Founder's Story - $21M Compounding Pharmacy Exposes Why Peptides are Trending | Ep. 407 with Kris Fishman CEO and President of Wells Pharmacy Network

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Daniel and Kris Fishman explore why compounding pharmacies are suddenly part of the national health conversation, especially as GLP-1s, peptides, and personalized medicine become mainstream. Kris breaks down what compounding actually means, why “one size fits all” medicine is being questioned, and how pharmacies like Wells step in when traditional options are unavailable or not personalized enough. The conversation also covers FDA scrutiny, peptide regulation, Big Pharma tension, operational scale, and the emotional reality of leading a fast-growing healthcare company. Key Discussion Points Kris explains that compounding pharmacies go back centuries and combine active pharmaceutical ingredients to create personalized preparations when standard retail versions do not fit a patient’s needs.  He breaks down why peptides became a major health trend, describing them as amino acid chains that have gained traction through wellness culture, social media, and gray-market demand.  Kris discusses the FDA’s review process and the importance of the upcoming PCAC meeting, where physicians and pharmacists can explain why certain peptides should be available for compounding.  He explains that Wells Pharmacy Network focuses on quality, testing, sterile processes, and transparency, encouraging people to research their pharmacy and understand its safety standards.  Kris shares that the company’s operational unlock came from improving speed, technology, and order fulfillment while maintaining strict quality control.  He talks about the tension with Big Pharma, especially after GLP-1 shortages, and argues compounding exists to help patients where personalized or unavailable options are needed.  Kris says the biggest CEO pressure is not product quality, because he trusts his team, but making sure regulators understand the data, adverse effects, and patient impact behind the products they carry.  He opens up about the personal cost of leadership, including missing much of his children’s lives while building the company, and the tradeoff of trying to provide a better future for them. Takeaways Personalized medicine is growing because more people are questioning whether one-size-fits-all healthcare actually serves their needs.  The biggest misunderstanding about compounding is safety, which is why quality controls, testing, and regulatory transparency matter.  Peptides are popular, but Kris warns that people should avoid gray-market options and work through qualified doctors and reputable pharmacies.  Scaling in healthcare requires both speed and trust, because getting products out quickly means nothing if quality is compromised.  Leadership can create real personal sacrifice, and Kris reflects honestly on the cost of building while raising a family. Closing Thoughts Kris Fishman’s story shows the intersection of healthcare, entrepreneurship, regulation, and personal mission. What started as an industry he did not fully understand became a calling after seeing patients and family members benefit from personalized products. This episode gives listeners a clearer picture of why compounding pharmacies matter, why peptides are everywhere, and why the future of medicine may depend on safer, smarter personalization. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The hottest thing right now in health. It was GLP1, and now it's peptides. What's interesting about them is we nominated them a few years ago. The FDA has a period of time to review the nomination. It came to a conclusion that you cannot call Pongous Fock. Nobody wants to do products that potentially are not safe for you. During COVID, when I saw family members and myself take products that Wells made, I became a much bigger believer in these products.

after I saw it with my own eyes. Then it became a mission statement perfecting medicine to some degree. So Chris, the hottest thing right now in health that I'm hearing about are it was GLP 1 and now it's peptides. And I think a lot of people are like, I want to do peptides. I don't even understand like the differences, this and that. And then you have a lot of compounding pharmacies. And I think for me, I'm totally lost.

Can you break it down and simplify what is a complex? compounding pharmacy and why are peptides the hottest thing right now? Yeah, yeah, great. So look, compound pharmacies, it's interesting. So if you look back in the history, it started in 754 AD, right? So essentially where compound pharmacies were putting together preps for all different types of medicines to do wellness and even fix, you know, illness. not until the 1930s, probably for a decade.

So 1930 to 1940, 60% of what was dispensed to you was through a compound pharmacy. So what is a compound pharmacy, right? So simply put, we buy APIs, which stands for active pharmaceutical ingredients, and we put them in together in some sort of combination to help you with whatever you're going through, right? So not till the 50s, did bigger companies scale at large numbers, like where a big pharma came into into the picture. And somehow compound pharmacies were forgotten about. Interesting is that throughout the last probably 10 to 15 years, more and more people are saying maybe one size doesn't fit all. and they're looking at us as how do I become more custom to my problem, right?

And that's kind of where we started. When I started in the pharmacy world, I as well had no idea what a compound pharmacy was. My wife did. She said, you know, Chris, this is what was used for our kids because we couldn't find a retail version out on the marketplace to serve our kids' needs when they were babies. So she knew about it before I did. Not about 10 years into the business, COVID came out. And believe me, everyone started to talk about compound pharmacy.

