Who we are

“We’re going public in 6 months” announced my ex-business partner, and majority equity holder of Mednow. We just closed a $6.5 million private placement round, it’s Summer 2020 and everyone is home under COVID social distancing rules. My first daughter is one year old, and the youngest on-court witness of a Toronto Raptors’ championship game, when I accepted the CEO job at Mednow Inc, formerly TSXV: MNOW.

A few years later, Good Apples is born out of the need for better advice to founders as an equity partner with skin in the game. We seek profitable or break-even businesses with line of sight to sustainable growth when supported with funding and a great Board.

We will look at any company with at least a million in EBITDA and a good balance sheet. If this sounds like your company you’re building or selling, drop us a line!

See my LinkedIn profile here.

How the story went

  • Gravitas Securities, a merchant bank out of Vancouver, Canada, just helped Ali Reyhany, close a $30 million minority investment into Care Pharmacies, a 45-unit pharmacy aggregator where he is also a majority shareholder of an entity with more debt than equity. I ran point on vendor due diligence and supported closing the deal with Credit Mutuel, one of France’s oldest and largest banks…et oui, je parles français, aussi!

    MNOW, went public March 9th, 2021, on the TSX venture board with aspiration of becoming a billion-dollar company – I was skiing Whistler that day and here is where we landed:

    • $145M market capitalization at IPO,

    • 54% insider control,

    • a $6.75 initial offering stock price, and

    • We closed the first day of trading at $4.50

  • Before Care Pharmacies, I had executive roles at Innomar, Canada’s largest specialty pharmacy and at McKesson, Canada’s largest wholesaler and distributor of pharmaceuticals. Prior to that, I ran buy-side activity for Europe’s largest supplier of medical gases and devices after a few operations and marketing roles at the same entity.

    At McKesson, I saw hundreds of pharmacy owners being taken kicking and screaming, by banner programs, into being business owners. Generic rebates were still abundant, and no one really needed to get that creative to keep the lights on, but the world was going digital with Amazon and Uber and independent pharmacy was becoming the industry’s dinosaur. McKesson wouldn’t go for a digital pharmacy that I pitched because wholesaling was lucrative enough. Meanwhile, Care Pharmacies, looked for more growth in banner programs and found none – they needed to do business even if the store is closed so Ali and I co-founded Mednow in 2018.

  • Digital pharmacy eliminates the need for patient proximity or an “OPEN” sign, but there was only one problem, those who would use a digital pharmacy did not need to. Most were 5-minutes away from a 24-hour pharmacy and were generally acute users of pharmacy getting unprofitable prescriptions of antibiotics and rash creams rather than recurring revenue of medications that treat chronic diseases such as cholesterol and hypertension. That was an older population that in some cases preferred walking into a pharmacy and talking to pharmacist in that white lab coat – in some cases, that might be the only human interaction that these older patients would have. They were not concerned about the time that a digital pharmacy saved. And it did not make them any better off so why bother downloading our app.

    • Don’t become the CEO of a public company without a Board seat

    • Lawyers and Bankers are the gatekeepers of Equity

    • Fundamentals mean nothing at a micro-cap PubCo valuation

    • Pick runway-to-profitability over stock price every day all day

    • Even $50M cannot replace the need for a strategic planning process