing them with this information that whether they knew about it or not, it’s just resonating with them and telling a story not in trying to convey that they have to pay off this much money in such a short period of time, but the fact that we’re giving them these resources that, you know, they’re just not provided in school. And I think Your Financial Pharmacist, I think we’ve all harped on this, is making the education relevant and putting it out there for everybody. That’s just something, it’s a passion that we’ve kind of taken up on now is wanting to speak at more events and do more things to try and share our story.

Brittany Patterson: Right, because I think it’s something that we wish we would have had too, coming out of school.

Tim Baker: Yeah, I think Adam, I think one of the things that you said was, you know, when you were looking around, kind of looked to your left and looked to your right at hey, what’s the best way to tackle the loans, there wasn’t really anything there outside of maybe like a colleague and a few opinions. So you know, I think shining a light on this and having more people kind of like just openly speak about some of the trepidations with their loans. We hear a lot of people say, ‘Hey, you know, if we would have known now what we know today, we would have made a lot better decisions,’ and I think that’s why, aside from the facts of, you know, the facts and figures around your particular case, you know, there’s no — like I said, there’s really no silver bullet. It’s just like, OK, we worked a lot, we sacrificed, and you wake up, and you’re through the loans. And now, it’s what’s next? So I think your story, you know, is amazing. But then, you know, the fact that you can stand in front of people and say, ‘A few short years ago, I was in a similar spot, this is kind of what we did,’ is really amazing. So do you guys see yourself speaking more? Did you enjoy that part of it?

Brittany Patterson: Yeah. We both really enjoy it. And we actually have another one in November coming up, and we’re speaking at the National Community Pharmacists Association in Auburn. And so we’re going to go back to Auburn and be able to speak to those students. They came up to us after, I think it was the president of NCPA from Auburn, she came up, she’s like, ‘Oh, we loved y’all so much. We really want to have y’all back. I feel like these students could really learn from y’all since this is something that we don’t hear much about in school.’

Tim Baker: Well, and I think, you know, and that’s what I’m kind of hearing more, especially from NCPA, you know, or at least people associated with, pharmacists associated with NCPA is, you know, the decision or start, you know, an independent pharmacy is so huge. You have to have your own financial house in order or at least have a plan to have it in order, so I think there’s a lot of — you know, especially with that group, you know, a lot of relevancy to say, ‘Hey, if this is something that I really want to pursue, you know, I need to make sure that, you know, this big kind of elephant in the room at least is accounted for and there’s a plan in place,’ and I think that’s a great group to be talking to. So I guess for you guys, if I’m a recent pharmacist grad, what are kind of the big takeaways — I’m a new PharmD, I’m out, I’m earning income, I have kind of the average $150,000, $160,000 in debt. What would be the kind of big takeaways for, that you would impart on me in terms of how to tackle it?

Brittany Patterson: I know no one likes to hear this, but the biggest thing that we did was we lived below our means, which I know everybody hates to hear that because you feel like you’re constricted, but we weren’t because we were so used to living like that in school. And I think that’s one of the biggest reasons we were able to pay off our loans. We weren’t buying expensive cars, we weren’t buying expensive boats. Nobody told the students. We had friends who went and bought cars and boats, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but we just didn’t want more debt on top of the debt we already had. So I think that was one of the biggest things was really watching what we were spending and not overspending.

Adam Patterson: Yeah, I would say that would probably be one of my biggest things is living below our means. Something other to add to that is, you know, work hard for what you’re given. I mean, there’s too many people that just expect or receive things, and it’s all about hard work. Like we’ve talked about before, you know, putting in the hours, trying to maximize that income. As a new grad, I mean, what else do you have to do?

Brittany Patterson: Right.

Adam Patterson: I hate to say it, but to go on top of that, while you’re working hard, you have to treat yourself every now and then. I think debt’s something that we all can get caught up, and just working nonstop but not ever reaping some of that benefit, some of that benefit is to take a vacation every once in awhile.

Brittany Patterson: Yeah, and we don’t really eat out much, and that’s something that, you know, we really appreciate when we do get to eat out. We enjoy those moments more because of the fact that we aren’t doing it all the time.

Adam Patterson: Right.
Brittany Patterson: So we don’t take those moments for granted when we are able to enjoy evenings out together, which is nice.
Tim Baker: Yeah, it’s a treat rather than the norm, right?

Brittany Patterson: Right.

Tim Baker: Exactly. Well, and maybe, you know, you grow an affinity for Mint.com and logging in every day, right, Brittany? And making sure that the spending is in line, and you’re good there, that would probably be another piece of that.

Brittany Patterson: Right, that is true.

Adam Patterson: What is it they say? Eat, sleep. And Brittany’s is eat, sleep, mint.

Brittany Patterson: Mint, unfortunately.

Adam Patterson: So I will add, you know, something we got a lot of questions about. As a new grad, don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Using your resources and everything, that’s huge coming out of school is finding the information and going off, adding to that is talking about a financial planner and stuff. You know, that question’s came up to us a lot. Should I invest in a financial planner early on? There’s nothing that hurts from investing in a financial planner early on because they’re going to be able to, you know, guide you to those resources also. So that is a big thing I would harp on coming out of school.

Tim Baker: Yeah, and I think to play on that, you know, in terms of extra resources, obviously, I think what we’re trying to achieve here at Your Financial Pharmacist is just with the Facebook group and the different guides, to have information and kind of a community surrounding the information to put you in a position to tackle the debt or investments or if it’s insurance questions, so you know, I know you guys talked about — to kind of bring it back to the loans is one of the big things you did is refinance. So if you are looking to refinance, you know, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/refinance, we have calculators, we have different refinance companies that will give you bonuses and we have podcast episodes that are about student loans. So there’s a lot of good information there if you’re a YFP listener that you can digest and kind of learn more about the process. And I think it’s key to continuously push the envelope in terms of what you want to do with your financial life. Well, Brittany and Adam, thank you so much for coming back on the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast and sharing your incredible story. It doesn’t sound like you guys have let off the gas at all. I know you took your trip to Ireland and took some of that time to decompress, but it sounds like with the home purchase and some of the other things you’ve got going on that, you know, you’re kind of going back to the hustle and making sure you’re making moves with your financial plan. So it’s been a pleasure working with you guys, and I can say that your story truly resonates with a lot of our listeners and just a lot of pharmacists out there that it’s truly inspiring. So keep up the good work, and we’d love to have you back for the next major milestone. So you’ve done the debt-free theme hour, maybe we’ll have you on for the millionaire theme hour when you hit that millionaire status for net worth. So again, thanks again for coming on.

