Reinvigorating Retail | Dave Wendland, VP Strategic Relations, Hamacher Resource Group (HRG)

Mike Koelzer, Host: [00:00:00] You're listening to the business of pharmacy podcast with me, your host, Mike Keer

David, for those who haven't come across you online, introduce yourself and tell our listeners what we're talking about today. 

Dave Wendland: I'm Dave Wendland vice president strategic relations at Hamacher Resource Group, and I've spent nearly 30 years with HRG. And during that time, I've uncovered things, Mike, that I'd like to have as a focus of our conversation today.

One is innovation. A second area is positioning and branding. And then lastly, the blocking and tackling of today's new retail. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: When you talk about innovation, a lot of times people. Oh, I'm just not getting ideas. You know, ideas just don't come to me. But from the people that I've kind of studied, whether it's musicians or writers or artists or whatever, it seems like they don't set up innovation as chance, like, oh, nothing pops into my head.

It's more like they put themselves in the position to get ideas and to be innovative. Do you agree with that? 

Dave Wendland: It's funny. You'd ask Mike because without knowing my background and as well as perhaps I own, I know my own, I spent a few years doing improv comedy. And what was interesting during my improvisational comedy year, years is oftentimes we'd attract new people who were interested and their response.

Mike was usually, I'm not funny. I can't think on my feet, I'm not quick enough to be an improv. And we put them into a situation. And so let's just pretend you're standing at the top of the grand canyon and the person next to you starts to slip. What's your reaction? And it's amazing how quickly people think on their feet.

Yeah. Right. So we overcame that, you know, the key to creativity is not to walk in with a preconceived notion that you're gonna have a great idea or that innovation is this science that's mystical. But rather as Yogi Bera once said, you can learn a lot by looking around. All you need to do is stop.

Look across the landscape and believe me some idea, some reference point, some trigger point is gonna jump out at you. And you're gonna say, that's what I've been waiting for. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: It sounds like you have to put your mind in that position. Not so much what you're doing, but. Open, 

Dave Wendland: Perhaps there are those Mikes that are more purists, right?

I'm a very practical person. And I figure that everybody innately has creativity. They just haven't flexed their muscles yet. So when I talk to pharmacists as an example, and I ask them about their daily routine and you've probably done it through your career as. They sound very similar. I get up in the morning.

I drive to work. I opened the pharmacy. I walk in the back door. I look at my fax machine or my incoming messages. I started filling prescriptions. The rest of my team comes, I start making calls and ad nauseam. It sounds like they're doing it in their sleep. So I generally challenge those people and I say, okay, tomorrow morning, when you drive into the, to the Pharmac.

I want you to go a different direction. I want you to take a different road. I want you to walk in the front door of your store instead of the back door. I want you to walk the aisle of Coff and cold instead of the aisle of oxycodone and see what it's like through the lens of somebody who walked in your store for the very first time.

And it's amazing what happens when you go in with a different mindset. It isn't to my earlier point, Mike, it isn't about. Science and theory, as much as it is putting yourself in a position to see things differently. That to me is the essence of creativity. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Dave, I'm giving you permission. I'm a pharmacist here.

And so you can nail us here as a whole, our pharmacist, not creative. And why do we have to be creative double's advocates? It's like. Do this to be creative. I did this to learn these drugs and these directions and these dosages. Why am I in the position to have to be creative? What's the reason why we have to be creative?

Dave Wendland: I think any business owner has to be creative. Now, if you're a pharmacist and your job is to punch in in the morning and punch out at the end of the day, someone else is responsible for that. The development and the care of [00:05:00] your business, and you are really, your primary role is filling prescriptions and taking care of lives through the prescription department.

Then maybe you're right. Maybe creativity is not a requirement or requisite. However, for those pharmacists that want to also be business owners who also want to have a thriving business, Who also wanna attract, retain, and skill, the individuals who work with and for them, they better be creative because the moment they become numb to creativity is when the competition will overcome them and their business will falter.

Mike Koelzer, Host: I know that. Every pharmacist, even the one that you mentioned that said, maybe doesn't have to be, I think you and I both agree that the days are done. An individual even has to be creative. There's no such way anymore. Just to go in and put your nose down. That's gonna last for like three to five years or something like that, till something changes or less or less.

