Student Team Plans to Reshape Community Pharmacy

Four UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy students take on the NCPA Business Competition.

Story by Zach Read | Photo by Guatham Venkatesh | Published November 19, 2024

A team of four UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy students was recently named second runner-up for the Good Neighbor Pharmacy National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) Pruitt-Schutte Student Business Plan Competition. The team presented its business plan at the NCPA’s Annual Convention in Columbus, Ohio, in late October.

Fourth-year student Gautham Venkatesh captained the team, which included students Excellanxt Greer, Ethan Hatfield, and Trace Pigg. Greg Vassie, PharmD, UNC class of 2003, served as the team’s adviser.

The competition is designed to motivate student pharmacists to create a business model for buying an existing independent community pharmacy or developing a new one. The UNC team learned about the contest from the UNC NCPA chapter president Caroline Eason at the chapter’s meeting during the previous school year.

“The four of us want to own our own pharmacy one day,” says Gautham. “We thought this would be a great experience to get our feet wet, learn about the process of buying or developing a community pharmacy, and see what we would need to know to make that happen. Most importantly, we wanted to see what we didn’t know yet and needed to learn more about. We’re excited that we got our names out there. It was an amazing experience.”

For the competition, teams were required to create a 50-page plan outlining all the details for their business model.

“It needed to be feasible, and we needed to have real numbers,” Gautham shares. “As students, we didn’t know much about the real-world data that makes a successful business. We had to go out there and talk and network with a lot of people.”

The team worked with industry professionals ranging from wholesalers to independent pharmacists to investors. They received demographic analyses and conducted psychographic analyses, which provided data on the attitudes and other psychological criteria of their audience. The gathering of information included a lot of cold calls and emails introducing themselves and their project.

“It was amazing how receptive people were to us, and they loved the concept of our business plan,” Gautham says.

For their plan, the team asked what could be done to evolve the pharmacy model to include more revenue streams and expand services. They focused on Southern Village Pharmacy, located in Chapel Hill, where Gautham will work after graduating.

“Our whole model was, ‘Let’s bring the pharmacy to you,’” he explains. “We focused on expanding the pharmacy outside of the Southern Village area to include more Medicare patients in Chapel Hill—specifically patients who can’t leave their homes, can’t go to medical appointments by themselves, and don’t have the resources they need.”

In their analysis, the team found that elderly patients don’t want to live in a facility; they prefer to live at home. The team asked what they could do to help them age in their own homes.

“We created three services: long-term care at home, remote patient monitoring, and immunizations in the patient’s home,” he continues. “Those are the three big services our plan offers.”

The team worked with Greg, who earned his MBA from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, to develop the plan. A community pharmacist who has opened pharmacies and other medical care facilities throughout North Carolina, Greg has vast experience building business plans and models designed to meet unique needs within each community and provide greater access to better care to North Carolinians. He has been an adviser to UNC NCPA teams over the past three years.

“We looked closely at the location and determined that there’s not a lot you can do with the immediate space, so the team went into the home to create a new model,” Greg says. “Home is the new brick and mortar and there are things we can do to help patients thrive in their home. The team saw that people want to stay in their home for as long as they can, and that there are a lot of people in this same predicament. The plan they wrote is marketable, profitable, and can be dropped into the workflow.”

Greg met with the team every Wednesday in 2024, and often remained with them when meetings ran long.

“Greg went above and beyond,” Gautham shares. “He was there since the beginning. He has a vast network of pharmacists he knows, and he found people we could speak with to vet and review parts of our plan. He was a great adviser to us.”

Gautham also credits UNC faculty members Laura Rhodes and Macary Weck Marciniak for feedback they provided during mock sessions, as well as the School’s overall culture of support and commitment to development.

“The opportunities the School gives us, through our immersions and rotations, were critical,” he explains. “We rotated through different independent pharmacies, spoke with those owners, and accessed whole networks who were willing to connect us with people who loved our plan and were willing to help us.”

At NCPA, the team’s work was validated when they saw a number of presentations on the idea of long-term care at home.

“Not a lot of pharmacies are doing it,” Gautham notes. “It’s very novel. It’s risky because there’s not much data yet to support it, but the analysis we did showed great numbers, great profit margins, and demonstrated a great service to the community.”

Gautham and his teammates plan to implement the model in community pharmacies when they become independent pharmacists with their own businesses.

“Our goal was to build exposure through the competition, and we did that,” he says. “We’re excited about implementing our plan in the future.”

UNC’s NCPA chapter received $1,000 and an additional $1,000 was contributed to the School in the dean’s name to promote independent community pharmacy at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy.