The Art of Goal Re-Setting

We're off track for the quarter, but you have to be able to capture the energy that would come with setting some micro goals. You know, maybe it's not revenue. Maybe you're talking about, hey, why don't we focus on net momentum or why don't we focus on our conversion rate or why don't we focus on fill in the blanks? Right? So it's like we're going to pick a number. It's going to be a smaller, more focused, more specific KPI that we're focused on, and we're going to set a smaller reward or bonus with it.

Hello and welcome to the Remarkable CEO Podcast, a show dedicated to chiropractors who want to transform their job into a business so that they can have a remarkable practice as part of a remarkable life, not instead of one. With your hosts, Dr. Pete Camiolo and Dr. Steven Fransen.

Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable CEO Podcast, Chiropractic's number one business podcast. I'm Dr. Pete Cameolo.

And I'm Dr. Steven Fransen.

And we are thrilled to be here in the studio. It is a morning session. We are here on a Friday morning in the midst of our quarterly. We're fired up because we had a phenomenal day yesterday. Great week. This week, coming off of an immersion, we are just flying high. Doc Steve. We've got a lot going on, lots of great energy and man, we had so many things we could have chosen as far as episodes for our recording today. I'm thrilled with the topic we're choosing because coming out of our board meeting subject matter, which is one of the things we train on in our CEO masterminds and the goals, CEO goals report and goals resetting. That whole discussion we had, especially at the fourth quarter, we definitely had some challenging and but really necessary conversations with so many of our CEOs. And so I'm excited to get into our. Our subject matter here today. We know we talk about Dr. Stephen goal setting. Today we get to talk about what happens when you need to reset those goals. We're gonna have a. A really great conversation today in regards to that very important but very sensitive subject matter.

Yeah, Dr. Pete going a hundred miles an hour as usual. We got two speeds, man. We are going 100 miles an hour or we are just sleeping.

So I'm psyched to be in the studio today. Lots of energy, lots going on, lots to talk about. I honestly, I was already go. I was already flying high. I never even need a plane to get home from these immersions. It was just so awesome that the, our remarkable attraction immersion, our marketing immersion in Denver. What a home run. We had about 600 people in our tribe just bouncing around the Gaylord. And uh, man, we're just, we, we, we did sort of interfacing the, with the 4, 500 moms that were there for mom con which was just awesome. God is good, man. They didn't know what hit them, right? So that was just awesome. But then I came home knowing that my boy, my son Sam was coming home this week for his fall break. And that's just a super special thing, period. But we've been blessed with just great surf. This is the time of the year when we get great waves in New England, right? So as much as we just feel for all of the people that just suffer from those storms down south, the silver lining for us is as they come up the coast, they create great surf. So we wait patiently all year long for hurricane season and it's just great waves, great surf. So my son Sam, who's at liberty, as most people probably heard me say before, down in Virginia, he and three of his roommates drove all night. So 12 hours, they drove up just to be here for sunrise to meet the incoming swell. As the waves arrived, so did the boys. So they pulled into my driveway at 4:50 in the morning and you know, dad was ready with a coffee in hand with my wetsuit already at my waist, I was just ready to rock because the surf was awesome. So these guys didn't even get any sleep and they looked at me like, what should we do? Should we, should we lay down, take a nap, whatever? I'm like, no way. Guys, let's go. Sun, sun's up at 6:20, we were in the water at 6:15, got to watch the sunrise and we were blessed with just like the, the best surf of the year. So just what a great way to start the day and just have. There's nothing like seeing my 20 year old son who's now a grown man with his buddies just out in the water surfing and just yucking it up. And for them to arrive with that perfect swell was just a triple blessing. So man, I'm on cloud nine. They're still here. My house is full of boys now. There's six of them here now and man, I just couldn't be happier.

Man, I love it. I love that story and I love, you know, how, how valuable it is and important it is for us to have those places that we can go to that really refresh us and fill us and I know for you, it's your board meetings are, are very important to you and to your family, so.

Oh, name that segue. That was beautiful right there. I love that.

