93: Chaos To Amazing Results Part 3 with Host Ken Kaufman and Guest Jodi Evans, COO of National Dental Partners

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. Welcome everyone to another episode of DSO Secrets. My name is Ken Kaufman, your host today, and I'm excited to introduce again our guest, Jody Evans. Jody, thanks for being on the show.

Yes, thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love it.

Well, we've actually been getting a lot of momentum and energy around this concept that you created called Chaos to amazing results. And this is going to be part three in that series because what we found is there are all these amazing steps that you've built out. And so we've been unpacking some of that for the listeners and I think they've been getting a ton of value. So I want to go through first and just reset what we've covered so far. And then we're going to jump in, we're going to go like head, head first into this concept of playbook, which is something I know you spent a lot of time on. You've developed, generally speaking, in the NDP platform, you have been one of the main drivers to creating our annual playbook. And so again, I think there's just so much value for our listeners here. So we said, okay, first step, when it comes to moving from chaos to actually driving and creating amazing results in your group practice or DSO is first to assess the level of chaos in your organization. And that generally means, and you went through a bunch of great examples of what that means for employees, meaning where your mentality is and how they're reacting to you and overreacting in some cases. The next step is to drive awareness about who's actually on your org chart, who are these people. And they gain awareness individually and then they gain awareness within with who's around them and their team. So they sort of started in the small circle and then expand to see their team and how they interact. And then the next step, once you get there, is to build this vision for the team and individual. So do you maybe want to reset any of that or do you have anything that sticks out that you think will help our listeners as we jump into the Playbook discussion today?

Sure. Now, in the vision, we talked a little bit about there's some components of looking at your customer and who they are. And I think we went through that as well last time on who the customer is and what they need and really understanding what org chart are they interacting with and what's the optimal results you want to achieve with them. And then developing your department out. And it's not people, it's what infrastructure do you want around you and does your team want around them to make sure that they're going to be successful as they're trying to achieve these results and expectations that are set out? And so that's what we had around the vision. And that really brings us to this Playbook platform that we're going to talk about today.

Yeah, that's right. And I love that you called that part out because that was an aha for me as you were talking through it, that when you make the customer the center of the vision, it flows so much better and there's so much more alignment because ultimately all of us have customers and that's how we're going to get paid. We've got to be able to show up and bring tremendous value to them for an overall dso main customer are the clinicians. And how can we bring support and, you know, bring value to them. But then to be able to break it down department by department, team by team, and have everybody assess that and then build their vision around how they're going to just deliver and do a great job for their customers, that. That really stood out to me. So we've got this framework then where you've, you know, we've gone through all these steps and I encourage everybody to go back and listen to the last couple of episodes on this. But we're now going to jump into now that you've got this vision built and the team's all aligned and all of those different things, now we move into building a playbook. So can you maybe walk us through what are some of the components of this playbook? And let's start to unpack this concept of. So our listeners could potentially do something similar.

