Strategic Planning Sessions

Hi, this is Dave Katz with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you.

 When was the last time you ever did any long range planning for your clinic, where you got together with people that made a difference in your clinic and decided what to do both now to correct problems and in the future, especially as far as your marketing is concerned.

We call those strategic planning sessions and here's how they work. We gather four or five of our best confidants, our business confidants of people that have other therapy practices that are friends of yours, your spouse or your significant other, and anybody else that you feel would have a good business head that would help you make decisions.

You get together somewhere, not in your office. We like to do what we call off campus. So you go somewhere else to some quiet meeting place where maybe you can have a writing board and then you go over the topics of that day.

The first thing you go over is the problems that you may be having in your practice. Now, you may have to think a little bit before you get to find those problems because sometimes we get so used to dealing with those problems, we don't even see them as problems anymore. But the first hour, you may have some food to serve them. You thank them for all being there. You tell them why they're there because you value their information. And then you talk about the problems or the challenges you have in your clinic right now.

The second thing you do then in the second hour is you talk about what you can do as far as getting more streamlined in your practice so that you can handle more people or do more things without having the concern that you're gonna spend too much time in the office. And the last hour, the third hour, you talk about your marketing plan, what you're going to do to market yourself and promote yourself in the future.

Now, these strategic planning sessions are very important. I don't care if you cover the exact topics I told you those are the topics that we talk about. But I will tell you that if you have a strategic planning session about every nine months, you invite those special people, you have it in a special place, you'll find out that it really helps the growth of your practice.