Remember your customer is king

Every pharmacy should set clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for customer service, including conducting anonymous surveys of the people visiting the pharmacy. Your KPIs should include waiting times, owings and customer expectations and experiences. It is good to have an understanding of what your customers think of your service offerings.

This can be done by asking a third party to conduct a survey on your behalf or by having an anonymous online survey, where customers are more likely to tell the truth. The best way of improving on all of these indicators is by training your staff and promoting a managed repeat prescription service. This helps to plan workflow and reduces owings and waiting times.

Learn constantly

An entrepreneur never ceases to learn and always strives to be ahead on the learning curve. Sometimes this means not only learning from your own mistakes, but also €“ even better €“ learning from the mistakes of others. Formal study is an effective way of examining lessons of business success and failure.

A four-year degree course makes us into a pharmacist. Likewise, a business degree or a diploma can give us valuable business learning. Pharmacy ownership will always require you to strike a fine balance between being a clinical professional and being a business person.

Think laterally

New ideas and initiatives don't appear out of thin air, and it helps to develop your 'blue sky' or lateral thinking skills. Lateral thinking is a characteristic that comes naturally to many, while others have to develop it. Our minds tend to think segmentally because we mostly use only one side of our brains.

It is the other lobe that gives us the ability to think creatively. A tool that should help you to think in this way is the 'mind map'. Before embarking on any project, no matter how big or small, it is useful to conduct a full mind map on the subject.

This can be done with simple pen and paper, or, for the more technologically savvy, electronic versions of mind mapping tools are available. It is amazing how much information your brain stores and how a simple technique can help you to offload your thoughts, experiences and learnings onto a blank sheet.