O CC U PAT I O N A L M E D I C I N E Occ Med Programs Need Business Plans, Too ■ FRANK H. LEONE, MBA, MPH I n all likelihood, you wouldn’t dream of opening a new urgent care clinic without first putting together a business plan. Does- n’t it make sense that key aspects of your overall business would benefit from the same careful planning? Data from the Urgent Care Association of America indicate that over 60% of urgent care companies offer at least some occupa- tional medicine services; nearly 5% of locations offer occ med exclusively. Putting a business plan for your occupational health services to paper allows this aspect of your business to move purposeful- ly toward where you want to go, with a cohesive strategy for just how you plan to get there. The “where you want to go” segment of the plan documents the rationale of your business opportunity, how you plan to respond to that opportunity, and your anticipated financial return. The “how you plan to get there” segment is your sales and marketing plan. The Rationale With everything else you have to do, you might be asking “why bother?” The answer is multi-fold: Developing a plan encourages strategic thinking by you and your team. It is valuable, if not essential, to periodically step away from the fray and re-examine what you are doing, and why and how you are doing it. The very process of developing a business plan encourages a consensus that gets all parties closer to sitting on the same page. The back end of a business plan should be a date-specific blue- Frank Leone is president and CEO of RYAN Associates and executive director of the National Association of Occupational Health Professionals. Mr. Leone is the author of numerous sales and marketing texts and periodicals, and has extensive experience training medical profession- als on sales and marketing techniques. E-mail him at fleone@naohp.com. w w w. j u c m . c o m print to get your clinic’s occ med business from point A to point Z. Without such a timeline, your business may be drifting aimless- ly from day to day. Development of a plan allows you to connect the dots, lead- ing your clinic from simply wanting to be at a milestone to actu- ally being there. Marketing professionals acknowledge there is no foolproof for- mat for a business plan; hence, formats vary widely. But regard- less of design/format, every plan should answer the same basic questions: Ⅲ What do we want to do? Define your product and how your clinic will provide this product to the market. Here again, the what-why-how contin- uum should be tied together; e.g., “We will introduce a line of travel medicine services because our large white collar popu- lation uses these services disproportionably more than the gen- eral population, no similar program is available in the market- place, and one of our physicians has special expertise in this area.” Ⅲ Why are we doing this? The “why” defines and affirms your intention in doing what you are doing. That is, does your clinic have the wherewithal to offer what you suggest, is there a measurable market need for these services, and do competing entities fall short in meeting this need? If the answer to all three is affirmative and if pro forma projections support the return-on-investment (ROI) viability of moving forward, then, as they say, you’ve got a plan. Ⅲ How are we going to get there? The marketing plan, basically, is a response to the opportuni- ties that you have identified earlier in the business plan. Although flexibility in writing a plan abounds, certain funda- mental rules apply: Ⅲ Identify quantifiable goals at the outset. In most cases, these goals should be net-revenue based. Ⅲ Segment your market, if appropriate. Whereas segments in an overall clinic business plan are likely to be deter- mined by demographics such as age and socioeconomic JUCM T h e J o u r n a l o f U r g e n t C a r e M e d i c i n e | D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 6 35