Overcoming Clinic Blindness

I call it "Clinic Blindness" because you can't see it.

When you are too close to something, you can lack a point of view.

It can be hard to see what is directly in front of you that is impeding your growth as a practice.

Little changes lead to massive success is true, but what change should you make first?

Here it is: Overcome Clinic Blindness!

This presentation on "Overcoming Clinic Blindness" can help you find a path and the vision to see yourself get to your destination. Click on the link below and find out what "Overcoming Clinic Blindness" will do for your practice.

You can go straight to this presentation by clicking the link below.

HOW TO OVERCOME CLINIC BLINDNESS

In this presentation I cover:

• Learn how to overcome mediocrity from your team
• Find the "sweet spot" where action multiplies success
• Learn how character, work ethic, performance and purpose intertwine to bring about successful or failure
  
  I hope you find this helpful for you as a practice owner.

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Schedule a consult with Shaun by visiting  https://ptpracticesuccess.com

Transcript

Speaker 0:09

I want to welcome you to this presentation, which is overcoming clinic blindness and driving your entire practice towards success. My name is Shaun Kirk. I'm a physical therapist. I've been a private practice consultant for For many, many years working with a variety of different practices of large and small from startup to multimillion dollar practices. In business, there are things in which we can't see. They're a little bit too close to us that we can't quite view. So what I'm going to go over in this presentation is what, I call overcoming clinic blindness. Because if I popped you on a plane and we went off to do an office visit, and we went to somebody else's practice, I guarantee you will see things that that owner will not be able to see. He's just too familiar with it. He's got it all explained away or what have you, but you'll see it. But he or she may not. I want to improve your vision so that you have"super" vision and take your team where you want to be able to take them moving forward. So we work exclusively with private practice owners, and we focus on the fastest lines that to create growth and 3 things. One is get the patients how to get the patients. Right? And make sure that we're treating the patients in a way that we deliver great results in a very fiscally responsible manner and that we get paid. So what I want to kind of touch on first is to go with what we would say would be our goals and our purposes. So sometimes we say goals and purposes and we say them together, but they're actually two different subjects. So when we look at removing clinic blindness and be able to see and have supervision within your clinic, we want to be able to. Differentiate what we'd like to achieve as a goal and what we see as a purpose, right? So when we look at a goal, right? So it's an observable, it's measurable end result that one's trying to achieve within some type of time frame. Okay, we would like to get to this number of let's say PVs in the next three, this next quarter. Okay, that's a goal. Okay. So we want to open up a new clinic by the end of the year. Okay, that's a goal, right? Then we have a purpose, which is different. So when we look at a purpose, we go, what is, what would that be? The purpose could be defined as the reason why. It is like, why are you doing this thing versus anything else? And when we look at having the, the, the purpose kind of smartly aligned, you know, we, we'll find that, that, We'll be able to achieve what we want to achieve much, much faster. Okay. So when we, we have to then kind of get in there and dial in, I was like, what are we talking about when we say purpose? You know, what does that even mean for us? Right? So when I look at purpose, I consider purposes, the fuel. Okay, it's the thing that drives you. It's the thing that why you even doing this versus selling rugs on a street corner or something like that. Why are we playing this game? And sometimes it's hard to play this game because this game is hard, right? So we have to have enough fuel and tank to be in order to get us to where we want to go, regardless of goal, if you don't have a strong purpose, you likely aren't going to achieve it, right? So I'll run into guys sometimes that will, they'll say You know, what would you like to accomplish with with your purpose? Like, what would you like to accomplish with your practice? What's your goal? And I've had people say, I'd love to have five clinics. Okay, that's great. That's great. Why five? Well, five is my favorite number. And you go, okay, laugh, laugh. And then no, really, it was not, I like five. I think it's a good number. You know, it's, it's significant. It kind of means something. Good. You know, but that's, he's just stated when I asked, why do you want five clinics? He's actually told me his purpose for five clinics. And that's not going to be a purpose. It's going to kind of play out very well in actuality. Right? So without a strong purpose, then there is no real production and pride in what you're performing, right? What you're doing, right? So the, if your goals begin to falter as the purpose becomes abandoned and life becomes work, right? So you're, you're you're getting up every day and. We're not trying to beat last week or achieve some goal, whether it's last week's meeting of last week, or whether we're trying to achieve something, you know, in, in the in the realm of you know, target attainment of some sort. We get it, we bump into something that gets in our way, so what we look at is we have a goal versus a purpose. So there's this great book, you know, it's been around a