By Tim Rausch
Where else can you get your prescription filled while you play bingo?
As chain-store pharmacies tout soft-drink sales and the latest holiday-related trinkets, Barney’s Pharmacy in south Augusta added a health clinic and a cancer support group.
It hasn’t been Barney’s pharmacy in decades. It is Barry’s, but Barry Bryant never had any intention of changing the name.
In 1984, an agreement to fill in part time for the Peach Orchard Road pharmacy put Mr. Bryant on the road to ownership. Only three years out of pharmacy school, he left a Kroger store for the uncertainty of an under-performing independent pharmacy.
Almost a quarter of a century later, Mr. Bryant has a small empire of medicine under way in the shopping center in the 2700 block of Peach Orchard.
More than a year ago, Hope Medical opened as a medical clinic attached to the rear of the pharmacy. A few doors down is MedEquip Healthcare, his medical equipment company.
“I tried to create a one-stop shop,” Mr. Bryant said.
Those making the stops are people attending diabetes classes or playing bingo on Friday mornings. Barney’s pharmacy fills 1,000 prescriptions a day, some of them delivered.
Just five years ago, the pharmacy had a fraction of the staffers – now there are 60 – and one cash register – now there are five.
“Anything he touches. … I don’t know how he does it, but he does it,” said daughter Vanessa Hoffman, who works at the pharmacy.
All three of Mr. Bryant’s daughters are following in his footsteps – except they’re getting their education at the University of South Carolina. That was initially a tough pill to swallow for the University of Georgia graduate.
The upstairs conference room is Bulldog territory. The walls are team colors. He has pictures of six Uga bulldog mascots on the wall, hanging above the ceramic bulldog bigger than his chest.
With three daughters going through the doors of the sporting rival, Mr. Bryant has been converted to a Gamecocks fan – except for the day they play Georgia.
The biggest joke in the pharmacy is Mr. Bryant’s “day off” on Thursdays.
“He’s here six days a week, church on Sunday, that’s his life,” Mrs. Hoffman said.
If he’s not at Barney’s, he is visiting two other pharmacies where he shares ownership: Medical Center Pharmacy in south Augusta and Medical Center West Pharmacy in Evans.
There’s another store in the works, set to open somewhere in Grovetown next year. That one will be called Barney’s.
A name
The real Barney was Barney Crouch, who died in October 1984, just weeks after Mr. Bryant took over the store that bears his name.
Mr. Bryant worked along side Mr. Crouch for a time in 1980. Mr. Bryant was doing an internship rotation on his way to obtaining his pharmacy degree from the University of Georgia. Mr. Crouch was the pharmacist at Shoppers Drug Mart in Regency Mall.
“This guy, even though he was working for a chain, people came in with sore throat … he would mix something up. He had his own concoction for everything,” Mr. Bryant said. “People loved that. People come in here today and ask if we still make Barney’s special gargle, poison ivy cream. And we do.”
Three years later, when Mr. Bryant was offered part ownership in Barney’s Pharmacy, he had a thought of getting Mr. Crouch back into the store with his namesake. That chance never came.
“We kept the name the same. People ask me why don’t you call it Barry’s? Because everyone knows Barney’s,” Mr. Bryant said.
Mr. Bryant said Mr. Crouch was one of those pharmacists who had a love for people and tried to help each customer in a special way. It is that philosophy that continues today under Mr. Bryant’s ownership.
That ownership was a chance call during Mr. Bryant’s third year on the job at Kroger in Martinez. He was the pharmacist in charge.
A pharmacist who works at Barney’s called him to ask whether he could fill in the next day. Mr. Bryant had the day off, so he agreed to help out.
“He left the keys to the store in the mailbox,” he said. “This is a guy who never met me.”
He and one employee ran the store for the day. He recalled filling about 30 prescriptions.
Mr. Bryant filled in a few more times and then got a call from the owner, asking whether he would consider leaving Kroger. He was offered ownership in half of the business.
“I was thinking, the store wasn’t doing well. It had no computer and one employee,” Mr. Bryant said.
It also represented a $200 a week cut in pay to jump ship.
“The proposal was half of the business. Half of nothing that was half of an opportunity to make something. And that is what I saw,” Mr. Bryant said.
Even his store manager at Kroger thought it was a good idea. He left on good terms in case he had to return to the grocery chain if it didn’t work out.
Barney’s Pharmacy was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the time.
“I had to go down to the courthouse for the reorganization plan. Never been to court in my life.”
Mr. Bryant said they saw the new blood in the business, the young kid that was going to turn it around.
Five years later, all the debtors had been repaid.
Mr. Bryant said he wrote down the amount of business done in 1984. It was $284,000 for the entire year.
“We’ll do that business in a week now.”
A history
Mr. Bryant is the oldest of four, and the only son, born to Ernest and Dorothy Bryant. He was born in Augusta in 1959, but moved to Louisville, Ga., at age 10 when his parents separated.
His mother was a cosmetologist who ran a personal-care home out of her house for a handful of elderly people.
“You see the influence I had going back. She had four elderly ladies that lived in the house with us in the back. She cooked for them, helped them to the bath room, took them to the doctor. As well as raising us,” Mr. Bryant recalled.
His father was a chemical operator for Dupont at Savannah River Site. He retired after 40 years.
Living in Louisville, Mr. Bryant helped his father raise cows and pigs on the farm. He also helped with his uncle’s farm over the summer. It was that exposure to agriculture that gave him thoughts of agriculture at college. The reaction was:
“If you want to be a farmer, you can stay here and learn all that.”
Mr. Bryant went to college in Athens with a computer science degree in mind. Computers had been making a surge in the late 1970s and he wanted to become a programmer.
He enjoyed science in high school, anyway.
That was altered by a change of roommates – his first one dropped out after a family member died. He was then paired with a senior pharmacy student from Augusta.
“He was telling me about his classes and what he was reading,” Mr. Bryant said. Because he was already in a bachelor of science track, he needed only a few classes to fulfill pre-pharmacy school requirements. He was accepted, and a year later was on the road to become a pharmacist.
He was also the only person in his family to go to college. He did it on student loans and help from his parents and grandparents.
“When he wrote me that check for $100 to buy books and eat on that week, with what he made, I don’t know how he did it,” Mr. Bryant said of his father.
Mrs. Hoffman, the eldest daughter, said her father’s being the only college-educated member of his generation never manifested itself into forcing his daughters to go to college.
“Don’t rely on a man supporting us; we can support ourselves, is the way he always told us,” she said. “That was the way he was raised.”
Mr. Bryant’s first job out of college was the Kroger store on Columbia Road in Martinez in 1981.
It was there that he met Charlene, who worked in the front office and would marry him two years later.
“Once we got married, they moved her to another store, so we didn’t get to work together,” Mr. Bryant said.
A blessing
Barney’s was much smaller six years ago. It had a dozen employees and a single cash register. It did an average number of prescriptions compared with other independent pharmacies – 200 a day.
Mr. Bryant recalls meeting a greeter at church one night and being told he had a message from an evangelist on a local television station. There was a local business, a pharmacy, that the Lord was going to bless and it was going to flourish.
Mr. Bryant took in the message, not having seen the TV program. Others would come up to him in the following days after having seen that program – they all thought of him. They believed the message was about Barney’s Pharmacy, they said.
Six years later, Mr. Bryant believes it, too.
“Looking back at where we came from to where we are today, it is amazing,” Mr. Bryant said. “We have a $200,000 robot down there that was given to me. How else does that happen?”
The robot was a gift from University Hospital. It spends all day dispersing the most common medications.
The acceleration of business success began in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Bryant tapped a Kroger pharmacist, Kyle Pulliam, to fill in on Peach Orchard Road in the late 1980s. It was just coincidence that Mr. Pulliam happened to work in the same Kroger pharmacy that Mr. Bryant once ran. It was an eerily similar twist of fate that this Kroger pharmacist would be offered a businesses partnership just as Mr. Bryant was.
Mr. Bryant’s offer to Mr. Pulliam was a partnership in a new pharmacy that University Hospital wanted to put in its prompt care on Peach Orchard Road. Medical Center Pharmacy was born in 1995.
Mr. Bryant said it was better to start a new pharmacy than try to move Barney’s.
Mr. Pulliam and Mr. Bryant teamed up again in 2003 for Medical Center West Pharmacy, which started out as the University Hospital employee pharmacy on Columbia Road. There was still walk-in business there when the hospital employee concept moved, Mr. Bryant said.
The pharmacy moved a few times too, now situated within University’s medical complex on Belair Road in Evans.
“We’re in a building with 30 doctors, right in the middle of a beehive there,” Mr. Bryant said. “Even though they’re not called Barney’s, we do things the same way.”
They are also partners in MedEquip Healthcare. That idea came from customers’ constant inquiries into walkers and wheelchairs and hospital beds.
“I was the best ad for A-Plus and Duramed,” Mr. Bryant said. In 2000, he hired an office manager and a man with medical equipment experience and placed the new company next to Barney’s.
It started slowly, Mr. Pulliam said, but it blossomed. It now has 10 employees. The company handles everything from power lifts to braces, canes and power wheelchairs.
Mr. Pulliam said his partner is an innovator.
“He does have ideas. I don’t know if he does a lot of reading or if they are off the top of his head,” he said. “The clinic was a tremendous idea.”
A leap of faith
Mr. Bryant did something nearly two years ago that he never envisioned doing. He went into debt for $1 million.
The money went for the purchase and renovations of where Barney’s sits now, which is larger than the adjacent older store. More importantly, it went to create Hope Medical, an ambulatory care center that is more like a family doctor center than a prompt care.
Mr. Bryant was already steadily adding more scopes of service to his pharmacy, a breast cancer support group and healthy heart and diabetes classes. He wants to add a support group for stroke victims too.
