Guardian Pharmacy employees from across the country will be ringing the closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
The long-term care pharmacy trades on the exchange under the symbol GRDN after going public Sept. 25. The company raised $112 million in its initial public offering, Reuters reported.
Founded in 2004, Atlanta-based Guardian priced its offering of 8 million shares of common stock at $14 a share, at the low-end of the company’s targeted range of $14 to $16 per share.
Several reasons make now a compelling time to go public, Guardian Pharmacy co-founder, President and CEO Fred Burke told the McKnight’s Business Daily.
“The first one is it allows us to continue to do what we’ve done, which is build this very special company with competitive advantage over a two-decade period of time. [And it] provides us the resources to let us continue to do that,” Burke said. “Secondly, it allows us to leverage the platform that we’ve built … to carry forward with continued growth.
“And then finally, it’s about the people,” he continued. “We believe deeply in employee ownership,” he said, noting that 230 of the Guardians’ approximately 3,000 employees also are owners in the company.
Guardian has 50 pharmacies across 36 states. As of June, Burke said, the company was serving 174,000 residents in skilled nursing facilities, assisted living / memory care communities and a few continuing care retirement / life plan communities.
The institutional pharmacies operate off-site in approximately 20,000-square-foot facilities in light industrial areas. Burke said that the pharmacies are highly automated, using much robotic dispensing equipment, from which the company delivers medications to long-term care facilities within a two- to three-hour radius.
The company’s mission, he said, is to get the nursing home and senior living residents on their proper drug regimens and to provide a platform for consistent delivery.
Guardian began as a service for assisted living communities, which was revolutionary at the time, before adding on skilled nursing facilities.
“Moving forward, we want to continue the leadership role that we played in defining the service offering for [assisted living communities],” Executive Vice President and CEO David Morris added. “We want to continue that leadership role, and we want to continue enhancing as we grow and as the [assisted living] community grows.
“We feel special about that,” he said. “We’ve got a great platform.”
