Strategic plan development and implementation

Introduction
This business plan is for a care home for veterans. The home will be a new facility, a new business, and will serve the needs of the local community. In terms of positioning, the veteran's care home will serve a slightly premium market. While recognizing the role that government agencies have as payers, the home will also be able to cater to the needs of veterans whose families wish to offer a higher standard of amenities and service, to go along with meeting the medical needs of veterans who need this form of care. This business plan will outline the key elements of the new care home, including the organizational structure, environmental analysis, financial plan and aspects of implementation and evaluation.
Part 1: Organizational Structure
The organizational structure of the home will be similar to those of other care homes. Heading up the home will be the Chief Executive Officer, who will answer to the home's Board of Directors. The Board will be comprised of members experienced in the operation of care homes and other medical and veterans facilities. The board will provide strategic guidance, and assist with the selection of key executives.
The CEO will have a team of executives that will be responsible for running the home. The most important role is probably the Director of Operations, as this will be the primary point person for oversight of all aspects of the business that have to do with the veterans. This role will run the maintenance and support staff, as well as the facilities staff. The Director of Operations will have several reports who run the different functional departments that keep the home running.
The other key executive will be the Director of Nursing. This role will be the person in charge of nurses and other caregivers. As such, this is a critical role in the operation of the facility. The Director of Nursing role is essential for the maintenance of a high standard of care, and for identifying the best means of serving the veterans in our care – for example helping to determine how to meet any special medical and psychiatric requirements that there might be. The Director of Nursing and the Director of Operations will both answer to the CEO, as will managers for the different line functions.
The different line functions will not be run at the Director level, but the senior management level, as these are typically smaller departments. Administrative, sales and marketing functions, as well as accounting and compliance, will fall under these smaller departments.
The benefits of having this functional structure are that each department will be run by someone that specializes in how that department works. These different departments can be very different, and as such the functional managers will bear the primary responsibility for hiring. Human resources, a function within administrative, will therefore largely focus on benefits and retention strategies, working with each functional manager to optimize their staffing needs in line with the organization's strategic objectives.
With a functional structure and clear lines of authority, each role can be designed in such a way that all tasks are covered by somebody. Furthermore, having clear lines of authority allows each staff member to focus on their work, ensuring that it is done to the highest attention to detail and the greatest standard of care possible.
Mission, Vision and Values
The mission of the organization is to provide the highest standard of veterans' care in the area. The vision is of a home where veterans and their families feel honored for their service, where great people can do their service and sacrifice proud. Family and a commitment to excellence, as well as a detail orientation are the key values that we express. These mission, vision and values are clearly aligned with the organizational structure. The structure allows for the execution of the mission because it puts everybody in the best position possible to succeed. Each functional unit is therefore in a position to focus on productivity and efficiency as well as optimizing the talents of each person, without being distracted by trying to master too many skills at once (OrgCharting,com, 2018).
The vision and the values statement provide further guidance for each department within the organizational structure. Each department can look to the vision and values as examples of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and what a member of the team should value as part of their work life. When all of these factors are closely aligned with the structure of the organization, and its strategic mission, then there is opportunity to deliver on the promise that the home makes to veterans and their families.
Part 2: Environmental Analysis and Setting Strategic Goals
The base structure for the strategic plan is the environmental analysis. The SWOT analysis is a common and effective framework for this, as it evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strategic plan is designed to align the strengths with the opportunities and seek to eliminate any weaknesses that leave the organization vulnerable to threats (MindTools, 2018).
Despite being newly-founded, the company already has some key strengths to draw on that will help it to excel. The first of these is that the team assembled to lead this new organization is made up of seasoned health care pros, including people with specific experience at executive levels of other veterans' care facilities. The second key strength is the passion of the leadership team. All have come together to start this new home because they have worked in other, similar facilities. They have strong, passionate ideas about how a veterans home should run, and a clear vision of how to bring that type of home to life. This passion and commitment on the part of the leadership team puts them into a position to excel. A further strength is that the team has been able to get enough financing together. A lot of new ventures struggle for lack of financing but that does not appear as though it will be a problem here.
That said, there are nevertheless some weaknesses that will be a challenge that need to be overcome. The first such weakness is that the home is new. Thus, it has no experience or track record, and as such there is a higher risk of something going wrong. The systems are going to be very well-designed, but new systems are always more likely to have something go wrong, even if they are great systems. The second weakness is a lack of brand name. Having a fancy, splashy new facility is certainly a means to counter that, but a lot of people also like to look to a track record of successful service delivery when choosing a home for their loved one. So lack of an established name or history in the community is certainly a weakness that in some cases will need to be overcome. Lack of staff is also a critical weakness. Turnover is already a problem in healthcare, which in a sense provides opportunity, but it is still important to find an entire team of great people, and pay them even if the home isn't full. If recruiting is a perpetual problem in this industry, then certainly it will be that much harder when starting from scratch, because you need to find that many more staff, and might have trouble getting the best people initially.
There are a number of different opportunities that have created this business. First, there are a lot of veterans in the area, and the population is growing. In many cases, there are veterans who fit the target market where there are families can afford a higher standard of care. Second, the area does appear to be underserved with veterans care homes, despite there being a lot of veterans. This area was specifically selected because of the mismatch between available care home spaces for veterans and the number of veterans believed to need such care homes. The final opportunity was to really take advantage of this market niche – a lot of the local care homes maybe aren't that well run, so there is a chance right away to get people to switch homes.
