With 2016 coming to a close, it’s time to look to the new year and decide what goals you have for your home care business. What changes do want to make for 2017? What worked in 2016, and what didn’t? Where do you see your business going? With the new year right around the corner, it is essential that you take the time to create a strategic plan for 2017. This plan will help you establish goals and ensure your business is going in the right direction.
Strategic planning is important to the health of your business. However, for a strategic plan to be useful in driving your goals, you need to remember why you began your home care business. Many home care providers start their home care business because they are driven by an inner desire to make a difference. They either have personal experience with home care and a desire to make it better, a love for serving people, or they are just passionate about seniors. Whatever your reason is, build your business around it. At Home Care Pulse, we call this “knowing your ’why’.” When you build your home care business around your “why,” you’ll have a business staffed with people who are passionate about your goals and dedicated to your success.
Now that you have your “why” in mind, it is important to have a strategic plan in place for your home care business.
A strategic plan will help you to:
1. Prioritize Your Direction
Knowing your “why” will help you to prioritize your direction. Creating a strategic plan pushes you to look at your business from an outsider’s perspective and see if your business if moving in the right direction. Your “why” should be the foundation for all your business goals and decisions. Is your business model successful? Where do you need to make improvements? Are your staff and caregivers helping to drive your “why?”
2. Get Your Team On the Same Page
Creating a strategic plan gives you the opportunity to share your “why” with your team. This will help them know the direction you want for your home care business, and then they can help you get there. When they know what your business goals are for the year, they can adjust their projects and tasks to help meet those goals. This will help eliminate any “shiny object” projects/goals that will detract from your progress.
3. Make Decision Making Easier
If you have a strategic plan in place and follow it, when it comes time to make decisions for your business, you can look back on your plan and decide if that decision is in your best interest or not.
4. Communicate What is in Your Head
Taking your goals from the planning state and putting them on paper is the first step to creating a strong strategic plan. If you don’t write your goals down, you will struggle to accomplish them. Your team cannot help you to grow your business if they do not know your direction.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” A business without a strategic plan is like a ship without its captain; it has no direction and is susceptible to the winds and waves of the ocean. If you don’t have a strategic plan, your business has no direction, and your goals are just dreams that may never come to fruition.
Knowing that strategic planning is essential to the growth of your business is just the first step; your next step is to create a plan. What elements should you incorporate in this plan? Next week’s article will discuss the key elements that make up a strong strategic plan and keep you on the road to success.
Home Care Pulse has multiple tools to help you create your strategic plan. Visit our resource library to see what free tools can help you.
