Communicate your plan. When you develop your brand and you create your vision, you’ve got to be realistic and you’ve got to do the research and the development. You’ve got to understand and study the industry, the historical trends. You’ve got to present the economy, the social conditions.
You’ve got to develop an attitude and you’ve got to keep the vision in front of everyone and keep them aware of that vision.
It starts at the top and filters all the way through the organization right to the smallest position in the company. If you came into this company without me even talking to you, I think you would recognize (the vision) and be able to pinpoint it just by walking around and talking to the individuals and see the attitude in which they’re all working.
We do constant training on the vision. We challenged our (marketing director) and said, ‘Look, we need to keep the brand working.’
The marketing director came up with this thing called ‘Brand Jeopardy.’ We broke up in groups and we established this Jeopardy game. You got points if you could answer the question properly about the brand and we awarded the team that did the best job.
You know what happens there? Everyone got excited, they all got involved, and if they didn’t know before they got in the room, they knew when they left more about the brand. I think it’s constantly reminding the team that the brand is this. They have to believe in it and they have to drink the Kool-Aid on a regular basis.
Review your plan. A good business plan covers all facets of your company, and we review the plan. I would like to do it more, but we do it semiannually.
In a difficult period where a company might be experiencing some difficulties, we would actually do it on a quarterly basis.
We’ll sit with our plan in six months and we’ll check every area. How are we doing in sales — that’s the most important thing —how are we doing in customer service, are we maintaining the clinics that we started, which clinics are difficult, how are we going to manage those difficult clinics, and then financially, where are we according to our budget?
Our budget tells us that we should be at $10 million in revenue by the end of six months, are we there? If we’re not there, what do we need to do? If we’re there, how do we increase it perhaps in the second half of the year?
These adjustments come through logic, actual experience and real planning.
There’s nothing you should not look at within your company. The minute you don’t focus on something that’s the minute that things can start turning on you.
There is probably an eight- or 10-pronged list that CEOs, at least in my industry, they need to be aware of. If there’s anything wrong, they need to get in and fix it soon because one thing goes wrong then it’s another thing and another thing.
There are forces outside that can cause it like an economy or not having discretionary income, those you have to deal with but you certainly should be able to manage the ones you can manage and the ones you can manage are your own internal operations.
How to reach: Medi-Weightloss Clinics, www.mediweightlossclinics.com or (877) 633-5677
