Turning Your Strategies for 2023 Into Results
Carter Schelling closes his business planning series by showing how a monthly action chart keeps long-term strategies moving when urgent problems compete for an owner's time during the year.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Welcome to Studio 3655 and happy new year. I'm Carter Schelling, director of business development for Martin Healthcare Advisors. For the past several years, I've helped Paul create his terrific series of video interviews and presentations on the state-of-the-art in [snorts] physical therapy across America. Several of those shows were actually shot right in this studio. I'm also chairman and founder of a consulting company called 3655 Incorporated. And for the last 43 years, I've helped my business owner clients build extraordinary companies in ordinary industries. And this is our final show in a series about building the most valuable business plan you've ever created.
The plan that generates the strategies that can help you prepare to sell your company for the best deal possible. That is the deal that offers the most money, the best structure, and the best acquirer. And we've gone through our paces, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and all of those aspects of an important plan like this one where we create and strategies that come from connecting your unique strengths to the opportunities that are out there and protecting your unique weaknesses from the threats that are out there. Now, those strategies offer the most powerful proactive actions you can take now to increase the value of your company when you sell.
They're terrific opportunities. And I know you've spent most of December thinking about what those strategies are going to be. But there's a problem. They're not urgent, these actions that you should take. In fact, many owners say things like, "Well, it's not a problem if the actions wait. I can always get to them later." Why do they say that? Well, and also, why is this the time of year when the bestlaid plans of mice and men aft gang a glare? Because you launch into the year and then your plans to do these proactive things for the future get interrupted by urgent problems that arise or unexpected new urgent opportunities or the best one people upsets.
Things come up that take you away that have to be dealt with and that stuff you should do for the future. Waits until the future and then the future arrives. You know, I should have been doing this. Well, we have a tool we use to help our clients keep the future present in the present by injecting it into each month's goal setting. We call it a perk chart. It's basically just an Excel sheet with rows and columns that takes all of the goals that are part of a particular strategy and offers to you and your team the actions we should take first in the next three months and then in the rest of the year.
Let's say for instance you came up with a strategy. You happen to be very successful in a partnership with a well-respected hospital system in your footprint. And because you've gotten good at helping them, they've discovered, they just did a study where they discovered they make more money when you do their PT than when they used to. And you did a study and realized you make more money with them than you do with the general population. And there's nobody else in your footprint who specializes in helping hospitals deal with the opportunity and the problem that PT represents.
So you decide we're going to get good at it. And if you listen to the advice I give, you decide we're going to dominate it. We're going to be not only the primary provider, but the only provider any good hospital should consider when they're thinking about having a partner take care of their PT responsibilities and opportunities. So, you decide you're going to dominate the market for all the hospitals in your region for PT and you come up with a set of goals. Like here, let's walk through the goals for a minute.
This is an important enough opportunity that you need one of your staff, one of your managers to actually be responsible for leading it. But that person right now has a lot of other responsibilities. So you're going to need to develop backup for them so they have time to dedicate to this particular opportunity. Second of all, you got to have a successful sales plan. You have one great customer success story. Okay, how do we promote that? How do we turn that into new sales? There's a plan required for that.
Next, you got to have the systems that match up with, you know, hospitals are very interested in the systems all being correct. You have to have the systems for working with them successfully and efficiently. You have one site where you're very successful. Okay. How do we replicate that and institutionalize what we do there so we can do several sites successfully and efficiently? Then we need to train our staff because working in a hospital is different than working in our one of our clinics. We have to have a certain cadre of people ready to make that transition and they have to be prepared.
And then finally, it may be that one of your competitors does some hospital work, but it's not an important part of their primary strategy, and they don't do it very well. So, we're either going to buy them or drive them out of the business. Hospital contracts are typically multi-year. So, we're going to seriously consider buying at least that part of their business and taking it off their plate and putting it on ours as part of our plan to not just participate in the hospital business, but to dominate it.
And why do I stress the importance of domination? When you have the biggest market share, you control the pricing. When there is pricing opportunities like with hospitals and you have the greatest efficiency opportunities, you do more of it so you can do it more efficiently. You never want to be a small player in a market. You want to be the dominator. So as you look forward, you decide, well, what on each of these subp parts needs to get done in January? Let's just take the first one for instance.
In January, we got to figure out who's going to be the leader, who's going to be the backup, and get them set and interested and motivated to participate. Maybe in February, we need to teach the backup the system stuff. They need to be able to step in for some of the leaders responsibilities. Maybe in March, we prep that person to handle the people who the leader is going to delegate to them so they're prepared. And then in the rest of the year, we want to get to a place where by the end of the year, the leader is spending 70% of his or her time on this hospital opportunity.
Now, at the end of March, we're going to change the sheet and put in April, May, and June, and July to December. The reason we only go three months out on a monthly basis because things change. I mean, things don't go the way they were supposed to. So, it's crazy to start planning what we're going to do in September of 23 because it won't be what we expect it to be. The next three months at a time is fine with one more category for where do we want to be at the end of the year.
Now, anytime one of my clients comes to me and says, "I got so many things going on. I can't keep track. I'm not on top of all the things I'm responsible for." I prescribe what we call the dreaded perk chart. Okay? Because although it seems ridiculously simple, just taking the time to put the most important goals and the most important actions through time into the future helps organize enormously any owner's thinking. In addition, if all of this is non-confidential, we might not put the acquire competitor up on the sheet.
The non-confidential stuff we put up on the wall so that the manager, our people, everybody knows this is what we plan to do in January. So, at the end of January when we have our manager meeting, we go, well, here's the January column. How did we do? We look at the numbers and we look at the per chart. The numbers tell us about our past performance. The per chart tell us tells us our progress on future performance. And unless you insert in your daily management thinking the demands of the future, you're going to back into it and it's going to happen to you rather than you making it happen.
My ctor, my second mentor once had a saying. There's three kinds of people. People who make things happen, people who have things happen to them, and people who wonder what happened. Okay. With a perch chart, you got a good start toward being in that first category. So, good luck with your action plan and your per chart. If you have any questions, we'd love to talk to you about this process and how it can help you be successful and get the best possible deal for your company when you sell. In the meantime, thanks for your time today and we'll see you next week.
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