I am seeking one or more persons interested in learning what I do as The Pharmacy Sage, and discovering how to do it. This is not a job recruiting post. It is simply to locate those who are interested in emulating what I do.

If interested, contact me at lester@rxresultsnow.com, or by calling 518-382-1990.

All inquires are kept strictly confidential.

Wellness has never been practiced properly in a chain pharmacy. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

Yet, you can create one that totally differentiates you from all other pharmacies in your trading zone. If you have the passion and the drive to create the pharmacy of your dreams, it can happen now. And you can make your family a lot wealthier in the process.

Yes, there are pitfalls. Nevertheless, there is a proven path to financial freedom that a select group of your colleagues have pursued with great success. Many enjoy personal incomes of high six figures. They also enjoy working fewer hours.
You can discover and embrace that very same prolific business model. It’s all about:

• Compounding
• Natural medicines (nutraceuticals)
• Collecting a fee for your expertise on chronic diseases
• Strategic marketing that creates the results you want and fattens your bank account

“Wellness” Helps Your Patients, and Fattens Your Bank Account

“Wellness” is alive and prospering for those who use it properly. Helps more patients feel better, live longer, and enjoy those extra years. Also, puts significantly more money in your bank account, because your patients trust you more, and accept your recommendations. And those recommendations are decidedly different from what they will hear anywhere else. Causes patients to spend more money on your products and services.

Getting Started

You can easily get started by putting a few higher quality nutraceuticals in your front-end and systematically advertising them from the standpoint of the benefits they deliver to your patients.

Wellness is about your patients.

It’s also about your bank account.

Yes, indeed, Wellness is the wave of the future for you as an owner. Even if it’s not a part of your name or your logo, it should become part and parcel of your thinking. Your approach is to enable people to enjoy good health, and you become known as the community’s premier purveyor of it. Builds your brand as it puts money in your bank account. Also enables you to leave a powerful legacy. Isn’t that why you went to pharmacy school in the first place?

Yes, wellness, as the foundation for your independent pharmacy, is marching ahead. So should you.

Your patients and your bank account benefit as never before!

If you’re not yet truly acquainted with this business model, you’ll want to find out more. And you can do so by getting a free copy of my report ““The Pharmacy Sage’s Start Your Own Pharmacy.”

How to Treat Patients the Way You Want, and Score the Life You Want

If you’re sick and tired of working for a chain store and being unable to take care of your patients the way you really want, the way that you had in mind when you first graduated from pharmacy school, then the following information is decidedly for you.

• Create a niche and own 100% of it using a tried and true business model. That model is based on compounded scripts, as well as lifestyle changes, and supplements that really get the job done.
• Organize everything around your strategies and marketing, not around your daily operating activities (may seem challenging, but it works when backed up with the right advice).
• Become a pharmacy marketplace disrupter, meaning you disrupt how and where people obtain their information and products so that they come to your pharmacy, not any other.
  
• Discover the 3 most powerful, potent, rules for wealth gathering in your pharmacy. They are so potent, you will build cash flow and profits faster because you know and practice them. And, they will help you avoid making the mistakes ever-so-many of your colleagues make in their pharmacies.

In the final analysis, it’s all about treating patients in ways that other pharmacies do not…and probably cannot. It’s all about why you went to pharmacy school in the first place.

And it’s all about what you’re not able to do for them given the constraints of working for a chain pharmacy, or one that is located inside a big box store.

Want to change your future? I bet you do!

Consider this: you can create a pharmacy with a different business model. One in which you help your patients attain much higher levels of health and longevity than they can get in any other pharmacy in your community. It’s also one where you call the shots, work fewer hours, and do NOT suffer the stress and pressure of your current job.

You can succeed to the highest level of your aspirations when you make the right choices, when you utilize the best tools available. It’s called a Wellness Pharmacy.

For more information, send for my free report “Start Your Own Pharmacy.”

Is your life how you imagined it would be as a pharmacy owner? Or is it, in reality, more complicated and stressful than you had planned? Do you get to the end of each day and wonder how you managed to achieve it all between the phone calls, interactions with patients, training and supervising your team members, and doing everything else that goes with owning a pharmacy? And, at the end of each day, do you feel as if you’re getting closer and closer to burnout?

Today, we need tools to help us push back against the culture of burnout and overwork. Rest is one of those tools.

