The Bottom Line Pharmacy Podcast: Developing a Weight Loss Program with GLP-1s in your Pharmacy Featuring T.W. Taylor, Owner of Williamsburg Drug Co.
Compounded GLP-1s is One of the hottest trends in pharmacy right now and one of the best ways you can take advantage of this opportunity is by implementing a weight loss program in your pharmacy!
In this episode of The Bottom Line Pharmacy Podcast, T.W. Taylor, Owner and Pharmacist of Williamsburg Drug Co. discusses how to develop a weight loss program with GLP-1s in a pharmacy.
He shares insights into:
- The different types of GLP-1 drugs available and their benefits
- Role of pharmacists in helping patients achieve their weight loss goals
- Profit potential of offering weight loss programs in independent pharmacies
- And more!
Join the discussion with us!
More Resources About This Topic:
Resource – How to Develop a Weight Loss Program Using GLP-1s in Your Pharmacy
If you prefer to read this content, the video transcript is below:
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Well hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Sykes Pharmacy or the Sykes Bottom Line Pharmacy Podcast, however you want to say it. We have with us today a good friend and client, T.W. Taylor, who has put together a presentation for us if you’re looking at your screen on YouTube. Very exciting. T.W. you are always in the middle of the next and greatest big thing that’s coming out in the pharmacy industry. You’re actually usually ahead of the game. So I know you’re going to speak a little bit today on the weight loss programs, GLP-1s in your pharmacy. I know you’ve been doing this for a while now.
T.W. Taylor: Yes.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: I know some people are really starting to try to get on that train, but you’ve been doing it for a good bit of time.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: I get his marketing emails.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Yeah, I mean, he’s been doing this is like not new to him, but it is new for a lot of people and it is big in the industry. So how are you doing T.W.?
T.W. Taylor: Good, good. I can’t wait to share how our program is going and what an impact this can make to your pharmacy. And really best thing about it is it helps you be a lot more valuable to your customers. That’s really the key to it. We’re the most accessible healthcare professional and we should be taking advantage with exactly programs like the GLP-1s.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Right. And obviously anything just as a quick plug because we always talk about it and the way everything is going right now with pharmacy, independent pharmacy, anything you can do, you know, that’s cash that is different from just filling scripts, changing up and diversifying your revenue is a plus right now, as you know.
T.W. Taylor: It has to be cash; it has to be. So, the GLP-1s offer for the foreseeable future an opportunity to increase your profits dramatically and build customer loyalty like there’s no way to build better customer loyalty. And so, with that, let me get started. So, this is how to develop a weight loss program with GLP-1s in your pharmacy. I’m T.W. Taylor, I own Williamsburg Drug Company. We’re the oldest pharmacy in Virginia. And we like to think of ourselves as new every day. So, these drugs began with a Gila Monster in 1985 and a Canadian scientist. And because Gila Monsters could regulate their blood sugars, and it has finally developed into. It’s a bunch of GLP-1s, Trulicity, Biota, Victoza. And then of course there’s the ones that we can use for weight loss, which is Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepp -Bound, are Semaglutide and Trizipotide. There’s a new one that’s in phase three clinical studies called Retatrutide. It’s going to be available probably in 2026 or so. And Williamsburg Drug Company is a 503A non-sterile compounding pharmacy and we do make Semaglutide and SubMagna base for sublingual use as well. So, we advertise that as there’s no more shots. And SubMagna is a base only from PCCA and it’s developed for high molecular weight drugs such as the GLP-1s and it helps push it through the oil mucosa. We have a number of patients that get success from that. There’s a number of ways to do it, but basically you need to end up with about a milligram or even two milligrams per day. Normally what we’re doing is giving them six milligram per ml and doing half ml every three days and giving them a 90-day supply. That seems to work well. The SubMagna has a good BUD, and it works well. We have some patients that do not get good success from it. I have patients that, I had a patient the other day lost 33 pounds in the first 90 days. I have other patients that don’t seem to lose weight. I had a lady recently that’s been on an Ozempic for six years has never lost a pound. So, some of that is because the GLP-1 receptor site sets