And I know that, you know, for, for many of our, our listeners too, I know this, that some of these storms have been challenging. So our hearts and our prayers go out to you guys. We've been, you know, praying for the parts of our country that have been, you know, really hit and really hit hard by these storms. So just for, for all of you who have been in those harm's way, so to speak terms of the path of the storm, our thoughts and prayers are with you guys. And you know, Dr. Stephen, it's, it's been an awesome year. 2024, which is where we're coming at you guys right here at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Like, like you said, you know, when we have these meetings, goals is a big deal. Right? It's one of the most important things as a CEO, right? You're, you're the visionary, the vision casting. So your first objective is to cast vision. So we quantify our vision and we capture it and we, in a measurable. And that's what a goal is. Right. So the goal is basically says, hey, this is what success looks like. Okay. And the way we, the way we define success is we capture it in the form of a goal and then we organize our goals in specific domains of your business. So you're not just kind of haphazardly putting goals out there or just generally setting goals? No, no, we're very specifically, intentionally, and even the keyword here for today I think is going to be intelligently setting goals.

That's right.

So we intelligently set them intentionally and intelligently. And then there are moments in time where we have to reset them. So I'll give an example of some conversations that have happened over this last few weeks is when we started 2024, just like we started every year, Dr. Steven, we set out with what we call your base case goals for the year. So you set out a target of where we want to be at the end of the year. Let's just use top line revenue as the goal. And let's say in the previous two years you've experienced maybe an 8% increase year over year of top line revenue growth. That number if like in 2022-2023, the growth was 8%, 2023 into 2024. If you follow the base case model, it would be a 8% growth in 2024 over what we did in 2023. Hopefully you're tracking with me. I'm trying to keep it simple. That is what you did in, let's say, January. So here we are now in October and September, October transition into fourth quarter. And the question we asked in our meetings was, with you as CEOs, is where are you at right now in relationship to the goal you set at the beginning of the year? Are you on track or are you off track to hit your base case goal? And I got a mixed response from people.

Some people.

There's three responses. We're on track. That's option one, which is awesome that you are on track. There is. We are ahead of target. So, so we are actually, we're trending above the base case. So we are actually on Track to hit 10%, potentially year over year growth. 11%, 12%, 18%, whatever it might be.

Best case scenario.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's the moving towards the best case because you're above base. Or, or, hey, we're slightly behind. We had a, we had a really good first quarter. We had a mediocre second quarter, was okay. But our third quarter, we took a big dip. So we find ourselves a bit challenged here because we're actually off track. We're behind target. So what do we do? So, Dr. Steve, we're gonna spend some time talking to our awesome CEOs, who get to tune in and listen to us every week. By the way, thanks for tuning in.

Yeah, we love to hear that.

Yep. Yeah. So we appreciate you and we appreciate the great feedback we get on this podcast. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. We're really glad you're here and stick around. I think you're going to gain a lot from this. But Dr. Stephen, let's, let's, let's, let's dig in because it's such an important subject.