Some of the World’s Greatest Minds

Some of the greatest minds in the world accomplished their highest level of creativity in just one to two hours a day and spent the rest of their time hiking in the woods, taking long walks, or writing letters. Why shouldn’t you do the same, focusing only on those things that produce the biggest results and the most profit?

If some of history’s greatest figures such as Charles Darwin didn’t put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret to their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored (and succeeded), but how they rested, and how the two relate.

John Lubbock is another. He is a hard charging alpha male whose fame as a politician rested on an advocacy of rest. Bank holidays were his invention, and they sealed his popular reputation.

Scientists and researchers repeatedly discovered that top thinkers and performers in various walks of life and industries were defined not by how hard they worked, but by how much rested—how much they enjoyed their leisure hours.

The Critical 4 Hours

According to Tim Ferris, author of the “4 Hour Work Week,” it is possible to own a business and work as few as 4 hours per week. Is that possible for pharmacy owners? Read on.

The 4-hour work week, as defined by Ferris, was based on the findings of serious Oxford and Cambridge students in the early 1900’s.

What do you accomplish in your 4 most productive hours? And, if you could increase your productivity in those 4 hours by 10%, what could you accomplish?

David Nicoletti, owner of Prescription Labs Compounding Pharmacy in Tucson, has actually surpassed that gold standard. He has a pharmacy that was underperforming when we first got together. In a matter of 5 short years, he acquired 4 pharmacists and 12 compounding techs for his compounding only pharmacy that features only high performing herbal and homeopathic medicines in the front-end.

Today, that pharmacy runs like a well-oiled machine, and he visits it only sporadically—perhaps once a month, perhaps less frequently. He and his wife, Diane, live in a new home several hundred miles away.

Others have followed in his footsteps, even retired in a grand and glorious fashion.

What’s the secret to their success?

• Having a business model that is not dependent on insurance companies
• Training and delegating everything that they did not want to do any longer, especially if they wanted to work less hard, not more hard.
• Having standards of excellence to which everyone must adhere
• Having a culture of what their pharmacy is all about and why they established it to begin with
• Making certain that each and every hour of every work day contributes directly and measurably to their aims, goals, and their longer-range objectives

Stop Trying to Do Everything Right

You need to do one thing and only one thing right. And that is to concentrate on those few things that contribute the 80% of your profits.

Everything that goes into the building of your brand falls within that wheelhouse. Everything else should be delegated. You should be concentrating on the details and only those details. It’s called brand building, and yes, it’s all about profit building, too.

“That Which Matters the Most Should Never be at the Mercy of That Which Matters the Least”
– The Pharmacy Sage

It’s Time to Get Unstuck

And so, working smarter, not harder is the order of the day. The problem: you’re trying to do too much yourself. The solution: anything is possible when you stop trying to do everything at the same time. Do less, delegate the rest.

Practice the 80/20 Principle (Pareto’s Law): 20% of your ideas produce 80% of the results, and 20% of your time produces 80% of your profits (money in your pockets).

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”-- Confucius

When You Stop Trying to do So Much, You Can Get So Much More Done

It’s all about doing less and accomplishing more. It’s also about putting the resources under your command to the best use (The Pharmacy Sage maintains that most pharmacy owners are getting less than 30% total value out of all the resources at their disposal).

If you’re waiting for all the planets to align and for the conditions to be perfect before you make changes to create that pharmacy you’ve been dreaming about all your life, you’re letting the gremlins of resistance that live in your head rule the day. It’s time to turn the tables.    

All of these subjects are covered in greater depth in other blogs I have posted. They and other contributing factors are additionally well detailed in my report “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches in Your Pharmacy.”

Whether you plan to open a pharmacy in the near future, or sometime further down the road, the following 3 points are significantly important to you.

1. How good is your proposed location—will it help you do more business, and with greater ease, or is it a deterrent to helping you achieve your aims and goals?
2. Do you have enough money—not only to set up your pharmacy business, but also to see you through the lean months before you start making a profit?
3. Do you have the right business model, strategies, and marketing to make it all happen? Are you sure?

Your Proposed Location

In choosing a location, you want to be closer to the people who have money to spend. Either locate in an area that has upscale homes, or on a major highway that is accessible to them. Your final choice should be in a retail setting where other stores are located that appeal to those with money to spend.