next to the estrogen receptor site. So sometimes if their hormones are off, it doesn’t work as well. The Semaglutide works well for other things like Oxytocin, Ketamine, Progesterone, Testosterone, Sidenafil, Tidunafil, et cetera. And that’s good because there’s no more shots. The Semaglutide is the only one that we’re doing like that with sublingually. Semaglutide is a single agonist. It’s a GLP-1 agonist and you lose about 15% weight loss. And that’s…And in a two -year period, they’ve lost about 44% percent, I’m sorry, they’ve lost 10% in two years and 15% in one year. Dezipatide is a double antagonist. It’s a GLP-1 and a GIP antagonist. And you lose more weight with that, and you have less side effects. And you’re losing about 21% weight loss with that and that’s in a 72-week period. Retatrutide, which is not out yet, is a triple antagonist. Again, less side effects, better activity, and it’s a triple antagonist with GLP-1, GIP, and Glucagon, and you have almost a 25% weight loss with that one, and that’s in a 48-week period.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: So, I have a quick question about that. If it’s more weight loss and less side effects, why would you not use that one versus the Semaglutide?
T.W. Taylor: Perfect question. The main reason is cost. So, normally we have people start out with Semaglutide and that’s about $400 for a 3ml vial, which is 15 milligrams from us. Trizipotide for the same 3ml vial is $819. So, it’s a little bit more than double the cost. And so, people that cannot afford the Trizipotide usually start out with the Semaglutide and we have lots of people losing weight with Semaglutide and they’re fine with it. But the cost difference is dramatic.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Gotcha. That makes sense. And obviously doing this is obviously giving options to patients that can’t afford some of these more expensive drugs where their insurance isn’t covering the cost. So that’s a big benefit, I’m assuming right, T.W.?
T.W. Taylor: Oh, as a matter of fact, the reason I was late to this is I had a lady that was just asking me those exact questions. Her Mounjaro wasn’t covered. It was going to be almost $2,000 a month. From us, she can get, that was for one month supply. For us, she can get anywhere from eight to 30 weeks-worth for $819. So, it’s a far better deal. And I mean, she was having trouble believing it because it was such a much better deal.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Are you finding that the providers are understanding and feeling comfortable with all this as well? Are they pretty receptive to the options?
T.W. Taylor: Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, we have a number of providers that they just tell them to come see us. And then we send them a prescription, they sign it and send it back. And if you think about it, the whole reason for this is that if you look at a picture of the beach in 1970, everybody was thin. I mean, there wasn’t any big fat people at the beach. And so about 74% of the population is overweight or obese. And that leads to so many diseases. You gotta remember Alzheimer’s is type three diabetes. I mean, all the sugar we’re taking in, 200 years ago, we ate two pounds of sugar a year. Now, we eat two pounds a week. I mean, we’re flooding ourselves with this.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: Bonnie eats three pounds a week.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Is that? I do not hahaha
T.W. Taylor: Yeah. And so, it has changed our lives so dramatically and its addictive. mean, you people love sugar, and I mean, your brain likes it. So, gets you to have more of it. so, if you look at it from people say, well, what’s the side effects of this? Well, the side effects of being overweight are dramatic as well. know, high blood pressure, diabetes, fatty liver. I mean, people are dying from those diseases. And so it’s always a weight versus benefit priority, but being overweight is bad. And so this is what it means to me is that this is a huge opportunity for independents. Now, how do you, if you are regular independent right there, you don’t do any compounding, how do you do this? Well, you need to contact a 503B compounding pharmacy. 503B compounding pharmacies can sell direct like a wholesaler to you. But you gotta make sure there’s about 70 or so in the country and not all of them are as equally good. So you wanna find a good one. I’m a PCCA member. had them give me some advice on what some good ones are. So I wanna make sure they’re giving me a C of A per lot. I wanna make sure that they don’t have a lot of 483s where they’ve been dinged a bunch by the federal government, by the FDA. That’s how we decided who to use.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Now TW, is there any kind of regulation on the selling prices that those 503Bs are offering? Are they able to set their own prices completely?
