50: The Success Cycle

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and today I'm going to take on one of the top questions I typically get anytime I'm talking to someone about their group practice. And what's so interesting about about this question is it's the wrong question. And the number one question, or maybe number two question that I constantly get is, can I get a copy of your sops? Or some version of that? How do you develop out your SOPs? And for those who don't know, SOP is standard operating Procedures. Now, I know the basis of this question and the basis of this question is I've got a result that I'm trying to drive, and it's not predictable. In other words, the people who are driving that system or that result are not doing it consistently how we want it to be done to get that same result. And the premise of the question is, if I had better checklists, if I had an organized system, then I would get that result. Now I get why this question would come up. It makes logical sense in a lot of ways that if I could just get a copy of the checklist or process that other people are using, I could tweak it to my own needs. I'd hand it over to someone, I'd say, follow this and then they would start following that. And I wouldn't have that same problem of inconsistency anymore because this magical SOP was taking care of the problem. Now, there's a lot of flaws in this thinking, but I first want to say I get why we think that that is the solution. And my goal here today is actually to give you another process that's much better than this. Copy somebody else's SOP process or get a copy of someone else's SOP process. And I can tell you from experience that giving people an SOP or even getting an SOP from somebody else, it just never gets implemented for a lot of reasons. One is the SOP isn't really what creates the momentum and the consistent results in the first place. So the product itself isn't the right product for what we're trying to achieve. But number two is taking somebody else's and it doesn't have the energy and momentum you need versus something you've developed yourself. There's a great saying that goes something like this. The right answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer. And that is, if we're trying to achieve a certain objective, but the question we ask doesn't help us achieve that objective, then getting the right answer to that question, we're still unable to achieve our objective. Feel this, when people are seeking after SOPs and saying, I just need that standard operating procedure and then this team member, the staff member, will start achieving the objective I was hoping to achieve. So I've talked to other organizations as well and associations and have asked them what's the number one question that you get from your members? And it comes down to can I get SOPs or do you have SOPs? And again, I'll just tell you that that is not going to solve your result. Let me kind of walk through it. So let's say that you're trying to get your phone calls and how those are answered to be more consistent or maybe even confirmations to be done on a consistent basis. And so I hand you my process for doing that and you take that to your team one, your understanding of that process isn't totally clear typically. And the momentum, the motivations, the reasoning behind it isn't totally clear. And so to you it's just simply items to be done. And so you give that to someone and then they do those items without really understanding the purpose behind it other than to achieve the checklist. Now, because this is such a human business, without understanding the why behind things or having clarity, you've already started so flat footed and that product, that SOP product really just has no energy behind it to be completed. And when it's done simply by what's on the pieces of paper, it really doesn't achieve its result anyway. So I would beg and plea of you to stop asking for SOPs because you're going to spend a lot of time and energy one just trying to get them, trying to understand someone else's and then your implementation of them. You're going to be very disappointed at the results internally. So what I'm going to give you today is the system we use. That's not an sop, so to speak. It's called the Success Cycle. It's something that I developed with our team and it provides consistent results with the energy and motivation that you're looking for to reach your objectives. And the best part is you can do this. It's not something that you just kind of hack from somebody else or you have to get from someone else. The other great part about this is when you get into just this SOP mindset, you have this underlying philosophy that if you can checklist and systemize everything in your business, then somehow that's when you finally will reach scalability and results. And I'll tell you, if I had to SOP everything in our business, man, just the thought of that is completely overwhelming. I mean, there are so many different pieces and systems, especially at the stage we are with a support center, with call center and billing teams and project managers and practices spread 9 to 1200 miles apart. To think of every little system and process having to be perfectly soped. I don't know that you would ever get out of the gates and get the momentum that you're really looking for. Even at a single practice location. The number of moving parts and the changing parts is so extensive that thinking that you're just going to get that perfect on an SOP, I think is honestly ridiculous. But there's just a lot of thinking around this that that's the holy grail and that's the solution that is going to solve all of their problems. So again, I'm going to give you something called the Success Cycle. And it's seven steps. I'm going to break it down for you here so that you can do it. You won't need nearly as many success cycles built within your organization as you would sops. Nowhere close. You'll still want to continue to build success cycles within your business. They are more detail oriented in some ways, but their power and their impact is 100 times more than an SOP. So let me start breaking this down for you. Here is kind of the seven steps of the success cycle, and I'm going to take the time to go through each one and try to give you as much clarity around that step as I possibly can here in this podcast. But you can also come over to our Facebook site at DSO Secrets and feel free to ask more detailed questions. So step number one in the success cycle is defining the why. So the first thing that we know that humans need is they need to understand the bigger why. So, for example, I'm going to take you through kind of one Success cycle in order to give you hooks to put this on, and then you can apply it to other areas of your business. But