The Daily Item, Sunbury, PA

Sunbury/Norry Region

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  • Adam Rosinski, owner of the Custom Care Pharmacy on South Front Street in Milton. Rob Inglis/The Daily Item

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February 4, 2013

Business advice helps Milton pharmacy start and expand

By Evamarie Socha The Daily Item

MILTON -  Custom Care Pharmacy was a Bucknell University student, it would graduate summa cum laude.

Adam Rosinski opened his independent pharmacy in Milton just a year ago, one of 33 startups Bucknell University’s Small Business Development Center in Lewisburg helped get up and running in 2012.

One year later, his business isn’t just doing well, “it’s much better than I ever planned,” Rosinski said.

He recently opened a second location, in Sunbury that extends his delivery reach into the Coal Region, bringing services such as custom compounding and “bubble pouch” dispensing, a prescription-filling method for patients on multiple medications.

The bubble pouch puts a month’s worth of dosages by time of day into one complete cartridge; all the patient needs to do is open and take the meds, sparing the need for confusing multi-day pill boxes and risk of missing doses.

Custom Care is a poster child, literally, for SBDC, featured in literature the center uses for potential clients.

Center Director Steve Stumbris said Custom Care Pharmacy is among the biggest luminaires of the SBDC class of 2012. Rosinski began with the center in 2008, working with it to devise a business plan and financial projections that showed him where the pharmacy would be with income and expenses and whether it would be financially solvent. SBDC plugged in industry numbers as well to make a forecast.

Armed with this information, Rosinski secured a bank loan to get started.

“Without all that, I couldn’t get the loan,” he said. “For me to do it by myself, it would have been very hard.”

Rosinski also credited the center with saving him from a potential business failure. He first thought was of buying a local pharmacy that would become part of a chain. SBDC took the company’s numbers, figured some projections and advised Rosinski against the move.

“They thought it wasn’t good idea to get involved with that company and business,” he said. “I was disappointed because I thought it would work out, but they basically told me I could pay only this much money for it because that’s all I could afford with the prescription volume (the store) was doing.”

It may have put Rosinski’s dream on hold, but he never forgot it or the services the center offered, said Maureen Hauck, assistant director of business consulting with the center.

“He had the technical skills and work experience necessary to run his own pharmacy,” she said. “He recognized the need for his services, then took the time to carefully consider and learn until it was right to move ahead.” When he came back to them in June 2011, “he knew he was ready to move forward, and he knew how we could help.”

For more information on Bucknell’s Small Business Development Center, visit www.bucknell.edu/sbdc

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