Streamlining Pharmacy Drug Inventory | George Lazenby, OrderInsite

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

[00:00:12] Mike: George, for those that haven't come across you online, introduce yourself and tell our listeners what we're talking about today.

[00:00:20] George: My name is George Lazenby, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Order Insight, and I thought we would talk about prescription drug management and monitoring in today's retail pharmacy space.

[00:00:33] Mike: George. Now I imagine if you've done your job right with the company, that those words together, order, insight, probably describe something about your company. What does that mean order insight?

[00:00:50] George: Yeah, so when we were pulling the company together, we were asking ourselves, what's important about properly managing your prescription drug inventory? Well, the most important thing is getting your order optimized to demand. anD making sure that order goes to the right suppliers so that you optimize your cost of sales.

So you're making sure you're getting the right things ordered in your bucket and you're making sure it goes to the right supplier so your costs are in good shape and you're optimizing to the agreements that you have. And then the insight part of it is There's a recognition on our part, really, that our customers, which are primarily retail pharmacies, but we do work in health systems and long term care, really don't have access, generally don't have access to current advanced analytics.

 And the benefits of that, and they're running their business. So because our service becomes a reporting engine, as well as a workflow engine for our customers, Insight was just a sort of tip of the hat towards, we're going to enable you to have better insight, better visibility and better control of the largest asset you have in your business.

[00:02:10] Mike: where is the stubbornness if you see it? Or where is the Doubt if you see it of owners that think they're doing it by the seat of their pants and they're doing it better.

Are there some of us out there still? 

[00:02:24] George: Well, prescription drug purchasing in a pharmacy is critical. If you're not doing it well, your pharmacy's profitability is going to decline and it threatens the business.

 And every pharmacist that runs their own store knows that. And every large pharmacy chain that has an inventory and purchasing group understands that as well. And so over time you develop a way of doing it and you get comfortable with that way of doing it. And so when you present software like ours that is not emotional and it's taking real inputs from the industry and it's creating an optimized approach for the current situation that you're in.

[00:03:06] George: But it's not doing a lot of things that you used to do. Then there's always skepticism and change and we recognize that when we developed the software that we have, and one of the, so one of our primary focuses was. Creating transparency in the application. So, we didn't want our software to be a black box.

If you wanted to know why the software was doing something, it's very easy to sort of drill into and understand why are we forecasting this particular drug to be purchased, or why are we not purchasing this drug at this time? And you can go into the application and see that, or why are we picking this supplier and not that supplier, can take into account that, machine learning artificial intelligence and predictive analytics that are all bundled into the application that we've developed.

Can take into account way more data than any individual can at any point in time and use that information to make the best decisions, even if that decision is not consistent with maybe the method you were using in the past. 

[00:04:14] Mike: Now George, it seems years ago and through the years that you would have, and without naming names, but you'd have the pharmacy operating system. saying that they're going to help this. And then you had the wholesaler saying that they care about this and so on, which I don't really agree with because the more they can sell us, they figure the better until we go out of business because of misplanning.

 Do those vendors still? Try that, or have they kind of given up, or is your software way beyond what they can do and so on? How do you fit into that hole?

[00:04:57] George: We're focused really on two things in our organization, and number one is being at the top of the industry in customer service. And then number two being the top of the industry in innovation in our space. So if you think about it, our entire company is focused on advocating for the pharmacy and optimizing and man it properly monitoring and managing your prescription drug inventory.

The pharmacy system vendors have lots of things to do. They've got to focus on, the new clinical outcomes or workflow related to, to build it, whatever it is that they're focused on, where our focus is solely on optimizing the inventory. So we're best of breed in that area.

Now on the supplier side, you're right. I think there's generally skepticism among the pharmacy world. That if a wholesaler supplier is offering inventory management solutions, in a way it's like the fox guarding the henhouse. But from our perspective because we're advocating for the pharmacy and we're agnostic to the supplier, we feel like our solutions are going to be built and designed to optimize across any supplier and not for a single supplier.

