For those of you who haven’t heard, we recently embarked on a company-wide endeavor to rebrand our family of companies. In addition to taking a hard look at the mission, vision and messaging for four organizations (two for-profit group purchasing organizations – GPOs – and two not-for profit entities), we took on the task of coming up with one name and core set of values to explain what we do-overall. This is not an easy task when you have several organizations that span diverse industries such as healthcare, education, group purchasing, business and industry. Below are four lessons learned during this roller coaster ride of a process in placing Seagate Alliance, RRHA Joint Ventures Corporation, Rochester Regional Healthcare Association, and Rochester Regional Healthcare Advocates under one new name – Pandion Optimization Alliance.
You don’t know it all.
The first thing we didn’t account for was the research telling us things we didn’t know and that would change the scope of the project. We knew from preliminary surveys that we needed to change our naming conventions and how we spoke about our companies, so that is what we expected to be validated through our focus groups. But what we didn’t foresee was that the research would point to a need within our current services that wasn’t fully being met. This finding not only prompted us to conduct additional research, but was the catalyst for our new supply chain consulting arm. So our project, which began as a rebrand, also morphed into the expansion of a business line and internal restructure of resources, services and offerings.
Follow your friends and colleagues.
Ever hear the song ‘Lean on Me’? Well that’s what we did. And it was one of the most important and informative steps in this process. By reaching out to colleagues, both locally and nationally, who had recently gone through similar processes, we were able to pick their brains and prepare for several steps that were not on our radar. One important suggestion was to create a brand implantation team from departments throughout our company. This allowed for representation from each of our verticals including sourcing & cooperative purchasing, supply chain consulting, and healthcare advocacy and education. Doing so helped people to better understand the process and for the entire group to come up with a massive checklist of things that needed to be changed company wide- from a new DBA to CRM improvements, new company checks and more.
The obvious isn’t always the best choice.
Throughout the process it was thought our new name would somehow involve the word- or a synonym for- association. All of our companies bring people together and our history centers on our legacy as a healthcare association that dates back to 1925. Historically, that’s what people know us for. But when tossing around new names with our brand consultants like nexus, convergent, and tandem- all of which are relevant to what we do- we decided that we wanted something that was unique. Something we could trademark. And something that no one else in our field currently had. And that is how we came up with Pandion. Pandion is a genus for a bird of prey, the Osprey. A Pandion is a loyal partner who is adaptable, preemptive, and has a sharp vision. We believe the name reflects our unique ability to bring like-minded organizations together by tailoring solutions to meet their specific needs and proactively delivering new ideas and opportunities.
Timelines are meant to be broken.
Looking back at the original RFP, we estimated that the project would take 5-6 months. But anyone involved in a project of this scale knows this is rarely the case. Especially when the project took on a life of its own with the creation of our new supply chain consulting business line. We also didn’t account time for brand training with our senior leadership, staff and members. In the end, what we envisioned as a six month project took close to a year to execute.
Now that the change is officially here we couldn’t be happier with the results and our members can expect to receive an even higher level of service and more opportunity as Pandion Optimization Alliance. We’ve also kicked off the New Year with a brand new website with increased capabilities so check out how Pandion can help you in 2018.