Pharmacy Conferences Reimagined | Vivian Juter Frankel, PharmaSalon

Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript is generated using speech-to-text technology and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

Mike Koelzer, Host: [00:00:00] Well, hello, Vivian. Hi, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here. So Vivian, for those who haven't come across you online, tell our listeners who you are and why we're 

Vivian Juter Frankel: talking. I'm Vivian Juter Frankel. And I am the founder of PharmaSalon, a, uh, conference company that I started in early 2020.

Mike Koelzer, Host: How would you define a conference? I 

Vivian Juter Frankel: would define a conference as an educational forum for busy professionals. I'm 

Mike Koelzer, Host: trying to think like what other things do people get together for? Business-wise. That they don't call a conference. They never just say we're going to get together for the hell of it and drink a lot of beer.

Right. I guess that would be called a party. So almost everything would be kind of considered a conference or at least that's what they're telling their, the IRS and telling themselves that they're going to a conference, right? Yeah. I think 

Vivian Juter Frankel: the. The other thing is that people would get together for trade shows and often within a trade show, you have a conference.

I was 

Mike Koelzer, Host: going to say that a show and a show would be more of the table set up and that kind of 

Vivian Juter Frankel: stuff. Yeah. And I associate trade sorrows with, you know, a couple, I guess it could be, you know, from 500 to, you know, a hundred thousand people, you know, it's a big event where you traipse around a room, looking at all the exhibitors, um, looking at their tables and depending on the size of the trade show, you know, you might just go for the trade show portion or you might, um, there's usually some sort of conference attached to it as 

Mike Koelzer, Host: well.

The trade shows are usually huge conferences. Necessarily have to have those kinds of numbers to call it a 

Vivian Juter Frankel: conference. Right? I mean, I've had conferences with 35 people. How short would 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You call something a conference? Could it be an hour or is it usually like a day or a weekend? Those kinds 

Vivian Juter Frankel: of things.

I don't know if there is really a definition. I think an hour would be more like a class. You know what I mean? I think you need at least several sessions. I have seen some events that are half day events. I think they're probably more called seminars. I mean, you're getting really down into the nitty gritty.

Mike Koelzer, Host: We have all kinds of things. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Where's that line between a seminar and a conference. I mean, you know, I don't know, because like I said, I've had small conferences, but could they also be called a seminar if you have 35 people? Yes. Even though it's over 25 and honestly that goes into your marketing as well.

Like if I know I have a niche audience, I might choose to call it and we were always going to be small and intimate. We might choose to call it a seminar. I can really call 

Mike Koelzer, Host: it whatever the hell you want. As long as the people don't come and expect something different, you probably don't want to call it a conference when there's maybe five people coming.

Oh, I have. Or you 

Vivian Juter Frankel: have, and I didn't want five people. That's what showed up 

Mike Koelzer, Host: and call it a conference 

Vivian Juter Frankel: still. Obviously your objective is never five people, you know, I've called things, seminars, and I've called things. Workshops, workshops. Implies a certain amount of interactivity. And then, you know, you bring up the other issue, which is goals and outcomes.

The goal is always going to be probably to have, I would say 35 is the minimum 20 is, yeah, you're getting more down into a seminar, I guess for me, maybe a conference, it depends on the room layout. If you've got a bunch of round tables and people and people in front of the stage, then you're doing it.

But once you talk to maybe a situation where, you know, you have those rooms that are in giant squares, you know, maybe that's too small to be calling a 

Mike Koelzer, Host: conference. That's interesting with my podcast here. When I started it, I said that I wanted to have X amount of listeners. Every week that X to me was just personal.

And I said, what? I spend this amount of time. If someone said to me, you're going to go and talk to this amount of people in grand rapids, this might be, we'll be sitting in the room. And I would say, okay, I'd like it to be about X. That makes sense to me. Well, the podcast has done better than X, but at some point, if it's below X, you start saying, well, I guess it's almost like feedback.

It's like, well, I should have at least X, you know, it's Vivian, we're going to go deeper, but I want to know this. You must've had some embarrassing times, right? Me inviting people to my seven year old birthday party and nobody's showing up, I'm just, I'm just kidding. A little drama. My mom came, you know, so that was, that was good.

Well, there you go. Do you have a horror story of having a conference or a meeting through no fault of your own? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Of course. Well, that's the thing about corporations? Some of it is my fault. It was marketing's fault. It's 

Mike Koelzer, Host: marketing. I got to blame it on [00:05:00] somebody. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I've had two, two epic disasters and they're both humiliating and upsetting because you're not the only one involved, but.

And you bring up a point, which is about canceling one of them. It was for my own company, moms making money. I did two in California that were hugely successful and I decided to take it across the country and go to Connecticut again to blame. Not, not my fault, of course. No, of course not to blame my PR team.

They let the side down and whatever, for whatever reason it, not many people showed up and it's, it's hard. It's very hard when you put your heart and soul into something like that, because that was all me. The other disaster I had was in San Diego and I was doing an event on, um, in healthcare on a device.

And I was pretty excited about the agenda. I thought it was a great agenda. It was a really great roster of speakers and we literally had two paid attendees. Um, and that was really hard because now you've got, you know, you've got 10, 15 people who've prepared because it was a full two day event. Who've prepared, um, presentations taking time out of their day, come to San Diego, you know, for two people.

And I will say the speakers were enormously gracious. One was kind of a jerk and he was from San Diego. So it wasn't even that big of a deal. He didn't know. There were only two attendees. I mean, there were 25 people in the room because of the speakers.

Mike Koelzer, Host: You incentivize all the speakers to stick around for everybody else's program, you know? Right. Yes. Typically a speaker's not going to go to every presentation. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Exactly. Yeah. They did all feel a little obligated to show up. I think everybody, um, but on another level it was actually great. So we set it up and moved it to a seminar format.

That's what made me think of the round table. You know, we took everything out of the room. The hotel graciously moved us to a smaller room and we set things up in that, you know, square and the speakers would give the presentations. You know this and you have to remember, speakers are also attendees. Like there are things they want to learn and they were so incredibly gracious and nice and supportive because they were like, all the speakers here are fantastic.

The content is fantastic. And even my two attendees wrote, um, actually they were from the same company, but they wrote a testimonial saying we were a little, um, upset when we got there and saw that the, you know, so few people, but it turned out to be a great event because people were very comfortable exchanging ideas and having dialogue and, you know, and cross-talking and things like that.

And a lot of those speakers came to other events of mine after that and things like that. So organizationally, it was solid. Like I said, they respected the agenda. I think this is the problem. I mean, I did a lot of, you know, we did a lot of evaluation with my, um, managers at the time. It was kind of an event that was thrown together at the last minute, which I can do as a producer, but marketing struggles with it was one of those conferences where the corporate powers decided they needed another event in December.

