Growth Strategies for Private Duty Home Care
The other day, we received an email offering "Strategic Planning on DVD". For a couple hundred dollars you could learn how to do strategica planning for your business. It kind of made me chuckle, because it's the fast food alternative to a gourmet restaurant.

There are absolutely some fundamentals when it comes to strategic planning. You can learn the best practices. You can develop solid processes, action steps, accountabilities and target dates. Unfortunately, these are only the functionality of strategic planning, not strategy itself.

Here are some key ideas to keep in mind as you search for your own strategic planning process:

• Focus on the journey, and the destination. Much like navigating a ship, the course of your business may have crystal-clear focus on the destination, but it's rare that you can draw a straight path from here to there. Buying a book or DVD is kind of like purchasing "How to Sail", then heading across the ocean.

• Birds eye view is important.  An outside facilitator acts as a type of GPS. This top-down view is much more effective as a navigating tool then the drivers seat. You will steer your business watching for traffic and reading signs along the way, but your GPS guides you towards the next major turning point.

• Industry expertise. There are two ways to learn. Make mistakes, or learn from others who've been down this path before. While strategic planning in theory is very simple, applying it to a specific business in a specific market requires expertise. Look for outside experts who can help you with industry expertise.

• Original research and proprietary information.  There are some things no one knows about home care. This is particularly true in private duty home care, a relatively youthful collection of companies. Because of this, we recognized in 2003 that we were positioned to become the leaders in research. We identified best practices, and developed the model proven successful for private duty home care. Our marketing strategies for private duty home care have adapted and changed as that industry has evolved.

• Hindsight.  Our first home health care client was in 1983. We’d only been in business as a consulting firm for a few years, and frankly, we were green. As our reputation grew, and our focus narrowed,  we gained the ability to see how changes in the environment, legislation, funding and even customer perception influenced individual companies. Hindsight over an entire industry is even more valuable than expertise from the drivers seat. Had I spent the past 25 years as CEO of one home care company, even a very successful company, today I still wouldn't know much beyond my community.

• Future trending.  Predicting the future is an invaluable skill. It's one I don't have.  However, I do have foresight. Market trends tend to travel from east to west, or west to east. Decades ago we watched the first HMOs on the West Coast change healthcare, and that helped us predict the future for those in the East. Other trends begin in metropolitan Northeast, and help us predict changes across the country. Politics, regulation, technology, perception of value and customer attitudes all change over time. Your marketplace evolves constantly, however it likely mirrors changes that have already happened in another part of the country.

• Best practices.  Home care is a relatively simple business. Hire professionals, identify referral sources and customers, connect the people who need with the services they demand, and take a percentage of the revenue. In practice, however, the difference between highly successful private duty companies and the rest lies in the details. The winners are the ones who identified best practices, implement them consistently, and evolve with the market. The winners are the ones who make the best decisions using the best information.

If you spend a couple hundred dollars on a DVD, I can almost guarantee you will get your money's worth. Your business will be a couple hundred dollars better.

If you hire an expert with CEO level experience, national vision, hindsight and foresight and an arsenal of best practices designed specifically to grow your company, you will also get your money's worth. I can guarantee that.