while, but if you haven't read it. By golly, you should, it's called Good to Great by a Stanford professor, Jim Collins He researched companies that have been around a hundred years to find out what they had in common. That was why they had such great staying power. And he found that there were three things. Well, the one thing was that there was a driving purpose that the founders had, like, You know, I want a computer on every desk, you know, that was Microsoft's, right? It wasn't their software. It was just a computer on every desk, right? So every home had a computer. I think that was it. Not every desk, but every home had a computer. So that was the driving purpose. Now they take that purpose and then you can get the people on your team. To kind of embrace that purpose as well and when the people on the team can embrace that purpose and the activity that we have Is economically viable we fall into this nice little sweet spot right in the center Now that sweet spot is getting smaller for us that economic viability Is much more challenged than it's ever been just in health care in general, right? It's difficult. There's more barriers You obstacles and things in your way that impact that economic viability. So much so that many practice owners and some of my clients are looking at alternative methods of actually increasing the revenues of the practice outside of just dealing with insurance all the time. Because insurance is a game that maybe nobody wins ultimately in. Patient doesn't win. You may not win. And, and maybe the insurance company doesn't win, but you know, that's not true. They always win. Right? So what do we, what do we want to do to increase the economic viability? Maybe that's again, offering other cash services. And I've got a couple of interesting ones that I'm toying around with right now. And I'm just trying to get some people on board. I'm playing it because I think it could be huge. I'm not going to tell you what it is. But what I would tell you is that that sweet spot is what you're looking for. And when the purpose is a little bit weak, especially with an economic viability that isn't super strong, you're kind of a stressed out practice owner. You're not really achieving the goals that you'd like to achieve. So, you know, we want to change that, right? So the handling of the clinic blindness is what I'm talking about here. And it will help you get there. It'll help you find that sweet spot of those, that Venn diagram there in front of you. Okay. So honestly, your team is counting on you. What you need to do is you need to add fuel, right? You need to reignite your reason why. So purpose is the reason why, like add fuel, like, like, why am I playing this game? Get a little fired up again. Sometimes when you get beat up a lot, either internally or from external forces you begin to see things from the half empty cup versus the half full cup and changing your mind is probably one of the easiest things you'll ever do. It's easier than changing your underwear. You're just like, change your mind. Boom. done, right? It can happen pretty quickly. But then we have to know, how do we identify those people who have a purpose that are on our team that's counter to my own, right? Sometimes you know, you can have a team that really doesn't care if you win. They care if they get a paycheck And you'll spot that. And I was recently in a practice where I saw that firsthand. And then unfortunately the very next week, I was in another practice where I saw the incomplete opposite. Staff that were fired up leaders that wanted to lead and looking at opportunities who are getting partnership deals with the owner. I saw quite a dichotomy between the two facilities. The one that was struggling, the staff had an intention that was counter to the intention and purpose of the owner and what the owner wanted to accomplish with his practice. In the other one, the staff members that were on the team were aligned with the owner's purpose, were fired up to play the game and they were winning. Like pigs. Okay. So what we want to be able to do is pour the coals on the purpose, pour the coals on the purpose, you know, so we want to be able to see, you know, what is it that we need to be pushing on. So when we look at clinic blindness, okay, clinic blindness, it's losing sight of the big picture. It's a gradual tolerance of the mediocrity from your team. And that comes gradually. You don't just wake up one day and go, man, nobody wants to work anymore. No, if it ever gets that bad, it's, I mean, they've been showing it to you for a while. And they, as a general sense, it might be just one or two people, but just like a virus at times, kinds of spread if you don't take care of it. So, you know, It, it can get a little bit out of hand. I was doing some role playing with a client on one of my trips a couple of weeks ago I was trying to be the owner and then the owner was actually being the staff member in question that we were doing, doing a drill about, right? And he started saying some really nasty things to me, again, me being the owner. I said, no, they don't talk to you that way. Yeah, they do. I go, no, they don't. No, they really do. And, and like, how did it get that far? Well, the owner let it get that far, you know, he was too threatened by what might happen if he held a position and it kind of pulled back on goals and purposes. And became more tolerant of mediocrity, right? So your tolerance of mediocrity, it moves further away from your initial purpose when you're playing the game. So it just comes on you slowly. It sneaks up, bites you hard, right? So when we want to reestablish economic viability, we want to be able to look at what is that. So it's measured by long term survival and sustained profits