And then you're out, 

Dave Wendland: there is no such thing as an absolute in my world. I mean, there's nobody, who's absolutely not interested in being creative or hasn't exercised that creative muscle at all. Nor is there somebody that's, you know, cut from the cloth of every day. They're coming up with a million ideas.

And we all come up with ideas. The key to that is how you implement them, but I'll give you a case and point of another great example of creativity that has nothing to do with quote, unquote idea generation, but it's creative communication. And how often does a patient walk over and present to the pharmacist in a way that requires a different set of skills to respond than the previous.

Almost every time because we're all individuals. So what skill does the pharmacist need to interact with each and every patient's creativity, what do they also need? Communication skills. And then lastly, they need an eye toward where they really want to go? Right. Um, nobody can get to a destination if they don't have an idea what that end goal looks like.

And most pharmacists I speak to, they. Less likely that their children are going to get involved in the business anymore than years ago when I started 30 years ago, that was the norm today. It's the exception. It definitely is not the rule. Um, many pharmacists are not interested in selling to a chain or to a larger entity, and they're looking to attract some other buyer.

Well, what kind of a business do they need to attract a future owner? It better be a vibrant business. It better be a creative business. It better be a business on the leaning edge of where the future is not living in the past. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I was thinking about that. I was walking the other day up by my cottage.

I was telling my wife, I said, boy, with a thousand dollars on that house. I'm not gonna do it. but with a thousand dollars, if someone put a little paint in there, you know, and cut the lawn and put up new shutters and things like that, I said, you could sell it for a lot more. Well, then I got thinking to myself, I said maybe though it would sell better by.

Still having some of that potential there, because then you get someone like me who might say, Hey, this is probably underpriced, even though it probably isn't, I would say it's probably underpriced cause nobody else wants it. So I'm gonna buy it. I'm gonna jump on it. I'm gonna put that thousand bucks in there and make it great.

So it's an interesting point in my head though, about, would my pharmacy be more valuable by having potential and someone saying, well, Let's buy Mike's place. Let's get his lazy ass out of there. He made money, but let's go in and innovate and do this. The point just makes me wonder if the potential is better than actually me doing something already?

I just 

Dave Wendland: I'm wondering if it's a great topic, Mike. I mean, we could go on for hours about how you, how do you portray the potentiality of a business? You know, let's just use the home example for a moment and, and drive that one home a little bit. So, if you wanted to sell that property, but it had potential, you still would probably wanna mow the lawn.

Right. So it's got some curb appeal enough for someone to look correct. You probably would not want layers of dust all over the place because that kind of distracts the person from the potential, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: right? Yes. They don't even wanna look at it or go 

Dave Wendland: in. Correct. So. Basics that have to be in place for that house [00:10:00] to be a palatable purchase for somebody else.

Now what I would recommend, and I, I just thought of this now, like we said, ideas come at the weirdest moments. Yeah. With technology today, the owner of that home, if they wanted to sell it through virtual reality or augmented reality. Yeah. Could have somebody stand outside it and say, I wonder what that would look like if it.

Painted beige and they could click a button and it would paint it. Oh my goodness. The value just went through the roof. Yeah. So the same could be done with a pharmacy. You know, these are services that I haven't implemented yet, but I have done the work. If you wanted to carve out this area of my pharmacy and make it an optical center.

Mm-hmm , I've had an architect draw it up. Here's what it would look like. That would be kind of interesting to a potential buyer, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: you know, which brings up Dave. It seems like I heard more about this, like five years ago about people saying I had that idea, you know, I had that idea about delivering products through drones and now Amazon's doing it, but I had that idea first and I think everybody now, or anybody who.

On the internet at all, realizes that ideas are really a dime a dozen. I mean, everybody has ideas. And so it's the implementation of those. That is key. 

Dave Wendland: It's two things, Mike, it's the implementation. And I'm gonna start with one step before that it was the adaptation of an existing idea. Original ideas are hard to come by.

Original ideas are hard to come by because there are so many other types of industries that you could draw from. However, the implementation and the adaptation for pharmacy creates it as an original idea for that class of trade mm-hmm . So I used to always think that donut holes at dunkin donuts were a fabulous idea, right?

It's a small circle. . So what industry took a page right out of the Duncan donut hole page and created bagel bites. It's the center of bagels, theoretically, uh, or it's the, the cup cupcake top as they had on Seinfeld. So there's a lot of different ways to take a pre-existing idea and adapt it to an industry.

