Pharmacy Owners: What's Your Job Description?

The bulk of most pharmacy managers’ time and effort is spent solving problems where even extraordinarily successful performance will nevertheless have minimal impact on results. Part of the problem is managers take too much pride in doing difficult tasks, whether or not it’s practical.

In reality, prioritizing your time is one of the most important things you can do to get a better grip on the managing process. You can attain it by stealing some quiet minutes away from day-to-day activities to plan what you want to accomplish in the coming week and set forth what you’ll do to achieve these goals.

But first, ask yourself: “What do I want to achieve?” Although asking this question won’t ensure the right decisions will be made, failing to ask it virtually guarantees the wrong decisions will be made.

Now, ask yourself: “What should my business be?” and “What are my patients’ unsatisfied wants?” This will logically lead to “Who are my nonpatients and what wants of theirs are being satisfied elsewhere?”

Your Job Description

To further understand this concept, you need to write—or rewrite—your job description. Describe responsibilities for which you should be holding yourself accountable as the entrepreneur and top manager. Then, determine what you’ll spend all of your time doing.

At this point, you should discover your main job is to constantly increase your pharmacy’s wealth production. In order to have time to do this, you’ll need to make your staff members effective. So, your next step should be training your staff to perform the day-to-day tasks to which you’ve been devoting too much time. Once that’s accomplished, you’ll be a more effective pharmacy owner.

Your job description should look something like this:

I. General Purpose: To constantly increase the wealth-producing capability of the pharmacy.

II. Responsibilities:

A. Manage change

• Practice areas (eg, financial strength, productivity, organizational development)
• Communicate expectations throughout the organization
• Ensure policies and procedures are practiced universally

B. Make staff effective

• Set monthly goals for each staff member
• Provide training and feedback as necessary
• Get entire organization involved in creating a shared vision

C. Review business performance on a monthly and quarterly basis to ensure the organization is performing as desired

D. Direct marketing and answer questions like “What is our business?”, “What should it be?”, and “What will it become?”

• Develop Master Marketing Plan
• Ensures all details of plan are totally operational
• Administer the marketing budget
• Take charge of selling the business to outside patients/organizations

E. Organize information and knowledge for the benefit of the entire business. Ensure this information and knowledge is communicated to the proper individuals at the proper time.

F. Reallocate scarce resources from areas of nonproductivity to those of higher productivity. Abandon poorly productive and unproductive areas entirely.

G. Seek opportunities, especially relating to or resulting from change.

• Exploit them
• Constantly seek answer to the question: “Which opportunities, if realized, would have the biggest impact on productivity and critical results area of the business?”

H. Develop maximum leverage through:

• Time
• Staff
• Systems
• Marketing
• Technology
• Knowledge
• Money

This is just a sample job description. You need to create your own in detail, based on what you can best contribute, in order to achieve your objectives. You can’t expect to have an A-team helping you achieve your goals if you don’t even understand what your job is.

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