YFP 092: Creating an Indispensable Pharmacy Career

Becoming an Indispensable Pharmacist

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Church welcomes Alex Barker back to the show to share some of the highlights of his recent career transition out of pharmacy practice, some tips for pharmacists who are struggling in their careers, and how to become an indispensable pharmacist. Alex also discusses the release of his new book Indispensable: The Prescription for a Fulfilling Pharmacy Career.

About Today’s Guest

Alex Barker is a pharmacist, entrepreneur, author, and creator of thehappypharmd.com and the Happy PharmD Summit.

Summary

On this episode, Alex Barker dives into how and why he transitioned from a full-time pharmacy career to a full-time hustle and about his passion in helping pharmacists be happy in their careers.

After a one year residency, Alex got a job in an ambulatory care setting. He liked his work but wasn’t fulfilled, so he started doing different jobs on the side. Eventually, these different side hustles led him to launching The Happy PharmD in 2017. The Happy PharmD helps pharmacists start businesses or find and transition into a new career.

In December 2016, Alex had been working in his side hustles for 3 or 4 years and felt like he should’ve been farther along with his earnings. He realized he was unhappy with his full-time work. He decided he was going to focus all of his energy on the Happy PharmD after his wife asked him if he was going to regret spending more time in his full-time pharmacy career in the future. In October 2017, Alex went all in and made the Happy PharmD his main gig.

Alex recently published a book Indispensable: The Prescription for a Fulfilling Pharmacy Career. Indispensable is a guide that is meant to help pharmacists if they are feeling burned out or lost in their careers. The book is broken into four sections which cover the current reality of the pharmacy profession, options of other careers, strategizing your career transition, and indispensable career choices. The book is geared to help pharmacists who want more from their career or lives.

Mentioned on the Show

• Enter the Indispensable Giveaway: Leave an iTunes review and send a screenshot of it to YFP by March 24, 2019
• YFP 038: The Happy PharmD’s Journey to Becoming Debt Free
• YFP 007: Maximizing Your Income
• The Happy PharmD
• Indispensable: The Prescription for a Fulfilling Pharmacy Career by Alex Barker
• Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones for Success by John C. Maxwell
• 5 External Reasons Pharmacists Feel Burned Out, And What They Can Do About It by Alex Barker
• Seth DePasquale’s Pharmacy Inspection Podcast
• Alex Barker – LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Alex, thank you so much for being on the show again.

Alex Barker: Hey, you know I love being here.

Tim Church: I think you’re creating the record for most times on the YFP show with this being No. 3 as you were back on Episode 038 and all the way back in Episode 007. But a lot has changed since those episodes, and just the other day, I was looking at my Skype contacts at work, and it said, “Alex Barker, offline for 194 days.” And I thought to myself, offline as clinical pharmacy specialist, online as entrepreneur.

Alex Barker: Yeah, that’s a good assessment. By the way, call Guinness Book of World Records ‘cause I want to hold that record down, baby.

Tim Church: I don’t know. We might have had a couple people that have been on twice, but I guess I don’t really count since I’m on the team. So I’ve just kind of made appearances here and there. But anyway, for those who don’t know your full career story, can you just talk a little bit about your career path and really how you turned your side hustle into your full hustle?

Alex Barker: Sure. So the very short story is I started off my career, I did a one-year residency, got a job in an am-care setting. And I liked my work, but I wasn’t fully fulfilled by my work and the creativity that I wanted to see happen in my work. So I started things on the side. I sold everything from baby strollers on eBay to making stickers to building websites, doing marketing for small businesses, and lots of other failed projects. And that all culminated into the Happy PharmD, which I launched in January of 2017, where I made it my mission to help pharmacists either start businesses or get into new careers. And now, it is at this recording, Feb. 2019, I’ve been doing that now for two years. And recently left my job as a clinical pharmacy specialist to do that work full-time. So that’s kind of the very short version of it all.

Tim Church: Yeah, so I want to dig into that a little bit, Alex, because for everybody listening, you leaving your full-time, secure, clinical pharmacy specialist job into something in the entrepreneurial space and really taking ownership over your income and providing for your family, I mean, that’s not a small decision to make.

Alex Barker: No, it’s terrifying. I’m still scared.

Tim Church: But I want you to talk about that a little bit. How did you come to that decision to where you say, “You know what? I’m going to do this full-time. I’m going to leave that security blanket that I have in place, even though I have those great benefits, the insurance, the steady, predictable income, and I’m really going to go after the Happy PharmD full-time” in addition to your other projects that you have?