You know, you, you talked about delivery sort of as your placeholder and drone delivery. the other important thing about an innovation or about an idea, especially if it's originally adapted the very first types of pharmacies that delivered to patients for independent pharmacies, small community pharmacies in the neighborhood that said, Mrs.

Jones, I'm gonna take this over and have it delivered to you. It even is wonderful. 1934 movie. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Well, that's how I treat my delivery guys. you gotta, w 'em upside the head and bloody their ears. If they don't get something there on time. Now there's an idea for 

Dave Wendland: you. That's an idea. The challenge that the independence had was, you know, they kept out a secret and, and they told their patient base, but they never really broadcast it.

And so the chains had a brilliant idea. They said, Hey, we're gonna start delivery and we're gonna charge for it. And they promoted the living daylights out of. Pretty soon, everybody forgot that the independent was doing it free. So think about all of the early adapted ideas that took place. Med medication synchronization really was born in independent pharmacy, um, community outreach to include physicians as part of the ecosystem in the neighborhood began with independent Pharmacy.

Support of the local little league or the Kawanis or other groups within the community was born in independent pharmacies. Let's not lose all of those too. We unfortunately leveled the playing field with, uh, with delivery, but I think there's a number of other advantages that can be solely owned and solely promoted and differentiated for independent pharmacy.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Your point is well taken on ideas. And I heard that before, cuz I was always sort of, I haven't ran with hardly any of my ideas, but I was always kind of proud in my ideas saying, well for the example, if I was a bagel shop, I might say that's not a very good idea because I didn't think of it, the bagel, but you know, some other industry thought of it.

But I forget who said it, it was some smart person in addition to the smart person I'm talking to right now. But it was some smart person that said that ideas were taken from others. Areas and brought into your own industry are great ideas. In fact, in this [00:15:00] 5 billion year old earth, what hasn't really been thought of or done, but if you can mold it to your industry, that's intelligence, 

Dave Wendland: it truly is because you're, you're going to, again, that's that adaptation.

You're not going to take it exactly as it is for another industry. You've gotta make some changes too. You've gotta put some fresh look on it. You've gotta put some fresh window dressing and then you gotta tell people about it. And that becomes part of the message. And I'm very bullish Mike, on pharmacists that have room to improve their messaging, have room to improve their essence of why they're in business and why they care so deeply about the community they serve and not enough pharmacists.

Communicating that with the kind of pride that perhaps they should be, although humility is super important as a business owner, you also have to believe in what you do and tell people why and how you do it. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Let's take that example, Dave, about delivery. And I was kind of in the same boat for years, you know, it's like, you might wanna promote your delivery, but you know that it's probably.

More expensive to do it. So you don't really want to promote it. You kind of want it as like the ACE in your pocket in case it's needed to not lose somebody to a competitor, but you didn't know how much profit it was making for you and so on. And then in the meantime, the chains come by and then of course all these new boutique apps and stuff that that's their whole thing delivery.

Why did pharmacists? Let that messaging go by and maybe it wasn't intentional. Maybe it was just, I don't wanna say laziness, but maybe it was just like, oh yeah, we do that. But just not thinking of it, you know, I don't know. 

Dave Wendland: I think that pharmacists thought that it was a convenience for patients and B, it was kind of a nice thing to offer to those kind of, as you said, Mike, keep it kind of as the ACE in the hole.

It's not something I'm gonna put on the middle of my, my door and my sign that says I deliver, I'm not gonna have a flashy vehicle that says I deliver because I don't want to get robbed. But at the end of the day, I wanna offer it as a service. Yeah. And service is important. It's just that as the. Essence of shoppers began to change and they became less likely to walk into your pharmacy.

Or the competition began to heat up with delivery or other industries began to offer delivery. Let's think about the pizza industry dominoes made a fortune with their 10 minute delivery rule or whatever it was. 30 minute delivery. and overtook a lot of the pizza industry at that time and carved out a little niche. Pizza hot had to play ketchup for that.

So as things like pizza delivery, restaurant delivery in general, dog food delivery, um, salt for your so, uh, your water softener from Culligan began to become in Vogue. That would've been a perfect time for pharmacists to have started to promote the. That they're in the delivery business too, but many did not for fear, maybe it was a profitability message to your point, Mike, maybe it was a staffing message that I don't have enough drivers.