So it was like mid December, not a lot of love given to 

Mike Koelzer, Host: it. It does everything that you say this will never happen again because of X, Y, Z, or could that happen again? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Since that one was more corporate, I was less out of my control, given my experience with the moms making money event in Connecticut. And I thought about it.

It's complicated because as it, as it, uh, you know, again, this was my own business, so it's all my own money. You know, I've already put down all the money for the food and the hotel and spent all the money on the marketing and all, you know, I did have a couple of S you know, exhibitors slash sponsors, things like that.

So you always have to weigh, you know, what's the embarrassment and the dissatisfaction going to be versus the money that I've already spent and having to give back all that money and so on and so forth. But I would say personally, I was so upset over the way that event went. And again, the people who went there enjoyed it, but some of the speakers were not as gracious, to be honest, as the professionals, um, in San Diego.

And I would cut my losses. That was my, my, what I learned out of that. Cut your losses. If that 

Mike Koelzer, Host: happened again, and you had two people show up. Cancel it, no. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: If I had two people going into the event, like a week beforehand, I would cancel the event, like 

Mike Koelzer, Host: on that one. Did you know that only two people were coming?

When did you find 

Vivian Juter Frankel: that out? I knew because yeah, you're always kept abreast of who's 

Mike Koelzer, Host: registered. And now if you'd have done that over, you would have canceled it. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Well, that event, again, it's a little bit different because of course corporate dollars are involved, but you know, moving forward, I have my own company.

I think I would have canceled it. Yes. Or what I would have done. I believe that [00:10:00] knowledge to quote a much overused phrase, knowledge is power. I also believe that the key to success is managing expectations. And what I think I do differently is email all the speakers. Just give them a heads up. Like they're not.

If you don't want to come, I totally get it. Will, you know, you'll be missed. Maybe you could record your presentation and at least I can do that. You know, air that, or send out the presentation to people. Um, things like that. I don't know. You know, you have to play every event kind of as its own thing.

But the complexity is that there were two people. But what if you have 10 people, you know, you're still kind of like, eh, but now you've got 10 people who've paid for flights and paid for hotels. And they're not getting their money back. So unless you're prepared to reimburse them for their flights and everything, you know, so it's, it's a difficult balance of which I don't know if there's, I have a general rule.

I'd have to play it by ear. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: A lot of it is like you say the perception. I mean, if it was built more as a seminar kind of thing or this or that, or breakout groups, if you had eight or 10, that's different than saying you've got this three day event in your, your radio ads, you got the echo going for like the big monster truck and then just a few people are there.

All right. So Vivian, you went to school in Boston for poly psy government. Where was that jump to say I'm going to do this? No. My 

Vivian Juter Frankel: first event was with the Botswana national volleyball association. And I was helping them put on this international tournament with 12 countries and it was to date the craziest most fun event ever.

So what are you doing over in Africa? I finished college and wanted to travel. The world ended up in South Africa, you know, met a boy, moved in with him in Botswana. We started a chain of retail stores called sunglasses and things, and we had about five stores. And while I was doing the five stores, I didn't love retail.

I remember one time I was yelling, this is what I loved about Botswana. I was yelling at one of the, um, shopping mall managers about how there wasn't enough traffic. It was a new mall. And I was yelling at him about not having enough traffic for my store. And he finally turned to me and he said, well, if you think you can do a better job, go right ahead.

So he hired me and I started doing, you know, promotional events to bring people into the mall. And that led me to the Botswana volleyball association. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yeah. Then you came back and said, Hey, I can offer my services. Because you weren't always self-employed with that. You were working for companies at their events.

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. The first time I went out on my own was for moms making money. I kind of looked back and I said, I really enjoy events. I enjoy bringing people together. And I also say part of the reason I like events is I enjoy talking to people who are smarter than me. And I enjoy learning about 

Mike Koelzer, Host: a lot. That's our life.

The only one that doesn't fit in that category is probably my dog lady. But besides that. I've always got that slanted against me. Yeah, me too. With the events you're working with, what people that know a lot about events or they know about the subject matter. They're going to 

Vivian Juter Frankel: talk about, they know about the subject matter, which I find really interesting.

So when I put together moms making money, I wanted to do events, but I also wanted to help women like me, you know, who were not ready or could not, or, you know, we're not able to go into the tree, you know, back into work because, you know, I was part of a mom's club and there would be these women, it was crying saying, now I gotta go back to my job or whatever it was.

So I wanted to help them figure out how it was that you could establish an income from home. So we had not as sophisticated, but basic. Tracks, which is one job you could do from home. And the other one was helping women start their own business from home. And it was, you know, it was fun. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Did you have events then to grow that business 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Then I did.

And what, the reason why it became so overwhelming was I started with events, but I didn't stay with just events because as everything, you know, you kind of want to stay in front of people and stuff like that. And I started a podcast, so I was an early podcaster, 2003. So we started a podcast. I started, um, local meetups and I created a workbook called birthing your business.

And I tried to arrange it so people could get together and you know, who wanted to start their own business and kind of provide a support group while they work through their workbook and stuff like that. So there was a lot going on, all that 

Mike Koelzer, Host: stuff. And then that subsides, you don't do that anymore. And then when do you say, all right, I'm going to now do, now I'm going to do events as my, my main thing going forward.

Did you do that through a company then? Or did you start doing some of your own? I 

Vivian Juter Frankel: got hired, you know, so w bombs making money kind of provide me, provided me a back into a market. You know, kind of box on my resume. So when I was prepared to go back full time, so [00:15:00] I started working with a company that did events in the life sciences, but for academia, and I think did things like conferences on aging and conferences on metabolic health and conferences on the gut.

And I can't even frankly remember because they were all highly scientific. When I left that company, I was freelancing for a company based out of the UK, putting again on these academics. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: To get those jobs. Are you responding to a call-out? I mean, are you sending your resume and stuff in, or are you going into these companies and saying, here's what I can do for you.

You don't have this yet. They needed an event person 

Vivian Juter Frankel: established event companies. So you have your basic event companies and they just hire producers like myself, um, to come in and create these agendas and books, speakers and stuff like that. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Oh, they have the company and then you're coming in. When you say producer, almost like producing a separate, like a producer would a movie.

You've got a different producer for every event. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Exactly. Exactly. Now it's interesting how things have changed. So originally as a producer, I was in charge. Finding the topic narrow, you know, narrowing down the topic and finding the speakers, putting together the agenda. I'm in charge of all the media partnerships in charge of all the marketing, everything, but it seemed like the position evolved to my last few jobs.