Sure. And so I'll give a little bit of context. Where the Playbook concept came from Was Patrick. I think it's Lencioni's book, the Advantage of, and he talks about transparency and vulnerability on a team. So I was immediately drawn into this book because it's one of my favorite subjects it's one of the things I need to work on the most. And so it's one of the things I like to study. And so as I was looking at this book, it brought up this concept of a playbook. And he started really outlining this concept. And I've modified it a bit to work better for the NDP organization. But I love this idea of having your initiatives in one place that everyone can see. And the reason why I love that is because when you're working in an organization and people are aware of what you're planning to do, the support around you goes up exponentially. The prioritization is clear, and everybody knows what they need to do. But before we jump into, oh, what are the projects that exist in a playbook, There's a concept that as you've worked on your vision, you begin to answer in a more systematic way. So playbook starts with the question of why do we exist? So if you're working on your vision statement or your mission statement, you can start to pull that out a little bit better in a format that lets everybody see it that you're constantly referring back to. And we'll go back to the cadence on that as well. After we go through the playbook, then the question is, how do we behave? And the reason why I like that question is it puts us in a place of remembering your key values. And I like to put three in there. So for us, we have our nine pillars. But on the playbook, when it said, ask, how do we behave? We say we behave with humility, gratitude, and personal honesty and responsibility. Because what we've recognized over the years is if you don't have those three, you're going to really struggle in the organization. And we hire and fire a lot off of that, those three pillars. And so putting that out there and really saying, okay, how do we behave? What are the expectations of the team from a culture standpoint? And then the question is, what do we do? And I know that sounds like such a simple question, and it's easy for leaders to think it's so obvious to the team, but you would be really surprised when you map that out, how many different answers you come up with. And so the question is, as a whole, entire team, like an entire organization, you know, what do we do? What is it that we really do that's meaningful? And then how will we succeed? So when we ask that question of how will we succeed, you're really letting the team know what winning looks like. So for us, in our playbook, we support entrepreneur, doctors, and yes, we're excited about our patients, we're excited about our staff, but ultimately, without doctors, we realize we can't move forward and progress and provide the health care needed. Right. And we give the example of, you know, if a doctor isn't in the office, but a practice manager is there, with all the staff and the facilities up and running, there's patients, what happens, it still shuts down at the end of the day, because YouTube, you know, cannot compensate for a clinician. So we look at that and go, okay, ultimately, when we succeed, when we are able to get entrepreneur dentists to join our organization and they're motivated to grow and they feel that support. But every company may be different on how they think about, you know, what they need to do to succeed, and then what's most important right now? And that's a big question. And that's the thing that I think people struggle with identifying. When you struggle with identifying it, it leads back to the chaotic environment that we're trying to avoid when faced with this question. With the Playbook, Vashti created a platform called the predictable platform that shows what questions we need to consider when we're talking about what's important right now. So what we do in that stage, whenever we're creating this vision and we're creating this, our playbook, is we start brainstorming on every project that we think is possible in order to take us from the results, or, sorry, from chaos to amazing results. And we realized that after doing this quite a few times and iterating with different departments, that there's this predictable platform piece that we could look at that really starts to say, in actuality, every project probably fits under these categories. So we have vision, org chart, recruiting and onboarding, technology and reporting, patient flow and acquisition, growth map and planning. And this is for the clinical mindset. But we looked at that and we said, okay, every story is probably going to fit underneath there. So with our Playbook, we begin to brainstorm on what are all the ideas that we could have, and then we begin to organize those ideas in those categories, because those categories help us think and remember. Oh, yeah, is there any technology that we're missing in order to bring this, you know, bring these ideas to pass? Is there anything else that we're missing in order for us to really create a platform that's scalable? So when we do the Playbook, that's. That's what we refer back to.

Okay, so you go through these questions, and this last question, what's most important right now becomes like, Once you get those other ones behind you, it lays a foundation. But then when you get to this question, what's most important right now, that's where you end up spending a lot of time iterating and back and forth because your predictable platform has these questions in it, and it just drives a lot of discussion around, hey, what can we do to improve and grow the business? And you know, one of the things that comes to mind as you were talking is Emmett is really big on his dope process, which is document and then organize. And so it's. It's almost like once you get to this, what's most important right now, it's where you start to document and then you even start to organize it into these, these different, I can't remember what you called them under the predictable platform, all those different groupings. What did you have a better term than that?

Oh, that's a great one.

Okay, we're going to call them, we'll call them groupings. Great. So you organize. And the reason why you're going through that whole effort, it's not just to come up with a big list. It's actually to then be able to look at the list and start to prioritize what's going to bring the most value to your customers first and what's the most important to your vision and your organization for how you want to serve your customers. Does that sound right? Have I restated that?

Well, yes. That's awesome.

Okay, so then as you get to this point, then comes, I think, well, this is the other thing I wanted to say. So a lot of entrepreneurs that I know, they feel frustrated that when they have ideas or their team has ideas that they don't have anywhere to capture them. They don't even necessarily need them to happen today, tomorrow, or even this year or next year. And so I think that this creates the playbook, creates this really amazingly safe and helpful place for entrepreneurs to make sure they're getting all their ideas down and getting them documented. And at the end of the day, if some of those things aren't getting done, it's because the team and the organization has decided that other things just have a higher priority. But they're not getting lost, they're still there, and they're still going to be part of the company at some point down the road, and they're great ideas. And the other thing is, sometimes some of these great brainstorm ideas end up getting killed 12 months down the road. You're like, yeah, totally irrelevant, even have a place here. And so you can kind of kill or keep propping up the ones that are next in line to get value. So anyways, coming back around, I just wanted to share those couple of thoughts because that's what it stirred for me. And I think that from it's documenting, organizing. So can you jump toward then this process of as these potential projects and initiatives start to take fold, start stepping us into this prioritization. So you've got this big list, you got all these interesting things. There's a lot of opinions in the room, potentially about which ones are good or better or best. How do you take that on, and how does your predictable platform kind of help through that process?

