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Hi everybody welcome. I’m Dr. Nicole Lindsey, founder of DominateChiro Marketing, where I teach chiropractors how to build profitable relationships with medical doctors so they can build the practice and the lifestyle of their dreams. Welcome to ChiroSecure’s Empowering Women in Chiropractic series. Thank you, ChiroSecure. We always have to start thanking them for everything they do for us, for, um, our insurance needs for putting out great information, bringing us together every week for gathering helpful information that we can utilize for our practice in life. So thank you ChiroSecure. And when you get a chance to make sure you thank them too, today’s topic is building your rockstar team. My last show, I talked about, uh, having an associate assistant practice and building that. So I thought it was only appropriate to follow that up with going over how to build a rockstar team so you can support your associate assistant practice.
So next slide. Does this look familiar to you? It’s mid-year you’re looking at your stats for your practice. Looking at the numbers. I know I’ve been doing this recently and I noticed that things are up, certain things are down and sometimes you just can’t figure out what’s going on, right? You think why I’m I’m working so hard. I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. And I just can’t burst that bubble. I can’t get the roof off the ceiling. Like I want to, and year after year, this goes on. If this is you, if you’re experiencing this, if you’re looking at your stats and you just can’t break that ceiling that you’ve been at for awhile, then I encourage you to listen to the next 20 minutes or so, because I may have a solution to you for you. Um, next slide. So one of the reasons your practice growth may be stunted is because of the way that you’re staffing your practice.
You may have a revolving door and frankly, a ROV revolving door is a closed door. So basically there’s such a high cost for high turnover. It costs you your time when you have new employees coming in and out in and out costs you your time, your energy, not to mention you’re losing productivity, right? Because not able to process as many patients, you’re not being able to focus on growth. And let’s talk about the cost of putting ads out and then actually interviewing these potential employees and the training that’s involved. The cost of turnover is never really assessed in a practice. I mean, think about it. We look at numbers like our overhead. We look at what we’re paying and wages and benefits to our employees. We’re looking at retention, PVA. Uh, we’re looking at collections how much money we’re making, but do we ever really calculate what we’re losing because of losing employees? The cost of turnover? I don’t think so. Not too many people are.
So it’s something we need to look at your, your practice growth may be stunted because of this revolving door, because it causes revolving door blues, right? This lowers the morale for both you and your team, right? Isn’t it depressing when you just get a new employee, you’re getting them into the rhythm of your practice and how things go. And then they leave. It’s, it’s a bummer, right? The morale, everything goes down. Not only that, but your patients start asking questions. What’s going on around here. Right? They’re confused. They liked Sally. They liked Mary and now Mary’s not here anymore. They liked the way that Judy hooked them up to the decompression table. They liked the way they were greeted by the certain front desk person. And now they’re not there anymore. So your patients get, get the blues as well. There’s also a lack of connection and cohesiveness.
When you have a revolving door at your practice, the most important reason why the, uh, your revolving door is a closed door is because it prevents you from, uh, from not obtaining your goals, right? So you can’t focus on hiring and training at the same time. And I know some people say that you can, there are some schools of thought, some chiropractors, some coaches that are out there telling their, um, their clients that, you know what, just keep, keep an ad out. You’re forever hiring. And this may be true if you have a solid office manager or somebody else that can really focus on hiring, interviewing, and training. But if that person is you, if you are the one, doing all the, the interviewing and training, I’m going to tell you right now, you can’t be two places at once. You can’t be really jumping into growth and pushing and driving.
If you are training at the same time. So it’s hard to do. It’s hard to get new employees trained because it takes time, uh, while you’re growing. So revolving doors can prevent you from obtaining your goals. A Deloitte survey that was conducted in the U S found that it takes up to six months to get new employees working reasonably proficiently six months, right? That some of my colleagues can’t keep CA’s for six months. It also showed it takes 18 months until they are fully integrated into the culture of your organization. And it takes 24 months before they really know the strategy of the business that they have joined 24 months. That’s insane, right? Most CA’s only lasts that long for most practices.
