Your busiest month is not your best month

Ask most owners about winter and you get the same answer: it's a good season. Cold and flu lifts the takings, the shop is busy, December looks healthy.

The takings do rise. That isn't in dispute.

What I'd like to put to you is that the busiest month of your year is often the least profitable per customer, and that it's worth knowing which it is before you plan for it.

Think about what people actually come in for when it turns cold.

They come in for the products they can name. The cold and flu drink their mother used. The night-time liquid from the television advert. The children's medicine they've used since the first baby.

That's the defining feature of winter trade: it lands almost entirely in branded products customers ask for by name.

And those are the products where you have the least pricing freedom of the whole year.

I checked this in September against a wholesaler's published prices and the main supermarkets.

On one leading branded painkiller, the supermarket shelf price was below what a pharmacy pays its wholesaler. Matching that price would mean losing about 20p on every pack sold. The same pattern appeared on a well-known children's medicine.

So in your busiest season:

More customers come in.
More of them ask for something by name.
More of your sales sit in the lines you can least afford to discount.
And your staff spend their time serving those sales rather than any others.

Takings up. Profit per sale down. Hours up.

That's not a bad season. But it isn't the season most owners think they're having, and it's the reason January can feel strangely thin after a busy December.

A manager at a pharmacy group told me how winter works where he is. The branded cold and flu lines are bought in advance, the shelf layout arrives from head office, and the deals are agreed nationally.

I asked what happens if something clearly isn't selling in his particular shop.

Stock levels are monitored centrally too, so head office can see exactly what sells. It stays anyway, because one branch's numbers don't move a national agreement.

That's worth sitting with for a moment, because it's the one advantage you have that cannot be bought. You can change your winter range this week. He can't.

Not discounting. That's the instinct, and it's the wrong one: the lines everybody price-checks are the lines where discounting costs you the most.

Three better moves, and none of them need a budget.

1. Decide which lines are footfall and which are profit. Some products exist to bring people through the door. You stock them, you price them sensibly, and you stop expecting them to make you money. Others are where the profit actually is. Confusing the two is what makes a busy season feel pointless.

2. Buy the predictable rush properly. Winter is the one season you can see coming months ahead. That's your strongest negotiating position of the year, and most independents still order reactively as the weather turns. Ask your wholesaler and your buying group what they can do on the lines you know you'll sell hundreds of.

3. Use the conversations the season brings you. Winter sends you the customer we've spent three issues on: the one with a question and no prescription. More of them walk in during cold and flu season than at any other time. What they buy alongside the thing they came for, if it's genuinely right for them, is the part of winter where your margin lives.

And the clinical point stands as always: what's suitable for the person is decided first, by the person qualified to decide it. The commercial question only exists between options that are all genuinely appropriate.

Write down your five biggest winter sellers. Next to each, two things:

1. Profit per pack in pounds, from the list you built in Issue 2
2. F or P: footfall line, or profit line

Then look at where your team's time goes in December, and ask whether it's going to the Fs or the Ps.

Just the five, with the letters.

It takes ten minutes, and it's the difference between walking into your busiest season with a plan and walking into it with a hope.

Hit reply and tell me your three biggest winter sellers. I'm curious whether they're the same across the country, and I'll publish what comes back.

Next week: something that changes how I've been writing about this. A pharmacist and independent prescriber told me this month that the problem isn't that people don't know a pharmacy can help. It's that they don't know what they're eligible for, what's free, and what isn't. He's right, and it needs a whole issue.

Pollyanna

Potheko also publishes the Pharmacy Profit Accelerator, an eight-module workbook for owners who want the whole system in one go rather than one idea a week.