Alex Barker: You know, I think it’s all psychological and fear-based. I don’t think anyone makes a decision until the pain of not making a decision is greater than the reward of just not making the decision or being lazy like I am so often at times. I would say in December of 2016, I had been hustling for about 3-4 years, and I loved it. But I felt like I should have been farther. I felt like I should be doing this kind of stuff all the time, either in a full-time career in academia or I should be a full-time entrepreneur. I was just very unhappy with work, my conditions, I wasn’t doing everything that I wanted to do, I struggled with my teammates. And so I made a very difficult decision, one which I talk about in my book, “Indispensable,” and it was to just focus on one thing – to put everything else aside and say, “OK. I’m going to focus all of my attention and effort on the Happy PharmD and focus on helping as many people as I can.” And that really helped me put all of my energy into one basket to make it so that this thing could be successful and that I could grow a team, and I could hire people who could help me do the same work that I’m doing and kind of multiply myself. And probably the thing that really scared me the most was when I started seeing success with this business, and I said to my wife, “OK, it’s do or die. I think we need to decide, is this what the future of my career is? Or should we — I don’t know — choose something else? Or should I be like full-time worker for the next 10 years, and go with a FIRE path, a Financially Independent Retire Early? Or should I put everything I have into the business?” And she asked me a powerful question. I don’t think I’ve ever shared this story, but she asked me, “Are you going to regret spending more time in the job where you don’t feel really fulfilled or happy at the end of the day with what you do?” And that really stuck with me, and it made me think about where I wanted to go with career and what I wanted to do and the impact. And I thought about academia, I thought about this business. And I finally made the decision to pretend as if my business was my full-time job. Pretend as if it was supplying all of our income needs, and so in like October of 2017, I decided to pretend as if my day job and income did not exist, and we were just pretending as if to live off of our business. That really helped quench my fear because I was paralyzed by the idea of moving full-time into a business. The idea of living off of my business was terrifying to me because, you know, my efforts yielded results. And it was no longer just come to work and get paid, do your job and get money. This business was more like, hey, you’ve got to show up, you have to help people, you have to hustle. And only then will you get paid. Only then will you see results. That was really scary.

Tim Church: So what was the hardest part of the transition? Do you think it was the financial aspects or was it a combination of a couple things?

Alex Barker: Yeah, definitely a combination. But I would say the fear of losing out on money is the greatest thing. Personally, I believe most pharmacists, when thinking about their careers, thinking about transitioning, I think we all struggle with our golden handcuff syndrome. We all feel like we can’t take a pay cut or we can’t, you know, get into something that may be less money in order to feel happier with a job. But I found that when people actually transition into something they enjoy doing, they usually have more freedom, more drive, more desire. And for those that are entrepreneurial, they find that pathway to ultimately create extra income. For me, I was very scared to put myself in a no-way-of-escape situation. You know? Putting myself in the corner and saying, “OK, Alex, hey, listen up. You better hustle. You better perform because if you don’t, you can’t blame yourself or other people” — I’m sorry — “you can’t blame other people for what ends up happening, whatever it is.” I think we as pharmacists, we don’t want things to fail. I think it’s in our blood. We’re trained from the very beginning that if we fail, patients die, someone gets hurt. And if that’s the case, well then that applies to all sorts of other things in our lives. And we, when we try something, we don’t want it to fail. I didn’t want my things to fail because if it failed, that means I am a failure. And so I found myself in years prior like focusing my energy on multiple different projects, different side hustles, different things, different ideas. And because I did that, I ultimately didn’t see a lot of success in one single area or one thing. And I told myself, “Well, you know what, I’m going to try this other thing. I’m going to try this other project or other idea.” Instead of giving it my all, my everything, and giving myself a deadline of if I don’t perform, if I don’t meet this end goal by this deadline, then I will give up. I will try something else because what I did didn’t work. And putting myself on the ropes like that was a lot of pressure, but it definitely helped me overcome fears of failure and fears about money that I had.

Tim Church: How much has failure played a role in your entrepreneurial journey?

Alex Barker: It’s probably part of the job description. If you want to say like “role.” I’m constantly failing. I’m constantly trying new ideas and finding out that they don’t always work. I hire people, and I find out that, hey, they’re not showing up, they’re not doing what I’m asking them to do. And that’s a struggle. I’m also finding out that I suck at a lot of different things. As you know, Tim. You know that I’m not good at my website. I’m not good at marketing or designing things. And relying on other people sometimes is tough because — actually, you and I, Tim, have talked about this with my book. I wanted my book to come out like the summer of last year.

