Welcome to this week's edition of Waypoint Unscripted. This is Ben Coakley with Waypoint RX. Today, I am actually traveling to Latta, South Carolina, to meet with a client. These are my thoughts from the road. I was talking with my father, Rick, yesterday, and he asked me something that I thought was pretty interesting, and it's something that I think some about, but maybe not enough about. His question to me was, "How much time, Ben, do you spend on you?"

Let me give you a little bit of background on why we were having this conversation. My wife and I are expecting our second child any time now, and we have a two-year-old, Ivan. We were talking about the challenges that we have owning a business where we have to be flexible in our business because our clients' demands sometimes cause us to work before hours, after hours, sometimes even on Saturdays, and when you have a family structure where a lot of things are set in place and on the calendar well ahead of time, and then you have a dynamic, flexible environment at work that causes you to have to adjust your schedule sometimes, it creates a situation where there could be some difficulties as it pertains juggling your home life versus juggling your work life.

I think that's important for pharmacy owners because one of the things they tell us is I don't have enough time for those things that are important. Matter of fact, on our scorecard, we ask that question before we work with anybody, any new pharmacy owner. We want to know where they stand on that. The average score, if I were to bet, is a 3-4 out of 10 when we ask, "Do you have time for the most important things in life?" Our thought is that we need to get really intentional with how we view our time and also how we get the information we look at when we choose to spend time certain ways.

Let me give you an example of how that works. We believe that there are four primary activities that every pharmacy owner has. The first one is management. We call it pharmacy management. That is keeping the doors open, keeping the business running, keeping the lights on, keeping the bills paid, keeping payroll done, those kind of things.

 The second is pharmacy growth. That is actually focused, intentional time and energy on trying to bring in new revenue, whether that's looking at a new idea to add to the pharmacy or whether that's going out and actually meeting people in the community and asking them to use your pharmacy for their prescription needs.

Third is pharmacy stewardship. Stewardship is working on that resource or those resources that you already have to maximize what goes to the bottom line. Let me give you a great example of this. I was talking to an owner one time, and she sent me over her profit and loss statement. I was looking at it and I looked at phone system and looked at phone system and it said, "Phone system, $8,000." I called her and I said, "When's the last time you looked at phone?" She was still on one of those old analog digital phones that actually plugged in with the phone company. I said, "Have you heard of VOIP, Voice Over Internet?" She was like, "Well, I have." I said, "Well, do me a favor. Just call this company." It was a good friend of mine. I said, "Call him and get a quote and see what happens." She called me back and she said, "You know, it's going to be, like, $2,500 a year now for our phones."

That $5,500 a year for this pharmacy, it may not seem like a lot, but when you add up all those things ... The other thing is is you want your employees, most likely, to do more. How much time are you spending training them. That's stewardship time.

Then finally, inspiration time, and we call this pharmacist inspiration. That's the fourth activity. This is your time to unplug, recharge your batteries, to travel, to spend time with your family. It is imperative that you do this. If there is no commitment to that, what will happen in our opinion, and we've seen it time and time again is that you will experience this burnout on a level that you've never experienced burnout before. I talked to a guy one time, and he said, "When I'm ... I'm 32 years old so I can work all the time." I was like, "Yeah, you are." I said, "But you're gonna be 45 and 50 one day." I said, "I would much rather you get into the habit and make a commitment to working on yourself spending time on you rather than half to try to do that when you're 50 when you're completely burned out."

Here's how it works. If you take your calendar, and you want to spend time on you and the things that you care about most, travel, kids, family, whatever that may be, block that time out first.

My good buddy, we were doing this exercise and this good friend and client of mine and he said, "I want to be in the gym 5-7 o'clock every morning." I said, "Block it out. If you don't block it out, you wake up, you, your natural urge is gonna wanna go to work, so block it out." He blocked out that, 5-7. He gets to work about 8 o'clock. I said, "Do you want a lunch?" He said, "Man, I need a lunch during the day." Block out an hour. Blocked it out. I said, "What time do you wanna be home having dinner with your family?" He said, "I wanna be home 6 o'clock every night having dinner." Block it out. We blocked it out. We put that in first. If you don't put that in first, all these other things that you have to do ... What's amazing is is when you block out that personal time or that inspiration time first, you end up with a situation where you only have so much time left.

You have to fit ... It's going to force you to become more efficient in the time you have available to do the other things. With this particular gentleman, one of the things he said, he said, "Ben, I need to grow my business, and I need to focus on stewardship training my staff." I said, "Well, what happens when you go in there?" He said, "Well, when I go in there, they, they interrupt me and they, and patients see me." I said, "Well, do your growth stuff and do your stewardship planning stuff, do it outside the pharmacy." One day a week, he actually stays home. He blocked out Wednesdays where he's not even in the pharmacy. What happened is amazing. He got everything he needed to get done in that one day because he wasn't interrupted.

If you're thinking, "Well, I don't have a pharmacist or I can't pay a relief pharmacist for an entire day," then what you have to do is you got to be really selective on when you choose to work that time. You need to find out when you're the slowest. You need to look at the patterns in your business. There are patterns in there where you can find out. Keep this in mind. You are in a retail pharmacy environment and that is unpredictable and dynamic, so there may be a day where you plan to do certain things and you don't get it done because you got an influx in customers. That's not a bad thing to get an influx of new customers. Just know that at some point you have to circle back around and still got to get those things done, but block them out. Give yourself the best chance to accomplish them. Don't block them on the days where you're busy. If you can do them outside the pharmacy walls, get out of there and find somebody else that can work the counter while you're gone and do it that way.

The question comes back to, how much time do you spend on you? That is one of our big challenges at Waypoint. We want you to have more time for you and the people you care about and the things you love doing. Just take these tips. Block out that time first. Commit. Commit to having that life. We have a saying in our business. I think if you asked our employees, that we really, really, really have a work to live environment rather than a live to work environment, understanding we have to be flexible with our schedules because pharmacy owners need us to be flexible, but when we work late one evening, we give the next morning off or we give some time off. We want people to have those things outside our business and outside our walls, too. We want those things because those are important and they create satisfaction for our employees. They can also create satisfaction for you in your life.

Just think about these things. Think about how they would impact your life, how much more satisfaction you would have with your life. If you're young, you're not married, and don't have kids and you want to work 75 hours a week, by all means, do it, but I will tell you now one of the things that I personally would do different is I would have committed more to having time for those things outside the business that I really like to do. I like to play golf, and I wish I would have played more golf when I was younger. Now that I have families and stuff, I have a family and a child on the way and a 2-year-old, I don't get to play as much, but if I would have committed to figure out how to do my business in the timeframe that I wanted and allocated because I would have blocked out other time for things that are important to me, I think I'd be in a better situation today than I was.

Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. It's almost summertime, so enjoy the long evenings, the daylight, and the warm temperatures. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to reach out to me. My email is Ben@WaypointUS.com. My phone number is (843)873-4420, extension 13. I would love to have a conversation with you about it, but this blog will be posted here in the next week or two. Thank you so much.