Right on. So I just want to reference. Because you laid out so much gold there, Dr. Pete, I just want to make sure I bring to the surface the awareness that we consider the historical library of the podcast a great reference place for you guys. So, you know, you heard Dr. Pete talk about goal setting and goal getting. Well, we've got multiple episodes that we've done on how do you set your goals? Like he talked about base case scenario, best case scenario, worst case scenario. We have multiple episodes on how to calculate base case scenario and use that to determine your goals. We, we talked about, you know, this, bonus systems associated with setting goals. Right. So, and that's what we're going to get in today. It's like, well, what happens if you're off track? Do you set or reset goals? What about bonusing? Does that go out the window? So I want to make sure that you guys listen to the other episodes. Like if you want to figure out, you know, how do I set bonuses in the first place? Like, let me set base case scenario. All you got to do is go into the search functionality in, on. On our website, on the podcast page, just put in goal setting or just put in bonus system right in the search function and it's going to bring that up for you. Dr. Pete, I think it's episode 195 and 196 that we get into our TRP, the remarkable bonus system, which is a question we get all the time we. Right, so go to episode 195196. There's two episodes there back to back on how to set goals and how to set up your bonus system relative to your goals. Okay, so that's your homework assignment. We have a PDF that's a synopsis of the goal setting system that we're going to give away on this show also. Right. So to make it easy for you guys to get that resource, there'll be a link somewhere here in the show notes for you to be able to download that. So make sure you're downloading this stuff. So I want to make sure that everybody just has that elevated awareness that, oh, wow, this, this is, this, this podcast is an academic experience and there's a great reference library of five years worth of podcasts there for you. So if we're ever talking about something like a great best practice, if you listen to our podcast, if we say something that you want to go deeper on, write that phrase or terminology down and put that into the search function, because then you can go deeper on the very specific thing that you're looking for. So. And P.S. guys, by the way, we also take requests. So if we say something, we start talking about something you'd like us to go deeper on. Just send us a message, okay? So you can hit us up on Instagram. I hope you guys are following us on Instagram. Go to the Remarkable Practice on Instagram at the Remarkable Practice, right? So you can follow Dr. Pete there, you can follow me. We all have separate and distinct pages, but follow the Remarkable Practice on Instagram. You can send us a DM there, you can follow us on our YouTube channel, and then you can put messages in there. Right? So I don't care if you text me, send us a Fax a pigeon. Doesn't matter. Make a request and we'll go deeper on it. Right? So, Dr. Pete, I. I know that my mouth is writing checked our asses are gonna have to catch, right? But we're taking requests, guys. We're like the dj. You're on the dance floor. What do you guys want us to spin? So, hey, doc, Steven Fransen here. If you're like me, you know that we're in the business of saving lives. And when business is good, everybody wins. That's the good news. But here's the bad news. Most chiropractors don't own a business at all. They own a job. It's a job they love, but it's a job. And far too often it feels like that job owns them. Is this true for you? Do you own a business or a job? Have you built and do you run your practice on brute force? Does it rely fully on your time, your effort? A pound of your flesh? Are you responsible for for all growth, for all new patient generation? How about new patient conversions? Is it all up to you? How about patient care and delivery? Are you a sole practitioner, an owner operator who owns the practice but is also the only one that is head down and bum up taking care of all the patients? Is revenue generation or collections all up to you? Let me ask you the most telling question, Doc. What would happen if you took 90 days off? What breaks in my experience, most on purpose chiropractors do not lay awake at night worrying about their practice. They worry about their business. Let's slay that dragon. The remarkable CEO program has helped hundreds of chiropractors just like you turn the job that they love into the business that they've always wanted. Are you ready to run and build your practice on leverage instead of brute force? Do you want to create the scalability and durability that will allow you to make a bigger impact and a bigger income? What would it mean to grow your practice, increase your productivity and your profitability? Do you want to get your time freedom back? Are you ready to turn your pirate ship into a battleship? This sounds like you. Then the remarkable CEO program is for you. Just last year, 53 of our remarkable clients received the Seven Figure Club Award. Meaning they hit the million dollar mark for the the first time or their next million dollar level, be it 2 million, 3 million, 10 million, up to 36 million and growing now, Doc, is it crazy to imagine that your practice could be next? Click the link below and learn how to apply for the next cohort of the Remarkable CEO program. We look forward to working closely with you and creating the business that supports your remarkable life, not competes with it. All right, let me address what you're talking about. So we talk about goal getting, right? So that's setting goals and going to hit the goals, right? So is this goal setting, goal getting? What happens when you're off track? Do you reset the goals? Right? So, yes, this is goal resetting. Okay? So why would you reset it? Okay, so. And I don't want you to be haphazard about this. What you have to recognize is go all the way back to why do we set goals? Right? So what is the purpose of goals? What is the objective of setting goals? And what is the purpose of setting bonuses? So ultimately, guys, at the end of the day, it's about energizing you and your team, okay? So the purpose of a goal is to energize your team, okay? So we do this by quantifying the vision story, right? So if we say, hey, this is where we're gonna go. This is what success looks like. That's a picture, a movie in their mind so that they can see the visual of it. But then we want to quantify it, and we want to quantify it to make it concrete and clear. We know that whether we're on track or off track, which are those, that's called milestoning, right? So as we are manifesting our vision, we want to know, are we on track or off track? So the human brain loves feedback, right? So this is called the Hawthorne Effect. Everybody in your team wants to know, where we going and how are we doing? And the how we doing is answered by where are we relative to our goals, right? So make sure you're leveraging the Hawthorne Effect. You'll actually see. Research shows us that you can actually get 65% better return if you. Are you leveraging the Hawthorne effect? And it's also called the measurement effect, right? So making sure that you know, you recognize if you've surrounded yourself with a players. A players require goals. Not tolerate them, not like them. Not want them. Require. That's a strong word. Okay, so think about you. You're an A player. Don't you require goals? Don't you? It's so. So it doesn't feel like, oh, man, I'm just grinding and I'm just, like, keeping my legs going. And I was just like, no, it's. It's. You're not blindly just, you know, just putting effort into things, right? All of that is implied, right? But we want feedback. We Want to know what is. You know, I want to ring the bell. Where's the bell? Right? So it's like, let me be super clear on what my target is. So, Dr. Pete, what we want to first recognize is that goal setting is about energizing your team. You want to have those milestones in place so it remains objective. People are super clear on exactly what we're trying to achieve. And if we go back to equals MC squared energy equals money times crucial communications. One of the five crucial communications is goal setting. So it's one of the ways that we energize the business. Right? So listen to the other multiplier. Money times crucial communications. Money is the other one, which is why we have bonus systems in place. Dr. Pete. It's exactly the same thing. We're energizing the team. And, and I know, you know what? I know your business is always a reflection of your energy, your energy and your team's energy, right? Energy's up, business is up, energy's flat. The business is flat, energy is down, the business is down. So as CEOs, chief energy officers, we know our role in the, in the village is to make sure that we have our hands on the throttle when it comes to the energy of the team. And one way we can do that is through bonusing as it pertains to the. The goals that we have in place and goal setting.

You know, a few, a few concepts really come to my mind is as I'm listening to you and just as a reminder, friendly reminder to, to all of us, which is, you know, the, the big thing, the big difference between owner, operator and CEO when it comes to goal setting and goal getting and all this is that you actually include and recruit your team into the process of goal setting and goal goal getting. Right? There's a. The owner, operator might tell the team, this is the goal. This is what we're. So you have a vision, this is our goal, and then basically tells them that's the goal. And then let's go to work and let's hit the goal. And then basically it lives with the owner. Right? The owner would take ownership of the goal. Like this was the goal. The team didn't really take ownership of the goal. So this is a process of. It's part of our delegation methodology as well, where we entrust people with areas of leadership and accountability within the departments and the functions of the organization. And within the context of the goals, you actually have to break it down into smaller parts because we talked about. Dr. Stephen, to quantifying the vision story, you have to be able to quantify it to determine if we're on or off track. What I found, Dr. Stephen, is when we're more general in our goal setting, it's harder to determine if we're on or off track and course correct. But the more granular we are with our goals, the more specific we are, the more specific function goals we have, the more we can course correct and influence the outcomes. In other words, if you're off track and you're like, our new patients are down, that's a broad scope. All right? Our new patients are down 15% from where they need to be for the quarter. We're not hitting our revenue or netmo goals. And it's all due to the fact that our new patients are down. Okay, timeout, time out. That's a very general swoop at your marketing. The question, a better question would be specifically, where is the new patient function not functioning optimally? Let's look at it more closely. And that's when you can start to have influence here. Because, Dr. Steven, if you find yourself off track and not hitting your goals and needing to reset, be more specific because two of your three tributaries might actually be functioning optimally or near optimally. You might have one tributary that is completely broken, dysfunctional. You might have a team, a player problem. You might have a system problem. It could be a leadership problem. It could be a team, a training problem. It could be accountability problem, it could be a skill problem. I mean, we'd have to troubleshoot it to determine what is the actual problem. Why are we not functioning optimally? That's how we address it. So this is a very. But if you don't have a team and you don't have equipped and empowered a team that's taking ownership and they're invited into the goal setting process and then the. And then they're being held accountable for that regular check in this Hawthorne effect. I'm regularly checking in, giving you good feedback in regards to the goal. You know, when you're. It's going to be what's being measured, you know, why it's being measured, how it's being measured, when we're going to be meeting about it to follow up.

About what's being measured, how you can influence the outcome.

Yeah, how you can influence all of those things go into this effect. That's what's going to create the momentum, or what I'm saying is reset the momentum, like get the momentum going back again. Because it felt like it was screeching to a Halt. Or we're just dragging this, these KPIs, or we're dragging this department along. You know, we're limping with our retention. We're having to rely so much on our attraction conversion because our retention is just not working or whatever, right? That's the power that Dr. Stephen this process have. It goes to the. We don't get what we want, we get what we tolerate, right? We don't get what we want, we get what we measure. And this goes back to the level of measurement that you have, the level of tolerance that you tolerate. That's all going to translate back into the energy that we're going to have in our team. Because this is meant to energize the team and energize the business. And we know as your energy goes, so goes your business.

All right, so let's, we, we just laid a nice foundation, right? So for this conversation around. Okay, so I understand now, what if you're off track, what should you do?

Right?

