A Year at BioScript, part 4 of 4: What I Love About It (plus: coffee)

This week I’m dwelling on some of the things I love the most about the role, the company, and the people. Plus, I share where to get the best coffee on St. George Street.

Helping people. At EQ Bank I could look at our user base and estimate how much money we were saving / earning for our customers. Working at Arterra was fun, though a little less impactful; wine’s important, but it’s not that important. But working at BioScript, where we’re ultimately helping patients with their medical issues, it’s easy to feel like what I do makes a difference, even though in the technology team we’re pretty removed from that actual patient experience. It hits that fourth circle in the Ikigai Venn diagram.

Not too big, not too small. Size-wise, BioScript is juuuuuuuuuuuust right. Big enough to do things at scale (~1500 employees, >100 clinics nationwide, etc.) but nimble enough to do things quickly and not get bogged down in long approval cycles. (Being privately owned and not publicly traded helps a lot with that). “Legacy” software here is less than ten years old. Like any company that’s grown this quickly, there’s technical and process debt to clean up, but when I look back at my thirteen months in the role, it’s remarkable how much progress we’ve made…and we’re just getting started.

Speaking of that, I can’t overstate the importance of a company being ready for this kind of technology change program. Not only did I encounter no resistance when I joined, I encountered very little inertia at all, and in fact encounter enthusiasm at nearly every turn. I’ve never seen that before. I always expect to find some portion of the company on the left side of the change curve, but here everyone seemed to be in the acceptance stage the day I showed up.

Being back on the east coast. It’s not just that I get to see my family more, occasionally travelling to Moncton. “East coast” also reflects the ethos of the company. You know how people say “Everyone is so nice!” when they visit the Maritimes for the first time? It’s the same thing when they join BioScript. The vibe is a group of smart & capable people who are very serious about patient care, but not much else…especially themselves. There’s a great culture of caretaking (maybe because the early core of the company was a bunch of pharmacists and nurses) and it’s just in the water supply of the place.

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In previous series I’ve written about where I’m getting/drinking coffee that fuels me during my workdays. With BioScript there’s been a fun bonus: the two co-founders are also obsessed with coffee. Travelling with them to visit our pharmacies and clinics meant trying some excellent coffee shops like Museo in Saskatoon and Thom Bargen in Winnipeg. They also brought me a bag of Rogue Wave after their trip to Edmonton.

When visiting Moncton the most obvious stop is Brix (which happens to be owned by one of the co-founders) but I also love Epoch Chemistry. I need to make the trip to La Factrie next.

Back home in Toronto I usually grind & brew beans I get from Omnia (Diablo) or Pilot (Heritage), or whatever special bag Mercury has on offer. If I’m near our office, I just recently tried the Oakville outpost of Vareda.

And on that caffeine-y note, time to get back to work. Thanks for reading along!

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Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: What’s similar

Part 3: What’s different

Part 4: What I love about it