“It is about caring about the patients’ health. We get involved with their health care as much as they want us to be involved,” he explained.
The clinic opened in April 2007. It averages 25 patients a day.
Setting it up seemed as though something divine was guiding it, Mr. Bryant said. New X-ray equipment was found from a doctor closing his practice, he said.
Mr. Bryant said the initial plan was to convince a doctor to move in next door. No one signed on to do it, so he went with the idea himself, hiring nurses and physician assistants and finding a medical director.
He doesn’t see the clinic as competing with family doctors, but there is so much business out there from people who don’t have one.
“We’re trying to keep folks from falling through the cracks.”
That includes education. He said half of the people who walk into the pharmacy are diabetic.
They have classes twice a month in the attached meeting room. One of the pharmacists is a certified diabetes educator, something rarely seen outside of hospitals.
Mr. Bryant said he wants Barney’s to become American Diabetes Association-certified in order to bill people’s insurance for the time they spend educating.
Diabetes is a topic that runs close to Mr. Bryant’s heart. His mother died of complications from the condition.
“I remember her taking insulin shots,” he said. “If someone was able to educate her then and help her get her sugar where it needed to be, my mom would still be here today.”
He lost a father-in-law to diabetes, too.
“People did what they wanted and ate like they wanted because they felt fine. When the complications catch up to you, it is too late, the damage is already done.”
Barney’s has fun every Friday morning when more than 40 people pile into the wellness classroom for bingo. There are prayer, dancing and prizes, at no charge.
“It costs money to do things like that. We don’t do it to make money. But it really helps grow the business. People feel you care about what you’re doing,” Mr. Bryant said.
He said his business smarts come from on-the-job training. Up until a few years ago, he did the payroll, too.
If he plays golf twice in one month, it is a lot. Mrs. Hoffman said work is her dad’s life.
“He’s business-driven; that’s where his heart is.”
A future
Two pharmacy students from the University of Georgia started working in Barney’s this month. They are doing their rotations – on- the-job training – that are needed before becoming board certified. Mr. Bryant gets two to five students a month from either Georgia, University of South Carolina or the Medical University of South Carolina.
“They’re pharmacists, they just don’t have their license yet. Getting the hands-on clinical experience. That’s an asset for us, no pay but they’re here to serve people,” he said. “Carolina has reached out to us, really interested in what we do here.”
The pharmacy dean and faculty have toured the pharmacy and seen what he’s doing as the cutting edge of pharmacy. Classes cite what he’s doing.
He has also funded endowments to aid in the education.
Students going through Barney’s can spend time in the compounding area, where the pharmacy makes special items such as tetracaine (anesthesia) lollipops. They can also spend a month on the retail line or ambulatory care at Hope Medical.
Mr. Bryant said he hopes some of the information being gathered in Hope Medical by the pharmacy students can be published in a journal.
Mrs. Hoffman did her training this way, though the clinic wasn’t there when she was still in school. Her interest in pharmacy was piqued much earlier. She started working with her father when she was 13 years old, coming down to the pharmacy on Saturdays.
“I told my mom then that I wanted to go to pharmacy school,” she said.
Stephanie and Brittney Bryant are also in pharmacy school. They will join their father in the business after their training is finished.
Mrs. Hoffman sees an equal partnership in the business among the family one day.
“I couldn’t think of a better person to be in business with,” Mr. Pulliam said. “He’s a Christian guy that walks the walk and talks the talk.”
Mr. Bryant has never been on a mission trip, though his wife has taken them to Costa Rica and Mexico.
“He helps support them, donates as much as he can to those causes,” Mrs. Hoffman said.
Mr. Bryant said he’s given inoculations for free for those going to foreign lands.
“Not everyone is called to go. I don’t think the Lord is calling me to Africa,” Mr. Bryant said. “Where I come in is to help those that are called to go.”
Mr. Bryant sits on the board for The Sanctuary church on Cox Road in Evans. It has been there two years now. A parking lot is being renovated and soon a project will start for a new sanctuary to sit more people – room for 1,000.
He also sits on the board of the CSRA Partnership for Community Health, which runs indigent care clinics on Druid Park Road and Golden Camp Road. His role in helping the indigent is reduced cost prescriptions, for a $5 co-pay, for the people who come through those clinics.
“My girls were raised going to church … I’m trying to instill in them why we’re doing this. In the long run, helping these folks will come back,” Mr. Bryant said. “This is something my girls can take and continue the legacy.” \
BARRY BRYANT
BORN: July 13, 1959, Augusta
TITLE: Owner, Barney’s Pharmacy; co-owner, Medical Center Pharmacy and Medical Center West Pharmacy
EDUCATION: University of Georgia, bachelor of pharmacy, 1981
FAMILY: Wife, Charlene; daughters, Vanessa, Stephanie and Brittney
HOBBIES: Occasional golf\
Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352or [email protected].
Originally published by Tim Rausch Staff Writer.
(c) 2008 Augusta Chronicle, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
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