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"The Successful Pharmacy Owner is The One Who Discovers New Solutions Before Big Pharma & The Insurance Companies Destroy it."  -- The Pharmacy Sage

1/31/2019 0 Comments

The Relentless Pursuit of Patients & Profits

If you want to increase your patient base and your profits, then decidedly differentiate your pharmacy. The people who see your marketing should realize that you are obviously different in every way, form, and manner, especially when it comes to relieving their aches, pains, and other chronic maladies.

And that’s the key! Be noticeably different to the degree that other pharmacies cannot compete with you. When you do, you create a niche of which you will own 100%!

And when your marketing messages clearly disclose how your products and services are so superior...click here to read my full article in The Pharmacy Times.
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1/24/2019 0 Comments

Is This the Reason You’re Working Harder & Harder for Less and Less Money?

Your compensation is getting butchered by the insurance companies. Yes, your problem lies with the third-party payers; however, the solution lies with your business model.

It’s a fact: in one trading zone after another, where an independent pharmacy with the right business model, the right strategies, and the right marketing plan, that pharmacy has differentiated itself and risen above all others, so that it totally dominates the landscape. It totally DISRUPTS the marketplace. Meaning it can change patients’ buying habits in its favor. The longevity of such a pharmacy becomes markedly increased.

If you’re still filling traditional scripts, you’re probably experiencing what The Pharmacy Sage has been hearing from ever-so-many pharmacy owners day-in and day-out: “I’m having more and more problems paying the bills based on the monies the insurance companies are sending me!”

5 Key Questions

Finding answers to the following questions may be a very good starting point.

  1. Have I differentiated my pharmacy in the marketplace?
  2. Is what got me where I am today going to get me where I want to go tomorrow?
  3. Am I organizing my time, effort, and other resources around winning strategies and great marketing to build the future I want, or am I still clinging to the status quo, which is based on yesterday’s breadwinners and today’s mistakes?
  4. Am I focusing my time on those few activities that contribute the most to increasing cash flow and profits?
  5. What do patients and non-patients alike value the most that they’re not finding here and are seeking from our competitors?

Those are tough questions. And I believe that, at the end of your workday, you can be pretty tired. Nevertheless, in order to change your future, you need to change your thinking— and actions. Perhaps setting aside a couple of hours on a Saturday or Sunday will give you the quietude and peace of mind to tackle this very important subject. More relaxation produces better results.

The Value of Marketing

If your pharmacy school taught you anything about business subjects, you would have learned that marketing is the only element of your pharmacy business that creates significant results.

The Pharmacy Sage has discovered that 99% of all independent pharmacies waste most of their marketing dollars for lack of this specific expertise. The other 1% brought in expertise from the outside. On average, $15,000 a year is wasted by each of some 14,000 independent pharmacy owners today. That’s $210,000,000 gone. Down the drain. Each and every year. Talk about a train wreck!

What they didn’t teach it you in pharmacy school about business, and especially marketing, is costing you a bundle.

Playing the same old game makes you a dinosaur. In fact, to be more profitable and capable of administering to patients the way you want, some changes need to be made, especially to your business model.

The short version is you need to offer more of what those with money are seeking: customized scripts (compounds) and higher quality nutraceuticals. With the right marketing, your messages will resonate and penetrate. And your cash register will ring.
In each and every trading zone, other pharmacies, both chains and independents, have struggled to compete with the one and only Wellness Pharmacy that understands this proposition and gets it right.

To find out more about how you can achieve this exalted status, you may want to get my new marketing report “The 3 Biggest Mistakes Independent Pharmacies Make, Continue to Make— And What You Can Do About Them.”
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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1/3/2019 0 Comments

Want to Put a Spike in Your Cash Flow in 2019? Here’s How

There are 3 very apparent trends that could affect the destiny of your pharmacy in 2019. They are:

  • The downward trend in compensation by insurance companies re: traditional scripts
  • The rising importance of customized scripts, commonly called compounds
  • The constant growth of herbal and homeopathic supplements as a way of treating chronic diseases

The Tragedy of Learning Disabilities

Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in pharmacy organizations. Because of them, few independent pharmacies live even half as long as a person does. Most die before they pass the age of 35.
Perhaps your own pharmacy is subject to the following crippling learning disabilities.

  • The delusion of learning from experience. The school of hard knocks is not only very expensive, it can be totally misleading. Then, all your efforts make the problems worse.
  • The primary threats to your survival today come not from events, but from slow, gradual processes to which we are 90% blind. Learning disabilities in our organization are very often one of them.
  • The myth of teamwork. Most teams operate below the level of the lowest IQ in the group. The result is “skilled incompetence,” in which people in groups grow incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things, or doing the right things, the wrong way. As a result, they become very apt at keeping themselves from learning.