let's say that one of your whys, and there's lots of ways to say this real elegantly, but one of your whys is that you want to treat and impact as many patients as possible with complete care. So determine your demographic, your niche that you want to take care of, and figure out what is your kind of mission and why for treating patients and giving them complete care. And the first thing I'd want any team member to understand is that why I would be wanting to say to them, listen, our goal is to treat as many patients as possible with as comprehensive care as possible. That is our goal. And when that's not happening, we're not achieving our mission. If you're in the pediatric space, maybe you say, we're trying to treat as many pediatric patients as possible with as comprehensive of care. If you've got specific niches or types of care, we want to bring this type of care to as many people as possible. We want to remove this much bacteria from a community as possible. Whatever your why is, determine, determine what your why is and make sure other people understand that underlying goal. I will tell you that defining the why will be something you'll want to come back to again and again. Because adults need context. They need to understand why these other things are in place and what their purpose is. And so coming back to listen, our goal is to treat as many patients as possible with as comprehensive care as possible. That's our goal is very helpful for every team member to understand. All right, step number two, now you have to determine what the success metric is going to be for that. So if my goal is to treat as many patients as possible with comprehensive care, a great success metric for that is revenue. Right? So revenue relative to what I did last year, am I treating my more patients? Am I reaching this goal? Am I giving them more comprehensive care? Revenue is a clear metric to measure that. All right, number three is what are the drivers to that metric? Because eventually I got to get down to what team members can help to support this bigger why. So step number three is what are the drivers to that metric? So think about this. If my goal is to treat as many patients as possible with comprehensive care, and my success metric is revenue, what's really driving revenue? Well, the number of patients coming in the door and the amount of care that's being provided to that patient, I could see a scenario where I've got millions of patients coming in the door, and we're not giving them any care. And I wouldn't be reaching my why. And my revenue would be showing that I could see where I have one patient coming in. I'm giving them very comprehensive care. I still wouldn't be achieving my overall Y. Treat as many patients as possible with complete or comprehensive care. And I would see that in my revenue. But ultimately it comes down to what is my patient flow, patient visit count. Right. And what is my patient production or care being given? Those would be the underlying metrics or drivers to revenue. Now, step number four is what is the frequency that I need to look at those metrics? So as you go through this process, you'll find that some you may want to see in real time, other metrics, close of the month is a great time to look at those, and that's when they're relevant. Others at the end of a week and others at the end of the day. So for this scenario, I'm going to say that understanding at the end of each day or the next morning of each day is when the frequency of this metric that I want to look at, okay, so I want to look at my patient counts, and I want to look at my care per visit or production per visit every morning for the previous day. And I want to have the team looking at that too and asking themselves, all right, how do we set up this morning and the next day in order to continue to drive that goal, Treat as many patients as possible with as comprehensive care as possible, moving revenue up, how do I get more patient visits in? And doctor, how do we support you to give as comprehensive care as possible? And I'm going to look at that each morning. So frequency is step number four. How often do I want to look at that metric? Now, once I've determined that I've got my why, I've got my success metric, revenue, I know what my drivers are that I need to be looking at. Patient visits and patient care, patient production. Now, I'm going to know that each I got to look at that every morning. So my frequency, then I'm ready to move to step five, which is how do I build the systems, the checklist, the tracking tool, the technology to capture the drivers, the metrics of those drivers. So if I'm wanting to look at patient counts and production per visit, what is the easiest way to capture that? And honestly, in dental, none of this is super easy. I would say that from a technology perspective, no matter which software you're using, which practice management solution you're Using, there's probably some work to do to get this report on the frequency and with the clarity that you're looking for. So up to this point, getting the why, the success metric, the driver metrics, and the frequency kind of figured out has been a lot of whiteboard thinking. Now, as you move into building the systems, the checklists, the tracking tools, to be able to capture this data and get the technology now you're going to have to get your hands a little bit more dirty and maybe even bring in some kind of vendor or support in order to capture this information. So now you finally get the report created and you say, hallelujah. I can look at my patient visits and my production per visit and I know what my revenue is each day. And now what do I do with this report? I roll it out to the team and I say, what? This is a place I see a lot of mistakes made. Because it often takes so much work just to get the metric created or just to get the information to the team that taking the next step is often skipped. In fact, most owners feel like, great, I'm done. I've explained the why to them, I've broken down this information into something that they can see, and now they need to take action. So step number six is to determine the actions the team should take to influence the drivers. Alright, so let's say patient flow is down. What actions do I want the team to take to increase patient flow? And so I need to take the time to start to organize those actions and give them specific activities that they do. Priority one, do this activity. Priority two, do this activity. Priority three, do this activity. For example, if patient flow is down, what should be the first group of people that the front desk should be calling in order to get that up? Who's the second group of people? Who's the third group of people? Are there proactive activities around marketing or other things that