Blending Entrepreneurship Mindset and Skills | Jonathan Baktari, MD, eNational Testing, e7 Health, & US Drug Test Centers

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

[00:00:12] Mike Koelzer, Host: 

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

[00:00:22] Jonathan Baktari: My name is Jonathan Bakari. I'm a physician. I'm the C e O of E national testing, US direct test centers and E seven Health. And today we're gonna talk about everything that has to do with growing a business culture, how to do things correctly to grow a business.

[00:00:40] Mike Koelzer, Host: Jonathan, there are a lot of people who wanna be coaches and things like that, but you are coming at it from the side of having started these businesses. What was your impetus after already being a physician to

say, eh, I wanna take another step.

[00:01:02] Jonathan Baktari: Well, my whole career, like most people in healthcare, was growing. You're a medical student resident, a fellow attending a, becoming a partner in a group. And for me, it just seemed natural that it would continue. I didn't want it to just stop. Even if somebody wants to go to pharmacy school, they go to pharmacy school, they then do an internship, and then they, whatever.

Then they get a staff job and, but then at some point you're like, okay, what, so what's the next step? So I think for me, It was just continuing the path of growth and I think it evolved. I slowly got into administrative medicine and that one door opened and another door, and then I got into hospital administration.

I got into teaching at medical schools, clinical faculty and then eventually, moved on to working at insurance companies, health insurance companies, being administrators at hospitals, and then eventually, getting into the business side of it. So, it was a very slow evolution.

It wasn't like one day I woke up and said, oh, I'm gonna do this.

[00:01:58] Mike Koelzer, Host: It seems to me that the link that maybe got you more into the business was you were talking about the medical things and the hospital and things like that,

It seems like where some of that kind of merges maybe with the financial part is the insurance realm because that's where, medical kind of hits,

Finance.

 Is that true? Or even when you were doing your earlier things, you were quite involved in the financial part of it?

[00:02:26] Jonathan Baktari: no, I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that once, I did clinical medicine and I also did teaching, and then I worked for health insurance companies and I worked for hospitals. I got to see medicine, both clinically and financially from every perspective. I got to see what the hospital was thinking?

What's the insurance company thinking? What are the pharmacies thinking? What are the doctors thinking? And so it was having that global perspective of every angle. So when I started something, I could factor all that into account and say, okay, what are the problems with the way everyone's approaching it?

And everyone's got their own angle. If we really want to innovate in healthcare, what are the things that are holding us back, given what the hospitals are trying to do, given what the insurance companies are trying to do, what the doctor groups are trying to do, the equity groups that are buying the doctor groups.

The big pharmacies, what's Walgreens trying to do? What's c v s trying to do? And having that broad, or the breadth of that experience, I should say, allowed me to ideally craft a solution. Understand the pitfalls of those viewpoints and the good points of it and come up with a more efficient way to provide some of the services we're currently providing.

[00:03:47] Mike Koelzer, Host: Back in the old days with pharmacy most of the pharmacists that went to school

Had dreams of coming out of starting their own independent pharmacy. I'm talking back in the,

Fifties and sixties and then kind of going maybe into the eighties, a little bit of nineties

Now because of the chain pharmacies.

Now it seems like that is sort of flipped where the average pharmacist is not the entrepreneur that they once were. Do you think the medical field has gone that way? 

[00:04:22] Jonathan Baktari: For 

sure. Well, I'll just give you the statistics. The statistics speak for itself. 20 years ago approximately 25% of physicians worked as an employee. 75% had their own practice. Currently, it's the opposite. Currently 75% now are employees and 25%, and this is just that I saw a few months ago, and I, and that's only going in one direction.

So what I think what you described really is not exclusive to pharmacy, it's healthcare in general. The big equity firms and hospital chains are buying up practices literally every day. And we are having what's considered healthcare consolidation. We saw this in the airline industry about 10 years ago.

There used to be 12, 14 airlines. Now there's maybe three. We saw it in the cellular phone industry 10, 15 years ago. There may have been 10, 15 cell providers. Now there's three. And we're seeing it in healthcare. It's the same playbook, the same equity firms, the same Wall Street strategy just being deployed on healthcare.

