185: The Secret to Scaling: The Power of Organizing Your Ideas

And maybe the number one thing that's so simple that I notice in my one on one, very few people have and that is in order to scale, you have to have been able to organize and prioritize your ideas. Hi, I'm Emmett Scott and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problem and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DEO Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott and today I want to talk about scaling your business. So many of my one on one coaching that I'm doing here in deo, we're talking about how do we scale, how do we get to the next level? And so the question I have for you is what do you think is the key to scaling and growing your dental group? Now I think most people would answer, well, I've got to have a lot of capital. Others might say I just, I need more team members. Maybe some would say I need associates who have certain clinical capabilities. Maybe it's like I need that killer marketing strategy that would allow me to bring in tons of patients. I don't know. Different answers like that though I think are missing the deeper issue. And maybe the number one thing that's so simple that I notice in my one on one, very few people have and that is in order to scale, you have to have been able to organize and prioritize your ideas. If I ask you right now, where are all, what are all the things, what are all the things that you are working on within your business? I know you could rattle off in the next five to ten minutes a million things that you're trying to solve. Again, whether it's on the recruiting side, the marketing strategy, that front desk person that needs training, that back office person, that talented terrorists that you're trying to figure out to do with all of those different pieces ars that aren't getting collected. Well, your whole RC process, what to do there? Do I need a fractional cfo? Why aren't I getting my financials in a timely, accurate manner? Do I have the right operations person? Should I add a regional? Should I centralize call centers? Should I centralize billing? Should I offshore ensure? Do any of these things, like should I change my practice management software do I need to increase my compliance? A million things that we can think of. And most of these things, if I said, where are they written down? The answer is they're not. They're simply in our head. We're communicating them to a team member. Maybe some of us are using something like EOS, where we're saying, well, we're having our level team 10 meetings and we're throwing them in there as, as rocks, etc. But I would say even those using EOS would say, something's off, something's not giving us the traction, the momentum that we're looking for. And what I have found in this very simple process is that the reason you're not scaling is because your brain is cluttered and unclear. And for me personally, I have so many ideas that when my brain is cluttered and unclear, my team is cluttered and unclear. And oftentimes the way they express this is they are 100% overwhelmed by everything that's going on. And I'm using terminology like, hey, we've been talking about this a long time. Why aren't we making progress on it? I've said this before, why aren't we moving this forward? I'm using shortcut language to drive by delegation of different tasks. And I've developed out a team that is frankly, maybe scared to even take any action because I'm going to change anyway and ask about something else. And then by creating that chaos within my company, by having that ADD lack of organization, my team's able to kind of work on whatever they want to work on, knowing that most of my ideas are going to change every Tuesday anyway. So some of you have heard me talk about the importance of documenting out and having a central place for all your projects and ideas. And I want to go deeper on that because I think all things for scaling start with a foundation of a good prioritization worksheet. And I'm going to start with just using a Google sheet. And we have one at DEO that we can share with you, but just something simple that you have as a place to dump all of your ideas and they can be then organized and prioritized before being executed on. And this is what I call the IDO process. All ideas documented, organized, prioritized, and then you execute on them. Now, I was talking to one of our new project managers and he even said, really, you can't have expectations. So if we think about that e execution, but expectations, you can't even have expectations around your idea until they're documented, organized, and prioritized. I love that. So what would a spreadsheet look like? Well, all of you have seen a spreadsheet, I hope, and you know what the first column looks like. And in that first column you, you would just write down all the name of projects and ideas that you have it on. I rattled off a bunch of them. They could be marketing, they could be recruiting, they could be upgrading a team member, changing out a team member, training on something, getting a new software, looking at certain vendors for marketing, or rcm, looking to insource or outsource all of those things and ideas that you have from whatever last conference, something that you saw, you would put that down in that first column. And I call that first column name of project. What is the name of the project or idea that I have? The second column I would call my expectation, just description. See, my name like upgrade my website usually isn't enough to give real scope of the project, which is 95% of the problem is the team doesn't know what you mean when you're just rattling off these trailers. They haven't seen the whole movie. So in that column B, I would start putting down what's in scope, what's out of scope, what is the expectation, what's not the expectation. When I say upgrade the website, am I saying change our address to or change this picture or add this one, or am I saying I want a total revamp, go hire a vendor, let's do a whole new framing out of the website, Right? Those kind of things have to get clear. When I say we need to improve our Ars, what do I mean by that? That's in column B, column C, who's leading this project? By the way, if I see that who's leading this project as I go through my list is the same Susie, then I also can have a little self awareness that maybe Susie has other things. Maybe she's also an office manager, regional, whatever else, if she's full time. Still, what's realistic on the number of projects that one person can take on? So who is my project lead for this quick interruption to your podcast?