All I did was book the speakers in the agenda and create the agenda. You know, marketing partnerships, all of that other stuff was left to other people or multiple speakers paid or unpaid depending on the company. The companies I worked for were predominantly unpaid big names and things like that. I did do ask to be 

Mike Koelzer, Host: because it's helping those people get exposure to that demographic, that market.

And so on. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I find the speakers have a lot of different reasons why they present, um, You know, some just like it, some like, you know, I think some are doing it for their resume to get their name out and become, you know, more well known in their field. I feel like they do it as well because they like the conference.

Cause you know, you always have to sell your event to them. So they liked the conference and they liked the idea. So they also want to come and learn and talk to other people. How do you 

Mike Koelzer, Host: write that in the presentation to them? Do you come out and say this is a non-paid thing or no, they know it's not, unless you say something like how much do you charge or 

Vivian Juter Frankel: something, right?

Yeah. Or usually it's the other way round. They'll be like, how much are you paying me? And they'll be like, Hmm, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You don't bring it up. If they bring it up, I don't bring it up. If they bring it up, then you say, we're not paying you anything. And then some will say, okay, and some will say, no, I, I need something.

Vivian Juter Frankel: Or depending on the name and the situation I might be. What's 

Mike Koelzer, Host: That fee that you pay to get into a place? Yeah, it could be a reduced registration or maybe pay for the registration is free. Oh, that's free. So when they come, that's free and that's a lot of money. Sometimes this 

Vivian Juter Frankel: is what I like to think is they want to be part of the event and they want to go to the event and they're not being charged for that.

Somebody wants to tell me, and this was a couple of years ago, so I don't know if it was a model. People were trying and didn't go anywhere, but they tried charging speakers and I was like, I've never heard of that. I was like, no. I mean, I think that's probably a different type of 

Mike Koelzer, Host: event. There are some podcasts that charge guests to be on there.

I get 

Vivian Juter Frankel: it because it's there setting it up as a 

marketing 

Mike Koelzer, Host: thing, you know, they're saying, look, I've got thousands of listeners. And so if I'm going to bring someone on, I think they usually do it when they've got so many people that want to do it, that they say, "What's it worth to everybody?" 

Vivian Juter Frankel: And to be clear, there are positions often reserved for sponsors speaking slots.

But I think most companies are very careful about that because nobody wants to be an attendee. You don't want to be like, I just paid to hear a bunch of people pitch me. So you're 

Mike Koelzer, Host: saying some companies have spots for people to pay to come. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. The sponsors are part of the sponsorship package. Oh, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: if they sponsored, they'll get a speaker.

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. They'll get a speaking spot. But you know, and we always do try to say like, okay, you've got the speakers to that, but please don't use this as an hour long commercial for your company. And I would say my experience is that most are pretty careful, but there are some that sometimes are like, Terrible.

And that's all they do. And it pisses off the attendees. I mean, and rightfully so they didn't come to be 

Mike Koelzer, Host: pitched. It's gotta be hard to put a limit on a number like you can't say, all right, saying your business name this many times means that you've gone overboard, but only saying that once, you know what I mean?

I mean, look at people who aren't stupid. The speaker knows if he's getting up and he's trying to put on a sales pitch or not, but they might think they're trying to pull one over on you guys. What would be something where you start saying, oh crap. Or you start shaking your head because you've seen it. Right.

You've seen someone get up there and try to pitch your company too much. Yeah. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: There's nothing you can do about it as a corporate line. They always say, well, we won't invite them back, but you know, Your business is making money. You're not going to say no. He tried to talk to them and say, tone it down.

There was this one guy. I did a healthcare conference and he came in at the last minute and the sponsor people asked me to put them on. He wasn't sponsoring my event. He was sponsoring another event, [00:20:00] but he was interested in this and they're like, can you put them on? And I had a speaker slot available. So I said, yes.

And then we decided to do something at lunchtime. Um, it's like round tables or something. So I said, do you want to kind of introduce that? And you know, launch that? And he said, yeah, that would love to. And he was an entrepreneur and had a lot of great experience and a lot of great businesses and was very knowledgeable in the field.

So I was like, okay, great. The guy literally. 15 minutes out of our 45 minute lunch, where people are supposed to eat and network and have conversations with each other, talking about himself. And I was like trying to cut them off and I'm trying to figure like, good God. When is he going to talk about himself and his businesses and what they were doing and how successful they were?

I was tearing my hair out, you know, trying to keep trying to, I literally was like walking up to him, trying to take the microphone from him. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Was he even trying to promote money stuff or did he just have a stage for himself to brag about himself? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I think so, because it wasn't like these people weren't even really their target audience.

I think he was just, you know, I have an uncle who's a producer. He has produced movies and plays and musicals. And whenever he's in the fundraising stage, His motto is talk to everybody, sell yourself to every single person you come across, never, ever stop. And like I said, it's worked for him and I feel like that was this.

Guy's kind of, I don't know if it was a conscious decision, but that's kind of what it is. And you know, and again, hats off to him, you know, running your own business and being entrepreneurial and securing funds and getting everything out there does take a lot of work, but it was, you know, I just feel like it was endless and tireless self promotion, and yes, we got the feedback saying he was terrible.

Mike Koelzer, Host: That theory of, you know, well it doesn't hurt. Talk to everybody. It's like, well Yeah. If you want to be known as kind of an asshole who wants to be known as 

That, I'm just going to say, I think my uncle probably does it a lot more, uh, with a lot more finesse. Yeah. 

I'm sure there's a few different ways to do it too.

And 

Vivian Juter Frankel: yeah, he just took up like half the lunchtime. I was like, dude, nobody wants to sit here and listen to you. Talk about your businesses, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Vivian. You know, what should be against the law? I decided on the best man's speeches. Those should, I mean, look at the combination you got, you've got a friend Who is drunk probably has never been in front of a microphone too often.

He's not a comedian, but he thinks he is after a few beers. Well, here's what I'd say. At least if they don't do away with them, they should have clearance. You know, like you have to read it and you've got to get authorization or something because that's a 

tragedy. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I'm going to tell you a funny story.

Normally I would agree with you, but you do have, uh, so my brother is an exceptional speaker and he's just a really funny endearing guy and he does everything off the cuff and my brother got married. My other brother. I had two brothers when he got mad. He did that. He's like, I want to see what you're going to write.

You have to write it out because I need to approve it. And my brother was so upset. He's like, I can't work that way. I can't function. And you know, it's just not the way he thinks it is to write out a whole speech. So he tried to do it and he started reading it and it was just a disaster. It was the worst speech ever.

But I mean, I get what you're saying there. I mean, he's the exception to the rule because he's a natural off the cuff speaker, my 

Mike Koelzer, Host: best man. And unfortunately we don't see eye to eye anymore, but I knew before he got up there that. Probably going to say something a little off color and things like that.