the team should be doing in order to increase patient flow? So this takes some more heavy lifting and thinking. Again, oftentimes I just see these metrics thrown out to the team and it said, hey, increase patient flow. But this is where there's an opportunity for us to brainstorm and to organize. If patient flows down, here's the first activity due, here's the second, here's the third, here's the fourth, here's the fifth, et cetera. And what about if production per visit's down? Has the clinical team sat down and said, listen, if looking over the organization, we notice that this associate has lower production per visit, what is the actions that we're going to take to give them the right support to do more comprehensive care. In other words, can we give them more ce? Can we look at the procedures and the treatment planning and have discussions around comprehensive care and what is the training that that individual needs? Has the clinical team thought that through or are they doing the worst thing possible, which is walking in and saying you just need to do more. Right. Which would not be appropriate, instead saying, all right, let's look through your cases and say, what is the opportunities where we can bring real value to these patients? And either you need some clinical capability or you're missing a perspective of value that these patients need. All right, so now I have my why clearly organized and the team knows that we're trying to treat as many patients as possible with as comprehensive care as possible. Got my success metric, which is my revenue goals. I know what the drivers are for that revenue goal. It's patient visits and it's my production per visit and I know that I need to be looking at that each morning. And I've created all the reports necessary for the team to have a comprehensive view of what the patient flow is and what the comprehensive care that's being provided has been. I now have taken the time to figure out what to do when those metrics aren't in line with the goals that we have and how are we going to bring real value to the patients and increase the patient flow and increase the care that's being provided. And I've documented that out so that the team has those action items to take as soon as they see this report not in line with where they know the goals need to be for that time period, usually for that week or that month or even day by day. Now my last step, my seventh step is I need to build all the documents and all the training to get this into a training platform for my team. So I need to have something that clearly states the why, what the result is, the drivers, how to and how often to read the metric report. Oftentimes our team struggle to even understand the reports and which ones to pull. So I've organized that and I have the actions for everyone to take. So documentation's that last piece. Now the reason I put that in there is because I often see team members or executives organize all of these steps and then they verbally give it to the team and kind of a one off training or even just in kind of a drive by training, right where you say, hey, here's the metric and I need you to start watching that, by the way, here's some ideas in case it's not good and, you know, it's off to the races. And then we wonder why it's failing. So by documenting this out, by creating what I consider an internal marketing material or training material for people to understand step by step, here's the metrics, here's the why, and here's the actions to be taken then. Now people can really take action and they can use that as a reference piece and they can come back to it in morning huddles, so. So that everybody knows what steps they're supposed to take. You may even be breaking it down if it's something as. And I apologize that this is so generic of an idea, but I think it gives you a hook to put this on, to apply it to other concepts. But you can start looking within the team. The actions each of them need to be taking could be different. Let me give you one example. So if we notice that the amount of care being provided is lower than it should be, you know, everyone might say, well, that's a dentist problem. They need to increase their capability to do that. Well, no, that's not just a dentist problem. The chair side and how efficient they are and effective they are really determines how much effort and how much energy spend that dentist is putting and putting out that care. And so if we can make that chair side even better, then the dentist is able to do more comprehensive work with less effort. The X ray tech, if there's better X rays, it's easier to identify care that needs to be provided. So where are the X rays missing that we can go the next level. So now the team can start owning these metrics and in a new way where if we see that care per visit is down, all the team is looking at the actions and saying, oh, care per visit's down. As an X ray tech, that means I need to get my X rays even better in order for the dentist to identify real care that's available. That's one example. So everybody has something that they can drive around those metrics. Now, as I walk through this, some of you might be thinking, you know what? I think I just want to get somebody else's SOPs. Right? That sounds a lot easier. Let me just get somebody else's checklist. But think about the comparison of two companies. One that's kind of just taken checklists from another organization or even developed them in house and said, I have this checklist, and this is how you do something versus someone who's used the success cycle. And they've sat down. They defined the why, right? They've determined what the success metric is going to be. They know what drives that success metric. They determine the frequency that the metric should be measured and reviewed. They've taken the time to get the technology and the tools together to create a nice report that's looking at that metric at the frequency that they need to. They've determined the actions for the team to take if that metric is off one way or the other. And they've built the documentation and the training for everyone to be aligned to take action. Now, is the SOP guy going to win or is the success cycle guy going to win? And I can tell you all day long that the guy doing the success cycle is only going to have to do one or two or three of those cycles and he's going to outrun the SOP guy even if the SOP guy has soped everything within his practice, which isn't going to happen. So try this out. Take one concept of your why and something you're trying to achieve your vision and start to break it down within this process. If you have further questions, come over on our Facebook site at DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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