And that's how it would answer those two things. 

[00:06:22] Mike: George. Where are your speed bumps during the day? 

[00:06:26] George: What keeps me up at night about the business, is we want to make sure and have built controls and monitoring around the system to do this, but we want to make sure that every order is accurate and every order goes out to the supplier in a way that the store is going to receive their prescription drug inventory as they need to support their patients.

If there's any hiccup in those areas, it can affect someone's business and be very disruptive. And that's what would keep us up at

night. 

[00:06:54] Mike: I was just waiting for you to say, we give the pharmacy kind of advice on what to buy, but it sounds like your company goes further. Like you're placing the order and looking at the success of that.

And so on. Does it truly go that far? Is that a care point of yours, does it actually show up?

[00:07:16] George: Yeah, absolutely. So we have sort of segmented our applications into three buckets. The first bucket is called Inventory Management and really the goal and objective of that suite of applications is to make sure the pharmacy has the quantity on hand that they need. And that quantity on hand is optimized to demand, and optimized to demand means we're forecasting, what you should be buying based on your patient mix, and we're doing things like telling you, hey, you've only got three patients on this really expensive drug, you don't need it on the shelf right now, we'll just order it a couple of days before the patient shows up, so we're doing those things.

So inventory management is about, let's get your quantities on hand. The second bucket of our applications is Intelligent Purchasing, and what Intelligent Purchasing does is once that order has been created by the system, then we comb through that order and we make sure that it complies with purchasing policy or is optimized to the supplier, so that's it.

If there's 50 items on a list to be ordered and you've got three suppliers, we're making sure that the purchase order gets split up and sent to the right suppliers. But we're also monitoring that entire process because we have the connection, the electronic connectivity or EDI connectivity to all of those suppliers.

So we know when the order gets sent and they, with their system, tell us, Hey, we got it. And we monitor that. And then we know when the shipment comes out. So then we look at the stores and make sure that they receive the item that was ordered. We, so we reconcile back to that. And then when the invoice comes in electronically from the supplier, we make sure that everything that they ordered is on the invoice. And things that they didn't receive or not. So yes we're carrying it full cycle. And then the third bucket of our applications are around compliance. So we have an application that monitors for diversion. We have an application called Guardian that monitors your controlled substance dispensing and stops items that their pharmacy may be trying to order manually or otherwise that aren't supported by that pharmacy's activity.

So we're trying to prevent reportable conditions to the DEA and give our customers a process that they can, that can stand up to scrutiny on why they're buying. the controlled substances they are. 

[00:09:58] Mike: George I came across the fact that your service, your program is being used in a.

rather large grocery slash pharmacy slash whatever these big companies do. I think they have 300 stores or something like that. That sounds like a pain in the ass that you're dealing with the different stuff that goes on between these stores.

 If you've got one of these super centers that's seven miles away, if they lend and stuff, that sounds like a headache once it's out of your hands and now it's in the mesh of this 300 store. Operation. Is that your concern? Do you have to monitor that or how does that go down?

[00:10:43] George: Yeah, sure. So, just to be clear, Order Insight has 10, 000 pharmacies using the system today, and our customers range from, one and two locations, independence, all the way to a national chain with 6, 000 sites. And yes, we are definitely involved in the movement of the inventory among the stores.

In fact, in our inventory management. We have an application called Exchange that monitors an entire chain, whether it's five stores or 5, 000 stores, and it identifies slow moving inventory in one store and matches it with a store that needs it, so that you don't have inventory building up. And store one, when store two needs it and keeps buying it.

So we're absolutely redistributing or rebalancing inventory all the time. 

And, 

our applications are smart enough to know, hey, you can't move these controlled substances over state lines or don't recommend this transfer of a refrigerated item to this location because they don't have a refrigerator there.

 It can be very sophisticated.

