Road Warrior

A weekend vacation and a book don’t often combine to create life- and company-changing experiences. But that’s what happened when Chris Gage, vice president of operations for pharmacy point-of-sale company Retail Management Solutions, visited a friend at an RV park just after reading Live a Thousand Years.

The book, written by Giovanni Livera, urges readers to mark the passing of life through experiences, not time. The parable had been given to her by RMS president and CEO Brad Jones, who mentored each member of his staff personally through the book’s “Life Documents.” Some in the company made dramatic changes in their personal lives, resulting in a less stressful work environment.

But Gage took it a few thousand miles further, thanks to that experience in the campground. “We were sitting around, all of us in our early 40s,” she says, “just dreaming about what we would do with our lives as we get closer to retirement.”

With the book as an inspiration, she decided not to wait to achieve her goal of seeing the country. She pitched Jones on an idea that would allow her to travel and connect with RMS’s customer base: She would live in an RV for two years, visiting customers and vendors while touring the country. She already worked remotely quite often from her home, 100 miles from the company’s Olympia, Wash., headquarters.

“I thought, ‘I could be sitting somewhere sunny with a laptop and wireless connection, doing my job wherever, not sitting in rainy Washington state,” she says. “I could be on the road experiencing great weather for my personal satisfaction, but in a way that would benefit the company.”

She put together “a plan of attack” and presented it to Jones. He was intrigued, but probed her commitment to the idea since she’d never lived in an RV before. “I didn’t want her to get two or three months into it and say, ‘What did I do?’” Jones says, but “she’s got the right personality and this was something she really wanted.”

Positive results
Within six months, Gage had sold her house, bought a 40-ft. RV, packed up her pets and headed south. Now, she plots out a place to park for a few weeks at a time, and visits customers several days a week (in a Jeep towed behind the RV), spending a few hours at each site.
“Some of [the customers] have been a little bit apprehensive, thinking it’s a sales call,” she notes. “It’s not. My visit is to help them work better with RMS or utilize their system in a way that’s more beneficial.”

That means specialized training and making customers aware of new features in the existing POS set-up. While visiting one pharmacy, for instance, she noticed that customers had to sign twice — once when they used a credit card and once to verify that they’d received their prescription. The POS system had an update that allowed for a single signature, but the pharmacist had not activated it.

“Communication between RMS and our customers is pretty tough,” she says. “We’ve found that they are missing out on a lot that we offer, because as communication has become technology-driven, they are faced with an overwhelming amount of information to filter.

“Spending time with customers lets me see what they’re doing or not doing and I can implement the settings that are best for their workflow.”

While in San Pedro, Calif., she made some changes onsite while visiting Ray Berry’s Seaside Pharmacy. But it’s what has happened since she left that has impressed Berry the most. Gage told him not to hesitate calling her “if I do have an issue and can’t get it worked out. I haven’t had to do that because she’s been on top of things. She’s followed up with us several times already.”

Berry’s experience is fairly typical, Gage says. “Once I give them training or talk about their needs, the end result is positive,” she says. “The relationship they have with me and with RMS has changed. That’s been my experience 100 percent of the time.” She’s also started leaving behind a copy of Live a Thousand Years.

The personal touch
On the road since October, Gage admits she hasn’t quite mastered the work/life balance. “I need to make more of an effort to look at the scenery of where I am,” she says. “I’m so enveloped in the project and excited about it I find myself sitting at my computer 15 hours later.”

In addition to the onsite meetings with customers, she has retained much of her responsibilities as operations VP. Then there are the rigors of the road — finding the next RV park, setting up appointments and following up on past visits.

Still early in the process, Gage isn’t yet thinking about what will happen when her two years are up, or how she’ll go back to living in one location. But the experience has already transformed how she approaches her job. “Part of the problem was me being so buried in the business that I couldn’t see the business,” she says. “It’s taken me to a different level, to manage the company as a whole, to see where our problems exist.

“I give my direct line to every customer that we meet, and make it clear that they can call me. It may seem extreme, but RMS is a small company and there’s no reason that our customers can’t get to the top. If they’re not getting what they want, I want to make it right.”

Company president Jones is sure that RMS will change as a result of the roadshow. It has already launched two new communications initiatives — a biweekly newsletter and a plan to call customers and check in on how they’re using the product and what they might need assistance with.

“One of the things that Chris walked away with is just how engaged these pharmacists are with their customers,” he says. “Every day they see hundreds of people, many of them they’ve known for a lot of years. They have professional and personal conversations with these people. That’s what we’re achieving again here, getting that personal touch.”

For RMS, the RV roadshow may not end when Gage’s two years are up. “I’ve already got two people saying they want to do this when she stops,” Jones says. “I’d like to believe that we’d be able to continue this for some time in the future.” He’s even considering purchasing a company RV and putting an RMS staffer on the road for six month as a time.