So, you know, at the end of the day, what I want to make sure that we recognize is that, you know, happens, right? So there'll be the, the, you, you can. January be like, this is where we're going, right? So, hey, we grew 20% last year. We ended up at, at a million bucks. So this year our base case scenario is to also grow 20%. So our goal by the end of the year is to be at 1.2 million, right? So, so, and these numbers aren't going to be perfect, but I'm just going to use numbers so you guys can kind of follow in your mind. So if we're just talking and we're just using top line revenue, by the way, you can set goals and should set goals all over the place with all of your KPIs. But really, really, I like tying the bonus system to revenue and profit, right? So, so let's just talk revenue, right? So if you said, all right, by third quarter, then we want to be doing 100,000 bucks a month, right? So let's say for July, August, September, we want to be collecting $100,000 a month. And we've got. That's our base case scenario. And we've got a bonus system set in place. Bonus system. The way we teach it is you should be 5% of your top line revenue goal. So what's 5% of 1.2 million? What's that if it's about 60 grand, 60k, something like that. So let's say we've got 54k, so 9,000 per quarter set aside, what have you, right? So now we've got a budget for our bonus system to be distributed across eligible team members. So now, now, now we've got a plan. We're going into the end of the year, into the quarter with a plan, right? So now if we say, all right, so man, we just had a wonky second quarter, so we're below where we need to be and going into third quarter and in the midst of third quarter, man, you know what, July, August, September, July was kind of wonky again. And now we know we're off track and we're probably not going to hit our goals. So if you're like in week three of a 13 week quarter coming out of the summer and everybody in the team kind of having that look around the table like, oh man, we're not going to hit goal. We are off hoping against hope and probably being demoralized by the fact that every week we show up and we're talking about, you know, oh, we're, you know, the goal was to get to 100k in this month and we're not going to get there and everybody knows it. And we would have to have our, you know, best month ever by 2.3 times, you know, to actually, like, everybody knows that. We can do the finger math, right? So now what do you do? You know, you're three weeks into a 13 week quarter. Do you just surrender the energy that comes with goal setting? Do you surrender the energy or the energizing effect that comes with bonuses, right? So as you, you're finishing July going into August, that may be the time to be able to say, listen, we're guys, we are off track and we're going to need to come up with a plan to how to crush it for the next nine weeks. Now you're mid August and you're just like, hey man, you know what, we are still way off track, right? So we're just not going to recover. So now we're, you know, we're recognizing there's a constraint in the business. We understand what the root cause of the constraint is, what have you. We're a seven in these two, three categories and the business is not going to be able to overcome that. So now we're like, we got the whole second half of third quarter and we're losing the energy that would come with goal setting and bonusing. I think you guys understand what I'm saying. We've all been there, right? So the question is like, so what do you do? Do you abandon that and you'd be like, well, guess it's not going to happen this quarter, right? So I'm going to suggest that you've got to capture the balance of that quarter and be able to say, all right, so brutal facts, we're off track. What can we do? What can we set for goals in this third month of the quarter where we say, you know what, we're off track, but let's set some micro goals. Let's set, you know, a goal for the month of September, right? So let's finish the quarter strong. I know we're supposed to be at 100k, right? So we're still in revenue here. You can do this for any KPI. You could say, listen, if we get to 80K, we're going to have this bonus. If we get to 90k, it would be this bonus. Or if we get to, you know, 100K, we're going to get this bonus, what have you. We're off track for the quarter, but you have to be able to capture the energy that would come with setting some micro goals. You know, maybe it's not revenue. Maybe you're talking about, hey, why don't we focus on net momentum or why don't we focus on our conversion rate or why don't we focus on fill in the blanks, right? So it's like we're going to pick a number, it's going to be a smaller, more focused, more specific KPI that we're focused on and we're going to set a smaller reward or bonus with it. So depending on how far off track you are, maybe it's one half of what you're going to bonus, or it was going to be one third of what you're going to bonus, right? So that you can have some integrity around the fact that we're not going to hit goal and it's gonna. And the business is gonna feel the pain, the owner's gonna feel the pain. It's not fair that we're the only ones that feel the pain. The team has to feel some pain too. So don't just replace the bonus, just set a new bonus that's a smaller level and just put words to it. Tell them, don't expect them to figure it out. Tell them, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. This is how we're doing it. Dr. Pete, we wanna harness goal setting and bonusing, even if that means goal resetting and just defining a new bonus.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Remarkable CEO Podcast. Remember, what the world needs now is chiropractic. And what chiropractic needs now is more successful chiropractors. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, share with a friend and leave us a review. And if you'd like to get connect with us personally, direct message us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram. Now go and be remarkable.