over time. The longer the company stays profitable. The better its viability. This is not complicated, right? If the viability of the company can continue to expand with or without your presence You are a competent executive and I got a gob of guys over the years that if they took off for a week or a month or three months things can go fine I've got a client that stayed at his clinic for over six years and it continues to expand even to this day, right? seeing 600 visits a week, right? So that is a competent executive creating viability with or without your presence, right? So one of the things is to recognize that there is this three things that comes from Jim Collins. I mentioned before that the three things are driving purpose in the founders and ability to instill that purpose in the rest of the team. And the game itself has some economic viability. We want to be able to look at, you know, are we lonely? Do we sometimes feel like we're pushing the rock up the hill all alone. If you were to ask your staff, do you know the reason why I play this game? Do you know why I'm actually doing this versus selling rugs on the street corner or whatever it would be if you were to ask Your staff, you know, why do I play this game? Why do I play this game? Do you think they'd be able to answer that? Do you think they'd say money? Do you think that they'd say that's your motivation? But do you think they'd say it's about the care? What do you think they would say? And if they said it, whatever it is, even if they nailed it, do they agree with it? Is that their purpose too? Do they see a future or it's only your future that counts? If you're lonely, you're making yourself lonely. Okay, so you may have a burning purpose to play the game, but are you able to instill that purpose in other people? you may feel like you're pushing a rock up the hill all alone. So it's important to identify, like, what is your reason why? What is the thing that drives you? So do you, so to be able to say, do you know the reason why I play this game? Right? I think that's a key thing. So one thing is to break apart what we, I would say is policy versus purpose, policy versus purpose. Okay. So And look at policy, we could say, well, those are rules of the organization, because how you do certain things related to the job, right? It could be as simple as hours of operation, or this is how you schedule a patient. Now when we look at purpose, and this is kind of where a lot of the blindness comes from, you know, like, well, I just, if you just show me how to do it, I can get my staff to do it. And I would say, in some cases, it's true. But in many cases, it's very far from being true. Okay, you'll find that you know, there's probably things that you know how to do right now, but you're not getting your staff to do it. So there's purpose that can be yours. willingness to push through and the character and work ethic, performance, and, and the fuel that you might find in your staff themselves. So when we look at purpose, the purpose would include the character of the individual that's, you know, doing the job, right? The work ethic of that particular staff member and the internal drive. That they must have to perform. Very, very, very key. See, they must have their own fuel, right? They must have their own fuel. So you know, we, we can get, we can get people to join our, our team. We can hire people. You know, sometimes I, I teach a course for probably 20 years called hiring and team building, right? And I, I sometimes would say it should be called firing and team building. Sometimes hire, hiring is. You know, finding a therapist is very hard but other people, hey, you know, getting people employed may not be as difficult as getting rid of people who are mediocre. mediocre is not quite bad enough that you can justify a fire. So how do you handle mediocrity? And if you have a fair amount of that, that they lack fuel, they lack fuel. And so you're always like, he'd be doing the cheerleader thing. I have clients say, well, you think if I put a bonus system together, that would make my guys perform. I go, you put your bonus system together because they perform. Not to get them to perform. If money was the driver, they'd be talking to you about money. If you're looking at how do actually get people to be more productive? Throwing money at them doesn't generally work. You're almost kind of admitting when you're throwing money at somebody to get them to produce more, that you're out of options. Don't want to be out of options. Okay. So when we look at like how we want to demonstrate the company's purpose, we're going to look at like four things, their character, their work ethic, their general performance on the job and fuel. In other words, fuel would be how driven are they to help The organization achieve its purposes and that are aligned with everybody else's on the team. So we're going to break these things down and look at them because I want you to look at your team. Not to say I got that guy's got to go. That guy's got to go. That guy's got to go. But to look at your team from a perspective of like, Do I have the people that are going to get me to that next level of growth? And if I do, I better think about developing them because when you start a practice, you have a front desk and if they can answer the phone with the name of your practice, they get to keep the job, right? They may not know how to schedule well. They probably make a lot of errors, but that's who you can afford right now. But by hook or crook, you figure out how to grow your business and you. Need a much higher caliber front desk than you used to have. Well, that staff member could be lovely when you're seeing 10 visits a week, but not so lovely when you're seeing 200. So if