PMG

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of The Compounder pharmacy in Aurora, Illinois. We’re a custom-only pharmacy lab, so we produce eye creams, lotions, eye drops, suppositories, and more. We can make anything as long as it’s legal and the active ingredient is available. Furthermore, we don’t work with any insurance companies, so we only accept cash. Nobody really knows what we do until they need something for us, so we’re like a restaurant for drugs that no one knows about.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with PMG?

A lot of the things we do were related to information. However, we were also aware that we couldn’t legally market products — we could only market our services. We were in a strange corner of healthcare because we could only be found by external customers when they need us. Despite that, we couldn’t trim down the amount of information that we had on our hands because that was also part of the service we gave to people — it was necessary that we make information available to them.

Similar to a lot of websites in the early 2000s, our website had a dropdown menu with a submenu. With that setup, it was difficult to find something our end users wanted in the menu. We also had a difficult time navigating the site. As a result, we looked for a company that could understand what our end users as well as our internal employees needed.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

One of PMG’s goals was to enable my father who was in his 70s to post his blog without going through too many hoops. That was something we needed because we used to wait for people in Ukraine to wake up before they could fix whichever version of the website we were on. Our hope was to get our site away from Joomla or Drupal. We also wanted the search function to be the holy grail of our site. On top of that, we wanted our site to be user-friendly.

To achieve our requirements, PMG built a WordPress site that was simple and allowed us to keep a lot of information. Their work didn’t involve any Google Ads or anything of similar nature. In fact, what we had asked from them was the opposite of what most people would recommend for website development. 

The team also had to fix and place over 3,000 pages on a database. We didn’t need them to be categorized since a lot of topics regarding medicine always overlap. For example, topics on migraine medication could also be placed under hormone medications. However, that caused us to have an increased number of duplicate pages and an increased number of website crashes. As a result, PMG removed the sitemaps in order to make the website work faster. They also integrated Shopify.

In addition, doctors need to submit their prescriptions electronically by January 2022, so the team created a section where doctors could upload their prescriptions on the website. PMG continues to provide ongoing maintenance as well as design and development work.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with 2–3 people, depending on what we need to work on. The person that I’ve dealt with the most is no longer at PMG, but her work has revolved around taking a chunk of pages from the old iteration of our website. After that, she would place it on the sandbox page and my job has been to make sure that the text is formatted correctly and didn’t have any hyperlinks or indentations from the old site. After we've checked everything, their designer ensures that the site looks good, whether it’s on mobile or desktop.

How did you come to work with PMG?

We wanted to work with a company that was relatively close so that we wouldn’t have to worry about time differences and communication challenges. We found PMG through word-of-mouth recommendations. I had mutual friends with PMG’s owner since I lived in Yorkville. 

After that, I reached out to them and asked them if they could make a website. I didn’t care if our website wasn’t organized, but I had to make sure that everything that we were looking for was something that could be searched within the platform.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $1,000 annually for the site updates.  Then, for the web development work, we’ve spent $15,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing collaboration began in January 2013.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They’ve faced some challenges during our partnership, but they’ve been able to figure out our needs. The number of people that have contacted us randomly has been incredible. If you look up any of the things we’re known for, we’re in the top three results so as far as SEO and impact, we’re definitely performing the way that we should. 

Even if we can’t do a lot of marketing as far as our products are concerned, our website has enabled people to find us. In addition, since doctors can easily upload their prescriptions on our website, we’ve established good communication with them.

How did PMG perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate through email, and they always get things done. I usually get a response from them in less than an hour.

What did you find most impressive about them?

PMG’s responsiveness and their ability to understand that I don’t expect mountains to be moved have been impressive. I just want people to acknowledge that I’ve asked for something, and PMG has been excellent with that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not at all.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust that PMG knows what they’re doing.