[00:11:57] Mike: All right, George. Now, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about here, but let me ask this and I want to say the word API. I want to say that's a way for little chunks of your system to work with other systems. So if you have a customer that's on pharmacy system X and they want to use you, you. Are you able to take your chunk and put it right into their program or are you looking at two different software programs? Or in fact, do some of the software programs say, no, we're not going to connect with you.

[00:12:32] George: Yeah, so it's all the above. And so we interface to virtually every pharmacy system out there. However there are some pharmacy systems that we haven't built interfaces to yet. And even within the ones that we're interfaced with we have various levels of integration. So you're right on point.

For some customers and some systems, our application actually is embedded within their current pharmacy system. So the pharmacist can stay in the application and our software does its thing and presents in their workflow. Other. Other software applications are not as sophisticated in terms of how they integrate with a partner like us.

So we have a portal that sort of sits on top of, or is bolted onto that application and requires a pharmacist to go outside of the pharmacy system into our application and do things and then go back into their pharmacy system. So yeah, it's all the above.

[00:13:33] Mike: SPeaking about web interfaces and things, are you guys on the AWS Amazon thing or Google what's your service operation?

[00:13:44] George: yeS. so we do operate on Amazon AWS. We're a cloud based service. We also operate on Azure, which is a Microsoft cloud and Google as well. So in our world of retail pharmacies, certain. of our customers aren't really keen on providing business to Amazon, because they might compete with them in other areas, especially these grocery stores.

So we had to develop our software to be agnostic as to which cloud that we're using in deference to our customers' policies around What they do and what they need to do for their own business.

[00:14:24] Mike: It's interesting the companies, George, that don't commit to that. Obviously the PBMs and I've thrown the major wholesalers under the bus. It's like I could go on and on about that stuff. But then there's some company that thinks they're so.

Pure and focused and driven. And all of a sudden you get some junk mail you can tell they made some backend deal with somebody and all of a sudden you're getting something from them. I'm not talking about your competitors. I'm talking like it might be some wholesaler or some computer program or something, not even in pharmacy.

 It's big. Gamble, when you've kind of built your company on that trust of, we're all in the same boat here kind of thing.

[00:15:11] George: Yeah, it happens. I mean, from our perspective, this is a company that I started back in 2014 and we had a very specific mantra and that mantra was we're going to advocate for pharmacies because I believe fundamentally at the time that pharmacies were going to be under a tremendous amount of pressure from a reimbursement standpoint and needed software and solutions that they could afford.

That would help them run their business more optimally and improve their margins. And so that was the beginning of the company. And because it's a privately held company and we own it we're on that path and we're going to stay on that path. And we're only going to focus on prescription drug inventory and the supporting areas around that.

And we're going to be aggressive on behalf of our customers and try to resolve problems that cause them not to be as profitable as they could be. I mean, let's face it. I came from, I MD ON in my past and MD ON, which is now Change Healthcare and... It Was sold again, but we had physician service, physician office customers, hospitals, health plans, dental practices, and pharmacies that used our services.

And what is true about the provider, CER provider industry? Is that whether you're a doctor's office or a hospital or a pharmacy, uh, the reimbursement policy of the insurance companies in the government have a dramatic effect on your ability to run your business and be profitable in your business.

And we, what we felt like with Order Insight is if we can create a cloud based solution, that's affordable to our customers, that can leverage the power of technology. in a way that each of our customers gains the benefit of all of our customers using the application, then we could sort of level that playing field a little bit.

We could court or give a data advantage back. And those are the, that, that was the, one of the original sort of thesis of bringing the company into the market was. Hey, we've got these guys that are doing all the work and getting paid the least. And how can we help them with advanced tools that they can afford to optimize their business?

And so far, so good. I mean, like since we launched we've been able to support. Like I said, single pharmacies, single owner pharmacies, independent pharmacies, all the way up to large national chains and deliver a similar value.

[00:17:54] Mike: George, how did you know this need in pharmacy and how did you prove it? 