What I probably shouldn't have done is ever had that situation and probably never had him as my best man. So I think a lot of it is don't pick someone like that. Do you think your other brother had any reason to believe that your brother would do this? Or do you think he listened to advice from someone like me who, you know, didn't know, you know, I 

Vivian Juter Frankel: never really thought about it.

And now that you mention it, I wonder if he took advice from his now wife, because we're all like, and she is just the most.

So I wonder if she was like, you can't let Joe say whatever he wants. Why 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Do businesses have conferences? You mentioned it earlier. Like one wanted to get it in before their end of the year. It is a 

Vivian Juter Frankel: business. I mean, that is the business. So there's two types of events. One is somebody like I did some work for Nvidia, you know, you know, them, the chip company.

And, um, they have an annual event for their developers. I think it was called the GD. I forget what it was called. So you have the corporations who put on their own events, and then you have companies that are just event companies that say, you know what I can make. Putting on an event, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: It's a profit game.

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yes. So they just say, and then you have a corporation, like what I, uh, I, who I was working for, you know, and their whole goal is to put on [00:25:00] 120 events a year. Wow. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: And pharmacy, we had to go every year to our wholesalers, dog and pony show because they would give like a few percentage points on your buying for the whole year.

If you went to the convention, the trade 

Vivian Juter Frankel: show, it goes back to what we were talking about. The pitch sessions. I'm assuming that, did they have a conference attached to that or was it just the trade show? It was a 

Mike Koelzer, Host: conference attached to it. I never went to those. I don't know. I guess the hotel room seemed more attractive to me than sitting at conferences.

Yeah. The three or four main wholesalers do it. They make you go. Crap load of money to go to, but they say you save that in your percentage off buying through the year. Let's say it costs you a thousand to go. Maybe you save two or 3000 by purchasing discounts, not even buying they're just through the year.

They give you this discount because you went to the trade show. So I guess those conferences and stuff, they're money things, but some probably. Do them for money. They do them for exposure, 

Vivian Juter Frankel: the corporate events, the corporate events, like the one you're describing, like, I think Nvidia, I mean, I don't know if they make money.

I was never part of that business model, but I think it's more to get people in the room to find a message. Right. Cause you know, like all these companies, big corporations have big events and sometimes they're internal for their people. And sometimes like you said, like that in Nvidia, I think it was external.

You know how Apple can, uh, you know, you can develop stuff for, you know, apps for the iPhone. Nvidia had the same thing. They had open-sourced information. So you can bring in all these people who just needed to learn it, to learn various things about the chip chips and stuff like that. Um, I don't know if they're designed as moneymakers.

Um, I don't even know what, like Nvidia, I don't even know what they charged people to, to come in. I'm sure they want to at least break even like, you know, it's not a lost lever leader and I know there's, you know, they're charging money to attend. So, but whether the goal is for profit, I think it's, I mean, I think the goal is more for marketing and publicity, but whether they figure they can make a profit at it as well, I'm not, I don't know.

But for companies like Inform as a huge national international conference company based out of the UK, I mean, that's their whole business. I mean, it's huge and they've got. Fingers and almost every pie, you know, healthcare, the life sciences, uh, um, defense, what finance, you know, whatever that's, all they do is produce conferences.

I lie informally, and also produce publications. So lately there's been a big tie in between publishing and, and, and conferences, um, the, to support each other very nicely. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: So I've always seen conferences that have been by the company, you know, by the wholesalers and so on. And I think maybe they don't advertise much to pharmacies that way, because most people probably aren't going to go to.

Two or three, you know, they've got the, they've got the wholesaler and maybe they've got their national association, something like that. But I understand what you're talking about and would this be similar to a home and garden show or something in town? You know, like a trade show that might be put on by a company who just does these things and they make money from them, but similar, but for conference.

Right? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: So my background is technology. So let me know if you remember, but you remember things like the internet, the world, or CES. These massive technologies are not massive. They were massive tech conferences. CES still goes on, but that's like a private company 

Mike Koelzer, Host: South by Southwest. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Something like that. Exactly.

All these things are just private companies that are like, I'm going to get people together and make money from it. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure Southwest, Southwest makes tons of 

Mike Koelzer, Host: money. If you took a poll of the average person walking around a trade show or a conference, and you said compared to two weeks ago, when you were back at your.

Office or back in your hometown or something. Is this a positive thing to be here? Or a negative thing to be here. You think the participants like it, or it's just a pain in the ass for them and they have to go because of their company or something. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I think most participants choose to go for the conferences they choose to go to.

They have to apply to their company to allow them to go because they have to justify the costs of the time away, things like that. Because it's not their vacation. Um, whether they enjoy it or not, of course boils down to the event, the success of the event on a good event. I think most people would walk away saying, yeah, I think it's an opportunity.

There are a couple of things you get out of conferences if you get the opportunity to learn more about what you're doing and let's face it in business. There are a lot of managers or executives who. And I don't say this as a negative, this is just life. There are a lot of things, you know, a lot of decisions have to be made and you don't always feel like, you know, all the facts or, you know, you want to see what somebody else is doing and how somebody else has managed it.

So [00:30:00] it provides an opportunity to learn from other people. It's an opportunity to get out of the, uh, out of the office and to hang out with some 

Mike Koelzer, Host: colleagues. That's a big part 

Vivian Juter Frankel: of it too. Isn't it? Large conferences can do things that are kind of fun. Um, cause they have the money, you know, to throw into all these extracurricular activities like big parties.

Like I, I, you know, again, when I was going to big trade shows, uh, there was a big party to go to every night, um, you know, or a dinner or things like that. But for smaller events, you always have the, you know, you have your networking breaks lunch and the gratuitous cocktail party, a 

Mike Koelzer, Host: typical conference.

That's not a trade show. They don't have fun things planned. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: No. I mean, some people try, but yeah, no. The fun thing is your cocktail figure. Most events are two day events. So the first day, you know, for the two days you'll get breakfast, you get lunch, you get 15 to 30 minute coffee breaks. And then at the end of day one, you have a cocktail party, which is about an hour, hour to an hour and a half, where half the people don't stay for pre-dinner or after dinner or what pre-dinner as soon as the conference ends.

So if the conference ends at five, the cocktail is like five to six 30. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: And then people, because it's a two day event, if they're out of town, they might go to dinner or something like that afterwards, 

Vivian Juter Frankel: but it's usually left up to their own devices and I've seen organizations. And again, I think this has mostly to do with the bigger one.

Like people have set up sheets and things like that. You know, if you want to go to, you know, like, you know, if you want to go to dinner with somebody, put your name down here and we'll try to match people, but it's, I don't know how successful those 

Mike Koelzer, Host: things are, but most of them don't have nighttime 

Vivian Juter Frankel: things.