Determine That You Have the Right Amount of Money

Having the right sums of money seems to be foreign to most would-be owners. And that’s understandable because your pharmacy school did not teach you a significant amount of accounting, did they?

As such, the amount of money you need is based on two things:

• The cost of remodeling any retail space that you might select (being in a medical arts building close to the doctors no longer works)
• Having enough money, once you open your doors, to get you past the breakeven point, which can be 7 to 11 months following your grand-opening, provided you’re employing the right business model.

Differentiate Your Pharmacy

How you differentiate yourself is based on having the right business model, the best strategies, and what I call “strategic marketing.” That business model has been proven to be:

• Compounding
• Natural medicines
• Fee for services
• Strategic marketing

Strategic marketing gets you money that you can take to the bank without serious discounting or couponing. It is based on informing and educating people about what you do differently, and in a superior manner to any other pharmacies around you. It also decidedly builds your brand.

The Choice You Make Determines Whether You Have a Great Future or Not

Now, You Have Two Choices

• Follow this proven formula that has led to successful pharmacy openings one after another
  Or…

• Face a horrible destiny of joining the ranks of those who do not survive who make it to only one place: The bankruptcy court

Getting people to change their buying habits today is far more difficult than ever before.
Just imagine what will happen if you made the wrong decision, the one where you did not invest the time, effort or money in discovering what really works to getting a new pharmacy off the ground—off and running with plenty of new patients coming through the doors.
And just imagine what would happen to your family and its destiny, because you failed to act on information that could lead to success through building an ever-increasing cadre of patients who want to:

• Obtain your expert information because you are the “go-to” person in your community concerning chronic diseases. They get information from you they simply cannot get from their medical doctors.
• Obtain the very special high-quality products which never sell at sensible prices and which they simply do not get at CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Walmart, or Target because these particular brands are not mass distributed, not mass merchandised and not ever available at these giants (hence they are mostly available only at your pharmacy)

As The Pharmacy Sage, I provide all the business and product details to help you successfully go from concept to opening your doors. And I also provide a workable timetable to get you there in just 4 months.

For more information, send for my free report “The Pharmacy Sage’s Open Your Dream Pharmacy.”

Each One Alone Improves Results— Together, They Create a Blockbuster Future!

“Nothing succeeds like success” in an old adage in education. It is likewise applicable to successful businesses— especially independent pharmacies. Here are my suggested 7 very important recommendations to create that success.

1. Find out how to solve the single biggest problem facing most pharmacies today: how to hire the best people for each job
    opening— even in this labor market that’s getting tighter and tighter.

• Get new marketing to attract the most outstanding applicants in your marketplace
• Find out how to do the best job of interviewing— quickly and effectively— getting the right results. We’ve discovered new information even most of the big boys don’t yet know about.

2. Once you’ve found your “just right” new employee, we’ll show you how to train better than ever before. In fact, we’ve uncovered
    additional new, very sound techniques for helping your people learn how to do more and sell more— and do it in less time.
3. Get new advertising that’s guaranteed to get you direct immediate results— new patients buying your high-profit products and 
    services.
4. Also, discover how to take advantage of this big secret for boosting sales and profits. GE makes use of it every day. Dell has
    used it to steal business from IBM and Compaq. Our pharmacy clients, who apply it intensively, are making more-and-more
    money— and finding it ever-so-much easier to do so.
5. Discover the single biggest marketing secret for independent pharmacies. You get more repeat purchasers of your most
    profitable front-end products. They come back month-after-month— thus helping you pyramid your profits.

• Your independent pharmacy competition doesn’t have a clue about this strategy
• Your primary suppliers can’t teach it to you because they don’t know anything about it
• And those chain stores in your area— well, they just don’t have a clue
• It’s 7 times easier and 7 times more profitable to get your existing patients to spend another dollar than it is to get a new one. Make this work and you will instantly skyrocket your profits.

6. Turn your competitors’ strengths into weaknesses. We’ll show you how to carve out a special niche market for yourself— one
    in which the chain stores actually have difficulty competing with you. They wind up filling more-and-more less profitable
    prescriptions while you grab more-and-more high profit business. Once you occupy this niche, you will own almost 100% of
    its business.
7. Want to further dominate your competition? We’ll show you how to make information products one of your most vital tools. In
    fact, you’ll control information available to your customers in such a way that you minimize price resistance and maximize
    acceptance of your recommendations for helping people feel better and live longer. You’ll explode your profits and build more
    customer loyalty than you ever thought you could achieve.

