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
- YFP Giveaway
- YFP Facebook Group
- The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann
- YFP Blog: Money Talks: The Cost of the Pharmacy Residency Quest
- TL;DR Pharmacy
- Mastering the Match: How to Secure a Pharmacy Residency
- Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual E-Book
- Alex Barker, The Happy PharmD
- 100 Strong Residency Interview Questions, Answers, and Rationales by Brandon Dyson and Tony Guerra
- Discover Your Talent Podcast with Tony Guerra
- 7 Figure Pharmacist by Tim Church and Tim Ulbrich
- APhA
- The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy
- Contact Brandon Dyson
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.
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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