Hiring your Perfect Employee

Hey, what's up? It's Aaron. Let's talk about hiring, specifically hiring another physical therapist. So there's time to hire VAs, there's time to hire admin assistants. But let's talk about hiring physical therapists and where the problems are. Because if you really want to grow your business, you really want to make more money and not like, slave away even in your own business, you need to hire a team. We need to hire other people to help us. We need to bring on team members. So I'm going to talk a little bit today. I just give you a little crash course on how to hire, where to hire, how to get them to apply to work with you, a little bit about compensation models and then some of the leadership skills that you need. I'm going to do it pretty quick. This isn't everything you need to know. This is just a high level overview. And maybe if you've hired people, you're like, yeah, I've hired people. Maybe if you've hired people for someone else, you know, like there's one or two of these things missing for you. So number one. Well, I guess the why. I kind of talked about the why. Hire. It allows someone. It allows you to help more people. It allows you to go on vacation without taking a pay cut. It allows you to, you know, travel freedom. It allows you to stop seeing as many people so that you can create online programs. Look, I treated patients for 20 years. I mean, there's a time at which you're just like, you know what? I don't need to see as many people anymore. But I don't want my income to decrease. I want to pass along my skills, my knowledge to the next generation. Or maybe you are the next generation and you're a badass and you're just like, aaron, tell me how to hire so I can grow this thing and open multiple locations and do it before I'm 32. You know, I mean, we can absolutely do that. So the why? The why is because really you're not special. I'm sorry to say it. You're not the only game in town. You can train someone to be 90% as good as you. It's not about the skills we've learned and how you touch people. It's. It's how we engage with the person. So the three things that I teach all my employees in our practice, especially the physical therapist, is to our model is we listen, we touch them, and we empower them. So we listen to what's going on, we ask good questions, we Touch them where they hurt. Okay? Like, that's one of the things we have to do in the first visit. Touch them where they hurt. Because everyone before PT told me, aaron, you're the first person to touch me or hurt. I've been to everybody, like, and I'm a massage therapist helping these people who've been to pt, ot, acupuncture, massage, massage. They've been to the surgeon, orthopedic specialist, they've been all over the place. I'm the first person to touch them because I was touching them. I was listening to them, I was listening to their body. It's not that hard to do. Look, I was only a lowly massage therapist, Aaron. Yes, I had a degree from Duke University, but that didn't teach me how to, you know, touch people's bodies. And we empower them. We give people something to do at home, whether it's an exercise or we give them encouragement and give them hope. We give, we empower them to, with an exercise or self treatment technique to reduce their pain and symptoms on their own so they don't rely on us. That's why. That's like the why and that's it. So I need to help more people do that. Right? Okay, how are we going to hire? Well, I can go to my friends, I go to my classmates, be like, hey, you want to work for me? Maybe the co worker that was working for me last time. A lot of people will find people to hire in their business from people they already know. And that's great. Just know this, as soon as you hire someone you've had a prior relationship with, you risk the prior relationship. So let's say you were co workers and friends and then you hire them and things don't work out well, are you willing to lose the friend? That's happened to me. Not necessarily in hiring, but in going into business. When we change relationships with people, we risk the prior relationship. And so you just have to understand that. But sometimes the people you've worked with before, you've already vetted them, you've already worked with them for two years. You know how they work under pressure, you know how they work with you. You know, great, so maybe there's someone in your network. But the other big thing of how is, how are we going to hire? Well, what we have to have is a job description. We have to have. We have to be very clear on their roles and responsibilities. Like, are they going to, are they going to be responsible for doing their own marketing? Okay. If they're responsible for doing Their own marketing and their own business growth. Then why are they working for you? Why don't they go work for themselves? Right? So what we have to do is if we want them to participate in some of the marketing, um, we need to get them on board with it and know that, hey, if you help, it'll grow your, grow your caseload. But we can't rely on them to do it. Like, it's my job as