T.W. Taylor: Whatever they can get for it, they do. Now, I’ll tell you all who I use and stuff in a minute. But once you’ve settled on getting into this business, you’ve got to get your message out. And so I have a social media person that is an outside contractor that helps us. She comes in every week. She talks to all of our staff, she does pictures and helps us develop a marketing plan every year. And then we go through that plan and we keep pushing out what we’re trying to get our patients to know the most about. so that includes emails. We’ve got about 15 ,000 patients on our email list. And so that’s 15 ,000 direct contacts, know, two twice a week or so. And now I am a little different. I have a pharmacist that markets for us four days a week. That’s her whole job. And she usually works, I put four days a week, she usually does five, but she works for us for vacations and stuff. And her whole job is to be a partner with a physician to help their patients get better. And she happens to be a, hormone replacement specialist and has certificates in it from PCCA. so all of our prescribers, she markets the semaglutide, trizipotide program, our hormone program. We do a lot of LDN. And so by having a person out there as a partner with the prescribers has helped us immeasurably. I mean, and we have a large veterinarian business as well. Take care of all animals at our local. Schuck’s, what is it?
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: The Zoo.
T.W. Taylor : Yeah, amusement park and we also do Virginia Living Museum. So, we take care of everything from wolves and eagles, Busch Gardens. So, we do everything from eagles and wolves and rats to turkey buzzards and hedgehogs. So, we do a ton of veterinarian business.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Man, you’re all over the globe. Everything.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: So, T .W., on the prices, I know you’re in a pretty affluent marketplace there, but I hear most people tell me the price is between 200, maybe 300 for the Semaglutide, and you mentioned 400. Maybe everybody’s doing a different dose that I’m thinking of here.
T.W. Taylor: Yeah, what they do is that they have different size vials. So I can sell something for 200 or even less if I’m selling a 1ml vial. Yeah, we’ve chosen and they make a 1ml vial that we can buy, but we’ve chosen to only go with a 3ml vial because it is such a better deal for our patients. So they would normally pay, you know, probably five or $600 for that much. So it saves them a lot of money. And that’s the main reason that we’re doing that.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Are you doing the prefilled? Are you doing, I know you mentioned vows. Are you also doing some of the injectables filled?
T.W. Taylor: Yeah, we’re doing it sublingually and then we’re doing the injectable and the injectable Semaglutide and the Trizipotide, we dispense insulin syringes and alcohol pads with it. If the patient has never given themselves a shot, we teach them how to do it. And that’s part of it is the educational piece. Now I’m gonna send you my slide deck and in it, you’ll see it’ll have a picture of what we’re sending out to our patients. And it’s a really wonderfully designed email piece and it says achieve your weight loss goals with personalized pharmacy care as semaglutide and trizipotide. And it’s really nicely done and you’ll see it in that. And then what we’re just talking about is the pharmacist’s job, in my opinion, is not to lick, stick, count, and pour but is to educate your patients, to help them find their health retirement plan. And so your job is to help them understand how to do a sub-q injection. But not only that, they need to understand that they will lose as much muscle as they do fat. So, they need to have protein. Women need to take in at least 100 grams of protein a day. Men need to take 150 grams of protein a day. It’s an opportunity for you to sell protein powders. Now, we actually sell orthomolecular and some, you know, these high-end protein patterns. They need to do resistance training. And the supplement side of this is a big deal. So, for instance, when you sell Semaglutide to a patient, the side effects they’re gonna have is gonna be nausea, bloating, diarrhea, constipation. We actually sell a supplement for that. We also sell supplements to help them maintain their nutritional values. So, we give them a good phyto-multi. We have some products like Thermo GLP-1, and it actually increases the utilization of GLP-1s, the injections and sublinguals so that it works better and you may even be able to lower your doses of those drugs. It helps you burn brown fat. You can take it alone or with GPL ones. And like I said, it’s synergistic with those. We also have gastric subtle that you can spray in your night. It helps with nausea. We have a product called Tulinozyme. It’s by an endo professional and it decreases or blocks the absorption of carbohydrates about 40 some percent and I know it works great because I got a number of diabetics that use CGMs and they’re saying that they can cheat and this and when they use the gluonazine it does not raise their blood glucose sugar they don’t get any spikes so
Bonnie Bond, CPA: I love carbs. I probably need some of that spray. Will that work for me?
