30: SOP Hacks

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm so excited to be back with you all again. I have had the most eventful couple months here. I took off to Tonga on a humanitarian trip with my son. Two and a half weeks, built a home for a very grateful family. Awesome experience. Then I came back and went to deo's Shark Tank and was able to be one of the sharks on that. Great experience. Amazing presentations, great to be with dentists who are striving to scale and grow their businesses. Then I took off to Israel for two weeks. I know, tough life, awesome time with my. My wife and just amazing experience. It was definitely a bucket list item. And the coolest part is we opened up five practices during that time. I should say my team did because I wasn't here. So it's so great to have an amazing team that can help support at that level, which is really my topic for today, because when I was at the deo, so many people were asking about how do you set up standard operating procedures? How do you create scale with your employees? How do you make things more systemized so that every time a new employee comes in or you open a new practice, it's not reinventing the wheel. And so oftentimes at these dental conferences, people are asking about standard operating procedures, or SOPs, how do I build my SOP? So I want to talk about some of the SOP hacks that I have used in my background in coaching businesses and in helping entrepreneurs even outside of dental do this. So it works across industries and I think will be hugely helpful for you all. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that oftentimes I just start with mindset. And the mindset here for SOPs, yes, there's a mindset for SOPs is create a crappy SOP in this place. Probably more than any other, perfectionism creates paralysis. People want to create this perfect Checklist, this perfect document or video that's going to just make it so no one ever makes a mistake again. It's. It's not going to happen. The heaviest lifting you ever do on SOPs, and frankly in any documentation or any creation is going from blank sheet of paper to something on that paper. Man, when a team member brings me a piece of paper and it's already got a checklist or some other documentation already on it, how much easier is my life now to edit that, to improve it, to iterate on it? I'm looking at version 1 and I get to go to version 2. But, man, when you're at version 0 and then you're trying to create version 10 or the version 100 that's going to last forever, you'll just be in complete paralysis. So do not go into this with the mindset of we've got to create the perfect sop. Instead, go into it with the mindset of I just got to get something documented. I know some of you already are going, oh, now I can do it. Mindset number two, the biggest question I get is, okay, where should I start? How do I get everything documented, everything soped? As you can imagine, that creates paralysis too. You can't document everything. So what's the right order? Well, my attorney says I should start here. Well, my friend said the best place to start here, etc. The most important place for you to start is where you're feeling the most pain. Where are you feeling the most pressure? Noise, Frustration, Concern, fear? Is it around your billing processes? Is it around patient acquisition processes? Is it the scripting for the phone? Is it tray setup? Where is it in the operations, in the sales and marketing, in the accounting process, billing process, revenue cycle management? If you had to list out for me and say, emmett, if I had a magic wand and I could solve this problem today and never have to worry about it again, this would be huge in helping to reduce the anxiety that I have. Now, I understand that there's 10 or 20 of those, but which one would you start with? So don't worry that it's going to be weird that, yeah, we documented the scripting for this kind of phone call first, but we don't have this over here, even organized, it doesn't matter. This is your business and it's customized around you. As the CEO and as the owner, where's going to be most helpful for your business to have something documented? Where are you feeling that noise? Okay, those are mindset items. Now let me give you a couple tactical Ways to really create your SOPs. Number one, take your worst employees and before you fire them, think about using them to create SOPs. What do I mean? So let's say I have Jane or Joe who's just not doing a good job in their job. What I can do is start building the checklists and the processes and the flowcharts that to try to get Jane or Joe to do better. And as I do that, I might actually save them as an employee, you know, using the Astro principles that are in the other podcast. So using S for support by giving them the right support, because so much early on is just kind of on the job training or. Yeah, I've never really built out something for that position. I was just hoping you'd be smart and figure it out those kind of things by giving them real checklists and real processes. Then I change the game for them and they might actually succeed. So go ahead and build the checklists and the processes around some of those WORSA employees, especially if that's where you're feeling the pressure noise. Sometimes we'll say, oh man, I just, I got to get rid of them and get somebody new in. Once I get somebody new and then I've got to build out the SOP for that. I love to do it while I have the terrible employer, the one that I don't think is going to last with me. Let's go ahead and build the checklist for them because if they can succeed with this checklist, then this new great team member that I hire is going to be so much better because now I have a good checklist for them to use. So that's number one. Number two, use new hires to help build out your sop. So in that interview process where you are bringing somebody new in to fill a position, just be transparent and upfront with them and say, listen, I don't have good training materials for this position. Now, if