Mikayla Strode

I attribute my success to staying curious. That's the one that's always in the back of my mind - always question everything, always ask about why is something happening, why are we doing something this way, what does this product do, how can this benefit the patient, how do we do XYZ. I think that's ultimately what has led me as far as I've gotten. My biggest piece of advice is to stay curious and always ask questions, even if it is a dumb question. I've also been very blessed in the sense of having good teachers in all of my positions that have led me up to this point. My biggest mentor is my current boss, Eric Shiplov - he's just an abundance of information, a wealth of information, and I do attribute a lot of what I've learned to him. He's given me a lot of opportunities. When I started with my company, I had interviewed for a completely separate role and they chose somebody else over me, but then I got a call saying they really liked me and they ended up making a position just for me. I was flattered, and we've built from one pharmacy to almost 4 pharmacies now, building out quite a few new projects that are going to be extremely scalable.

I think there's actually two pieces of advice that come to mind. The first is that assuming is always the worst thing that you can do - to always verify what you're doing. In my case, we work with PHI, so making sure that we're being mindful of HIPAA and the patients that we work with, we want to protect their information. So assuming is your first enemy - just verify everything that you're doing. The second thing is just always stay curious. I think that's the one that's always in the back of my mind. Always question everything, always ask about what, why is something happening, why are we doing something this way, what does this product do, how can this benefit the patient, how do we do XYZ. I think that's ultimately what has led me as far as I've gotten is staying curious. So that would be my biggest piece of advice - to stay curious and always ask questions, even if it is a dumb question.

I think as far as challenges go, it's just making sure that we are educated on all aspects of the business and all aspects of this field so that we're not misstepping in any way. Being on top of compliance is the focus at our company - we are very uber-compliant. Ensuring that we are meeting those standards and making sure that we're not doing anything that could harm the patient or trying to find a workaround - we don't want any part of that, which tends to be some cases with other pharmacies. Luckily, we have a fantastic legal team and we have advisors to coach us through all of this on what we can and can't do, and I have very well-experienced pharmacists whose input is always valuable. As far as opportunities, there's a lot of growth to happen with GLP-1s and peptides in regards to patients and their livelihood and different comorbidities. It's a very fluid field, and one of my favorite things about it is that it's never the same - every day, there's something new coming up. The government is hopefully going to be releasing the peptides in roughly about 2 weeks, and that'll open up a lot of competitors and distributors to different telehealth companies and providers for different peptides. The drugs themselves are very fascinating - they help not just with weight loss, but with other comorbidities such as fatty liver and heart problems.