T.W. Taylor: Yeah, yes it does. It’s great for nausea.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: So could spray and then have some pasta.
T.W. Taylor: Well, the glenozyme is what you want to do. So before a meal, like if you’re to have pasta and bread, you want to take a glenozyme as a gummy, you eat it before your meal and it’ll help block all those carbohydrates. It helps actually maintain a normal blood sugar. So, if you have low blood sugar, it’s as good as well.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: That’s what you need, Scotty, for the bread.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: I guess. I probably need all kinds of stuff to listen to this.
T.W. Taylor: And then, you know, of course we always recommend berberine. It’s been around thousands of years. It helps burn the brown fat. It helps keep blood sugars low. It’s good for your gut health and a bunch of stuff. We also have creatine. Creatine is necessary to build muscle mass. Most weightlifters use it. So, we definitely have creatine, and the protein powder is available. We have a protein powder called Imploblock from Orthomolecular and it has 47 grams of protein per shake. I mean, that’s just really good and it tastes good.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Yeah, my 16 year old is begging to take creatine
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: I’ll take all of them. Just send them all my way. I’ll take –
T.W. Taylor: You got it, buddy. But you know, what’s important about this is that you can turn a $200 profit into a $300 profit or a $400 profit with your patient, and they’re healthier because of it.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Right. And the main thing is always patient care. You want to always make sure we say that.
T.W. Taylor: Absolutely.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: But I think that even goes beyond the GLP -1. You’ve talked about that with us before. You have a patient come in. That’s part of what independents do, right? They have whatever their issue is, and they’re getting this prescription field for whatever. You can also look at them and say, hey, this medicine is going to make you nauseous. You might want to grab XYZ as well. And so it’s another way to help the patient obviously and then obviously you are selling other products.
T.W. Taylor: Yeah, well, so our job at Williamsburg Drug is to help each patient that comes through our door become their healthiest. How can we help that patient be healthier when they leave than they did when they come in? And the way you do it is you help them figure out what their deficiencies are and fix those deficiencies. Your body is a huge biochemical factory with all these pathways and each pathway has to have the nutritional value for that pathway to work, whether it’s B1 or B6, lithium or magnesium, vitamin D. And if it doesn’t have those nutritional molecules in the pathway, it’s not gonna be optimized. So, you know, doing functional medicine, you know, of course, you know, we drew blood this morning, we had a phlebotomist here this morning, drew blood on four patients. And so, it’s root cause analysis. And how do you help the patient rather than give them a drug give them something that their body can use because their body is a much better fixing itself than we are.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: And also like you’ve mentioned again with other things I know you’ve talked before about years ago about you know helping people get off all of these pain medications they’re on by using other supplements and things like that I would assume with the some of these weight loss drugs that you’re talking about if you can get people down to certain weights they can get off all sorts of things
T.W. Taylor: Oh, it helps their knees better helps their hips perform better. I mean we sell a lot of an and professional products and they’ve got an infamies that that works great for inflammation. And so, we give people journals to keep, and they bring them back to us showing that they had a level eight and then they’re down to two. Well, now they can live a normal life and it’s all about pain and inflammation and inflammation is the enemy. It makes every disease state worse. And so, you want a CRP .3 or less. And that’s the kind of things that we work on. Here’s a good example. To have weight management, you need about, let’s see, about 15 or 17 nutritional molecules for you to be able to manage your weight. And if you’re deficient or borderline deficient