[00:05:32] Mike Koelzer, Host: Knowing what you know now, and let's say you had a child that was the age of going to college, and let's say that they were enamored by the entrepreneurial spirit and so on, would you recommend to them to go through medical school like you did? Do you think that's a powerful background or would you say let's do a little bit differently?

[00:06:01] Jonathan Baktari: Well, if you still think healthcare is a calling for you and that's your motive, by all means, whether you're an employee or not, taking care of people is an honor and a privilege. And I view it that, and it's, I'm so lucky to have been able to do it and still do it on some level, but but if you, if your main driving force is also to have a lot of independence, I think, the writing's on the wall, I think you can kiss that part goodbye.

It depends on your motive. If you're going to need freedom, if you don't want to have a boss, And you want to call your own shots and you want the sky to be the limit for what you can do professionally, financially, I would say medicine probably is not going to be able to give you that.

In terms of seeing patients and taking care of people and that being a calling, regardless of whether you're an employee or you're in private practice, then of course you should go for it because at the end of the day, it's a privilege and an honor to be in healthcare, to be a pharmacist, to be a doctor, to take care of people to impact people's lives.

It's a big honor, it's a privilege. if that's how you're hardwired for sure. But if you want, if you're the kind of person that's gonna need independence, that needs to call the shots, that needs to have no limits, no boundaries. I mean, take a pharmacy pharmacist for example. Once you get a job, let's say at Walgreens or CVS, okay, maybe you could be the head pharmacist.

But at a certain level, you're capped. I'm talking about finances. I'm talking about professional growth. So are you okay with that? And if you're okay and you love taking care of people, helping people, and pharmacists do that every day, all the time, then by all means.

[00:07:46] Mike Koelzer, Host: Back when my dad was a pharmacist, pharmacy school was basically four years. The whole thing was four years. And a lot of people would then do that. Then they'd go on to either get medical or dental 

Degrees and things like that. Now the commitment is so long for pharmacy 

That I think people are making those choices.

We just talked about the medical angle there, but if you have this entrepreneurial spirit, maybe you do this. I think there's a group of us that are in my gray haired years that it's kind of cool because for whatever the reason we're here now with both the love of business and having that medical background. In the future, it might even be more divided. You might have more people just kind of on the medical side and people maybe without that medical background that around the business side, but we might be a bit of a dying breed of having both of those.

[00:08:50] Jonathan Baktari: Especially now, if you go down the clinical path, it really is very difficult to try to branch out because you're an employee at that point. When I was branching out, it was my practice in essence. And if I wanted to take a couple days off and go teach at a medical school or get involved in administrative medicine, that was up to me.

 Now I'm not sure if your boss is gonna like that. If you wanna say, take two afternoons off and go teach or do something like that. So, I think the freedom basically, you're giving up some of that freedom. I guess you have theoretically security, but I'm not even sure that's

true Because, 'cause as hospitals get bought out and merged and stuff, you, your position's not secure either way but you've, I guess some semblance of more security.

But your time is definitely not your own like it used to be when you were in private practice.

[00:09:43] Mike Koelzer, Host: Sometimes people will say that pharmacists are not the best people to be entrepreneurs because everything's black and white. It's right or it's wrong. And pharmacists need permission from the doctors and the hospitals and The insurance 

companies and PBMs to do anything. And so some could argue I'm not sure if I'm there.

Some could argue that. Having pharmacy training can be an impedance to having entrepreneurial thoughts. Do you see that at all? Do you think anywhere in the medical training that you said, oh, I've gotta get this feeling outta my head because it's slowing me down as an entrepreneur, because I picked up this skill set or this thought pattern in medical school?

[00:10:32] Jonathan Baktari: I see where you're going with that because pharmacists don't necessarily have to. Sort of the elbow room to be creative and try different things because it's all pretty much, everything's baked in the cake already. I get that and maybe that there is some truth to that, but I also think there's a component that applies to physicians, healthcare providers and pharmacists, which is I think often they don't realize that developing entrepreneurial skills is actually a true skillset.

It's not a soft skill. For example, just because you're a great doctor, you're a great pharmacist, doesn't mean you can land the 7 47. You just can't. You could say I'm the smartest guy, got great grades, and I'm a big pharmacist. I'm a big doctor. We put you in a cockpit of a 7 47 at 30,000 feet there's only one thing that's gonna happen in that plane.

It's gonna crash.