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Now back to the episode. The next column I'd have. Who the stakeholders are, who needs to be communicated with on this project? Do I need to be updated? Who else are There other executives or team members that need to be updated. Next column. Who's the specialists? Who is this project lead gonna lean on or need to lead on? Is it an office manager? Is it someone who does billing? Is it a marketing vendor? Who are they gonna need to lean on to do this project? The next column I'd have, what's the return on investment like? Why are we doing this? Is this to increase revenue, decrease expenses? And I'm going to put this column in there because I'm going to have a list of a lot of things that we're working on. Whether you're one practice or your 10 practices or a hundred practices, you're going to want to say, okay, with this whole list of things. What's number one, what's number two? And columns like this start to help me understand, okay, these are the ones that can increase revenue. Maybe I even want to put in there. How much revenue increase do I think I'm actually going to get? Is it 10,000, 100,000? And maybe I want to put in there. What's the time frame will this take? Three months, six years? Those kind of things can determine. Like, this idea sounds really cool. It's going to take six years to make 10,000 more. It's going to move really low on my list. Next column, I'll start working on, like, the status. Now. I'm getting a little bit of, okay, I've prioritized these things. Now the status starts to give me the feeling of, like, execution. Is this in progress? Is it stuck? Is it on hold? Is it, you know, ready for final approval, ready to communicate and launch out all these things that we have listed in our notes on our spreadsheet for anyone in deo, you can use these. Then the next column I'm going to have, what's our percent complete. How far along are we? So now I'm in the execution. We're running the projects. I don't want to just see in progress. It's in progress, it's in progress. One of the things I don't like about other systems is it says things like, I'm on track, I'm on track, I'm on track. And then it's like, I'm not on track anymore. A percent complete added to that can say, I'm on track. 10% completed, I'm on track. 25%, 35. Are we really making progress? I don't want to get to the end of a quarter or end of a month and be like, never mind, we're not going to Complete it in the time period, then I can get into more detail if I want, like, if I want to see on this project, what's the next action? What's the date of that next action? I could have it on the spreadsheet, linked to other documents, etc. As simple as it is to just have a spreadsheet and for some of you, like, that sounds like a lot of work to like write down all the things we have going on. Do you know what's a lot more work? Not making progress on projects, being overwhelmed, getting reminded in the shower and be like, okay, what am I supposed to do right now? I'm naked and I, you know, can't call anybody, definitely can't FaceTime anyone. That's a lot more work. So you got to kind of choose your hard. Like do you want the hard where you're having to remember all this in your head, you're frustrated with your team, your team's frustrated with you and no projects are moving forward? Or do you want the hard where you sit down and every week review a spreadsheet and say, where are we at on this? And your team's able now to say things like, hey Emmett, you had this really great idea. You, you know, sent me a text message, you said it was real, I put it on the sheet. Can you give me a more clarity on the expectation description of what you're looking for from this? And then after I do that, can you tell me where this is in our list of 30 ideas? Is this project now number one and we're going to push some of these others down and take Susie off of something else? Or is this just like, I just wanted it on there, we'll get to it in a year or so. Like where is it on the spectrum of those things? So the teams. Because listen, let's be honest, most of us as entrepreneurs and leaders, especially when we're stressed or we, we're really excited, we only speak in like present urgent tense. We share ideas as if the team is already behind. And so they tend to listen to us and then they drop everything else they're doing and start working on the new idea that we came up with, which again creates a lot of like 25% complete ideas. Think about if this was a manufacturing business and we ran it the way we do our dental groups, we'd have a lot of half built cars sitting around the warehouse. We would actually be able to measure the loss, the opportunity cost, the payroll, the material expense of our lack of organization. What's so deceiving in a dental group is that we're able to change ideas and start and stop things. But because we're so unorganized and because it's not a physical object, we're not able to say, wow, we've already put a hundred hours of payroll into this and now we're just going to move to the next idea and then we're going to put 100 hours in the move to the next idea and never really get the return on investment. Some of the reason you're feeling a squeeze of margin is because you have so many things going on, but you're not focused. So now your team is spending payroll on all these different ideas, but you're never really plucking the fruit of the tree. You're planting it, you're watering it, fertilizing, you're spending all of that money and then you're moving on before you really pluck the fruit of it, before you get the return on investment. So if you're ever going to scale your business, I don't care if you're in the chair or out of the chair at this point. I don't care if you want to be the Chief Dental Officer or if you want to be the CEO or the operator, whatever your title might be. And I don't care if right now you're the CEO or if you're the visionary, you're the implementer, etc. You need a document that helps to organize all of the projects, all the ideas and so forth into one place. And you need to review it regularly with the key team members who are responsible for those things. That alignment will drive so much momentum. So much of the frustration you're feeling right now with your team is a lack of clarity from them and you, and a lack of alignment that could easily be solved if you just had one document. You either find out that they're not the right team member or you find out that you've just underutilized them because you have them scattered into so many different areas. So hopefully this is helpful. It's so simple on one extent, because you literally open up a Google sheet and share it out with the right people and start filling it in. Now, for some of you who are very much visionaries, maybe you're in the in the chair often, etc. You know you're going to be the ones that's like texting it over to your operator and they're going to be putting this stuff in for you. So don't expect you have to type it all out though you might want to to just do your initial dump of all the ideas and get them out of your head. But expect them then to be updating this where you need to show up as you need to show up to that meeting. Look through this together every week. Say, are we on track? Are we off? What's the percent complete and what's the prioritization? You know, if they're working on number one and they're getting that crushed, don't be hitting them on. Why isn't number 10 moving along? Right? There's only so much you, I don't know how many project depends on the scope, depends on the resources you have. Could be only one, could be three that you could be taking on. But you have now you can start getting very realistic with your team on how many pieces you can move forward. Hopefully this is helpful. A simple tool that's really the foundation for you to scale your business. This will drive more resources than trying to get capital from someone or some investment, etc. Because now you'll be an efficient, focused, aligned business. All right, hopefully this is helpful. If you have any other questions, come over to our DEO Grow Secrets Facebook page. Or Even better, join DEO. Join us at our intensives, our WhatsApp community groups, where we're asking questions to each other and answering those all the time. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders. Leaders get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling.