Dominic Rubino | Taking an Online Pharmacy Business from 0 to $120M Per Year

John Corcoran 12:23

Wow. And, you know, in the United States, obviously, the health care system is a complete mess. He had a different one way of putting prescription drugs as well. But you said it was all over the counter. Did you eventually sell prescriptions as well?

Dominic Rubino 12:39

So we started with over the counter. But here in Canada, you’re not allowed to have a pharmacy unless you have a pharmacist on the board. And so when we got to a certain size, we brought a pharmacist in and had them as part of the ownership group. Which by the way, I don’t mind saying this and any pharmacists out there listening can call me later, was a disaster because pharmacists are not business people. But they thought they were fantastic business people that caused all sorts of strain. 

John Corcoran 13:06

But it was like they had some equity in the company. 

Dominic Rubino 13:08

Also, they had equity, they had to say at the table, but their say was largely based on their own ego and feelings of the day, not really sound business decisions.

John Corcoran 13:17

This goes towards how you select your business partner. So in retrospect, what advice do you have for others about selection of business partners?

Dominic Rubino 13:23

I’m on the spot here, John, don’t have a business partner. No now. Here’s my advice from having two businesses with business partners is that it’s very, it’s almost impossible to find that alignment between people. And I would know what I know now. I’d rather go raise more money and pay a VP very, very well and work them just as hard as I do. But they’re not going to be an owner with me. I’m done with business partners. No one.

John Corcoran 13:52

So as far as a back to CanadaPharmacy, so you start this about 1999 I believe it was that’s that’s pretty Oh 99 2000 Yeah. I mean, in the evolution of the Internet, very early days for e-commerce. Was it ever earlier? Yeah. crazier. Were some of the learnings along the way from growing that company over the six years that you had it before you sold it.

Dominic Rubino 14:16

You know, we had to the one thing that I remember the most was that businesses came in every day and had to reinvent the business or be prepared for it to fall apart. I can remember just the supply of medications and we were a legitimate pharmacy. We had pharmacists. So not only did I had a call center of 120 staff, I had a manual or a shipping and packing center of 40 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. So these are all very educated people there. The difficulty was buying a product and then reselling it to the states. And so there is a real fear and uncertainty campaign coming out of the US that Canadian medications weren’t safe. Well. We’re all humans, we all have the same blood. But you know, so just be careful. Your competition in this case was the American government. So they were really trying to stop us and stop us. And do you want a real mind blowing story? Here, Condoleezza Rice came to visit Vancouver where I live for a surprise visit. And about two days later, my life went down the toilet. Wow. Yeah, well, our call center was in an industrial area, like she’s Secretary of State at the time. She’s secretary of state at that time, we’ve been running the company for maybe two years, okay. And we’re doing well, and we’re selling a lot of products. So our offices were in industrial warehouses. They’re called tilt up warehouses. They’re just row warehouses that you’d see in any city in any town. So our staff, we had 160 staff, so they’re parking all over the streets. Well, Condoleezza Rice coming to town seems like no big deal, right? Suddenly, we’re getting parking tickets. The fire department is doing surprise inspections on us. Our landlord, who is an independent guy, suddenly goes, I have to come and check. Apparently, you’re using too much water like? Well, he came into our shop all the time, because we had soda for 25 cents. So he’d come in anytime he’s working. And I’m like, why are you worried? This seems weird. It’s a formal visit. He goes, Yeah, I got a call, I have to come and do an inspection. And what I know what happened, they put our name in the middle of a big piece of paper and said make their lives. You know what? And so

John Corcoran 16:25

he so in order to get Was there someone that eventually was there someone with the provincial government or city government that told you this?

Dominic Rubino 16:34

Huh? No, I can. How do you go from getting parking tickets to water usage to an independent, like a private landlord coming into the city coming by for surprise inspections to all sorts of things. And then we got a call from Visa, our credit card process? And they said, Well, we suspect there’s some crazy activity going on. So come on in. So they sent an ex RCMP officer to tour the facility. And he tours with me, and he’s like, this is all legit. Like, yeah, like, we just are who we are. We’re just doing what we’re doing. And so we got the Okay, so eventually, we got the okay from everything. But for a while there, it was a hot burning mess.

