Operating Playbook

Phase 1: Acquire and take over

Majority recap with meaningful seller rollover. Owner takes chips off the table and stays on to operate. Licenses, prescriber relationships, staff, and local trust transfer intact.

Phase 2: Optimize the core

Before adding anything: purchasing and wholesaler terms, inventory, staffing model, workflow, front-end margin, adherence programs, and existing clinical service billing. The dispensing business stays fully intact; it is the trust engine and the traffic engine. Prove we make an existing pharmacy better before we ask it to become something new.

Phase 3: Install HARP Wellness

The membership, panels, app, clinical services, and product line layer on top of a stable, well-run base. This is expansion revenue, not replacement revenue, the new line grows while the old line holds.

Phase 4: Convert to a HARP Wellness Pharmacy

Once the wellness layer is established and performing, transition the location to the HARP brand fully, signage, front-end merchandising, format, and staff model.

We only buy anchors in captive markets. Not distressed rural stores bought for the license: dominant local businesses with pricing power and a defended position.

Anchor criteria:

• Captive market, geographic or competitive isolation; the pharmacy people in that market actually use
• Dominant local share, a genuine corner on the market, not one of five options
• Strong household income and favorable demographics, 30–55, health-engaged, able to pay $79–$299/month cash
• Prescriber density in the catchment area, the referring physicians are the asset we cannot buy any other way
• Modern pharmacy management system, pharmacies with integrated e-prescribing and dispensing automation command higher multiples specifically because they reduce post-acquisition integration risk. Paying up for standardization is cheaper than migrating four different systems.
• Owner willing to roll equity and continue operating, many are exhausted; we screen for it explicitly
• Adequate square footage for a private consultation and draw room

Then we expand around the anchor. Once we hold the anchor in an MSA, we acquire smaller local pharmacies in the same market to extend convenience and coverage; additional touchpoints for the same member base, fed by centralized clinical, compounding, and back-office infrastructure already paid for. Density inside an MSA compounds; scattered coverage does not.

We use the NCPA/USC Pharmacy Access Initiative mapping tool for site and market screening.