Dealing With Problem Employees While Scaling Your Business With Tim Furman

I always love being able to take a pause out of my week, my day, and share another interview with you. This episode, we have another business owner in the trenches doing it. We are excited every time we can bring you the real deal or the real scoop from people who are leading seven-figure business owners to share with all of you, our readers. We want to hear from them about their challenges and the lessons they’re learning so that that can help you and your growth.

In this episode, I’m pleased to introduce our guest. His name is Tim Furman. His company is called MediSuite. I believe we found Tim and MediSuite via the Inc. 5000 list. That is an absolute accomplishment. It’s a great accomplishment to be on that list. It means you are leading one of the fastest-growing companies in the US. I realize that’s for 2019. I wish you the best for 2020. Welcome to our show, Tim.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us a little bit about MediSuite. Take a minute quickly to give people some context about your business. You can even share the best way to find out more about it if they’re interested. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and then I’ll ask you some more questions to learn from your journey.

MediSuite is a national mail-order pharmacy. We specialize in men’s health medications, mostly which deal with erectile dysfunction and some prostate cancer issues. Mostly, we deal with medicines that urologists and primary care would prescribe to their male patients. We got started in this because we had another entity that did the distribution of pharmaceuticals. We realized there was a need, and this is in the 2013 timeframe, for a way to get prescriptions to the patients whose doctors couldn’t dispense out of their office at a reasonable cost.

Dealing With Problem Employees: We started MediSuite when we realized there was a need for a way to get prescriptions to patients whose doctors couldn’t dispense them out of their office at a reasonable cost.

We started the pharmacy in 2013 and have grown it substantially since then by getting additional state licenses. We’re now licensed in 44 states in the District of Columbia, and we should have the other states to total 50 by the end of 2020. We focus on working with physicians throughout the country to get medications at a reasonable price. We are a wholesale distributor, so we’re able to buy straight from the manufacturer. We don’t work with any insurance companies, so we pass on the savings straight to the patients.

You happen to deal in men’s health, but the business is a national mail-order pharmacy. You’re taking inventory or medicine directly from the manufacturers and making those available at affordable prices across the US.

Correct. We dispense all FDA-approved medications from the manufacturers and fill them individually for the patients and mail them out to them, typically get them in 2 to 4 days.

You said 2013 is when you started doing some of this.

In late 2013, we started. The first two years were minimal growth then we started to gain a little bit of popularity, got additional licensing, moved to a little bit bigger space in 2016, and increased the marketing to the physician base throughout the US.

Good work. It’s quite an accomplishment. I know having been at a company that was on those Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 lists how difficult it is to get on there in the first place and then maintain a presence over time. That’s a great accomplishment. Keep up the good work on that.

Thank you. We plan to.

Tim, this has been quite a ride over the last years that you’ve been doing this, and you’ve grown a substantial business. It’s to seven figures plus. You don’t have to remember exactly the moment you guys crossed the $1 million in sales mark for the year. Roughly speaking, what would you say are some of the lessons you learned after you hit that seven-figure mark? What are some of the challenges you experienced that you may not have expected?

It’s interesting. I did that in 2016 or 2017 or somewhere in about those parts. About that same time, we had been doing it for a couple of years. It started to get national attention because we had some big competitors who had big advertising budgets like the Romans and 4Ms. We had increased competition, but it brought into regular conversation with people. They weren’t necessarily ashamed to have erectile dysfunction. It expanded our marketplace. Everybody became aware of the drugs that were out there, so we were able to take advantage of our competitive marketers to gain a share within the physician and prescriber base.

Some of the bigger players come in, pouring some more dollars into the education of the market. That opened up some space for you guys, maybe unexpectedly. That’s a nice surprise. What were you experiencing internally from a challenge standpoint? The market dynamics are a cool insight. Maybe some of our readers can take advantage of some of the things that other people are doing to educate the market, which is a key lesson. What was happening internally for your business as you were trying to grow? What kind of challenges did you experience?

It’s like any growing business. You have some staffing challenges. Fortunately, we’re in a good area where there’s a lot of pharmacists and pharmacy techs available. The growing pain is trying to figure out how to maximize the production of the fills while taking care of the customer base. We do give good individualized attention, one, because you have to. As a pharmacy, there are certain protocols you have to follow. The other is we want them to keep our patient base which we’ve done real well. The internal struggles were, and they continue to be, how to grow the market transitioning from standard marketing of mailers and touchpoints and such over to the digital platform and keeping up with the Joneses.