you've got good people, you have to develop your people, okay? Or you have to either give up on your goals or find new people. So if you don't like firing people and they're good people, you better learn how to train people. And that's what I do. Right? So you better learn how to train people. When we look at what we might want to bump up, right? The character worthy ethic performance and fuel in relationship to how one handles schedule book control or general patient compliance from a clinician's point of view, right? Or overcoming financial concerns at work. Might lead a patient to self discharge. What would a person with a high character work ethic performance and fuel, how would they handle those people versus this is the policy that you follow if those things are going on in your business, right? What is it about that person? Cause you, if you have several staff members, you could probably pick your best one. Right. I'm not asking you to pick your favorite child, but you could pick your favorite employee. Right. So so you, you can, I thought that was pretty funny, but I'm only laughing on the inside. Right. You know, what are the financial concerns that you might have? And then, you know, how to ask for and get patients to refer friends and family. You might have somebody who's really good at it. Right. And why are they, why are they doing it? Are they, they're probably doing it for money. They're doing it because they believe in what they do. They're on, they're on board with the purpose, right? They have the right kind of attitude and character. They're willing to kind of work hard. They're just doing what needs to be done. And, and, and what does staff do when things are slow? Right? What kind of things, when it's slow, do people just, you know, drag their feet on their notes or I don't know, have an extra cup of coffee or, you know, play a card game or something like that? What are they doing when it's slow? Staff marketing actions, you're like, what staff marketing actions, 50 percent of the patients that you see right now, you've seen before 50%, 50%. I bet money, right? Take a look, right? 50%, but we, most of us don't do anything to affect that number except doing great care. Now, what if we had some staff marketing actions that you did when things were slow? And what if you had the right character, right? The right work ethic and willingness to perform and purpose in your staff members that you didn't have to tell them what to do when they were slow. They just knew and they just did. That would be awesome. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't your life get easier? I bet so. Right? So also will staff members exert discipline on other staff members? Lady who worked for me she was you know really good billing person, you know, ran to my billing department and we hired another person to help out in the billing. I don't know, three, four weeks later, I walk in and I can't find this person. I go, where's Patty? The lady said, I'd let her go. You, why? It's like, well, you know, I was still doing her job. She really wasn't stepping up. It was costing the company money. It was affecting my bonus. So I let go of her. You know, you cannot do that, but did you get the key at least? Yeah, I did. Okay. Well, don't do that in the future. Right? So that's somebody that's like playing the game, looking at what's in the best interest of the company. I'm not saying that your staff should just walk around and go, you're fired. You're fired. You're fired. But I am saying, you know, that, that they, they care about. The organization and that, and they recognize that the organization is the thing that takes care of them if they take care of it, right? And if they take care of it, they can demand that it takes care of them, right? You can't demand that it takes care of you if you're not taking care of it. This isn't even hard stuff, right? So here's a simple thing. If you want to make more money, well, you make more money and you know with the right type of team. With the right direction and the right leadership can pull that off. So we talk about whether somebody is on purpose or off purpose, or somebody is like really has the purpose of the group, or they actually have a purpose to show up and get a check. And if you're fortunate enough to have a solid team, you could put your head down here for the next couple of slides, but. If by chance there's this one person that everybody knows about, like if you asked, is this person awesome? Who's the most un awesome person? They'd all name the same person and they're probably off the purpose of the group, right? So the off purpose staff member will kind of hurt your practice, right? So how do we define the character of the on purpose staff member? We want to break down what are the traits that we're looking for, right? So when we look at character character traits are the valued aspects in a person's behavior. And the character traits are labeled with descriptive adjectives such as patient, faithful, Jealous, right? Often someone's character and personality, they're kind of intertwined, but believe it or not, they're two distinctly different things, right? So the personality traits, okay, one's personality trait are surface level observations. They're visible from the outside. Right. Whereas characters are deep seated and not immediately obvious. So we've all had that interview that we go, Oh my gosh, this person's amazing You know, and then six weeks later you go, I want to shoot this person in the head. You know I don't know what to do with this guy. I can't get rid of him right now. And now he's on, now he's on the team, right. And he's chewing on the furniture and he's crapping on the floor, but I don't know how to get rid of him. Right. So