The Pharmacy Sage draws on science, wisdom, psychology, and the cutting edge of managerial thought, as well as entrepreneurial and leadership strategies and policies to create a far higher performing organization for you, with you as the supreme leader of the pack as the integral health builder in your community. 

Four New Year’s Resolutions You Should Make & Keep Guaranteeing That 2019 Will Be Your Best Year Ever

Then, adopt the following four resolutions to help ensure that 2019 will be your best year ever.

  1. Set meaningful goals—and post wherever they create influence. And that may mean on your bathroom mirror, if that is the location that gets the job done.
  2. Spend time doing what you want and delegate the rest. Concentrate only on the real money-making tasks each and every hour of every work day. Appoint an operations manager. Delegate to that ops manager anything and everything you do not absolutely have to do yourself. Such delegated tasks should include, but not be limited to, staffing and training, as well as organizing and upgrading service to all patients.
  3. Be more open-minded. If you’re close minded, then you believe you know all the answers, will not entertain factual or scientific evidence to the contrary, and you go down your own lonely path. Sometimes you find success; most often not. On the other hand, those who are more open-minded, those who are receptive to information, education, and new ideas, are the ones who succeed the most.
  4. Stop blaming others. If you hire them, train them, and supervise them, whose fault is it?

Take Advantage of These Opportunities

To take advantage of the above trends and put them to best use for your pharmacy, I suggest that you seriously consider embracing the following:

  • Adopting a better business model. Filling traditional scripts is becoming more and more of an exercise in futility because the insurance companies are compensating you with less and less money on most of your scripts. Also, the three major trends in the industry indicate that that is becoming a poor way to support your family in the 21st century.
  • Build strength into your organization. Create a team of superstars capable of supporting your every activity on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Predicate that on the culture you want as you build not only sales, but also your brand.
  • Marketing—find out details that create immediate and measurable results, and at the same time builds your brand as opposed to what you’re doing now.
  • Organize around your marketing. And make certain that marketing informs, educates, and influences your target audience.

For more information, send for my new book “How to Create a Profit Explosion in Your Own Pharmacy.” It’s free for a short time now. Later, it will cost $197.
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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How to Create a Profit Explosion in Your Own Pharmacy & Why It’s the Most Powerful Money-Making Manual for Pharmacy Owners
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12/7/2018 0 Comments

How to Win Patients, Influence People, and Increase Cash Flow When You Create Your Own Pharmacy in 2019

I created this checklist because I wanted to share some ideas that would-be-owners could clearly read and understand. It’s designed to make a difference to you as you consider creating your dream pharmacy.

To help you go further, faster and be more satisfied as the owner of that pharmacy, here are 11 strategies that virtually guarantee success.

  • It’s ok to take charge of your future. Understand that doing so is what you should be doing. It’s also not readily achievable without capable help during these perilous times.
  • Pursue your passions and follow your dreams
  • Do not allow yourself to evolve to the lowest common denominator. The insurance companies would love to see you do this. You do not want to follow their dicta.
  • Be audacious—determine what you want to achieve, then figure out how to do it
  • Maintain a “CAN DO” attitude to all problems—every problem is soluble—and each solution provides a valuable lesson for creating a stronger, more positive future for you and your family.
  • To negotiate better, be a good listener
  • Determine to practice according to your own rules, not someone else’s
  • Prove that you are worth it by everything you say and everything you do

Discover the tools to avoid chaos, ones that will take you safely down the pathway to creating the kind of pharmacy you want. This superior package is available from The Pharmacy Sage and nowhere else.

  • Determine to rise above the fray and offer solutions to chronic health problems your patients cannot find elsewhere  
  • It’s alright to hire outside assistance and get mentorship. In fact, it’s a perfectly healthy idea to seek outside help. Doing otherwise can be a prescription for disaster. Nevertheless, choosing the right help can sometimes be difficult, especially if you have not been exposed to it. To get the maximum exposure and the right information, seek help that relates to your passion.
  • Before accepting outside help, follow the attached guidelines

How to Rise Above the Rest

The Pharmacy Sage has discovered that highly successful pharmacy owners seem to get there by breaking through limitations, going beyond how their existing places of employment are defined—by conceiving and doing more for their patients and providing extra value above and beyond what anybody else is doing.

