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Dec
2018
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that you probably couldn’t do in Melbourne,”
Mr Kastrinakis says.
After about three years, the group morphed
into the Advantage pharmacy group and the
Advantage banner was born.
The first member pharmacy joined after
approaching Advantage because the owner
wanted to replicate what Mr Kastrinakis and his
co-directors were doing. At the time, there was
no real strategy to recruit pharmacies.
“Advantage really started off as a buying
and selling group — we didn’t really envisage
that it would become a banner group,” says
Mr Kastrinakis.
“It really wasn’t until 2008 and onwards
that we started to get into the market place,” he
says, adding that as late as 2014, it had just 52
pharmacy members.
But over the past four years, membership
has more than quadrupled, and as of October,
there were 232 pharmacies in the Advantage
group, with just over 100 of these carrying the
Advantage Pharmacy brand.
Advantage offers various memberships levels.
These range from fully fledged franchises to
pharmacies that want to remain independent
but benefit from buying deals, trading terms,
store fitouts or marketing support.
“Even though the endgame is to have those
stores branded, we still value everyone in the
same way,” Mr Kastrinakis says.
An essential part of Advantage’s success
has been keeping ahead of changes in the
community pharmacy landscape.
In 2015, the group anticipated an increasing
focus on professional services and hired its first
“Pharmacies don’t want to
do another feel-good service
that doesn’t pay the bills. A
pharmacy that is not viable
is no use to anyone.”
pharmacist business development manager as
the Guild announced details of the 6CPA.
“We could see the Guild was talking about
the implementation of services into stores and
we made the investment in personnel to allow
that to happen,” recalls Mr Kastrinakis.
“Fast-forward to 2018, and we have four
pharmacist business development managers and
another group pharmacist who helps implement
change into stores.”
Mr Kastrinakis credits Advantage’s success
in this area to the fact that all its services are
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“People and companies come to you with
programs and initiatives which sometimes don’t
have commerciality,” he says.
“We don’t allow a program to roll out that
hasn’t been proven.”
This is important as pharmacists are eager to
offer their customers more services, but are wary
of forking out money to introduce services that
deliver no financial benefit, Mr Kastrinakis says.
“Pharmacies don’t want to do another
feel-good service that doesn’t pay the bills. A
pharmacy that is not viable is no use to anyone.”
Mr Kastrinakis believes two pharmacy
models will do well in the next 10 years:
services-based pharmacies and the discount
model. While there will be some pharmacies
that sit between these models, he doesn’t believe
they will be very profitable.
“If you don’t stand for something, then
you’re in no-man’s land, a kind of Death
Valley,” he says.
With an increasing number of pharmacies
migrating to the Advantage Pharmacy brand,
Mr Kastrinakis is aware there is increasing
pressure to prove that the group offers value.
And that’s one of the benefits of being both a
franchisee and franchisor, he says.
“I go into my own stores and become very
critical of my head office.
“You can’t just create a program and say
it’s fantastic unless you’ve seen it live in your
store.”
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