Tim Church: Yeah, I’ve been waiting on that.

Alex Barker: And I haven’t let it come out because I wanted to do a very good job with launching it, with producing it, making sure it’s very high quality, great content, research-based information. And I found that that takes time. I can’t do a crappy job with it, and be proud of what I would create. And so it’s taken time. And that’s — I considered that for awhile a failure, you know? But it’s really just a part of the job, unfortunately. Like you just try things, and if it doesn’t work out, you keep moving.

Tim Church: Yeah, I love the book by John Maxwell called “Failing Forward.” And he has a really powerful quote in there, but he basically says that the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. And I’ve always kind of gone forward with that in mind that that is part of the job. And in order to excel and to get to the next level, you have to almost expect that it’s going to happen. But it’s really about that response and how you’re going to take that in order to move forward, basically.

Alex Barker: Imagine if they taught that in like the pharmacy curriculum. Like.

Tim Church: It’s the antithesis of the pharmacy curriculum, right?

Alex Barker: It has to be somehow included, I suppose in like an entrepreneurial thing. But I’m sure at the time, most students are not interested in that because all they think of entrepreneurism is dependence. But yeah, it’s scary, right? I’m pretty sure he talks about Colonel Sanders in that book, right?

Tim Church: He does. Yeah, it’s a great story because it wasn’t until I think his mid- or late 60’s when he actually got a deal and started becoming big because he kept getting rejection, rejection, rejection.

Alex Barker: Yeah, I think the actual story is he was rejected 1,000 times by people. There may be an additional zero on there, but I think it’s 1,000 times.

Tim Church: Yeah. It’s something like that. It’s a really cool story, so if you haven’t read that book, “Failing Forward,” by John Maxwell, I highly recommend it. One more question for you in terms of your journey, and then I want to talk a little bit about the profession and your book. But how much has being debt-free allowed you and enabled you to make this transition?

Alex Barker: Oh, it’s huge.

Tim Church: I guess the better question is how important has that been?

Alex Barker: Oh, it’s been the thing to set us free. You could argue that — I guess it would just have slowed me down if I did have debt, right? Because our debt payments, my student loans and my house, the major debts we had, you know, it’s a big chunk of money every month, right? So I think by not having them, I could probably predict that we got away from my job earlier than what we did. But because of it, we are immensely free. We own our house, we have no college loans. We can — this summer, Tim, I’m visiting you this summer in a camper van. We’re going around the entire summer and living the van life.

Tim Church: At Disney, right?

Alex Barker: Yeah, actually, we are going to Disney. Yeah. And if it weren’t for being debt-free, I don’t believe we could really do that this soon. So it’s allowing us to live a lot freer with our lifestyle and our money choices.

Tim Church: That’s so cool. And I love your story. You know, and I know you talk about that in the book too is, you know, a lot of people have different mentalities around debt, and it has to do with basically where you see yourself and where you want to position yourself. And you basically came out and said that, you know, you would rather be debt-free now to give yourself more options and opportunities versus staying in a position you didn’t necessarily like but able to maybe retire a little bit earlier than you would otherwise. So that was a pretty cool story that you talked about. And I think that’s what’s so important is it’s not always black-and-white, and it really has to do with your goals and your aspirations and where you’re trying to get to.

Alex Barker: Totally. Yeah. I cannot argue with that.

Tim Church: Well, let’s switch gears a little bit. It’s basically an understatement that there’s a lot of negativity in our profession. Right?

Alex Barker: Yeah.

Tim Church: There’s many pharmacists out there feeling trapped, burned out, stressed out, unfulfilled. What are your thoughts on this in 2019?

Alex Barker: Oh, man. Well…

Tim Church: Keep in mind we only have like 20 or 30 minutes.