The most successful owners also have some other things in common:

  • They are really good at what they do, and what they are doing seems to suit them personally. They are really doing what they are passionate about.
  • They stand out as being different from their peers. They are not just practicing pharmacy as everyone else in their state is doing. Nor are they simply abiding by the rituals and practices of the industry—they are getting bigger results with a wider swath of patients and making a bigger impact than anyone around them because they have differentiated themselves in the marketplace.
  • They have an amazing series of protocols based on information that goes leagues beyond what the industry standards are.
  • They command immense respect from their patients and prescribers because they offer different solutions to chronic health disease.
  • They may have failed at marketing in the past, but they have mastered at least a part of it by now. As a result, their bank accounts have grown enormously.
  • They do stuff. It’s not always dramatic, but there is always a sense that they are doing things that help more patients and they’re making steady progress as they make inroads in their communities.
  • Most of them find that they can make plenty of money, but beyond a certain point, that’s not the main point for them. They feel genuinely satisfied with what they’re doing for patients. As a result, they have happy families, take extensive vacations, and even enjoy hobbies and community attachments.

Leave it to The Pharmacy Sage to turn the secrets of your passion into an effective and practical Action Plan.

For more information, send for my free report “Start Your Own Dream Pharmacy.”
FREE DOWNLOAD!
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11/15/2018 0 Comments

How to Differentiate Your Pharmacy, Build Your Brand, & Stand Out in a Crowd

You Make a Ton of Money, Too

Advice from The Pharmacy Sage: don’t be a commodity.

A commodity is something that is interchangeable regardless of where you find it, i.e. nutraceuticals such as Nature’s Bounty, Windmill, etc. These products are found in chain stores, big box stores, even supermarkets. In other words, they can be found here, there, and everywhere.

As such, when you sell one of them to your customer, you’re helping your competition, because…your patient may find it a few pennies cheaper or just simply at a more local and convenient location.

Not the best idea for your business.

Hence, today’s maxim “innovate or die” should sound an alarm. At the same time, it should be a rallying cry.

It is imperative to understand the principles behind this concept in order to differentiate your pharmacy.

You need different supplements—ones that are recognizably different by brand name and can also achieve higher levels of health for your patients.

If the third-party payment fiasco doesn’t kill your business, it probably will send you to the “funny farm.”

The following outlines a simple set of procedures for you so that you can get from where you are to where you would like to go, in about two years.

It actually takes only 90 days. I also have to make one big assumption: achieving massive amounts of new cash flow is not something you can do by yourself or you would already have done it. Not because you lack the brains, but rather that you lack the background in business education.

As such, you should engage a firm with rock solid experience to help you.

The 5 Secrets of Innovation

How to Simply and Easily Change Your Strategies for More Cash Flow, More Profits, and Ease of Operation

Change your strategies and you change your results. Sounds easy. But you view it as difficult as climbing Mount Everest. So now let’s simplify, because I believe you avoid thinking about innovation due to your fear of change. In fact, you may be adverse because:

  • You fear too much change
  • You’re not sure how to do it
  • You have too much anxiety

So, whether you want to create your own new pharmacy or reinvent your current one, these 5 steps can create the format for establishing a much more profitable independent pharmacy business in the future.

Here briefly are the 5 secrets.

  1. First, create your vision of what you want your ideal pharmacy to look like. Make certain it’s complete. As such, you will want to include such elements as what markets you serve, what products and services you will render to serve those markets, what your ideal pharmacy will look like, etc.
  2. Next, set a few goals and objectives. Make certain that you include at least one “shoot-for-the-moon” goal, something that you normally would not be able to accomplish without the concentration and focus that it truly requires.
  3. Create your strategies and operating plans to tell you how you’re going to get there.
  4. Develop a marketing plan second-to-none that will assure you of success
  5. Organize around your marketing, not around what you do daily

When you follow these 5 steps, you eliminate the fears mentioned above, as well as other aggravations.

How to Simply Use and Implement Changes That Create More Cash Flow, More Profits, and Better Ease of Operations

The most important concept is that you need to initiate the idea of change. Then bring aboard a firm that has the expertise to mastermind the details. I have done it for over 300 of your colleagues.

For a better understanding of what it’s all about and how it can be exemplified, as well as implemented, send for our very private and proprietary “The General Theory of Entrepreneurship, Leadership, and Marketing for Community Pharmacies.” It’s free.
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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Successful pharmacy owners think differently. Learn to apply this thinking to grow your pharmacy bigger & more profitable.
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11/12/2018 0 Comments

Turn Your Expertise Into a Powerful Cash Generator

I know your time is extremely valuable. Probably so valuable you’re not analyzing what works and what doesn't. That is why I have put together this very special newsletter, where you will discover information on key elements to building your business bigger and better, with leadership, entrepreneurship, business building, marketing— even  all-natural nutraceutical remedies you can market to your patients.

