On April 1, 2023, Ryan and Julie Summers drove out to Primitive Old Crow and Winery. There, they were surprised to find family and employees gathered for a party to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of their first pharmacy in Clinton.
That first pharmacy was a 3,300 square foot building they built on Pawnee, where they employed six people, Ryan said. Now, they own pharmacies in 13 locations, with 140 employees.
Having his own pharmacy was a long-time goal, but Ryan still remembers how he felt back at the opening for the first pharmacy.
“Excited, nervous, pretty much everything,” he said.
Like the first one, their stores fill a gap left by pharmacy owners who started their businesses back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and closed them when they decided to retire, Ryan said. They include the owners of Kreisler Drug in Clinton, where Ryan worked as a delivery driver and stocker in high school. He graduated from Clinton High School in 1997 and entered the six-year doctor of pharmacy program at the University of Missouri School of Pharmacy in Kansas City.
There were 40 or 50 people in the graduating class of 2004, Ryan said, including Julie, from Charleston in southeast Missouri. They married in Charleston in 2006, and moved to Clinton. Ryan worked at J and D Pharmacy in Warsaw, he said, and at Walmart. Julie worked at a pharmacy in Harrisonville.
Last Tuesday, Ryan and Julie were both working at the counter of the Pawnee pharmacy. They opened their second pharmacy in the Golden Valley Medical Clinic in 2013, a few months after the Pawnee store, they said. Pharmacies in Butler and Bolivar followed in 2015, then in Nevada in 2016, also the year they expanded the Pawnee location.
In 2019, they opened pharmacies in Marshall, Warrensburg and Slater, and in 2020, Boonville and Appleton City. Last year, they opened a compounding pharmacy in Blue Springs, where they compound medicines that are prescribed by doctors but not available from manufacturers.
Julie usually stays in town while Ryan travels to visit the other pharmacies, she said — he planned to get to three on Wednesday. Any free time they have they spend with their three children. Part of their support are Ryan’s parents, Nancy and Kent Summers, who live in Clinton, and are retired teachers — his father taught math in the middle school in Osceola, Ryan said, and his mother taught elementary school in Osceola and Clinton.
Kreisler Drug closed two weeks after Ryan and Julie opened their first pharmacy. Besides the baby-boomer generation of pharmacy owners retiring, what other changes has he seen in the industry in the last 10 years?
“Everybody is getting bigger, “Ryan said. “There are more chain pharmacies.”
The Summers pharmacies are an independent chain, he said, with an actual owner. Overseeing 13 stores is definitely challenging, he said, but has its prerogatives.
“The advantage of being the owner is you can take time to be away when you want,” he said, “but you have to take care of everybody, too.”
Ryan said he continues to hire high-school students to work for him. And for those aiming at a career in pharmacy, he has these words of advice: Study science.
“And math,”Julie adds.
