Cooking Up Success

On a pleasant spring day in tiny Dora, Ala., more than half the town’s 2,422 people were hanging out in a parking lot, listening to an assortment of enthusiastic bands, downing dressed-up hot potatoes, vying for door prizes and other giveaways and all in all, just having a fine time.

No, this wasn’t the annual carnival nor had the circus come to town. It was just Ken Glover and his team stirring the pot.

“Stir the pot.”

That’s Glover’s three-word recipe for a vital, growing home medical equipment company. The owner of Ken Glover Drug does not believe in standing still, a condition equal, in his mind, to stagnating.

Since 1992, he’s established four Alabama locations — Dora, Cordova, and two in Jasper, the newest there just opening on Feb. 15. The occasion in Dora was his latest version of stirring the pot, the grand opening of a triple-the-original-size facility just across the parking lot from the old flagship store. This one sports two compounding labs, a bigger gift shop and a vastly larger area for HME.

“There were 1,500 people in our parking lot,” says Jennifer Weathers, RN, DMEPOS coordinator, about the crowd that included customers, vendors and representatives from pharmacy associations. “We pulled out all the stops for them to show our appreciation.”

That appears to be the Glover style — pulling out all the stops, stirring the pot. It’s what’s made Glover Drug what it is today: the largest independent pharmacy in Alabama’s Walker County and a key HME provider in the area as well.

Prescription for Success

You could say that Ken Glover was born into the pharmacy world. His dad Sam, a pharmacist, opened a drugstore in Jasper the same year Ken Glover was born, and he ran it for 40 years until his son took it over in 2008.

Glover worked with his dad and in 1992, established his own store in Dora. In 1998, he opened the Cordova store, followed by the two Jasper stores in 2008 and 2010. The Dora store is so far the only one to carry HME. But there was a time when it didn’t carry such items at all.

“We were in it originally and we were outsourcing our billing, and that was a disaster,” Glover says. “Claims stacked up without payment, either timely or at all. We just threw in the towel and quit.”

But Glover couldn’t shake the idea that HME would fill his customers’ needs. “I never gave up on the idea. But I knew I needed to have somebody on the staff here,” he says. “We went several years without that opportunity. We just couldn’t find the right person.”

That was frustrating to him. Glover doesn’t like to disappoint people.

“As our company kept growing, we kept getting request after request [for HME],” he says. He referred them to companies he respected elsewhere, but still he was a bit nervous. “When you pass them on to someone else, you take a chance. You hope they are going to get the right service,” he says.

The requests kept coming, until it was a daily occurrence.

“I don’t know how many people would come back in and say, ‘If you ever get back where I can get my [diabetic] test strips from you, let me know,’” Glover recalls.

Enter Jennifer Weathers.

“When we were getting to the point that we were going to remodel [the Dora store], the opportunity for Jennifer came along,” Glover says, adding that Weathers, a registered nurse, had another asset: Her family had been on the billing side of HME for years.

Weathers joined the company of 40 employees in January 2009. “The main reason we got back into it was we never wanted out of it,” Glover says wryly. “We got tired of giving claims away.”

Glover and Weathers didn’t waste any time. “We hit the ground running,” she says. “We got accredited and we reactivated our Medicare number.”

They also joined the Alabama Durable Medical Equipment Association and the National Association of Independent Medical Equipment Suppliers.

From the beginning, the store was a full-line HME provider, the only one of the three in the county.

“Our business base is an even mix,” Weathers says. “We have patients from a newborn baby because we do phototherapy for infants and there is no other provider in our area that does that. And then our oldest patient is 100.”

The company also does an even business in Medicare and private pay, she says, but does a respectable business in cash, too. “The retail side is where it’s at,” Weathers says. “So you have the CPAP and then you have the CPAP pillow and on and on.”

As exciting as it was to re-establish HME in the old Dora store, Weathers knew she needed more space.

“In last year’s store, we had an 8-foot aisle and a 12-foot aisle and that’s all. I had nothing on the floor, no hospital beds, nothing. People didn’t even know we carried oxygen or CPAPs unless it came from a referral source because I had no place to put it,” she says.