You know, and I believe when you can say South Park did an episode, we knew we were going to be, you know, talked about much more. So in essence, we're basically a short-term cooked, you know, that puts together a lot of products that that are served your needs that are not necessarily done by a big pharma company. Yeah. Once you go South Park, it's mainstream already. And they for clarifying that. So why is it that within the last two to three years? every single person that I know is talking about peptides. I don't know how this became such a thing so fast,

but why are people talking about it so much? Right. So peptides are just amino acids, blockchains, you know, and what's interesting about them is we nominated them a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago. And when we nominated them, the FDA has a period of time to review the nominations and say if the safety, you know,

to see if this makes sense to do in our role. It came to a conclusion that they were not, and they removed them from the nominated list and put them on what's called Category 2. Category 2 is just a list that says you cannot compound these products or sort of better you shouldn't. What happened was is that built a market with a bunch of R&D products,

so research and development products, and it went all throughout the internet. And there was a lot of activity around this. It's interesting. if you think about that, sort of that market, that gray market sort of built a lot of attraction with a lot of our kids and just people in general from the working outside to better sleep, to, you name it. And that sort of built a demand. Recently, what we're hearing and seeing is the FDA is taking into consideration of having a

meeting in July 23rd called the PCAC meeting. And this is where we'll be able to come in with some physicians and some of our pharmacists that have been doing this for years and explain all of our our reasonings of why we nominated it and to put it under category one list, which is a list of products that we can buy from and make from. So that's kind of what's happening and you're seeing a lot of this in motion right now. But yeah, it's all over social media and TikTok and, you know, all of our children are, you know, talking about every single peptide, you know, for whatever element they need. I know. I have to laugh. My friends like, do you ever try like A, B, 3, 45? They're throwing all these numbers. It's very chaotic. It just seems funny because I'm like, I don't even know what you're,

like, if you don't explain to me what you're talking about, I have no idea what you're talking about. But I appreciate that. And it seems, it seems like people are very interested in health and longevity. And I think that's amazing as we potentially could live longer as a species now. with all of AI and technology, do you think that there's a world where we potentially not only could live longer, but we could be healthier based on the access to all these things? Absolutely. Look, I'm not one to say that everything's going to make you live to be 120,

nor maybe people don't want to, but at the end of the date is what is there to help make either a broken bone or some sort of issue or concern hill faster, right? And we have a lot of products that do these things. How about better sleep or less stress? You know, all these things are going to be helping, you know, us get better at what we do. And for really good reasons. Now, as the FDA reviews this, we're hoping and looking for their support on seeing the data and sharing that as well.

Right. So we want to be able to say, look, we got into this industry to make people better. not to actually hurt people or or wait to get sick and then say, okay, now I'll take this, right? So we're excited because we feel there's a lot of opportunities out there. You know, starting in this industry 10 years ago, I had no idea either. You know, and like I said, I knew about this or my, so I say my wife knew about it before. And when things like COVID came out, the people that were ordering products to better themselves were, you know, something that I actually watched from the inside.

It's been interesting to watch. So as the CEO and president, what challenges do you face when you're leading and scaling such a fast-growing company at the same time you have these trillion-dollar pharma giants that I imagine see you as great competition, and I'm not sure if they even want you around? Yeah, and that's fair. You know, I want to say when the JLP1 shortages occurred, you know, we were here to actually make that market still demanding.

You know, it was available opposed to not having it, right? So I believe the CEO of Norvo, Norvonotus at the JPMorgan conference earlier this year, did thank compounders for stepping in and taking care of the shortage. Now, now as that shortages ended and we're here really on the personalized side of medicine, I would agree with. with you that the big farm is not not a huge fan you know and that's okay um again i i you know if you look at how many people are doing for example jop ones it's one out of eight americans in the united states which is roughly 35 million people on jlp wants um so that's a it's a rather large number and i i believe we're here to to to help not not to hurt anywhere in the demand just to keep up with everybody what do you think is misunderstood or the great

this misunderstanding right now around compounding. Yeah, you know, I think I would say the safety to what people feel. There's a lot of communication between pharmacies and Big Pharma and everybody, right, indicating who's safe and who's not safe, right? I didn't get into this industry ever to hurt anybody clearly. Our job is to take sort of smaller scales. I mean, we're limited to making 250 batch sizes or less and testing every one of them. very, very, through all, you know, the sterile and the, you know,

narrow, you know, all the testing is required. And, and what we do is we want to make sure that people understand that, that there may be a lot of pharmacies out there. But, but some to, some have scale and some are putting a lot of effort into making sure that we're doing it correctly. And we, we encourage the FDA. We encourage states to come in and audit us and expect us. I mean, again, we're here only to make sure people are better.

