4: HELP! HOW DO I BUILD A TEAM

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Hello everyone. This is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm so glad to have you here on another episode of DSO Secrets. Today, I feel like we're talking about the biggest secret of scaling or growing or developing any. And it's really this secret of how to build a team. How do I get this business model, this practice, beyond just me doing everything, or at least the feeling that you're doing everything or being able to hand off things that you're done having to manage and do. I think initially we all think it's feels pretty simple and intuitive. You know, you hire people to do what you hate. You look at the resume, they like what you don't want to do, they then will do it and you're free to pursue your passions and, you know, highest and best use and it's done. And you're paying them money and so they'll intuitively know everything that needs to be done or at least be awesome at their job day one. And that never happens. I mean, it's just so rare. Occasionally it'll happen. You'll just find somebody that clicks in the right place. And then you know, that that makes it even worse because then you think that that's actually possible out there. So I mean, the things that I always hear is common complaints. You know, it's hard to hire smart people or it's hard to hire competent people. Today, people are so emotional. You know, they want to talk about all their problems. You know, they, they want me to tell them that they're doing a good job or whatever. You know, people are just in general emotional. Maybe the feeling is people require too much explanation. You know, I just want to hire someone who can do it without me having to babysit them. These are just things that I've heard different business owners and entrepreneurs, professionals complain about. And, and I get it. I get it. I've been there. You know, when I started as an entrepreneur, my hope was That I could scale very quickly, hire people, pay them well or you know, mid range even, and get people quickly to be able to hand things off to. I felt like the hardest part of the business was, you know, the part I was doing and the parts I was handing off were fairly simple. And man, there was some reality checks to figure out new principles that I had to learn in order to get to that next level and to scale the my business. So, you know, as you try to build out your dental, your dental practices and build out your DSO dental support organization, you know, here's some, some key principles. Number one, I think that as a professional small business owner, entrepreneur. I'm just going to use the term entrepreneur. There's a French definition for entrepreneur which is to take an entrepreneur as someone who takes resources at one level and moves them to the next. I feel like that's the best definition of what anyone with a level of ambition has a mission in their life is trying to do is they're trying to take resources at one level and move it to the next. They're trying to do a bigger contribution to the world. That's really, you know, people like to define it around business components or money components. But really if you, if you dig in, if you've met a lot of entrepreneurial and ambitious people, that's really what they're trying to do is upgrade the world, if you will. So entrepreneurs, these professionals often run off of a hub and spoke system, I'll call it. So what I mean by that is you take somebody who's really smart, a dentist or some kind of business person and they understand what the customer wants in a unique way which drives more customers wanting to come to them. And then they start looking for help and they delegate things to people to do. But those people have to continue to come back to them for key components. And I've seen companies get fairly big off of this hub and spoke system. But you always know when it's hub and spoke because the bottleneck to the company is the approval of the owner in order for anything to move forward. And kind of in the worst case scenarios, I mean, office supplies can't be purchased without the sign off of the owner. It's just a total, everything has to come back to the hub and then out. And the problem is when you go to hire more people, all you're doing is creating more spokes. And so you start to realize you're not getting your ROI on those investments in people because at the end of the day you're the bottleneck you know, everything's flowing through you. There's a good article on this, which is done by Harvard Business Review Journal. I think if you just googled that and google monkey on my back or monkey on the manager's back or something like that, just, you know, it primarily talks about the upward delegation that can come from employees as they look and say, hey, here's a good idea. Can you look at this? Here's a good idea. Can you look at this? And pretty soon that owner, that entrepreneur, becomes the bottleneck to the company. And they look around and they think, I'm more overwhelmed than I was when we were smaller. You know, how did, how did this happen? I hired all these people and now it feels 10 times worse. It was actually simpler when I didn't have everyone around. And it really comes back to that hub and spoke system. So that's, number one, is kind of recognizing that that hub and spoke system exists and that that needs to move from hub and Spoke to what I call the executive team structure. So entrepreneurial structure, hub and spoke executive team. Now I've got multiple leaders starting to get empowered to drive the mission of the company forward. And we'll talk some more on, you know, as you scale up different parts of this. And in, in some of my other podcasts, I'll. I'll talk specifically about the CFO position and the chief marketing officer position, the CEO position and cio. Right. Getting the IT leadership that you need within the company. And it doesn't always mean that you have them full time in your company. There's definitely what they call fractional or part time of executive team members. But, you know, the part I want to address here is having the mindset to understand that you have to move from hub and spoke to an executive leadership type structure. And it is different. And there is a changeover that has to happen both for you mentally and for the organization if you're ever going to scale to that next level. And I'll tell you, it's not easy. There is a component of wanting to be in control and you have to start stepping away from some of the control aspects and realize that even though you won't be necessarily in control of everything, you will be in charge of everything. And we can talk more through how you make that transfer from being control, in control of everything to being in, in charge of it. I think the other difficult thing is you have to start systemizing the components, which kind of leads to principle. You know, number two on this, if you think about fast food restaurants like McDonald's it's really incredible. And this you have to have respect for, even if the food's terrible. But it's really, really incre that they hire a bunch of teenagers to cook raw meat all day. And they're not killing everyone. And it's not because those teenagers are incredibly competent. You know, they're thinking about their boyfriend or girlfriend all day, but they're able to cook this raw meat because of the system that has been created without killing, without killing all of us. So I think the challenge for us as entrepreneurs is trying to systemize, especially in a service business. Right there, they're