John Corcoran 17:12

Wow, wow. So lesson, they’re difficult to go up against something as large as the US government, if they’re fighting you. So there’s a lot of

Dominic Rubino 17:21

risk in that business. So if you know, we can’t get into the valuation, but it affected the valuation, that kind of high level risk was literally at the day by day level. Are we open tomorrow? Are we not?

John Corcoran 17:31

So did you sell it at a time when you still were experiencing this uncertainty? Or was it a couple of years later,

Dominic Rubino 17:38

I sold it. When I got my number, I set a number in my mind. And then I walked into my partners and said, Hey, guys, I think it’s time for me to go. There was no discussion, it was no argument. I mean, I think we’re all ready to go. And you know, the takeaway message from that is values or values, and our values were so different. You and your partners. Yeah. And they have their values, which they believe in and obviously are good for them. And I have my values, which I believe in and are good for me. But we just have different values. And it was a good time for us to split.

John Corcoran 18:08

Was that there was a part of you though, that was that was challenged by that? Because I mean, that’s a phenomenal result. By any means. There must have been a part of you that was like, geez, six years we’ve gone from, you know, nothing to 120 million in revenue. That’s just phenomenal. There must have been a part of you. There’s thinking like, God, how can I leave

Dominic Rubino 18:29

this? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s easy to look back on right now John, and say, with some, you know, if I’m this big philosopher, oh, well, I recognize that I have to do this. But my life was going down the toilet. Like I lost the age of 36. It was just a black hole, a lot of stress, a lot of craziness, a lot of hours, and the hours were bad. And also just when I see values, you know, I walk into the call center one day, and there’s 120 people in there. There’s some new person sitting at my desk. And I’m like, hi, it just goes Oh, so and so just hired me. I’m here to start today. Well, who are you? Well, I’m a cousin of this other person. Like, what the heck am I going to do with that? We don’t have training starting in two weeks. She was no, he said, I can start today. So I’ll start today. Like what is going on here? So just real bonkers stuff going on. 

John Corcoran 19:21

And lack of alignment and territories management strategy and hiring processes and things like that.

Dominic Rubino 19:27

Yeah, you can’t, you can’t polish a brick, and I’m done. I don’t need to polish bricks. So that brick can go Polish himself.

John Corcoran 19:36

How much later so it wasn’t too much later that you end up acquiring the mastic business master business franchise for folk franchise rights, which was an extension of Brian Tracy. Right? Yeah. Okay. So how did that come about? You know,

Dominic Rubino 19:52

I still remember most of this time I’ve been a business coach. My original franchise term had lapsed from the Australian based businesses. His company, so I wasn’t part of anything there. And then I sold the pharmacy. So I was kind of, I call it untethered, I was untethered. And if you talk to Calvin, make sure he doesn’t take that book title because I’m writing it one day. Because I’m what do you call it when guys like us sell our companies? untethered? We’re not We’re not unemployed, right. So I went to buy a local coffee shop and I got slapped in the face with that one, I did it wrong. And then I called a friend of mine. And he goes, Well, interesting. Brian Tracy’s just approached me, do you want to come with me and buy the global franchising rights? And so we wait, hold on, before

John Corcoran 20:37

Before we get to the Brian Tracy story. What went wrong with the business, the coffee shop?

Dominic Rubino 20:42

You know what I was jute. Like I thought I knew what I was doing. But I went to buy the coffee shop. And without doing my proper due diligence, I gave them a price. And I didn’t realize that I had just struck, they had it. They already had another deal on the table. And all I did was reinforce that the other deal was good or something like that. I just never heard from them again. So they just went off and took that other deal. They went off and took the other deal, which was fine. It’s okay. Yeah. I shouldn’t be running a chain of coffee shops.

John Corcoran 21:10

Yeah. Why was, I’m curious, you like coffee? Why? Why did you want to go to an online pharmacy for coffee? Well,

Dominic Rubino 21:16

I love recurring revenue businesses, I look for businesses that have repeatable, recoverable recurring revenue. I also love coffee. And this is the kind of coffee shop that if it was across the street from Starbucks, they would have a line at Starbucks that would be empty. So it was a high end, high value, really nice coffee shop, and they still are today, and the right owner bought it. It wasn’t me. So I’m good. Probably would have ruined the opportunity.

John Corcoran 21:42

Got it. So you end up going and acquiring the master business franchise for Brian Tracy’s FocalPoint, Business Coach, how did that come about?

