33: Hiring The Perfect Associate

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I'm excited to be with you today. I'm going to talk about a topic I get a lot of questions on, and that's our associate doctors. How do I train my associate doctors? How do I make them into better leaders? How do I get great doctors? What is the process for doing that? And I really think it divides out into those three things. It starts with being able to hire the perfect associate. And I use that term, perfect, not because the individual themselves are perfect, but because they're perfect for your organization. Now, in order to hire perfection using this definition, it really starts with some self awareness, starting with some questions like what am I really trying to build here? Am I, do I have a vision, a clear vision that I can share with someone that benefits them and as well as benefits the organization, but something that people can really get excited about. Too many times people look at doctor associates as a wheel and a cog instead of looking at them as that partner, as that customer, even that you're bringing onto the team. So I think every customer, every partner wants to know, what are we doing here? What are we solving? What great world crisis are we helping to overcome? Or at minimum, what's the difference we're trying to make in the marketplace? If you haven't taken the time to really reflect on that, really finding your why, I think that's critical. So often the first questions I get are, what's the bonus that you pay to docs when they come on? And. And how does your fee structure work? And I get that and I get why those questions are there. But really, our conversations with doctors don't start there. Conversations with doctors start with really aligning are we on the same page for what we're trying to build and the difference we're trying to make in the marketplace and what they want to accomplish with their career this quickly? Leads to what are my core expectations for any doctor associate? And really, I think we could boil them down. As I listen to our clinical team and what they're looking for, it's really kind of two H's. It's humble and hungry. We're really looking for the doctor who's entrepreneurial and has that hunger to learn, but is also humble about where they are in their career. Even if they've been out for a long time, let's say 20 years or so, we're still looking for humble and hungry. What are the things that you're looking for? What's critical for a doctor to be on your team? Is it being willing to work from nine to five every day, five days a week? Is it being willing to work till 9 o' clock at night? Is it how do they need to act with the staff? Do they need to be the leader with them? Do they need to be the team member? What are you looking for specifically? Are you looking for someone who wants to be an associate the rest of their life? Who wants to be a partner? There's not a wrong answer to these, but each of them are a different decision tree in finding that perfect associate. And that really starts to drive down to who you're looking for. Once you know who you're looking for, you start to ask yourself, so what's important to them? You know, if I'm looking for humble, hungry doctors, what's going to be important to them? They want to know that they have a support team behind them. They want to know that they're going to be listened to. They're going to want to know that their hunger can get satisfied, that we have the mentoring programs and training programs and partnership programs to fully satisfy their hunger. So starting to dig in and say, what are these doctors looking for? What are they looking for as far as compensation? And what are different ways that I can organize that in order to really meet their needs? Then you start to ask yourself, who's the real decision maker here? You know, is it them? Is it the spouse? Who is it that we need to be working with directly to help make this decision? Who's my real customer? Which I think leads into what's the real decision drivers? Are they wanting to pay off debt as quickly as possible? Do they want to live in a certain area? Are they looking to learn specific skills? There's definitely different skill sets that you're going to get with any practice that you're going to be in. So do the skill sets that they're interested in line up with the skill sets of our practices. Now, too often I see those who are recruiting dentists and associates, they really haven't gone through the exercise to ask themselves these questions. For the most part. They spent so much time on the Dr. Contract, which is necessary, and figuring out different bonus systems and compensation systems which is also necessary. But I think some of these softer questions of figuring out who am I really, what kind of doctor customer am I looking for, who's really the decision maker here? How do I get alignment with those individuals and am I going to be able to satisfy everything that this customer really wants? At the end of the day, if we can know what's important to our associates and do everything we can to bring that value to them within the realms of reality, then we are going to have amazing alignment throughout the organization. To the extent we get too caught up in our own expectations or our own spreadsheets or what we think should be happening versus really drilling down, figuring out what their needs are and supporting them. If we're too self centered, then it's going to not play out well. We're never going to feel like we have the perfect associate. And I really think that this is step one to creating a clinical culture of excellence. Oftentimes the questions I get are around how do I train them to be better or get them more leadership skills, et cetera. But if we're starting with misalignment, if we haven't figured out what we really want and what they really want, then just kind of layering on additional trainings and so forth, it's either going to feel like we're cramming it onto them because they don't feel that trust and alignment or it's just going to be money wasted because it wasn't something they were asking for or hungry for. I'd love your thoughts on finding the perfect associates. What's worked well for you all? Please come join us on our DSO

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