A New Year
By Stacy M. Menz, PT, DPT, PCS
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had a holiday season that was filled with love, laughter, friends, and family. The New Year is a great time to not only reflect on the previous year, but also to look forward to the upcoming year.
With reflection, you can assess how you did with your personal and professional goals, benchmarks, and expectations from the previous year. Did you meet, exceed, fall short, change direction? Regardless of the answer, I think it is important to not only reflect on if you met your goals, but if you feel you came up short, contemplate why. What were the factors that came into play throughout the year? How did you respond to them and did that response ultimately lead to you meeting or not meeting your goals?
This issue of Impact is all about branding, and this period of reflection is a great time to ask yourself: What brand is your company presenting to the world? Does it match your original vision? Is it consistent with your practice’s current mission, vision, and values? Have these things changed and perhaps your brand has not caught up? It is important to revisit these questions on a regular, periodic basis.
For example, we restructured our business model over this past year. I am now sitting down with my team to see if we need to make any adjustments. Do our values that we developed over the past nine years still hold true today? Our values are the key attributes you see when you look around our practice as a patient. How have they have evolved? Do we still have the same mission and vision? How are the public and our customers perceiving us, and is it consistent with how we perceive ourselves?
Asking yourselves questions and updating goals keeps your strategies and ideas fresh—that’s why we’ve decided to do it on a regular basis! Impact magazine will now have “Action Items” at the end of each feature article to help you apply new ideas to your practice. We welcome your feedback!
The beginning of a year can be seen as the beginning of a brand-new notebook. None of the pages have been written on yet, and you can create the words that will be written on the pages and the path you would like to take with your company. All the best in filling your notebook pages in 2017!
