In 1999, I had an idea that felt both simple and ambitious: create a pharmacy that could deliver medications in compliance packaging, organized exactly the way people were supposed to take them. That kind of packaging had been around for years in nursing homes and other care facilities, but consumers didn’t really have access to it. I believed there was a better way, and I wanted to build it.
Of course, having an idea is the easy part. Turning it into a business is something else entirely. I needed two things to get started: a packaging machine and a pharmacy. At the time, I had found the only vendor selling the machine I needed, and when I called the company president, I asked the obvious question: how much? He told me the machine cost about $250,000. That was a pretty sobering answer, especially since I probably had about $100 in my checking account.
Still, he invited me to his office to talk. I went with nothing to lose and explained what I was trying to build. After hearing me out, he said, “That’s a great idea, you really need one of our machines.” I told him I agreed, but I still didn’t have the money. He said they worked with a very creative leasing company. I joked that maybe they could guarantee the lease. To my surprise, he said they could. That was the moment things started to feel real.
Now I had the machine, but I still needed a pharmacy.
I started networking and talking to anyone who knew the institutional pharmacy business. Eventually, I found a very small pharmacy in Indianapolis that was serving one nursing home and wasn’t going anywhere. I met with the owner, shared my idea, and explained that I already had the equipment. He saw the opportunity and agreed to contribute his pharmacy in exchange for 10% ownership. That was the beginning of SafeDose.
At first, we tried to sell the concept directly to consumers. That turned out to be much harder than I expected. This was before the internet made it easy to reach people at scale, so customer acquisition was slow and expensive. We had to rethink everything.
We shifted our focus to care facilities, and after a lot of trial and error, we found our best fit in facilities serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or IDD. That market made sense. The residents often took multiple medications, their routines were stable, and the need for organized medication management was clear.
Even then, we had another important lesson to learn: the person we thought was making the decision usually wasn’t. At first, we assumed the pharmacy choice would be made by the owner, president, or executive director. We spent time calling on those people and got very little traction. Eventually, we realized the real decision-maker was often the Director of Nursing, or DON.
That changed everything. DONs were experienced, busy, and not easy to reach. A phone call or broad marketing campaign usually didn’t work. After speaking with an internet marketing firm, we launched an email drip campaign, and that finally opened the door. We found that after about five emails, a DON might start to respond. At that point, we focused on understanding the facility’s needs and setting up a presentation for the DON and the staff. That approach worked. Contracts started to come in, and our momentum with the IDD market grew.
What happened next still feels remarkable to me. Institutional pharmacy is a small world, and once people started noticing what we were doing, word spread quickly. Larger pharmacies began approaching us about buying the company. After extended negotiations, we eventually sold SafeDose for attractive price
Looking back, the story of SafeDose was never just about one big idea. It was about persistence, adaptation, and learning as we went. I had to figure out the machine, the pharmacy, the market, and the real decision-maker one step at a time. None of it happened exactly the way I first imagined it would.
That may be the most valuable lesson of all: the path from idea to outcome is rarely straight. But if you stay with it, listen carefully, and keep adjusting, even a start that looks impossible can become something real.
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” —Nelson Mandela