We clearly don't want to hurt anybody. So we want people to understand that, you know, do your homework. You know, when, you know, there's, I want to say 7,000 503A pharmacies in the United States. And I would best say to people is to really maybe do a visit to your pharmacy, go through their quality measures, go through all their legal problems, and really go through that pharmacy. It's important, you know, to do your homework on this. And you've mentioned before that you didn't have much knowledge or experience previously. So you came in as an outsider. You moved up within the organization.

What did you see that was the unlock where you said, if we change this, our company will grow and scale much faster? Essentially, was there like a secret sauce or something that you saw that maybe other people didn't? Right. So Wells, Wells Pharmacy always had great products. As I started in about 13 years ago, we were very solid in making products that people said, wow, I really feel this, right? So maybe, maybe people took shortcuts or didn't give you the full, full products, you know, for say. But what, but what I noticed was that our lack of getting orders out the door timely was a struggle, right? So over the years, we looked at having great products, high level of demand, and just took a little bit of time to get out to the patients, right? People were looking for things next day, not a couple

days later. So we scaled through efficiencies in technology, allowing more of our doctors to put in our orders, get them out quicker and faster out to the two to all, while developing better guidelines and understanding the political outlook of things. For example, you know, we want people to understand our products are safe. We want them to understand they're, they're useful and they do help, right? Otherwise, what are we doing? So, so over the years, we really became the pharmacy that said, look, let come visit us, come look at the quality control that we have. That's never going to give on our business, right? We're always going to be 100% by the book and then, and then work on speed to the market. And, uh, and that's, that's happened. You know, we were, we were luckily able to team up

with a lot of our telemissing companies and we were able to fulfill for them at a high speed with with with with with with with with no safety issues meaning we we were dispensing appropriately and have the right staff needed I would say probably one of our biggest struggles we're we're hiring and you know qualified people over the last five six years so what yeah besides hiring and it seems like a lot of people have been saying that this has been a challenge as the CEO it's 2 a.m. You wake up hot sweats. You're thinking about something. I imagine this happens a lot where you as CEO are always thinking and you're always waking up thinking about something. What is it that you're waking up thinking about? Yeah, I can tell you what I don't wake up thinking about

is the quality or someone taking a product of ours and getting hurt. I have all the enough trust in our sterile team and our quality team making the right decisions. They're empowered to do so. However, what I am worried about is where certain states or even FDA will say, okay, we're not going to do a certain product. So it's really from my job to wake up and realize how do I do a better job of showing data, adverse effects, if there's any, and really just making sure that we're all side by side on why products we want to carry are impactful to you. So that's probably the biggest one is really getting that message through. So we're excited in spending a lot of time and effort like on this PCAC meeting coming up with the FDA and kind of working hand in hand with the FDA to see the same picture. So that's that's probably the biggest concerns if something says, you know. And what has that experience been like when you're working with the FDA?

And I mean, this this has to be highly complex things, right? And you said earlier too. So if it doesn't get approved, that could have a significant impact on not just your organization, but many other thousands of compounding organizations. So there's obviously a lot at risk. How has it been working with different government and private organizations? So far, been great. Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of news on this, a lot of movement in regards to the social media play. I believe our children are speaking pretty loudly on this.

Obviously, mid-age adults. And here's the thing. Nobody wants to go to the black market. Nobody wants to do products that potentially are not safe for you. So, you know, we're hoping the impact is positive to work with us and to do things by the book and ultimately what the FDA is looking for. If it doesn't come through, I fear that that could cause another background. on the R&D place and people buying whatever they feels appropriate for them on the, you know, online or

these, these, these dark, dark markets. So I, I hope that's not the case. But, but that's potential. When you think about what's enabled you to get into the position that you are in, is it grit? Is it hard work? What do you feel is one or two things where you're like, every CEO needs to have this trait? Because I have have firsthand experience. And the reason I ask as well is my dream was always to be a CEO of a publicly traded company or a larger organization. I didn't even want to be an entrepreneur. But then I realized as I was moving up in the corporate world, I was not really fit to continue. And the only option I had was to do my own business. But what for you has been, you know, some traits where you like you have to do this or you have to be like this in order to keep moving up?