in half of them, then you’re not going to be able to lose weight. You’re going to be insulin resistant. And so really, what does all this mean to me as independent pharmacist? Well, one is you be able to practice as a true professional that you’re able to actually help your patients. If you have 10 patients, just 10 patients a month, this would add $2,000 – $3 ,000 to your bottom line or even more. If you have 50 patients, it’s going to add $10,000 – $15,000 or more to your bottom line. If you have 100 patients, it’s going to be $20,000 – $30,000 or more to your bottom line. Now, that is super important for your pharmacy. I mean, if you could get 100 patients out of the however many thousands you have in your computer system, that is not a big percentage, but it’s huge to your bottom line. And it’s about having the companion products that they need in order to succeed and they have to have the protein. They’ve got to have a good multivitamin. They need berberine. They need glenosine. Then they buy them each month because they’re getting success.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: What about those who say this shortage is not gonna last long or they don’t wanna put all the effort into it and then six months from now they’ve taken it off the short list. What is your thoughts on that, T .W.?
T.W. Taylor: Great, that’s terrific question. So, I’ll take six months’ worth of profits, right? I mean, every dollar I make is a dollar that I didn’t have before. So, I’m gonna ride the wave as long as I can. The next thing is, is that they’re already making some waves. So, the manufacturers are trying to push us out. Well, what happens is is they make more and what’s gonna happen is, they’re not gonna be able to keep up with supply because it’s going to go right back to the short list. And so I think this is going to go on for quite a while because if they get it off the short list, people are going to buy a lot more of it. It’s going to go right back on the short list. And so, I think that it’s going to be a long time. We’re going to have a long runway with this. Now, whether that’s a year or two years or three years, I mean, if you think about it, the Retrudatide, I mean, that’s not even gonna come back to 2026. You know, they can’t make it fast enough. So, here’s an example for me. We’ve been doing Semaglutide for some time now, the sublingual. We started in June doing the injectables. In July, we sold over 50 vials. In August, we’re gonna sell something over 80 vials. And that does not include all the supplement sales that you have with it. So, if you said, you know, we’re going to sell over 80 vials, 80 times $200 in profit or more, plus the supplement sales and people are going to buy $100, $200, $300 worth of supplements. That’s anywhere from another, you know, $75 – $300 worth of profit. You know, we make 50% on all of our supplements. And so it’s a win -win. Something else that we do is that we have a set of Tonita scale, some people have in bodies, but what they do is that that measures the amount of muscle and fat per arm, per leg and trunk. It also gives you your water weight and your extra cellular and intercellular water weight. That gives us lots of data. So, we have people coming in and getting a weekly shot from us and weighing themselves so they can figure out how much muscle they’re losing and then they can take advantage of what to do to fix that.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: That’s awesome that you guys are going, you’re definitely going above and beyond, which is smart. Just, and it’s what you should do, right.
T.W. Taylor: Well, that’s what we should do as pharmacists. This is how we should practice. Our job is to help our patients be their best. If they’re 90, I want to be their best 90. If they’re 40 and want to be their best 90, I want to help them get there.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Yeah, I agree. So what is your, do you foresee that in how many years, I don’t know, two years, the US is, all gonna be skinny? Walking around on that beach again?
T.W. Taylor: No, no, no. Some people like being fat. I mean, let’s just face it, some people do. Or they don’t wanna, they really don’t wanna lose weight. I’ve got a family member that we have on the max dose of tizipatide. And I think she just eats through it. I think she just eats anyway. I mean, even though she’s not hungry, I think that she just, her friends are having beer, she has beer.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Sounds like me.