I'm trying to plan one. My dream event that I'm planning for September is in park city. And I want to do a tour of a distillery and dinner. Right? How fun would that be? 

Mike Koelzer, Host: People going to these conferences might apply for them. Then they go. I imagine that people probably like to go to some, but you wouldn't want to go to one every week.

Cause then you'd probably get behind on your stuff a couple of times a year though. It's an 

Vivian Juter Frankel: interesting question. I've never actually asked. Maybe I should start doing that. How many conferences people go to a year? 

Mike Koelzer, Host: My dad always said, 'cause we're from grand rapids, Michigan. He'd always say, how come you never have?

He was joking. Well, how come they never have these in Detroit? They're always done in Florida. You know, but people like the warm weather, right? They like to travel a little bit. Things like that. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I think there are two schools of thought, one is the destination event and one is the convenience event.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Opposite. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Exactly. So for example, a lot of, you know, when you're playing and this is the producer's job, as well as to identify a location that they think, so you try to take into account where is going to come from, you know, or the flight's going to be difficult. What they need to do is most people are going to need to do transfers.

How far is the hotel from the airport, you know, or is the hotel in a place where people can wander around? Because as we discussed, they do have some time available, like in the evenings, you know, can they leave the hotel and go find something to eat? And then certainly the weather, like, you know, even Detroit and, you know, even though Detroit may be easily accessible, nobody wants to go to Detroit in January.

Mike Koelzer, Host: I don't think they want to go to Detroit in July. We have a little rivalry going on this side of the state to that side of the. Of course Grand Rapids is trying to make their mark. We can't have huge things, but we've got the Amway boys, you know, and they're, they're always trying to, to bring stuff here.

Vivian Juter Frankel: You're seeing a lot more smaller cities I think are becoming popular, Nashville in Alaska. Like I remember when I was at a company four years ago, I tried to do an event in Nashville and they refused. They said it was too hard to get to. Cause I was like, it's right in the middle for everybody. And next thing I know Nashville, like all these events are happening in Nashville because it's a hotbed.

Um, I've, I've looked at Louisville, uh, Denver, we did an event. I'm not such a fan of Denver because I think it's too far from the airport. Um, you know, these are the things you take into account trying to balance what people like and, you know, cause you gotta remember also like we did an event in park city, which I thought was fantastic, but no, there wasn't any time for anybody to do anything.

And if you're at an event all day, You know, and people do come and go, like, they feel like they've taken their two days off. They don't, you know, they're rarely going to spend another day or so. Where were you 

Mike Koelzer, Host: working at this time? Last year 

Vivian Juter Frankel: I was working for a company based out of North Carolina and I was about to leave them.

So yeah, I left them in February. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: What kind of events were they doing? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Healthcare. I did healthcare and finance for them. They were in those two different 

Mike Koelzer, Host: verticals, but they were one of those companies that did events. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. We did a lot of events in managed healthcare, which is huge, you know, like Medicaid, Medicaid, Medicare, enormously complicated.

Um, then, like I said, I also did some stuff. I also did stuff in finance, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: but that's going to be one of those. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. Yeah. Then I think they did some legal 

Mike Koelzer, Host: stuff, which people are more boring. The healthcare people or the. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Neither. They were both super fun. [00:35:00] All 

Mike Koelzer, Host: right. I know when to move on. I thought I could get 

Vivian Juter Frankel: yet.

Yeah. I mean, these are dry topics, but the people behind them are passionate and interesting. So that's 

Mike Koelzer, Host: true. All right. So it's this time last year 

Vivian Juter Frankel: and I make the grand decision to quit my job, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: you know, looking back at your early Twitter stuff, one of your early tweets was COVID I 

Vivian Juter Frankel: think, wow. You really did go through all my stuff.

I rarely see. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Oh, heck yeah. Go through everything. One of your early things was COVID you quit your job. All of a sudden you've got people that can't go to conferences and it almost seems like. Had like a crystal ball. Like, I mean, it seems like that would be the time to do this, but it wasn't. You already had your job quitting plan.

Did you already have farm salon in your 

Vivian Juter Frankel: mind before this? I registered pharmacists on October 20, 19, yes. I had been planning on it for a while. I was extremely unhappy in my work situation. Not so much the topics, but very, you know, unhappy with my managers and enormously stressed out. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Managers suck a lot of managers, sock.

Why is 

Vivian Juter Frankel: do sock? I think this one was just threatened and yes, feel free to publish that she was younger than me. And she was the worst, you know, always like I know everything I do is right. You've worked at one company your entire life. Don't tell me that. Anyway, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: it's all self preservation at seams. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah.

And you know what, it's the feudal system. Everybody very, you know, protects their little area and they have to be king. Yeah. They have to be king of their area. I'm not built that way. I, you know, we always talk about teamwork, but I truly am a team player. And I was looking forward to working with organizations to be able to have a team, you know, again, you don't want to be an island.

Like, I didn't want to be an island. I wanted to be somebody who would like to talk to my marketing person and say, oh, you know, maybe we should try this. Or maybe we should try this. And, uh, you know, what do you think of this top? Like talk to my manager who supposedly had more experience than I did and be like, what do you think of this topic?

Or let me kind of tease something out with you. And all I ever got was either that's wrong and then figure it out on your own. And I got this from my two last jobs, so, which really kind of embittered me too, to corporate life. Not that I ever was a fan, but 

Mike Koelzer, Host: I haven't. Corporation ever really it's always been our family business.

I run things as a benevolent dictator and heavy on the dictator and not so sure about the benevolence. I've never been in corporate politics, but I know they would try me bunkers, batty. I'm sure. Okay. So I would look at this and I would say, well, Vivian, you did all this because of COVID and stuff.

You're like, no, I was going to quit my job. I had a pharmacy salon. How far back had you gotten that name? 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Let's say, I think it was around, it was October of 2019. All right. So bring me through 

Mike Koelzer, Host: your thought process that maybe you want to do it. We already know you 

Vivian Juter Frankel: hated your, that. Wasn't the only reason why, I mean, that was certainly a motivating factor.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Oh, I think you should do things out of spite. That's how you get successful. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: That's why I will be moving into healthcare next. So I was in this business and I've always done smaller events, less than a hundred people. And this I think was a little bit of rub between me and the corporations. Like they had this girl come in and she always did these large trade shows.

And, you know, she thought she knew everything because people and I hear this a lot. People think that quantity translates to quality. So if I do bigger events with more people and more everything, I clearly know more than. Because you only do small events with a small number of people and only one or two tracks, which to me is like, they're just two different animals.