And it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how people like you. People think, well, I'm a great leader. Because they assume leadership being a c e o, being an entrepreneur or soft skills that if that, if people like me or I get along with people or I'm so smart, a smart person can't land a plane,

You can be a genius. Put 'em in a plane, it's gonna crash.

If you view developing skills to be a leader as really technical skills that you need to acquire now, it doesn't mean you can't do it. You and I could land the 7 47 if we took a year or two of lessons and we could do it.

So the question really is when you try to break out of your. Pharmacist role to do more? Are you gonna just wing it? Like you, you try, you would try to land the plane? Or would you say, no, I gotta go out and get some specific skill sets

[00:12:25] Mike Koelzer, Host: I think one of the skill sets that people think you have to have as an entrepreneur is to disregard hell or high water.

 I'm throwing all my money on red and if it hits, I'm great. And an entrepreneur means you have to bet it all and fail if you don't. And I think that's kind of an opposite skill of the entrepreneur that's maybe one for the movies and so

[00:12:49] Jonathan Baktari: No I agree with you because, If you are going to become an entrepreneur, it needs to be calibrated. It needs to be planned. Often you have to do it simultaneously while you're holding down your job initially. And so, if you kind of do what you just described , which is just, oh, screw it all, I'm leaving this and giving up my paycheck.

There is a period in which your life will get much harder if you do it that way, because you're gonna have to hold down a full-time job or eventually cut it to part-time while you grow it. So as long as it's planned out and thought through, your idea is to mitigate risk. I mean, so yes, being an entrepreneur has risk, but your job as an entrepreneur is to 

mitigate the risk. And not just full steam ahead with your plan. Maybe you have to find mentors. I always tell people, for example, if you wanna try something, get a job in that. I remember a long time ago, one of my friends, not even an acquaintance of mine, said, Hey, I wanna get into the limo business.

It's very profitable. You lease 10 limos for a thousand a month, you make 3000 a month on the limo. And I said, well, you know, if that's such a great idea, if you think the limo business is so great, why don't you just spend three months and go get a job at a limo company and learn all the mistakes on their dime,

 And then come back and start your limo company . There are these steps you can take.

I mean, if you wanna start a pharmacy and you're out of pharmacy school, go get a job in a pharmacy first and talk to you like, the owner when a surgeon does his first appendectomy he's not really doing his first appendectomy.

 He's watched 20, he kind of assisted a little bit just made the incision on 20.

And so if you view growing your business the same way that you are going to learn about it, invest in it. So it is not throwing, it's not betting on red or black at the roulette table. It's a thought out calibrated response.

[00:14:53] Mike Koelzer, Host: Speaking of that I see a lot of these apps that come up like delivery app for a pharmacy that's 

raised like a billion dollars or something. And then, they last for a few months and they go down. I'm just sitting back looking at this. I think that's sometimes either they sold this idea to investors like, ah these hick pharmacists don't know how to do this.

If we just get in there with a program, we can easily do it. I think they've sold them that line. Or startup guy believes this, but I think there, if each of 'em spent three months in a pharmacy and realized what it takes to get Mrs. Smith, her medicine, and all the pitfalls that come along with a day-to-day kind of thing, I think a lot of 'em might have changed their decision on how deep they got into some of these programs.

[00:15:44] Jonathan Baktari: Well, it's funny you should say that because a lot of times like our company E seven Health people say to me, do you ever wonder you've kind of created this own space. You do something nobody else does. You know what, why couldn't somebody just look at your website and replicate what you do and Yeah, I guess the, in theory they could we're a technology company.

We write software, but the technology we write is based on the fact that we're doing the business, right? So if you're just like four developers in Silicon Valley and you're trying to write our technology, you're gonna be in a world of hurt because we're writing it based on. Real events on the ground, things that my clinicians are seeing, my medical assistants are seeing, my receptionists are seeing, how do we streamline this?

How do we reduce friction in this process? How do we reduce the chances for errors? How do we improve quality? And so if you don't have the benefit of being in the trenches as you're writing technology, I guess it's doable. A lot of people do it, but it's much more difficult. So I think we're very fortunate that for all three of our companies, E seven Health, US drug Test centers, and now e national testing, we're doing the business and writing the software.

