71: Keys To Ramp-Up and Re-Open: Project Management Platforms, Team, and KPIs

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate right out of school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I'm here today with Jacob Poole, CEO of the Dentist Entrepreneur organization. Jacob, thanks so much for being with me today.

Yeah, it's always a pleasure. It's always a pleasure. And I get excited about kind of talking about what's hot and what's going on in the industry. What we're seeing every day.

You've got your hand on the heartbeat of the industry with the peer learning group that you have and then your connection into the larger groups and the smaller groups. I love having you on because you're able to kind of help all of us get pulled out of the details and say, I. All right, here's what I'm hearing everybody saying, here's what they're, you know, so, so what are people talking about? A lot of states are opening up right now. Right. So that has to be part of the buzz that's going on. What's the main concerns, ideas, et cetera floating around?

Yeah, there's a lot. So as you know, everyone in the DEO is kind of growing, some kind of multiple location or aspiring to grow in multiple location group. And we bring in people, bring in experts and just, you know, bring in connections over and over again. And so what that creates is a situation where we're hearing from the AM emerging markets every day, all day, talking to folks. And so, yeah, what's hot right now? Of course, there's the standard stuff which you've seen a lot of. We spend a lot of time in DSO Secrets Facebook group and there's awesome conversation there around ppe, ppp, ramp ups, who's open, who's not. People are starting to care a little bit about demand and how much demand people are seeing. In fact, I was talking to a member yesterday and it seems like a trend is emerging around urban and fee for service being less demand and then rural and Medicaid and kind of a spectrum of like how much demand people are seeing throughout those. So that's hot. And then. And then also people are, you know, starting to get a little bit. There's a lot going on. Right. Trying to figure out their employees and figure out how to manage all of the moving pieces that are happening as you start to ramp up. It's almost like a de novo opening again and again and again and again.

Yeah. So let's talk about each of those. So it sounds like on the macro level, some of the things we might have been expecting around having that extra money and income to spend and having lost our jobs, et cetera, would impact PPO and fee for service. There's some softening there. We'll continue to watch on that. Right. And then these rural towns where there wasn't access before and there was need or Medicaid, which the Medicaid rosters have increased dramatically. It seems like then that's kind of the place ramping. You think that slope is a little bit higher than the other one. That's the most current information.

That's what's happening and what it's, you know, it's a little bit cliche, but I think it's identifying really the local nature of dentistry because it's really so much is based on the variables that each person, each of our members are seeing in their local area, depending on the state and what's, you know, is the state we should be free and open state or we should go slow and what's the governor of that state's, you know, disposition? So it's very localized. But I think DSOs are in a really good position to monitor this because they have such a wide footprint. I'm curious you, Emmett, I mean, you all are on the ramp. What are you seeing? How's the vibe around your offices?

I think our vibe matches with your vibe. You know, we've got a lot of underserved markets. We have Medicaid in our m. And definitely seeing that ramp up happening around that. I'm really interested too in that part you're talking about where they've got a lot going on. I am seeing as you bring that up. I'm seeing a lot of conversation around how do I organize my projects and planning. And maybe they're not even articulating it that way, but if they had a lot going on before, if they felt like they were chasing a lot of rabbits before, now there's herds of rabbits. Right. And there's. There's new deer and everything kind of mixing in here with some of the things you're talking about. Their accounting on PPP is now at a whole new heightened level. They didn't have that on their list before COVID ppe. Whole new heightened level. They didn't have that on their list. So it's definitely accentuating the need for core platforms around organizing and prioritizing these projects. And everything feels so urgent right now. Right. There's this anxiety to get back. There's this anxiety to serve and to help. There's also just anxiety in managing that with team members as well. And so, you know, I think that for all of us, we have to ask ourselves, if we weren't organized, if we didn't have a platform, we need one now. And especially for a group like DEO members, if they're emerging groups trying to do multiple practices, they're definitely gonna be feeling like we need a platform for prioritizing activity. Right. And they don't have, like, the margin to sit on either, to be like, well, revenue covers a lot of sins. The fact I didn't do things in the right order or the right things, I'm still making money. Like, we gotta be more efficient than we've ever been on our resources.

Yeah. And a lot of this, you know, some of this came up from there's a question in your Facebook group, which was, how do you measure the effectiveness, more or less, of your executives? And this all kind of mixes. Because I think what's happening too is there's a lot of offices that are probably gonna require fewer people. I think people are starting to realize that. And so then you have to decide who to keep. Right. And how do you measure how well somebody's doing? So that's one thing. And then I want also afterwards, Emma, I want to get into your idea of what platform is. Cause I know you use the word platform quite a bit, and I'm curious what you mean. But first. Yeah, Executives and measuring effectiveness.

