Jonathan Abrapour, COO at Empower Pharmacy, joined COO Alliance for immediate access to action plans, events, and a network of peers. He believes organizations must invest in people because their decisions outweigh the cost of development, and that personal and professional growth should move together.
Questions this video answers
Chief Operating Officer at Empower Pharmacy.
Within three days ("Within three days, I had an interview").
Chapters
My name is Jonathan Abrapour. I'm the chief operating officer at Empower Pharmacy. What's my experience been to come to coalliance? It happened actually very quickly. My CEO is part of the EO Group, and he's seen Cameron Herald from afar quite a few times. And so it was kind of a quick transaction between him and I. He said, hey, you should look into this organization. And I've been looking at growing myself professionally and really taking tools that other people have had and just be able to be able to do my job 10 times better, if not 100 times better. So quickly looked up Cameron Herald. I really didn't know at the time the audibles he had and whatever. And it quickly just made sense. I wanted to be part of an alliance group of some sort, and I didn't really see anything else that was out there. So I just did the quick application. Within three days, I had an interview, and then next thing I knew, I had an invoice sent over to join the group. So it happened really quickly. And then very different from other organizations. The action plans were there immediately afterwards. I think within a week or so, I was sitting at one of these, you know, these monthly events. And then it was just bam, bam, bam. A lot of interaction. And then I got to read more and more read Cameron Herald's second command after that. And it's just. It led me quickly to come to this conference. So can I explain any differences between COA and any other type of organization? So I can't, because I actually haven't been part of other organizations. I think I was thinking a little bit more traditional in terms of, like, what is a, you know, accelerated type MBA or something like that. Right. And, you know, I knew I didn't have the time devotion for that. I knew there's a lot of other skill sets that are there professionally that I could get. And I saw the COA provided that with the network that I was needing overall from an organization. Yeah. So what's been my favorite part of the coa, I definitely thought coming into this meeting there was going to be not nearly the amount of personal growth. And as we all know, personal growth and professional growth, they need to be synonymous, if not harmonious. And so that's a lot what we got out of this entire, you know, this entire session. And if I think back to kind of what Cameron has been trying to do, and really the entire COA group is how do we build a network? Right. How do we make sure people are utilizing the Slack channels? There's thousands of resources within ourselves that we have that's untapped and untouched. And so I think that was kind of a brilliant use of this entire event, was really to make sure that we got to know ourselves and get out of our comfort zone so we can build ourselves professionally and personally and so that the two aren't really seen to be as different as they really should be. Yeah. So the whole question, why invest in people? Why is this a good sense of investment? First of all, if you're not gonna invest in your people, then who are you investing in? At the end of the day, people are gonna end up becoming where you grow as a company. And aside from that, sure, ROI is a very hard thing to calculate when you take a look at price, personal development and growth. But at the end of the day, that needs to happen across the entire board. And it should be right. The responsibility organization that you're investing time in your leaders so that they can grow. If not, you should. Every single day. The decisions that we make are worth more than the cost of this conference and the organization itself. So it's really more time lost from the organization that I would think is probably more concerning to CEOs, because that is what we do every day. And so. Yeah, but that's what we're here to do. We're here to build ourselves because we're not our best version in our current roles. So any words of gratitude for the entire CoA team for putting this together? It's been awesome. I think the red carpet was rolled out for us. Definitely put us out of our comfort zone, and I know a lot of that was Cameron inspired to put us in a place to where we felt that we could be very close to each other. It's very hard to do that with people you don't know, especially in the professional world. So my hat's off to the team and especially for Cameron for making sure that happened.