a business owner to really fill their schedule. I just need some support from the team for, to show up at events and I need to train them and give them the expectation, you know, hey, you're gonna write a blog post once a month or create like two Instagram reels, you know, a week, like, and I'm gonna pay them for that, right? I'm not gonna expect to do it all on their own or figure it out. I have to give them this path. But let's get back into how we've gotta have this job description that has. It doesn't need to be huge, but it's just gonna have, here's your responsibilities, here's your expectations. And if we're looking to hire a physical therapist in 2024, you know what we have to do? We have to actually sell the position. Because there are more open positions, jobs for physical therapists, and there are physical therapists that want them. I know there's probably enough physical therapists, but people don't want them. And then, so we have to sell it, right? Like, if you live in a dope location, like you live in San Diego, you got to sell the San Diego lifestyle. You have to sell, you have a cash practice, you got to sell the lifestyle. Like, hey, you're gonna come and you're gonna see up to 32 patients a week. People are like, well, I see 14 a day, right? They're going to see up to 32, 34 patients a week, or maybe four, maybe it's only 40, whatever. Like, you sell the lifestyle. Two minute documentation. Do you. Would you like to, you know, not have to document on the weekends like in a cash practice? Your documentation should take you just a couple minutes. Because I'm not documenting for insurance. Like, you got to sell the lifestyle. You got to offer something that no one else offers. And that doesn't mean you have to offer a 401k and, you know, benefits, but like, let's offer them mentorship, which, you know what mentorship means? It means meeting with an employee once a week at a team meeting and going over cases or case studies or Self treatment techniques. I mean, it's, it's not a ton, but that's what a lot of people want. We gotta sell that. And then we have to put together a job description, right? And we have to post it out places. That's really how to hire. I mean, there's a lot of other things in there. Like your state may require you to have certain documentation, work with a lawyer who's in your state to create the handbook that you need and you know, like a contract for you, etc. I mean, in our Platinum Mastermind, I give everyone access to like a template of our, like our contract and our, in our handbook, employee handbook and trainings on how to hire and do this, how to write the job description and application. I give them a, you know, you get a template for that, but you can do it on your own too, you know, but just in your state, you might have different state rules than we do in North Carolina. Like, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not writing, you know, your legal documents for you. I'm just giving you examples so that you can see, like how we do it and what works well. And so you need to have some of those things set up. And really before you even put out, it might take you a few months to find a pt. So as you put it out or before, we really need to have some SOPs in place. Those are standard operating procedures. It's like the things you do every day. Like you bring on this person, they're going to need to know how do they answer the phone, how do they set up the room, how do you want them organizing the treatments, how do you want them doing the documentation, closing their space, etc. They need to know that. And you can't just tell them and expect them to remember. They need to have it documented somewhere. So we got to have some SOPs as well. Okay, let's say we got his job description and you have hourly and you know, like, here's what I'm gonna charge, right? Here's what I'm gonna pay, compensate. Okay, where do we go? So here's what we have to do. We have to take this job. And if this person's gonna bring in 250 to $350,000 a year in your business, you should be willing to spend $20,000 finding them. So you're gonna post it on indeed, LinkedIn, you're gonna post it in on your personal Facebook page, you're gonna email your list, your patients, you probably have PTS on there, you're gonna Tell people you're gonna put it everywhere, you're gonna post this job everywhere. There's job boards. Jess, Jenny has a cash based PT job board. I think it's called Cash based PT job board. It's something like that. If you need to connect with her, go find her on Instagram @WonderlessPT and tell her you heard about her on the podcast. You know, like, you need to leverage everything you can to find this person and work hard to do it because they're going to free up your time. The first thing they're going to do is free up your time. So, you know, Indeed has been the best place right now. But there's monster jobs, there's other job boards. At some point, Indeed would charge me 40 bucks for a, an applicant. And then this last few weeks I've been looking not for a PT but for someone for other roles in the business. And they're