And I really wanted to, and when I had joined this company, to be honest, I thought they were open, you know, they said they were trying to build their thing and they wanted to do things differently and they wanted to do things interesting and, and stuff like that. And I was excited because I felt like small events, too many people looked at smaller events and made them look like a trade show conference.

You know what I mean? Like you have your people, a person on the stage, you have a presentation, a presentation, a presentation, and then you do it all the next day. And maybe like a, you know, a fireside chat or a panel discussion, but there's no difference other than scale to the way a hundred person event. A range to a 5,000 person event was arranged.

And I felt like that was just wrong because when you're selling a smaller event, part of the reason that you say is a certain amount of intimacy, right? You get to meet everybody, you get to kind of talk to everybody and, you know, you're just selling this much more, going back to what we were talking about, networking a kind of a, getting closer to everybody there, but they never really provided the format to do that.

And whenever I tried doing that, I was kicked back [00:40:00] saying, well, that's not the way it's done. The 

Mike Koelzer, Host: 5,000 versus a hundred can be a lot different. But unless you take advantage of those differences, you're just the little sibling of the bigger one. And people are going to say I was okay, but it wasn't really big.

It was like, unless you take advantage of that small. People are always going to just say you were 

Vivian Juter Frankel: the underdog. There are things to be had out of a small event. And so when I started a pharmacy salon, the whole idea was to make things that better enable the exchange of ideas. Because the other thing that always, I always say is that the people on the stage nine times out of 10, Are the same level of experience as the people in the audience.

I mean, you'll have some junior people who are there to learn, but it doesn't mean they don't have anything to offer either. You know, even if they have good questions or probing questions. So why not maximize all of the education in the room or all the experience in the room. So I wanted to set up events that allowed for more back and forth conversation.

Yes, we have our presentations and yes, we have our panels and yes, we have our fireside chats, but we also, I also wanted to make sure that we have room for people to exchange ideas with the guy next to them as well. And in that process, they get to better know everybody in the room. You know, if you're constantly moving tables and things like that, and just make whole thing a lot more experiential, then I'm just going to sit and listen to a, you know, a didactic presentation where I sit and take notes and review the notes and, you know, report back to my company.

What the speaker 

Mike Koelzer, Host: said. You say, you want these smaller. Things. Tell me why you picked pharmacy. Did you see a whole lot more in the pharmacy? In other words, why didn't you pick dental or why didn't you pick medical equipment? Why is this called a pharma salon? Why the 

Vivian Juter Frankel: pharmacists? Because when I was at one of my previous corporate jobs, We actually started a, I started an event in compounding pharmacy and it came because I was in life sciences and we were doing something for pharmaceutical and for the pharmaceutical industry, in terms of, um, you know, again, labs or, or production, I forget what it was.

Um, I'm still not really, you know, Jack of all trades, master of none, Jack of all terms, master of none. And the guy talked to me, he turned to me and he said, you know, who could really use these events are compounding pharmacies because the industry is relatively newly regulated. And a lot of people are in denial.

A lot of the labs and the pharmacists and the pharmacies are in denial about being invested in, you know, inspected by the FDA. They got so hard 

Mike Koelzer, Host: on things back 10 years ago, right. They got a lot more rules and things. Well, 

Vivian Juter Frankel: you know what I'm talking about, that big event where all those people died from a compounding pharmacy, the big meningitis event.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yeah. Pharmacists know how to shoot themself at guys left out. Vaccine overnight. I read that it was deliberate. I'm glad it wasn't me. Cause I'd like, no, I wasn't delivered. I just forgot. But yeah. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Well I think that's where the story they went for, but then they just, he said, no, I did it on purpose, but that's the whole point.

There's so many processes and things that can slip you up, you know, like air quality in the lab air, you know, where do you even get gowned up inside or outside? Where do you wash your hands? They're all these like little details that nobody ever had to deal with. Anyway, this guy from Eli Lilly had suggested it and we did an event and it went really well.

It was really fun. We had FDA speakers coming and engaging and everybody there said they were looking for more of these events and you know, you've got the association events, but again, those were the big trade shows and you have like individual small kind of state events I found out, but there's not a lot of conferences as there is in every other industry, you know, for healthcare, for pharmaceutical, for medical devices that bring all these people together in this kind of.

So when I left my company, I was like, I really enjoyed the compounding pharmacy space. I still had my contacts. So it was kind of, you know, there's a law, there's a balance of what's really interesting. And what can I realistically get into having zero contacts? So I went into the compound pharmacy space and there is, you know, there's the big player, which is the one that I started, which is compounding pharmacy compliance.

They do it twice a year. So I kind of had to figure out how to manage, injecting myself in the middle of all that. And the online space worked out really well. And then it coincided with, you know, COVID kind of rocketing me forward. COVID help. It was both a detriment and not a detriment to help in the beginning.

And now everybody's burnt out on zoom because there are so many events. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Interesting. All right. Got to break this down a little bit. There's a lot to process. First of all these pharmacy conferences, because they force you to go to the one, the dog and pony show with the wholesaler, which you don't have enough of.

Like-minded people together there, you just got the [00:45:00] wholesaler trying to do this. That's one. Then you've got the state association overnighter, you know, where you go for regulatory things, but it's more general, it's more general pharmacy stuff. If they force you to go to the wholesaler one, and then there's some other stuff going on.

We talked earlier about how many people would like to go to? And I think that what you're saying then is people were saying that they liked some of these when they went there, but you might have a half hour of compounding or. Every other subject that would be, you might have a half hour of it, but then the rest of it is going to all the other stuff that is to conference and that people could use more of.

And then more interaction with other people there. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: And other people is specifically in their field, because if you're at a big trade show, like you said, that's pharmacy, you know, how are you going to necessarily, other than like you said, going to that half hour, how are you going to identify who else is in the compounding pharmacy space?

Mike Koelzer, Host: What's the dream? Tell me where you want to 

Vivian Juter Frankel: see this. So my original idea is that we would provide a deeper dive, which is maybe you have a presentation and then you have a panel and then you have a round table. So each time kind of drills down a little bit more into a topic ending with the round table where people can really kind of say, this is what we learned from the two previous things.

And like I said, loosely, like, it might just be a presentation round table. This is what we learned from the presentation, but let's all talk about how that's relevant to us. Was that useful? Do you have any other experience that, you know, you think would be relevant to this topic or any other questions? Um, and the idea was that you would have an expert at each table.

So let's say you do have a question, you know, maybe you have an expert that can answer those questions or any, like I said, and the other people can chime in. So that was really the dream. So for our first event, we'd put on a couple of presentations and a couple of panels. And then what I did cause the other opportunity with the round tables is to also be more niche events.

