The History
When CEO Peter Koshland first reached out, he was looking for a way to get past the daily demands of his business and optimize operations.
Koshland Custom Compounding Pharmacy is an independently-owned business located in downtown San Francisco that serves patients and doctors by providing customized medications. It is a unique pharmacy where all medications are made on-site.
The Problem
Peter was a highly trained, certified pharmacist well known in his community, but he was new to business ownership and did not have a lot of business expertise. His business plan was a Word document… but he knew he needed more to ensure consistent turnaround times, good staffing, strong financials, and expanded offerings to doctors.
That led him to retain one of our certified senior consultants to help address those challenges and to help formulate a solid business strategy to help his company better serve both doctors and patients.
The Solution
According to Peter “From the very beginning, our working relationship with our One Page Planning consultant was a highly collaborative one as we put together all the big picture things like our true mission and setting realistic goals for our business. As time went on, our working together has become more granular, moving into more specific tracking activities. We’ve received a lot of value from our relationship with him because it forced us to think about certain things for the very first time.”
Peter had a business plan of sorts before working with us, but he didn’t have a simple, easy to use tool that would focus his team and track critical projects and metrics over time. To correct that situation, he and his team used the One Page Business Planning System to work through the operational challenges he was facing. Before that, he often worried that he didn’t have a way to keep up with the demands of his leadership role in the company without working overtime. It was very stressful for Peter
Using the One Page system has allowed Peter to develop a simple and accurate tracking system to overcome a number of persistent problems. One case in point was discovering a troublesome profit drain due to overtime. After plugging in overtime as a key metric, he was able to ask… “Where’s overtime this month… and how does it compare to last year?” and have the answer at the click of a mouse. Peter was able to get overtime expenses back under control because it was prioritized as a metric on his plan.
Peter relates…“After four or five years of using The One Page Business Plan, we mainly use it to make sure we’re on track and to catch new things like the need for a price increase… but what it really has produced is clarity around what we need to focus on each month. We successfully improved our turnaround times early in the process. And when one of our tracked metrics starts going off the rails, there’s an alert that lets us know that we need to act at once. And as the CEO, keeping myself at that kind of at that level, seeing the business from a 10,000-foot view, it’s helpful because it forces me to step back once a month and say, okay, what’s the big picture?”
Currently
Looking back, Peter and his team have accomplished a great deal. Turnaround times for filling prescriptions is tightly managed and rarely a challenge anymore. Hiring technicians and pharmacists is no longer a scramble. Profitability and cash flow are sufficient to fund expensive compliance to recently heightened regulatory requirements as well as to fund growth. Peter is more able to focus on developing new therapies, speaking at conferences to his peers, and interacting with doctors about caring for patients. Total revenues have nearly doubled since he began utilizing the One Page Business Plan, exceeding his expectations.