Pharmacy Advisory Services Promote Growth

We continue our conversation about the pharmacy advisory team you need during the start-up pharmacy phase. In this video, Ollin Sykes CPA, discusses who your start-up pharmacy should have in place to succeed. Learn which advisors must be on your team to grow your start-up pharmacy.

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If you prefer to read this content, the video transcript is below.

– [Narrator] Welcome to the Sykes & Company P.A. video blog.

– And in a purity start-up arrangement, your advisors need to be in place I think preferably at least six months in advance. And the advisory team we have been talking about is having a legal health care expert. Obviously, you’ll need to have a pharmacy niche banker in place, ’cause most likely you’re gonna be looking at some type of financing with the pharmacy niche bank. And we highly recommend that versus going with a local regional national bank who knows nothing about pharmacies. Let me just repeat that. If you by chance go down that route, or have already gone down that route, you probably know the frustration that I’m talking about. Because they just don’t understand the lingo, they don’t understand the terminology, much less they don’t understand the difference between a DIR fee, a GER fee, or a PBM. And when you start talking to people in this space, they don’t know the differences between those items, you know you got a real problem to begin with. But obviously, dealing with third-party contracts early on in the start-up is extraordinarily important. And your advisors that you’re working with, through your PSAO may be able to get 90% plus of your third-party contracts in place. But you always have, they can never get your Humana, Express Scripts, Optum, Prime Therapeutics, Caremark CVS contracts, you have to get those yourself. And they typically are the ones that take anywhere from three, four, six months to even longer, in fact certain states we’ve seen take as long as two years. That’s outside the scope of what we normally see, but typically that runs into a particular issue with start-up pharmacies, because most likely you’ve already put a lease in place, you’ve got building that you’ve got to coordinate with the start-up of your pharmacy, getting all your permits as well as getting all your third-party approvals, so working with again, the advisors in this particular area, dealing with these third-party contracts, working with, making sure you’ve got the proper leases structured in place, keeping in mind that in most cases the lease is gonna have to be guaranteed by you personally, so that sometimes a spouse is required to guarantee that, that lease for a long period of time. If you do get pharmacy niche bank financing, please note that you’ll have to have that financing, that lease for at least the period of time as your financing typically is put in place. So you’ve got a lot of things that you have to kinda coordinate here on a timeline, starting really months and quarters out from when you believe you’d be adjudicating that first, that first claim. So as you work up towards the point in time of getting these approvals, getting your lease squared away, getting all your pharmacy permits from your state, obviously you’ve got to get your federal ID number, your DEA, your MPI, your NCPD number, NCPDP numbers, get it all that really on the very front end before you get your contracts, all that leads up to the point in time of the opening of the pharmacy. So the start-up phase of working with your professionals and your team of advisors is extraordinarily important. And I might add that we have other videos we have previously done too, about the associating costs, the associating with these advisors, you may wanna reach out and listen to separately. But it’s very important that during the start-up phase, that you work with these professionals at the right timeframe, not calling them two weeks before the opening of the pharmacy, but months out from when that need will be.

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