What if everybody wants it? And some of it was an expectation that only if people came into the pharmacy, would they truly get a quality service, let alone be able to sell them one more thing. um, that all changed in and in today's world. I, I believe if a pharmacist is offering a pharmacy is offering delivery.

That delivery individual may be the only interaction that that patient has with the pharmacy. And I often encourage pharmacists to go on a ride along with that person. Let's make sure that that delivery person is representing the pharmacy the way you want it represented. And please let those patients at home realize that you as a pharmacist, owner care deeply about them.

So I would put your best person in the delivery role. I would just, as I've often said in stores that are moving to self checkout in the grocery realm, and there isn't a soul to be found, right? Put your best customer ambassador there, pay them rich. To make sure that the impression of that store and the quality of that experience is lost by the fact that [00:20:00] they had no one to interact with, put your best personnel in front.

Mike Koelzer, Host: The listeners can sit here, like maybe I do, or I have and said, oh, we miss that delivery thing. It's like, We could have done it. And then all these other places came in and did it. And all these apps are doing it now, but we've missed it. It's like, well, no, you haven't necessarily missed it. I mean, there's room there still there's room for, you mentioned it, you know, with Tom Monahan, with dominoes, there's still room for a, our delivery or delivered.

I don't know, delivered. And the drivers got a monitor that they hold up to. Patient at their door. And the pharmacist says to them, hello, Mrs. Smith, do you have any questions today? Hope you're having a good day. You know, whatever. There's a lot out there still. It's easy to sit there and just complain and bitch and say, well, that's another thing that's gone for me.

It's like, well, no, it's not, but you gotta be innovative. You gotta think, and you gotta put it into action. 

Dave Wendland: It all goes back to that, adapting from another industry. And I love your idea of having a virtual chat with a Pharmac. On a digital pad. When the driver is delivering the prescription, let's bring that pharmacist along with them virtually, uh, let's do a prescription review with that patient in, at their home using their smartphone.

Show us what's in your medicine cabinet. Let us help you decide what you should be taking with that medication. Cuz that's the challenge. We don't know what's in these people's homes unless we're in these people's. So let's use technology. So those are simple ideas to implement Mike and they are adaptive ideas that bring real creativity to the profession.

Mike Koelzer, Host: What's the best way a pharmacist can look outside their industry. Is it just a desire as you have Dave to be open and so on? Is there anything that they can kind of force themself to do to look at other industries? Is it just. Reading Forbes or something and coming across your articles in there, or how are they picking up this other industry knowledge?

Dave Wendland: There's an endless fountain of people, places, and, and things that pharmacists can do. And you gotta go into retail and you gotta look at all of it. It's not just retail pharmacies. Don't just go to Walgreens and CVS to see what a pharmacy does. go to dollar general, go to the seven 11 or the yes. Why go to Macy's, go to Dunkin donuts and say, what do they do?

I sometimes take things out, and again, it sounds like I'm using all the food. Maybe I'm hungry. But why does Baskins 31 flavors list? Their 31 flavors on a big billboard. When somebody could look in the ice cabinet and see what flavors they had. Because of that menu, it allows an individual to read it at a distance without getting too close to the service.

Right. So why doesn't a pharmacist have a list of their services if they do medication flavoring, if they do medication synchronization, if they do home healthcare fittings, why isn't there a menu board that says these are the services we. so that when the patient walks forward, they say, yeah, I had like a little dope, a scoop of that and a scoop of that.

Yeah. So get into retail and then read and listen to podcasts like yours. Mike, there's always great ideas and they're coming, there's almost too much to consume, so be selective, but don't limit yourself to just those publications that speak to pharmacy. Remember. Business owners are entrepreneurs. So reading ink magazines, reading Forbes magazines, and reading fortune books might be perfect for your business.

Um, so I look at all of those things. It helps to identify trends. It helps to identify ideas of how to keep your employees. It helps to bring forward. Thoughts about changes, incremental changes that could be made. That could be tremendous breakthrough innovations. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: What's the next step? After these ideas that pharmacists, maybe aren't 

Dave Wendland: One of the hesitancy that business owners in general have is this fear of change that the status quo is working.

Good enough. Why do I wanna rock them? The second factor that limits people's I idea implementation is fear of investment. The third is fear of time. [00:25:00] I don't have time to do it. I'm busy. How do you maximize 24 hours in a day, multitask, purposefully, and intentionally, and then eliminate those things in your life that are just time.