Here at Rx Profits Now, we constantly work on getting your business to master the process of unleashing the collective genius of your people. Most pharmacies unleash about 20% at the very most.

Many of our clients have sales of one million to six million dollars. We have helped many of them create $100k to $200k in additional profits. What would you like to achieve?

For more information, download my free report “The Savvy Independent Pharmacy Owners Marketing Handbook.”

The Insurance Companies May Be One Reason, But That’s Not the Only One

The insurance companies are the main reason that your profits are being slashed so badly. On the other hand, beyond the insurance companies is another big factor that relates to why your profits are in a downward spiral.

Many a pharmacy is now following a new and different pathway to success. While the number of success stories are in the hundreds, they do, nevertheless, represent a tiny portion of the independent pharmacies in existence today.

And yes, they are the successful ones. The ones that are attracting many a new patient and providing them with newer and better ways to help them overcome their aches, pains, and other discomforts that are currently plaguing them.

What’s it all about?

Following Trends!

Perhaps a better question is in order: “is what got you where you are today going to get you where you want to go tomorrow?”
The rational answer is, “seemingly not.”

Current information indicates that the 3 key trends in the independent pharmacy industry today are:

• Compounding as a way of fulfilling prescription meds
  
• Nutraceutical supplements as a method by which you can significantly enhance your patients’ health and wellbeing
  
• Dispensing information about the above 2 matters as a way of building trust and loyalty to you as the “go-to” pharmacy. Case studies prove people will drive from greater and greater distances. Yes, they will bypass all of your competition, whether it is an independent, chain, or big box store, because you have solutions to their health needs they simply cannot get elsewhere. Our experience validates those studies.
  

There you have the hidden reason that your profits are being decimated. It is also the answer to what you can do about the entire situation…and especially your future.

It calls for a bit of a shift on your part because you need to embrace a different business model.
Such is the nature of being a pharmacy owner.

However, the future can be bright and shiny and full of good things. Such a future includes significantly more cash flow, as well as the gathering of a lot more wealth for your family. It also means having a pharmacy that’s more enjoyable to run because your stress level is much lower.

Thus, you commence to enjoy being a pharmacy owner in ways that you had originally envisioned.
Isn’t that a good reason for making the necessary changes?

For more information, send for my new free report “The 90 Day Independent Pharmacy Miracle.”

July 4th is a day in which ever-so-many people celebrate independence.

You, as an independent pharmacy owner, however may yet need to create a different kind of independence—one from the insurance companies that are dominating and depressing your cash flow, profits, and the way you help patients.

You need a different business model.

What’s the chance of your being able to do it? Very high, based on what other independent pharmacies have done.

Such a celebration occurs when you:

• Commence another income stream
• Embrace a different business model
• Create—or bring in—marketing so powerful, it enables you to drive hordes of new patients through the doors each and every month based on that new income stream
• Market to your existing health oriented patients who spend cash with you. Give them valid reasons to return more often and spend more money as you help them to attain higher and higher levels of good health— ways that help them feel better, live longer, and become more energetic. They all love you for doing that.

With the aid of the above, you quickly become identified as the “go-to” pharmacy, one that definitely delivers a new higher level of information. And one that offers those patients more respected herbal and homeopathic medicines that they are seeking more and more in order to combat and defeat their unwanted chronic disease.

Naturally, you must embrace new ideas. Indeed, thinking outside the box becomes basic and fundamental.

Then, you must pivot with an open mindedness seldom seen before by your colleagues.

And no, what you do should not be all about filling prescriptions. Rather should it be about helping people to “feel better, live longer, and really enjoy those golden years”.  That should be your brand-name promise—your Battle Cry.

You’re In Charge

The insurance companies may be picking your pockets. They may be robbing you of income that could--even should-- be yours. They even may be blocking the entire future of your family’s wealth from taking hold the way you want.
All of that is reversible, if you take just two simple steps:

1. Quickly increase your gross profits by 5% to 8% simply by making one easy change, by lowering your drug costs to chain store prices (feasible with new proprietary software, in spite of what your wholesaler or buying coop maintains).
2. Create at least one new income stream by embracing a different kind of business model—one that is succeeding for a small percentage of savvy independent pharmacy owners today.

