25: Recruiting Doctors in Rural Towns

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And so excited to be with you today. You know, I want to talk about a presentation I recently gave at the Adso. Just a few weeks ago, they asked me to speak about recruiting associates primarily to rural towns. And honestly, as I focused in on that, I realized recruiting associates, wherever it is, is difficult. And how you want to do it for rural towns, which may be some of the most difficult to get reached to, is the same principles you want to use no matter where you're recruiting to. So one of the first things that I hit on was mindset. I think if we can get our mindset changed, there's so many things that we solve. When complexities hit me, when problems hit me, I always think, okay, where is my mindset off? Where a new set of perspective or knowledge will get me to the next level. And I think when it comes to doctor recruiting, the number one thing we have to look at is who is our customer. Now, when we first start as a single doctor practice, we could easily argue that our number one customer is our patients. We have to take care of our patients. We have to understand what their constraints are, what their complaints are, what issues and blocks will keep them from accepting treatment. We have to have empathy and know how to validate them. We have to know how to reach them. Where are they at and which mediums are best for marketing? What does our on site experience need to be for those patients in order to retain them as patients? But something really subtle happens and it's very dramatic. The day we decide to hire an associate. The day we hire an associate, the customer becomes the associate. Now, there's no other industry like this where we hire the customer, but that's exactly what happens when we hire a clinician. They actually move to becoming our primary customer and the patient actually becomes the customer of our customer. So I'm not saying that you abandon all of your marketing for patients because you still want to be able to support your primary customer. And one of the things that your primary customer, the clinician, wants is patience. But I do think that there is a mindset shift that has to happen in order to think about the doctor as the customer. Frankly, most people are just really frustrated with their associates or the prospect of recruiting associates. I mean, just think through some of the things. An associate might want compensation, you know, I want to make over $200,000. Now, depending on your area, that might be closer to 150,000 or that might be 250,000. But there's some dollar amount that they have targeted in their mind, whether they're capable or deserve it or not. The reality is, as your customer, it's what they want. They want their percentage of, of collections or production to be above that 25%. They want a base salary in case there's slow months. They want help paying off student lo. They may want time off or vacation days, various bonuses. They may want to be paid on production, not collections. And ultimately they want a high income to effort ratio. They want a support platform. They want trained assistants and trained office manager, a marketing platform that's going to bring in huge patient flow. They want payroll perfection. Man, you mess up the payroll, you know, that really kills trust. They want billing, speed and accuracy, especially if they're getting paid on collections. They want to make sure they have compliance, Compliance protection is all the consents and everything associated with osha, hipaa and any other regulatory body getting taken care of. They want benefits, they want, they want partnership opportunities and they want to be mentored. They want the train and show me how mentality to support them. But then they also want complete autonomy to be able to do the things the way that they want to. Ultimately, they want CE credits, they want case studies, and they want study group. Now, honestly, as dentists go out there to do the recruiting, oftentimes as an owner, you just kind of throw your hands up and say these dang millennials or whatever classification you want to use, you know, it's just unreasonable requests that they have. And the reality, all of us feel that when it comes to our customers, we, we feel that they demand a lot from us. And the reality is we've got to figure out to the best of our ability to give them as many things as we can. So here's my first suggestion. Right now you have a team and you have certain things that if I was just going to go start a dental practice by myself, not Knowing anything, you've already overcome some of those obstacles that I would initially have or feel being right out of school or even having done it myself, but not successfully. So one of the things we have to do is look internally and say, wait, if I'm only a single location and I'm hiring on an associate, I've got a practice manager that's trained, I've got current patient flow, I've got some kind of marketing program I'm doing, I have a platform. If I'm multiple locations, you know, I've got billing and credentialing, I've got compliance in hr, I've got BI metrics, I've got marketing strategy, I've got operational leadership, and I've got clinical leadership. All of these things need to be packaged when I'm out recruiting to doctors. Think about the amount of money and time you've spent on getting your website for patients or getting brochures made or whatever Facebook ads, whatever marketing you might be using, and then think about what you have for recruiting doctors. That same level of marketing effort needs to be put into how do I recruit doctors? And in any marketing brochure, it always forces us to kind of step back and ask ourselves, wait, what do we really offer patients? Okay, what do we really offer doctors? And a good graphic designer can make some of those things that are a little bit intangible look more tangible. Through nice graphic design, we can start looking like a DSO platform. And listen, we're not going to throw out everything we're doing to recruit patients. We want to take that information and put that in part of our DSO platform for recruiting dentists. We want to show them, look, I do have this brand out there. I do spend on these marketing mediums in order to bring in patients. I've already have that happening for you. So anything you're doing to help, again, bring in the customer of your customer is going to go into this package that you're creating with your graphic design team for recruiting dentists. It's a value offering that you have. Now, when you dig deep into