Dominic Rubino 21:52

Well, like I said, somebody that I had met in the original Australian based franchise, we’d stayed in touch and he said, Hey, Brian wants to sell his the rights to this, do you want to come in with me. And so that just happened, like, it made all sorts of sense. The reason that it made sense for me to buy the global rights to the franchise, is because I already understood business coaching. And I had been a trainer at an Australian company. So there were only seven of us in the world that were asked to be on the international training team from the Australian franchise. Right. And just to, not to over clarify, but we I was a business coach, and I trained other incoming business coaches. So I knew how to train business coaches, I knew how to get clients, I knew how to get clients. And that’s what you need to run a coaching business. But then I let that go, and kept running the pharmacy. And then this opportunity popped up. And so I joined my partner to build the FocalPoint brand for Brian. And that worked just lickety split. We went in there and we started increasing sales, training the franchisees better to be business coaches. And then slowly over time, we grew, there were lots of challenges, but we grew.

John Corcoran 22:59

So it seems like a lot of that focus then was on adding more franchisees. So it’s kind of like you’re selling but you’re selling to other franchisees or other businesses or other business coaches to come in as a franchisee for you.

Dominic Rubino 23:13

Yeah, so if you separate the business into two parts, I took over operations, and my partner took over front office operations, if you will. So I was responsible for global coaching, quality, and delivery. So all of the new franchisees that came in my team or I would train them and support them as they started their coaching business. My partner took care of the marketing and sales to find the new franchisees. And I used to joke that our franchisees were all ex presidents and CEOs. And so the heart of one of the hard parts of our business is Friday night, Saturday night is when all of our business coaches who are ex presidents and ex CEOs are sitting down with a glass of wine going, you know, what FocalPoint could be doing better. I’m going to email DOM and say that I’d get this list from a guy who’s a president just like me, who’s the CEO, just like me saying, Here’s what you’re doing wrong. Here’s what we need to do to fix it. So he’s a very smart, organized really smart person, like incredibly wise and smart. So these are your franchisees? Yeah, but they’ve all come from corporate.

John Corcoran 24:18

Got it. So they all want to improve internally processing everything right?

Dominic Rubino 24:22

Which is yeah, really, it’s the worst of all best problems like yeah,

John Corcoran 24:26

complaining on the one hand, it’s good, you’ve got a lot of internal knowledge that can help improve things on the other hand is like Okay, guys, come on.

Dominic Rubino 24:34

Yeah, give me 10 days to implement this thing. So and but to a person excellent people in that franchise, excellent. People well vetted, well trained, well supported,

John Corcoran 24:43

right, right. Now, you end up exiting that business. And you decide how you end up getting into starting a podcast focused on cabinetmakers? Again, another like a different direction?

Dominic Rubino 24:59

Yeah. So I don’t build. I think I build businesses differently than other people do. I look really at what the makeup is that I want. And then I build it bottom up, right. So my other option is if the internet didn’t exist, I’d be a touring public speaker because I’m, I’m quite a good public speaker, I’m confident up there, I can deliver a message and really easy manageable chunks. I’m not shy about it, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t want to travel, I am done traveling. I spent my whole business life traveling and then don’t want to do that anymore. So that took traveling out but I’m still good at speaking and training and all of those things. And then I went back and I just looked at my most enjoyable business coaching experiences. And it actually happened to be one of my very first clients to make pool tables. And we were all things and other guys made caskets, like.

John Corcoran 25:50

caskets. Yeah. Coffin for the dead.

Dominic Rubino 25:53

Yeah, dead people. It’s woodwork right for these guys. Yeah. So those were two of my early clients, and they were great people. And so the construction trades. Plus I grew up at a construction trades, dinner table. That kind of language is just how we talk when my family gets we’re Italian. You know, it’s not even stereotyping. It’s exactly what it is. Yeah. So it’s just my people. My language, it’s easy for me. I don’t like using complicated words. Like I don’t like consultants speaking, I’d rather just speak like I do now. And so it just fit.

John Corcoran 26:21

And so you decide to start coaching cabinet makers. How did you decide in that particular niche, or did it evolve? 

