Pharmacy U news

The ‘complete retail pharmacy experience’ has a way of bringing out the pharm-grumpies. But take heart, there is an antidote. Not a pill (or a suppository like you were thinking – yes, you were), but it does involve looking inside and doing a little pharmacist-introspection.

In our series of blogs about benchmarking, we’ll discuss the best ways to answer a couple of vital questions about your pharmacy business: How much should you be spending on wages? And how do you know if your pharmacy’s departments – front-of-store and dispensary – are profitable enough?

You would think that leading down is the easiest form of leadership, and perhaps it is. But consider this: if it is supposed to be so easy, why is it so hard? Why is it so challenging?

Leaders build pipelines. They manage the future by thinking ahead while still managing the day. They forecast, they calculate, they design without allowing the anxiety of the unknown to take over. Always preparing for the next sequence greatly improves the chances of being ready to capitalize when that sequence happens.

We all know that the rules and regulations in pharmacy are cumbersome. Not only are there an endless number of rules, but they are ever changing.

One of the most important ways we lead is by leading up. This is key for a number of reasons. Perhaps most notably, it is because when we lead up, we make life easier for our boss. And in turn, our boss can make life easier for us. And if you are serving on a team with others who have the same boss, life can improve for all of you!

Solving hiring in pharmacy will first mean finding more candidates without a sizeable investment of our time. We need to automate hiring into a process that isolates precisely what we need, finds more puzzle pieces and brings them through a consistent and well-practised screening-interviewing-placement pipeline.

Bad accounting practices are just, well, bad – for your business and for its value when it comes time to sell. If your books are unreliable, a potential buyer is going to look askance at your pharmacy and wonder what else is wrong.