BUSINESS STRATEGIES

Which Way?

How to master the art of business planning

regardless of the size of your enterprise, it’s important to sit back and review where you are and where you desire to be. From there, it’s even more critical to share that vision with your team—and to have them engaged in developing the plans for how they will best support your vision.

Avoid Getting Lost

Imagine being a player on a team for which there’s no goal and no scoring. At the end of the day, everyone knows that they’re tired, sweaty, smelly, and hurting…but no one knows what was really accomplished.

Or imagine being in a car with the goal of arriving at a certain destination, but none of your fellow travelers refers to a map, or stops from time to time to reassess your location on the trip. Are you sure you’re heading in the right direction, or making good time?

Is this going on in your business?

As the leader, whether of an entire enterprise or a department, you assume the solemn responsibility of providing your team with a clear understanding of where you’re going. In many respects, this vision is far more important than the map of how you’ll get there. But one cannot exist without the other. And lack of planning is a root cause of business underperformance.

Potential, Unfulfilled

We see this all too often. We hear from professionals who go to workshops and seminars and are thrilled that they come away with scores of ideas. When we follow up, we often hear, “I shared the ideas with my team, but nothing happened.”

This inability to execute is most commonly the result of a lack of clarity in planning. The world is full of good ideas. They’re a dime a dozen. But an idea that isn’t in line with the goals of the business won’t likely see the light of day; and it probably shouldn’t.

Such random ideas often take your eye off the prize. Further, in our information-saturated world, it’s even more critical to seek clarity and to focus the majority of your energy on those few opportunities and challenges that will deliver the most significant result.

Road Map for Success

Being successful in your business is largely the result of luck and hard work. So, what are your goals for 2016? Here are some questions worth pondering:

Why do we do what we do?

How will we measure our success as an enterprise?



What has gotten in the way of achieving our goals in the past?



What resources do we have? What resources do we need?



Who are our star performers? What qualities do they have?



What do I need to do to support my team?



If money were no object, what goals would we set?



What is my role? How is it going to be different from last year’s role?

I’m told that one of the most frequent reasons staff members leave a business is that they don’t know where it’s going. This is even more true with the current generation of focus—millennials.

Millennials work well with clear instructions and concrete targets. They want to know the “what.” But they also want to take responsibility for how they achieve their goals, and thus the “why” is equally critical. When people understand the “why” behind the goals, they can make the daily decisions necessary to deliver on them.

Our industry is changing at warp speed. Disruptive technologies are being introduced that will affect you and your business in profound ways. Successful eyecare enterprises are those that recognize that the world is changing around them, but also have a crystal clear, well-defined vision of who they are and where they’re going.

Successful ECPs don’t cower to competition; they are the competition!

So, what’s your plan?

—Alan Cleinman

Alan Cleinman is the founder and CEO of Cleinman Performance Partners (cleinman.com), a business consultancy specializing in the development of high-performance optometry practices. The opinions contained herein are those of the author and do not represent the opinion of Eyecare Business or its publisher. ©2016 Cleinman Performance Partners, Inc.