When selling a pharmacy, appearances matter

November 28, 2023

When planning to put up a pharmacy for sale, many pharmacist-owners pore over their business’s financial statements and its operations to find ways to make it more attractive for buyers. And so they should – smart acquirers pay close attention to those. Yet buyers who pay attention only to finances and operations are few and far between. In fact, most buyers’ assessments of a pharmacy’s value are impacted significantly by a much more simple, qualitative factor: how it looks.

In short, appearances matter when you are trying to sell your pharmacy. And that’s not only because a shabby-looking facility can make a poor first impression with a prospective buyer. Customers can also be put off by disorganization, dirt and confusing merchandise display. Ultimately, cleaning those up can go a long way towards improving your pharmacy’s profitability – which in turn will help make it look very, very good in the eyes of a buyer.

Over the course of our decades working with pharmacist-owners, we’ve identified several “hot spots” for facility decorum, where a little bit of effort or creativity can drive pharmacy profitability and ensure your business is putting on its best face when you go to market.

1. General cleanliness and repair

If a pharmacy looks faded, dirty or unkempt, customers won’t want to spend much time – or money – there. So look around and clean up what you can. Are the floors clean? Shelves free of dust? What about the ceilings? Look up and you might spot some dangling cobwebs or stained tiles. Does the dispensary look like an obstacle course? Tidy it up. Remember, too, that a fresh coat of paint can be a cheap and easy way to make a place look brand spanking new. And don’t forget the human element: your staff should be wearing uniforms, and those uniforms should be clean.

2. End caps

End caps are the exclamation points in your store’s merchandising, so pay special attention to them. Style matters. Get an end cap right, and it tells customers (and potential buyers) that you care about merchandising and devote resources to it. That should help you sell more.

A book called New Supermarket Design (HarperCollins, 2007) by Cristian Campos has some great tips for end caps that apply well to the pharmacy environment. Here are a few of them:

• Keep it simple: You want to ensure end caps have clean lines and allow for easy access to products – the last thing you want is for a customer to struggle to buy something! If you can arrange products into a semi-circle, allowing shoppers to see them from the front and the side, even better.
• Load it up: A display should be full of products – no shopper will get excited by empty spaces on your shelves. Shoppers like to experience abundance, not scarcity, when in a store.
• Theme it up: The best end cap displays only one product or group of related products. Distinguishing between a bunch of different products is too much mental work.
• Use color wisely: Different colours have different psychological effects. Yellow is the easiest colour for the brain to process, so it gets the most attention. Green suggests health. Blue is associated with fun. Warm colours like red and orange? Heat. And remember: bright, bold colours might get attention, but shoppers often associate them with “cheap.”
• Put a tag on it: Many stores neglect to properly display information like name, brand and price on end caps. That’s a mistake.

3. Displays

There’s an old saying in point-of-sale marketing: “Pile them high and watch them buy.” That goes for displays, too. You need to make sure they are full of product, and make sure the items are not “shelf worn.” An old display is a bad display.

4. “Holes”

What we said about end caps goes for merchandise display in general: empty spaces on your shelves – anywhere – are bad for business. “Holes” project a poor image, making your pharmacy look like it is going out of business. People tend to think those kinds of stores won’t provide very good service, either. And there’s an even more basic reason to fill up your shelves: you’re in the business of selling products, not empty space, and holes are just a wasted opportunity.

5. Shelves

There’s an art and a science to merchandising, and one of the most useful “scientific” tools for the effective arrangement of products on your shelves is a planogram. If you don’t know what that is, you should. A planogram is a visual representation of where and how products should be placed on shelves or displays. As a planning tool, it can help you ensure that you are maximizing both the use of shelf space and the impact of your displays. Tools like planograms are often made available by pharmacy banners, so if your banner has them, use them.

Now, we understand that pharmacist-owners can get so wrapped up in their work, which is often behind the counter in the dispensary, that they sometimes fail to see their stores from the customer’s perspective. If that sounds like you, then starting to think about selling your pharmacy provides the perfect opportunity to take a fresh look at facility decorum, particularly in front-of-store. Cleaning it up and maximizing store merchandising can not only make your business more attractive, but also more profitable – and any potential buyer is going to like that very much.