charging, you know, just per like views now, again, which is a little bit less because I would get these applicants and be like 40 bucks and be like, ugh, I have to get on there every day. Because if it was 24 hours, they'd charge you. There are some things in Indeed you can filter for, but there's this whole job application strategy that we use where people answer questions, they apply, and then there's a little test on the thank you page. They have to do the test, they have to send in the email with the right words and video and everything. And I know if they're like serious. And so that's kind of where I'm going as we post this. Let's say we post it on Indeed or LinkedIn. I don't want to just look at people's resumes. Resumes don't matter to me. You know, I don't care. Like I've said in the past, I don't care if you've got OCS, CSCs, GCs, RCs. I don't know what all the other specialty things. What I really want to know is, you know, do you value what you do? One of the best questions you can ask someone and I'm gonna say, I tell you where I learned this from. I learned this from Jerry Durham. So shout out to Jerry Durham. How much is too much to pay for physical therapy? That's one of the number one interview questions I, I ask. And, and when I was hiring my first pt, I got on a call with Jerry and oh God, there's another guy out in la. We did a little three way call. I can't Remember? But we were both hiring and Jerry kind of like helped us with this. So shout out to Jerry, thank you very much. If you haven't checked out Jerry Durham in a while, go check him out. Jerry was one of the first older pts that really was encouraging to me in doing the cash based PT thing. He had a clinic in San Francisco that was out of network and Jerry and Sturdy were like really encouraging, which was rare in like the Twitter pt, Twitter and Apta, like circles. So thank you. Okay, so we're going to post it on indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook. Don't spam my Facebook group or anyone else's without permission, but put them on these places. Email your list. That's kind of where. Let's talk about, you know, this little application. I mean, just real quick, the application button on Indeed has gotten better over the years with some of the questions that asks. But what I'm really looking for is, you know, do they have desire to do something different? At the beginning of the application I'll have a little bit like a job description and I even put a video in there about our practice and a tour of our practice. I've made this even more complicated where I had a whole funnel for this. But in the last few years it's gotten harder. Six or seven years ago, when I hired my first people, there were way more people looking for jobs, especially PTs. So, you know, I've simplified it and I use a Typeform and you could do Google forms, something else. I use Typeform and I ask, here's a bunch of questions, here's a job description, here's some questions. Tell me about a time when this, tell me about what you value about here, you know, et cetera. Just some general questions to get them to go through it. And I'm even like, give me your Instagram and Facebook because I'm going to go find you on social media anyways. You may as well give it to me. And then if they answer the questions right at the end, I have a special message for them. I can even say, you don't. You miss a question like, are you willing to get vaccinated for Covid, like for our clinic? That's important. Like, I don't want someone unvaccinated working in our clinic because it's not just Aaron working in there, it's not just you, it's other people. And that question will disqualify people. There are other disqualifiers that we'll go through. And at the end if you qualify, you'll get a message with instructions on what to do next. And there's another step in the process that only really good fit people are willing to do. This is called the hiring application or the hiring funnel. And our Platinum Mastermind members get access to this and they can, you know, get a copy of it, etc. You can create your own. You just need to ask these important questions. Questions like tell me about a time when, you know, you worked with a irate customer. Tell me, you know, what's, you know, who are the people that you like or learn from and why is it important? And you can tell by the way people answer if they just do these short little one to two word answers, they're not good fits. If they give you good paragraphs, they're starting to be a good fit. And then at the end there's a test and it's like, send me an email to this specific email address with this specific subject line and include these specific things. And what this is, is not, is a test not just to see if they would do it, it's a test to see if they follow instructions and they're, they're teachable or coachable. And, and if they actually do it, they're willing to go above and beyond what most people will do, which is really who I'm looking for is someone who's ready to go above and beyond what most employees will do. Right. So that's the application. And