One strategy that many successful pharmacy businesses adopt is to work to ensure that spend per customer is maximised at all times. In the analysis of your customer base you already know the key characteristics of each customer segment you serve. Try to align your resources to maximise spend per customer (sometimes referred to as the 'average transaction value').

Make sure that you maximise customer spend from seasonal opportunities in your pharmacy and from national and local health promotion activity. A list of what is happening at both a local and national level (such as Know Your Numbers! Week for hypertension awareness, National Allergy Week and so on) over the year is useful in order to plan what you will do in your pharmacy (such as offers on hayfever products or blood pressure testing equipment).

Manage your stock

A key objective of good stock management is to hold the minimum value of stock to satisfy customer demand. All too often community pharmacies find themselves overfilled with lines that are only sold once every few months and too many different lines for the same category type. Many successful companies review this constantly and set themselves a stock turnover target €“ calculated by dividing the cost of goods sold by the average stock value. The higher the stock turnover figure, the better the stock is managed in the company and less cash is tied up unnecessarily.