What’s Your Road Map?

By Stacy M. Menz, PT, DPT

Wow, I can’t believe it’s our final issue of Impact for 2018.

I find it fitting that the topic is strategic planning. Strategic planning helps prepare you, your business, your staff, and your consumers for starting off 2019 the right way.

I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to plan for the future, I sometimes get carried away with possibilities or what I might be missing out on if I don’t set a particular goal. What I constantly have to remind myself is that I am creating a road map—an overall plan of how I want to get to the end result. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I remember when I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast many years ago. I knew my starting point, my destination, and most of the places I would be stopping at night along the way. What I didn’t know was exactly what the path between those points would look like. I encountered many opportunities that weren’t part of my original plan. Some of these detours ended up being a great decision and enhanced the trip immensely. Others may not have been the best idea and ended up using resources that would have been better used elsewhere. Regardless of the detours, I had the map and our end result firmly in mind and we made our goal.

I share this story because each year, I assess how my trip through the previous year went. Did we hit our stops along the way (short-term goals)? Did we take some detours that really worked out, or did we take some we don’t want to take again? Did we reach our destination faster than we thought, or are we still working our way there? What did we learn over the year and what can we carry forward?

I love strategic planning, and I love to engage my team in the process. The more engaged they are, the more they take ownership of the plan and the goals. They bring their unique insights and offer ideas and cautions that on my own I may not have thought of. They may have seen triumphs or setbacks that I missed from the previous year. We are each able to bring our unique view to the table, and this only serves to further help the kids and families we work with.