The sign reads Fry’s Pharmacy and Registered Pharmacist Ben Fry is behind the counter.  But Fry sold his business to pharmacist Ed Walsh in 2004 and has been an employee since. Fry’s jump from boss to employee demonstrates one man’s approach to the question, “Is there life after selling your business?”

In 1972 after graduating from the University of Houston Pharmacy School, Ben Fry returned home to San Benito and began working for Adams’ Pharmacy.  As a boy, Fry had watched Adams, a friend of his parents, prosper, and he realized that pharmacy’s mix of science and business appealed to him.  For eight years, Fry worked at the hometown drug store, learning the pharmacy business from Adams, who had opened his business after World War II.  Soon Fry was, in reality, running the pharmacy for Adams.

“It’s tough to be able to borrow enough money to buy any business outright,” Fry recalled.  But in 1980, once owner financing had been arranged, Fry bought the drug store and renamed it Fry’s. “I walked in the front door, and he walked out the back for good.”

Over the next 20 years, Fry became the respected hometown druggist, and it became his turn to prosper. When San Benito Medical Associates opened an office in Harlingen, the personable pharmacist opened a Fry’s Pharmacy next door. Then he opened a pediatric pharmacy called Small Fry’s next to Harlingen Pediatric Associates.

When Fry’s wife died, his outlook on life changed.

“I lost the fire in my belly. I wanted to just be a pharmacist without all the other complications of running a business,” he said.

The idea of not having to deal with insurance, Medicaid and the government sounded good to him.  He sold the Harlingen drug stores to other pharmacists.  Around that time, Registered Pharmacist Ed Walsh decided to close his South Padre Island drug store and went to work for Fry in San Benito, testing the waters more or less for a year.

“We wanted to make sure he liked us and that we liked him,” Fry said of Walsh.

With confirmation that their personalities and work ethics were compatible, Fry owner-financed the sale of the pharmacy to Walsh in 2004.  Fry, unlike his predecessor, did not walk away, but became an employee, an employee with benefits to be sure. “I am here full time, when I don’t have a better offer to go hunting, fishing or travel,” Fry said, shortly after his return from a trip to France.

Being an employee in the same business and same building where you were the boss is not for everyone.  It requires huge amounts of self-control to not take the lead, to not speak up.

“It was hard to let go, and it’s still hard,” Fry admitted.  The years of directing employees and even micro-managing them established routines that were difficult to step out of, but Fry transitioned to seeing himself as a pharmacist, not a business owner with 30 employees. “Ed Walsh has a different management style than I, but it has all worked out for the best. Our practice is still thriving and growing.”

Read more of this story by Eileen Mattei in the December print edition of Valley Business Report, on newstands now.