Take charge of…

• How and when you consult to patients
• The amount of time you spend with them
• How you get paid
• How much cash flow and profits you generate
• How much wealth you can gather for yourself and your family

Here’s What It’s All About

What can you do for your patients and how can you help them? Provide them with new, different, and better solutions to such debilitating chronic diseases as:

• Arthritis
• Allergies
• Alzheimer’s prevention
• Asthma
• Weight loss
• Diabetes
• And many others

By now, as a reader of my blogs, you should be reasonably well acquainted with my thinking and that which I espouse for you as an independent pharmacy owner. However, if you’re still skeptical about the value of what I have been increasingly offering you as solutions to your most wicked problems, then perhaps you need to have a conversation with me.

To help you celebrate your own independence, I am offering every reader of my blog, a personal business analysis, FREE. No strings attached. No obligation.  I am perfectly happy to share with you, profit opportunities that lie hidden in YOUR pharmacy. Depending on varying factors, your opportunities may not be the same as another.

I’ll identify for you, how many I find, as well as how you can unleash them. Sometimes, I find as few as 10 Hidden Profit Opportunities. Other times, as many as 24.

Now is the time to emancipate yourself. Join the growing group of pharmacy owners who are enjoying running a Wellness Pharmacy—and prospering.

For more information, get my free report “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches In Your Pharmacy.”

Much has been written about the importance of setting goals and achieving them. You can read book after book published over the past 30 years that acclaims the importance of so-doing.

But what about the steps necessary to help you, the pharmacy owner, achieve those goals? What is it that you can do to more well-ensure that you get there?

That’s what this blog is all about.

Getting Started

Before you even attempt to get started, let me challenge you: open up your mind. Create a new mindset. Consider possibilities…even ask yourself “what if I really could achieve bigger and better goals for my bank account, and create more wealth? What if I could even make just some of them happen?”

Your Toolbox

First of all, break down any goal into smaller components. For instance, if you have a goal to achieve a certain amount of nutraceutical sales by the end of the year, then break that down by quarter and then by month. By so-doing, you immediately make the bigger goal much more achievable.

And that process gives you immensely much more motivation to pursue the larger goal.

At this point, let me inject the fact that there are tasks that you enjoy and others that you do not. Make a list of the ones you do not enjoy doing…and then delegate them. Be certain to adequately train whatever individuals you designate to take over those tasks so that they will be performed to the level that you want them. Remember, if you can do them and it’s not a requirement of your pharmacy license or your job as the owner and entrepreneur, then it can be done equally as, if not better, by someone else. It’s learnable. Therefore, it’s teachable, and it’s your job to teach others those particular tasks you don’t want to do so that it gets done rhythmically time and time again, just by somebody else.

That act of delegating turns you into a much more successful leader.

Now that you have broken your goals down into smaller pieces, and delegated what you do not want to do, let me suggest that you sit down in a quiet place, close your eyes, and create a mental movie of any one particular goal that you want to achieve. Picture yourself achieving it, doing what you have to do in the form of a simple action plan i.e. training your people, doing some upgraded marketing, etc. so that you have a complete moving picture of how you are going to achieve that particular goal.
Once you have successfully created that mental movie, repeat the process at least once each week. Choose the same day and the same time of day so that you get into the habit of performing this detail.

In addition, a tool that has worked for ever-so-many goal-seekers is to write your individual short-term goal on a 3x5 card and post it in a prominent position where you will see it each and every day. Perhaps your bathroom mirror may be the best locations for you to use. This constant reminder may become a very effective tool in reminding you on a daily basis of your goal and its importance.

By this time, I hope you’re well on your way to at least getting started to achieve your first goal. In order to get there, you will need some additional support. That’s true not only to gain the emotional support you need, but also some actual physical help. Such assistance can best be had from:

• Your spouse
• Your team

Your spouse would be your best source of support. Even if she/he is not totally in accord with the goal, or has not previously been exposed to it, that person who is closet to you in every way, form, and manner is probably in the best position to help you achieve some of the aspects of the goal with words of encouragement and perhaps a few suggestions. The method by which you will most likely achieve the goal, however, is with the aid of your team members. Training each one who is even remotely concerned with this goal is paramount. The more they know and the more they understand the reason, the more they will get involved. And with the proper motivation, including the answer to the question “what’s in it for me,” they will become extremely involved.

