Building a Pharmacy Giant: Strategic Insights from Jack Gance

Strategy at Scale

Australian businessman and the visionary founder of Chemist Warehouse, Jack Gance began his career as a pharmacist with a single store in 1972, but his innovative approach and strategic acumen quickly led to the creation of a pharmacy distribution empire. He is known for creating the Le Specs, Le Tan, Australis, and Colours of Australia brands of sunglasses, sunscreen, fragrances, and cosmetics, which he sold in 1991. He completed his MBA at Monash University and NYU Stern School of Business and returned to revolutionize the pharmacy industry with the My Chemist chain. From there, he went on to found Chemist Warehouse, now a multibillion-dollar powerhouse.
Jack brings a natural strategic mind to the puzzle of scaling a business. Thanks to a sequence of smart strategic choices, Chemist Warehouse, under his leadership, has grown to encompass around 600 stores, generating approximately $7.9 billion in total sales annually. He was recently named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Australia and has also received the Retail Innovator Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Retail Association.
In the episode, we dig into Jack’s strategic decisions with the goal of capturing some key strategic concepts we can all apply to scale whatever we are building with greater speed, easy, and success rate. We will cover:

• Why he doesn’t write a business plan
• The trick not trying to predict the future but, instead, limiting the downside
• The benefit of looking for what your competitors are ignoring … or are avoiding
• Why you need to underperform on some things, make tough choices, and overperform in other areas
• Why you shouldn't focus just on customers at the detriment of suppliers
• How to align culture to strategy
• Why business school didn’t really teach him new things as much as validated what he learned as an entrepreneur
• The benefit of taking action on idea to prove it, rather than seeking to prove it to take action

Thanks for listening! This episode is brought to you by Kaihan Krippendorff of Outthinker Networks, Verne Harnish of Scaling Up, and the team at Growth Institute.