cooking hamburgers. Most of the things we're trying to hand off are service oriented. There's a lot of nuance to it. Oftentimes, if you're having success, whatever you're trying to scale to another employee, it's almost like trying to put down and describe what it's like to breathe. And I think that's oftentimes why as entrepreneurs and business owners, we get frustrated because we're like, you just do it, you know, suck in, suck out, you know. But what we're trying to explain to them, we've got to have a methodology and a mindset that what we might be doing very intuitively could be because it's our superpower. You know, I mean, it's just a gift we've been given. And so figuring out how to do that handoff to get that systemized in a flowchart, in a checklist or whatever form, and who's going to help you do that, I think is a critical part. So that's, number two is having a mindset to figure out how you're going to systemize it. Number three is probably the one that took me the longest to have the paradigm shift on, and that is when I hire someone or one of my team members hires someone, you hire someone, it only frees up 50% of the bandwidth you're expecting to delegate. And I think when you go into it, like, I'm going to hire this marketing person so I don't have to worry about marketing anymore. And they're going to handle all of X, Y and Z. Even if you're hiring an entire agency that's extremely competent, you have to remember that the other 50% that's still going to be required of you might not be the same activity, but you're not getting 100% of your bandwidth back on that item. The 50% can come from either. Well, number one is what is your vision around where this is supposed to go see when you were controlling it and managing and everything, all that was kind of built into your own mental mindset. You would take action based on concepts and vision and nuances and intuition that you understood and felt good about. And you might have been amazing at it. But now all of that has to be transferred to someone who's going to take those actions. And so they're going to have a lot of questions on, so why do you think this is important? So how do you feel about this? And it's not going to be just a one time meeting meeting and then you're done. It's going to be an ongoing process because whether it's the it, the accounting, the marketing, the ops, the clinical, each piece has a lot of detail and dynamics and changing dynamics that there's a level of intuition, there's a level of vision that you have to drive. Now how's this different than the hub and spoke system? Hub and spoke system? You're managing like every activity. What I'm talking about here is managing the, the overall vision and principles of why are we doing this? What's most important to you? Help me to prioritize those kind of items. It's, it's a nuance, but it's way different than saying, hey, I want approval to do this activity and, and you starting to control it. So it is different. The other part of the 50% is just the mentoring that goes into onboarding a new person. Now why would you ever hire someone if it's only going to take 50% off your plate? Because 50% off your plate's huge. And number two, that other 50%, over time you will get in sync and they won't need 50%, you know, they'll need 5%. I think that the, the problem I always had was thinking that, you know, okay, after a week they could start operating at 5% of me. And I think we have to extend that time period. There's a business coach, Dan Sullivan, and I love one of the quotes he says, which is there is no unrealistic expectations, there's just unrealistic time frames. And so as I think about team members and how do you onboard and invest in team members, you really have to address your time frames. Are you so burned out that now you're going to transfer that burnout to someone and have an expectation that a week, a month after you've hired them that this shouldn't be taking up any of your bandwidth that's going to set them up for failure? You know, I mean, the Thing I hear sometimes, right, is business would be so much easier if we didn't have employees and customers. Humans are messy, humans are complex. They're also incredible and freaking awesome. And so you got to manage both sides of that. And of course, if you didn't have staff or customers, you wouldn't have a business. And I think where we have to give ourselves credibility credit is there's a lot of business models out there. You know, I kind of divide the world into three different business models. One is manufacturing. And when I look at manufacturing, they've got a level of humans that they have to deal with. But then pretty soon the product is being managed by a machine and the product that comes out is, is an intangible or I'm sorry, it's a tangible product, right? So if I'm producing some kind of widget, right, I've got to manage the machine and I've got to. And then I've got to sell the widget. So my human component is the most limited, if you will, in a manufacturing, in a service industry, let's say your lawyers and financial planners and accounting and so forth, any kind of, of service industry, they've got humans at the leadership level, they've got humans that are actually producing the product. But then the product itself is a tangible item. You know, it's a tax return, it's an estate plan, et cetera. And I contrast those two against healthcare and of course specifically the dental industry. Because if you think about that, all the leadership and management's humans, all of the delivery of care comes through humans and the product itself is done on humans. If you think about all the complexity that goes into that, it does take a unique level of leadership and a higher level of emotional intelligence and capability in order to be able to be in this healthcare industry. So what you all are taking on is awesome. It's incredible. It's complex. I think that's why we love it. Again, like I said, in the following episodes, I'll try to really dig into specific positions. We get a lot of questions around how do you find that, right? CFO or COO or clinical director or cio, and whether that's the title you use, you know, you might call them all directors or VPs or managers or whatever. Wherever you're at in your scaling, what are the things you need to be thinking about and why is it that you're not getting the results that you want? What is the secret behind that and really being able to scale up and get to that next level? And, and I'LL tell you. It's difficult too, because different stages and ages of the business are going to require different people along the way. And so you've got to have the guts to continue to analyze and say, is this the right team and what do I need to be learning and what do they need to be learning? And is the company moving past some people and I've got to make changes there, or am I the one that needs to change so that the company continue to move forward so that I'm not the bottleneck? I hope this gave you some insights, maybe some things for you to start thinking about. Until next time, I hope you leave me a review on itunes or join our private Facebook group of listeners where I can give you some additional secrets on a one on one basis. Feel free to ask questions. That's at DSO Secrets on Facebook or you can go to dso secrets.com to download episodes or get onto our newsletter. Most important, start thinking about your team and if you have and if you have specific questions, post them and I'll try to help. But until next time, keep smiling.

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