The marketing changes that we’ve come into, over the past several years, have been a challenge. Also, staffing. We got a great team in place. We had a little bit of transition not so long ago. That was good. Now we have a really good team in place and have very little to no turnover. The other thing that challenge us was what culture we want to create. I’ve had a lot of help from my Vistage group and my Vistage chair, helping us create the correct culture for our company.

I’m sure everybody’s aware that a retail pharmacy space is small. A mail-order pharmacy is a little bit even tighter in our situation. You work closely together. There’s a lot going on. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of rules and regulations you have to follow for each and every script and how to standardize that process for our company. I would say those were probably the biggest challenges, just the process orientation, documenting all that, creating the right culture, and then the other growing pains. Fortunately, we didn’t have any cashflow instances. We were well-funded, so that was not an issue. The others provided plenty of work for us to do.

Never a dull moment. When you’re growing, there’s always stuff that comes up. I’d love to go back to a couple of things you said. One of them you alluded to, and I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. You talked about staffing transition. Maybe there were some challenges. On the other side of it, the team’s great. You have very little turnover. If you don’t mind us uncovering some old wounds, what were some of the people challenges that you went through? Did it have to do with building out a leadership team or you just couldn’t hire and onboard enough people? What was the flavor of your people challenges and what can we learn from that?

The major one that I’ll get into as much detail as I can is we had an employee who was one of our early hires who decided that they were going try to go out on their own and duplicate what we did. We didn’t have strong enough language in our employment agreement. We had to involve some attorneys in order to get that situation taken care of. That was one of the major staffing issues. My lesson learned from that is if you have a company that can be replicated, you need to lock down your employees with agreements on non-competes and make sure they’re enforceable. We have since tightened those up as well as we can in order to protect ourselves. That was a little traumatic once we learned what had happened.

Dealing With Problem Employees: If you have a company that can be replicated, you need to lock down your employees with non-compete agreements and make sure they’re enforceable.

The recommendation is to get that in place as soon as possible because it will occur. As far as HR issues, that was a major one. In staffing, we had a core and then we had to add threefold the amount of people that we had. We went through some interesting hires and some interesting stories as far as attendance issues. I would say that got shored up also. I wish I would’ve been more proactive in dealing with those HR issues because that’s not what I want to spend time on. In hindsight, I wish I would’ve spent more resources on that upfront. That’s probably my biggest lesson learned from that situation.

Tim, you said some very interesting things, at least from my perspective. Those who read know I’m an organizational behavior geek, all these people things. That’s what I love to talk about. You and I haven’t talked before this interview. That’s normal for my interview guest. You didn’t know that I like to talk about these issues and talk about culture, which we’ll get to here in a minute. I love that you’re saying, “I wish I would’ve spent a little more resources upfront or more proactively around the people, processes, and systems.”

You gave some great advice to all of our readers. Go shore up those employment agreements. Put one in place if you don’t have one at all. If you do have one, make sure that it will hold up if an instance were to come up like the one that you faced where an early team member decided they could go off and do the same thing as good as or better. Off they go, just take your model and run with it.

At the end of the day, whether it was that case or hiring the wrong people and having to deal with some HR or employee relations type of issues later, you end up spending the resources. Usually, you spend more than you would have if you wait until dealing with the problem rather than doing it upfront the right way. Lesson learned on that, good. Could you get any more specific about some of the things that you guys have done to shore up your hiring and onboarding process to make sure you’re getting training and keeping the best people?

We have a much better screening process. Our two major positions are pharmacists and pharmacy techs. Our environment’s a lot different from any retail, Walgreens, or CVS that someone has been into in the past. It has some advantages, and it has some disadvantages, but we know the questions now to ask to get the people that will fit within our team.

We’re talking about culture a short time ago. We came up with a MediSuite motto which is the eleven culture items that we go through. We also value proposition. We go through both of those during the interview process. I used to think that was a little bit cheesy per se, but I believe it has helped both the candidates and us understand what’s going to be expected and the type of person we’re looking for.

Dealing With Problem Employees: Going through the culture items during the interview process helps both you and the candidates understand what’s going to be expected and the type of person you’re looking for.