Adam Patterson: Thank you so much for having us.

Brittany Patterson: Yes, we really appreciate it.

 

 

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YFP 053: One Pharmacist’s Journey from Financial Ignorance to Financial Independence


 

On Episode 053 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, YFP team member Tim Ulbrich interviews Dr. Tony Guerra, an author, podcaster, entrepreneur, real-estate investor, educator and father to triplet girls that has an incredible story to share going from financial ignorance to financial independence. Tony talks about his financial journey, his various business ventures, and how and when his mindset shifted that allowed him to be on the path to financial independence.

About Our Guest

Tony Guerra graduated with a Doctorate of Pharmacy from the University of Maryland in 1997 and has followed a non-traditional career path to best suit his needs and interests. Tony has taken on the roles of pharmacist, homeowner, professor, real estate agent, author, mentor, podcast host, husband, and father of triplet girls while continually striving for financial independence. Through motivation and creative entrepreneurial thinking, Tony has created a lifestyle that allows him to focus on his family and his passions.

You can learn more about Tony and his work at http://MemorizingPharmacology.com

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 053 of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. We have an awesome episode in store for you today with a special guest, Dr. Tony Guerra that has taken a nontraditional path with his pharmacy career, which has allowed him to be on the path to financial independence. And I’m excited to have him on the show to share that story and journey today. And ever since I heard about Tony’s work more than a year ago and having the chance to learn about his background, I’ve been excited to get him on this show and to share his story with you, the YFP community. So Tony, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the YFP podcast.
Tony Guerra: Hey Tim, thanks for having me on.

Tim Ulbrich: So to be honest, Tony, there’s lots to talk about today. The more I dug into your background and story, the more I thought, where do we even start with this? We’ve got your fascinating pharmacy career, the real estate that you’ve been involved with, successful business ventures, and so I think maybe the best place to start is let’s go all the way back to when you graduated from the University of Maryland in 1997 with your pharmacy degree. So tell us a little bit about your first job out of school and what was your financial situation right away after you graduated?
Tony Guerra: Well, first, thanks for having me on the show. I actually listen to every single one of your podcast episodes, so I’m honored to be No. 53.

Tim Ulbrich: Thank you.

Tony Guerra: And my journey was a little bit different in that, you know, so many students right now are graduating, want to do residency, do 40-60 hours a week. When I sat down for the interview to work for Walgreen’s when I graduated to go to the Phoenix area, I actually asked to work only 24 hours a week or three days a week. And he talked me into four days a week, or 32 hours a week. So I had no interest in maxing out the number of hours I had, and my situation’s a little bit different because they had doubled our tuition from BS to PharmD, but my tuition was $4,000 a year.

Tim Ulbrich: Wow.

Tony Guerra: So I had $16,000 total in tuition. So my situation there is a little bit different, and before people hang up like, this guy doesn’t have any problems, let me talk about the mistakes that I made. So the issue with Maryland is that New Jersey and Atlantic City is not that far of a drive away. So a lot of times my buddies and I would go up to Atlantic City, and the most important thing that we had to do was because in New Jersey you can’t pump your own gas, we just had to have enough money left over to have a tank of gas or at least half a tank of gas to get us back to Maryland. So when I talk about finances, it was truly monopoly money that I was playing with back then. I had $20,000 in credit card debt, I had the student loans, and then I bought a $20,000 car, brand-new car, just out of college. So I had absolutely no concept of what it meant to owe money at the end. So in terms of graduating, the only budget I did was to make sure that I could work 24 hours or 32 hours, so I worked four days a week. And I didn’t want the pharmacy life to take over my life. So I was going to the Phoenix area. I wanted to go to a destination area. After seven years of college, I didn’t want to work 40 hours a week. I only worked 32. But I’d made some mistakes with finances, and eventually, it did catch up with me.

Tim Ulbrich: Couple things there that really stick out to me is, you know, even the student loan numbers, which obviously are very small relative to our indebtedness we’re dealing with today, right? $160,000, $200,000, depending on public-private, whatnot. But also, you’ve got to remember context of, you know, 20 years ago. But that I think does highlight how much that has increased in that period of time, which is obviously shows you —

Tony Guerra: 1,000%, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think to your point about Monopoly money, I know we just talked about this on your show as well is that we’ve got to change that conversation that it’s got to hit us, have a little bit more of an emotional reaction to that debt. And when we see a number like $160,000, we should be like, ‘Holy cow! What is that?’ One of the things I wanted to ask you, though, which is intriguing to me is your intentional choice to not work full-time. And the reason I want to ask this question is that as you know, right now, there’s a trend going on nationally where some pharmacists are getting cut back to 32 hours, and they’re not getting full-time work because of various reasons, saturations of markets and whatnot. And here you are, and I think a lot of people out there are obviously unhappy with that. They maybe financially feel pressed that they need their full salary, but here you are intentionally not choosing to go full-time. And I heard in your conversation, I heard a little bit of a strategic decision that you didn’t really want maybe to get burned out, you wanted to give yourself other options. Talk more about why you made that choice to not go full-time right away.

