How to hire great people that stay and perform in your clinic

Treat Your Business EP72

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: If you’ve ever tried to hire in your clinic, you know the struggle is real. Finding high performing team members who not only stay, but excel, can feel like searching for a needle in the haystack. But fear not, KB is here. In this episode, I’m going to explain why we get hiring so wrong, and why that sets us up and them up for failure, and how you can transform your hiring process from this day forward.

[00:00:27] Katie Bell: So let’s go there.

[00:00:28] Katie Bell: Welcome to the Treat Your Business podcast with Katie Bell. I am Katie, and this is the place to learn the strategies, tactics, tools, and mindset needed. To build your clinic or studio into a business that gives you the time, money, energy and fulfillment you want and deserve. My team and I work every day with overwhelmed and exhausted clinic owners like you to shift them from a business that is a huge time and energy drain and is not giving them the income they want to confident clinic owners that are making money, saving money and getting time back in their lives.

[00:00:59] Katie Bell: So if this sounds like something you want, let’s dive in. This podcast is sponsored by HMDG, the leading digital marketing agency for the Clinicare is in the U. K.

[00:01:08] Katie Bell: Good morning, everybody. I know most of you listen to this podcast as soon as it drops on a Wednesday morning. So if you are in your car listening along, a huge welcome. I am so happy that you are here listening in on this wonderful Wednesday morning. So how do we assess? The need in your business for another person, for another body, or for another role or receipt.

[00:01:33] Katie Bell: Because hiring is not easy. It’s time consuming. It costs money and resources. It takes a lot of your energy. So we’ve got a plan for it. You will hear me say, my, our clients on our program hear me say all the time we hire slow and we fire fast. And we hire for where we want to be in six months time, not now.

[00:01:57] Katie Bell: This is one of the the biggest challenges and the biggest downfalls that I see in clinics is that we’re not planning far enough ahead. And I was listening to a great podcast while I was carpet cleaning over the weekend, how rock and roll is my life. Don’t get me wrong, that is like what I love to do.

[00:02:17] Katie Bell: I love to clean. And I’m really hoping that Stacey Solomon might want me to go and work on her program, Sort Your Life Out. If you haven’t watched it, watch it. It is an utter joy. Anyway, I digress. But I was listening to this great podcast, and she was talking about her role in, she coaches people and she calls herself a strategic consultant.

[00:02:40] Katie Bell: And this really resonated with me, because actually I feel like that’s what my role is more than just a coach, because Very often our clients just need to be told what it is that they need to do. Like they’re done with trying to figure it out for themselves or they’re so tired, they’re so time poor. But actually they just need the how.

[00:03:00] Katie Bell: They just need to be told what to do, what to say, when to say it, when to hire, how to hire. And that’s what we do within our wonderful transformational programs. But as a strategic consultant, my role is constantly saying, you’ve got to start thinking further ahead. You’ve got to start projecting much further ahead in your business.

[00:03:20] Katie Bell: So you should all have annual planning days in your business that really maps out your 12 months ahead. And then we need to reverse engineer those into quarterly plans, and we need to reverse engineer those into monthly plans, and then we need to reverse those into weekly plans. So you are so focused, you’re so you’ve got so much direction that you don’t feel like you’re flitting from one thing to the next all the time in your business, which is what we hear all the time, until you work with us, of course.

[00:03:49] Katie Bell: But for many of you, because you’re so time poor and you’re so busy and you’re on that hamster wheel, you really feel like you’re just dealing with the day, like this week, what is going on this week, what is happening next week, and it’s very reactive. So we’re constantly trying to encourage you to Really start to stretch that vision and look further ahead and think and look at your financial projections Because that will give you an indication of when you need to hire in your business When you look at your capacity for revenue in your clinic, that’s saying okay I have this set of team members working this many hours And if I deduct off their hours that they’re employed, the administrative time that we give them, the time that we have for meetings on a regular basis, their lunches, whatever it is that has to go in regularly in their diary that they can’t see clients.

[00:04:43] Katie Bell: When we make those deductions, it then gives you a potential capacity for revenue in your business. And we want to make sure that you are working at a really high occupancy or capacity, whatever word floats your boat, before we start just adding more costs into your business. But we want to project for that because hiring is a challenge.

[00:05:09] Katie Bell: Hiring’s always been a challenge, but particularly in the last few years, we’re seeing more and more challenges when it comes to hiring great people. So we’ve got to think further ahead. We’ve got to start planning for where we want to be. Now I get it. Sometimes we have people handing their notice.

