Steinbaum: We were a privately held company and we were growing rapidly. We needed funds with which to grow. We had a number of choices, one of which was to go public. While we were considering that option, we had an offer from Pet, a conglomerate on the New York Stock Exchange, to buy our company. We felt that that was the answer to our growth problems because they had the resources to finance our expansion plans. Shortly after Pet acquired Medicare-Glaser, I became a group president and had responsibility for six of their 17 operating divisions. From that vantage point, I had the opportunity to look at management firsthand and how they made decisions. They were very risk averse. As a matter of fact, their culture was one where they would manage problems as opposed to solving them.
My partners and I realized that if we could reacquire our company, we could implement our growth plans better ourselves. That became my defining moment, approaching Pet with the idea of buying our company back. Needless to say, it was a very tough and prolonged negotiation, but in the end we did re-acquire our company through a leveraged buyout. It was the most important decision I ever made. The result was that our company grew and prospered and we had an impact on the industry itself.
Knowledge@Wharton: How much did the company grow after you took it back from Pet?
Steinbaum: We developed the first chemically-based drug interaction database in the country. This would allow a pharmacist to notify a patient who was on more than one drug if a drug he or she was taking could react with another and adversely affect them. We also started to open health care stores and pharmacies. We formed a network of drug stores throughout the country where people could get prescriptions filled if they didn’t have a store in that area. We got very heavily into mail. We formed a joint venture with Santos, which is an HMO headquartered in New York. The result was a company called Express Scripts, which is today the second-largest pharmaceutical benefit company in the country. It fills prescriptions for more than 50 million people today.
Knowledge@Wharton: Turning now to the other 39 CEOs whom you interviewed for your book, how did you go about selecting them?
Steinbaum: Some of them I knew. I knew their backgrounds and that their stories were fascinating. Others were referred to me. After talking to them, I found that they had compelling stories that could provide lessons to be learned by the reader. I felt that these lessons would be invaluable to anyone who was interested in getting into business, or if they were already in business, allow them to move further in leadership roles.
Knowledge@Wharton: Some of the CEOs told you were about career decisions that they made. Could you give us some examples?
Steinbaum: Well, consider Bill Rasmussen, the founder of ESPN. Bill had been the communications director of the New England Whalers hockey team, and he had just gotten fired because they had had a bad season; they literally got rid of everybody. Bill and his son Scott wanted to get involved in doing sports broadcasting in Connecticut. They had a couple problems. One, they had no money. And they had no way of broadcasting the television programming into people’s homes.