Tony Guerra: Well, I can connect the dots looking backwards. I think Steve Jobs said in that famous graduation speech at Stanford, but I call the other eight hours, the Entrepreneurial Eight. And so what I wanted to leave was that other day just for kind of entrepreneurial ventures, and I was taking classes in journalism and writing. I never had a plan to become a journalist, but I knew I wanted something besides pharmacy. I didn’t like my job after about three months, and I kind of knew that that was coming. I’d been in retail for 3-4 years, so it wasn’t a surprise that I’m like, ‘Gosh, this kind of got repetitive.’ And I did try to make changes. I would change my days, I would go to overnights, I worked as a pharmacy manager in a grocery store, I worked in mail order. But it just — I just wanted to minimize that. What I found was that it was OK — I enjoyed the people I was with, and so I focused a lot more on the people I was with and the people I was serving. But if I had that one day a week that was completely dedicated to creative work and making money a different way — and now we call them side hustles — I just wanted a creative outlet. So I think making room for that intentionally before you graduate was something that I really wanted. The residency burnout is much lower in pharmacy than it is in medicine, but to have to dedicate 50, 60 hours at that salary — and it works out to I think maybe $16 an hour as a resident if you work 60 hours a week, that’s deflating. And I didn’t want that to happen. So if I’m going to go to a destination, I wanted to have time to enjoy it. So I knew early that I wanted to be a writer, but that success didn’t come until much later. But the entrepreneurial space — I always made room for entrepreneurial space.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I remember, Tony, my whopping $31,000 salary during 2009.

Tony Guerra: Ouch.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think it’s an interesting point you bring up there, and I’m so glad — and I hope our listeners can stop and listen and absorb the wisdom that you just shared. The Entrepreneurial Eight, I love that term because I wouldn’t say I have many regrets. But if I look back and now with a family of three young boys, every year that goes on since graduation, my tolerance for risk is looking more — looks different with each passing year, right? Because you have more things that you’re accountable for, you have more things that you’re responsible for, and I think as I envision where the profession of pharmacy is going, and as I think about some of the new grads being frustrated with either the options that are available to them or maybe the work environment that they’re in, I love that concept of why not carve eight hours a week? Why not work part-time? Why not put yourself in a financial position that you can do that? Because I think while it not only positions you for potentially long-term other options, business ventures, things where you can control your own destiny, that one day of creative outlet I’m guessing made some of the other time more palatable, whatever you want to call it, that you knew you had that day of the week that you could ultimately turn to that creative outlet. So I hope the new graduates, some of those in their mid-20s where maybe they don’t have a lot of things that are going to hold them back risk-wise, obviously besides student loan debt — is this the time potentially to think about some of those entrepreneurial risks that somebody could take? So what — as you look back and kind of think about the graduates, I know you take a lot of APPE students on rotations, what advice do you have for them? Maybe mistakes that you’ve made? Things you wish you would have done differently? Obviously, you mentioned credit card debt, new cars, and I’m guessing there’s just a certain set of advice or points that you give to your APPE students to say, hey, if I were in your shoes right now, these are the things I wish I would have done differently. What are those things?

Tony Guerra: I find that money and budgeting is kind of deflating. And so what motivates me is doubling my money. So I find places where I can double it. And I want to be very careful not to say, I can double a pharmacist’s salary. I don’t know how to do that. But I can certainly double $400, $5,000, even $40,000. And maybe I can go through some of those stories where I’ve done it or where I understand where I’ve doubled my money. But I find that what you have to do first is what you’ve taught — I think when you’ve talked about your student loan course — is you have to have everything in place before you start playing with this double-your-money game.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Tony Guerra: To put the money somewhere because you can get it, you can always lifestyle creep up to whatever you spend. But I’m actually taking on debt right now so I have a place to put the money so that’s something you also talked about in a recent episode is that people that are high earners that have no debt really struggle to know where to put their money.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Tony Guerra: So I’m taking on debt in the form of a third home, I just bought it yesterday. And that’s where it is. But maybe we can talk a little bit about some ways to kind of double your money. And we’re not giving investing advice. And I’m going to take this on instead of you guys taking it on because you guys have a very good, methodical way. But maybe we can just talk about how to double $500 to start with.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, let’s do it. And I know you’ve been involved in different things. As I mentioned in the intro, you’re an author, so you’ve written a couple different books, and we’ll link to them in the show notes, so “Memorizing Pharmacology,” “How to Pronounce Drug Names,” what am I missing, Tony? What else have you done on the book front?

Tony Guerra: The new one’s “Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics.” It’s meant for APPE students. And it should be free on Audible if they’ve never had an audiobook before, but something they can listen to back and forth on their way. You know, I think that really, as you get into the APPEs and you get into the internal medicine one and then the grueling critical care ones, you’ve got to have the basics down. And by having the basics down, I wrote that book and made it into an audiobook with another pharmacist out in New York, so “Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics” is where I would start if I was an APPE student.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll link to those in the show notes, and I’m guessing — and we’ll talk real estate here in a little bit — but I’m guessing your authorship, and I know you’ve put these online, so you’ve done audiobooks, which if I’m right, one of these has landed its way onto the Audible.com best seller list. And so you’ve obviously had success here. So talk to us about even just that journey of, wow, I want to write a book and how I did that, what impact that’s had for you financially but also maybe just the scratch that entrepreneurial itch that you’ve had all the way back to graduation.