The main threats to this new venture are talent – if the local talent pool isn't deep enough to recruit enough people, that might have a spinoff impact on service delivery and care standards. Further troubles occur from there. Another threat is the local economy, and government funding formulas. Both of these affect the ability of people to pay – there is always a risk that government changes its funding formulas, but people also need a healthy economy to pay for premium services, and without that they might switch to a cheaper care home. The third main threat is technological change. The cost of health care service delivery is very high, and while technological change can sometimes lower that, it can also increase that as well, if the home needs to pay for new technologies. There is a threat that the cost of service delivery rises faster than the amount of money that the home can charge its clients, which of course would cause the home to be at risk for losing profitability.
Use of External Analysis
External environmental analysis is a great tool for a new business to understand what the opportunities are in a market. By understanding what the opportunities are, and the strengths of the business, management is in a better position to leverage the strengths of the organization to exploit those opportunities. At this stage of the business plan, this is mostly testing the viability of the business as it is planned. The other part of working with the SWOT analysis is defensive, to check against the vulnerabilities that a business might have, where the threats are specifically positioned to exploit the known weaknesses of the business. Environmental analysis gives the company a lot more information with which to set out a strategy, and then to analyze whether that strategy will truly help the organization to meet its strategic objectives – or not (Nanda, 2015).
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis plays an important role in the strategic planning process. The key objective of competitive analysis is to understand your competitors' strengths and weaknesses and then use that knowledge to help position your own product or service (Entrepreneur Magazine, 2018). For a new business, this is important for two critical reasons. The first is that the business plan needs to be viable – in other words is there room in the market for another company? Or, if not, is there a different strategy that the company can employ that would put it in a much better position to compete? In the case of our new veterans care home, we believe that the market is underserved, and that many of the competitors in the area are not that good, certainly not as good as we intend to be.
Financial Plan
The financial plan is a key component of any business plan. The financials are attached in Appendix A. The point of the financial plan is to evaluate whether the company is going to be able to make enough money to survive. The financial planning process starts with a basic assessment of the market, to determine what potential demand is going to be, and what price can be charged for the service. That provides an estimate of what the revenues can realistically be, and so the next step is to evaluate the cost side. Running a veterans care home is not easy, so it is important to understand the cost structure at a granular level, in order to ensure that all cost estimates are realistic. The next step in the financial plan will help to determine what the cash flow and financing (capital) needs for the organization are. If the organization does not have the capital yet to meet these needs, it is better to find out before breaking ground on a new veterans' care home. Additional financing can be acquired in order to meet either capital or operating needs, once those needs and the timing of those needs have been clearly identified.
Part 4: Implementation
There are always going to be barriers, but the biggest ones that worry management are anything that would result in time delays. A time delay means a delay in the revenue streams, while the costs continue to rise. Thus, the major issues are ones such as licensing and permitting, finding the right staff, and anything to do with the pace of construction or its financing. These are the major risk areas, and there are often unforeseen circumstances. Having a professional construction team working the build of the facility will be important to keeping this project on track, but it is just as important to have the right people acting as liaisons with the various levels of government who have licensing and permitting power.
Communication can be done through a number of different channels. Regular written communication, either via email or memos, can help to convey specific operational concepts. Team meetings or huddles can play an important role in providing context and motivation for the days' activities. That the organization has strict lines of command will actually help in this regard, because this means that there will always be someone tasked with keeping the communication flowing through their department, and to their direct reports. Throughout the start-up process, it is essential that all the staff understand what their role in the process is before opening, as this will be the least familiar part for most of them. Once the home is open, it becomes more straightforward, and the vision is for clear and transparent communication that provides everybody with the information that they need to do their jobs.
Part 5: Evaluation and Control
Measuring the effectiveness of strategy starts with the budgeting process. The budget can be used to keep costs in line, and also to look at whether the revenue strategies are proving to be effective. For a start-up, it might be harder to budget accurately without historical data, but there is still a role for the budget to play in evaluation and control.
Another means by which control can be mandated is that each person will have specific metrics that relate to their role, that they must meet. The managers for each person will ensure that they are given the resources needed to meet those metrics, which allows for a fair evaluation. There are a lot of healthcare organizations that aren't particularly metrics-driven, but our leadership team believes strongly in metrics and data, and has designed a system for ensuring that each role has targets, and that hitting those targets will contribute to the overall strategic objectives of the organization.
Initially, because this is a new business, the tolerance range would be quite wide. This is simply reflecting the reality that without historical data it is hard to accurately predict numbers. Over time, it will be easier, and reasonable tolerance ranges can be determined that would trigger corrective action. In health care, it is worth remembering that there are specific metrics where the tolerance would be zero – like preventable deaths.
If performance falls outside the tolerance range, it will be important to hold people accountable. Failure to achieve performance should be reviewed, especially in the first few years when the targets might not be as achievable in practice as they seemed on paper. But there does need to be a system of accountability for non-performance, that might require the dismissal of people, or some sort of supplementary discipline. These structures will be task, role and department-specific, and each manager will be tasked with creating their own disciplinary procedures for task non-compliance.
References
Entrepreneur Magazine (2018) Competitive analysis. Entrepreneur Magazine Retrieved December 11, 2018 from https://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/competitive-analysis
MindTools (2018) SWOT analysis. Mind Tools.com. Retrieved December 11, 2018 from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm
Nanda, J. (2015) Interplay between environmental analysis and strategic management. LinkedIn. Retrieved December 11, 2015 from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interplay-between-environmental-analysis-strategic-prof-j-k-/
OrgCharting.com (2018) Functional organizational structure introduction – advantages and disadvantages. OrgCharting.com. Retrieved December 11, 2018 from http://www.orgcharting.com/functional-organizational-introduction/
Rosado, J. (2018) What are the business organizational structures of a nursing home. Houston Chronicle. Retrieved December 11, 2018 from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/business-organizational-structures-nursing-home-75958.html