And the software's written for us, not for, I mean, eventually, there's opportunities to go beyond that, but we are writing it to solve our problems and our patients' problems. And reduce friction for them. So there's a huge advantage when you're gonna write a technology for limo companies, if you've never run a limo company, I think you're probably gonna have some issues.

[00:17:25] Mike Koelzer, Host: And you can get into a lot of trouble. And I can't think of a better example than the software company because so much of that stuff is built on this pyramid of cards going up with programming. And if you go down the wrong direction for a while, you just don't get to change gears. You gotta backtrack down to where you split it off and then rebuild from there.

So if you're not going on the right road, that can be a heap of a lot of trouble I imagine.

[00:17:56] Jonathan Baktari: Yes. It is building Legos and realizing on bag one, you're left out. A couple of pieces.

[00:18:01] Mike Koelzer, Host: It reminds me of norm McDonald, he's a comedian that passed away a few years ago, but he's got a story of a guy playing Scrabble and he said there was no blank pieces in there, and he just figured the old guy just said, what's with this defective piece?

And just threw 'em out. Alright, so Jonathan, let's hit those. So you've got the three businesses. So cover those again, give us a snapshot of each of those.

[00:18:25] Jonathan Baktari: yeah. The original business was E seven Health, which was our attempt at getting into the adult vaccination business. The C D C reports, there's about 50,000 vaccine preventable deaths in the United States annually which is a lot, equal to the number that died in the Vietnam War.

It's a lot of people, and so there was this opportunity to. Do vaccine medicines. Primary care doctors in the last 20 years have moved away from carrying vaccines. Mainly because, mainly two things, the insurance reimbursements and two the complications of storing vaccines, keeping 'em at the right temperature, having 'em expired, and knowing whether your staff give them subq I am, how to dilute them.

It was a whole production. So most primary care doctors, if they did it, struggled to do it correctly. And so one way or another they stopped and I. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons pharmacies had to pick it up, because if primary care doctors were doing it, pharmacies wouldn't be doing

1. And so then it fell in the purview of pharmacies, it's not what they do. They're not necessarily vaccine experts. 

[00:19:36] Mike Koelzer, Host: there's some good pharmacies that do a really good job on vaccinations. But there's also a ton of pharmacies that you're gonna go into and you're walking past the toilet paper 

and then, they made a mistake on your prescription 

and you're waiting for that, and you hear the pharmacist in the background yelling to somebody and this and that, and all of a sudden they want to come out and poke you.

 I'm not really big on that,, , I think vaccinations are a little bit more intimate because it goes into your body. I gotta trust someone a lot when that happens.

[00:20:09] Jonathan Baktari: We thought , wouldn't it be cool if we created an adult vaccination company? This was before Covid, obviously it was 2009, and we. Open two clinics and we've written tons of technology and software. So our electronic health records patient portal, everything is our proprietary thing, and that really has allowed us to provide this incredible service that people can't imagine that exists.

Our goal, of course, now that we're almost done with the technology is to expand those regionally and maybe beyond that, but simultaneously, there were two parts of that business that we could do nationally by partnering up with our network that we were already partnering with laboratories.

And so we created US drug test centers, which provide nationwide drug testing for businesses and individuals both d o t and non d o t. And then we opened up e national testing with, again, our partnership with nationwide Labs so people can go on our website and just like Amazon in a few clicks.

Order a cholesterol test or do and just go, a mile away from their house and get the laboratory testing they needed. So those were the two concepts that were sort of sister companies or grew out of E seven Health.

[00:21:25] Mike Koelzer, Host: What's the bottleneck if there is one on E seven Health to expand? Because it sounds like the other two are more national already. Do I have that right?

[00:21:37] Jonathan Baktari: They're national because we don't need brick and mortar locations. We're using our contracted network of laboratories to get the drug testing or the blood test. But we would need nationwide brick and mortar to give the vaccines, do the physicals, do the audiometric testing. And to go national on brick and mortar.

Our technology needed to be at a certain level, so it was scalable, meaning if you open up a location in. Just like buying a McDonald's, we're gonna hand you all the policies, procedures, technology, the marketing, the training , we have an online university for staff, so all of it.

We can replicate it and not lose any quality and keep the same standards.

[00:22:24] Mike Koelzer, Host: Alright, so Jonathan, bounce back to the entrepreneurial skills we talked about. We know that being the John Wayne of the entrepreneurs is maybe not the way to go.