The second reason your practice growth may be stunted is that a bad employee can poison the well, let’s talk about this. What does a bad employee actually do for your practice? Well, first of all, your brand is affected. You’re losing credibility by having this so-called bad employee, the staff member that’s poisoning the well your staff members are your brand ambassadors. So if they are not representing you or your brand, well, it’s, it’s only going to cause problem. They they’re underperforming, right? This is causing you a loss of revenue because now your other team members have to pick up the slack. And this isn’t fair. So everybody gets disgruntled and it affects a whole entire team. This is going to cause a decrease in the morale of all the other team members and everybody’s attitude. All it takes is one bad employee to create this cascade of events in your, in your practice.
So think of if this is going on in your practice, you probably know who that person is, that’s causing this, but they can be responsible for changing the whole work environment. Even if your practice is the most positive place to be positive environment to work in, it can turn into a negative one, one bad employee. One bad employee starts calling out absenteeism. And this affects the rest of your team because now they’re picking up the slack from this as well. And one of the most important reasons that a bad employee can poison the well is because customer loss, they can damage relationships with key patients that you have in your practice. And then those patients stop coming. They stop referring other great patients into the practice on and on and on studies show that one bad employee and an otherwise high performing group can bring productivity down by as much as 30 to 40%.
Do I have your attention now? Yes. True one bad employee. That is why building a rockstar team can help close that revolving door. And it’s something that we really need to be practicing on because what, what this can do. If you build a rockstar team, it can help motivate. You can help motivate your team can help inspire you, inspire your team so that you can hit your goals. Now, why did I choose this topic today? Well, yes. I said because it’s a great follow-up to the associate assistant practice, but also because this is something that I experienced in my own practice. And I only give you in my shows, things I have experience with so that you can learn from it, take it if you will, and put it in practice for yourself. But this is something that I experienced over this past year. You know, COVID was a huge blessing to me for a lot of reasons.
And one of those reasons is because of this very topic, I was analyzing my practice statistics a year after year after year, and I had this juicy goal set and it just could never hit it. We kept getting close and then boom, fall back down, getting close. And then boom, fall back down for 20, almost 20 years. This went on, right? Why couldn’t I hit that goal? Well, what happened with COVID? Our practice numbers dropped just like most of everybody’s, uh, initially the first three or four weeks. And we had to temporarily let go, uh, all of our staff all but one. And this was a great opportunity for me to really dive deep into my stats and look at my brand, my core values, my mission, what I stood for, what my practice stood for. And what I realized is that my team really wasn’t on board with a lot of my core values and they didn’t fit in with my brand anymore.
And it was, it was not cohesive. So as we started building back, which didn’t take long, it was maybe five or six weeks. We had some downtime with COVID. I started bringing rockstar team players into the practice once that really jived with what we were trying to create in the community. You know, my brand was really strong at that point. So I knew exactly what I wanted and I brought team members in that fit with my brand that fit with my mission, fit with my values. And I’m going to talk about this over the next few minutes, what that was specifically, and you know, what happened by doing this is that over the past year from March of 2020 to March, 2021, I had my best year ever in practice best year ever in practice, I hit that goal and beyond I experienced so much growth. And I know it was because of this very topic, because I was able to build that rockstar team so that we could grow so that we could function as a team. And now I only have momentum going forward and I don’t even see that ceiling anymore, which is so cool. So here is exactly what I did. I’m going to share it with you.
So, number one, here’s my roadmap. If you will, IQ tests and personality profiles, should you? Yes, you should. Absolutely. You should IQ tests. In my opinion, for me, it ensures that I’m going to have a person on my team that learns very quickly, that can think on their toes that has critical thinking skills, problem, solving skills. Listen, I can’t be everywhere all the time in my practice. So I need strong team players that can help me put those small fires out that I don’t have to do all the time that I can trust will that they will do a good job. They can think critically I cue high IQ is a good determining factor for that. So there is a wonderful, uh, program, and it does exactly this, it tests PE uh, potential employees, cognitive skills, their motivation, and their personality, all three it’s called wonder lick.com.
