The planned story for 2011: How the NOH team will fight back

Let’s get in the water and not just dip our toes. Let’s fully engage with existing and prospective customers to ensure we are the best and most profitable medical services company in the world.
We enter 2011 with good news and bad news.
The good news is that we have the most prospects at the start of a New Year then we have ever had in 8 years. That is 9 potential new clients worth more than 1 million pounds per year in revenues. 5 oil and gas, 1 mining, 2 media, 1 sports. We also have prospects with the NHS and private schools.
The bad news is that although we maintained our service standards we had a terrible financial 2010. So the first 3 months of 2011 will be very hard work.
We have taken decisive action to reduce costs by the following actions:
1) Moving admin from the basement of NOH to 126 Harley Street (they do our X-rays). This saves 36K per year.
2) Redundancies/natural leavers – saving over 30K per year
3) Reduced admin hours – saving over 20K per year
4) Salary cuts in admin – saving 40K per year
5) Fixed fees for doctors – saving over 30K per year
6) More work for nurses – saving on doctor’s fees

In total over 170K of cuts to our overhead. We now know our fixed costs per month and can budget for these with much less variation than ever before.
One additional cost is the 10K we will spend on rolling MBA interns (Rotman University/American Intercontinental University), students and Chinese (via Carrie Waley of Mandarin Consulting) support staff. These costs will be much less than full-time staffers and carry no agency/recruitment fees. They come out of the marketing budget.
Almost half our revenues are things we give to our clients: vaccines, medication and kits. So in 2011 we need to do a lot more of that and make it easier for clients to get these things from us: on-site, off-site and via the web.
2011 will see us co-ordinating and managing a LOT more off-site work.
We may also drop some services that don’t add up to decent numbers or profits.
Our breakeven figure for each month of 2011 will be communicated to all the team and we will track this daily, weekly and monthly.

We are improving:
• billing processes and will review all bills within 24 hours of the previous days daily takings
• sending all invoices within 24 hours with purchase orders
• identifying invoice discrepancies within 24 hours
• proper management of cash and the reconciliation
• re-instatement of the weekly stock meetings to ensure adequate but not excess stock
• management of creditors (people we owe money too)
• management of debtors (people who owe is money)

We will undertake regular cash flow projections based on 1) the first 6 months of 2010 and 2) the last 6 months of 2010 both with the 10% price uplift and new 20% VAT.
The new marketing plan will be shared with all. The budget for this will be around 60-80 K (around 5% of turnover). Marketing and innovation are how we will win new customers in 2011 and beyond and increase usage amongst our existing customers.

One of the key elements of marketing costs us nothing. It’s the staff attitude, engagement, commitment and training to ensure excellent customer service. Jay Levinson describes customer service as ‘anything the customer wants it to be.’ We will stick with that!

In 2011 we will do new things, we will do something differently but all with one aim ‘to be the best and most profitable medical services company in the world.’