Hello all, Bridget here! Welcome to our second week of blog posts where we dive into who we are and how Front Range Pharmacy came to be. Last week, you heard Michael talk about his experiences and path to independent pharmacy ownership along with some little-known facts about the industry. This week, you’ll hear about my story about why I took this leap into the unknown.
If you would have told me in March of 2013 as I accepted my invitation to enroll in pharmacy school, that I would be opening up my own pharmacy 7 years later, I would have called you crazy. To be perfectly honest, I have never had a long-standing vision of who I wanted to become as a pharmacist, but my guiding light has always been to use every opportunity as a chance to grow and do good for those around me. Ever since I was young, I wanted to do more and be more even if it meant creating my own path to success. It’s the competitive drive that helped me excel as a Division-I student-athlete and chemistry major and gave me that extra push to want to become a pharmacist.
I graduated pharmacy school in May of 2017, fought my way into a market that was already heavily saturated with pharmacists, and was quickly promoted to pharmacy manager three months after being licensed. I was proud of what I had accomplished but I had already hit my ceiling. I had no room to grow into the complex needs of patients in healthcare because there was always someone above me with less knowledge and less daily patient interaction telling me I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to wait. I knew it was time for me to again be pushed out of my comfort zone.
I met Michael through work at a corporate chain pharmacy. In voicing my frustrations about my current job to him I was able hear first-hand how things can be different. There are problems you encounter every day working in a chain that didn’t even need to be a problem in the first place. It is a lot more work to own and run your own pharmacy. At the end of the day the finger is always pointed at you. While this can be terrifying you are also afforded a unique opportunity to grow with your patients. You can take their frustrations with the current system and act independently. I truly believe that this is the way I can be the pharmacist I was meant to be. I know that, in Front Range, I finally have the platform that lets me serve my community and develop professionally with the freedom I envisioned as I walked across the stage at graduation. I still have a lot to learn but I have reignited my fire to be more and do more for myself and others.
