ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN COMMUNITY PHARMACY AND DEVELOPING BUSINESS PLAN
Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business. The people who create this business are called entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages and assumes the risk of business or enterprise. The word” entrepreneur” originates from a French verb meaning “to do something”.
Good characteristics of an entrepreneur
- Self motivated
- Leadership skills
- Risk takers
- Innovative
- Ethical
Characteristics of a great entrepreneur
- Self motivated- Mostly workers are motivated to go to work every day simply for paycheck or not to be fired. An entrepreneur should be intrinsically motivated as there is no financial reward in beginning stages of business. Rather than waiting for progress and success an entrepreneur takes whatever action is necessary to facilitate those things.
- Leadership skills- Entrepreneurs must have strong leadership qualities. An entrepreneur must have ability to motivate his/her employees to work together to achieve goals which requires earning their respect and trust. They should have excellent communication skills as they have to work with various types of personalities.
- Risk takers- Entrepreneur should possess well developed decision making skills eve in face of failure as well as should be flexible enough to alter methods when things don’t go as planned.
- Innovative- New ideas plus ability to develop and improve them as business is essential character of an entrepreneur.
- Ethical- Entrepreneur should possess strong sense of basic ethics and integrity. Clients and investors will lose interest in doing business with an entrepreneur who lacks credibility.
Qualities of community pharmacist as entrepreneur
1.Get involved with your community
As an independent community pharmacy, it’s important to get outside of pharmacy and give back to community. It may be either free educational class or speech at local school. It helps in creating business opportunities by building credibility.
2. Continue education
Pharmacy is continually evolving industry. We should stay informed on current trends in healthcare by attending industry events or joining local or national pharmacy association. Certificates and license should be updated too.
3. Network
A pharmacist should maintain professional relationship with other independent pharmacy owners and industrialists.
4. Focus on patient experience
We should keep patients happy. Hire friendly employees and emphasize on customer service to gain loyal patients who will refer our pharmacy to their friends and family
5. Pay attention to loyal patients
Paying attention to patients needs will promote loyalty and potentially help us to discover idea for new business venture.
6. Learn from unsatisfied patients
Unhappy patients teach us about things which need to be changed in our pharmacy or amended in our customer service.
7. Keep employees satisfied
We should be able to create positive work environment for employees. We should take steps to increase their job satisfaction and make them feel involved in pharmacy
8. Invest
We should invest in new assets, no need to be afraid to hire more employees, purchase new equipment or spend money on marketing.
9. Take a risk
We should try offering new services in our pharmacy. We will never be able to move forward if we don’t take risk and try something new.
10. Search for new ideas
We should also visit other pharmacies or even retailers to get some new ideas which may work for us.
11.
Consider specializing
Specializing is a unique way to help stand pharmacy in competition. We can focus on certain condition like diabetes, woman health, medical equipment.
Steps in entrepreneurship
1)Spotting opportunities
The first step in entrepreneurship is identifying opportunities. The entrepreneur must be able to spot an opportunity like unmet demand or needs. He should be able to figure out a potential solution which gives rise to new opportunity.
2) Accessing opportunities
While it takes a creative skill to identify opportunities, it takes an analytical skill to access them. Each opportunity should be accessed to and financial and human resources are required to execute upon it.
3) Selecting opportunities
It is a risky decision as selecting wrong opportunity may lead to failure of business.
4) Executing upon opportunities
Execution or the ability to generate most value out of an opportunity requires a unique combination, creativity, passion, focus, responsibility, intelligence, planning and energy.
