How Pat Kelly, member of the Medical Distribution Hall of Fame, shaped people’s lives
Editor’s note: The medical distribution industry mourns the recent passing of Pat Kelly, an industry legend, mentor, friend, and visionary. Kelly started his career at General Medical before co-founding and starting PSS (now part of McKesson) in 1983. He was inducted into the Medical Distribution Hall of Fame in 2002.
Pat Kelly
Back in the late 1970s, young Bill Riddell had a problem. “I couldn’t get anyone to hire me,” he says. Riddell had been in Louisiana working for a medical supply company but returned to Jacksonville, Fla. to start a career there.
At the time, Pat Kelly was running the Surgical Supply branch of Intermedco in Jacksonville. “I’d go to see him once a month,” recalls Riddell. “Nobody would hire me; but at least he talked to me.”
One Friday Riddell arrived at Surgical Supply to find Kelly high on a ladder doing inventory. “He says, ‘Hi Bill, how are you doing?’” recalls Riddell. “And I say, ‘When are you going to hire me?’ And Pat said, “Bill, I’d love to, but I can’t afford you.’”
The next day, Riddell got a call from Kelly, who told him the sales rep running Surgical Supply’s Georgia territory had quit. The next week, Riddell was in Savannah for the company. Two and a half years later, he came back to Jacksonville to take over that territory for Surgical Supply.
Shortly thereafter, Intermedco promoted Kelly and brought him to headquarters in Houston, leaving Riddell working with a new general manager. “He and I were like oil and water, and I knew my time was short there,” he recalls. He started planning his own physician supply company.
Soon afterward, Kelly called him. Having been forced to resign at Intermedco, he was returning to the Jacksonville area to work for Miltex. “He asked if I wanted to do some ride days with him, so I told him I’m going to start my own company,” says Riddell. “He told me to hold on; he was coming to Florida in two weeks and we could talk then.”
The two met in a LaQuinta motel room to discuss their plans. “At first, he tried to talk me out of doing it,” recalls Riddell, “but I told him I was tired of being hamstrung by other people.” Kelly soon came around, and asked Riddell if the two of them could enlist a third person to start the company. They did – Clyde Young, also of Intermedco.
Young and Riddell drove to Atlanta on a Friday to buy inventory from Hugh Cooper at Atlanta Medical, who had agreed to help the young company. “We started selling on Monday.”
And with that, Physician Sales and Service was launched in 1983.
Upside down
Richard Riley was a young salesperson at Surgical Supply in Jacksonville in 1979 when Pat Kelly arrived that spring to become general manager of the company, which had been acquired by Intermedco. “The company wasn’t sales-oriented,” recalls Riley. “So when Pat came in 1979, he turned it upside down. He turned it into a sales organization almost overnight.” Kelly could do such things – and get others to join him, willingly.
For example, twice before, Surgical Supply had asked Riley to take a territory in Tallahassee, Fla., “I told them I didn’t even know how to spell it,” he recalls. “Then Pat came, and within two weeks – I don’t know what it was – I was ready to move to Tallahassee.
“I saw the future of the company and what he was going to do. There would be lots of education, sales training and growth. He was a great motivator, so I went to Tallahassee – without any resistance – in July 1979.”
After Kelly, Riddell and Young started PSS, Kelly took to calling Riley regularly in Tallahassee asking him to join PSS in Jacksonville. “I told him to leave me alone, knowing that once they got stabilized, I would go,” recalls Riley. Six months later, he and his wife – and four kids – moved to Jacksonville. “With four kids, it was risky, but it was worth taking the risk. And with Pat as a leader, we knew the thing would work.”
Riley didn’t leave PSS until after its acquisition by McKesson Medical-Surgical in 2015. “I was the last standing founder,” he says.
This stuff doesn’t just happen
Gene Dell, who in the early 1980s was selling lumber to contractors, first ran into Bill Riddell through his brother-in-law. It was happenstance. At the time, Riddell, Young and Kelly were dreaming up their new physician supply company. “Bill said to me, ‘You are exactly what we need,’” recalls Dell, who ultimately became COO of PSS World Medical before leaving the company to join Riddell at HealthLink. “I was young, aggressive and I had the gift of gab.”
A couple of months later, Dell ran into Riddell again. “‘We’re fixing to start; we need guys like you,’” Riddell again told him. “Sixty days later, I ran into him again. That doesn’t just happen. The Lord was pointing me in the right direction.” Riddell told him Dell needed to meet his partner, Pat Kelly. At the time, Dell was frustrated with the lumber business and was open for a change. “So I went to see Pat.
“He asked to see my resume, but I didn’t have one,” he recalls. So Kelly gave him a legal pad, and Dell wrote a list of jobs he had had in the past three to four years. “He said to me, ‘You’ve had a lot of jobs,’ and I said, ‘Pat, if you look at them, I had more responsibility and success with each one, but every one of them wanted to put a ceiling on my head.’ He said, ‘You’re exactly what we want.” Dell came in as one of PSS’s very first sales trainees.
“Being a sales trainee meant you did some receiving, you put inventory on the shelf, you boxed the UPS, you cleaned the bathroom and emptied the trash,” says Dell. Seriously, the fact was, Kelly and Riddell lacked the money to hire an experienced sales force, so they decided to “grow their own,” usually young people and/or recent college grads, and teach them how to sell. The one prerequisite: The person had to have the desire to succeed.
“Here was a guy who was open and excited and passionate about doing something,” said Dell, referring to Kelly. “I didn’t know anything about the business, about medical supplies, about the competition. All I knew was that this guy was going to allow me to be all I could be, if I wanted.”