Recognition, both individually and collectively, goes a long way. So do selected financial rewards.
Once you have achieved even the smallest of goals, reward yourself. Do something that you enjoy doing, go out for a good meal, etc. Do reward yourself.

Your Vision

Now, articulate your vision. Make sure that vision is clear and in writing as per my blog posted May 29th, 2018.

To make all of this happen, your probably need to realign some time management. By that I mean how you allocate time to opportunities versus problems is paramount. Opportunities will help you develop more cash flow and more profits. The solving of problems should be delegated. After all, if you can do it, you can teach it. And someone else can learn to take that “monkey off your back.” (see my blog of April 11th, 2017 for details)

And finally, seek advice from someone who has considerably more expertise in these areas than you. Hiring a consultant or coach who has been there and done that exactly the way you want to succeed is basic and fundamental to your obtaining the success you want. It is an investment, not an expense, and should be approached from that vantage point.

There you have the secrets to successfully achieving your goals. They are perhaps briefer than you would otherwise need. Perhaps a book can be written on it. However, the last of the list, seeking advice from someone who has “been there and done that” is perhaps the greatest one of all.

I guess you could call that goals, guts, and greatness.

For more information on how exceptional pharmacy owners think, get my free report, “Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Marketing for Independent Pharmacies.”

The future of your pharmacy rests on your vision.

It is paramount to what you will do and how successful you will become.

Essentially, your vision should evolve around the following 6 topics:

• Products and services that you sell
• Markets you serve and how you serve them
• Type of people that you want in your organization as team members, and concepts about how they can be rewarded for creating excellence.
• Your core area of competence, which is the way that you will carry out your mission.  This will include your core values and your core purpose which is the basis on which you are driven to become different and superior in your field.
• How you will relate to the community.
• What are your future expectations, as expressed in goals for one to three years in the future (and beyond)?

The elements of your vision should indicate a culture that you want to establish and a way of differentiating yourself. For instance, do you want to have products that are different from those in the chain stores or big box stores in your trading zone? If so, how? Are they higher quality? Do you have products that others do not sell, such as N-Acetyl Cystine?

Such should be the nature of your vision statement. And you should spell out, descriptively, all the details of each and every one of the six points.

No two pharmacies will be alike. No two pharmacies will have the exact same vision.

The above six points are purely guidelines.

What will yours look like?

It just takes one phone call to change the future of your pharmacy. Sign up for a free business analysis, and let me help you figure out your best plan of action.

Christine Blank wrote a very challenging article. It revealed ever-so-many basics regarding why the independent pharmacy should be concerned about Amazon.

Nevertheless, if a pharmacy truly differentiates itself, it creates a niche that Amazon would have trouble invading.

What’s it all about? Informing and educating the patient.

The independent pharmacy owner should be the master of chronic diseases. It’s a field not sufficiently well covered in medical school. Neither is it currently being mastered by chain store pharmacies or big box stores. Admittedly, it’s not taught in pharmacy schools, either.

The independent needs to search out the information and study it by himself. And, when he does, he differentiates himself and creates that niche where he can own almost 100% of that marketplace. For instance, if the patient does not know the value of N-Acetyl Cysteine and how it can help her ward off most any viral infection by building glutathione, then that’s information that he should be dispensing. Indeed, it should be the foundation of his helping people to feel better, live longer, and become more energetic.

And that’s just one sample. What about PQQ and its ability not only to energize the mitochondria, but also to rebuild those mitochondria that are dying. PQQ can be a tremendous source of energy, especially for seniors.

And those are just two examples. When they are marketed properly, online and offline, they can draw dozens of new patients.
Also, when the pharmacy owner backs up that marketing with other marketing that goes directly to his patients, once they sign on, then he can further indoctrinate them regarding how his solutions to aches, pains, and other maladies can benefit each patient.

Yes, Amazon is another competitor to be reckoned with. However, the independent pharmacy can create his own niche, and he can own almost 100% of it. The result: they visit more often, get expert advice from their favorite pharmacist, and they spend more money.

It’s all about the independent’s learning how to dispense something new and different: information that is not available from the chains or big box stores. Neither is it available from doctors. Then, he can not only attract patients like flies, he can also build significant wealth in his pharmacy. He just needs to pivot.