Once they get on board, they see that everybody else is bought into it. It creates a good work team and a good workflow. It also creates accountability. That’s where some of the mis-hires, I would say. They weren’t getting into the accountability piece and everybody else was there, so they just didn’t last that long.

I love the way that you described some of that. My way of talking about it might be more behavioral, or at least I’ll use that word. It sounds like you found questions that would help you guys filter whether or not a candidate was going to match the behaviors of your culture and be an integral part of that team instead of somebody who doesn’t fit very well.

In our case, most of the people we hired had come from large pharmacy chains where it’s very structured and protocol-driven, and they have the resources to tell them what time to do everything. Ours wasn’t quite as structured. We looked for people who had some type of entrepreneurial spirit rather than just someone that’s going to come in and throw pills in a bottle and ship them out. We were looking for more than that. That’s what we learned the difference between someone that can come in and fill a script versus someone that can come in and take care of a patient and do everything else that’s necessary in order to follow the guidelines and the laws that we have to.

They have to be a little more entrepreneurial in your case, a smaller company, be a little more flexible and wear more hats than in the larger retail pharmacy machine. It makes perfect sense. I love that you guys have put in the work and made the investment to get better at hiring good people. If you could put a dollar amount to it, how much would you say you save now by investing some in the hiring process, onboarding, and making sure they’re a good fit? How much do you think you save in avoiding bad hires?

It’s hard to put a number to it. The biggest thing I’d probably save is wasting time. I very rarely do I have to replace anybody. Thankfully, we’ve had a very low turnover, whatever you could value your own time out. It’s priceless in my eyes not to have to deal with HR issues. We’re trying to nip them in the bud before they ever start, and then you don’t have to retrain somebody.

There’s so much expense that goes into posting the job, screening the candidates, and interviewing. Whatever your hiring process looks like, all the people, time, and effort involved is just wasted if we select the wrong person. You’re right. The time’s huge, even just take your own self. If you’re running down a path trying to lead your company in a certain direction and you got to stop and take a detour or deal with a problem because we hired the wrong person, that could be so disruptive. I’m with you.

Thankfully, you don’t have a bunch of turnovers. You know it’s costly even if you don’t know the dollar amount. Why deal with that? Let’s stay focused on what we’re all up to doing. Talk a little bit more about culture and what you’ve learned there because it sounds like you’ve got a fairly defined culture now. I’d love to know what are some of the things that you can share with our readers that you do to proactively or intentionally design culture.

Fortunately, I was exposed to a speaker who talked directly about culture and gave us a lot of good information to put together your own set of rules, values, and such. We’ve got them posted on our wall in a couple of different places. One is probably a 2×3 foot poster that you got to see every day coming in. I’m not sure how much they pay attention to it anymore, but when we first put it up and we first went through the process of rolling out our culture, we got buy-in from everyone. They’re basic things, “Do what’s best for the customer, do the right thing always, make quality personal, drive legendary customer service,” etc. What we did was we went through them with each of the team members.

Once a week, I would send out an email with the motto for the week. I would explain to them what it meant to me in my regular non-work life. I’d have them do some thought training on what it means to them in work and then outside of work. We challenged them a little bit to try to implement it in their everyday work, not just pieces of paper on their wall or desk. We wanted to try to think about it. We went through that process. It’s probably been few years. It is not a huge expense to put that together, but that has paid off. To put a dollar amount to it would be tough, but we have very little turnover as far as patients.

We don’t lose many scripts once we get them. They stay with us because they get taken care of. We answer the phone in a timely manner, we get the script out the same day, and we offer next-day shipping if they have to have it. There are things we do around response time and honoring our commitments that, at the end of the day, we’re trying to push out scripts. It’s neat to see the staff be concerned about everything being ready when the pickup comes. You can see the results. If you went down each and every one of our eleven mottos, you could easily see an example of that on a weekly basis.

That speaks volumes to what you’ve built there, Tim. It’s one thing to get recognized as one of the fastest 5,000-growing companies in America. It’s another thing to actually build a sustainable growth machine. The way you’re describing the intentional efforts you’ve made to establish a culture and build a team around that, that’s the stuff of great companies that continue to succeed. My hat’s off to you on that.

Let me try to pull out a few more lessons from what you just shared for our readers before I hit you up for any more here. I don’t know if you were looking at them, but I got the sense that you were reciting back some of those mottos from memory. You didn’t take us through all eleven, but you rattled off a few. Was that from memory or were you looking at something, Tim?