[00:17:57] George: Yeah, so, I'd like to say I just woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat and wrote it down on a notepad

and, And enthusiastically pursued it from that day forward. But the truth is I was familiar with another company in the space that was similar. And that company was acquired by a large national wholesaler. And When that happened two things occurred to us, me and my co founder partner, which is Mark Lyle, who is a serial pharmacy entrepreneur, he started ERX Network 

and Zadol

Systems and. But Mark and I realized that when that business got acquired, it was in this, in portions of this space that they would, they'd lost their.

Independence in terms of they were no longer agnostic,

um, and that there were some areas like intelligent purchasing and compliance where they hadn't focused that we felt like needed to be a part of this overall bundle. So we already knew there was a market for it. And we already had a sort of head start in that we'd seen a company in space and we knew the founder of that company personally.

So what, in my opinion, and I think you could ask our customers and they would agree with you if we took what was an original idea and made it better. And we entered the market in late 2014, early 2015 um, and have never looked back.

[00:19:33] Mike: What's the most typical way that somebody ends up with your product? Is it the pharmacy software company that introduces you? Is it you guys in a sales team? Is it a million different ways people can come across stuff in pharmacies?

How are people normally introduced to you and then decide to take that step? 

[00:19:53] George: hEalth care is a very big Market, but a very small community.

And, and so, generally we get introduced by our own customers. So they're always talking to each other in industry groups and asking each other how they're dealing with challenges and because we've been able to develop a strong relationship with all of our customers.

They advocate for us in the market. We also have a sales team that Jason Gasper runs, and he's excellent at going out and building relationships with potential customers and showing them the value we have. We participate in all of the major industry conferences. We're out there on social media for things like LinkedIn.

And we just try to stay active and present. And our style really is to... Be very consultative. We love to sit down with prospects and understand their business before we just start telling them what we're going to sell them. 

 We just found that doesn't really work.

I mean, years and years ago in a different industry I was selling we had a company that supported hospitals in their billing. And revenue cycle. I'll never forget this. I was sitting in a conference room at UCLA Medical Center on Wilshire Boulevard. And we were talking about how our software could help them solve a problem.

And, 

The gentleman that we were presenting to just looked at me and said, Everybody says that. Why are you different?

He goes, I can't tell you how many suits have walked in the store and told me they're going to solve all my problems and then left with me paying them something and getting nothing for it. At the time I thought, wow, this guy's really being a jerk. But at the same time, he was just being honest. All of these software companies make these big, grandiose promises and when they don't keep them, what's the customer left with?

So, we just set out, we set out to understand first the challenges that our customers are facing, um, because everyone's systems are different and everyone's approach is a little different, even though they're all doing the same thing.

And then we come back and say, okay, these are the areas that we can help you, and this is how we're gonna do it.

And then we build sort of a sales presentation around that. And so it's a little different approach. But I'd rather be deliberate and deliver value, then try to sell anything to everyone. And end up with a company that can't support its customers.

[00:22:33] Mike: I was listening to an interview by Bezos from Amazon one time, and he was saying that someday they will go bankrupt. It might be a hundred years from now, but just er, out of business, just like Sears or the list goes on and on. In your case, with your company, and we wish for a good hundred year run, but what could put you out of business a hundred years from now? 

[00:22:56] George: I was telling a vendor partner of ours today that Order Insight is a customer driven company. Okay, so I think as long as we're in the conversation, as long as we are a strategic partner for solving problems, as the business evolves, there's a place for us.

And that's why our company has evolved pretty dramatically over the last several years, going from just inventory management to inventory management and purchasing to inventory management, purchasing and compliance. And within each of those buckets, adding capabilities, 

[00:23:33] Mike: there might be some day where I don't know, customers at home can press a button and it forms any drug they want out of any molecules they want or something like that. But that's not in the near future at all. But I guess, that would simplify things, 

George.

 We darn humans. Where do humans mess this stuff up? Like I talked about the Amazon bag, and maybe somebody didn't put it in the bag and sealed it. Maybe it was a computer. I don't know. Where is the link broken in your system? Is it someone in the pharmacy not checking in something?

Is it the wholesaler, only putting a half dozen in instead of 60? They put six in, something like that. Where does that break down? If ever.

[00:24:18] George: Yeah. So we are. What I call , an enabling technology. Okay. So what that means is we recommend that you do certain things. If you choose not to do them, then the software is less effective. Of course.

We understood that when we built the software. So the things that you have to do to overcome people not wanting to do the things you're recommending, you have to make it easy to do.

You have to make it intuitive because challenges for enabling software companies are there's lots of them, but one of the key challenges is training, making sure that the people in the store know how to use your software to do the things that they need to do. And it isn't that you train them and they forget it.

There's more complicated than that. It's like turnover. If you've

got, Four new clerks in a matter of six months, and they're the ones that are doing the cycle counting, it better be easy to do, or it's going to be hard for them, the pharmacy people that are already. so busy taking the time to retrain.

So we spend a lot of time on making sure that those barriers to adoption are as they possibly can be and still get the benefit of the application. So, it breaks down when people don't do the recommended tasks and that could be receiving an item that's put on the shelf, like you said, it could be.

It could be not doing a cycle count and validating the quantity on hand, so that the forecasting has bad data and doesn't understand what's really going on. It could be all those things. But, we have a lot of checks and balances around the system to catch when people aren't doing those things.

 Because we know, It's just, it's a, it's enabling technology. If you're not using it, you're not going to get the value that we've talked about. And honestly, at that point, whose fault is that? I mean, we take responsibility. Even if it's not our fault, so to speak, we know if someone's not getting the value from the application, then, then it's, they're not going to stay a happy customer.

So we try to design our systems in a way that we understand what they are and aren't doing. And we're communicating with them about that in a way that's easy for them to understand. And it's not disruptive or is it minimally disruptive to their operation, all that stuff.

[00:26:46] Mike: Most of the time people want to do a good job. They really do. And it's usually something that I can change as the boss, make a step easier, do this or that, because people they're not out to do a bad job and they want to do a good job if they can.

But typically there's something in the way, and I'll have to admit, I usually put the bad connotation on that. And it's usually not bad. It's just something that's a little bit too difficult for them.

[00:27:12] George: Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think I wake up every morning trying to do the right thing, and I think most people do, 

and, 

there's, we have good days and bad days as humans, and we have some days we're on it, and some days we're not and what we try to do through our lives.

Applications in our relationship with our customers though, has helped them be more consistent, make it as easy to do, to complete and automate as much as we can, so that we take the errors out of it, all of that stuff,

[00:27:45] Mike: George, how many people are in your company?

[00:27:48] George: We have less than 20 in our company total.

[00:27:52] Mike: And what is the breakdown of that roughly, sales versus technology versus this and that?

[00:27:58] George: yeah, I would say that it's half of our team is in the application development and then the other half of the team is in, uh, the customer facing

portion. when this airs, if my application development team hears this, they're going to go, what are you talking about? We're customer facing too.

And They are. um, yeah, they're on the calls. They listen to the problems. We try to get them involved so that they can, I don't know, feel what the customers are going through as they're designing ways to solve their problems.

[00:28:33] Mike: George, let's say for some reason you couldn't do this, you sold the company for a billion dollars and you had a non compete or whatever the reason you couldn't be in pharmacy anymore. What industry would benefit from this knowledge and could you take this to?

[00:28:54] George: Yeah. Well, our, it's, first of all, our software. It was built specifically for pharmacies from the ground up. Every supply chain has the same issues. A grocery store needs to understand how much of something I need on the shelf. A 

parts store needs to know, Amazon needs to know.