And you can create account. They have over a thousand different job profiles to choose from. So an avatar, if you will, of personalities that are exactly what you want for this specific job. So whether it’s a front desk assistant, or it is a, um, med tech or exam tech, someone that’s going to be doing vitals on the patients that is a profile in they’re already set up for you. And basically you get one simple, easy score that encompasses all three, so that it’s easy for you to compare one candidate to the next. So create an account and choose the appropriate job position for your, uh, whatever person, whatever position you’re hiring for. So the, the personality, the motivation, the cognitive tests, they’re not just for you as the employer, they’re for the employee as well, because if your new hire hired newly hired employee gets into a position that they’re not suited for personality wise, cognitive wise, they’re going to be unhappy.
They’re not going to stay with you. And this has happened to me so many times throughout the course of my career, I hired an amazing person that I thought would be perfect for the job. I get them in that seat and they cannot handle the position and they’re disgruntled. They leave. And it’s a, it’s a terrible break, right? This will prevent that because you are testing them to see if they are suited for that position. So it’s not fair to them either to be put in a position that they’re not suited for. So these cognitive motivation and, and personality tests are good for them. And they’re good for you so that you can find a good fit. So you can cut down on employee dissatisfaction and stop that revolving door. Right? So number two is this hands-off approach that I have, um, developed in hiring.
And that way it’s simple, it’s easy. I don’t have to stress about it. So I set it up. So it’s automatic because listen, if you have to sift through 80 to a hundred resumes, who’s going to do who has the time to do that, right? And I know every time I put an ad out, maybe it’s just Asheville, North Carolina, I will get 80 to 100 people applying for the job. And I simply do not have time. And whether you only get 20 seriously, do you have time? And what can you tell from a resume, right? It’s hard. So don’t waste your time looking at the emails and the resumes that come in instead create a separate Gmail account, call it, join our awesome Cairo team@gmail.com. Something to that effect, create an ad on. Indeed. I always use indeed and I do the free version. Um, if you’re in an area that you don’t get enough hits, you may need to sponsor it a bit.
But what you can do is create an automatic email in your Gmail account so that every time a patient applies through indeed and their resume gets put into your Gmail inbox, they will get an automatic reply. You don’t have to do anything. And that email is going to say something like this, thank you for applying for the front desk position at back in balance chiropractic, we are so excited that you are interested in this position. The next step is to complete this test. Now Wunderlich gives you a wonderful, easy link that you can just paste right into the email. And the email is going to say, once you’ve completed this test, we will be in contact with you for setting up an interview. Thank you so much. And that’s it. So hands-off right now, you will only go into Wunderlich once or twice a day.
Don’t go in every minute, you know, give it a chance to build up the dashboard. It’s so easy. Basically it will give you that number, the person’s name and the number, how they scored for your particular position that you’re hiring for. And what I only do is I only focus on the top 10%. So they have to be within that 90 to a hundred percentile for me to invite them back for an interview because the software has done the work for me. It has weeded out all of these candidates saying that person’s not going to be suited for that position. This person, cognitive cognitively is not going to be able to handle that position. This person is not motivated. They’re not going to enjoy that position, right? They’ve done the software’s done that for me. So I’m only going to invite the ones in that are showing that they can handle that position and that they’re suited for it.
So if I have 80 people apply typically only eight to 10 will fall into that top. 10% makes it much easier to invite eight people in for a one-on-one interview than 80. Wouldn’t you say step three is actually conducting the interview. And here’s the thing. If you have been watching my shows, you know, that I am a get to the point kind of person. So I do that in my interviews as well. I don’t have time to waste. I’m not going to waste your time. So let’s just get to the point. So here are some of my key questions that I think really do a good job. And I’m going to tell you why. Uh, so first of all, you have to know your brand. You have to know what is important to you, uh, what you want your employees to possess, because again, your new employees are ambassadors for your brand and your practice and whatever core values whatever’s important to you.