Tony Guerra: I found that I couldn’t write a book until I got mad. So I had to do something to get mad about the book, and so what I did was I was taking classes up at Iowa State, and I went into a class that I knew I was going to get kicked out of. And so there’s an MFA program, a Master of Fine Arts program there, and there was a class on nonfiction creative writing, and this is a class I wanted to take. And I knew I was going to get kicked out. I knew the teacher, and I knew the people there. I said, ‘Hey, you know, I signed up for your class.’ And she said, ‘No, no. You’re not in the MFA program.’ ‘Yeah, but I’m allowed in. I’m in an English program, and part of the department.’ ‘Yeah, we’re just going to stick with what we have here.’ And I knew that would — I didn’t know for sure she’d kick me out — but she did kick me out, wouldn’t let me in the class, so I was excluded. And the one thing that makes me mad is being excluded, and I knew that would happen. So it made me mad enough to write the book, and now the book actually makes double the salary of the professor herself, so I won’t name the person, but it just makes me mad. So I think 98% of people, they say, want to write a book but only 1% do. So some kind of emotional reaction — and I think in your writing your book, “The Seven Figure Pharmacist” with Tim Church, I think that it was an emotional response to what had happened with your stories as well. So to write a book or to get there, you really have to. And what I think I’ll point to is actually another author, Dr. Richard Waithe, who was the host of Rx Radio podcast, I think he probably put about $500 into his book, and I can’t remember the name, but it’s like “The New Pharmacist” or “First Time Pharmacist,” that’s what it’s called. Yeah, “First Time Pharmacist.” And I just by seeing his numbers and knowing how much he makes from each book, he’ll probably double his money I would say in four or five months. But the way that I would — and I don’t mean to be self-serving to your course — but the easiest way to get make $400 on $400 is to invest in your course because the return could be close to $100,000. And that’s one of those returns that’s so big that you don’t even do the math on it. You’re just like, I put $400 into the course, and I saved $100,000. Or in your case, if you had had — if we could go back in time and you wrote the course for yourself, you would have saved $300,000.

Tim Ulbrich: Oh my gosh. I try not to think about it.

Tony Guerra: And I would have saved tons of money. So that’s an easy way to double $400 or $500 — either write a book that you’re passionate about, put maybe $400 or $500 into it or take the student loan course. That’s where I would start with $500. And then maybe we can talk about $5,000 is the next way. But I would recommend being a little slower with this one. But I can tell you how I doubled $5,000 as well.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, so before we go there, just talk me through — obviously, you got mad, which I think obviously there’s an emotion there which inspires action. I’m with you, I need something to fire me up, especially if you’re going to sit down and start writing and typing. I remember lots of early mornings, lots of late nights, and it’s a grind, right? As you’re kind of working through the process. So you’re mad, but you obviously were very strategic about, you know, I’m not going to write this just to write this, I want to write something that’s going to provide value and is needed in the market and is something that I have expertise in. And so I think a lot of listeners might be hearing that, hey, I do this every day, and there seems to be a need for something, whether it’s a book, a course, a Webinar, whatever. Talk to us, though, about how you put those pieces together that it’s not just writing a book to write a book, it’s that you want to put something that had value, that was needed and lined up with your expertise. And does that connect with your day job and what you do as a professor right at Des Moines Area Community College? Were you able to sync those experiences up to maximize your time?

Tony Guerra: I actually think you have to sync it. So my recommendation to anyone who’s always wanted to write a book is instead of worrying about writing a book, just write the curriculum for the course that you’re going to teach or that you would want to teach and just put it in book form. And then when it comes to audiobook, it took — when I first talked to my narrator, I never had hired a narrator. He was $400 per finished hours, so that means for a 7-hour book, it’s $2,800, a ton of money on something I had no experience with. And he said, boy — because it was a two-month lag between when I could have him do it — he’s like, ‘Boy, you’re going to really have a heck of a time making this for the ear.’ And what he was saying is is that if you can make nonfiction into something that is listenable, people will buy it. And so that’s really where it came from is the two steps are 1, what course would you teach if you could? And then write the course for something that you actually are maybe doing. It’s a lot easier for professors and things like that that have it. But if you’ve got technicians or you’ve got other people that work for you, what would be the course that you would write for them? Or if you, you know, with you guys and teaching about money, how would you write that course? And the second part is is make it for the ear. So you take that course, and then you just read it. And then you just continue to revise it but make it as if you are talking to someone. So those two components, writing for a need — and the pharmacology books, the need was that many nursing students have to take pharmacology but don’t get chemistry before it. So imagine hearing beta lactam or N-acetyl para enol phenol and all of these things, and you’ve never had chemistry. So that was kind of the need that I filled. But the way to get a book done — align it with what you do anyway, and then No. 2, then read it and re-write it as if you’re reading it to someone rather than ‘Here, I’ve wrote this book.’ And if you read Dr. Richard Waithe’s book, it’s really conversational.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I love that. And I think for those that are listening that maybe are not fully satisfied with your job, and you’re looking for a creative outlet, you’re looking to create something, obviously the money that we’re talking about here and how you can generate revenue to help accelerate your financial plan is an important piece, but you can’t underestimate the positive energy and the feeling and momentum that you get from being in the creative process. And so you know, I would ask, outside of your time, of course, what is there to lose to potentially consider a path like this, thinking of the work that you already do? I want to take a brief moment before we jump into the second part of the show to highlight today’s sponsor of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, which is Script Financial.

Sponsor: Now, you’ve heard us talk about Script Financial before on the show. YFP team member Tim Baker, who’s also a fee-only certified financial planner, is owner of Script Financial. Now, Script Financial comes with my highest recommendation. Jess and I use Tim Baker and his services through Script Financial, and I can advocate for the planning services that he provides and the value of fee-only financial planning advice, meaning that when I’m paying Tim for his services, I am paying him directly for his advice and to help Jess and I with our financial plan. I am not paying him for commissions, I am not paying him for products or services that may ultimately cloud or bias the advice that he’s giving me. So Script Financial specifically works with pharmacy client’s. So if you’re somebody who’s overwhelmed with students loans or maybe you’re confused about how to invest and adequately save for retirement, or maybe you’re frustrated with just the overall progress of your financial plan, I would highly recommend Tim Baker and the services that he’s offering over at Script Financial. You can learn more today by going over to scriptfinancial.com. Again, that’s scriptfinancial.com.