Suck. And there's plenty of 'em. If there's something more important to be done, do it first. There'll always be time to do the junk. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: I've done that. And probably to a fault where I maybe get a little bit anxious if I don't get it done early, but you don't know what's gonna happen in the day, you know, with your family, some medical emergency or business emergency or something like that.

So, The earlier the better. And then at the end of your day, you have time to then work on more projects and things like that. 

Dave Wendland: We can always put it off, but if it can be done, we better do it. Now do it today. Do it efficiently. Get ready to rock because we don't know if tomorrow's another pandemic and we have to close our doors again, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: that whole other topic about the pandemic.

I think one thing that really hurt was people don't know the future. It's gonna make people think about it. What to invest in, do I invest in a bowling alley that can be closed down? Do I invest in a restaurant that we can close down? You know, it's gonna be interesting where that all goes. 

Dave Wendland: I, I, there will be a lot of lessons that come out of this pandemic.

Mike Koelzer, Host: It's gonna be an interesting study for the next, you know, forever 

Dave Wendland: well beyond our lifetimes, unfortunately, and it won't be the last pandemic and it, it wasn't the. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Someone told me one time thinking about worrying about stuff. They said, don't worry so much about things because what you really should be worrying about is something that's gonna hit you outta the blue next Tuesday at 4: 37 in the afternoon, the news that's gonna come is horrific news.

You just don't know what it is, but we worry about things we can control. But COVID, my listeners have heard that. I mean, two years ago, my business because of this. PBM structure and so on. I mean, I was about ready to lock my doors and then who would've thought that someone would say, oh, guess what, Mike, a pandemic is gonna come.

You're gonna lose two thirds of your staff, but with some of the government handouts, which you've never taken before in your whole life, that's gonna swoop in, give you enough money to decide, to get rid of all your brand name. Prescription products in your store to come through, to pay off this loan and to end up where you are today.

And I'm like, just, I'm not gonna think about that one. The point is you just don't know what's gonna happen. Just hang in there and keep innovating and keep changing and keep going, because you just don't know at 

Dave Wendland: the root of all of that. Mike is this tremendous commitment. Every pharmacist I have ever met in my 30 years in the business and actually.

I've been in this business from the time I was a child, as I said, my father was in the drug wholesale business. So, the heroes at the table, we used to talk about the people that he used to go to the green bay packer games with were pharmacists. So I heard great pharmacy stories. However, at the root of all of those pharmacy stories is this pharmacist who went through the process.

For a particular reason for a particular desire to help others for a particular outcome that was far bigger than themselves. And yet I open up websites or Facebook pages, and I read the about us section of so many and they're boring. There's no excitement. There's no threat of personality to. I challenge every one of your listeners to go back and reread your about us on your website.

And if it says, we opened our doors in 1966 and we have a brick and mortar and we've been part of the community, that's all well, and good. That could be there, but please add something to it about why you personally are in the profession, because that's your differentiator. That's your message. Who you are and why you're in the business and why you're in the field of pharmacy is far more important than the brick and mortar around 

Mike Koelzer, Host: you.

I think a lot of pharmacists fall into this. I was way too close to my message. Way too close to thinking this the whole time. So I hired some guy and it sounds silly, but I just gave him all the stuff that I usually talk about. They spit it back to me in kind of a paragraph of, kind of the, about us, which you were talking about.

And it's like, They threw a little bit of that love in there. A little bit of the warmth and things like that. And it's like, yeah, I told him that I sent him that, but I [00:30:00] never would've put that into my stuff because I'm too close to it. So it helps to hear that from you, Dave, and from others that there's a differentiation there that's different than just brick and mortar.

Dave Wendland: That's a great story. And I think it's important that what you're describing is a transactional description versus an emotional grab. Right? If you wanna grab a patient emotionally, you're not gonna do it with your products. You're not gonna do it with your building. You're not going to do it with your hours of operation.

You're going to do it with feelings and feelings are tough to communicate But that's what creates loyalty. That's what creates that differentiation that nobody else can deliver. What you personally can deliver. Nobody can do for your patients, what you personally can do for them and for their lives. Anybody can deliver.