They need to embrace them and represent them. So you have to figure out questions that will enable to get that out of them. Are they willing to possess these core values? Do they agree with them? Do they like them? Are they excited about them? If not, it’s not going to work. Right? So for example, one of my number one core values is connection. I need to make sure that my patients feel a connection when they come in my practice from every single employee in my, whether it’s the front desk with a smile, the tech CA um, putting therapies on them, the chiropractor adjusting them. Everybody needs to connect with this patient the entire time they’re in the practice. So that’s important to me. So one of my questions is going to be what interests you in working here. Now, what I’m looking for is I’m looking for the candidate to tell me that they, they really love to work with people that they really love connecting.
I love it when they say that word too, when they, when they answer with that word. Cause I know that’s, that’s, that’s it. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s my core value. Right? So what interests you in working here? I’m not, I don’t want to hear, ah, I don’t know. I’m just, I’m just looking for a place to land for a few months. Uh, I don’t know. I just need a job at that. That’s not what I’m looking for. That’s not what my brand is. Right? So, um, if you want to bust through your goals, you need to be really clear on your core values, your brand and hire people that can help you, that they can be extensions of your arms, your hands, your fingers in putting this out there. The second question, why are you in the job market? One of my other core values is, um, inspiration.
Okay? So we want to be constantly inspiring patients to take healthy action. Whether it’s drinking, drinking more water, whether it’s starting to exercise, whatever it is coming to get adjusted, changing their life. Inspiration is a core value. So why are you in the job market? What I’m looking for here is not, uh, I don’t have a job. I just need a job. I’m not looking for that person next. I’m looking for, I already have a job, but I don’t feel a purpose there. I’m looking for a purpose. I want to be excited about showing up in the office every day. I want to be excited about what I do. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for that kind of response. Third question. Do you have any issues promoting natural health care options? Why is this important? Well, everybody’s core value. If you’re a chiropractor should be healthy or health, right?
I would hope so. That’s one of mine. Okay. My employees don’t need to be the healthiest people on the planet. However, they need to be interested in health, right? And inspiring people to get healthy and being a part of that. And so I’m very clear with my candidates. I let them know. We educate, we promote natural health regularly. We do videos. We do Facebook lives. We do team challenges. We have a book club, we read healthy books. I don’t sugar coat it. I let my candidates know. We want to be healthy as a team. We want to grow as a team. So we’re going to constantly learn different ways to be healthy. Are you cool with this? And either they’re not, and they’re not on board next or they are. They may say yes. Wow. I would love that. I would love to be inspired to be healthier.
That’s what I’m looking for. So that’s a great question. Fourth one. What are your short term goals? I want to know in six months to a year, where do you see yourself? If they say, oh, well, I, uh, I’m going to be going back to school to get my master’s degree. I don’t really think I want to spend the next six months training somebody knowing that I’m going to lose them. So that’s a great question to kind of weed that out. Where are your, where do you see yourself longterm? Five, five years down the road. Where do you, where do you see yourself? Um, I just like to know that I’d like to know where the staff are, where they want to go. Are they looking to buy a house? Um, are they looking to have a family? Um, and number five, what hourly rate are you hoping to make?
Just cut to the chase. Get to the point that if on occasion they have said on a lot of occasion, oh, I’m looking, you know, and I’m hiring for a front desk person. I need $30 an hour. Well, yeah. Who does it? Right. So that’s, that’s an easy weed out question. You know what you’re going to pay for this position. And it’s probably not that, so next let’s get realistic here. Right. So that’s a really good get to the point kind of question. So there’s other questions as well that I ask, but those are definitely my core questions that I like to get that roadmap, uh, get clarity so that we can just get to the point. So there you have it. That is my roadmap to developing a rockstar team. And listen, I know I I’ve done a lot of things wrong in practice.
I’ve been going at it for 20 years and I have hired people for the wrong positions I have. Um, I’ve not done a lot of things, right. But I can tell you that this is one thing that over the past year, I have really learned and honed my skills on developing my team so much so that I see the importance of it. I now see that, you know what, there’s, there’s so much more that we can do so much more growth and momentum that we can achieve. And I want that for you too, because our profession needs you to grow in that way. So thank you for watching. If you have any questions about MD marketing, about anything chiropractic, don’t hesitate to reach out to me, dominatechiromarketing.com and make sure you tune in for our next Empowering Women, Facebook live show. Thanks everybody.
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