In the book, The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran introduces a concept and execution system that has absolutely revolutionized my business.
Similar concepts put forward by Stephen Covey as rocks and other authors have called them quarterly priorities but the 12 week year execution system has taken the concepts and broken them down in such a way that you can see a dramatic impact in your business within the first few quarters.
Here are the basics of the system:
In order for you to make the maximum impact on your practice with this system, each of your team members must have their own goal and plan to accomplish it in 12 weeks. This goal must be consistent with your practice mission, vision, and goals.
These 12 week year goals should be a project. It should not be something that can be accomplished quickly in a few weeks but something that will take time and effort consistently to produce something great.
The goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable, and timely (SMART).
Let’s look at an example:
Your front desk CA wants to improve her conversion on phone calls for new patient opportunities. This is a great goal and it’s consistent with your practice mission, vision, and goals. But we have to make it more SMART to make an effective 12 week year goal.
How can you make it more specific?
First, you have to have some data.
What is your current conversion rate on new patient phone calls?
Are you using our ChiroLead Dashboard to track and record all new patient phone calls?
If not, you may not have any idea what your current conversion is and I highly recommend you get the dashboard and track this key statistic.
But let’s say you are using the dashboard and you know that your CA is currently scheduling 30% of your new patient opportunity phone calls.
So to make this specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely the goal is…
Front desk CA to convert 50% of new patient phone call opportunities to schedule appointments by month three of Q3
So if you set this goal at your Q2 planning meeting then by the end of September your measured conversion on new patient phone calls should be 50% or more for the month.
You want to make sure that there is one person that is responsible for accomplishing this goal. Other people can help them but one person is ultimately accountable for the results. In this case, it’s our front desk CA Jennifer.
Once you have a SMART goal next you need to have specific tactics that will be completed to take you from where you are to where you want to be. Each of these tactics needs to be committed to a timeline.
Let’s continue with our example. For this example, I’m going to assume that you have practice phone guidelines that you have in place. If you do not we can help you establish tested and proven practice phone guidelines to convert new patients effectively.
Goal: Front desk CA to convert 50% of new patient phone call opportunities to scheduled appointments by month three of Q3 – Jennifer
Tactics:
Week One: Jennifer to investigate and purchase ChiroLead Dashboard to track and record all new patient phone calls.
Week Two: Jennifer begins using ChiroLead Dashboard to make and receive all new patient phone calls.
Week Three: Jennifer commits to listening to all new patient phone calls to ensure that practice phone guidelines are being followed.
Week Four: Jennifer finds one good example where the new patient opportunity converted to a scheduled appointment and one bad example where they did not. She then listens to these two calls with the rest of the team in order to improve.
Week 5-8: Jennifer continues to listen to her new patient phone calls but also begins role-playing with the Doctor or other team members to improve consistency of practice phone guidelines principles.
Week Nine: Jennifer again finds one good example where the new patient opportunity converted to a scheduled appointment and one bad example where they did not. She then listens to these two calls with the rest of the team in order to improve.
Week 10-12: Jennifer continues to listen to her new patient phone calls and continues role-playing with the Doctor or other team members in weekly training sessions to improve consistency of practice phone guideline principles.
Week 13: Celebrate you have accomplished the goal at your Q3 planning meeting!
The last step to making the 12 week year execution system work for your practice is to have accountability in weekly staff meetings.
At your weekly staff meeting, you should have a time where you check in on all of your team members 12 week year progress. We use a software where we can monitor goals and check off tactics on a weekly basis in our meetings.
Then as you lead the meeting you just ask the simple question “Jennifer are you on track with your goal?”? The answer will either be yes or no. The software we use keeps track of the percentage of tactics we are completing each week towards our 12 week year goals and the statistics show that if you are completing at least 85% or more of your tactics each week you will accomplish your goals by the end of the 12 week year.
Doc I highly encourage you to put this execution system in place in your practice. After doing it for a while you will be amazed at how much your team members can improve in their work and how much your practice will grow with this level of consistent execution.
If you need help establishing an execution system like this to get traction in your practice schedule time to talk with us.
