You may not always agree
with him, but Darryl Low
is going to make sure you at least understand what he’s
saying.
“Even if they disagree, they
understand,” he says of his
50 employees at MZI HealthCare
LLC. “As long as they understand, they’re willing to get on
board.”
When he became president
of the health care software
provider in 2005, Low spent
hours explaining the rationale
behind every decision he made.
That process helped him focus
his management team on common goals, and the company
has since doubled its revenue to
more than $5 million in 2007.
Smart Business spoke with
Low about how to get buy-in
from your employees during
strategic planning.
Q. How do you begin forming
a strategic plan?
The key element is understanding the whole picture before
you go into your strategic planning: understanding the market,
understanding your product, its
strengths and weaknesses, and
then identifying which strengths
you can leverage the most to
either turnaround the company
or to grow the company.
Q. How do you come to that
understanding?
I have always taken time right
out of the chute to spend with
clients. Go and find out what
the real world perceives the
(product) to do, what they
believe it does well and what
they believe it doesn’t do well.
Go out and do face-to-face
meetings. I actually scheduled to meet with clients of all different sizes around the country,
and we probably spent the first
year in pretty (regular) meetings
face-to-face with the clients.
We have about 120 customers, so it’s a little easier for
us to do than if you had thousands. [Even then], it’s still
worth targeting some of your
key accounts and then throwing in a good sprinkling of
smaller clients to get a really
good picture of the perception.
We all know perception is reality, and so it’s very important to
find out what the reality
of your customer base is.
Q. What’s the benefit
of meeting with clients
face to face?
It does a couple of
things. In turnaround situations, it gives them a
face to put the hope to. It
really allows you to
quickly form a bond that
you’re just not going to
get over the phone.
There were a couple of
clients when we acquired
(the company) that were
in the process of replacing the software. By
being able to go and meet
with them to admit that
there were issues, to give them
an overview of how we were
staging to resolve the issues and
just having lunch with them,
they left with a very high level
of comfort that we would
resolve their issues, and it postponed their decision to leave.
I haven’t personally touched
all the clients, but I’ve also sent
out my vice president and sales
force to deliver the message
after they’ve spent time with me
to understand what the message was. Every position, it has
been worth the time to do that.