The year plan for the optical practice: from the Wheel to the diary

December is the month in which the optical practice decides the following year, or suffers it. In most cases it suffers it: January arrives with the same habits, suppliers bring the same collections, promotions are last year’s and, in October, the owner realises the year has gone by without anything they wanted to change having changed. Not for lack of ideas: for lack of a plan with dates.

The year plan is not the budget and it is not a wish list. It is the answer to one question: which three things do we work on this year, in what order, and how will we know we have done them. The Optical Retail Marketing Wheel, the tool with which I read an optical practice, serves exactly this purpose: not choosing at random.

First: read the practice, area by area

The Wheel divides the work of the practice into ten connected areas, from strategic planning to relational capability. The year plan begins with an hour of honest reading, area by area, with one question for each: where are we, from one to five? Not with the figures from the annual accounts, which come later, but with the evidence the owner has in front of them every day: the window, the customer file, the way the team proposes, the online presence, the accounts.

The reading always produces the same result: two or three weak areas, which you work on, and the others that hold up, which you leave alone. This is the hard part of the plan. Not choosing the areas to work on: giving up touching the others. A practice working on seven fronts in a year closes none of them.

Then: three priorities, one per four-month period

The practice’s year plan has three priorities, not ten. One per four-month period: January to April, May to August, September to December. The season decides the order, not urgency. The priority concerning assortment and stock is worked on before the spring orders. The one concerning selling and the team is worked on before the sunglasses season, when footfall increases. The one concerning the relationship with customers is worked on from September, when people come back and recalls pay off more.

Each priority has three lines in the diary: what changes, who does it, what number will say whether it happened. The number is the same one read every month in management control: if the priority is stock, turnover; if it is selling, average ticket and items per receipt; if it is the relationship, the return rate I wrote about in Why customers of the optical practice do not come back.

The grid of the year

Period	Priority (Wheel area)	What changes	Number that measures it	Fixed date
January to April	03 Assortment and category management	Ordering rule based on sales data; dead stock out	Stock turnover	Before the spring orders
May to August	09 Team management, with 06 Communication	Training day on the undifferentiated discount and on completion	Average ticket, average discount at the till	Before the sunglasses season
September to December	07 CRM and customer service	Dormant list, ten names each per month	Return rate, successful recalls	From the September return

The "what changes", "number" and "date" columns are an example: every practice fills in its own. What does not change is the structure: three rows, one per four-month period, each with a number and a date.

The fixed dates nobody can move

The year plan fails when it is made only of intentions. It holds when it has dates that go in the diary before everything else, and that the owner defends as they defend an appointment with a customer. There are few of them.

The first Monday of every month, the management control hour: the year’s numbers are read there, not in December. The last week of every four-month period, half a day with the team to close the priority and open the next one: what has changed, what the number says, what is kept. The month before every season, the order based on data and not on the catalogue. And one day, in December, to redo the reading of the Wheel and write the plan for the following year.

The year is not planned in January. It is planned in December, and read every month.

The mistakes of those who make the plan

Ten priorities. A plan with ten priorities is a list of good intentions. Three, one per four-month period, is the most a practice can really close while it works.

Priorities without a number. "Improve selling" is not a priority. "Bring the average discount at the till below a chosen threshold by August" is. If there is no number, you will never know whether it happened.

The owner’s plan only. The team must know the three priorities, the three numbers and the dates. A plan that lives in the owner’s head lasts until the first busy week.

Starting from scratch every year. The following year’s plan starts from the reading of the one just closed: what worked stays, what did not work is understood before it is changed.

The reading of the Wheel and the year plan are the starting point of Trade Up, the six-month programme, in Italy, and of The Charismatic Practice elsewhere. The other articles are in the optical retail strategy area; the method is described in The Charismatic Method. The full picture of the numbers is on the Management control theme page.