How Important Is Business Synergy To Your Optometry Practice?
When we talk about business synergy we think about big corporations and mergers and acquisitions of considerably huge departments. When we looked in the literature, we found that fifteen years ago synergy was the concept employed to describe how corporations collaborate. However, now with the event of the pandemic, many eye care professionals and practice managers are already implementing synergy into their small practice and small business. Synergy even appears to be the fuel that is allowing small businesses to survive and sustain growth.
By definition, “synergy” is a state of cooperation where different individuals contribute to a common end result and where the combined effect would be greater than the combined effort. In business words, synergy means the mergers of different companies and departments to create a unit whose effect is greater than the sum of individual effort made by those companies and departments. The word “synergy” originates from the Greek “sunergiā,” which means “cooperation,” and “sunergos” (sometimes spelled “synergos”), which means “working together.”
Robert Kreitner is a Senior Lecturer in Management at Arizona State University. He is a popular speaker who has addressed a diverse array of audiences worldwide on topics including the 21st-century workplace. He emphasizes that in order to gain a competitive advantage, your business synergy can be created in four manners: market, cost, technology, and management.
By looking at the concept of synergy and understanding that collaboration allows the creation of something greater than you can do alone, you will recognize that synergy will not just amplify your business but helps you become more efficient and improve your business performance. The search and struggle for improvement are continuous in the eye care profession; Optometrists and practice owners strive to learn the best management practices, reduce costs, improve finance, implement the latest technologies, and enlarge their markets. Their strategy for long-term success involves mastering all of those practices, however, to succeed in business synergy it is suggested that businesses implement only one of the business synergy manners. They are required to pick one synergy type that will have the most impact with the least resources available to them. Each type of synergy requires a significant amount of effort and resources therefore no one can work on improving all types of synergy at one time. As most Optometrists and practice managers focus on finding what the business needs to succeed they should identify any potential opportunity to create synergy. This opportunity to create business synergy could be of various forms among them:
Shared know-how: look at the next opportunity to share your knowledge and skills with a potential partner or by collaborating with another unit. If you are a scleral lens specialist don’t hesitate to share your knowledge and skills and provide insights into this particular field of practice.
Shared tangible resources:: look at the next opportunities to gain synergies by sharing your practice – when you are on vacation or traveling for continuing education – for example with other specialists and combining efforts to gain economy of scale in utilizing your assets.
Pooled Negotiating Power: look at the next opportunity to combine your purchasing power with another practitioner to gain better leverage over suppliers, reduce costs, and dramatically gain from pooled negotiation. The same synergies can be created with other stakeholders like customers, government,…
Coordinated Strategies: look at the next opportunity to counter competitive threats by trying to coordinate responses to shared competitors.
Vertical Integration: look at the next opportunity to coordinate the vertical integration of the flow of products to reduce inventory costs, speed product development, increase capacity utilization, and improve market access.
Combined Business Creation: look at the next opportunity to create a new business that helps facilitate the employment and combination of additional synergies.