I’ve got it posted here in my office.

You’re an honest man. I like it. Let’s say you weren’t looking at that. How well could you do on the list if you didn’t have it in front of you?

I can probably do pretty well because I was the one that organized and put it together, but it wasn’t like I created these myself. I’m a big believer that there are smarter people out there than me and they have good suggestions. It takes a lot less time to research and duplicate it than it does to come up with stuff on your own. That would be a good question for our staff people and how well they could recite the eleven of them.

If I can offer some little value to you in return, I would challenge you to do that and all the people reading this. If you’ve done good values work, will you feel like, “This represents who we are, not just aspirational statements, but this is really who we are as a team.” Like in the case of MediSuite and what Tim’s describing here, if you feel that that represents who you are, I would encourage you to memorize them and incorporate that into your daily vocabulary.

I love that you gave that as an example, “Every week, we focus on one.” You talked about the thought work that they would need to do to think about how they’re living those things and sharing examples if we could highlight those examples. Good leadership not only puts them in place but to get others involved in the process. With that buy-in, now I’m leading them every week, highlighting one of the values or one of the mottos if you call them that. All of that’s great stuff.

I encourage you to memorize them because once you know them, the team’s like, “Tim knows these by heart. I need to do that too.” It further ingrains it into your company’s culture. Aside from having those mottos, what else have you done to ingrain that culture into your business to where it’s not going anywhere?

We do some team events. We’ve done some things outside of the office. Even if you have a low budget for them, it’s worth the time to do.

How often do you guys do stuff like that? Is that like a quarterly thing or a couple of times a year?

We aim for quarterly, and we had some stuff scheduled here that lately didn’t get to work out. We’ve done quarterly things either. Sometimes we’ll do dinner. Sometimes there are other activities. In one quarter, we sponsored a cancer survivor and did a wish list type deal for them locally here. That was interesting. I was impressed how everybody jumped in on that because it was mostly done outside of work hours. That was good. It made them feel like not only are we fulfilling our patients who actually pay us, but also, we’re giving back to the community. I would highly encourage that, too, as a team-building event if you have something either in your area or nationally that you can be a part of. It’s very neat and we’ll do it again.

You’re doing things that create a sense of unity on the team. We all know that shared experience will go a long way in building a shared identity. You’re doing some things, whether it be dinner or fun activity. I like the way you incorporated giving or a higher-purpose type of activity that people could feel good about being a part of. That’s a neat story. Good work on that. What other things do you do in the daily and weekly routine of the company that might reinforce some of the mottos? You shared how you would highlight one each week. Are there other things that you’ve built into the ongoing routine of how you run the business that helps to reinforce any of those mottos?

We implemented the EOS system, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I’m sure a lot of your readers are familiar with it. It’s a structured guideline on how to put together quarterly goals and issues, which they call rocks. I would highly recommend that because I’m not the most structured person, but that keeps you on task during the meetings that you have with your staff as well as future goals. You put them out there and you break them down into what is it going to take to accomplish that goal. The EOS system has allowed us as a leadership team where we’re bringing them together. Also, it goes down to the staff level. Everybody’s on board with them.

They want to see the daily and weekly numbers from us, which we didn’t always share as openly as we do now. They know what we do in a week as far as the number of scripts. They know where we’re at on a monthly and quarterly basis, scorecard type deal. Those things that we put together, along with the accountability piece, have helped us stay on task.

I firmly believe it keeps a long-term growth goal in front of everybody. They know we’re not content with just growing it a couple of points a year. We want the double-digit plus growth, and this is how we’re going to do it. We got a roadmap to do it. They see we’ve taken the time to put everything in writing and we hold ourselves accountable at all levels. That has caused a sense of purpose for everyone involved.

You mentioned EOS. Here at Elite Entrepreneurs, we do something very similar. Rather than talk about the specific components of either of those programs, let me share some of what I think are the high-level benefits that you spoke to. One of them is that we have a planning and execution rhythm. There is a routine. This quarterly, we identify the priorities. We know what the goals are. We have measurements, and we share those measurements with everyone.

There’s a level of transparency that everybody on the team knows what the big focus areas are for the quarter. They know how we’re tracking each month, each week. There’s a system for owning pieces of work and accountability that goes with it. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of great work to create planning and execution rhythm, alignment with the team, transparency, the measurement that helps people understand where we’re at, down to the individual accountability of, “Here’s the piece you own. Here’s how you’re doing against it.”

