Pharmacy U news

Wealth tends to sneak up on you as you pay off your first pharmacy mortgage and the surpluses start. Learning how to live with wealth is in fact, a new skill that needs to be learned, just like you learned your professional skills. It takes time, but the time is well worth it especially in family-run pharmacy operations.

You are the average of the 5 people you hang around with most. But what does that mean for a pharmacy dispensary if people are too hard to come by? We have a few problems in the mix right now. Pharmacy is a tough, grinding job. Minimum wage continues to grow, putting all local entry-level jobs on the same scale. A pandemic conditioned society to work from home or in hybrid models. Society expects to be paid top dollar with social media job titles, right away.

Family-owned businesses possess many strengths, such as their ability to look at the long-term development of their operation and align interests between management and owner. This is especially true of “owner-operator” structures often seen with independent pharmacy operators.

The difference between elites in any category is less than one per cent. The best of the best out-perform their colleagues across many measures of success, but in the end, what separates the greatest from the good pile lies in the fine details.

Last time we met, I encouraged you to consider conferences as a great place to find new ideas. Writing that post got me to reflect on the various conferences I have attended throughout my career. I thought I would share a story with you today.

When I sit down to write this blog, it not uncommon for me to identify experiences I had at various conferences to use as inspiration for my writing. I realize now that we really shouldn’t be surprised about that. After all, a conference is not a natural place where we find ourselves, so when we get there, we absorb and process things differently.

Change has been a fact of life since the first pharmacy opened its doors many centuries ago. And it’s a challenge pharmacists and pharmacist-owners will face for years to come.

As Peter Drucker famously said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." When it comes to measuring performance, pharmacist-owners often operate in a business vacuum. They might talk to a neighbouring business, a fellow pharmacist in the next community, or an entrepreneur friend (but probably not a pharmacist-owner).