When approached by Aesthetic Medicine to write a by-lined article focused on ‘How To Get DEPTH™ In Your Clinic’, we had it covered.
I originally developed my DEPTH™ model because what I could see, was people producing ineffective business plans that were doomed to fail. DEPTH™ stands for:
- Destination: As a business owner this is about having a complete understanding of what you’re trying to achieve lifestyle-wise, so where you live, what you want do, how many days a week you want to work, how many holidays you want and where you want to go. You really have to nail this down in as much detail as you possibly can.
- Exploration: This is about understanding exactly where you are as a business and then having a complete understanding of all the options open to you to drive it forward. This is where a lot of businesses fall down. They are unaware of the best marketing options available, or ways of doing things more efficiently to drive down costs and drive profits up
- Plan: Now you have a complete understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and all of the options open to you to drive your business forward, now you can build an effective working business plan. And this isn’t something that’s a 50 page document, I’m talking a maximum of three or four pages that you can keep referring back to, ensuring that you’re on track.
- Tactics: You have now got the plan so you can start to implement the tactics, these are the important actions to push your business forward – and you have to focus on them, because what typically happens is the urgent day-to-day things within your business will get in the way. However, what is important should never give way to what is urgent.
- Health: There will be some key KPIs that will be important to your business. It’s not about understanding your P&L sheet but about finding out which figures are important to your business and monitoring them on a monthly basis at a minimum.
Two of the biggest mistakes people make when setting out their business plans, is not reviewing all the achievements they’ve made in last 12 months, and not stepping outside of the everyday hustle and bustle of business (normally it’s easy to do if somebody helps you) to gain a real understanding of exactly where your business is.
Reviewing all the things you’ve achieved and making a point to write them down is important for a few reasons. One, it’s important to understand how well we’re doing and how far we’ve travelled, and we can easily forget everything if it’s not written down. It also enables you to reflect on some of the lessons (commonly known as failures) that you’ve learned over the previous 12 months, so that you can improve and avoid making the same mistakes.
Also, as a species we tend to focus on the negative things, forgetting all of the good stuff. This was really handy when we lived in caves and there was potentially a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the bushes, but in modern life where we’re constantly being bombarded by negative information and goings on in the world, it can be extremely stressful to us, so we have to make a conscious effort to focus on the positive.
Removing yourself from the situation and reviewing exactly where you are as a business is essential to formulating a plan that will work. If you don’t know where you are, it’s a bit like having a satnav with an end destination, however the satnav doesn’t know where is to start with so there is no way it can plan an effective route. This is why it’s important to get somebody outside of the situation to help you evaluate where you are, and from there, plan the best route forward.
FTSE 100 companies as part of their corporate governance need to have external non-exec directors on their boards, because they are exactly the same as every other business – they benefit from external expertise. Typically we can’t see the wood for the trees, or to give you another analogy – no golf pro can see his own backswing.
By Alan Adams The Clinic Coach
