4 Ways To Plan Ahead for the Best Holiday Season Ever!

After an exciting month of pumpkin carving, costume preparations and Halloween crafts, we kicked off November in my house by watching “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”.  It’s a family favorite, and curling up on the couch to watch it with my kids is a welcome respite from the rest of the craziness that November brings. 

Along with the excitement of leaf piles and holiday traditions, November puts a lot of items on the to do list. It’s the sprint towards the end of the year and our last chance to accomplish our goals. It also happens to kick off the busiest 2 months for retail stores, which makes the prospect of getting things done seem even more daunting.  

Even on a personal level, the holiday to-do list stresses me out. How am I going to get my shopping done? What will I make for family dinners? When am I ever going to find time to get my house clean enough for guests? And how can I even think about doing all of this without letting the rest of my life fall through the cracks? 

The key to getting through it all with your sanity still relatively intact is to understand what’s ahead of you and plan accordingly.   The elephant in the room will be there until you acknowledge it and figure out how to get it out of the way.  Even if your pharmacy doesn’t have a large retail front end, these last couple months of the year are likely to be busier than usual.  Here are a few items to help get the planning started.  

Get Holiday prep done now.  If you do operate a pharmacy with a large front end, now is the time to make sure you’re ready to go. The big box stores already have displays of twinkle lights and shiny wrapping paper, so it’s now or never.  Get your holiday products ready and evaluate any restocking you need to do in departments that see an uptick in sales during the holiday season.Reports in your pharmacy point-of-sale system can help you evaluate historical sales data to make this process a snap. If you’ll be making planogram changes or setting new displays, plan out precisely when those will be occurring now. 

Schedule Holiday promotions. Promotions are another thing that it’s great to get taken care of in advance.Use your pharmacy point-of-sale system to set these up as far in advance as you can. If you’re running any loyalty promotions, get those scheduled out to. This way, all you have to do is spread the word and put up signage when the time comes. The rest will already be done.  

Determine if you’ll be participating in Small Business Saturday.  Black Friday might not be the big sales day in your pharmacy. But Small Business Saturday can be.  This year, small business Saturday falls on Saturday, November 25th. That’s just a few short weeks away so prep now. Check out this article for more information and some helpful tips. 

Don’t lose sight of your goals. At the beginning of the year we encouraged you to set some goals for your pharmacy and shared some tips on how to stick to them throughout the year. Make sure you plan some time to sit down and check in on your goals in these last two critical months before it will be time to measure your success and then start fresh in 2018. 

Take the time you have now (While everyone’s still recovering from the Halloween sugar rush) to think about what the season and the remainder of the year have in store for your pharmacy.