How to write your own strategic plan

Part 1 of 3: Early steps and the strategic planning meeting.

By Peter Wasserman, MD, MBA

You’ve been working hard, seeing 50 patients a day, five days a week, and it’s time for a vacation. Before you leave, you decide on your ultimate destination — the beach. You also decide how to get there; you are going to drive your BMW. Next, you consult your GPS to show you the best route to get to the shore.

This is the basic premise of strategic planning. You have an objective, the beach; a strategy, to drive; and a tactic to get there: follow your GPS.

At least when I was in medical school, we were not taught how to do strategic planning, or business in any way, because we were supposed to be above those mundane matters. However, as most of us realize, some knowledge of business is critical if we want to stay in practice and care for our patients. Strategic planning is the backbone of our business decisions. It is crucial to reaching the end results we desire for our practices.

TWO VERY EARLY STEPS

1. Answer three questions

Before I went to business school, I thought the whole strategic planning process seemed complicated. I could not really distinguish between objectives, strategies, goals, tactics and the like.

Talking to business people made it worse, as they were quick to correct and explain (with disdain) that my strategies were really tactics, or my objectives were really strategies. It doesn’t have to be this hard. Strategic planning is really not very complicated. Basically, strategic planning answers three questions:

• Where are we now?

• Where are we trying to go?

• How are we going to get there?

In this series of three articles, I will explore how to do strategic planning for your ophthalmology office to allow you to reach your goals. This will follow what I call the COAST and 4 C’s model of strategic planning (Table page 62).

2. Develop mission statement and draft a list of values

Before starting on strategic planning, you must take some important early steps. A painter needs to prep before he paints, just as you need to prepare your office for moving forward. An organization should have both a mission statement and a list of critical values. This creates the foundation you will build on with strategic planning.

A mission statement is one or two easy-to-read sentences that explain why your organization exists. This is an individual statement reflecting how the organization wishes to position itself in the marketplace. Here is one example: “ABC Eyecare’s mission is to bring the highest level of eye care, using the most up-to-date equipment and techniques, to the northwest corner of Texas.” Or, “Global Surgical Partners’ mission is to provide the most high-tech surgical eye care to far reaches of the world, while creating ‘out of this world’ profits.”

A list of values simply reflects the values important to your organization. They could include efficiency, caring, loyalty, honesty, productivity or anything else the organization’s owners feel strongly about.

GETTING DOWN TO WORK

Commit

The strategic planning process (COAST) starts with Commit. Commit means more than just committing to the process. It implies committing to the time involved and to a strategic planning meeting. This meeting usually involves at least a few hours to a few days. It can be an evening, a half-day on the weekend, or a full retreat over several days. Evening meetings are not ideal because the doctors often are tired and most interested in keeping the meeting short to go home early.

A morning meeting before clinic hours is even worse, because there is not adequate time to go into the necessary depth. Strategic planning should not be tacked on to the last 15 minutes of a regular partner meeting; it needs to be separated from the typical office issues both for time and psychological reasons. It must be clear to all participants that this meeting is very different and distinct from all their other discussions, and it needs to be given its own special time and place.

The planning meeting

Location. Meeting outside the office makes it clear to all that this is not a typical office meeting. One of our best strategy sessions was held at a ski resort hotel, which included an afternoon of skiing for those so inclined. Having dinner together at the hotel’s restaurant afterward (while watching the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl) was great for bonding of doctors and administrators. However, location is not critical, and just having the meeting is most important.

Participants. Meeting participants should include all practice owners and key administrators. Other doctors, including non-owner physicians, optometrists and lower-level administrators, could and should be invited to participate for relevant segments of the meeting. They may be able to provide useful insights into their practices and departments. For example, before deciding to raise contact lens fees, you can evaluate the likely market reaction by including the optometrists who fill these prescriptions.

However, before making strategic decisions, the non-owner doctors and the lower-level administrators should be thanked for their contributions and politely asked to leave the room.

For a group of more than two or three doctors, a neutral facilitator present can be very helpful. Sometimes, the administrator can play this role if he or she has experience with such meetings, or a facilitator can be brought in from outside as a consultant. Sometimes, discussions need to be brought back on track or stopped to allow decision-making. Agendas and allotted times need to be followed, and “quiet” participants need to be queried for their thoughts, all of which a neutral party can facilitate.

Preparation. Administrators should come to the meeting armed with as much information as they can about the health of the practice, including, but not limited to, profit and loss statements for the last several years, individual doctor and department revenues and expenses, outstanding loans, referral sources, numbers of patients seen by doctor, surgeries, numbers of new patients, marketing plans and scheduling backlogs for each doctor. Prepare a basic agenda and show it to all the owners in advance, allowing them enough time to collect their thoughts and come up with ideas before the meeting.

No negatives. It is imperative that all members feel they can present their thoughts and ideas without judgment, or, worse, ridicule. All responses should be written down, preferably on large sheets of paper for all to see. No negative reactions to these ideas should be allowed during the brainstorming process, as nothing stops ideas more than participants feeling theirs are not appreciated.

Once all ideas have been generated, the facilitator can then help lump common responses together. Less important (or impractical) suggestions can be tactfully eliminated, while still remaining positive. Remember, this meeting should help bring partners together rather than create greater conflict within the group. OM

Next month: I will explore the actual strategic planning, beginning with Objectives.

About the Author
	Peter Wasserman, MD, MBA, is president of Concord Eye Care, PC, a multi-subspecialty ophthalmology practice in Concord, N.H. His e-mail is info@insight-healthcare.com. Disclosure: Dr. Wasserman is founder of Insight Healthcare Solutions, LLC, an ophthalmology consulting firm (www.insight-healthcare.com).