Mike Koelzer, Host: In looking at a lot of your information that you put out over the months and years on LinkedIn, you seem to have a real love for branding for that messaging, what a brand encapsulates and delivers. And I imagine. Your love for that has less to do with, we're gonna give the best brand to show exactly what's in this box.

And instead your brand is encapsulating a feeling that's inside that box. Well 

Dave Wendland: put, and it actually takes me back to before I joined the hallmark of organization in 92. I was living out in California and I had two passions in California. One we've spent some time on already. I was running an improv comedy group.

I was very passionate about that. It was tremendously, um, energizing to be able to have a group of part-time improvisational non-traditional actors, if you will. Portraying something for audiences. It was a thrill ride to say the least. The second part of my business was helping small software manufacturers at the time, develop their brand positioning concept and go to market strategy.

And one of the things I both figuratively and actually did was meet with some of these CEOs who had created a tremendous software application. There, it was sitting on their desk in a pretty little box that said, this will help you type faster, or here's your spreadsheet, software here's whatever it is.

And I would generally say to the CEO, I want you to stand on your chair or look from across the room at that box. And tell me why anybody should buy it. It's amazing when they started to describe it from a different perspective, rather than sitting in their chair, looking at their child, they had created looking from across the room.

They began to describe it, not so much by its utility, but by its essence. And the essence of a product is what does it stand for? What is going on? How is it going to benefit somebody? It really answers the question. Why is it important? I, to challenge pharmacists, do the same. Stand at your pharmacy. As you enter your store, look across your pharmacy and ask yourself a couple of questions.

What does it portray? Does it emanate health and wellness, or does it say you sell Mylar bloom? Walk down the center aisle on the way to the pharmacy and ask yourself, is it clean? Is it the kind of place I would trust buying a lifesaving drug? And if there's any question mark around that your essence is lost.

And then thirdly, stand at that pharmacy counter and turn around 180 degrees, just like a patient does. And what do you observe? If it doesn't say I care about you. I care about your wellbeing. I want you to come back and visit me and be one of my loyalists. Then you're missing the boat. And that is the essence of the brand that the pharmacist needs to communicate and to support from the moment somebody crosses that T.

One 

Mike Koelzer, Host: question that I ask myself often and I tell my staff to answer this, what would I do in a pharmacy across the street to put myself out of business? You know, it's one [00:35:00] level higher than just saying, well, we're family owned and we're not corporate. We're not chained. We're not this it's like, all right.

Yeah. But I'm saying, what would you do to get a family owned? Longstanding business out of business. You know, like we talked earlier about taking all of the tips for tats, take all of that out of the equation. Let's say that the pharmacy across the street has exactly what you have. Now. All you can talk about is non tangibles.

Dave Wendland: A story about bear aspirin many years ago. And one of these family owned pharmacies, Mike was on the corner. and across the street, a shiny new competitor opened up and put a sign out front and said, I'll sell bear aspir for $79. Well, the independent family owned it, charging a dollar 99.

So the first thing he did is he reduced his rate to dollar 79, took a hit on profit and said, mine's a dollar 79. Also the guy across the street says I'll sell it to you for a. The pharmacist says I can't do that. All these customers started walking in the door saying, I wanna buy bear aspirin for a buck. The pharmacist said, I'm sorry, I can't, I'd be outta business.

If I sold it for a buck, why don't you buy it across the street? And they said we would, but they're going out of business and they don't have any. So you can't put a price on a product. That's never smart. You can't be the low price leader and still provide service. But what you can do is offer something unique.

So maybe along with that aspirin, what if that individual said, I'm also going to have you take a moment and sit in this massage chair and take the stress out of the back of your neck. And I'm gonna give you 10 minutes in that chair at no cost. While I package this up for you. And here's a, here's a list of our current specials on all of our other personal care items that you may wanna have, but now you've delivered the product, but you've coupled it with a service that nobody else offers.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Is it because of necessity or your background, do you enjoy the business to consumer marketing slash branding slash thought pattern more than business to business? Or do you love that messaging across the board? And maybe we see it more as business to consumer because that's where in Ker. People come across you more.

Dave Wendland: It's a little of both. I, we are all consumers, Mike, we are all triggered by the same hierarchy of needs, whether we're buying office supplies for our business or whether we're buying, uh, post-it notes for our grocery list, we are all consuming. So I don't know that there's a huge difference. My passion is helping business owners be successful.