T.W. Taylor: And even though she’s not even in the mood or want it. Yeah, now I will tell you that this has far reaching effects. I have lots of patients tell me they drink less, they smoke less. It really does affect their society center so that they don’t want all these things all the time. And so if they’re drinking less and they’re smoking less, that’s another win for us.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: I had a friend that used one of them. I know she said that she just lost taste for lots of stuff. Like even her, she, you know, had coffee every morning and she just didn’t even want that. You know, just a random thing that wasn’t terrible, but she just didn’t want coffee anymore. She didn’t like the taste of it anymore.
T.W. Taylor: You know, that is very true. I’ve got one of my employees, she’s lost about, I don’t know, 25 or 30 pounds in two months. And one of her complaints is that she used to go home at night and have a couple of beers. Well, now she can’t even drink a half of one and doesn’t want any more. And the reason is this stops all the noise in your head. So it reduces your gremlin hormone, increases your leptin, so you don’t, you’re not hungry. You don’t think about food all the time. And what that does is it decreases all this time you’re spending on food. And it appears it bleeds over to these other things like drinking, smoking, et cetera. So it helps people across the board.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Interesting.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: It sure is.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: I love what you’re doing TW. I mean like I said I knew you would be on this way before a lot of people and you’re definitely taking it to the next level in patient care which I think is so big we forget about that. You know we’ve been pushing this with pharmacies and clients right now to take a look at this as an option, but you know you always forget that part is the supplements. The other things that you can also continue to sell to make the patient care experience better and make them healthier and get through this, you know, the best way they can. So, I appreciate that.
T.W. Taylor: Well, I mean, you know, really, as a health care professional, our job is make people healthier. Today’s medicine keeps them sick. When you go in, the only choice they have is another drug. And it should not be like that. And this is nothing new. Hippocrates, father of modern medicine, said 2,000 years ago, basically food is medicine and medicine is food. And so, we should take advantage of these opportunities, change how we practice, and start helping our patients. And I know a lot of people out there, you we’ve been licking, sticking, counting and pouring for so long. But if you get out and talk to your patients, and I don’t put a hard sell in, but I just tell them these are the things that would help you, they can make up their own mind. And I don’t expect to sell 100% of the time. If I sell 10% of the time, that’s 10% more than I had. To give you an example of what 10% means to you, if you had 3,000 patients in your database and only 300 of them did this it’d be a million dollars in sales a year at five hundred thousand dollars profit I mean you don’t need to get everybody just get the people that are interested in helping themselves and It’ll make your pharmacy better. It’ll make their lives better, and you will be a lot happier
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: That sounds like the bottom line to me. Yeah.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: Well, that’s a great bottom line.
T.W. Taylor: Yeah, it is the bottom line.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: That is the bottom line, T.W. We might have to coin that one as just the bottom line of the podcast.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: It is the bottom line.
T.W. Taylor: Well, it’s my pleasure guys. I’ll send you the slide deck. Last thing is I buy all of our GLP -1s from Olympia Pharmaceuticals in Orlando, Florida. They overnight it all to you. I usually order one day and get it the next. They’ve been fantastic to deal with. I was suggested To use those, had PCA do a research and they came up very good and I’ve been very happy with them. You’re welcome to give them a call. Hayden is the person you should talk to, Hayden Goldman. And if anybody wants to number anything, just give me a call and I’ll be happy to help.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: And is it okay if we share the slide deck if someone asks for that or? Okay.
T.W. Taylor: Absolutely. And I’ll send that to you here in just a minute.
Bonnie Bond, CPA: You heard it from the man. He’s willing to share the slide deck. Thank you, T.W.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: That’s right. Well, thank you, T.W., for your time today, and we’ll see you again on another episode sometime soon.
T.W. Taylor: Now you guys are the best. I appreciate you doing this, for all of us independents.
Scotty Sykes, CPA, CFP®: You got it. Thank you, T.W.
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