I want to provide you with all the pieces of the puzzle, not just some of them. In fact, my mission is:

 “To take independent pharmacies, turn them around, and reinvent them so that their profits soar and the owners will have a more enjoyable time leading their pharmacies to ever increasing goals and objectives.”

That is the purpose of the Pharmacy Sage community. To help you become the best pharmacy entrepreneur that you can be by helping you to change the way you think and innovate.

DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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11/8/2018 0 Comments

5 Compelling Reasons to Organize Around Your Marketing

Nothing happens until a sale is consummated. And filling traditional prescriptions is not a sale. It’s rendering a service and getting poorly reimbursed for it. And isn’t it getting less and less satisfying to get rewarded for your valuable know-how and the hard work that you do?

Pivoting so that you can at least start to head in a different direction may be very appropriate. However, whatever that you do that can differentiate you in some way, form, or manner is what you want to focus on. And marketing it is the way to get more patients to realize your uniqueness and spend a few extra dollars in your pharmacy, not somewhere else.

And so, here are the 5 compelling reasons for you to organize around your marketing.

Reason #1: when you do something to differentiate your pharmacy, but enough people are not running to you to take advantage of it, you need marketing. Marketing is the only element of your business that can produce significant results because everything else is just a cost.

Reason #2: if you’re not doing enough marketing, how will enough people get to know you and make a difference in your bank account?

Reason #3: if you don’t “toot your own horn,” who will?

Reason #4: marketing is the only way to show all of your potential patients how to achieve better health with alternative therapies not available at other pharmacies, especially chains

Reason #5: marketing is the only element of your business that creates significant results. Yes, word-of-mouth marketing makes all the difference in the world. But you need to activate it and make it work faster and more efficiently. And that’s what the rest of your marketing is all about.

Once you have repetitive offline advertising in whatever local media can best carry your messages that describe your uniqueness, then the rest fall within the following two no-cost to low-cost categories.

  • A total variety of different strategies and tactics that I call “Grass Roots Marketing.” Examples are:
  • supporting your local volunteer fire department in ways that give you exposure regarding what you do and how everybody else benefits.
  • Getting in front of groups of people to deliver messages about how they can deal with a specific chronic disease in ways that you cannot generally find elsewhere. Examples could be conducting a seminar, as well as talking about how to prevent the flu without a flu shot to a group such as the members of the garden club or the junior league.
  • Keeping in touch with your own customers on at least a monthly basis. One of the best ways is to send them a monthly wellness letter. In addition, when you can email the top 20% of your most profitable patients specifically according to their individual maladies, you will give your cash flow a very nice jolt.

Building a marketing machine is the only way to build sales and profits in these turbulent times. Doing what most of your colleagues do by heavily discounting and couponing is a prescription for disaster. So is abstaining from marketing entirely.  
Studies show that 90% of all pharmacy marketing is wasted. How do you avoid that prospect? By bringing in knowledgeable help from the outside.

Integrating all of your pharmacy’s activities, including selling, into your marketing machine will produce far superior results compared to what you’re doing now.  

For more information, send for my free report “The Very Savvy Pharmacy Owners Marketing Handbook.”
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW
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This handbook may be one of the most valuable written instruments you could ever get your hands on. It is loaded with marketing tips and strategies you simply cannot get elsewhere.
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11/7/2018 0 Comments

Are You Interested?

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.
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10/18/2018 0 Comments

The Shocking Truth About Creating a Wellness Pharmacy

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.”
INSTANT DOWNLOAD NOW!
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10/12/2018 0 Comments

Ditch Your Chain Store Job and Start an Epic 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.”
FREE INSTANT DOWNLOAD!
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9/28/2018 0 Comments

How to Build a Brand Your Patients Will Cherish

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

More importantly for you, which should come first: branding or increasing cash flow now?

The correct answer is: both. And your brand should be built around:

  • Your vision
  • Your culture
  • Your marketing

Your brand should also address these 3 deep questions:

  • What is the one thing that your pharmacy—and your pharmacy alone— can deliver to your patients?
  • How does your brand make that customer the hero to her family and circle of friends?
  • What does it say about each customer when she chooses your pharmacy?