And so what I did was I had six round tables in one time slot, you know, cause you know, you break things down into three hours or whatever, and you can choose the table that you want to talk about a topic that you want to talk about with other people. This was all online. This was in August where, you know, zoom, I think was, you know, all of a sudden, super out of control because everybody had been using it and there weren't a lot of options and people were still learning a bunch of.

We had one of those services. You know, when you go to trade shows, you can download an app that helps you see who else is there and network with people and meet people. So they try to pivot online as well, which I thought would be great because that way I had all the, you know, you could add your agenda and you could just click on the link in the agenda on the app.

And because otherwise we would have had to send out different links to everybody. At least that's what we thought in the beginning. And you know, that it would all be a different link and then zoom introduced breakout rooms. So that actually became a little less needed. So anyway, we had everybody accessing through the app, which worked for all the main kinds of stage presentations, but it didn't work for the breakout room.

So I had 75 people in six breakout rooms, unable to get in. That was a big kind of learning experience on that one. And then just, um, also the benefit is that it's such a big learning experience and doing what I wanted to do since it hasn't been done, uh, you know, is a learning experience and people were kind of were generous, you know, like they know we're all trying something new and I'm trying a different format.

I learned about a bunch of tables. Some of the speakers didn't complain, but they were a little disappointed because they didn't get the interaction that they'd hoped for from the people. On the table. Some of the groups said, yeah, we had a great conversation. Uh, some of them, like I dropped into a one with a lawyer and she was doing a Valiant effort.

There were, I think, six people in the room. And again, everybody knew, you know, that it wasn't, I mean, the tables were capped at eight. So we had six people in the room and only one person would answer questions or say something. So that was tough. What I took from that is, and I'm excited about our March event is, uh, to really do a better job of scripting the round tables and be, do a better job.

I think of leading up to the event, informing all the attendees, like come prepared with a story, come prepared with questions. You know, don't sit in these rooms and have nothing to say because the whole reason you would come to a pharmaceutical salon event is you get to sit in a room and talk to the speakers and talk to the other people.

Um, So I'm going to make sure that speakers know to go around the room and introduce themselves as why are you here or what are you hoping to learn? And you know, that kind of thing to start the conversation, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: you're going to stay away from any of the technology stuff. You're not building a technology platform, that's all gonna be there.

You can puzzle that together. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Since August. There've been, uh, there's been an explosion of companies that are geared up to this space. So we are going with a company called Hoppen, which I think is [00:50:00] going to be really good. It just has everything we need, including networking. And it's just, it's a neat program, but yeah, I don't need to build it.

It's there. It's there 

Mike Koelzer, Host: now. No, I ain't. No genius, but I'm thinking this, I'm thinking you've got to get the right speakers, but you also have to have a way to rate. The participants. So they need a rating because you don't want a table of six and have this a whole guy, like at the, uh, bet event where he got up and talked about himself.

You want people that speak enough at the table, but you also want someone that's going to be able to work well in the group. And so I think that you've got to rate the people somehow, but how would you do that without embarrassing people? And so on? I mean, I would do it once and they'd say, we don't want him there, but the participation is going to be interesting depending on how much you have people participate.

Right? I think 

Vivian Juter Frankel: there's an evolution that went on. I think we talked about this briefly once before, and this all started out when I started doing unconference sessions, which is, I would just put a topic on a table and anybody wanted to sit at that table. They could sit and chat to everybody else at that table.

Nine times out of 10 people loved it because it gives you a break to the day. You're, it's just a very free flow conversation. What you just said is exactly what would happen on occasion. You'd have one guy dominating the entire conversation and nobody else could get a word in edge or two. Um, so I introduced a moderator.

The challenge is to educate the moderator enough to let the free flow conversation go without it being dominated. And that's the speakers well, like, cause we do design bullet points and objectives, and I keep trying to emphasize them. This is actually kind of meant to be a free flowing conversation.

Even the presentation for the round tables, we don't always have presentations. Some of them are more formalized and they do a 10 minute presentation. But the idea is like, let the conversation grow organically without having one or two people dominate it. And at the same time, trying to make sure that everybody kind of gets what they want.

And I think, you know, I'm not, I haven't really thought of this, but you know, you do tend to use a lot of the same speaker. And maybe with time, and I'm hoping that this is an easy buy-in because it's online and a lot of these round tables, you don't really have to prepare a presentation or anything like that, as they do it more, they'll get more experienced, you know, like anything else, you get more experienced with it.

So maybe after a couple of times they know how to better manage that conversation or make sure it goes really smoothly. Initially it's up to the moderator to make sure that one or two people don't co dominate a conversation. And at the same time, be able to pull other people out of their shell to participate in the conversation.

If 

Mike Koelzer, Host: I'm coming to a pharma salon. It'd be interesting to know who was in my group, because for example, arguably, I'm going to see some of these people online already. I know it's a round table and they're not presenting, but I think it would be cool to sit down with Bob, from Bob's pharmacy in Kansas, because I see some of the stuff he does, but I'd rather not sit with, you know, Mary from Mary's pharmacy in South Dakota, because she's always online spouting political things or something like that.

That'd be tough to do the 

Vivian Juter Frankel: one that actually, you know, one of the softwares, the back ones I considered, had something that would solve that problem. And now you're making you think I should go back. But then we're missing some others. Uh that's the problem is nobody has it all. So they had a quote-unquote room.

It was the main room, which you can, it was actually set up, you know, like, have you seen floor plans with tables in it? Like, have you ever done a wedding or something or whatever. So there's, it's like a floor plan. Right. And you see the round circle for the table and you see all the chairs around it, you know, and all the tables that are in the room, they had it.

So you could go into that room and you'd see who is sitting at what table. And then you could put a name on that table. So topic a, you know, you could come in and you can say, okay, here's topic a and it's got, like you said, it's got Bob, Mary and gene, but this table has, you know, Nancy and Quincy.

Which we like you said, that is kind of neat that you could just go. And I liked that idea too, because one of the things I was thinking of that we were talking about was it would be fun because you could also just have a blank table. Let's say somebody just wants to break into hanging out with some people, you know, they would go to that table and do that.

I 

Mike Koelzer, Host: don't know if you've ever heard of it's called the traveling salesmen computer problem, where if you've got like, actually they study bees to do this, they see where the bees go to the flowers and what flowers they go to first and so on, because if you've got like, 10 places for a salesman to go, and you want to see what their best route is.

There's computers that can't even handle that. It goes up so high because of that doubling, doubling, doubling of the numbers. Here's another thing you could do. Maybe you don't have names on it, but you've got a few things like he's a new compounder versus he's opening one up and then someone could say, well, I don't want to be with a new guy.

Or they might say, I want to be with a new guy to get new [00:55:00] ideas because he's maybe this or he, or she's maybe this or that. So maybe you could do it without names. It would be like the dating game. You remember 

Vivian Juter Frankel: that? Yeah, of course. Contestant 

Mike Koelzer, Host: number two, I've got a one pound jar of you to surrender. Tell me what do I do with that?

