Mark Newberry and the $1.78 beginning

Mark Newberry once framed a time sheet showing 3.47 hours of work and $1.78 in pay. He had started helping in his father’s store at five. There are grander objects with which to decorate an executive’s office. Few do such an economical job of explaining how long a business has been part of somebody’s life.

The child who stocked shelves became the owner of Tarrytown Pharmacy in Austin. Later, he founded Tarrytown Expocare, a separate business that grew beyond Texas and attracted institutional investors. The distance between those enterprises is considerable. One carries a neighborhood’s name above the door; the other carried that name into a national operation.

Yet the most interesting part of Newberry’s career lies between those two descriptions. He inherited a store with a history, then spent years introducing things its earliest customers could scarcely have anticipated: online marketing, smartphone offers, new business lines. His version of continuity has involved a surprising amount of alteration.

A family tradition of changing the shop

Tarrytown Pharmacy opened on December 6, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Its original owner was Guy Kelly. The Newberry name arrived soon afterward, when businessman Gatewood Newberry bought the store. In 1950 he sold it to his younger brother Jack, also known as J.D., Mark’s grandfather.

In 1973, Mark’s father Brian took over. He had graduated from the University of Texas College of Pharmacy in 1968 and worked elsewhere before returning. One of his decisions was to remove the soda fountain and expand the inventory. Even a beloved family business occasionally has to tell nostalgia to move its elbows.

Brian later moved the shop into a larger space across the parking lot, beside the post office. The move made room for more gifts, cards and cosmetics. The business’s identity survived a change of premises and the loss of a feature that might have seemed inseparable from an old neighborhood drugstore. Adaptation was already part of the family inheritance.

For Mark, the succession began with an ordinary retail education. Shelf work came first. Cashier duties followed in his early teens, then work elsewhere in the store. The sequence matters: long before he could make a strategic decision, he had encountered the small tasks through which a shop either runs properly or irritates everyone in it.

“It reminds me that this didn’t happen overnight”

Mark Newberry, on his childhood time sheet

Newberry graduated from Austin High School in 1996, undertook undergraduate studies at Texas Christian University, and earned his Pharm.D. at the University of Texas in 2003. His father wanted him to gain experience with another employer. He went to Vail, Colorado, and worked in a Walmart Supercenter before returning to Austin and becoming the store’s owner in April 2004.

Twenty-first-century ideas, neighborhood-sized budgets

A familiar name can persuade people to enter a shop. It cannot, by itself, decide what they will find there or whether they will return. Newberry’s retail experiments addressed that less sentimental side of ownership. He was willing to try new technology, provided it could justify the expense and make sense to the customer using it.

In 2013, he tested RxWiki’s Digital Pharmacist program. Over the first two months, the store’s Facebook audience more than doubled, and online visitors requested driving directions more than 300 times. Directions were a useful measure for a shopkeeper: somebody was trying to turn an internet search into an actual visit. Digital attention had acquired a destination.

The following February, Tarrytown Pharmacy introduced Shelfbucks, an Austin company’s system for sending offers to shoppers’ phones. Beacons on the shelves connected the products in front of a customer with information and discounts on a screen. A store with roots in 1941 had become a testing ground for a retail startup.

The mechanics were deliberately practical. Customers could use an iPhone or Android phone to see offers on nearby products and redeem them at the cashier. The familiar business of finding a bargain had acquired a different set of tools. The coupon, at least, no longer needed to live at the bottom of a handbag.

Newberry’s selection process asked two questions: did the technology give customers value, and was it simple to use? Those requirements gave him grounds to reject a pitch as well as accept one. For an independent retailer, an impressive demonstration means little if explaining the thing becomes another full-time job.

He also understood his budget. The store could not develop its own sophisticated retail software at the scale available to large chains. Working with an outside developer offered another route. He negotiated a discounted rate in exchange for letting Shelfbucks test the platform in his store. Both parties had something the other wanted.

The business questions behind the experiment were specific. Which offers attracted attention? Which aisles interested shoppers? Would people using the system buy a larger basket of goods? Newberry wanted to compare shopping behavior rather than simply announce that the store possessed new equipment. The phone was interesting because it might improve the shop.

The family name leaves Austin

Expocare developed alongside this retail work. Its roots go back to services begun by Tarrytown Pharmacy in 2007, initially for 150 people around Austin. A dedicated operation followed. As founder and chief executive, Newberry took a business that had grown out of a local store into a different commercial setting, with agency relationships and expansion across state lines.

By 2019, Expocare counted more than 6,000 people among those it served. The original neighborhood name now belonged to a business whose work extended well beyond that neighborhood.

Sheridan Capital Partners invested at the end of 2019. Newberry remained chief executive during the expansion that followed. In October 2020, Expocare announced acquisitions involving businesses in Georgia, South Carolina and New Jersey. Its reach then covered 13 states. The geography makes the change in scale plain: Austin had become a starting point.

His comments about choosing advisers provide a glimpse of what he wanted from a transaction. In describing GuideCap Partners, he emphasized its attention to the business and its people, along with its ability to explain the company’s potential beyond the financial statements. A founder asking outsiders to understand his company was also asking them to understand what made it worth building.

On November 14, 2025, Carlyle acquired Expocare from Sheridan, which retained a minority stake. At that point the company operated through 12 regional pharmacies and served 36 states. Mark Lashley was named as CEO in the announcement. Newberry’s place in this chapter is as the founder and former chief executive of the company that reached it.

It is easy to make the acquisition the final scene. Transactions offer a date, a buyer and a tidy change of ownership. A career, however, also contains the work that continues away from the deal announcement. Newberry’s connection with Austin’s institutions gives this story a second geography, much smaller than a map of 36 states.

The sign at the school gate

His professional ties to the University of Texas continued after graduation. He served on its admissions committee and later its College of Pharmacy advisory council. In 2013, the college recognized him with its Distinguished Young Alumnus Award. The institution that had trained both him and his father became another place where he contributed time.

There were other local commitments: school athletics, community boards and youth organizations. Together they place the entrepreneur within the civic life of the city where he grew up. A business biography can reduce these activities to a row of affiliations. One small incident at Casis Elementary gives them a more concrete shape.

In August 2025, the school thanked Newberry for donating a new LED marquee sign. He had donated its previous sign years earlier. On noticing that it needed an upgrade, he contacted the school to ask whether it wanted a newer one. The school had not prompted him to do so.

There is something pleasingly workmanlike about the gesture. He saw an object that had served its purpose, recognized that it could work better, and arranged a replacement. The public thank-you concerned a piece of school equipment rather than a grand new institution. It was useful, visible and close to home.

The school sign and the old time sheet belong at opposite ends of Newberry’s story. One records how early he entered a family enterprise; the other shows him still paying attention to the neighborhood around it. Between them are a degree, a succession, retail experiments and a company carried into national ownership. The first recorded pay was modest. The habit of turning up had rather more staying power.