How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for Your Pharmacy

Whether your pharmacy is just getting up and running or you have decades of experience, a SWOT analysis will help you drill down and figure out where your pharmacy is succeeding and where it’s struggling — and identify potential future successes and struggles.

The acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and the exercise helps you to take some time and think about how you do business and how you can improve.

Here’s how to learn how to perform a SWOT analysis and how you can use that information to develop goals for your pharmacy.
Identifying strengths

When conducting a SWOT analysis, start with the positives: your pharmacy’s strengths.

Strengths are internal characteristics of your pharmacy that you can control. They are the resources you have at your disposal combined with the experience you have in the industry.

If you’re not sure where to start on your strengths, think about these different areas of your business:

Reputation
Financial and physical assets
Workflow
 
Remember, the only things that count as strengths are the practices and assets that have already been put in place. If you think, “Well, right now our workflow tends to get disrupted, but I have a great idea for how to fix it,” that’s not something you should count as a current strength — but you should hold onto the idea for later.

To make sure that you’ve listed all of your strengths, ask yourself a few questions:

What does your pharmacy do well?
How do you stand out from your competitors?
What skills do your staff members possess?
How does your community view your pharmacy?
What makes your pharmacy efficient?
Are you consistently meeting your budget goals?
What are your plans to grow?

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