[00:05:27] Katie Bell: And we don’t have a huge amount of control over that, but you want to make sure that you’re protecting yourself so that you’ve got people on a good notice period. We have three months within our business and the reason for that is I know it’s an absolute ball ache to find anybody else, hire them, onboard them, train them, manage them, get them performing within three months.

[00:05:48] Katie Bell: It’s a massive challenge. But as you have your growth plan laid out, you can start to then see at what point is my pinch point? At what point do we not have? the infrastructure to create the revenue that we have projected, so that you can see what your numbers are telling you. So that’s the first thing.

[00:06:08] Katie Bell: We’ve got to assess the need in the business. We’ve got to look at your numbers. You’ve got to look at what those numbers are telling you as to when you are going to need to hire. And then the second thing is about assessing Who you need first. Because most of you get to a point where you’re at clinical capacity.

[00:06:27] Katie Bell: So you’re like, Katie, I’ve got all these inquiries. We’ve got like a three week waiting list. We can’t get people in. We’re working at a really great capacity or occupancy level. And therefore we need another physio. But I want you to be really clear about the infrastructure that you have around you and what you’re spending your time on as the business owner.

[00:06:46] Katie Bell: If the majority of your time is spent in the clinical world, not doing all the other stuff, then it is suggestive that you need another clinician. But bringing in another clinician requires your time. So if you’re maxed out, how are you going to spend the time that new clinician needs to have, to ensure you have a really successful hire at the other end of it?

[00:07:13] Katie Bell: So there is a great exercise that we get our clients to do and it’s called the Zog Exercise. This is about looking who you need first and very simply for seven days it’s tracking everything that you do within your business. Every single, and actually personally as well, but every single task that you undertake for seven whole days you’re going to write it down and you’re going to put it in one of four categories.

[00:07:39] Katie Bell: Incompetent, competent, excellence and zone of genius. Your Zog. And what I’m going to guess is that if you do this for seven days, you are going to find that the majority of your time is being spent on activities that is within your incompetent zone or your competent zone. So incompetent is you’ve really struggled to do this task, but you think that you should be doing it.

[00:08:07] Katie Bell: The things that I see here are spending time trying to figure out your own Google ads, your Facebook ads, your own bookkeeping, your own accounting, running your tax return, trying to build a landing page or a sales page. They are skilled tasks. Unless you are trained in those, I’m going to guess you’re going to be incompetent at.

[00:08:30] Katie Bell: And it’s going to take you a massive amount of time to try and deliver the same results as somebody who, this is their zone of genius, is going to be able to deliver to you, or for you. Competent is activities that you are, you’re like, you’re okay at. But it really does not float your boat, and really you are becoming the bottleneck to the growth of your company, or your business, or your clinic, because you’re holding on to these tasks.

[00:08:57] Katie Bell: And whether you’re listening to this as a sole trader, a sole opener, and you’re clinically really busy, but you still think you need to hold on to the administration because it’s just you, like you don’t. Why do we feel like we don’t deserve great people around us? To allow us time back, freedom, flexibility, a part of running a business and being a great clinic owner, whether you are one person or 50 people, is that you are spending the majority of your time doing the things that you are great at, and you are have, you’ve got great people around you that do the things that you are not so great at.

[00:09:36] Katie Bell: Or you’re completely incompetent at.

[00:09:38] Katie Bell: So for seven days, I encourage you, grab a journal, grab a piece of paper. It does not have to be fancy. And track every single thing that you’re doing and put it in one of those four categories. If you want to be a little bit more thorough about this, if I’ve got any green and blues listening to this, then you might want to write down how much time those tasks took as well.

[00:10:00] Katie Bell: Because we’ll start to add up the time, and this is going to give you a really big indication of where you’re spending your time. In the same way as when you get your screen time delivered to you on your phone, and then you tell me that you don’t have any time to work on your business. And I say, wow, okay, but you’re spending three and a half hours on your screen every day.

[00:10:18] Katie Bell: This is exactly the same. This is going to really show you where you’re spending a lot of your time. And the conversation always is, but I can’t afford to hire. And I always go back with, can you afford not to? Like, how much is your time worth? How much is your health worth? How much is your family worth to you?

[00:10:43] Katie Bell: And when we’ve got that pinch point, I’ve got, when we’ve got no time, for me, it, there’s no question. You need more people around you then. You need more help. You need more support. Because there’s nothing that’s more important than your health, your family, and your time.

