The Vital Few for 2007

Like many of you, we spent time in November and December evaluating the progress we made during 2006 and planning for 2007.

Last month, the Board of Trustees for the association approved our 2007 Business Plan. We have posted it on our website, www.nmta.net in the Members Only section. All members have the same password, so just call the office 206-634-0911 if you have forgotten it.

The biggest difference in this year’s Business Plan came as a result of a management class I took last fall. It is called Management Action Program (MAP). The two-day workshop gets everyone to come up with the “vital few” for your own organization and then encourages you to “Focus on the Vital Few, and ignore the trivial many.”

Needless to say, this seems elementary and obvious but we all know how easy it is to get lost in the minutiae and lose sight of the truly important objectives. We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule and the MAP training is all about identifying those vital few ­that are measurable and then spending at least 80% of our time on those goals and objectives.

When I got back to the office after the workshop, I put together a draft set of “vital few” goals for the association and shared them with the Board of Trustees. Once I got their feedback and comments, we included them in the 2007 Business Plan. We divided the vital few into 5 categories and then tried to limit the goals under each category. Here is what we came up with:

1. Financial
a. Meet monthly budget objectives
b. Balance the annual budget                 
c. Receive a Clean Audit every year                                             
d. Steward our reserves, maintain our IPS                        

2. Membership
a. Renew 90% of the members every year                                   
b. Grow membership by 1% every year                                       
c. Keep membership dues increases at or below CPI                  

3. Boat Shows and Special Events
a. Meet attendance objectives for each boat show          
b. Meet attendance objectives for each special event                    
c. Keep space rental fee increases at or below CPI                      

4. Grow Boating
a. Increase # of registered boats in Washington State                   
b. Increase # of new boat sales by dealers in State                       
c. Increase funding by State in boating programs              

5. Organization
a. Maintain a committed and active Board                    
b. Motivate, coach, train and retain staff
c. Stay out of legal disputes and lawsuits  

I would encourage you to visit our website and take a look at how we integrated these broad objectives into specific, measurable and actionable goals in the business plan. After you have done so, please feel free to contact me with your comments and suggestions. This is your association and the staff and volunteer leadership are here to serve you.

With warm regards,

Michael Campbell
President
michael@nmta.net

P.S. In addition to the 2007 Business Plan, we have also posted the 2006 plan and the scorecard that we do at the end of every year to determine how we performed against our goals.