you're lucky, you might have a really strong employee that's there in another practice or in the position you're scaling out. So let's take that scenario for kind of first here. So let's suppose you have a really strong employee, but you really need two. But you don't have strong training. And the only reason you have that really strong employee is just because you got lucky. Right. And they're a hard worker and they kind of figured it out and they're one of those unicorn team members that we end up all getting. But now you have to scale and you've tried to hire somebody in that Second practice or, you know, the person that's going to sit right next to them and it just hasn't worked out. And you realize, man, I need better SOPs. And honestly, most of the time, really talented employees early on aren't good trainers and mentors because what they want to say is, well, they just need to work hard and dig in and do what I did to figure this out. So, so here's what we did early on, and we still do this as we build out new departments or positions, is when I go to hire someone, I tell them, listen, I don't have good documentation process systems around this position. Your first responsibility is going to be to shadow this really great team member that we have and to document out how they do things, to ask them questions and to get feedback. Now, also set up with that really strong team member that this is going to happen and that this person is here to ask questions and to document stuff out. And we're going to spend the next 60 or 90 days just documenting out the position. So I'm not going to be able to hire an employee who says, well, I just need to be able to show up and do my job. And, you know, I just need you to tell me exactly what I'm supposed to do. They're not going to make it through that HR hiring process. It's going to be somebody who says, oh, yeah, sure, I'm happy to help build this out and get that organized. Now, you know, they're not going to be a professional SOP creator, but again, I'm not looking for perfection. In fact, just something crappy would be really helpful. So I'm going to do a lot in that conversation of, I just need kind of a willing heart here. If you'll help us try to build this out using Word, PowerPoint, flowcharting software, whatever you might have, that would be really helpful. When I say whatever you might have, whatever we're providing to them to use, then that would be really helpful. So now I've hired this team member who says, yep, I'm willing to build this out. And they're going to spend the first 30, 60, 90 days just creating checklists, figuring out how things work. They're going to take those checklists back to that strong employee and say, does this look right? And they'll say, oh, no, you need to add this in. And I also do this, and so forth. I will also tell you that oftentimes strong employees will say things like, there's no way you can document out everything that I do because you know, it's so customized. And having had a lot of experience around this, I can tell you that you can always document it out. And that last 10 or 5% that is really customized, you're not worried about anyway. Now, let's suppose that you don't have a really strong team member in that position. You're going to have the same conversation with the new hire and you're going to say, this is a new position, or we don't have somebody who's really strong in this position right now. But what I need your help with is to help us document out this process. Now, obviously, it's going to take time and energy from me or somebody on the team to help them and to coach them, but that investment is going to be well worth it because I'm going to have this SOP that's going to help me start scaling. And you can see why you can't do this across the entire company all at one time. You can't boil the ocean, so to speak. You got to take one position or one task or one system, one process and start documenting this out. Now, just as a side note, this may mean that you end up hiring somebody who really likes to take on new things, who likes the challenge of trying to document it all out. And once they do get it all documented out, they might actually be bored by doing the task that's much more repetitive. So let's say that you say to me, emmett, I hired the person, they helped me document it all out. It's okay, it's a good start. And I say, great, that's all you needed. Get it from zero to something. And he said, yeah, but then once they did that, they really got bored with the task and they quit. Well, that's okay, because now I've got some documentation and the next person coming in, right, is now starting on a little bit better foundation and can help me improve it so I can say to the new person I'm hiring, hey, I have some of this documentation. Here's how I'd like things to be done. I think there's some opportunities to improve it further. I'm looking for somebody to help me take it to the next level. Okay, so idea number one was to leverage your worst team members and to utilize their lack of capability as really the tool to build out the sop. Number two is use new hires to either document what your best team members are doing or to help you build out the SOPs. And really, you're leveraging off their ignorance. You're leveraging off Their lack of experience. And you would think that that works against you, but it actually works very much in your favor when building SOPs. The hardest part about building SOPs, if I take a talented person with a lot of experience, so much has become intuitive that it's almost like asking someone, so how do you breathe? And they say, I don't know, I just kind of suck in, blow out, you know. So when I take someone who's new and I say, okay, I want you to build this out, they're going to ask a lot more questions and they're going to notice nuances of oh, so you click on that. Oh yeah, you're right, I do click on that. Oh, you always add that in. Oh yeah, that's true. I do always add that in. So much in more talented or experienced people is become intuitive. It's