Alex Barker: I’ll try to be as brief as I can then. I’ve made it our company’s mission this year to help 500 pharmacists transition into new jobs. And the reason for it is because I’m very passionate about helping pharmacists figure out what they’re great at, where are our — healthcare’s greatest needs, where do we need to put people to fix these problems that we have and people who are curious and are passionate about it? And to put all of this in perspective, I recently wrote an article about I believe it was like four or five things that are stressing pharmacists out or burning them out. And I received an email from a widow of a pharmacist, and I actually put her story in my book. And she shares that unfortunately, her husband died early, I believe in his young 50’s, if I recall correctly. And she was told by another pharmacist that you cannot convince me that work did not kill him. And that has — when she sent that to me, that’s really stuck with me. It kind of emotionally moves me. When I get some hater email or I get discouraged about my work, I often look at this email and think about the people out there who are just like him, who are struggling in their jobs, they’re really not loving it, but they convince themselves to be forced to work in these conditions. And that gets me excited to help them, it gets me a little bit scared about the challenges that are ahead of me to face that problem, but I don’t think anyone should be making six figures and be miserable. I think that’s ridiculous. I really think it’s with the way things are in the market, with the way things are in this world today, I don’t believe there’s any reason why we should be miserable in our jobs. But I think we lie to ourselves often and convince ourselves that no one wants us, I don’t have enough experience, I don’t have any desirable traits or qualities or values, and so because of that, I’m not going to try and I’m just going to be burnt out. I’m going to be miserable in my job, I’m going to go to work, get my paycheck, go home and try to be happy the rest of the time during my life. And I want to fix that. So that’s what I think about burnout and all of that nastiness in our profession.

Tim Church: So over the past year and a half, you’ve been working on your book that’s finally out. And I’m really excited because I was privy to some of the initial work and behind-the-scenes work and got the audio author’s cut early. So big announcement: It’s finally out. “Indispensable: The Prescription for a Fulfilling Pharmacy Career.” Alex, how does it feel to be done with this?

Alex Barker: Hot dog. It feels good. Some crazy stats on this that a close friend of mine let me know. 81% of people, Americans, want to write a book. Less than 1% actually do. And of the 1% that do, 30% actually publish it. So it’s crazy hard. It is not easy to write and publish a book. I did not think it would take me like 17 months to do this, but we’re finally here. It’s ready, I put a lot of time, energy, tears — no blood, but plenty of sweat, and I’m very excited to get this in the hands of people.

Tim Church: I’m really excited for you because it definitely packs a ton of value. And I’m not just saying that because I’m an Alex Barker fan or we’re friends or colleagues. But it actually is just jam-packed with so much great content. So besides drones delivering pad thai, becoming a guitar master, your poor Jenga skills in Dungeons and Dragons, what is this book all about?

Alex Barker: You’ve read the book. I love pad thai. This book is something that I wish I had when I was first entering the profession. It’s a book, it’s a guide, meant to help you if you feel like you’re burned out, to help you understand what your problem is with your career and how to fix it, how to solve it, to go about it in a sustainable way that leads you towards an indispensable career. Most pharmacists that I’ve spoken to in the last two years feel dispensable. No one’s ever said that to me, but that’s how they feel. They’re worried about being let go. They’re not fulfilled by their work. They feel like a new grad could come in and replace them totally, and they wouldn’t care. And that, to me, is a crime that I guess no real one person is guilty of. But in order to create something that’s fulfilling, you’ve got to find out what makes you indispensable. And I guess you’ve got to read the book to find out what that is. Wow, I didn’t think that would come out of me.

Tim Church: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, it’s broken down into four different sections, right?

Alex Barker: Mhm.

Tim Church: So can you just briefly break those down in terms of what you have in those different sections?

Alex Barker: Yes. I totally can, Tim. Perfect memory. Tell you all of the parts of my book. So Part One is all about looking at your current reality in the pharmacy career and seeing the different problems that we’re facing, whether it’s the current job market, whether you’re struggling with burnout and what your options are. And Part Two dives more into that, into your options and discovering the where and how you can make the change, whether it’s a new field in pharmacy or even out of the profession. On a side note, we work with a lot of different pharmacists. The vast majority of them, we help move into just a new field of pharmacy. But some do transition completely out of pharmacy. We’ve helped people get into real estate, financing, insurance, financial advising, internet marketing, all sorts of stuff. So it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t have to be pharmacy, if that’s where you think you’re at. Part Three dives into the messy middle and strategizing your way into your career transition. And finally, Part Four is all about making indispensable choices with your career, choosing to focus on relationships and creating value.

Tim Church: There it is. All the sections. I want to talk a little bit about one of those where you discuss this idea of passion and work and a lot of the misconceptions behind that. Could you give the audience just a little sample?

