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In August, we looked at your willingness to delegate tasks to others in your pharmacy, and last month we discussed the benefits of an employee driven pharmacy vs an owner driven pharmacy. This month, we look at the third factor - company culture.

Below is a review of the factors to finding whether you can leave your pharmacy and keep it too:

• First factor is your willingness to delegate (Click Here to Read This Blog)
• Second, do you have an employee driven pharmacy or an owner driven pharmacy?
          (Click Here to Read This Blog)
• Third, your pharmacy culture
• Fourth, the strength of your systems
• Fifth, your financial controls

Company Culture

This month, we will be doing a deep dive into developing a company culture that is conducive to helping you along the path of preparing to leave the pharmacy.  According to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss at Harvard Business Review:

“Culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off. Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time.”

In the previous blog, we mentioned the importance of your employees understand your Vision, Mission and Principals - these are the guiding factors that help make up your company's culture.

Your Vision is a future-oriented declaration of the organization’s purpose and aspirations. In many ways, you can say that the mission statement lays out the organization’s “purpose for being,” and the vision statement then says, “based on that purpose, this is what we want to become.”

Your Mission Statement communicates the organization’s reason for being, and how it aims to serve its key stakeholders.

Your Principals are the beliefs of an individual or group, and in this case the organization, in which they are emotionally invested.

When it comes to each of these, there are some key things to remember

1. Do you meet with them regularly and review these?

2. Are they displayed somewhere to remind your team of them daily?

3. Do you recognize employees that demonstrate that they understands and use them?

4. Do you celebrate victories surrounding them or only complain about issues contradicting them?

Example:
I had one pharmacy owner that, shortly after purchasing a new pharmacy, had a pizza party with her new team to discuss her vision/mission statement/principals for the pharmacy, now that she was the new owner. She mentioned how her goal was to continually review their inventory and  services in order to become the place everyone in the community could go to get the healthcare products they needed. On top of that, anyone who helped bring in new ideas would be entered to win a prize. 

Shortly after the meeting, one cashier mentioned that several patients had asked about where they could get durable medical equipment - to which she used to reply, "online". The cashier never mentioned it to the previous owner, because he never seemed interested in hearing new ideas or getting patient feedback. However, the cashier mentioned it to the new owner; who promptly ordered some basic medical equipment, and started growing that part of the business into a significant revenue stream.

By encouraging her new team to help her reach her goal, she was able to find a new and unique way to generate sales/revenue and build her customer base - all by communicating her vision for the pharmacy.

For help developing your pharmacy's vision, download our Lifetime Vision creator tool, by clicking the button below.

For questions or help getting started, feel free to contact a Waypoint Advisor today.

We have also developed several tools to help you prepare yourself, your team, and your store. Click on the Visit The WaypointRx Store button to download the tools. 

At TransitionsRx (a WaypointRx company), it is our mission to ensure you enjoy the greatest possible personal, ownership, and financial success. As champions of independent pharmacy ownership across America, we have amassed a tremendous amount of experience along with the most comprehensive toolbox of resources and solutions you can imagine. Our Inspired Independence Program has helped hundreds of pharmacy owners take full advantage of all their opportunities inside, outside and after their life in pharmacy.

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