And how do you measure. And they're probably going to tie in together. Honestly, Jake, and my philosophy, One thing I think is worth hitting on is often people ask me, which executive should I hire first? Which director, manager? And I always come back to the same answer. Where are you feeling the most anxiety and pain? Alex Charfen uses a great term, pressure and noise. Whatever word kind of resonates with you. That's where you start. Because I come from the belief that the most valuable person in the organization is that starting entrepreneur, is that clinician, that owner. If you free up their mindset, if you Support them. Then you expand the ROI on the business together. Now the next question is, great, so now I've hired this person, now what? Right? Like how do I actually manage and measure? Because it's not like, it's not like we have a practice management software for effectiveness of directors or even effectiveness of practice managers. Definitely not for effectiveness of COOs and Directors of Ops and so forth. I saw a lot of feedback around the EOS system. People are using that. I think that's an excellent level one. I've never done anything before, get my feet wet, get going. And we should have an EOS person on here because frankly I'd like to poke some holes and where I think EOS breaks down and really moving up that scale, right? Because EOS will get you to a certain level. And then I've watched others just kind of go off the cliff in other areas with it. So what do you layer on top? I think principle based, I use dope, right? I use the acronym dope. And dope is that principle that you can use within eos, but you can use it on other platforms that will help you scale even farther. And dope is you've got to be documenting all of this stuff. I know how basic that sounds, but Jake, how much is like just going on in people's heads right now, right? Just that anxiety, right?

I'll tell you one thing that we've done is we call them ideas buckets. And so we've, you know, figure out the place to document a document or we use asana or whatever. And we've seen other folks do this too because so often an idea needs to go straight into action, right? As an entrepreneur and even when things are getting crazy, what happens is entrepreneurs, they wake up in the morning, start thinking, we need to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this. And a lot of those are just ideas, right? And that they need to be better through the team. So if you have a document in place for those where you can, it releases your brain a little bit to think differently. But, but Emmett, I wanted to, so I wanted to go back though.

That's like really important too is we talk in present tense about everything, right? So our teams are completely confused. You know, we might have had a brainstorm that morning and we say something as if it needs to happen tomorrow, it could be a ten year idea, right? So again, documentation starts you on the road to better conversation. So I'm just going to put that out there is you've got to document and then you move into those other stages of dope that really take it to the next level. But go ahead, Jake.

And we've done, yeah, we've done some awesome stuff on that. Reach out if you're interested. You've even released your documents there. So I wanted to cover, just to cover the philosophy, which is that the dentist entrepreneur is like the racehorse, right. As the entrepreneur, and I've heard it, the kind of name of the game is where do you feel pressure and noise, as Alex Char would say, and then how do you get support? You've said, Alex has said support and protection. Right? I've heard it described, yep. And I've heard it described as a hot air balloon kind of lifting off. And how do you get rid of those weights? Right. Little by little, let go of those weights that hang off the side of the hot air balloon. So that's the philosophy, that's what we're trying to do as entrepreneur, as we're growing.

And let's, I mean, we say that and it sounds so obvious. Can we just talk why that doesn't just happen naturally. You know, part of the reason is half the books are written like this. Steve Jobs, alpha male, you know, James Bond type feel that we're all rugged individuals. We come in, we tell our teams exactly where we're going to go, we know all the brilliant ideas, put all that pressure on us, right? And then we just don't perform and then our teams don't perform because that platform doesn't work and that platform does not give room for us to be self aware around where we're feeling anxiety, where we're feeling stress. We're supposed to just show up and somehow solve all of these things. So I think that's one negative that really keeps us from being in momentum and progressive. And number two is we just aren't good at self care as entrepreneurs. We feel like we are the ones that are supposed to solve everything. And so it puts us in a place where instead of sitting back and saying, hey, this is where I need help. Who on my team can help me being vulnerable with them? Those kind of principles. Holy smokes. That gets massive momentum. You know, I think this is the reason that you hear so often dyslexics outperform as CEOs and entrepreneurs. I have a son who's dyslexic and one of the things I've noticed, he's fearless. He's fearless. We were on a trip and someone said, hey, can someone read this plaque for us? It was on a trolley and he raises his hand, he says, I'll read it, I'll read it. They said, sure, go ahead. And he goes, well, I can't read. Can somebody help me? And literally someone read it. And then he repeated it. He had no problem with that, right? That kid, Fearless, asking for help. That's what creates your. Richard Branson's right, 300 companies. And he's like, I don't know what net income means anyway. I think that's the next step that all of us, with so much going on, need to step back and say, where do I need help? And let me go tell my team.