[00:22:42] Jonathan Baktari: I like that.

[00:22:42] Mike Koelzer, Host: What skill do you think, if there is one, is kind of the base of all entrepreneurs?

[00:22:50] Jonathan Baktari: Well, let me just double back and go back to my first one. You can't acquire any other skills if you don't think being a c e O or a leader is something that needs skills. A lot of people think it's a soft skill, I'm good with people, people like me, okay. People respect me.

That's not gonna make you a good leader. And I can give you examples of that. And I think most people learn the hard way, or sometimes they think, oh, since I had the money to buy this pharmacy or to build this pharmacy, obviously I'd be the best person to run it.

Well, not necessarily. You just happen to have the money. Or some people say, well, it was my idea to write this software. Okay, but that's not, that doesn't necessarily make you the best leader.

And so the people who become CEOs by default, just because it was their money, it's their idea that doesn't qualify you to be the leader.

Now you can get qualified,

But again, I think the temptation is, people think it's a soft

skill. 

Almost everybody who started a business without acquiring some of these skill sets , I guess eventually learns it. After you have five wrong hires and five wrong fires and five wrong expansions or didn't expand enough or didn't, and then some people just stumble.

I guess with enough money and patience you can eventually acquire. If you try to land a 7 47, maybe a thousand times, maybe sooner or later you might hit the right buttons.

[00:24:24] Mike Koelzer, Host: If that is not just the ticket to success, having the personality and maybe the

vision of it. 

[00:24:34] Jonathan Baktari: but you need that. I mean, don't get me

[00:24:36] Mike Koelzer, Host: I was gonna ask that. 

[00:24:37] Jonathan Baktari: You need that, but then you need the technicals. No. If you're a bad guy, nobody likes you, of course you're gonna be a failure. I wasn't poo-pooing all those things.

[00:24:46] Mike Koelzer, Host: Is there anything in your built-in personality,

Is there any skill that is not a skill that you have to have innately to be an entrepreneur? Or can they all be learned?

[00:25:00] Jonathan Baktari: That's really a good question. I think maybe your motive for doing it, if your motive is simply just to make money which by the way, is a really good motive if you're gonna start a business. Otherwise, you're not gonna be in business. But if you don't have a higher sense, if you don't feel like you're trying to make a difference, if you don't feel like you're gonna improve the lives of the people that you know are on your team you're gonna have a hard road.

I mean, most people quit or stay on because of who they're working for, not the company. And if you are in it just for the money, I think most people just figure that out and you're gonna struggle

1. Have talent, keep talent and have people follow you or respect you. If you don't have integrity, if your word isn't, like cement, I mean, whatever you say, is it yeah.

You, I mean, you can just keep going through people, but it takes a lot of work to develop senior leaders in any organization. And your goal is to keep them.

And if you just do whatever you want and all you care about is the bottom line, which of course you should be, but if that's the only thing you care about I think you may actually find out that may backfire.

So yes, I think it helps to have integrity. It helps a lot to be honest and truthful. You never want people to wonder if what you're saying is true. Certainly you're senior staff so yes, there are some. I guess what we're trying to say, just innate intrinsic personalities that will increase the likelihood of you being successful.

 One of the things I always say is, people can always find another job, a similar job that pays them a couple of shekels more. 

Okay. But they can't find another you,

And that's gotta be part of that equation right? If you're mentoring them, holding their hands, if you're involved , part of the equation's gonna be like, okay I could leave here.

 Oh yeah, someone's offering $5 more an hour here, there or there, but can they find another you? And if the answer is, sure, yeah, whatever. He or she is just like taking up space and trying to make money, I think you're gonna be challenged.

[00:27:21] Mike Koelzer, Host: Alright, so we've talked about the two things that are a bit intrinsic, your personality, and then maybe just your motivation. It could be argued, those are gifts or something inside of you, but now there's skills to talk about, to be an entrepreneur, maybe things that can be picked up or learned.

[00:27:40] Jonathan Baktari: Yeah. When you're trying to start a business , I mean, the first thing I always tell people is understand. What it is you're trying to accomplish

And have some clarity. If I'm going to open up, for example, since we're talking about pharmacies, the fifth pharmacy in a three mile area I gotta have a plan.

