Nicole Small recognizes
that families have limited
resources, and with so many entertainment options
available to them, she wants the
Museum of Nature & Science to
be one of them.
“Understanding your customer and their choices is ever
more important,” Small says.
“One of our biggest challenges
is — and we wish it happens
this way — few children wake
up on a Saturday morning and
say, ‘Mom! Take me to get
smarter today! Take me to the
museum!’”
For that to happen, this CEO
has to have a solid strategic
plan to continuously improve
the museum, and she has to get
her 120 employees to buy in to
the plan.
Smart Business spoke with
Small about how to create a
strategic plan and successfully
implement it to keep people
coming back.
Q. How do you create a
strategic plan?
It’s finding a balance between
long-term goals and short-term
vision. Last year, we created a
three-year strategic plan, which
has a longer-term vision of how
do we deliver on our mission.
Then at the beginning of each
fiscal year, we sit down with
the overall team and establish
the priorities for the year, and
then we sit down with each
department head and develop a
plan for how they’re going to
help achieve those initiatives.
Then it all ties in to a financial plan because having a
dream or a vision, it’s great to
want to sell a million widgets,
but if you’re not sure how
you’re going to get there and
you can’t afford it, that dream
is not a reality.
Q. How do you prioritize
these objectives?
Be clear about how you
measure success, and understand the metrics on how you
measure it. We say, ‘We would
like to achieve operational efficiency of X. We would like to
achieve revenue targets of Y.
We would like this much
turnover in our HR department.
These are our goals.’
We’re very clear about setting
metrics for success. Once you
understand those, you can start
applying priorities and
resources against them.
We take each of the initiatives that we’re interested in, and we put
them through a set of criteria — do they help us
achieve one of our key
metrics for success? If
so, how much do they
help us move the lever?
You hope that everything
you do will move you
toward that goal, but if
you’ve got limited
resources, what’s your
return on investment?