It’s sure different now. The new store allows space to stage a room, so a hospital bed is set up with a nightstand (with a CPAP on it) and a table over the bed. There is a patient fitting room, three times the amount of shelf space and hundreds more feet of display space for all kinds of HME.

“We increased our over-the-counter space so now we can carry more products. The gift side is a plus and gift sales have shot through the roof,” Weathers says. “We have new product lines. And people who come in to get gifts say, ‘I’ll just move my prescription down here and, oh, y’all carry CPAPs.’ If I have heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

It’s not only what people see on the floor that’s important, it’s what they don’t see, as well. Behind the pharmacy, there are several thousand feet of warehouse space.

“We keep enough stock on hand to service someone,” Glover says. “We’re not turning anyone away anymore,” he adds, and you can almost hear the smile in his voice.

Challenges = Opportunities

Make no mistake, Glover Drug still has its challenges.

“The biggest challenge for us is just making everybody from clinicians to patients to the community aware of our services,” says Weathers. “We’re finding creative ways to say we are a retail and compounding pharmacy and a full-line HME [provider].”

The company is on Facebook and Twitter. “We’re using social media like Facebook to draw the younger people,” Weathers says, noting that the Facebook page focuses largely on the gift side. “We have almost 800 fans on our fan page.”

There’s also an online Glover Drug Savings and Information Club, which offers coupons, sale and new product information, and health and prescription news.

Being the new HME kid on the block, Weathers also has a challenge when it comes to working with health maintenance organizations.

“We’re trying to break into HMOs and become a network provider,” she says. “I have people coming in and saying, ‘I have to get my equipment from a provider that’s two hours away.’ And they want to get it from me because they see it sitting right on my shelf and know I could take care of them, but they can’t because of their insurance.”

She’s intent on winning HMO contracts. “We’re constantly seeking ways to grow the business,” Weathers says. “If [HMOs] are locking down their network, I want to be in them before they do. If I can be your sole provider, I’m all over that.”

Glover and Weathers are not impervious to the challenges to the industry, either. They are fully aware that competitive bidding is on the horizon, and they are in the second round.

“We’re trying not to be scared of anything that is out there and be positive,” Glover says. “We just hit it head-on with a positive attitude, and we’ll just throw our best offers out there.”

Meanwhile, they will continue to stir the pot.

“If you are stirring something, you’re constantly creating new ideas or thinking about changes,” Weathers says. “It’s not staying still. You’re always on the move, always thinking what could happen next.”

That is, she says, what has gotten them to this place — and what will take Ken Glover Drug into the future.

“One of my goals is to become effective with lobbying,” Weathers says forthrightly. “And because of Ken’s planning and putting us where we are, we can do that.”

But that isn’t the end of her goals. “I want to bring on nurses so we can offer nursing services. Becoming a [home health agency] — that’s another one of my goals.”

Because Glover added a sterile compounding lab that allows the pharmacy to mix sterile IV medication, that is even more possible than before, she says.

Both she and Glover are optimistic about the future, Weathers says. “We want to do what we can to be there to support changes that need to be made regarding the industry, as well as being a leader in the community. Our primary goal is to be there for the patients in the community,” she says.

“We just want to be that resource for the patient,” she continues. “If they want something related to health care, they’re going to know where they can get it, and they’re going to get it from a caring and friendly environment.”

Glover echoes all that and adds a business goal of his own: to be the largest independent pharmacy in the state. The current leader owns six stores; Glover has four.

But he’s always stirring the pot.

Top Tips

At Ken Glover Drugs based in Dora, Ala., there’s a certain way to do business, and it’s really all about the patient. Here, with the help of Jennifer Weathers, RN, DMEPOS coordinator, are Ken Glover’s best tips:

• Be readily and easily available to patients The pharmacy has 24-hour, on-call service, so there is always someone to help a patient, whether they need HME equipment or a prescription drug.
• Display products as they will be used in the home Have products in the store so customers can touch and feel.
• Realize the value of spending time with patients It doesn’t increase reimbursement but it does build loyalty.
• Analyze the competition What are they doing right? Are you doing it right, too? What are they doing wrong? Learn from your competitors’ mistakes.
• Do what you say you are going to do “If you say you are going to call them back, then call them back,” Weathers says. “If you say you’re going to have something in, then have it in at all cost.”