FUTURE FOCUS: GEARING UP FOR THE NEW YEAR

Smart RESOLUTIONS

Taking steps to prepare for 2015 can make the New Year a profitable one

BY WILLIAM J. LYNOTT

With the New Year just around the corner, now is the time to set your plans for taking advantage of the opportunities that will present themselves in 2015. Here are steps you can take right now to make 2015 your best year ever.

Set Specific Goals For Your Practice

Your goals for the year must be specific if there is to be any chance of accomplishing them. General goals such as “reduce office expense” or “improve net income” are almost always certain roads to failure.

Specific goals include concrete and measurable criteria. For example, a goal to reduce payroll ratio should specify the target, such as reducing the ratio from 9.8% to 9.5% instead of just “reduce payroll.” A goal should also be timely. By setting a specific time for accomplishment, such as year-end 2015, you generate a sense of urgency that helps to keep the goal on the front burner.

Finally, your goals should be realistic and attainable. While you should avoid any goal that is too high to be realistic, you must set goals high enough to make the effort worthwhile. If it isn’t feasible, move on.

Keep Your Goals Measurable

As the old saying goes, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” When you’re able to measure your progress in tangible criteria, you’ll know if you’re on track to meet your target dates. By knowing where you stand at any point in time, you’ll know what needs to be done, if anything, to keep you on track.

To know whether the goal you’ve set for your practice is measurable, ask such questions as: How much? How many? How long?

Repeat Your 2014 Strengths

Get together with employees to specifically identify what you did especially well in 2014. Plan to incorporate and improve those strengths in 2015. Conversely, take a look at those specific things in which you did not do well (and why) and plan to avoid allowing them to creep back into your 2015 performance.

Learn From Your Competition

Study your top competitors to identify what they did best in 2014. Do you see opportunities to learn from them? Is there as much as a single program or idea of theirs that you can put to work in 2015?

It’s easy to internalize all of your management efforts, thereby short-changing your practice by ignoring the accomplishments of others. Keeping a close eye on your competition is an important way to keep them from running away with top honors.

Pledge to Keep Your Best Employees

Big American companies spend millions of dollars every year in continual pursuit of new talent in sales and marketing skills, when it would be more profitable to concentrate on ways to hang on to their best performers.

While money will always be an essential ingredient in employee satisfaction, independent studies consistently show that other factors—such as recognition for a job well done—can be as important, or even more important, than money in employee retention.

Although concentrating on patient satisfaction is an essential management philosophy in the eyecare professions, it’s important to remember that a high level of patient satisfaction is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without a high level of employee satisfaction.

Take Action on Poor Performers

Retaining valuable employees should be high on your priority list for 2015. However, failing to take action on an unproductive or disruptive employee can be a costly mistake.

Keeping a problem worker around to create more trouble makes a bad situation worse. That’s not fair to you or to other employees.

A single problem employee in a business with dozens of employees can represent a serious threat to productivity and profits; in a small professional practice it can be deadly.

RATCHET UP YOUR INVOLVEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Where does a prospective patient go to find basic information about your practice? Up to now, you may have relied mostly on conventional media to satisfy this need, including an expensive ad in the Yellow Pages. Realistically, these platforms don’t work as well as they used to. More and more, today’s prospects go to the Internet to find an address, phone number, or other important information about an eyecare practice.

Chances are that you already have a website for this purpose. However, social media can be used not only to complement your website, but to help build a dedicated and loyal customer base by reaching many more prospects than a website alone.

Social media doesn’t cost anything except your time or that of a staff member. Even more important, social media helps to build permanent relationships and loyalty through two-way contact with prospects and patients. Traditional marketing provides one-way contacts with your patients and prospects. Social media provides a means for having a dialogue—a much more effective and profitable marketing technique.

With a dozen or more strong social media platforms now up and running, getting started may seem a bit overwhelming at first. One or more of the big three (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) is all you need to start putting social media to work for your practice.

Facebook, with more than 800 million active users, is arguably the most important of all social media platforms, and getting started on Facebook couldn’t be easier. Just log onto facebook.com and follow the directions to open your free account.

Whatever platform you choose, ratcheting up your presence in social media should be on your priority list for 2015.

Put More Trust in Your People

No one knows the intricacies of a particular job better than the person who is doing that job every day. Most employees are anxious to make a positive contribution in their workplace, so establishing an atmosphere that encourages employees to offer suggestions for improvements is a worthwhile goal for 2015.

If you don’t already have one, put a program in place that will reward employees who make usable suggestions with cash or other means of recognition.

Perhaps most important—take advantage of every opportunity to say “thank you.”