Tim Ulbrich: Alright, so we’re back with today’s show. We’re walking through with Tony Guerra to hear about all of his work. We’re talking about some of the books that he’s written, and he’s shared with us kind of that first step he took to earn income. And now we want to talk, Tony, about the next step that you took. So we talked about getting to that $500 point, and now we’re talking about that next level of $5,000. So talk us through for you kind of that next level of the business venture.

Tony Guerra: So the mantra is invest in yourself. And right now, you guys have an only $400 course, but I expect that if you guys continue on your path, there’s going to be a $5,000 course that you guys are going to have in your future where maybe we go to a destination, we get everything done with the finances and things like that, but then we start talking about investing, then we kind of create our own group. So somebody that has done that in the real estate space is Brian Buffini. He came here from Ireland and was one of the best realtors in the country but then created a coaching company. And the $5,000 I spent — I remember these exact words to my coach, and we’re very similar in that we want return on investment mathematically, where my wife is completely different. She would want certain feelings that come out of it. But when I talked to my coach, I said, she said, ‘What do you want to get out of this?’ I said, ‘$10,000. I want my $5,000 back, and I want $5,000 more.’ And that was it. And I ended up making $22,000 as a real estate agent. But what I invested in was $400 a month to get one-on-one coaching, 30 minutes, every two weeks, and what I was basically doing was following the path of somebody that had done these steps and was able to articulate how to do it. And then years later, I want to say five or six years later, just before the crash, my income — and I didn’t take all of this home, I had a little bit of group of people, of real estate agents, but my income — I had to leave pharmacy because it had just gotten away, and it didn’t make enough money. But I made $253,000 in that coaching program.

Tim Ulbrich: Wow.

Tony Guerra: So that $5,000 at first got me to $22,000 in the first year but then I was making $253,000 that last year. And I would have stayed with real estate even with the crash because that’s when people really needed me, but my wife made it clear that we’re moving to Iowa. And so I moved to Iowa, and I completely gave up the real estate business. But to spend $5,000 and make $5,000, I would invest in yourself in some kind of program. I think Blair Theilemier has something that’s a couple thousand dollars or something like that. But those kinds of things, that’s where I would put up to $5,000 in terms of investing in myself. And where I wouldn’t go is into some kind of postgraduate Master’s degree or something like that because you have to wait until you graduate to maybe get a return on that. I’m talking about things that you can — like a real estate license, it’s like $500 — that you can get returns immediately, that you can start making your money right away. But that’s how I’d put $5,000 in and get $5,000 back.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and we think about — we’re always harping on our students, professional development, professional development, professional development. It’s the same thing when it comes to your finances, real estate, a business coach, whatever, you have to look at those opportunities and say — and I’ve done the same thing with business coaching, I’ve done the same thing with hiring Tim Baker to help me with my finances — and I’ve realized all of those and said, ‘That’s an investment. I’ve got to write a check.’ But I realize the return on it is going to be much greater than what I’m investing. And I think that’s true for so many different areas of your life is you have to look at those things and say, OK. I’m going to try to go at this all myself or what are the opportunities I can really hire somebody who’s taken this path that can really keep me accountable and has the expertise to get me to the goal that I want to achieve. So let’s segway, then, into the real estate investing. So you alluded to the fact of being a real estate agent, you got your license, you’re selling real estate. But you’re also now getting into real estate investing. So as I know, you now have three properties, is that correct?

Tony Guerra: Yeah, we’ll close on the other one the first week of July. But I’ll have three again. And we kind of talked through the very first things that I did and then — so I have a 20-state, 20-year real estate career. And this will be my 10th property that I’ve moved in some way or another.

Tim Ulbrich: OK.

Tony Guerra: But I only own three. I only own three right now.

Tim Ulbrich: So why don’t we — obviously, you have the primary residence, and we’ll come back and talk about that because I think there’s some due diligence that people need to do in buying their primary home. But specifically from the real estate investing side, why did you look at this area and say, ‘As a pharmacist, this is something that I want to get into in the long run?’ You mentioned currently owning three. You’ve been involved in 10 properties. So talk to us a little bit about your mindset around real estate investing as a category or as an area. And maybe for you, where did that fit in while you’re also looking at more traditional streams such as a 401k, 403b, and the timing of those.

Tony Guerra: OK. So let’s kind of go all the way back to graduation and you know, should I rent? Or should I buy a home? And the first thing that I did, and when I did look at my student loans, I heard, I was like, why is this not tax-deductible? And your student loan interest is not tax-deductible, but it is deductible on a home loan. So my parents owned a vacation home, and the first home I bought was for $1. I bought it from them for $1; they were able to transfer it to me.

Tim Ulbrich: Sounds pretty awesome.

Tony Guerra: Yeah. Well, they took back the loan. So then I had to pay them monthly payments, but then I immediately put a mortgage on the property and then paid off the student loans so that now, the interest that I would have had on the student loans was now tax-deductible.

Tim Ulbrich: Got it.

Tony Guerra: So that was kind of the first deal I made. This is a deal that’s very common now with the new graduates in all fields in that they’re deciding to rent where they’re going to live, but they’re getting in the real estate market in a different area. So for example, if somebody wants to move to San Francisco, it’s a lot easier to find a rental with maybe rent control or something that’s a little bit more manageable and then buy something maybe in Nevada that’s maybe a vacation home or something like that. So the first thing I did was recognize that a home is a commitment as much as it is a marriage. And you don’t go into a marriage just saying, ‘Oh, look, I qualify for this marriage. Time to get married.’ You know? And I think a lot of people do that. They’re like, ‘Well, I think I should buy a home because it’s supposed to be tax-deductible interest.’ And that may or may not be true with the new tax code. So the first thing I would say is, find a place you want to live and get to know it. And so I lived there a year before I ever bought a home in Tempe. So I didn’t — my first piece of advice is to not buy a home in an area that you haven’t known for at least a year.