Love it. So kind of bringing it back to where people are using this right now. So feeling a lot of pressure, trying to figure out your team, trying to figure out who's responsible. As we're ramping back up, it's almost like a de novo opening up again for the first time. Right. And so you realize that you need help. You're either current executives, you may be hiring different executives. A lot of people are kind of considering this now. They're looking at their team and figuring this is, you know, the best time to figure out if they have the right people in the right seats. So then you have your, you have your executive, this person that's going to, you know, take, take some things off your plate and help where the most pressure noise is coming. But then you have this point, this idea of how do I evaluate them? Or you have a current team, you're trying to evaluate them. Now what I see most often, Emmett, is when, when folks in emerging markets and dental entrepreneurs start learning about KPIs, there's this, there's this thing that happens, is there, they get a little bit excited, like, oh, this is how I'm going to hold my team accountable. Finally I put a dashboard up and show them what that number needs to be and then they go in and do that.

So KPIs become the way, it magically happens.

Yeah. So KPIs become the way to manage your executives. But how do you think about, because you have a large executive team, some of the amazing, most talented people I've come across. How do you think about building? And remember, take yourself back to the beginning. You have quite the team now. How do you think about this?

Yeah, I think it's multi layered and you know, it's interesting because in a lot of ways I'm back at the beginning again and again and again because we're building different departments, different capabilities and it really starts over again. The only difference is we know how to do it and we can bring that to the individual practices right now on this podcast. So the most important thing for me is that we've organized, we prioritized these documents out these, these action items. I think one of the traps, so we're kind of talking through traps that people run into is that KPI piece feeds into. Now I just need to hire the right person, point them to the KPI, abdicate the responsibility. Call me if you need me. Right. Dan Sullivan uses the term drive by delegation. I love that. Versus we're going to set up a cadence. We have a platform, we have a project management way of that breaks this down and we can measure momentum within the project as we work towards the outcome of the KPI. Or maybe we don't have a KPI around this. Maybe this is brand new concept. If you're saying, hey, I got to go digital, you know, measuring how many online schedules you have right now ain't gonna help know if you're in momentum or not because you don't even have, say a website or online scheduling capability or where does that feed to or how do I track that software? You've got to have these interim capabilities. So at my executive level, you know, we've got 12 project managers, we've got directors on the team. All of those are measured off of this platform that we have, which we should share that sometime. You know, we share with the DEO team and we should share some pieces of that on this. But man, that helps you scale. You know what it's like, Jake, to go lay down at night and just know your whole team is working on the right things. Like that is probably as an entrepreneur, the greatest gift you can ever have. So I think once you're at that place. Yeah. Then you're really measuring success.

Well, well, let's take it down because, you know, inside the deal, we talk a lot about project managers. And to me, it's been in my four years in the industry and the emerging markets industry, specifically of dentistry, it's the, it's the biggest missing piece. A lot of offices, a lot of organizations, they are missing this whole capability of project management. And when you think about growing a business, when you distill it down, it's just doing a bunch of tasks and, but following up on them and make sure, you know, solving some problems and it's just, it's just a missing piece. But that's a whole nother podcast. I have some questions, some more questions for you around this. This will take it home for people. Let Me say you've got a few.

Part of that. Part of the reason it's a missing piece is because it's a missing piece. There's like not a technology, there's not a worksheet. That's what we've developed now, you know, for people. So, yeah, it's a missing piece. I totally agree.

Yeah, yeah. So let's say you got a few locations. You're either aspiring for your second or four or five, 10 locations. And you don't really have a project manager per se. Because the one thing that can be overwhelming is like, I gotta go hire a project manager. Go hire all these new people. You probably have people in your. Already in your, you know, your team who can do the project management capability or, you know, job. So how. So walk us through how you have employed this. So, for example, you have a new thing. You have safety in an office. This is a new thing to launch. Right. And I kind of talk about them being a spinning plate. You gotta get the plate spinning on the stick so you can hand it off to somebody else. So you have this thing of safety. So walk me through, Emmett. What? Because I know you work with a sheet and you work with meetings, right. You organize everything on a certain sheet and then you have meetings. It's really the two ingredients. So walk us through how you handle this new initiative with a project manager.