then once I have them send in this video, like three to five minute video, then I can review these. I don't have to review all the, all the resumes on indeed, I can just review the people that have gotten to this step. I can put it on autopilot and it happens and it'll just show up in my inbox. That's the beauty of the application funnel. It takes less of my time. You just got to set it up once and then you put it into action when you're ready to hire. All right, there's three compensation models and I've built a spreadsheet to model these out for different prices. But there's. Well, let me talk about this real quick. If you own a business and you're going to hire someone as a contractor, they really need to look like an independent contractor. But most people hire independent contractors to reduce their risk. And really you're increasing your risk because the person now looks like an employee because you've given them set hours, you've given them set times, set set instructions, et cetera. An independent contractor doesn't have set hours to show Up. They don't have. They do their own scheduling, they do a lot of their own work. So if you're going to hire a physical therapist to work for you, unless maybe you're doing home health contracting, even if it's cash based, they're probably an employee and you can still pay an employee per visit. You just probably need to hire them as an employee and you really need to talk to a lawyer to make sure that you're hiring them the right way. Um, so we've got these compensation models. You got salary. Okay. The benefit of putting someone on salary is you give them all your expectations and their job is to do their job right. They can. They're not getting paid just to treat patients. They're getting paid to help you, you know, nurture clients, do marketing there. I mean, all these things are part of their job description for, you know, being on salary. I think salary is great for a long time. I really liked it. And then I really, you know, I thought, oh, this is great because I can get them to do more than just treating patients, because otherwise they'll be incentivized only to treat patients, not to do other things. And I did. I made a couple mistakes. I took one person from hourly move them to salary, and their productivity decreased. I'm like giving her a raise and rewarding her by giving her a salary that's higher than what she was making hourly. And she started working less, productivity decreased. This wasn't a physical therapist, but, you know, so I was like, that's not so good. So there's another model that's basically a eat what you kill model, where it's like you're just getting a commission or not even really commission a set fee per treatment. And so definitely be careful of saying, hey, I'm going to give you 50%. Because as soon as you raise your rate, they get a pay increase. So does an employee deserve a pay increase when you decide to charge more for a product? No, they deserve to get a pay increase when they show you they're worth more to your business than what you're paying them. And so do not tie those two things together because you might have promised someone 50%. You come to work with me and I'm like, yeah, we need to charge more than $125 an hour and we get you to 250. And now the person you told you were going to pay $45 an hour is now making 90 bucks an hour only because you raised your rates, not because they deserve to make twice as much. So don't tie those two things together so you can eat what you kill. But what this does is requires someone who is a go getter, is a hunter, and is ready to go out and get more. But a lot of times, especially if you're starting and you don't move your patients to their schedule, they're like, why am I doing here? I don't have enough business to make this worthwhile, you know. So if you're on salary, they know what they get every two weeks. And it creates like safety and security. If you're on like a eat what you kill, like flat fee per visit. I know the more visits, the more I make. So this might incentivize them to book patients in longer because they'll make more, you know, like the right physical therapist won't do that. But there is this incentive to say, hey, well, the more times I treat this patient, the more money I make. The real incentive should be, hey, the more you help with the marketing, the more you help fill your schedule, the more money you make. So sometimes it can be hard to kind of extract these things and its personality. So then there's a model that's in the middle. There's like this base plus salary, and you got this base salary of, I don't know, 500 bucks a week. I'm just throwing out a number, like, let's just say 500 bucks a week. So that's $2,000 a month. That's enough for someone to pay some rent and eat some food if they have no patients coming in. But then they get a lower amount per visit. So instead of, let's say $65 a visit, maybe they're making a base plus $50 a visit. What I'm doing right now with one of my therapists is he's got an hourly, but when he sees patients, he gets more per hour. So he's getting like A$20 an hour. But