Many independent contractors tell us that they collect data and information from FP34s but do little with it; and this isn’t telling them the full story.

A year-on-year prescription growth of 4 per cent, for example, might feel good but is only just keeping up with the market growth. So in this case, market growth data is needed, as well as investigating where the growth is coming from.

Spending time capturing data but not using that information to make business decisions, or collecting information which is not helpful to your goals, means you could be wasting your
time. Equally, if you only measure a business metric occasionally, you may miss the opportunity to respond quickly and make a decision whether to stop (fail fast) or continue with whatever you are doing (eg, a service or stocking a product). In many cases, business performance is only truly known when the year-end accounts are filed. But by then it is far too late to act!

Consider measures and trends over time to get a sense of travelling towards your goal. Let’s take an example where you have set a goal of achieving 50 per cent growth in your OTC business over two years.

This needs to be firstly defined as a cash value to be meaningful, eg, monthly sales of £15,000 by September 2018. You won’t achieve that £15,000 straight away, so break the growth down into realistic chunks – you may even want to go down to daily sales to account for seasonal changes, based on historical performance.