What do you want your pharmacy business to be? To be better, more profitable, to be doing more prescriptions or services, to increase turnover?

These are all rather vague; if you do 1,000 prescription items a week, 1,001 is an improvement – but probably not a success. 

And without understanding the context of the potential for the business, these could be described as wishes rather than plans. 

When we look at the business from within the business, we are liable to limit our view of the potential by our current concept of our business.

We can focus purely on incremental growth and we can apply limiting beliefs, restricting our vision with self-imposed barriers.

We restrict our thinking to “the way we do things around here” and ignore the radical options that might lead to step changes in business success.

Thinking about business potential is a leadership activity. In a previous article - see P3pharmacy December 2024 edition - we discussed ways to understand performance and to place it in the context of the size of your potential market. Identifying potential takes this a step further and fits into a leadership process that includes:

• Creating a vision What type of pharmacy will your business become?

• Identify the potential for your future business What is the size of the prize?

• Strategic planning Identify what you need to do to move from where you are to where you want to be

• Setting goals and targets Clearly identifying timescales for action and the business success measures this will deliver.

A tool to inform this process is a SWOT analysis.