actually hard for them to do SOPs. That's why entrepreneurs and business owners are some of the worst at building SOPs, because so much has become intuitive that it's really hard to sit down and actually document line by line what needs to happen. But when something's been documented, we can look at it and say, oh, it's missing this, this and this. It's interesting, but that's why I'm so big on just get it from zero to version one for me and then I can help build from there. Okay, idea number three, this is my favorite, but it takes some investment is hire a project manager. Now, Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach, uses three tiers of different team member types. Those who make it up, those who make it real, and those who make it reoccurring. And so we're obviously typically at the make it up level, where we're coming up with the ideas and what we want to do, etc. We have a lot of team members who are the reoccurring. They love to have the standardization of their day to day and doing that right. Oftentimes when we're trying to improve the reoccurring people, we need that middle tier tier, which is the make it real. And so I call them in the workforce, typically project managers, somebody who can translate the, the strategic plan, the goal that I'm trying to do, and make it consumable by the reoccurring people, those day to day team members. So we're at a stage where we have several project managers on our team and one of the things that they have capability around is if we need an sop, they're going to go out to our strongest team members and they're going to create documentation. And again, they're not striving for perfection, they're striving to get something down. And then they can bring that back to the operational leadership and say, all right, here's how we have how our FAs work, or here's how our front desk is solving this or doing this solution. Here is how our trace setups work, et cetera. And then we're going to improve on that using the project managers. I think project managers are some of the most important hires to have within a business. Now, you might even start with someone you'd call an administrator, an assistant, somebody who might be even a strong receptionist in your business model. So I want to think about all different types of business sizes here. But taking someone who's detailed, who could go out and just kind of document some process, watch somebody and document that out. And then over time you can get more sophisticated individuals to help with that. But again, just moving from zero to version one. All right, and here's my fourth and last hack. So one thing that you can do is just set up a video or you or somebody else go videotape your strongest team member doing a task, and then go on a website like fiverr or guru.com or some of these other outsourced workforce solutions and just hire a contractor to say, I want you to watch this video and I want you to document out the processes that they're doing. And so, you know, this is for our most entrepreneur type individuals who might say, you know what, I can't document anything. I can't write anything out. I don't have time to hire anybody else. You might have somebody just videotape you saying, all right, here's how I want this done and let it be verbal and let it be visual, and then hire someone to take that and turn it into documentation. So think about this and hiring like a dentist associate, right? So let's say you're a dentist owner. You need to hire that next associate, and you want them to be better at treatment acceptance. And you actually are really good at treatment acceptance. So you might have an assistant kind of interview you, if you will, on how you do treatment acceptance. Have them videotape that, maybe even role play a situation with them. And you can do this for anything. You could do this for procedures. And then you can either just use that video as your SOP and say, here's my SOP training right here. You could have somebody clean up the video. You could have them drop it into like a PowerPoint type solution from the video, take clips from the video. But it's again, it's a way to start hacking the SOP solutions and create your internal training process. Now you might say, well, all that's going to solve is like for my dentist associates is them being good at treatment acceptance. But there's like a thousand things I want to teach them and that they need to be better at. Start with one thing and then start building on that. You'll be surprised how quickly solving for your biggest concerns first starts to untangle all the other components and opens the door that you're not going to have to create an SOP for every little thing. I mean, that's a reality. You just won't. But if you create them for the things where you feel the most frustration and noise, you'll notice that those other things start working their way out. Okay, I hope this was helpful. I know so many people get paralyzed on creating process and systems and SOPs, but hopefully one of these ideas works for you and your size, you know, your financial situation so that you can hack and start creating a process and solutions to take some of that noise off of you. And it's a lot of work I'm not going to take away from that. But this is simpler than a lot of mindset I see out there, which is trying to do all SOPs at one time perfectly and I have to do it myself or I have to have team member do it perfectly the first time and where do I find that person, etc. So these four ideas will allow you to hack that much faster. And you know, let's get your first SOP done this week. How great would it be if your biggest frustration or concern, you already had that documented and ready to go and then you can take that version one and just keep upgrading it week after week, month after month. Alright guys, that ends it for my SOP hacks. Hopefully you'll join us on our Facebook page. DSO Secrets. Please come join us. Ask more questions about SOPs and until next time, keep smiling.

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