Dominic Rubino 26:31

You know, a funny story. I was speaking locally, because I didn’t have to travel for that. I mean, I don’t count driving in my car to the other end of town. Yeah. And I was speaking. It’s called an architectural woodwork association. So there’s cabinet makers. And then above that is this class of woodworkers that make entire courtrooms beautiful judges offices or the lobby of a hotel you’d see in Vegas, all woods, just incredible stuff. So I was speaking at one of their association meetings, and they said, Hey, can we record it? Because some guys can’t make it today. And so that got posted. And then another and I thought, well, I’ll do an interview to follow up and before you know, it was a podcast.

John Corcoran 27:08

Now that’s cool. At what point did you get involved in EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, you know, which we are both members of?

Dominic Rubino 27:16

Yeah. You’re gonna laugh. I was in a row when it was called the association of collegiate entrepreneurs. I was at Simon Fraser University. And so it was just like the student version. Oh, it was like their theater group. But I think it’s now called Accelerator. We were pushed down.

John Corcoran 27:37

Wow. So was this. When? When was it? What years? 87 out of 1980 1987. I think it is around that time that sorry.

Dominic Rubino 27:49

Yeah. So in the room with me, Jade Burrell from HireDesk. Brian Scudamore from 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. You moved me one. 800. Like all that stuff? Yeah. But we’re all a bunch of pimple faced kids, dudes drinking out of those Styrofoam cups. Wow. Yeah, crazy. It was so long ago.

John Corcoran 28:06

And so what was it like then in the early days of when you were a member of it?

Dominic Rubino 28:13

I don’t remember , I just really crave that info. And I crave being in that kind of group of people. You know, what I now come to call forward facing business owners, people who are running a business, but not just stuck in the day to day, they’re standing up, shoulders back, and they’re like, there’s a challenge coming. Let’s go get it. Instead of like, oh, there’s a challenge coming? Yes, yourself. You know, like, if there’s a difference in that, and I’ve always really liked that kind of crowd. And as you know, from being an EO, what an incredibly creative group of forward facing business owners. So I just like that it’s hard to find anywhere else.

John Corcoran 28:49

For sure. What are you most excited about? We’re recording this in February 2022. What are you most excited about? As we hopefully are coming out of two years of pandemic? Yeah. You got your couple of different businesses now?

Dominic Rubino 29:02

Yeah, well, I’m gonna use words that are, you know, so common right now, but I’m scaling this business and I’m growing it. I’ve got the, you know, my strategic plan in place as you would expect me to have. And I’m going to use that strategic plan and what I’ve got in this business to grow it to the point where I’m building a nice business that delivers a lot of value to people that has recurring revenue, and that I can cash flow for my own personal sake, you know, because I, I need to do well as well.

John Corcoran 29:28

Yeah, that’s great. Dominic, I love asking this question. So, you know, I’m a big fan of gratitude. I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude, especially to peers and contemporaries. You know, people maybe in your community or or beyond, that you respect and admire. So, who out there would you want to acknowledge publicly?

Dominic Rubino 29:51

Well, I mean, I think we have to acknowledge Calvin because he introduced us. For you know, I’m Italian and so my family’s a massive part of my city. And my failures to like they’re just they’re always there. They’re always there. And that defines where I live, where my family is. I, you know, it almost sounds trite but my parents, my grandparents, all that stuff is fantastic. But I look around and when I’m up against a wall, I’ll call a guy. He’s actually used to be one of my franchisees. His name is Greg Disharmonies in Boston. Very, very good guy wise, contemplative. I’ve got some other people I rely on. There’s Marc Villard, Martin Hunter, Marty Park. You know, just those are the people I rely on when I’ve got a tough question that I don’t want to ask. Just anybody,

John Corcoran 30:36

Dominic, where can people go to learn more about you?

Dominic Rubino 30:40

If you can’t find me on the internet, you ain’t lucky. So that’s the thing, but the website is ProfitToolBelt. My name, as you said, is Dominic Rubino, you can catch me on LinkedIn. Haven’t knows people I don’t even know try to reach me on LinkedIn all the time from countries I haven’t ever visited yet. And then if you happen to be in cabinetry or the finished wood trades, as I know many EO members are actually you can go to Cabinet Maker Profit System. Lots of ways to find me. 

John Corcoran 31:06

Excellent. Alright, Dominic, thanks so much.

Dominic Rubino 31:07

Thank you. 

Outro 31:10

Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.