How Pharmacy Owners Can Outperform the Competition, Dump the Insurance Companies

The health care landscape is changing rapidly and traditional pharmacies, now at a standstill, oftentimes perish.

 Wouldn’t you, as a pharmacy owner, like to master new business strategies to remain competitive in this tumultuous environment? Sound impossible? Not really. Difficult? Yes, but decidedly doable.

But first, a more penetrating question: “why are you still doing what you’ve always been doing?”

The downward trend of compensation by insurance companies tells us that those who cling to the status quo may become a dinosaur. And you know what happened to dinosaurs. In place of outdated concepts, pharmacy owners can instead execute a business model that has helped a small collection of your colleagues to become very wealthy because it’s an all-cash business.

Hence, you dump the insurance companies. Here is that business model:

• natural medicines
• compounding
• fee-for-services
• strategic marketing

According to The Pharmacy Sage, your no. 1 job right now is to make your current business obsolete.

Why? So you can move resources from underperforming strategies and activities to potentially higher profit areas. For instance, would you like to get:

• More patients?
• More sales?
• More profits?

It’s all possible if you keep an open mind. As Carol Dweck wrote in her landmark book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, “a company that cannot self-correct cannot thrive.”  

She further wrote that successful businesses were led by self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers. That is, to look impending failures in the face while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.

Yes, they constantly tried to improve. As Peter Senge, of MIT fame, wrote in his book The Fifth Discipline about the parable of the boiled frog, “learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle, as well as the dramatic.”

Therein lies the core of our learning dilemma, supposedly we learn best from experience. However, we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. That’s because the trends that affect your pharmacy most significantly are the slow, changing, and underlying trends that affect the industry as a whole. We do not notice them and consequently we react to current events more aptly and invoke the law of unintended consequences.

The result is that people become a prisoner of their own thinking. Senge maintains that this is totally true and transcends across all industries.

When you consider the following 3 trends that The Pharmacy Sage identified as affecting the independent pharmacy industry, is that not true of you?

• The downward trend in compensation by insurance companies regarding 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.

To put it all together, here’s what you need to do.

Jump start your pharmacy’s cash flow

Isn’t it time to get off the pharmacy hamster wheel and start making some serious money for yourself and your family? It all comes down to helping patients achieve better health.

Present better alternative therapies, such as:

• Customized scripts for each person.
• The power of herbal medicines coupled with homeopathic medications to give any chronic ache or pain a one-two punch.
• Provide information and education in the form of carefully researched and highly informative reports on each disease state.

Then you will:

• Generate financial freedom by creating a pharmacy that runs like a well-oiled machine, whether you are there or not.
• Give a rocket boost to your wealth-gathering possibilities by reallocating the major portion of your work week to marketing and other business building tools. Delegate the rest.

That’s because in your marketing, you can include several no-cost but highly effective, strategies such as:

• Talking to groups of people about how they can attack, arrest, even overcome a specific chronic disease that may be ailing them.
• Providing authoritatively researched and professionally written articles for your local newspaper.
• Continually marketing to your top 20% most profitable patients on a weekly basis to get them to visit more often and spend more money. Experience proves this.

Why would any pharmacy owner ignore the above? Why would any sane pharmacy owner not want to embrace this concept? It has created millionaires for those who did. The Pharmacy Sage has documentation validating this fact.

The Pharmacy Sage can be reached at (518) 346-7021 or thepharmacysage@rxresultsnow.com