Tim Ulbrich: Amen. Yes. Yeah, that’s a mistake actually my wife and I — we had been in the relative area for a year but didn’t know well enough. And we were kind of itching from a renting standpoint, and as I look back, a little bit more patience would have done us a lot of good in terms of the rest of our financial plan. We’ll link in the show notes, there’s actually a good calculator the New York Times has to do a rent-to-buy comparison because I think a lot of times I hear people say things like, ‘Well, my rent costs $1,000, and the mortgage costs $1,000.’ But as you know, that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. So really trying to look at your financial situation and look at all the pieces to say, where does this fit in in terms of the buy of knowing the area? But also where does it fit in with rest of a financial plan? So where did you then see real estate investing beyond your primary home come into play? And how did you determine it was a right time to get involved in that? Was there a certain point where you said, I’ve got enough equity in my primary home, I’m on the path with my other retirement savings, so now’s the time? When did you make that jump into investing?

Tony Guerra: Well, I first thought I didn’t agree with you on this, but now I do agree with you on this — when I had 20 percent to put down.

Tim Ulbrich: OK.

Tony Guerra: And because I had bought this vacation home, which was in Ocean City, Maryland, so I actually never lived in it more than the 14 days you’re allowed by the tax code as a rental, that I decided to just buy something in Tempe. And the first thing I would say is don’t ever try to time it. The market is crazy. You know, right now, you would say, ‘OK, well now prices are going up. So now maybe I shouldn’t buy because they’re going up, and I shouldn’t do it.’ But then you’ve got this investing coming from China, and I just saw in the news that a house in San Francisco went $1.6 million over asking.

Tim Ulbrich: Gees.

Tony Guerra: So you know, you might say, ‘Oh, well you know, the student loan bubble’s coming and all these things so prices are going to drop, you know, in a couple years.’ And then you have this weird investing thing coming from another country. Timing it is not the way to go in terms of like trying to time when the best time to buy is. But what I liked was that once I had 20% to put down, I don’t want to say I was a bully, but I was kind of a bully. When you make an offer, and you’re putting 20% down, all of a sudden because of the savings rate in the U.S. and all of these things, you are in the pull position. All of a sudden, that seller is like, ‘Whoa. I don’t want to upset this person. I want to get them.’ So when I offered on my Tempe home, I offered under asking in what is a white hot market. The summer, right by Arizona State, to the east side of Arizona State University, is a white hot market. And I was able to offer a little under asking because I had 20% to put down. So when I talk about timing, don’t time the market. Time yourself. Time your own situation because if you have built up 20%, that 20% is actually — I don’t want to say a symptom — but that 20% represents that you have gotten your financial house in order and that you are ready to buy a home.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Tony Guerra: That you are financially ready, and a lot of the things that you put in your course and things like that. So don’t look at 20% as I have to do this thing first, it’s 20% will come if you do all the steps right. And I did a lot of things right in that year, and I took a little money out of that deal I did with my parents, and I bought a house that was $90,000. So the 20% wasn’t a ton of money.

Tim Ulbrich: The other thing — and I would love your input on this — the other thing to me, and my wife and I are hopefully going to be dabbling in this a little bit more here in the near future, but one of the things that interests me about real estate investing is that it has an opportunity, if done well, it has an opportunity for a cash flow on a monthly basis that is not waiting until a traditional withdrawal age for a retirement account of 59 and a half like a 401k, 403b or a Roth IRA. And so I think as people are out there maybe thinking, Oooo, I like pharmacy, I don’t love pharmacy, maybe I want to do something different — at the right time, and if done well, I think real estate investing or business ventures like we’ve talked about the work you’ve already done are alternative revenue streams that aren’t having to wait to a certain age to be able to draw down money over time. And so when you looked at this most recent one you mentioned is out in Tempe, right?

Tony Guerra: Mmhmm. Yep.

Tim Ulbrich: Was that connection because you know the area from being out there previously? Or how do you, I guess how do you approach real estate investing outside of your backyard and feeling comfortable — I’m assuming are you working with a property manager? What does that look like kind of day-to-day on those rentals?

Tony Guerra: OK, well let me give you the big picture. And again, this is kind of advanced investing. Let me actually talk a little bit about just buying a home, and then I’ll talk about this more advanced investing. So if you are — let me talk first about a single person. If you’re a single person coming out of college, and you’re going to buy a home, buy a home as if it were a — my thought is to buy a home as if it were a rental, and make sure that you have at least two other rooms that you’re renting out to other people or at least one other room. Don’t buy a house with just one toilet. Make sure there are two toilets because if you have one toilet, it’s an emergency if it doesn’t work. And that’s my first thing is get cash flow from the place that you’re living in. If you are married, and you’re like, I am not living with anyone anymore, that time is done, we are grownups now, I’m not doing that — and that was — but my wife and I did have somebody always in the basement while we were in residency here. Then my thought with maybe what you and Jess are thinking about is to start thinking about using a team approach. So my wife is a great lurker. She loves to look at homes, so if I say, ‘Hey, can you look at houses here?’ and so forth, that would be something she would be all over it. And then I would be the one that’s crunching the numbers, like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to cash flow at all.’ ‘But it looks so good!’ ‘No, the cash flow is terrible.’ You know? So when I looked at this Tempe home, I almost pulled the trigger on a house — and this is how hot the market is. They asked me to waive the appraisal. So I would pay in if it didn’t appraise. And I was close to doing it. It was $185,000 for a two-bedroom, and I just couldn’t do it. You know, my sensor was going off, like don’t do it, don’t do it. But you want the house! Don’t do it, don’t do it. And then I talked to my wife, and she’s like, ‘No. That’s dumb. Don’t do that.’ So always bring your wife in. She’s turned down a number of the ones that I was like, ‘Oh, I love this one!’ She’s like, ‘No. Why? I just don’t feel good about it.’ And I’ve learned over my 10 years, now almost 11 years of marriage, ‘I don’t feel good about it’ — you want to listen to that sentence. Always, always. But when I went from the two-bedroom that I didn’t buy, I bought a place that’s now a three-bedroom, two-bath in the same place. It’s a mile from a Starbucks and a Target. That seems to be — follow people that are smarter. If you’re trying to go into an up-and-coming area, if you see a Target moving in and then a Starbucks, those are really smart people. Follow those guys. But if you’re going in, if you and Jess are looking for a place, I would start in terms of looking at one, but the other caveat is that I was looking in four different areas of the country so I could see what’s going on. So at Tempe, 85281, 85284; I was looking in Baltimore, 21230, 21224, where I think Tim Baker is, I was looking in Gainesville, Florida, I don’t remember the zip code, and then I was looking in Ocean City, Maryland. So four places I knew, but I was looking at four different markets. And Tempe, in many ways, I just wanted it. My parents are going to end up moving to Arizona, there are a lot of reasons I picked it, but I was looking at different areas, so I didn’t have this kind of myopic view. And I think, not to keep talking too long, but when you’re looking at pharmacy school admissions — I help a lot of pre-pharmacy people — if you’re trying to get the best deal from one school, you might not get the best deal because you’re not looking at all the schools. Just as you know, you’re looking at one repayment plan. You want to look at all the repayment plans. But that was my kind of thought. And in terms of who I had there, Lisa Schofield (?) is my contact there in Arizona, she’s been a realtor for 17 years, I’ve done other deals with her when I was there. Having somebody that’s knowledgeable with investing. You don’t want just a real estate agent, especially not someone that’s related to you. You want someone that specializes in working with investors.