Okay? And I think people just think, oh, well I deserve a pharmacy and I have the money for a pharmacy but, Just going into business for the sake of going into business is not a strategy. And the other thing that's not a strategy, which I always hear is great customer service, we are going to kill it because we're gonna, cus customer service is not a strategy.

You're dead without it.

But you can't out good customer service the five other pharmacies because guess what, they'll up their game and then what then where's your strategy? 

[00:28:34] Mike Koelzer, Host: Any business that opens up. The customers are already getting it somewhere. They're already satisfied with getting that product or service. Now, maybe if you opened up like Jonathan, you're in Las Vegas. Maybe if there's a desert region that all of a sudden there's, a million people there overnight, well, maybe they're not serviced by a pharmacy, but every other case, whether you're a shoe store or newspaper or whatever you are, they're already getting it somewhere and they're gonna have to make the change

[00:29:08] Jonathan Baktari: Well, maybe

1. There's a great business book called Blue Ocean Strategies. And in that book, just to summarize a very old book, but pretty classic book, which is something I really take to heart is when you start a business, you have to say to yourself, am I opening up a business in a blue ocean or in a red ocean?

So in a red ocean, you're like one of five pharmacies. So it's an ocean full of sharks, and you're gonna be one more shark.

Okay. And like you said, the only way to succeed in a red ocean is to steal business from someone else. In essence, the Blue Ocean strategy is to come up with a product or service that makes your competitors irrelevant.

[00:29:53] Mike Koelzer, Host: Yes. 

[00:29:54] Jonathan Baktari: And so you have to say, if I'm opening up a pharmacy, I'm going into the Red Ocean. And so now you may be okay with that, but you have to acknowledge that I'm going into the Red Ocean. But if you open up some new version of a pharmacy, that's different. That just provides a service. Your competitors are irrelevant.

And I think you at least need to acknowledge that. So if I open up the 10th c p a firm in your suburb. It's a red ocean. The only way I'm gonna succeed is to take business from other people. But like with E seven Health, we really thought that was a blue ocean strategy.

And even with the national testing and US drug test centers, most of our B two B clients at E seven Health, I mean, they stay with us because we kill 'em with great service and we have an amazing staff. But if they tried to leave us, there wouldn't be many places they could go.

If they tried to replicate what we're doing for them, they would maybe get part of their vaccines at the health department, at a pharmacy, get their physicals somewhere else, get their laboratories tested somewhere else.

They'd have to go to five places to replicate what we're doing. So, so for us, that's sort of the moat. That keeps us separated. If you don't have a moat that separates your business a barrier to entry into your business. If you build a pharmacy and I can just go block away and build another pharmacy, well see you don't have a moat.

You don't have a barrier to entry. And in a blue ocean strategy, there are barriers to entries. You have a certain software that they don't have. You got into a market that nobody else has gone into. You're providing a service that no one else is doing. And so look at it this way. You're forced to just pick a business.

All things being equal, let's say cost is the same. Who wouldn't pick a blue ocean business versus a red ocean,

 Now, of course the challenge is to sit there and come up with a blue ocean strategy. To come up with a technology or a way to deliver something that no one else is doing.

 And so the easy thing is, yeah, let me just buy a franchise.

Lemme just open up another accounting firm. Let me open up another sandwich shop.

, but the people who really think about it and say, look, I want to innovate now there's some risk because if you're creating a space that doesn't exist it has to be thought through look, there's nothing wrong with doing a red ocean business, 

but you have to know it.

[00:32:28] Mike Koelzer, Host: There's a tendency, and you've seen this in pharmacies through the years. Independent pharmacies, there's a tendency to be everything to everyone. And it seems to me like with your three businesses, it could have been tempting to put the testing and the tests and the vaccinations all under one umbrella and so on.

But that sometimes makes the blue ocean a little bit murky. It's probably

Better to focus for marketing reasons if nothing else.

[00:33:00] Jonathan Baktari: When we opened up E seven Health, I mean, we had clinicians there, medical assistants. We could definitely do primary care and urgent care but we opted not to. So if you come into E seven Health and say, my tummy hurts, we won't see you.

 We'll refer you. Of course. So yes, very tempted. You have the whole clinic set up. But that's why we have 10,000 positive reviews on our website. Because we don't do primary care. We don't do urgent care.