Right. I would tell you, it was the last thing I wanted to do was the CEO. I never thought this would be the position I would land in. You know, I want to say that the dedication in just being aware of all the moving parts of the business, right? From shipping to production to customer service, right, every part of it. And really understanding those pieces. And then probably what was the most impactful part was spending time with the physicians and going to the trade shows, right? Because then you start to see patients and why they've changed. And that became the effectiveness. So, so I almost don't even look at products anymore as, as, as as a name. Like you,

earlier said, you know, like they're kind of these, these, these interesting names like BPC, you know, or, you know, C.JC, you know, it does sound like a row, like we're talking robotics. But, but what I did see were people that said, thank you for saving me for whatever reasons. Maybe it was for better sleep or better stress or losing weight or whatever it may be. And that became impactful, right? So you as a person start to say, you know, why are people not understanding this? You know, and it's not to be something afraid of. It's something that you should search for. You know, when we're in school, we learn history. We learn Spanish. We learn a lot of great things. We don't learn about your blood and maybe how to stay healthier longer. We just don't. And, you know, those are not necessarily a

standard of school education, right? So I think that as yeah. So I want people to start realizing this. Take your, get your blood taken, go to your doctors, start having conversations, start figuring out solutions to maybe live longer, not have a heart attack, not this. I mean, all the, all the things that we likely can change. We just don't. And so, so I think that's been the most in fact. And what that led to was more of a personal journey for me. Especially during COVID, when I saw family members of myself take products that Wells made, and I became a much bigger believer in these products after I saw it with my own eyes. Then it became a mission statement to say to people, like, let's go through these things.

Let's find the best doctors. And people ask all the time, well, what was the best doctor? And it's a hard question. But, you know, as you look through a lot of the physicians we work with, I mean, many of them are on a journey to find the answers. And that's the key, right? It's practicing medicine. I hope at some point in our life we can really get practicing medicine to perfecting medicine to some degree. It would be a nice, a nice change in our lifetime.

I used to have a mentor and I noticed once he became CEO, he had a lot of, he had a lot of sacrifices in his personal life. Divorce didn't really even see his kids anymore. From the outside looking in, he made like $150 million. but from the inside I noticed he was always he was he wasn't miserable but he was very lonely and I always found that very fascinating for you has there been any personal sacrifices along the way that you've had to make to continue in the role that you're in yeah I look I I have four children and and my last my youngest is 18 who just graduated high school this last week. And I look back at their lifetime of, you know, from my oldest to my 18 year old.

And I missed the majority of their life. So it's, it's hard for me to look at that now and say, I don't even remember going to like a football game or a baseball game with my son. And that's, that's been hard on, on my thought process looking in the past. Like, I missed that. And, and, and, and, you know, but, but on the other end, I, I hope to provide them, you know, college paid for and at least a kickstart of their life, which I think it's going to be a little harder to live as, as, as,

you know, prices are skyrocketed by home or, you know, cars these days, right? So, yeah, while,

while the sacrifice occurred, you know, at the beginning stages, hopefully I'm able to provide a better life for their future. So it's, it's definitely to your point, um, it's,

you know, it does cause a lot of internal issues, um, to that degree. I, I, I could say that now. You know, of course, growing through it, you know, yeah, it's, you know, honey, it's, you know, one more year, one more year, one more year, right?

Then you find yourself 30 years later. I was talking to my friend last night about that. We were cracking up. I guess one person at the table retired at 40 and he's, my friend's almost 60. And he's like, I'm still working. He's like, I'm VP and I'm making more money than ever and I can't stop. I'm like, you've been saying for 10 years, they're going to retire. So my wife and I wrote this book called Unlimited Possibilities where it's basically

breaking through barriers you didn't think possible. What was an unlimited possibility moment for you where you broke through something that you could, you know, going back to as a kid, you never thought was possible. I never, like I said, thought I would be in the pharmacy role. I never thought this was going to be a journey that I took and let alone be the CEO of the journey. So I feel, I feel what I've learned in understanding the blood work and understanding products and matching, it's become very clear to me. and I never thought that would be something I ever did. I never really thought that was a solution, right? So I become somewhat of a tool to help and advocate, you know, with the family and with friends and so on. You know, I'm not a physician, but, but, you know, obviously we utilize many of them.

And I think that from what I've learned the most and my possibilities is really just trying to be helpful in that in that world. I always wanted to be a doctor. I just had a lot of kids really and didn't have the time to go to school to be a doctor. So I feel that from a child to where I am today, I got to a really cool spot. You know, and I like to, I like to be in the spot. And ultimately, I get to see results of thousands and thousands of people. So it's, it's, it's awesome to see. Hey, it's the next best thing. There you go.

My wife said the same thing. She's like, I always want to be a doctor. And now I'm doing that. So I'm like, hey, it's the next best thing. But Chris Fishman, this has been great. I learned a lot. I'm inspired. Can't wait to hear what happens.

happens in July. Cannot wait to see what happens in July. Hopefully you come back. Let's talk about it. And I hope it's all positive news. But thanks again for clarifying everything today, telling me, I've been wanting to ask someone for years about these things because I had no idea and no one ever broke it down. So I appreciate that. And thank you for joining us today. Yeah. Well, I appreciate the time. And look forward to talking to you in the next month or two.