As a trainee, Dell started working his way through Kelly’s home-grown sales training program. Kelly had put together a catalog of all the young company’s manufacturers and products, from A to Z. Each week, the trainee would study the letter of the week, pick a product and then “sell” it via role-playing it to Kelly and whoever else happened to be in his office at the time.
“Pat was the kind of guy who would take passion or drive over pure ability,” says Dell. “If you had raw talent or raw ability, and the right attitude and drive, he loved that. He loved the underdog, because he was one, having grown up in the boys’ home. I think he enjoyed giving the underdog the chance to win.
“Our culture was such that we had the freedom to disagree with each other. The company was like a family: You fought, you made up and you went on; no grudges. And Pat loved the challenge. He loved someone to say, ‘Pat I’m not sure that’s right; let me tell you why.’”
Beach patrol captain
Doug Barrow, managing partner, BR Surgical, was working as a beach patrol captain in Jacksonville Beach toward the end of his schooling at the University of North Florida when he got a call from his brother-in-law, Richard Riley, who was working for Surgical Supply Company.
“Richard calls me and says he has gone to work for this new general manager at Surgical Supply who’s putting together a training program for new reps,” recalls Barrow. “‘You ought to come interview.’” The new general manager was Pat Kelly, who had been transferred by Intermedco to its newly acquired Jacksonville branch in 1981.
“I really just expected to go in and have a conversation with Patrick,” recalls Barrow. “But by the end, I have a job.”
Two years later, Intermedco brought Kelly to Houston to serve as the company’s national sales manager. But Kelly had other ideas; so did Intermedco. That led to the founding of PSS. About six months later, Barrow joined the new firm.
“Patrick was really a visionary. You had the feeling, if he had his hands on something, it was going to be successful.”
When you’re ripe, you’re rotten
Kelly was a man who did indeed have a strong vision of the future and an equally strong way of communicating it – some might say “selling” it – to others.
“He was a man of action,” says Barrow. “Some people talk about racing, other people go out and race. He was a great salesman; he was a mentor; he was a lifelong learner and giver.
“He used to say, ‘When you’re ripe, you’re rotten.’ Whenever we reached a goal, there was always a bigger one ahead. When PSS was started, you could see the shift in the marketplace. Many of the companies that used to supply hospitals were rapidly getting out of that. Around 1981, you could see that distinction between alternate supply and hospital companies. Patrick had the vision to see that. He moved Surgical Supply in that direction, and he started PSS that way.
“I’m not sure that the idea of being a national company was on anybody’s mind in the beginning. I do believe that as the business progressed, it grew into a Southeastern company; and then, he had the vision of the first national physician supply company.”
Pat Kelly’s vision is as pertinent today as it was in 1983, says Riddell. “You have to look at the things that are currently happening and know they won’t stay the same. That’s especially true in our industry.
“Some people get scared by change. Pat believed that change was to be embraced, and that you had to find the little nuggets of gold in it. We were very optimistic about change, because we knew that without it, things are stagnant and boring.”
“Pat had the ability to see opportunity and understand that there’s risk associated with it. But he was willing to accept that risk, knowing that if his vision was right, the outcome would be worth it.
“He was big on innovation, creativity. When we started doing same-day service in 1990, people thought we were crazy – going into new markets and trying to do that. And the cost. But it was an innovative strategy; nobody else was doing it; and it took hold and allowed us to be different than our competitors.”
Brings out the best
Kelly had another gift – the ability and willingness to see more in people than they saw in themselves, according to those with whom Repertoire spoke.
“Patrick liked to say, ‘I hire CEOs, not truck drivers,’” says Barrow. “He wasn’t saying that everyone should be a CEO. What he was saying was, ‘This guy should be the CEO of his route,’ or ‘This person could be CEO of the warehouse, or maybe the company someday, or maybe his own company.’
“He saw more in you than you saw in yourself. He put that notion in your head, and he challenged you and gave you responsibility. If you didn’t make it, you weren’t necessarily out the door. And if you think about it, there are a lot of people in the industry, like me, who started companies or rose in companies, who came out of that culture.”
Kelly learned the lessons of leadership not only through a tough upbringing at the Virginia Home for Boys, but in Vietnam, where he fought in 1968. But in his new company, Physician Sales and Service, he found the perfect vehicle in which to apply them.
“How were you going to grow rapidly and find enough people to go into sales territories?” says Barrow, referring to the early days of PSS. “Patrick’s thought about hiring young, aggressive people and giving them responsibility is something we lived by.
“None of us knew any better. We just thought, this is the way things happen.”
Says Gene Dell, “Pat’s whole philosophy was, ‘We want to give people the ammunition they need to go to war, and then get out of their way. We don’t want to load them down with a bunch of paperwork and parameters. We’ll have guidelines and rules; but every situation is different.’” It was up to the sales rep to take it from there. And Kelly trusted they could.
“He was a great motivator,” says Riley. “He gave everybody opportunities. If people grasped them, they went places.”
Pat Kelly: Philanthropist
Pat Kelly transformed an industry, but he did much, much more, says Doug Barrow, BR Surgical, one of Physician Sales & Services’ first reps. He helped kids around the world, particularly those without parents. Kelly himself had grown up at the Virginia Home for Boys.
For example, after stepping down as CEO of PSS in October 2000, Kelly traveled thousands of miles to more than 30 countries, and helped build orphanages in countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam. He was also a supporter and investor in Seamark Ranch, a home for children in Green Cove Springs, Fla. In fact, near the end of his life, he planned building a couple of more homes at Seamark Ranch.
“Pat invested in those people who weren’t always offered the best start in life,” says Barrow. “And you can see them planted throughout the community and the world.”