And so we're really good at what we do and people acknowledge that. And literally, I think we have a thousand Google reviews, all five stars, 4.9. And there's a reason for that is because we are really good at doing what we do because we have great people, we have great technology, but also we opt not to do other things.

[00:33:48] Mike Koelzer, Host: Jonathan what has been your biggest roadblock in being an entrepreneur? What is something that you kind of got slapped by and said this was a tough go.

[00:34:07] Jonathan Baktari: I think early on when you don't have a lot of staff, you're very dependent on staff that if you have just say three or four, and , if anything happens to one of them, it can be very painful. And what I try to tell people is there's different phases in starting a business. A lot of it has to do with the amount of redundancy you have in your organization. So let's say you had 10 pharmacists, let's just say,

and one of 'em is not working out. They're coming in late, they're on their cell phone and you need to have a talk with them. Okay. What kind of conversation is that gonna be if they're your 10th pharmacist? How would you deliver that message? Now, let's go and say they're your only pharmacist.

 Is that the same conversation? No. Okay. And this is the real challenge. When you're in that early phase where there is no redundancy, you cannot run the organization that you really want to the way you want to because you don't have redundancy the way you speak to your 99th accountant in an accounting firm, which may be professional, nice, but you're still going to deliver a certain message, however nice it is, but you're going to be walking on eggshells.

If you only have one accountant in the accounting department, and I don't think people realize that going into it. People say, well, when I get a business, I'm gonna have my staff, I'm gonna take great care of him. I'm gonna be nice to, I'm gonna pay him well, but I'm gonna expect a good eight hours of work.

Yeah, that might be good and fine, and you may get lucky, but if you don't, what are you gonna do? With your smile. I already know you've been tortured by 

some of this, 

[00:35:52] Mike Koelzer, Host: I'm a nice guy, but I'm very stubborn

and probably I'm too nice sometimes because I don't get to the bottom of things as quickly as I should. But I'm very stubborn for that reason, I've always had one pharmacy and maybe subconsciously I kept my business at something that could be done with one pharmacist because I always wanna be in the position.

 That I can tell people it's time to go.

And it might not be easy for me, but I can hang out at least for a while, whether it's days or weeks or months in that position where I had to treat the one pharmacist as if I had 99 because I don't like being under their pressure. It'd be really tough to own the pharmacy if you were not a pharmacist because that pharmacist knows either consciously or subconsciously that they have the upper hand. you need them to keep the store open. 

[00:36:54] Jonathan Baktari: The way we say it is you need them more than they need you

Literally in the first few years of business, we said this a thousand times in different positions, whatever. But the problem is you really can't grow unless you blow past that.

And the way to blow past that is to have your business grow enough that you have redundancy. And that's what happens. You just get enough redundancy. You have someone that could fill in for that person and the irony of the whole thing is when you have a lot of redundancy and you can be more straight, not more tough, but just be 

straight, it actually is self-fulfilling because then people get the message early and so you actually wind up not having to replace anybody. What happens when you let things slide and then you gotta get tough because it's gone too far and that, and then you're like changing the rules in the middle of the game.

 Versus right out of the gate like this is the barter. We pay you this, we give you that, we treat you well in exchange, you do this, you do that, and everybody knows the rules of the road coming out of the gate. And so I think. In any business until they get to the point where most of the critical positions have redundancy they're gonna be feeling that anxiety that you and I are talking about.

[00:38:16] Mike Koelzer, Host: I'm glad you mentioned that 'cause I've always thought that, but I didn't put it into words. 

 Jonathan, thanks for joining us.

I think we. Gave people a little taste of being an entrepreneur. You have to be a marketer. You've gotta be a pioneer. You've gotta be a psychologist, you've gotta be a leader. It's all packed in together and on these tangents, we could talk for hours on each of these. And I think that's the beauty and the passion of an entrepreneur.

And yeah, maybe if you don't have that, if you're not feeling it with these kinds of conversations, it might be a sign. I don't know.

[00:38:54] Jonathan Baktari: I like that.

[00:38:56] Mike Koelzer, Host: But Jonathan, thank you so much we'll be watching and I appreciate you spending time with us. So thank you.

[00:39:02] Jonathan Baktari: Mike, thanks so much for having me. It was a really big honor. Thank you again.