There’s a saying that when something stops growing, it dies. A veterinary practice is no different. While many people interpret the word growth as getting bigger in size, that is not necessarily the case. The growth might be in profitability, sustainability, joy, satisfaction, or professional skills. Other areas of growth could include customer service, practice culture, or diversity.
Strategic simply means having a strategy–a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal, usually over several years. Planning is the act or process of making a plan to achieve or do something. A plan is a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something or an intention or decision about what one is going to do. So strategic planning is just a systematic process of envisioning a desired future and translating that vision into broadly defined objectives and a sequence of steps to achieve them.
The purpose of strategic planning is to set overall goals for your business and to develop a plan to achieve them. It requires stepping back from your day-to-day operations and asking what your current reality is, where your business is headed, and what its priorities should be moving forward. When growth is your goal, a strategic plan helps define what you truly want for your practice and how to achieve it. A strategic plan looks at all the things your small business could do from a growth perspective and then narrows down the top priorities. A strategic plan also helps practice owners decide where to spend time and money, allowing them to focus their investments.
With the 2023 American Horse Council study showing a slowly shrinking pool of horses in the nation and multiple studies demonstrating the current difficulty attracting and retaining entry-level equine veterinarians, practices need a strategy for the future. The plan will illustrate your business’s definition of future success and establish the key activities to make this view your reality. The strategy will help you and your team know where the practice is heading, what they should be working on, and which things to tackle first. Without a clearly defined and articulated strategy, you might find your practice does not change with the changing times.
Creating a Plan: Where to Start
To begin, leaders must commit to self-reflection and truly see their practice as it is today. Are veterinarians and staff difficult to retain? Do people become burned out working within your practice culture? What behaviors do you reward? What actions do you punish? How would your team describe the practice’s values and priorities? Are they the same as the “official” practice values? Do the practice owners lead by example, demonstrating the practice values, or are they empty words? Considering the areas of needed change identified by the AAEP’s Commission on Equine Veterinary Sustainability can help focus your work of discernment.
Results from multiple studies have shown the top reasons for the loss of equine veterinarians are long hours and lifestyle, the need to provide emergency coverage, low compensation, and lack of well-being/balance. When you envision your practice in one year, five years, and 10 years, how will you address these issues? If you could wave a magic wand and create your ideal growth, how would the practice have changed? Engaging your entire team can help you develop this picture of the future. Ask them:
- What needs to change for you to look forward to coming to work?
- What makes your work most rewarding?
- What sucks the life out of you in your work?
- What do you need to achieve your professional goals?
- Where/How would you like to see the practice change?
By creating this vision of the desired future with your team’s input and collaborating with them to develop the key activities that will achieve the goals, you more readily have practice member buy-in. Use team meetings to develop a strategic plan to implement your vision, and commit it to writing. Unfortunately, if you don’t capture the strategy in a document, communicate it clearly, and evaluate progress regularly, you’ll be unlikely to achieve the desired results. But when your staff, suppliers, and even clients know where you’re going, you allow greater opportunities for people to help you maximize your success in getting there.
Areas of Consideration
One of the first areas of consideration is the number of hours spent working. Are team members satisfied with how much they work? Do they feel like they have enough flexibility and choice in their schedules? Having control and choice is strongly related to lower levels of burnout, so build in as much choice as possible. While meeting client and patient needs is a high priority, consider whether the needs of your doctors and staff might be more important in building a solid, productive, happy team.
Another area of change could be how the practice will provide emergency services in the future. Will you continue to serve anyone who calls, or will you require some previous relationship with the practice? Could you fashion an emergency coalition with local colleagues to lower the number of on-call shifts for everyone? Perhaps you could use an emergency-only practice for some shifts, if one is available in your area, or maybe this could be a new business opportunity for your practice to start. Would adding a haul-in facility to your strictly ambulatory practice make sense to minimize your windshield time and increase efficiency? With recent research showing only 2% of emergency calls occur after 10 p.m., should you curtail the hours you offer services at night, after which clients must haul to a referral center?
Attracting and keeping equine veterinarians increasingly requires producing enough revenue to afford higher salaries more competitive with companion-animal jobs. What steps will you take to achieve this goal, or will you shrink your practice to just the best clients, go solo, and reduce your expenses through frugal practices? Will you begin to focus on more profitable services like dentistry, integrative services, or sports medicine? Or will you adjust your fees to increase your revenue?
Veterinarian well-being is paramount as we lose doctors to burnout or suicide. Professional satisfaction, learning new skills, being intellectually challenged, and continuing to have passion for your career are all in danger when you are living to work rather than living fully. Having the time to pursue outside interests, enjoy family life, and maintain connections with a community are essential to well-being. Exploring how to grow into a culture that supports a full life for everyone on the team is a powerful priority.
Diversity brings multiple perspectives and has been shown to increase a team’s success in many ways. By offering psychological safety, listening to and valuing everyone’s contributions, and being open to new ideas, a practice can begin to thrive in new ways.
Growing a bigger business is often a practice owner’s goal. It is important to remember that a bigger team makes culture, diversity, and inclusion more important than ever. Managing a big practice is complex, with multiple ways for communication, client service, and team engagement to falter. When enterprise growth is the vision, the strategic plan must emphasize systems, team-building, and a healthy, inclusive culture.
Once you have reflected on your current practice’s strengths and weaknesses and determined with your team the most important priorities for growth, you can paint the picture of your desired future and collaboratively brainstorm solutions to the challenges you have uncovered and must overcome to realize your vision. Your strategic plan will emerge.
Putting Your Plan Into Action
The most important steps in implementing a strategic plan include:
- The practice owner’s role: Once the need to plan strategically is recognized and accomplished, the practice owners then become the catalyst for facilitating buy-in and commitment from the practice team. The practice owners play a vital role in facilitating and implementing their strategic plan throughout the organization.
- Creating ownership: The most common reason a plan fails is lack of ownership or leadership. If your team members don’t feel they have a stake and responsibility in the plan they helped form or the practice owner doesn’t walk their talk, it will be business as usual.
- Clear communication: The plan must be communicated with and championed by employees, or they won’t necessarily understand how they can contribute, make a difference, or benefit.
- Keeping long-term goals in sight: Practice owners, consumed by daily operating problems or clinical work, can become mired in the day-to-day struggle and lose focus. Treat the strategic plan as something special and separate from the ordinary process of practice management.
- An achievable, believable plan: The goals and actions generated in the strategic planning session must not be too numerous or unrealistic. Your practice members must know where to begin and feel excited about the future. The planned actions should support the practice’s vision, mission, and values, and the practice leaders should lead by example.
- Regular progress reports: Build in ways to track progress, measure what’s important, and share with the team, so everyone feels the forward momentum.
- Accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means each action step, measure, objective, and initiative must have an expected time frame and an owner accountable for achieving it. Accountability provides strong motivation for improving performance, but your team must also have the authority, responsibility, and tools necessary to act.
In Summary
A well-crafted strategic plan supports growth of many kinds. It all starts with careful self-reflection and research with team members. When everyone at the practice is on board with creating a compelling future, engagement and job satisfaction will increase. Foster optimism and excitement with the collaborative work of building a strategic plan.
Related Reading
- The Business of Practice: Shifting to a Haul-in Emergency Model
- Business Briefs: Why Adaptability Is Essential in Equine Practice
- Starting Your Own Equine Practice
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