when he sees a patient, he gets an extra 35. So he's making 55 per hour for a visit. And we've moved to a couple different payment models to see, like, how does that work? And I have room to give him a pay raise and an increase on that as long as it's working well. And I feel like that's a good mix. Like with him, he was on hourly and it was fine. I was paying him per, let's see, let me go back with Chris. I was paying him per visit when he first started. And then, you know, like, I lost an admin and I wanted him to do more. And I was like, well, you know what? I'll just pay him the same per hour to do admin as he was doing treatments because, you know, it just was easier for me at that time. It was like a little bit of a crisis time. I lost employee. I was getting divorced. I was like, I can't do too much. I can't make it complicated. And that was fine. But it didn't incentivize him to see more people. And then we had a good hard conversation. This is about a year ago, and I moved him to like an hourly. Plus, I've reduced his hourly. But I said, hey, when you treat a patient, I'm giving you even more. And all of a sudden, his schedule got busier. And then as Caitlin left back in January, December, I told Chris, I was like, hey, I'm going to get more patients on your schedule, but I'm also going to give you a raise. Gave him a raise, and now he's doing even more. And it's like the idea is to incentivize them to, you know, like, see more people, keep the right people booked on their schedule, etc. There's never a perfect model, but those are the three basic models. And if you think about this, if someone's going to bring in $300,000 a year to your business, you can easily afford to pay them about 30%. Somewhere between 25 to 35% of gross can go to paying their salary. Okay? Because remember, when you've got, let's say you're paying someone a hundred thousand dollars, it can cost you 25 to 30 something in additional taxes and payroll expenses, benefits, con ed, et cetera. It costs more. So you have to factor that in. And so there's not a perfect number. It can go up and down. And the higher volume you have, the more leverage you have. The lower volume you have, the less. But if you're only charging 125 bucks a visit, 150 bucks a visit, you're gonna have a hard time paying an employee close to six figures. Right? And six figures for seeing 30 patients a week. So just think about that too. Like, are you charging enough to be able to pay someone a good salary to keep them and retain them? Right? So how do you get them beyond six figures? Well, you charge more, you pay them more, you get them doing a little bit more in the business, maybe they get a profit share of gross. That's something that we've done. That's something I've had taught other people how to do. And then you get that person doing, they're not just doing management, they're kind of more responsible for marketing, sales and leading a team. And then they can have a percentage of the gross because as they grow the business, they grow your business and they grow your take home so they can take home more. And that's a great, I think, compensation model for someone who's been with you for a few years, who you trust, who has a long term vision inside your business. Last thing I want to chat about before I gotta go and hop on a call is this. Okay, now you hire someone and let's talk about leadership. I think I have a whole training and podcast that in this, but real quick, leadership, you are the leader of this team. You need to lead. You need to really lead from the front. Because a leader leads from the front. A leader pulls the cart and sets the direction. But a leader doesn't do all the work either. They don't do all the work for people. They don't micromanage. So don't micromanage. People get, give them responsibilities and clear like outcomes. This is the problem. This is like, this is the problem we're solving for. This is the goal. This is when I know it's done. Here's the timeline I need it done in. Here's the first five steps to get started and here's the big projects like give them that and then say, hey, when you encounter a problem that you don't know how to. When you encounter a problem or a fire in the business, I want you to come up with two different solutions. Like if you don't know how to solve it, if you don't know how to solve that problem right away without me, I want you to come up with two different solutions. And before you come to me and tell me about the problem, I want you to present me with two options at least maybe a third option, you know, hey, option A, option B. And I'm either gonna choose A or B or I'm gonna give you option C. And in that way people aren't coming to me with problems. And I'm not solving problems. They're coming to me with solutions. And I'm just choosing solutions, which makes my job easier, but, but it puts more ownership in their hands as well. Cause they can just solve this problem. Sometimes you gotta keep an eye on it. Cause sometimes just solving that problem can lead to drift. Like last week Chris and I were going through like the cleaning, like