2026 Dynamic Dozen No. 9: Alps Pharmacy

SBJ: Alps Pharmacy has been a Springfield Business Journal Dynamic Dozen honoree in 2021, 2022 and again in 2026. What’s your secret sauce for growth?
Don Savley: The first and foremost thing of everything we do is all about the people. When you look at our mission, the last part of it is the Alps way, which is carrying the most, giving our best and living to serve. That’s to our patients as well as our personnel.
Melody Savley: A lot of community involvement and not only as a company, but we’ve encouraged our staff to get involved in different community nonprofits, serving on boards.

SBJ: Did anything change in 2025? Is there anything key to your more recent growth?
Don Savley: We opened a new store in the fall 2022, which is a community pharmacy in Anderson. We opened our gift shop in 2023. We opened a big new retail center in Nixa that we bought in 2022, and these new entities inside of it are new growth for us. They opened at the end of 2023. We opened a direct primary care, also, in 2024.
Melody Savley: We have two nurse practitioners there that are seeing patients.
Don Savley: And we opened our ambulatory infusion center in 2025.
Melody Savley: People can walk in and get infusions. It’s a lot more convenient than to have them go to the hospital, park and walk a mile. They can just park right out front, and it’s a spa-like environment for them, so that’s been very popular as well. ... [We] try to pamper them a little bit, whether they’re getting something they probably don’t want to have to have, for a chronic illness usually.
Don Savley: And I think the clinic affects all of it. We increased clinical services throughout all of our pharmacies [in terms of] personnel and training. The culmination of these really fueled growth and especially hit 2025 because they’re becoming more mature.

SBJ: There’s a lot of discussion about shortages of healthcare professionals. Does that talent pipeline issue affect your business?
Don Savley: Absolutely it does. We’ve been fortunate, however, that a lot of the things you just heard us say about, that we do differently, that we are very diverse – so is the population of pharmacists and technicians, and they like different challenges and our benefits and things that we offer.
Melody Savley: We’re in a pharmacist healthcare shortage. This year we needed 14,000 pharmacists across the United States, and we’re only graduating 8,000. So that leaves a big hole. But we refuse to lower our standards on who we hire.

SBJ: What has Alps Pharmacy’s growth enabled you to do?
Don Savley: Well, I’d say taking care of our patients in a broader form, in different points in their life and needs. ... We’ve been able to [build offerings] like our direct primary care. It’s a cash model of convenience, and so (patients) can pay a reasonable sum every month, and they can see the provider as often as they want and that doesn’t change.
Melody Savley: And I think it’s allowed... us to be able to afford more technology. And it’s also allowed us to hire more staff to actually do projects. Like this year, we’re going to have a project with helping to detect colon cancer. … You have to have the staff to come out from behind the counter and actually take care of people.