Because I believe there's a great need in the market for smart business owners, for entrepreneurs who understand the business side of their operation. And it is, you know, basic marketing suggests there's four P's I'm gonna add a fifth, but there's four PS. There's the product. There's the placement.

There's the pricing. There's the promotion, but also there's the personality. And I, I like to bring out the best in people's personalities because the other four to our earlier conversation, those are tangibles. I like to focus on the intangible that helps a business person be as successful as they can.

So I'm much more attuned to the business, to the business side. Even though I talk about branding, I will work with manufacturers who are coming out with a product that's going to appeal to a patient with arthritis. Absolutely. I'll help them develop their messaging and their packaging, their go to market strategy.

But at the end of the day, I'm also interested if a retailer or retail pharmacy puts that product on the shelf, that they'll make a good business decision. By putting that on the shelf, it will actually not just sit there, but someone will purchase it for all the right reasons and they could stand behind it and say, this product does exactly what it's supposed to do.

So it's business to business with a consumer 

Mike Koelzer, Host: twist, there's quite a [00:40:00] psychological dance, you know, and the whole sale thing, our customers, they know where to find us. You know what I mean? And not that we make these huge promises that we have to stand behind as far as the product goes, but it's just an interesting dance, you know, about commitment to having the product and people buying it and then their feelings about you and then coming back and so on.

It's really a psychological 

Dave Wendland: cycle. It is true. I mean, Anybody, regardless of what profession they're in, is in the business of selling something. And, as a sales entity or a deliverer of a service or even fulfillment of a prescription, um, the road kind of stops there with the relationship. Um, if they have a patient that has a bad feeling about a product.

They're gonna come and, and yell at you about it. Mike, they're not gonna take the time to write to their manufacturer. Go find out where the raw materials came from. They're coming to you because that's where you, they, you sold it and that's a risk. However, there's also tremendous reward in that the reward is that 99 times out of a hundred or more, the patient is satisfied and so much.

So. They probably didn't come back and tell you about it, but they probably told some of their friends that Mike gave me some great advice and Mike helped me find a product that relieved me, you name it. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: So David, with HRG, I'm gonna say that I maybe know your company better than a lot of our listeners, cause I'm an old fart.

And when I was like, I don't know, 13 or 14 years old, you guys have been around for 40 years or not. How long have you been around? Correct? 40 years. All right. So I just nailed that by chance. I thought you might be longer because when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, I was doing the shelving for our pharmacy.

And that's when ER, Came in and was selling planograms and so on through our wholesalers. So I would take the envelopes that would come in, you know, once a month and set these things up and do all that, you know? So I go way back with you guys. So I know you started there, but then through the years, as.

Well, more companies, infiltrate, retail, pharmacy, more people want to get their fingers in. That's a good thing as far as your company goes, because you can make some of those connections happen and so on. So you're like retail, pharmacy based, but I know that many people want to get their hands on your expertise.

Dave Wendland: It is true that we've certainly matured and morphed through the 41 years, we were started in 1980, literally on the kitchen table of a pharmacist's, uh, home. And when Dave Ocker started our business, he had a pretty simple mantra. He wanted to improve the productivity of inventory space and people in drugstores.

And we still do that and do it extremely well in the envelopes that you affectionately spoke about. I'm really proud of the fact that for 41 years, without fail every single month envelopes have been either sent via the mail or electronically to independent pharmacies across the country. And tens of thousands of pharmacies use our services and our intelligence in some way, shape or form to manage their business.

So those are things we take a lot of pride in. Um, obviously we've had to morph, um, about 20 years ago. I don't believe it was Al Gore who invented the internet. But about 20 years ago, this thing called the internet came along. Right. And we realized what we had been doing. Imaging taking digital photographs of products, using technology to place them on shelves.

When we no longer did it physically and delivering those to pharmacies that all of those pictures that we were taking and all of that content about a product, the description, the unit of measure, the manufacture, the uses, the purpose, the warnings, the indications, all of that could populate eCommerce sites.

So today, I don't know the number, but there's, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of independent pharmacies that rely on our digital images and our content to drive their storefront. And that's what it is, is another location for them. We talked about the four PS of marketing and placement sometimes becomes thought of as only placement on shelf.

I think of places also of how [00:45:00] do customers interact with your business? the place could be virtual, could be a storefront online, and that content may come from us. The other area of our business, it's really been interesting. Um, and, and coming out of the pandemic, it's sort of on fire at the moment is the.