sorry. That's great. I may be a little too descriptive here, but I guess the bigger point is that sometimes you can shine a personality on, but you can't change those characteristics as readily right? The character traits are deep seated, they show up, right? So an old expression is actions speak louder than words. It's very true. when it comes to character traits. You learn about a person's character by watching how they interact with the world. Just see how they interact with people in general, right? And there's an array of, you know, character traits, right, that can be used to describe even yourself or others. So I'm just showing some slides here. So here's some value slides. So, you know, when we look at someone's values, like are they, do they have high integrity? Do they seem to be very loyal, right? Are they kind? Sincere? Peaceful, right? These are kind of values in a person, kind of a core value, but then we can also have a dark side, right? You know, and maybe the dark side could be, you know, dishonesty, disloyalty, unkindness, rude, you know, they're greedy. Right. They're always pessimistic. They're always trying to find a way to say nothing can be done about it. Nothing can change or whatever. Right. You know, so we see those there. Those be the dark side. Right. And then we have over here leadership. Okay. Well, are they confident? Are they persuasive? Right. A good leader is persuasive. Good leader is selling ideas. Right. Are they resourceful? All right. Can they make decisions? Are they decisive? Right. Charisma, authority, enthusiasm, these are traits. And so, you know, if you had this thing as a hard copy, you could just make circle the ones that you think fit any one of your staff members, including yourself. Right. And then lastly, you know, even children, right? Playful, zany, active, wild, silly, right? I mean, every child probably fits most of these within an hour, right? But but you'll start to see that there's a certain character that will come out in That we know and love. How about that? Right? So we have here purpose and character will cure clinic blindness and will drive the entire team towards expansion. And the difference here between reporting the news and making the news will lie in purpose. What I always talk about is whether someone is taking money from hip national bank, or putting money in, but so that they earned money versus have they taken money. Many years ago, probably 20 plus years ago. There was a guy that came to our marketing course and and it was like a big Texan guy, right? And he goes, he goes, well, sometimes you get people that mostly take money out of hip national bank. And then you have some people who deposit money into hip national bank. And I thought that was hilarious. And I've been using it for 20 years ever since, hip national, right? Yeah. Matter of fact, my, my partner and I, one time we had a company called hip national. We couldn't call it bank cause that's illegal, but we called it hip national, but we knew what it was. That's where we put the hip national money, right? So money earned versus money taken. Your practice viability is directly related to your ability to direct your team towards a dedicated expansion purpose. That is the key thing that when I look at when I'm working with clients, when I'm trying to make a difference, when I go to an office, sometimes I'd like to go visit people's offices. And the biggest reason I'd like to visit offices is I want to To see the team, I want to get a really good idea of, you know, their, their character, their work ethics, something on their performance. I could get some statistics from a long distance, but I can get a better idea of their willingness to perform by going and doing a workshop or something like that in a guy's office. Right. And then I can also tell how strong is that the fuel on the team. Recently went to an office that. You probably could let go of every staff member and nobody's even answered the phone and the place will be busier, right? And I've run into those once in a while So I don't necessarily walk in guns blazing that we have to kind of like, you know Let go of all of your team, but you realize why the owner's exhausted you realize why the practice isn't growing He realized that you know, he spends most of his trying time trying to sell staff to just to do their job, not anything heroic, just to do the minimum people coming early, people who stay late, that kind of thing. I hope you got something out of this. I hope that you found that it could be worth your while to seriously look and assess people, not just on performance. Not just on performance, but look at their character. If you got the right character and work ethic, you can begin to build leaders. So the practice I was at last week, we had five solid leaders that were developing. Because they have all the characteristics that you're looking for in a perfect partner, perfect clinic director, and they're willing to do what needs to be done, and they realize that it isn't that hard when you take the time to develop your team. So if you feel lonely, And you have a staff, you have a problem overcoming blindness. And if you need help with that, and you'd like to talk, I'd be willing to listen. I get clients by helping people. And so if you wanted to set up a call with me, click on the link below. I'd be happy to chat with you. I may have an idea or two that you could try right now that could help you. Maybe we get an opportunity to possibly work together, but you know, It's a two way street. I pick you, you get to pick me, right? And if it seems like I, what I say resonates with you, or if this talk has resonated with you in any way, let's connect. All right. Thank you so much. And we'll talk again soon. Bye now.