Branding is Not a Step-by-Step Process

Branding is everything you do—all the time.

Branding is a continuous process. It never stops. Based on the above, it continues to build with each passing day.

And so, the answers to the above three questions will always be evolving. Even more importantly, your brand gets delivered to patients who experience your values as a constantly ongoing process. Thus, you establish your culture.

You have a story to tell. When properly done and included in the right marketing, it can contribute to your branding. But, only when your vision and culture have been well thought out and implemented.

Meanwhile, what’s happening to your profits? While your brand building is undergoing a very slow ascension, if you’re filling traditional scripts, the declining compensation are destroying what little profits you have left.

A better idea is to get the right amount of additional business that also adds more profits.

Heavy couponing and discounting will not do the job. Even if you look at it from a long-range viewpoint of “buying customers,” deep discounting cannot help you achieve your goal of building profits, cash flow, and build your brand.

The best idea: create marketing that thoroughly informs and educates your targeted audience concerning the value of taking certain supplements that you, and you alone, carry. Make certain they inform and educate to the highest degree. Your ads should look more like an editorial or an article that a reporter wrote.

That way, you increase sales, acquire long-term patients, and you will definitely build your brand.

Your vision

The future of your pharmacy rests on your vision. It is paramount to what you will do and how successful you will become. When done in writing, it becomes even more powerful.

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

  • Products and services that you sell—should be about compounding and a vast assortment of higher quality natural meds
  • Markets you serve (your target audience) 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, that is, what is it you do better than any of your competitors. This is the way that you will carry out your mission.  Included will be your core values, that is, what you hold so near and dear to you that you will not part with them for money, together with 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, especially what particular non-profit you will support.
  • 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.

Your Culture is Vital

The dictionary defines culture as “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”
From my viewpoint, your culture is all about what you stand for and what you’re passionate about. It’s also about sharing and giving.

You have much to share. It starts with your knowledge and the information you want to share. It is also the beginning of how you gather wealth for yourself and your family.

If you want your team members to become totally committed to your aims and goals, then you must inculcate what you’re all about, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and further indoctrinate them by training them completely and utterly about the products they should participate in selling. Further sharing with them how they can benefit, too, as the business grows should likewise be the order of the day. So, how they get rewarded in terms of group bonuses, individual raises and promotions is all part of that program.

And of course, sharing with your team members is just the beginning. Sharing information and education with your patients is the ultimate goal.

Your Marketing Creates Results

Marketing is still the only element of your pharmacy business that gives you significant results. I’m talking about money you can take to the bank. Also, additional sums of money that you have available for yourself, and especially to provide your family with a more elevated standard of living.

Your marketing should be balanced online and offline with your website as the lynchpin. Your website should be made up of outstandingly good selling messages. 100% of the pharmacy websites I have examined have anything but. They all have weak and ineffectual messages that were doubtlessly created by the webmaster. Webmasters may be a marvelous masters of the web architecture. They know nothing about creating great marketing messages. We do.

Your offline marketing should be built around direct mail sent to higher income families. It, too, should contain superior marketing messages. They should be in line with what Dr. Carmen Simon, a noted neurological scientist who specializes in the brain has noted as truly memorable messages. They resonate with the individual and therefore they are memorable. Those messages carry benefit after benefit to the patient on the basis of her interests and what she wants, not necessarily what you do.

Marketing is the focal point of your business. It is something around which you should organize your thinking and your activities. Again, it is the only element of your business that can produce significant results.

Such is the starter kit for building your brand.

For more details, send for my complete and comprehensive free report “How to Build a Pharmacy Brand That Dominates.”

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9/20/2018 0 Comments

Attention Pharmacy Owners: Achieve More, Work Less

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.”
DOWNLOAD FREE!
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Most pharmacy owners get less than 30% value from their resources. Capture the other 70% by learning how to work smarter, not harder.
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8/16/2018 1 Comment

How to Start Your Own Pharmacy, Make Lot’s of Money, and Leave a Lasting Legacy

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.”
DOWNLOAD FREE Now!
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7/31/2018 0 Comments

Seven Can’t-Miss Strategies For the Entrepreneurial Pharmacy

Create More Profits in Less Time— and With Less Effort
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.”
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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7/20/2018 0 Comments

The Hidden Reason Why Your Pharmacy’s Future is Falling Apart

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.”
DOWNLOAD FREE NOW!
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    Lester Nathan, The Pharmacy Sage
    A powerhouse in the world of independent pharmacy, offering  insight, wisdom, and strategy to independent pharmacy owners. 

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