Tim Ulbrich: Great stuff. And to wrap up this section on real estate, I would reference listeners back to episodes 040 and 041, we had Nate Hedrick, the Real Estate RPH on, we talk about 10 things every pharmacist should know about home buying. And I think, Tony, I really appreciate — we haven’t talked as much on this podcast about real estate investing, but I think right time, right place, for many pharmacists, it’s a great move to think about obviously building your own financial foundation and house in order first, but when the right time is there — and I think for many listeners, that may already be there — to be pursuing real estate investing as an alternative way to diversify their investments at large. So I have a couple kind of next-level questions that are not related to any specific topic here, but as I hear this conversation to you, what sticks out to me is that you’re incredibly motivated. You obviously have a significant drive. You have an entrepreneurial mindset. You’re creative in the way that you think; you see alternative revenue streams. You’re willing to look at things that are in an outside-of-the-box way. Where does that come from? Where do you attribute to having that skill set? Is that something you feel like was taught by your parents? Have there been mentor that influenced you? Where would you say that’s come from?

Tony Guerra: This might be disappointing, but its fear. Absolute terror. And it comes from when I started, and I came back to Maryland after four years of being in Arizona, I had something go on with my leg, and I thought it was some kind of rheumatoid arthritis or something like that. It ended up being that I was standing 12 hours a day, and my IT bands were pulling so hard on my knee that I was in knee pain, but I actually, you know, I had to get it so I had a stool that I could sit on, and then I really thought I was going to lose my career. So I thought I was going to go to — I didn’t know what I was going to go to. And so that fear and then also watching the collapse of the real estate market, I was a little better prepared there, but I went from a $253,000 income to doing residency with my wife. So I went from $253,000 to $40,000. So seeing those two drops, I wish I could say I’m motivated by some great, entrepreneurial spirit, all these things, but it’s just fear of not having money. And I think people that maybe have gone through the Great Depression had this kind of mindset, maybe people that were crushed by the drop in ‘08 had this mindset. But really, it’s just that I was really fearful. But the most important caveat in terms of entrepreneurship is to give, ask and receive. So I continue to give without hope of getting anything back, and things come back to you. But that’s kind of my mindset. I’m a little bit scared about money, and that’s why I have two years’ worth of income in my savings account. That’s pathologic to have that much there. But I’m just scared of going through that again, and I never want to have to take a job or a career that takes me away from my children, makes me into a person that comes home that is just so dissatisfied with my work that I’m taking it out on my family, and I feel like that maybe happens a lot. And I just didn’t want to go back there again, ever again.

Tim Ulbrich: So obviously, there’s the fear of money there, which obviously is real. But as I also look at the work you’re doing on the Pharmacy Leaders podcast, I can tell there’s a very intentional pathway of shaping future leaders of the profession that is beyond just wanting to create revenue streams. So as you think about the work that you’re doing there and even some of your other entrepreneurial work, what are you hoping down the road to look back and say, this is what I was trying to do, this is what I was accomplishing. It’s a thought that’s been hanging with me a lot over the last year of, when I’m 70-75, you’re in retirement, what am I going to look back and say, this is what I was trying to achieve, this was the goal that I was going after. So with your work around the pharmacy leaders podcast, developing future leaders, maybe even modeling kind of entrepreneurship, what is that goal for you? What is that pathway?

Tony Guerra: I see time differently. I can’t see really past dinner. I’m very short-term; my wife is very long-term. And usually, people come together that way. So something will really bother me that might be due three weeks from now but I feel like I have to get it done now. So I guess when I look at what’s going on with pharmacy, I see, I guess I’m really scared for them in many ways as a parent who looks at it, and I know that certain students are going to be absolutely fine. These are the kind of national candidates, I look at their resumes, their CVs, what they’ve done, and what they’ve done differently is they’ve invested in other people. And I guess I just fear for them, and that’s why I keep interviewing them and giving them a space to be interviewed so that they can share what they have with the other people that may be making some mistakes. And you can never change someone’s mind, but what you can do is put out the people that are doing it right and expose them to those people. Casey Rathburn, for example, from the University of Houston, comes up, Dallas Tolburg (?) from University of Maryland, (inaudible name) are names that come to mind. These are the people that have invested so much in their pharmacy education in helping other people while they were in pharmacy school that it all came back to them — in the residencies they wanted, the career and eventually the careers they want, so I’m just seeing that if you just try to get through pharmacy school and you’re not known for anything, as Blair Thielemier says, you’re going to be in trouble. But if you continue to invest in other people as Ahmad Ahmad (?) who just started the Your Power Pursuit of Purpose podcast, those are the kinds of people that are going to have no problem. So that’s what my drive comes from. It’s just like, look, I made a bunch of mistakes when I came out. I think I can help a lot of people if I can expose other people to these leaders that are moving and shaping their own lives and other people’s lives.