[00:10:59] Katie Bell: And when you free yourself of these incompetent tasks. I’m gonna just say this, it doesn’t mean that I’m saying oh you can go and sip a pina colada on an island somewhere because you’ve now got all of this time. What I am saying at this stage of your business, particularly if you’re in your growth phase and you’re wanting to get to the next level of income, it means that you are freeing yourself up of that stuff to then go and spend your time on higher income generating activities.

[00:11:27] Katie Bell: Not always just seeing clients because that’s going back to exchanging time for money, but it’s about looking at if I spend time working on that collaboration with that other company, like that could be a 5, 000 contract to us. Or if I, even simply, if I spend time working with my practice administrator on a new process for debt collection, that means that if we get that we could collect that five grand of debt that we owed from insurance companies.

[00:11:54] Katie Bell: Or if I spend time working on my new person that is in the company, working on their performance, their capacity for revenue, if I have done my figures, is that I pay them 35 grand, but they can make the company 110 grand. That’s an 80 grand swing. So for you saying I’m going to hold on to just do my emails and being the one that always has to answer the phone and get back to people, or we’re always the ones that’s got to run the stock take, or order stock, or whatever it is, all that shit that we have to do in our clinics.

[00:12:27] Katie Bell: Then you’ll say no to 80, You’ll say no to that 5, 000 contract. You’ll say no to that 5, 000 of insurance fees that you’re owed.

[00:12:35] Katie Bell: So to recap, it’s about getting really clear on assessing the need. Who is it that I need and when do I need them? And we are hiring for where we want to be, not where we are now. We are acting like it’s happening. We are not waiting till we get to the point that we’ve got no appointments and then we’re like, oh shit, I need to find somebody.

[00:13:00] Katie Bell: Because you want to hire slowly. You want to take them through. What we have is a 12 step hiring process.

[00:13:07] Katie Bell: And this hiring process is so thorough that it means the chances of a bad hire are almost none. So slim. But to go through that 12 step hiring process, you need time. You need energy. You need resources. You need to feel like you’re excited about this, not desperate, not hiring from a place of lack, we’re hiring from a place of confidence.

[00:13:33] Katie Bell: Now coming up this month, We are running our next free masterclass. We have one every single month in the Treat Your Business Facebook group. If you are not part of that group, I would love you to be. It’s completely free. It doesn’t cost you anything, but we have a whole host of free masterclasses that you can watch back.

[00:13:50] Katie Bell: And then we have a new one every single month that drops and it’s live and you get one to one coaching with me on Zoom. This one, It’s gonna be, if you are a clinic owner that has self employed practitioners working for you, or you have associates working for you, and they’re like different, sometimes osteopaths call them associates, physios call them like self employed practitioners, whatever.

[00:14:11] Katie Bell: Okay, then this masterclass is for you. Particularly if you find that you never have enough money left at the end of the month to pay yourself. Or you’re always the last to be paid and it never really is enough. And actually when you look at what your self employed or your associates are taking per hour, it is more than you’re taking as the business owner.

[00:14:32] Katie Bell: I’d love you to join me to dig into why our industry is going through a very necessary shift. You’re going to find out the pros and cons of employing somebody versus self employing somebody and find out why most clinics are not making the self employed model work anymore. The link to register for that masterclass is going to be in the show notes and I would love to see you there live.

[00:14:56] Katie Bell: You get to chat to me, we get to talk. We usually have about half an hour of teaching coaching so you get some really great value from it and then we open the floor up for questions. So make sure you are there for that and next week we’re following the theme on. So we’re going to talk this month all about hiring and team and we’re going to Dig into how to hire.

[00:15:20] Katie Bell: So this episode is about assessing the need. It’s deciding when you need to hire and who you need to hire. And next week we are going to really start to talk a little bit more about some of the key points and the key processes you need. We have a 12 step hiring process. We’re going to share some of those with you.

[00:15:38] Katie Bell: Join me again next week. Thanks so much for listening to this show. Remember content consumption does not make changes, so commit to doing something from today’s episode. Maybe it’s taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it’s reaching out to me and learning more about our transformational coaching programs. Or if you have not yet, join our free Treat Your Business Facebook group, a free access to over 30 business masterclasses.

[00:16:01] Katie Bell: All of that is over at thrive businesscoaching. com or linked in the show notes. And the last favor I will ask, because social proof is endlessly important, is to leave a rating or review. I would love to know what you think of the show, how the show has been helpful for you. And I can’t wait to chat with you.

[00:16:19] Katie Bell: This is just the start of our conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon!

[00:16:24] Katie Bell: