Fast Lane
Precise planning
How to set a vision to move your company forward
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business St. Louis | March 2009
Page 1 of 2
Mike Barnell
president and CEO, Precision Practice Management Inc.
In the seven years that he’s
been running Precision
Practice Management Inc.,
Mike Barnell has probably
used thousands of sports
analogies.
The president and CEO of
the medical billing company
says that he sees a strong
connection between sports
and business, and he uses
that connection to motivate
his 85 employees.
“People get the concept of
never giving up until the whistle blows, giving the extra
effort, or knowing that races
can be won and lost by tenths
of a second,” he says. “When
you apply that to business,
that delivers a message that
strikes home with people.”
Smart Business spoke with
Barnell about how to communicate your message effectively and how to develop a vision
your team will believe in.
Q. How do you create a
vision your employees can
buy in to?
You have to really know your
business. That comes from
being involved in a lot of the
day-to-day things going on in
all parts of the company.
You obviously can’t do that
on a full-time basis, or you’d
be micromanaging people. But
if you are able to step in and
step out of various issues,
your people pick up a lot from
you as the CEO from that
process, and you get to know
your business.
As you’re developing your
vision, you had better know
what your capabilities and limitations are because you’re the
top guy who is trying to set the
vision for where the company’s going. You obviously have
to know your competitors and
the industry you’re in — the
big picture. It’s a great idea for
the top guy to be involved in a
trade association so you can
make sure there’s not something big that’s happening in
your industry or about to
affect your industry that
you’re not aware of.
Then your goal would be to
carve a path for your company
that is not just tracking where
your larger competitors are
going. That can be tempting —
there’s someone bigger than
you that has been successful,
and you think, ‘If we just do
what they’re doing, we
can be successful, too.’
I’d much rather believe
the Wal-Mart or
Enterprise car rental
examples, where they
took a different path in
an already well-established industry and
carved a different niche
for themselves.