this, really look at your patient experience. And I would show that in my recruiting, I would show how we have a unique patient experience from other competitors and what we're doing there. Because even though we're talking about the patient experience, what the doctor is learning is what is our culture towards customers. And I think he or she is interpreting that as, okay, if you do this much to take care of your patients, then that's also what you're going to do to Take care of me. If you're investing in some of the best equipment, digital, if you're investing in some of the best team members, all of those things you want to get into your recruiting brochures in some form or fashion, I would highly suggest bringing on someone who has some marketing experience and say to them, I need help being able to bring in more customers. And the customer I'm talking about is dentists. And I need some brochures, maybe a website landing page, something that really shows the value we're bringing. And they can help talk that through with you and help you to organize. Really what do you have to offer your clinical customer? Now, some people are really concerned because the location or town that their practice is in or that they're trying to recruit to just really, you know, it's not a large town, it's not a sexy town, whatever it might be. And so they're concerned about how's the best way to recruit someone to that town. I have two thoughts around this. Number one, go to TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor believes every town is cool, right? You can type in your town, look for the activities that are around there. What's number one? Number two, take that information and make a nice little brochure about that town. Or a little excerpt in your brochure in recruiting doctors on why that location is a great place for them individually, family, and what kind of patient type that they're going to be able to experience there. Number two, I would say that if you're recruiting to a hard to reach place, a rural town, etc. An underserved area, you've got to be telling a bigger story. How is this helping them to be able to pay off their student loans quickly? How is this helping them to work towards their partnership program quickly? What is it that they're investing in that that they're gonna get a return in? Some doctors don't wanna be in a practice that has multiple doctors. So maybe the hook is finding a doctor who really wants to be on their own, have that autonomy, and feels like they wanna handle all that patient flow and really own a town, become the doctor for that town. So you're looking for a specific personality type, but you're also telling a bigger story around the benefits that those practices really do have. The other suggestion I would put out there is a mentoring program. Now, some of you don't have your own DSO University, and I understand that that's a huge investment to be able to put that together, but here's what I would Suggest there's CE credits that you really enjoy or that you think would be really helpful to your associates as they came on. I would organize those into your own virtual university. So even though they might be going off site or they might be taking those through different providers, the reality is you could package those with a brand and call that your university. Having taken the time to organize those, find what's going to be best to help that clinician really go to the next level, align with you culturally, treat those patients better. I think you deserve the right to be able to put that in a brochure and say here in the first six months, we're going to have you do this next six months, next six months, etc. If you're doing town halls, if you're doing other mentoring with clinical directors or regional clinical directors, all of that you want to load in to your brochures and into your marketing materials to share with the doctors. I think another thing that clinicians want to see is that there's complete transparency. Any place that you might be perceived as, you know, hiding the ball, so to speak, or being a little bit trickery or deceptive, man, I would eliminate that from your culture or from your communication with them. As much transparency as you can provide the doctors on how things work, how compensation works, the contract. We have a contract that's fairly robust. I think there's a lot of dsos out there that figured out how to get an employee contract down to one page, which is awesome. Ours isn't. But what we've done is we've gone through with marketing and we've color coded and put icons throughout the contract to make it very consumable. The last thing we want is to start the relationship off with the clinician thinking that we're trying to hide something. We want complete transparency so anywhere we can make things more consumable and more clear, take those steps, it's worth it. It is effort. It's hard on legal to have marketing go through and color code things. It's a lot of work to maybe reorganize things into specific groups that are more meaningful to the clinician. Compensation all being in one section or as an amendment, anything that there might be around non competes having that really called out so that those discussions are up front. Listen, we're not trying to trick anyone into working with us or have foot fouls. We want to start a relationship off right. I have a saying that that which begins well ends well. So I think anywhere you can increase the transparency, do it now. Last thing I'd say is associates do have life stages. All clinicians do. As humans, we go through different stages in our career. So you know, we've identified five stages that we notice clinicians go through and we need to have a solution for every stage. So stage one is the student dreamer. Stage two is the associate with debt. Stage three is the proficient clinician. Stage four we call the entrepreneurial newbie. And stage five is the lifestyle dentist. So maybe I'll do another podcast just on those different stages. But for now I just say be cognizant that as a dentist pays off student debt. As they get more proficient, there's different expectations that they're going to have on that income to effort ratio and you need to be prepared to meet them where they are. I hope this is really helpful as you look to bring on associates. If you have any other questions, feel free to join us on our private Facebook group. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook @DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any DSO, go to our website at dsosecrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.