So all supply chain companies need to understand What they need on their shelf so that they don't buy too much or too little of it to support their customers. So in the, at the highest sense, you can apply these, this technology and these capabilities to any other space that has inventory and manages it. We think about these other areas and to some extent are dragged into like OTC over the counter. That's not a prescription drug, but we do manage over the counter items for our customers because they relate to the prescription. Syringes or alcohol swabs or whatever.

that go along, band aids that go along with certain items that are prescribed will make sure that the stores, the pharmacies have the stuff that they need to support that prescription. So in a way we're being dragged a little bit out to the quote unquote front of the store but it's just not an area we're committed to understanding.

We have enough problems to solve in the area that we're focused on.

[00:30:23] Mike: It sounds to me like this is a problem across every industry. The huge value you bring is the depth and the understanding in pharmacy. And to bring this to another industry, they might say, well, it's already there. Some companies are doing it. 

[00:30:41] George: Yeah, that's right. And from a solution standpoint, that's absolutely true. Who we hire we are focused on people that understand the industry, that understand our customers. So that when we bring someone in, they can not only immediately advocate for the customer, but they can also challenge the team to better understand or look at us solving a problem in a different way.

Uh, but yeah, pharmacy experience is critical to what we

[00:31:11] Mike: Thinking about blockchain, I know I've read a little bit about blockchain where it would be real valuable is like in pharmacy research and so that somebody who's a hundred and sixty pounds someone doesn't transcribe that to be a hundred and six pounds and now all I've Data for all these researches and stuff is screwed.

And so there's some reasons like that. Does it have a place in your stuff to correct data out there and things like that.

[00:31:44] George: So the blockchain, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. A lot of people associate blockchain exclusively with cryptocurrencies

and all of that. Well, blockchain is just a distributed ledger and it allows you to create permissions around data such that certain rules can be applied to the data and it moves among.

The, it's stakeholders in a way that's secure and keeps a higher level of accuracy. And in pharmacy we got really excited about blockchain several years ago with respect to this chain of trust that needs to be established between the manufacturer and ultimately the dispenser of a particular drug.

So this. There's legislation out there DSCSA, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, and the whole goal of that legislation is to make sure that counterfeit items are not pushed into the system and prescribed and delivered to patients. And blockchain presents a really interesting opportunity that technology as the information is created to manufacture, having it followed through the chain to the point of being dispensed is a perfect use for that technology.

And I think we'll get there and there's certainly some providers. of solutions that have focused in that area. But one of the barriers to adoption of new technology in any industry is always, does the current system work well enough without having to change everything I'm doing 

While blockchain fits that.

Perfectly. And we could even see and invest a lot of time and energy and understand all of that. There's also our existing systems and their existing data flows that can support the same outcome and don't require everybody to change everything they're doing. So at some point, yes. but today another great example is the sort of, from a like vaccines, there's such a heightened interest in vaccines and recalls and, all of that stuff.

Blockchain lends itself well to that. It's just the industry's not prepared to do sort of a wholesale technology conversion to get that benefit yet because the benefit of blockchain is it doesn't overcome the cost of that transition, 

[00:34:05] Mike: Another tech leader I talked to on the show said that these technologies are coming out. They're kind of cool. People learn about them. Blockchain. When you look back, maybe 20 years from now, you'll say, oh, well, yeah, this is doing it, that's doing it, that's doing it, but it's not something you would jump into if your current stuff is doing it.

Let it do it and put your focus somewhere else. It actually needs it at this time.

[00:34:30] George: Yeah, and artificial intelligence comes to mind too, everyone is sort of focused on AI and and, interestingly, we've been using those techniques for years but we're not using, we're not using these large language models that you see in chat GPT, like, write me a resume or answer this obscure question about X.

Yeah. But we are using technology that inherently learns from data as it's presented to data and in its own way, the learning means that it's changing to be more effective as more data is presented to it. And so, that's another example. People say, well, are you using AI?

Everybody's AI, but, and the answer is yes but probably not in the way that you're thinking about, 

but having said that we're beginning to explore, are there relevant ways to use that? Even those large language model types. Presentations of that capability in our solution.

So we're active. We like to be intellectually curious, so we're curious about new technologies. We're curious about our customers and how they do their business. We're curious about new ways to solve a problem or new data that might be available to automate. Manual task, it's all of that. 

[00:35:50] Mike: Let's say that someone, for some reason, you're out of this industry, you're out of everything. If someone said, George, you have to start a business in something unrelated to everything, the computers, the health 

 do any industries interest you 

For me, I always thought that and I have a son in mechanical engineering, but I always liked those shows, how it's made, they go through and how would you make one of those machines to do that?

So I think I'd probably be a Mechanical engineer, if I wasn't this. What other fields interest you? And I know you've had a lot of different fields, but if you had to pick a new one, what would it be?

[00:36:25] George: Yeah, so just to give you some perspective I started in accounting. And so I was a CPA in public accounting and got pulled into it. I got convinced to join a small software company in the hospital revenue cycle space to help them go public back in the day, and then the tech bubble burst and that didn't happen.

And so we had to sort of. But I like solving problems. And so any area, any opportunity to do that in any space, I think would stimulate an interest for me, whether it would be interpersonal, whether it would be fixing something. Building, who knows, just any way.

I like thinking about the problem and trying to take a step back

Away from the current approach. What's most energizing to me is when you can truly be disruptive, when you can say, yeah, we've done it this way for 50 years but that's not the real way to solve this problem and here's a new way to do it and blow up a model, that's very energizing and so I would like to think that's.

What I would do. Although sometimes it's appealing just to say, you know what, I may go hiking for a couple of days and get out and not solve any problems, just try to find my way around.

[00:37:47] Mike: I forget who it was I was talking to, , but I said that at the pharmacy, as an owner, I love it, but I'm always thinking of the next problem and how to solve it. And I said, sometimes there was a certain peacefulness when one of the pharmacists was gone for a week and I had to work in the role more because I gave myself permission to not always be thinking of solving in the future and things like that.

And there were some. Peace in that, just to say, this is where I am right now. And that's okay for a week. And then, kind of rejuvenate yourself and so on.

[00:38:18] George: Yeah, I can see that. 

[00:38:19] Mike: So George, you mentioned retirement and it wasn't maybe for you. What would that do right now for you? If someone said no more of anything, would you go crazy?

What would it mean to you to not be doing 

something for a business?

[00:38:33] George: Yeah, I did try to do that for about 90 days in 2013 and it didn't work. And, um, I think that for me, I would always want to be involved in a business. And so today Order Insight is my primary focus,

but, I have direct investments through an investment company that I have with two partners and five other businesses.

That is mostly in the pharmacy space. I have one in the cyber security space. And then I'm on four other boards. One in the healthcare payment, consumer payment space in healthcare. One in, the payment integrity business, which just means making sure that health plans are paying.

Accurately. And looking for fraud and abuse. I'll have one that's using artificial intelligence to predict length of stay and in a hospital environment. And one that's more pharmacy related, but a company that owns and manages inpatient outpatient pharmacies for hospitals. So I like to stay involved and I like to think that there's some value in the benefit of my experience and all the things that I've been able to accomplish in my career.

And as long as it's valuable to someone, I'd like to help. That's kind of how I would focus my time.

[00:39:53] Mike: You didn't drop all of that in 2013. Were you down to nothing? And then you built those responsibilities. You did. No kidding.

[00:40:01] George: Yeah. I was running a public company and sold it to a large private equity firm and worked for them for two years and then stepped down and decided. Okay, I'm going to retire, but I need something. So I'm going to 

join a few boards. So I picked three areas that I was curious about, which

was precision medicine and genetic testing consumer payment.

Evolution in health care and I had a friend ask me to get involved with his pharmacy, hospital pharmacy business.

And so I joined those three boards and, that was great for a little while, but I just still had needed to get dig my teeth into something a little more than a board will allow you 

[00:40:42] Mike: Yeah. When did you realize that? Was it a month into things? Was it three days into things? When did 

you say, I gotta get going here? 

[00:40:52] George: Yeah, it was probably 90 days. I'd had a few board meetings and,

And I didn't feel like even though I was adding value at a board level according to the rest of the board, not my own assessment, um, I wasn't. I wanted to be a part of the solution.

I just kept coming back here. I'd like to, and the CEOs of these businesses are like, Hey, I got it. I don't appreciate the advice, but you know, just, yeah. And that's when I realized that, I need to find something to do myself. I don't need to pest, I need to bother these guys 

with my point of view.

[00:41:31] Mike: George, someone listening right now, graduating pharmacy school, maybe in some tech spaces, whatever. What advice do you have for them?

[00:41:45] George: Sure. I can only relate it to my own experience. And I think that was the best advice that I was ever given and it just transformed my career. And I'll give you a little context. So I was part of a company that had just acquired another business. And I was a financial guy, the accounting side of me.

So I was on the due diligence team. And so I had been involved in the decision to buy this company. And usually when you buy a company, you have a closing dinner after. And the purpose of a closing dinner is everybody sort of gets to lick their wounds and bury the hatchet because The buyer is trying to get the best deal they can get and the seller is trying to get the best deal they can get and so there's always opportunities for heads to butt and the dinner is really about okay now that's over let's get together and make this thing work.

And so I was at one of those dinners and the CEO of the company we acquired and I were having a drink and he was asking me a few things. And he said, you've got a lot of good ideas, are you just an accountant? And I said, well, to be honest, I'm young and most people don't pay attention to accountants.

And even though I may have some good ideas, I'm struggling to get them. the senior management's attention. And he said, you know what, George, it has nothing to do with your age and it has nothing to do with the role you play in the organization. If you want a seat at the table, you have to listen to your customers and you have to bring their perspective to the company.

And I thought, wow, Scott, that's great, but I'm an accountant. How am I going to do that? But it did cause me to think. And so I said, the only place in the accounting department that I was connected to customers was in collections.

And if you think about it, people don't pay their bills for two reasons.

One is they don't have the money. But the other is they're unhappy.

I'm not getting what you told me I was getting. And so I took his advice and we just dove into the collections area of the company. And as a result, I kept finding, the salesperson sold them something that we don't do, or the technology is not.

is not reliable, or it's not solving the problem that I thought it was going to solve. And as a result, I created all these projects in the organization to resolve these issues all around getting paid.

 But ultimately, after doing this for nine months, I kept ratcheting up, and I was all of a sudden, I was part of the management meetings, and then the senior management meetings, and then the executive management meetings.

And it's because I was listening to and bringing the voice of the customer into our organization. And then I was doing something about it, and I wasn't asking permission to do it. I wasn't doing it in an obstructive way, but I would just go and sit down with the IT guys and say, Hey guys, the product is failing here.

This is what their feedback is, and then we would solve it, or the sales team, Hey, we can't sell the solution on this value proposition because it doesn't deliver that. So let's re educate the sales team, or let's rewrite our contracts, or let's redo our pricing. And now all of a sudden I'm involved in every aspect of the business.

And then I was promoted to be COO and president, and then ultimately CEO of that company.

So, I think that is the advice as soon as you can. And when it's appropriate, listen to your customers. Bring that feedback to the table. Try to solve the problems instead of sit around and complain about them. 

[00:45:32] Mike: George, thanks for joining us. Your point of solving the problems from where you Is reflective of your whole company that you've took something that's as old as dirt,

Even though it's an old system, there's so many potential problems there. And so you practice what you preach of solving things for the customer and obviously shows through the success of your company. 

[00:45:57] George: Yeah, Mike, it was great. It's always nice to have a conversation about what you're doing and give everyone a little insight into why things are the way they are. And I'm glad you gave me the opportunity to do that today. 

So thank you. 

[00:46:09] Mike: Thanks, George. We'll talk again soon.