Alex Barker: So I think a lot of people feel like they like their job, they want to help people, but they just don’t know what their passion is or what they’re passionate about. I, when I was a little kid, I was passionate about Legos and WE wrestling, and I was into comedy and making videos. But the thing that’s always been true about passions is that passions change. And I think I share a story about a fellow podcaster, Seth DePascal, and his journey about getting into retail and hospital and eventually, finding his passion in compounding. And he never knew he was passionate about compounding. He never thought a day in his life about compounding as a career path. But really, what he found is that following his passion first would have never come for him should he choose that path. And I think I also reference a story about Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, if he would have followed his passion, he would be like a Zen master out in China. He wouldn’t be leading Apple. He would be teaching people how to achieve Zen. So following passion isn’t exactly the thing to do first when figuring out your career. Passion is a good thing, but it’s usually developed over time. You get more interested in it. For example, I’ll give you a great example. So in my own pursuit of choosing the Happy PharmD, I’ve become crazy interested in labor economics. Sounds super boring, right, Tim?
Tim Church: It does.

Alex Barker: Yeah. You don’t have to lie. It is super boring to anyone else, but I’m amazingly interested in it because it’s revealing all sorts of economical truths about our job market. It’s really opened my eyes to things that most people aren’t talking about. And I’m able to on my blog. In the same way, what I propose we do is follow our curiosities and interests in pharmacy. And if you don’t know what those are, well, it’s time to ask yourself some questions and force yourself to get re-interested into pharmacy. Can I share a quick story?

Tim Church: Yeah, go for it.

Alex Barker: So I’m working with this guy named James. He’s out of St. Louis. And he was struggling in his career. He wasn’t enjoying his work, he was working in an institution, hospital pharmacy, and we were working together, trying to figure out, OK, well, what is next? And we ruled out all of the things that he was good at and different career paths. And then we came on an interesting idea. And he said, “You know, if I could quit my job and didn’t have to work at all, I would probably go volunteer for some sort of opioid treatment center or something that deals with the opioid crisis.” And that has led him down a very interesting path where he’s now very involved in different opioid committees in the local region. But he’s also now more involved in his work doing opioid-type work and committee work and different processes and creating policies. And his work now has become a lot more interesting to him, and he’s actually getting — well, depending on when this is released, I would be able to say, you know, I think he’s actually in talks with other people now to join either a new company or new projects or new things that involve straight-up opioids. So the point is sometimes, we just have to get curious or go back to when we were first in pharmacy school and think about, well, what were the things that really made me curious or I wanted to learn more about to inform a decision now about where you want to take your career next.

Tim Church: Yeah, I really like that concept because I think that’s probably where a lot of people even will transition out of pharmacy because that curiosity they have into even other types of work that provides value in the marketplace. And you talk a lot about that in that particular section, which is really cool. So Alex, who do you think this book is meant for? Is it for everybody in the pharmacy profession? Specific groups?

Alex Barker: Not at all. No. This is definitely not for everyone because some people have great, indispensable careers. They’re already probably doing many of the things that I recommend. I’m sure that the book would be a great supplement, maybe some new ideas about how they could achieve more with what they want with their career, but this book is really for the pharmacist who wants more from their career or their lives. It’s for the person who says, “You know, this job is OK. But I’m not doing everything that I think I was meant to do with my career or my job. It’s for the pharmacist who says things like, you know, it’s just a j-o-b. It’s just a job. Or if they feel burnt out. I didn’t write it for the elite. I didn’t want to write it to them. I wanted to write it to, truthfully, me when I was burnt out, when I was feeling stressed out about my job. And I was worried about what I was doing with my career and where I would end up. I was very scared a long time ago. And I wrote it to me and to the same people who are struggling with that same dilemma with their career and wondering, did I make a right choice pursuing this? Those are scary thoughts that you can’t really voice online. Like you can’t post something like that on LinkedIn or on Facebook and say, I don’t know what I’m doing. You can really only say it to maybe your close colleagues that you work with because everyone else feels the same way. Or you can say it to someone in passing at a party and just say, “I just don’t like what I do. I do not –” and you hear this all the time. And when I tell people what I do outside of pharmacy circles, they usually tell me, “Oh yeah, I know a pharmacist. They don’t seem happy.” Which is not good. I mean, that’s not good that that’s the default for our profession, right? Not at all. Yeah, I think we have a branding problem honestly. I mean, everyone that — the face of pharmacy right now is retail and community. And you know, if you — I challenge anyone to like go into a random retail store and just look at the faces of people. I do this often, actually. I’ll just go in and check things out and see how people are doing behind the counter. And they look stressed. They look rushed. Every once in awhile, I’ll see a smile, which is encouraging to me. You know? And I don’t want to make it seem like certain fields of pharmacy are always bad. It’s totally not true. There’s lots of happy people with fulfilling careers in every practice, I think, even retail, even corporate.And that’s great. They should be there. We need those people there. But a lot of people are mismatched. They’re not placed in the right position to really thrive, and their lives and their stress are usually evidence of that.

Tim Church: So what would you say, Alex, what’s the one thing that you want people to walk away with after they’ve read the book?

Alex Barker: Oh, man. Take action, baby. Hot dog. If you read this book, and you don’t take any different action, then like I would feel bad. I would want to refund you if you bought the book. You’ve got to take a different action. Everyone’s heard this now, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s time to do things differently. It’s time to not just be applying to jobs on job boards because you’re competing with dozens of other pharmacists who likely look better than you on paper. It’s time to do something different, get more involved with your associations to take action to do something different because — what’s the phrase? What got you here won’t get you there. So even if, you know, you don’t read my book, that’s fine. What I want you to come away with, even from this podcast, is that, you know, you’ve got to create value for others. You’ve got to build relationships. And to create an indispensable career, that means you’ve got to take some proactive action, my friend.

Tim Church: So Alex, where did the inspiration come from to write this book?

Alex Barker: The pharmacists I work with. The people, when we first talk like over the phone and we’re trying to figure out their careers, a thing I often hear all the time is that I’ve got too many negatives going for me. I don’t have a PharmD. I don’t have any experience outside of community. I haven’t done anything great with my career. And they have all these excuses, and I’ve worked with people who have thought that they would never be hired by the companies that they were hired by. And seeing that transformation, seeing people go through that process and being confident in their ability to really perform at the highest level of pharmacy, that has been my inspiration for writing the book, for doing a lot of the work with clients, and truthfully, hiring more people to help with this process because if I’m going to help 500 people, I can’t do it alone. I’ve got to get other people on this train.

Tim Church: That’s awesome. I know that you’ve shared a lot of these stories within the book, which are really cool to see how you’ve helped with those transformations of people who are really struggling, really feeling that stress that you were once in. So I think that’s a really cool story. Another cool story is the charity aspect behind the book. And I was hoping that you would share a little bit about that.

Alex Barker: Yeah. So one of the things I decided about halfway through this process is that I wanted to use 100% of the profits of this book to go straight to charity. And there’s one charity that I’m very passionate about, and it’s helping families fund adoptions. I’m wanting to raise hopefully $30,000 this year, 2019, to give to a family to afford adoption. I share a little bit of my own story in the book, but I’ve been profoundly affected by adoption. My dad, the man who I call Dad is not really my true father. He’s my stepdad. But because of him, him coming into my life and taking me as my own son, has — I wouldn’t be on this podcast if it wasn’t for him, for him showing me what it means to be a man, what it means to be a loving husband and a great father. And that really moves me to want to help other families afford adoption, which is stupid how much it costs. $30,000, are you kidding me? No one can afford something like that. And so I want to help families be able to do that because the average adoption right now costs $30,000. And so all of the proceeds of this book are going to go straight to this fund. And from actually here on forward, every year, I plan on donating continuously to families to adopt children who are not wanted. And that, to me, like that’s the legacy, I hope, of this business is to bring families whole. That’s something I’m very proud about.

Tim Church: Such a cool story, Alex. And I appreciate you sharing that. So I highly recommend that you go out there and you get the book, “Indispensable: The Prescription for a Fulfilling Pharmacy Career,” especially if you’re someone that feels stressed or burned out and want to explore other strategies and opportunities. You can get the book on Amazon as an audiobook, paperback or a hard cover. Alex, what’s the best way for someone to reach out to you if they want to learn more about you and what you do?

Alex Barker: Best place is The Happy PharmD, that’s my home base, where I live. We’ve got lots of great information on there about career development, how to grow your career, how to get into a new job, job transitions. And we have lots of resources and some other courses on there. We also have a free training webinar on there about how pharmacists can transition into a new career path. So I highly recommend you check it out. And alternatively, you can also shoot me a message on LinkedIn.

Tim Church: Alex, thanks again for coming on the show, talking about your book and sharing your story.

Alex Barker: Thanks for having me, Tim. I had a blast.

Tim Church: Hey guys, just a reminder: If you want to get your free copy of “Indispensable,” just write us an honest review in iTunes for the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. And then send us a screenshot to [email protected]. And do that by Sunday, March 24 for your chance to win.

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