Guide to Business Planning

There are seven core components to your Synergy HomeCare Business Planning process: 

1-page Business Plan, Yearly Budget/Performa, Organizational Chart, Weekly Scorecard, and the three individual 90-day Plans (Sales/Marketing, Caregiver Recruiting, Caregiver Retention).

The follow section provides a detailed description of each component:

1-page Business Plan

• Consider your long-term vision.  
  • What do you want your life to look like in the future?  What will your day-to-day look like when your business is “done?”
  • There may be a financial component here, a quality of life component, and an exit strategy.
• Then put down your goal of where you need to be in 5 years and 3 years to achieve your vision.
  • This should include a financial component and quality of life.
• Back into what that means for your 1-year goals.
  • This should include a financial component, as well as measurable objectives for the year (ie: revenue, profits, hours, caregiver roster, new clients, expansion plans).
• Outline what needs to happen in the next quarter in order to put you on the path to reaching your 1-year goals.
  • These targets should be very specific and can include revenue, profit, hours, number of caregivers, number of clients, new office plans, adding a specific position to your team, a new contract, etc.
• Complete the bottom section with the previous quarter’s goals, results, and notes about why you were on/off to use when creating goals for the next quarter.
  

Yearly Budget/Proforma

• Once you know what your revenue targets are, complete your yearly budget to estimate costs and profits.
• This budget can be adjusted as things change in the business (revenue comes in higher/lower than expected, unexpected expenses occur) to help you adjust your goals and keep you on track for net income goals.
• Utilizing the budget tool within QuickBooks will allow you to easily populate expenses based on previous history, as well as compare budget to actual on a monthly basis.

Organizational Chart

• The one-page organizational chart is the foundation to ensuring you have the team to execute your business plan goals.
• Each role on the business plan should be filled in with a name.
  • You may not necessarily have a different person in each role (ie: Employee John may sit in multiple role on the org chart) but each role needs to be assigned to someone
  • As a small office or a newer office, you may only have 2 full-time employees, so those 2 employees’ names will appear over and over on the org chart.
• It is important to establish up front who will be responsible for which roles, leaving nothing to guess.
• As you add more people to your team, the delineation of roles and assignment of responsibilities becomes more and more important to ensure everyone on the team knows what’s expected of them and that no tasks get missed.
• Utilize the Expansion Path Worksheet to guide you on when to add more people to the team and to see how the roles can be combined based on the number of people who are working in your office.

Weekly Scorecard

• Once you have established your goals and your organizational chart, break down your goals for hours, revenue, caregivers, and retention on your scorecard for weekly tracking.
• This tool is meant to be a predictive tool, meaning it will help you see where your trends are headed and if you are on/off track to meeting your quarterly goals.
• This scorecard should be reviewed weekly with your team during a weekly team meeting (see Weekly Team Meeting Agenda).
  • You may also utilize the template for the google form to keep meeting notes. You will need to recreate the form in your google account following the provided template in order for the “responses (notes)” to stay in your account.  Alternatively, you may print the form and take notes by hand.
• Each section on the scorecard should be completed by the person responsible for the results in that section.
  • For example, your salesperson should be completing the section for hours and prospects, your scheduler should be completing the section for opportunity, your recruiting manager should be completing the section for recruiting, and your employee care manager should be completing the section on retention.
  • Refer to the “eRSP Guide to Reporting” on where to pull the information to complete the scorecard.

90-Day Plans (Sales/Marketing, Recruiting, and Retention)

• Once your scorecard is complete, utilize the 90-day plans to set out your strategy for reaching your goals for the next quarter for Marketing, Recruiting, Retention, and Sales.
• You will complete each section with 3-5 tactics to focus on to drive new business, caregivers, and retention.  Your sales plan will be a list of focused targets to visit on a regular basis.
• The point of having a written plan is to follow it, meaning you should only focus on what’s included in your plan, and don’t do anything that is not written as part of the plan.  You should also make sure that everyone listed as a responsible person on the plan is following through with all the tasks they have been assigned as part of the plan.
  • The plans may be changed and adjusted as you find certain tactics need to be changed out, but make sure that a change in plans is deliberate and you are staying focused on the tactics laid out.
  • Without focus, you cannot evaluate whether your tactics are working or not.
• Your FBC can help you brainstorm ideas for tactics to include in each of your plans.

Also see these related articles:

• Organizational Charts
• The 1-Page Business Plan
• 90-Plans (Sales/Marketing, Recruiting, Retention)