Experience at retail is changing and we'll take a category like cosmetics for those pharmacies that are in cosmetics and, and remain in that space. A lot of that is based on plastic fixtures. And where do the lipsticks go? And, how does this mascara stay on the shelf? Well, there's holders for it.

And those holders are manufactured by somebody. We don't manufacture any of it. We don't go to physical stores and set any. We know that if Mike needed a four foot set of cosmetics that had a certain amount of plastic pieces and a certain amount of signage, pictures of Jennifer Aniston, we know how to get that to your store.

So we sit between the cosmetics company, the pharmacies, and the fixture manufacturer to coordinate all of that. And that's only been in our part of our business for about a decade. So through the years, we've morphed, we continue to learn. We talked about how do you learn new things while you open yourself up to new thinking?

We had an office in the UK for 10 years, 2001 to 2011. The reason we did that for a decade was so that we could bring value to that market. Yes, but we also learned a tremendous amount and we learned a lot about when a government runs all of the reimbursement pharmacists still. Aren't without things that are out of their control and we help them manage their space, their inventory, and their people.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Dave, you wake up tomorrow and pharmacy's not in the picture for some reason, for whatever reason, what industry fascinates you. We talk about learning from other industries. What other industry would you be in if it wasn't healthcare related? With maybe some of the skills you have now, but not anything to do with pharmacy or any of its fingers that are out 

Dave Wendland: there.

That is a very intriguing question. Like, and it's one I've never been asked. And so I'm gonna answer it in two ways, neither of which may be right. If Dave Wek. Had to reinvent himself tomorrow. And I was banned from the industry or the pharmacy industry didn't exist. And therefore, perhaps even HRG didn't exist.

I believe that I would personally wanna help professionals buff and Polish their ability to present themselves in the marketplace. Maybe they're inventing, presenting themselves to investors. Maybe they're presenting themselves to a board of directors. Maybe they're presenting themselves to a group of employees, but I have a unique set of skills.

I sound like Liam ne Nissan, but I have a unique set of skills in helping individuals feel comfortable enough in their skin to stand up and give an articulate presentation and get people rallied and inspire. And I believe I could, I could fulfill that 

Mike Koelzer, Host: almost like a personal branding, finding the value in a person and the same as you would do with a brand, but applying it to a person.

Dave Wendland: I, I really like the way you characterize your spot on Mike. Now, if H & G had to reinvent itself and pharmacy was not part of the picture, I believe that our business growth would be around data, data management, and attribution. And probably distribution of knowledge because without data, without coordination of data and assimilation of data, it's just noise.

HRG is very good at organizing information 

Mike Koelzer, Host: data. So you'd go broader and you'd pick up more industries. Because every industry has data. 

Dave Wendland: Every industry has. Discombobulated data that needs organization. And the only way you can make intelligence out of data is if you can look at it through a single lens.

So we're very good at organizing disparate data pools, and that would be our future. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Arguably before data was out there, you took the hodgepodge of stuff that was in a wholesaler box, and you taught us how to put [00:50:00] that organized on a shelf. Now you've taken data, which is thrown into boxes and you're teaching us how to organize that.

That makes sense. 

Dave Wendland: But it's a question that I hadn't been asked. Mike, you could ask me again tomorrow. I might have a different 

Mike Koelzer, Host: answer. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Well, Dave, thanks for 

Dave Wendland: joining us. Mike, this has been a pleasure. I hope that your audience has enjoyed our conversation, which is indeed what it has been.

This is all unscripted, as I'm sure your listeners know. I think that the business of pharmacy is healthy. And I'm excited to see the places that these pharmacists take. It. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: There's always gonna be room for a person that really cares about someone's health because people keep dying for some reason. So I think pharmacists are in the right business.

I 

Dave Wendland: I think pharmacists are in the right business. I think their heart and soul being in this business is where their value is. And I know that as the noise of the PBMs and the competition and the stress that goes with being in this profession remains the undercurrent. It's those that are riding the wave of personal care of taking care of patients, taking care of themselves so that they can take care of others.

Those are the ones that are surviving, and those are the ones that I look forward to continuing to communicate. Thanks for all you do, David. Absolutely. Mike had a wonderful week. Thank you. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: All right, we'll talk again. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.

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