All successful businesses have a clearly defined game plan. The first step towards this would be to decide on your mission and then define clear objectives and a timeline. You then adopt a more detailed strategy in order to achieve these objectives. For example, your mission may be to improve your profits by £30,000 in the coming year. To do this, you may have an objective to enhance your NHS prescriptions by seven per cent, your professional service income by, say, £20,000 per year, your counter sales by five per cent and a margin improvement of two per cent.

Your strategy will consist of the actions you need to take in order to achieve your defined objectives. The strategy could be to focus on collection and delivery, improved efficiency, cost control, improved buying, better category management of counter lines, better utilisation of staff through improved workflow and training, and so on. Then you will need to manage the resources €“ people, financial and otherwise €“ that will help you to achieve your mission.