Tim Ulbrich: Great wisdom there. And if our listeners have not yet checked out the Pharmacy Leaders podcast, please do. You’ve done an awesome job with that podcast, super inspirational, I think motivational for students and really helping shape the future of these leaders. I think you’re, what? 129, 130 episodes in already? Something like that?

Tony Guerra: Yeah, like I said, that’s kind of pathologic too. I mean, I do 3-4 episodes a week. Casey Rathburn (?) said, ‘Hey, can I do some episodes?’ I was like, OK, and she gave me seven episodes in three days. So you know, I wanted to make a space, but again, it’s so in line with what I do. I’m just a people-y person, so I like to talk to people. So it’s not work. And you know, if you’re doing something that you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll link to that in the show notes. Again, that’s the Pharmacy Leaders podcast. Now, one final — it’s actually kind of a split question — but I want to end here because I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about family. I know it’s important to you, you’re a father of triplets. You’ve got all of these things going on, your day job and your real estate investing, your book, your podcast. So two questions I have here for you that I know will be inspirational for me and probably even help me as well in my own journey. How do you balance all of this with the kids and obviously a marriage? And then second to that, how has some of these ventures in your financial success allowed you and created the space to enjoy the time with family that I perceive to be so important for you?

Tony Guerra: OK. You know, marry the right person.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes, Amen.

Tony Guerra: I hate to say that, it’s kind of a cliche. But man, marry the right person. But the one thing that we did was we did the Five Love Languages book. And I’m physical, which means that it’s better for her to tap me on the shoulder than to say anything to me when she comes home. And hers is service. And I can’t believe I didn’t know this until about seven or eight years in our marriage, but that means that the things that I do, making sure the house is clean when she comes home, it’s the first thing she sees is clean house, not extra work to do after a long day at the VA. So that’s my first recommendation is figure out which love language you have and which love language your spouse has because then you can know what’s important to them. So that allows the marriage to work well. And you’ve talked about “The Millionaire Next Door,” and most millionaires are married with three kids, and that’s the first thing. That’s the strength. But the other thing was — I guess I took for granted, and I didn’t do the episode, I should have, but the Father’s Day episode — I took for granted that 100,000 pharmacists each Father’s Day are probably working, you know, men and women. And I took for granted that this Sunday, I could be with my kids, coach their soccer team, and I think that was the other part is that I work so much because I’m fighting for that time to not have to ever say, ‘Dad’s got to work.’ And my one daughter just absolutely threw a dagger at us one morning. She’s like, ‘Daddy, you always get to come to the parties on Friday. Why does Mommy never get to come?’ And I was just like, oh my gosh, how do I answer this? And so I made sure to — I was like, ‘Daddy just doesn’t make enough money yet. And when Daddy makes enough money, then there’s going to be no problem with Mom coming to everything.’ She’s like, ‘Well, Daddy, you just need to work another job.’ And so I think too many pharmacists accept that that’s just how it is, I work weekends, every other weekend. And I have to tell you, if you follow the steps that you have in your loan course, I can tell you that once they get out of that debt, they could do a 32-hour week or a 24-hour week, no problem. And then they would have, they could stop having those conversations with their children, and they could have really good conversations like, you know, wasn’t that a great game that we had on Sunday?

Tim Ulbrich: Tony, great stuff. And I know your work has been an inspiration to me. I appreciate you taking time to come on this podcast, I appreciate your support of the YFP podcast. And I’m sure we’ll be finding lots of opportunities to partner in the future. So thank you again for coming on today’s episode, I appreciate it.

Tony Guerra: Yeah, I appreciate it too. Thanks so much, Tim.

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YFP 039: One Pharmacy Entrepreneurs Journey to Maximizing Income & Paying Off Student Loans


 

On Episode 39 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, we interview Dr. Blair Thielemier, creator of BT Pharmacy Consulting, The Pharmapreneur Academy and the Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit. During this interview, Blair shares her personal and professional story including the financial hardships that inspired her various entrepreneurial ventures that have, in part, resulted in additional income to pay off her student loans and be on track to achieve her financial goals.

Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit

The 2018 Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit is presented by the NCPA Innovation Center and hosted by the founder of the Pharmapreneur Academy, Blair Thielemier. The Summit features 24 all-new interviews with pharmacists and experts discussing collaborative opportunities, team training, marketing, and profitable services in community pharmacies. The free 5 day event is March 2125th and there are 11.5 accredited CPE hours available for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. Go to ElevatePharmacySummit.com to register for your free ticket!

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YFP 038: The Happy PharmD’s Journey to Becoming Debt Free


 

On Episode 38 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, we interview Alex Barker, a pharmacist, entrepreneur, author, and coach to share his story of becoming completely debt free. He is a clinical pharmacist with the VA and creator of thehappypharmd.com and the Happy PharmD Summit.

If you are a pharmacist who feels stuck in your current career, wants a change but don’t know where to start, the Happy PharmD Summit is the place for you to hear from more than 20 pharmacist speakers about non-traditional career opportunities.

You can learn more about the Happy PharmD Summit, coming up March 26th-29th, by visiting pharmacistsummit.com

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Maximizing Your Income (Interview with Alex Barker, PharmD)


 

On Episode 007 of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, we interview Alex Barker (Creator of The Happy PharmD) to discuss:

  • how Alex pursued multiple entrepreneurial avenues to expedite achieving his financial goals.
  • different ideas pharmacists can pursue to maximize their income.

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Episode 007 Special Giveaway

6 Ideas for Pharmacists To Maximize Their Income – available at yourfinancialpharmacist.com/007download

 

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