You know, one of those kinds of things. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Yeah. I mean, you could set up a signup sheet maybe beforehand, just before the event. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: That's tricky, but that's what you 

Vivian Juter Frankel: get paid for. So when I make the big bucks for 

Mike Koelzer, Host: That's where you differentiate yourself from people saying, Hey, now we're just gonna get a group together and chat.

It's like, no, do it this way because Vivian, she's done this her whole life. She knows how people work. She's had success. She's had a couple failures to learn from. She's the pro that's why we're going to do this through a pharma salon. That's that? Where does this go? After COVID. What do you think the live mix versus online is 

Vivian Juter Frankel: going to be, um, promoting for a long time, trying to do online events, you know, whether it be webinars and things like that.

And they just, I don't know, they haven't really been accepted. A lot of the stuff has been around, but they've never really taken full w it never needed to be achieved. I think it's a kind of mass acceptance. As a conference producer, we now have people who are very comfortable doing this in this space, in the online space.

There's a lot of benefits. I mean, you know, it's an easier buy in. It's an easier sell. You don't have to go anywhere. You can pick and choose what you want to participate in. The pros and the cons are, it is a lot less immersive. So I think moving forward, what a lot of conference people are looking at is hybrid events.

Um, and that's certainly what we want to plan. If you want to get out of the office in common. That's why I think location events are going to become more interesting. Uh, you know, a destination event becomes more interesting than one. That's closer to the airport and easy to access because the reality is I think people who come to these events are going to want to be there.

Because they want to see people. They want to be in a nice place. They want to get out of there. And if they don't, they're going to be able to access it online. So we'll be offering, you know, I'll have the full Avi team, they're recording everything and having the online thing going on at the same time as the live event going on.

And I think that's what's going to be really exciting and interesting in the future. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You know, even some churches are doing that around where they've got like the main, pastor's like 10 miles away. And then they got these satellite churches where people still even go to the church, but you've got just a big screen up there and it's like five miles away.

They just can't fit so many people in there. Let's say you have a speaker. I know you don't always, let's say you have a speaker. They might give it live to half the people and half the people might be watching it online. And then you might have some breakout groups 

Vivian Juter Frankel: and. And in a perfect world, I've got somebody in at the hotel, you know, at the live event, managing those round tables and everything that goes on there.

And I've got somebody online managing the virtual round tables and what's going on there. So if you have a large group of people online, they're still getting the benefit of the networking. And then as you know, like with the speaker on stage, they can still submit questions and stuff like that, which one you have coming up with then it's called a compounding pharmacy business salon.

And I got this from a lot of people who said, yes, we're all focused on, you know, a lot of the technical stuff, but there's not enough people talking about, you know, kind of the nuts and bolts of, of the business side. So I'm pretty excited because, uh, it's divided into three tracks. One is marketing, cause there's not a lot of people talking about marketing, especially for the 5 0 3 A's, you know, the independent pharmacies, you know, the 5 0 3 BS are pretty corporate.

You know, the kind of know what their role is and it's for both, but, so we've got the marketing, uh, track, the operations track, which is just, you know, just trying to figure stuff out, like budgeting issues, you know, how do you, how do you navigate certain budgeting decisions that need to be made? You know, just, uh, SLPs, things like that.

And I'm actually super excited as well about the third track, which is opportunities. I really wanted to explore where the compounding pharmacy business is going. The future. One is this in March, March 20th. And it's a one day event. So pharma salon.com. Right? Right. And I also want to mention one of the benefits to being online is all that, you know, we have all this content in one day and obviously everybody's not going to be able to hit all the, all the sessions.

So one of the benefits online is that all of these are recorded and there you can get CE credits for them. So anybody who registers can pick and choose the sessions they want to go to and they want to participate in, and then if they need the CE credits, or they're just curious, they can download all the videos afterwards and watch them on their own timeframe.

And I think that's a huge advantage to, um, the online 

Mike Koelzer, Host: space. Okay. Wait a minute though, I got to play devil's advocate on this one. So you spend the time [01:00:00] and the money and the effort, and you've got people that are drooling over these three different tracks, but then they can only do one of them. It would seem I ain't no genius, but it would seem that there is a way to let them go to all three of them somehow, like maybe like an extended day, if they do this 

Vivian Juter Frankel: or that there you have it.

The challenge in the online space is yes, people want to go to all three, but they're not going to, they don't want to spend three days online. They 

Mike Koelzer, Host: wake up and eat cereal at their desk and then they just sit there and they're not at work, but 

Vivian Juter Frankel: they're at home. Exactly. So, and then the challenge, as well as again, when we had this August event, it was a half day event.

You know, we had to do a half day event because of the time zones. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You needed three hours early and three hours later here to match them up. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: But the challenges since August, even now, everybody is doing zoom events, including the company. So people are spending so much time focused on zoom, the thought of spending four hours.

Over three days at one event they're not super excited about, even if they're excited about the content, they might get 

Mike Koelzer, Host: overwhelmed. And they're going to say, I'm not going to do anything. Exactly. I 

Vivian Juter Frankel: can't sit and process this much information in three days. So I agree with you. It's not ideal because I do believe everybody would want all three days.

At least they can say, you know what I'm really interested to hear about, you know, that five or three days in precision medicine. And I really want to hear, uh, about how I'm, you know, that case study about that guy who, um, was able to sell his product and expand his business by working better with doctors.

I really want to hear how I can kind of budget and build or prepare for automation, but I can't, I can't take off the three days. So that way, at least, and again, it's not ideal, but at least they can say, I do want to hear this other information. " I am interested in it. And I also need my CE credits so they can say, all right, these are the ones I really want to hear.

And then I'm going to spend the next month downloading the other. So at least I can hear about it. And at least I can get my CE credits at a more leisurely pace and that it was going to carry through to the hybrid event. So what I'll do is everything is recorded. So let's say people are online and they can't make all three days that same, you know, if they can't do it, they will still have the ability to download all the recordings and get their CE credits for one month after the event.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Here's what I would think. Let's say they're doing it in their house. It'd be nice to have something included to make them feel the same. Specialness or relaxation they have as if they went somewhere, like maybe you send over a SUSE to their house or this marijuana stuff is getting more popular. Maybe you send along with the signup, a little goody box.

There you go. A goodie box that has a special cologne or perfume. It's got some marijuana in it. It may be like a bad roller, but something to give them the feeling of being at this hotel. But they're sitting at home in their pajamas. Well, Vivian, it was a pleasure talking to you. 

Vivian Juter Frankel: Well, thank you, Mike.

It's been.