How TO Align Your Business Activities With the Industry Lifecycle

In a previous article, we detailed the PERMA model. PERMA stands for Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meanings, and Accomplishment. Adding PERMA to the Optometry workplace can be for the betterment of everyone. As a model, it has its importance for caring for patients and for helping employees too. In the workplace, PERMA can strengthen the relationship and help employees perform better while inspiring them to become more creative. Aiming to develop well-being in the optometry workplace for both staff and patients happily provides better eye care and reduces the risks of staff burnout. What we do on daily basis is the “engagement” part of the PERMA model, and helps identify opportunities later.

Business activities can typically be divided into five core functions: production, product, sales, society, and marketing. Accordingly, a company can choose to prioritize its actions in one of those five distinct ways. When companies focus their activities on production or product they are operationally oriented and when they focus their activities on marketing, they are growth-oriented. Every company whether small or big needs to know whether it is an operationally-oriented company or a growth-oriented company.

In the same context, Gino Wickman, author of the best-selling book “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” defines two types of business owners, visionaries and Integrators. To Gino, the visionary is the entrepreneur who sees opportunities in the future. He can transform an idea into something that no one has thought of. The integrator is the entrepreneur who collects and assembles the pieces left by the visionary in an organized way and operates a profitable execution. ultimately all companies include both types of entrepreneurs unless it’s a sole proprietorship with you the only employee and where everything goes down to one person.

If you are the only person working in the practice or the manager of a practice with a huge team you need to be able to identify the core functions of your team: whether it is oriented towards growth and revenue generation on one side or on operational execution and profit management on another side.

Every industry has a lifecycle that experiences five stages: an introduction, a growth stage, maturity, and decline. Once we identify the core functions of the team we can apply them to the knowledge we have of the lifecycle. In the introduction stage, the business presents a unique value proposition and creates awareness around it. In the growth stage, the business becomes growth-oriented and generates revenues as he implements his strategy. During the maturity stage, the business ends up focusing on operational efficiency and execution as well as profit management.