A Cork pharmacy team that finally felt confident on the floor.

Reens is a busy single-site Life Pharmacy in Cork, a community pharmacy with a strong dispensary, a full retail front, and the operational complexity of running both at once. The store was performing, but Owner and Director Mairead Reen could feel a ceiling.

The OTC team and the Retail team were technically the same team, but in practice they were working as two. Communication was patchy. The customer experience varied depending on which side of the floor a customer landed on first. New customers weren’t becoming loyal ones at the rate the store deserved. And the Supervisor, capable and committed, needed real operational scaffolding to lead consistently through a trading day.

Mairead asked for a programme that would do three things at once: grow the customer base, join up the two teams, and give the Supervisor the retail-operations craft and leadership coaching to hold it all together once I’d gone.

I worked with the full pharmacy team on site, pharmacists, OTC, retail, supervisor, manager. Monthly delivery in store with the whole team, plus a check-in every two weeks with management, and one-to-one coaching outside the group sessions. The team didn’t go on training. The training came to the team, around their trading patterns.

Alongside the team sessions, I brought in a set of consulting resources to support the management team in running the shopfloor day-to-day, the kind of tools that lift the mental load off a supervisor so they can actually lead in the moment.

Cadence: monthly on-site delivery with the full team, fortnightly management check-ins, 1:1 coaching support throughout. Eleven months end-to-end.

The headline is the mystery shop score: 65% to 90% over the programme, largely driven by the team becoming visibly proactive on greeting and approach. New customers were getting met at the door, and met like they were welcome.

But the change the team felt most is harder to put on a scorecard. The OTC and Retail teams stopped operating as parallel functions. The Daily Brief gave the Supervisor a clear direction every morning, what we’re working on, who’s where, what good looks like today, and productivity rose as a direct result. Team huddles to celebrate wins replaced what had previously been silence between functions.

• Before → After Two teams running in parallel, sharing a floor but not a plan.
• Before → After Greeting and approach left to whoever was nearest the door.
• Before → After Supervisor holding the operating load in her head every shift.
• Before → After Feedback delivered defensively when it landed at all.

After the programme: one shopfloor with one plan, zone-mapped greetings during trade, a Daily Brief that runs the day, and feedback delivered in the coaching style the team now uses with each other.