you know, cause Chris is running the practice and he's like, well, you Know, when do I need to order stuff? What do I need to order? I was like, well, let's take an inventory of what we got. And I went back and looked and we probably have an easily $500 worth of like disinfectant hand sanitizer and cleaner from 2020, 2021, where I basically told one of my employees, like, all right, you know, we need cleaners. Solve the problem. And I've just realized last week, or actually last week, early two days ago, that she was hoarding cleaning supplies and like, holy shit, we're never going to use this hand sanitizer. This is like the super liquid hand sanitizer. We're never going to use it. And it's just like, I got a couple, I got a couple like one gallon jugs of this stuff. I'm like, I don't know, I'm not using that stuff. So you can get a little drift. You know, that's happening, but you keep check on it. You have your policies and procedures and you know, you keep an eye on your business. And that's one of the ways, like metrics, like having your team fill out metrics so you can look at them, that prevents drift. But sometimes drift is unavoidable and sometimes, you know it is. But just don't micromanage people, you know, let them do it. Otherwise you're just doing it for them. It'll create resentment and from them and you, and you're going to stay busy and it's not going to give you that freedom that you're looking for. So that's the leadership, the other piece of leadership that I want to pass down to you. And I learned this from Bedros. And Bedros said, give him rope. And I was like, what do you mean give him rope? He said, give him rope. And I'm like, what? He's like, rope. You know, like, give them rope. Like they're, you're giving them an opportunity. They're either going to choose to build a rope ladder and climb to the next level or they're going to build a noose and hang themselves. And I've done that before where employees were asking like, hey, we want to get back into doing team building events. And I was like, great, let's do this event, set it up, schedule it, organize everyone. It took over a year for that to happen. I should have known. But I was too busy with the pandemic and all the other things. Like I see now, like, that was a red flag, that that didn't happen. I gave an employee that ability and she's now no longer with me. But you know, it's like, oh, I gave her an opportunity. Because if you can't, if you're not replaceable, if an employee isn't replaceable, they can't be promoted. So that's why our employees are responsible for creating their SOPs, their standard operating procedures, their alien abduction manual. Because if I can't replace them, I can't promote them. Because in order to promote you, I have to have someone else do the current job you're doing. And if I have to go in and train them very specifically and spend my time doing this like it's not going to happen, I'll just hire someone to come in at the higher end job. So those are kind of like the keys on leadership and hiring. I think the number one thing is, is create something awesome that you would love. Hire someone awesome to fill it, but they do not have to be you. They're going to be someone else and they're not going to be as good as you. Likely if you try to hire someone who's been out in the field for 10 years or more, they're going to be set in their ways. And finding someone who's set in their ways the exact same way you're set in your ways is going to be more difficult than firing, than hiring someone younger and mentoring and training them into becoming a great therapist. And remember, great therapists aren't people that command more dollars. It's people that connect, have empathy, ask questions and are good at the sales part because sales is all about questions. And, and people that are invested in your business. And intrapreneurs are going to help you grow your business, not just like the number one best, you know, person at manipulation. Like that's not what we're going for. Simple is scalable. Remember that simple is scalable. Grow your business, dream big. And if you need some help creating some of these hiring systems, you want access to our hiring program or like to work together to grow and scale your business so you have more time, you might be a great fit for our Platinum Mastermind program. If it feels like that's something you'd be interested in, I'd love to invite you to hop on a free break free new patient strategy. Call with me. You just go to call with aaron.com fill out the little form schedule in a time and we'll chat for like 10, 15 minutes. And if I can't help, no worries, I'll point you in the right direction. If we can, we book in another time to chat about how and what that looks like. So that's callwithaaron.com Otherwise, take these strategies. Go hire someone. Let me know what was helpful for you about this podcast, about the show. Shoot me a message on Instagram, even maybe let me know what you'd like to learn more about on the podcast, what kind of episodes you'd like to hear about, and I'll see you on the next episode. I. Get better.