Anthony Sartoris is president of Doc’s Drugs, a regional chain of independent pharmacies in Illinois. We talked with Anthony about his business, what’s made Doc’s Drugs successful, and what he sees ahead for independent pharmacy.
Tell us about Doc’s Drugs. How did the pharmacy chain get started?
My dad––Dave Sartoris––was a Walgreens regional vice president for more than 20 years, but he always wanted to go off on his own. One day the owner of the corner drugstore in Pontiac, Illinois, called Walgreens to ask if they wanted to buy the store. Walgreens sent my dad to take a look at it. It was a downtown location, around 4,000 square feet. He knew it wasn’t right for Walgreens, but it was right for him. So he bought the store and moved his family to Pontiac. We’ve been in business for 35 years now and have 16 pharmacies.
With 16 stores you probably have a lot of front-end real estate. Do you have a strategy for your front end?
Our strategy is this: be different and be innovative. We’re really selective in what we do. We try to make it so that when customers come in, they always see something different. If you go into a chain drugstore, there’s no personality to the merchandising or to the merchandise. I tell my buy team, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not pushing the envelope.’ If you’re not getting hits on items, start reducing the price until you find a sweet spot where it sells. And if your sweet spot isn’t giving you much margin, it’s a closeout. Get rid of it; don’t go there again. That’s not a mistake. A mistake is when you don’t do anything about a bad buy.
Are there certain front-end categories that are expanding or products that are selling well?
Vitamins are one of our top wellness items that we sell in our pharmacies. My dad was huge on vitamins. We’ve still got people on vitamins that my dad put them on. We have a 1-cent sale twice a year. For our last one, vitamin sales were in excess of $100,000.
Also––and this one surprised me––we sell a lot of Melissa & Doug® toys. We bought a competitor’s store and they had some of that product. I told our operations manager to get rid of it. But he thought it was worth trying to sell, so he merchandised it in his store and it did really well. It was a line that I wanted to close out and now it’s a mainstay in our department.
What has really driven our front end, more than anything we’ve ever done, is our loyalty program, Doc’s Advantage. We have 35,000 loyalty customers and we send out Doc’s Advantage points once a month for $10 off a $20 purchase. People come in when they get those. That has really driven our front-end numbers.
Do you manage that program in-house?
We looked at an off-site company, but we found out that our POS system has a way of tracking and printing the rewards. We’re pretty generous with the points. We look at what our cost is and we track every coupon we redeem. It’s a $20 minimum purchase to get $10 off, and our average sale is between $50 and $60.
What is your pharmacy known for?
I think it’s our service. My dad’s mantra was to treat every customer as if they were your own mother. When somebody comes to you with a problem, a lot of times you hear people say ‘We can’t do that.’ But if it were their mom, they’d figure out a way. For certain things, you may have to tell them no. But you don’t have to be indifferent about it. We’re not going to say ‘You’ve got to call your insurance company.’ We’ll call for them.
Also, we started with specialty pharmacy in September, and we’ve seen our revenues grow significantly. Independent pharmacies can deliver specialty the way it’s supposed to be delivered. We don’t give training on a YouTube video or a CD. Patients work with the pharmacist face-to-face.
Was it difficult to get into specialty pharmacy? How did you go about doing that?
It’s a funny story. I was sitting at my desk reading the specialty pharmacy magazine from Drug Topics. And I was thinking, ‘How are we going to get into this?’ Right then I got a phone call from our attorney and he asked what we were doing to get into specialty pharmacy. I said, ‘Do you have my office bugged or something?’ I told him I was just reading about it, but I had no idea how to get into it. He said he knew someone who could help and that’s how I heard about Rinku Patel, Pharm.D., a consultant on independent specialty pharmacy strategy. I met with her and not only did she have the right concept, I don’t think there’s anyone out there who knows more about specialty pharmacy than she does.
It seems like you have adapted well in a changing environment. What are some of the ways your pharmacy has evolved over the years?
We never used to go to tradeshows or conferences. We were very internalized. Then about four years ago, I got involved with a local group of independent pharmacy owners. It’s been the best investment I’ve made. I think peer-to-peer interaction, the mutual sharing of ideas and best practices, and talking through problems has been really helpful. I’ve met so many awesome pharmacy owners. We’re in the same business and we all have the same problems. There are people out there who may not have found the solution, but they’ve found a way around it, or they’ve found a way to enhance what they have. I’m getting so much out of what others are doing, and I try to share back. I think that’s important. And that’s made us successful.
What else has contributed to your success?
My team. We’ve got a great bunch of people working with us. There are so many programs that we offer, and we have individual pharmacists who are running them. We give them time to do that. I’d say over half of our pharmacists are engaged at a corporate level as opposed to just their own store. And it’s voluntary. They come to us and say, ‘We want to do more.’ When we go to conferences now we’re bringing them along. We want to get everyone exposed to what’s new and what’s different.
What makes you optimistic about the community pharmacy business today?
Everything rides on a pendulum. The way pharmacy is now, prescriptions are being consolidated into bigger entities. What that’s going to show is that the service is horrible and the outcomes are horrible. And their customers’ health is going to suffer.
I think it’s going to get to a point where people are going to realize it isn’t working. I was talking to a friend who said, ‘Well what if that doesn’t work? What if we get our Star Ratings up really high and we’re still blocked out of preferred networks?’ Here was my answer. We can do all this work and we might fail. But if we do nothing, we are guaranteed to fail.
Common sense has got to prevail in the end. Because I cannot fathom that the outcomes coming from a Walmart that staples a monograph to a bag and calls it counseling are going to be as good as the outcomes from pharmacies that really work with their patients, that put them on an adherence program, that work with the doctor on alternatives, and that counsel patients face-to-face.
What’s your vision for your pharmacy over the next few years?
I’d like to see us––through efficiencies, synchronization and refill reminders––free up time for our pharmacists, so they can focus on patient care. If we could take some of the mundane process of transferring pills from one bottle to another away, then our pharmacists and staff will have more time to do cognitive services. I see us not filling as many prescriptions, but taking care of even more patients.
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