What Advice Can You Give Independent Pharmacists to Succeed in their Industry?

In this video, Jim Springer, Vice President of RxOwnership South Region and Chris Cella, RpH, National Vice President of RxOwnership, from Mckesson Corporation explain how to take advantage of your situation to be the best independent pharmacist you can be.

Transcript:

Chris Cella, RpH: When you're looking to get into the independent pharmacy world, you have to decide what sets you apart from everybody else. So, what are you going to do better or different than anybody else, so you have to find your niche, and whether it be specialty compounding, veterinarian compounding, sterile compounding, whatever it may be, delivery, disease state management, MTM's, immunizations. You have to find out what it is, and capitalize that, and do that really well than everyone else, and that will help draw the customer into your stores. So, you're not just relying on the prescription anymore, you're relying on keeping the whole patient healthy. How do I take care of my patient? How do I keep them healthier than the other pharmacies? How do I coordinate my health, with my patient's, with the physicians, and make that collaborative practice really work together.

Jim Springer: Precisely, if you're going to open a pharmacy today, and rely strictly on the profits that you get from filling prescriptions, don't do it. Save your time, save your money, you're not going to be successful. It really is all about understanding your marketplace, doing your homework to be able to understand what needs are out there in your particular market place. What's the competitor doing, and even more importantly what are they not doing if it fits in the particular marketplace? Then you take advantage of those things, and the more diverse you are, the more resilient you are to all of those regulatory issues or other things that are outside that might affect you, because all you do is just very quickly shift to spend more time and more effort on some of those other things that you do, and maybe phase out that other thing that all of the sudden hasn't become as profitable as it once was.

Chris Cella, RpH: Which is the greatest point of being an independent pharmacy owner. You can make these changes on the fly. If you wake up one morning and decide to do something different, you can do it that day. You don't have to bubble it up to chain of command.