My job, as a pharmacy business consultant, coach, and analyst, is to ask questions— penetrating questions. Only by so doing can I get to the heart of the matter—separate symptoms from problems— then present solutions.

It's really not all that different than getting to the root of your patients malady, and finding a solution for them to treat the cause, not just alleviating their symptoms. 

So, I ask questions that go beyond the ordinary—seeking facts that uncover ideas that are not clearly or plainly in sight. Information which is important to ferreting out profit opportunities that lie hidden in your pharmacy. They’re always present; nevertheless, dormant, unrecognized, untapped.

Your job as a pharmacy owner is to have the valid answers to those questions.

What is it you don’t see, that I do? It’s more than just a fresh set of eyes, it’s a well-trained analytic mind, focused on pharmacy business opportunities, in ways others are not. I like to begin by asking questions, you may never have been asked before, such as:

• Is what got you where you are now, going to get you where you want to go? If your answer is “no,” you need a Strategic Plan. Without it, you will just continue to run in place.
  
  
• What differentiates you from the chains, big box stores—even other independents? It’s essential you develop a unique selling proposition and articulate it clearly in your advertising and marketing to your community.
  
  
• Do you know what your patients really value most? Most answers here are wrong! And, without it, you can’t give it to them.
  
  
• Are you organizing your time, effort, and other resources around winning strategies and great marketing? If not, why not? These are the tasks that create maximum profits
  
  
•  Are you still clinging to the status quo, which is based on yesterday’s breadwinners and mistakes? The world around you is changing quickly, and so should you. Constantly and proactively make your current business obsolete.
  
  
• On a daily basis, are you focusing your time on those few business building activities that contribute the most to increasing cash flow and profits?  There is absolutely no sense in spending one minute on anything that does not produce maximum profits and maximum cash flow. Everything else is a diversion.
  
  
• What do people who could be your patients want that they’re not finding from you and are obtaining elsewhere? A careful evaluation could give you the answers you need.
  
  

These are just a sampling of questions you should be able to answer without much thought. They are the heart of your business. 

The lack of proper answers, and certainly the lack of solutions, is blocking your cash flow increases. Isn’t it time you did something about it?

You can. Start by downloading my “Very Savvy Pharmacy Owner’s Marketing Handbook,” to get a head start on answering the questions above for yourself. Then, schedule a free consultation with me, for the solutions to your biggest problems.

Last week, we discussed 18 mindsets to put you on the path to success. Let’s take a look at the first one: “Always challenge the status quo.”

To do this, becoming an entrepreneurial genius is not necessary; however, developing some common street smarts is.
The pharmacy industry has its sacred cows and accepted practices, often based on premises that are no longer valid. That is, if you want to make a good living at it.

Innovation is discovery and creating disruption of conventional thinking and unleashing entrepreneurial savvy. That’s how Facebook was birthed in a dorm room, Amazon.com came from people not in the bookstore business, and Uber was created from people not in the taxi industry.

Just as successful pharmacy owners know that maintaining the status quo does not help them grow. Everything around you is constantly changing. You have to change along with them. Otherwise, you become a dinosaur.

Nothing differentiates you and it’s hurting your business and pommeling your bottom line. You’re paying too much to maintain the status quo.

Learn to recognize the constant urgency for change. Continuously ask yourself:

“Who is my customer?”

• What does he/she value?
• How does he/she decide to buy a service or goods?
• What does he/she really want?

Know your customer. Knowing their wants and needs are crucial to your success and can definitely give you a competitive edge. It shapes your marketing and reveals the strategies you need to be adopting. For example, let’s say you live in a community where the median age is 32, with less than 10% of the population being 65 or older, and your marketing screams you cater to the elderly: Senior Day Wednesday,  you accept Medicare, etc. Every pharmacy does it. Your marketing efforts are falling on deaf ears. Change your strategy, change your outcome.

​Your marketing should be bringing more people through your doors… to visit more often… and spend more money.

If your efforts in marketing, leadership or entrepreneurship is not providing you with immediate and measurable  results, get help from the outside. Change needs to happen now. The status quo is simply not enough.

What challenges are you now experiencing because of remaining complacent with the status quo? What are you doing to drive the change you need? Or what have you done to overcome those challenges?

Not sure where to start or exactly what you need to do? Contact us below to schedule a free consultation, with me, to explore your options. Also, be sure to visit our new FREE Resources page.