Yeah, so I'll give the bigger framework, but then we'll bring it way down. I have a dashboard of activity that I can see. I have a meeting sheet that I typically am working with them on. And then they have their own platform. If they're using Asana or Trello or some other thing or I don't want any of that detail. I don't have time for it. But they need that to get all the way down. So you're right, Jake. The first thing I'm doing is I'm scoping out the project with them. What's the why? What's the objective? What's the reason we're doing this and where does it fit and everything else. Let me address one thing. Stepping back. You're exactly right. Somebody on your team has a little bit of time to be a project manager, and that's where you got to start. And you have to be realistic that they've got a little bit of time and you got to give them a platform. So we're going to document scope on what this is. And we can't get so excited, Jake, that we give them like 20 things. In fact, we might not Even be able to give them two, right? We can give them one, maybe two. And then when we talk about something like, man, we really need our safety better, okay, that's a pretty big project. It needs to be broken down. So we're going to set up every week a specific time that we're going to meet. I'm not abdicating, I'm delegating, I'm leading. Right. They're going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but I'm going to make sure that they're on track. I'm going to remove blocks for them. Man, that weekly cadence, you know, and you can do it more frequently, you can do it less. But I found there's something magical about that week. It gives them enough time to make a little progress. And on that sheet, I'm going to see what they've accomplished, what they're currently working on, and what's kind of future things on my sheet that they bring to the meeting. So I've got a really clear perspective. Okay, they just finished this. They're working on this. And this is in the future. And I'll have the deadline there that we're all working towards. And Jake, as simple as that sound, there's some sophistication behind it. I'm just going to build that out now. If there's ROI in that project, it's going to feed into the business. And before long, Jake, I'm going to be able to hire someone full time, just do an ROI project. It's like. It's like money. I'm investing in the stock market when it was down and now it's coming up. So, you know, it's just, I'm making those investments and, man, patient flow increases. Oh, safety's increased. Oh, training's increased. These things all help build that business.

So this is probably, you know, for a whole other podcast on project management. And I want to take it back to executives, because you have all of your executives have somebody else running the project management. It's almost like a position on a field, right? Quarterbacking that project. Sometimes the executive would be the project. When you're smaller, the executive is the project manager on that project. And so how, just to kind of bring this home, how do you relate that to evaluating how well your executives are doing?

So it's really powerful because with this sheet and this cadence, we're able to measure progress and momentum. And you can see it, you can even measure it in dollar amounts and return on investment, et cetera. And, yeah, it rolls up. So if they've got two or three project managers under them. Holy smokes. They're even bringing more value in their leadership.

So you're measuring on top of, you know, the standard day to day, which is. That's pretty. You do have some KPIs around this, the day to day kind of stuff. But as you're growing and scaling, you have a lot of new projects. And the way you measure how executives are doing on these new projects is how much momentum are they able to generate. And then eventually you can see that come back in roi.

That's exactly right. And if they're generating momentum and the ROI is not there, that's my fault. Right. Especially if I created the project. Now, if the executive created the project, it's their fault. But yeah, the ROI is there. And I think one of the things. And again, different podcast. So many of us, especially in the dental industry, are good at cost management. Right. I love Glen Vo, like that is the master of cost management. Nifty, thrifty. Right? But what about investment management? That's way more sophisticated. How do I know to put dollars in and how many am I going to get? $2 back, $3 back? It's easier to measure. Is it 299 or 199amonth? Right. If the features and functions and service are the same, boom. But how do I measure return on investment? We should do a podcast on that at some point.

Yeah, yeah. Lots to get over and maybe to go over. And if I twist your arm, maybe we can get for DO members a coup. Those spreadsheets and platforms to use, I've seen them, they're really good. So last thing, Emmett, we have you hosting in June, June 4th and 5th. So DEO Summit, we've gone virtual. A lot of folks, a lot of listeners attend a lot of our events. We love everyone that comes, but we've gone virtual for obvious reasons. And we're excited. So you're hosting. Anything you want to just say to folks?

Last night, I'm going through each of the speakers. Okay. I'm getting ready to be the emcee for the Zoom. And we had such a great event just a couple months ago. And I'm like, okay, we got to top it. We got to do even better. Holy smokes, the speakers. I'm like, I don't care if anybody else comes. I'm coming because it's going to take my company to a whole nother level. Like, there's just. If you're struggling with getting more patients in the door, team leadership, management, financials are keeping you up at night or whatever. You know the biggest problem I had last night, Jake, I was like, oh, wait, wait. I got to get this team member to come to the summit too. I got to get this team member to come as well. Because there's just all these breakout groups, all these channels, et cetera. And thank you. We have on DSO Secrets we have a code, right? People can get $50 off and come. You get to sit there and like ask questions. It's actually better than a live event. Not that I don't ever want you to do live events again, but I can like chat with people without disrupting the speaker. And then magically people ask the speaker those questions and stuff. I'm just getting tremendous value out of it. So I'm excited to be the host. I'm actually excited to be a participant too.

Yeah, no, we're excited. And like you said, with the speaker lineup, there's a lot of folks who kind of who are working day to day and opening their practices and, you know, kind of building the DSOs. They come out of the woodworks and share what they're doing during this period, just like with live events. And we've also built in quite a bit of networking opportunities. So it's going to be fun and innovative. And everyone that's ramping up right now and figuring out how to manage this, we're going to be talking about all of that at this summit. So come join us. Come join Emmett. DSO Secrets is the promo code. We'll post it in the Facebook group. Emmett. And thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you for being on today. And guys, if you're not at the Facebook private page, please come and join us at DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook at 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 DSO Secrets 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.