You’ve done some fabulous things to help people from a foundation standpoint with values or what you guys call mottos, and you’ve built your team around that. You select new hires based on that. They got to be able to do the job, but they also have to fit in with the team. You’ve then built these scalable people processes for the way you lead in your company. You’ve got a planning and execution rhythm. You’ve got the measurement of the right things that help everybody stay on track. You have people who own their roles, and you’ve got some accountability around that. You can have intentionality and discipline to keep going forward with your growth goals. Awesome stuff, Tim.

Thank You.

As you think about your journey-post that million-dollar mark and you’re still moving forward and growing, are there any other lessons learned here, as we wrap up, that would help our readers either avoid a painful pitfall or benefit from something that helped you guys moving forward?

Everybody’s thinking about the scaling of a business. It doesn’t happen overnight. There are things you have to put in place early on in order to take advantage of them later. My suggestion is I wish we would have implemented some of these things at a much earlier point. It would’ve saved a lot of growing pains. When you first start up or when you first get off the ground and validate a business, you don’t always have time to think about the extracurricular things that don’t automatically fall to the bottom line. Slowly take the time to put those things in place, thinking of the 3 to 5 years where you want to be and what tools you need to put in place.

A perfect example is that the first pharmacy software system we put in place was awful. Once we got scaled up to a point, we had to implement a new one that was a better fit for us and much more scalable. It was a big learning curve. It was a hectic month going through that. It would’ve been so much easier if we would’ve either picked it up earlier or picked it up from the beginning. We went with the least expensive solution out of the gate. We did not improve it, probably about a year or two too late. Anyway, that was one of the things that we went through that was a big struggle at the size we are now where it would’ve been very simple a few years ago.

Those moments are painful when you look back and go, “Why didn’t we do that sooner? Why didn’t we do well?” It’s perfectly understandable. Every single one of our readers has postponed an investment of some kind or another because of current cash constraints or perceived constraints that make it go, “I just don’t know that I can pull that trigger yet.” Once we finally do, we wish we had done it way earlier. There’s probably no magic formula or algorithm as to how to know exactly when to make those investments.

Most of us have had moments where we wish we had done some investments sooner and got to look at the impact on the team, the cash, and the customer experience. The longer you wait, the more disruptive it gets. Thank you for sharing that as our parting share. As we wrap up here, why don’t you tell people how they can learn more about MediSuite or how they can connect with you if you are interested in people doing that? Tell us more about how to learn more or connect.

Website is MediSuite.com. We now have a telemedicine option that we’re actively marketing where people can go on. It’s a lot of the direct-to-consumer where they don’t have to go see their physician if they have one or, if they don’t have one, they can go on and use the telemedicine option. It’s very inexpensive and easy to go through. The process is extremely smooth as far as going through the questionnaire all the way to if you have to talk with a doctor, get in the script. This Coronavirus we’re going through now has fast-tracked the telemedicine piece. That’s something.

If they want to learn more about us, they can go through that process. On our website, we have a chat tool if they wanted to get in touch with us as well as we publish our company email address as info@MediSuiteRX.com. We have all the telephone numbers listed there, 800 numbers that they can get in touch with. We strive to pick up. Within the first 30 seconds or so is our typical wait time if they are on the wait. That’s several ways they can get in touch with us. If they have any other personal questions, my email address is Tim@MediSuiteRX.com.

Thank you again, Tim, for making time. Congratulations once more on being recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in the US in 2019. That’s quite an accomplishment. I know what that takes. My hat’s off to you and your team for making that happen. On behalf of all of our readers, I appreciate the lessons that you shared and the real challenges that happen after you hit that million-dollar mark. It’s not all smooth sailing. There are new things you got to figure out, and you’ve done a lot of great work.

The lessons you shared will be valuable for those who choose to apply some of the things that you shared. You’re doing some great stuff out in the world. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to share some of your learnings. I hope that all of you out there reading will share this episode with people and review, rate it, tell others about it, and keep reading. We’re going to keep bringing you great business owners and great experts to help you grow your seven-figure business.

Brett, thank you very much for your time. I enjoy the experience.

Thanks for joining us, Tim. That wraps up another episode. Take care, everyone.

Important Links

• MediSuite
• info@MediSuiteRX.com
• Tim@MediSuiteRX.com