So we have what we call, I think it's our magic eight. Sometimes it goes between seven, eight, nine, but we have this magic list, and I really focus on the first four. So when we go into prioritization, the first thing we're going to look at, we look at all of these different projects and they're in these nice little categories. You know, it's under tech, it's under onboarding, it's under this is we're going to look at the clinical side first, and we're going to say, do we have clinicians that are engaged in this idea? And the reason why we want to understand that is because if clinical is happy, because there are, remember in our playbook, we go back and say entrepreneur, dentist, you know, how we get where we want to go and who we need to serve, then we look at that and go, okay, if the dentist is excited about it, we feel like we can get a lot of momentum as long as the patient is also available. So we start looking at our constraints and we look at our dentist first, and we look at our stories and go, okay, which ones are going to serve clinical and are most important to our clinical customer, that has more weight to it initially, as far as organizing our stories, as what are the clinicians going to engage in?

So you go through this first pass as you get all these great ideas built out. And so you're starting to organize a playbook. But your prioritization, it starts by running it through this filter of clinical engagement, excitement. How are they going to respond? Or how have they responded? And how do you go about that? Do you call some of them and say, hey, here's what we're thinking, or are they the ones that actually generate the ideas? How, you know, say some of our listeners have five or ten associates working for them. How do they, you know, gauge the interest or the excitement level for some of the ideas and projects for growth and improvement.

One of the things that we really look at is the clinical leadership team being excited about it, because typically they understand what the clinicians want or need and can get that buy in if they're bought into it. So it really helps to have the clinical leadership there. And I've been in operations, I've been in marketing a long time, and it's been interesting because when asked the question, what clinicians want, I know the answer. I don't always like it. So there's a discipline of being able to say clinical. Out of all my customers, my four customers, right, clinicals first, what do they want? What are they excited about, and how can I support them? Now, you might end up prioritizing it different, but you want to start with what do they need first? Because if you jump over to what the staff wants or what the patients want, you're going to start spending marketing dollars and staff development dollars, and you're going to run up against a clinician that either won't see that patient or won't engage with the platform and so, or won't engage with the staff that's engaged in the platform, and so it ends up stopping anyway. So it's best to start with the clinical team. So that's where we go.

And so for somebody who's running a smaller organization with just say a few associates or one or two associates, their clinical leadership team would be literally just having a conversation with them and saying, hey, what would help you or would this help you? Would you get excited about this or more about this versus this? And then the bigger you get, then you end up having to have some type of a committee or leadership group that you select out of your group of associates and have them serve in this capacity, and then they sort of represent the group. So now you're not having a conversation with 25 different doctors or however many associates you may have. You've got a group that you think represents them. And ultimately, if they get excited about it and then they explain it to their peers, their peers are going to get excited and see the value of what you're trying to push forward. Is that a fair way to describe how that works with the leadership, Clinical leadership?

Yes. And I think another way to do it too is to, if your brains are in this and you're writing everything down, understanding what impacts clinicians the most or serves them the most, and putting that list together and handing it to them and saying, we want to capture this is our goal, this is our vision for this Year. This is what we're excited about and we think that this would help get there. Does this help you? So I just got done with the meeting introducing the playbook. It wasn't that they had to be there in all the details, but we wanted to ask them, does this serve the need? Do you guys feel like that this will give you momentum to get to this NDP level? And they ended up having great conversations and questions about it, which helps us improve that playbook. But you can initially up front, go and set the path and then you always have to make room for that path to get feedback, right? Yep.

So then we've got these filters we're running through. So we've got the clinical and the patient filters. Like for example, if a doctor says, boy, I am so excited to do, you know, to try to do same day crowns and to purchase the equipment required to do that. But if they only see children all day long who they're. When a crown need exists, it's being handled with a stainless steel crown, then. So you've got to look at what the clinicians are engaged in, but then also what makes sense from a patient perspective. And then there are two more filters that you're running this through. Can you walk us through those, maybe in a little more detail?

Sure. The next one that we run through is facilities, because projects and implementations can actually stop with facilities, which is not something that we've always considered. And so we went to roll something out, we realized we might have missed that first. And that can actually slow you down very quickly. And so facilities comes before staff. And that's why it's because we got a clinician that's excited, we have patients who need it. We then might have a facility that can't support it. And the good news with that is that then that item can actually be handed over to Biz Dev and say, hey, we have demand, we have buy in, we need to modify this facility, expand it, or create sort of a plan to service these patients, maybe build another location nearby or whatever. And that helps you understand that may not be on your playbook this year, but that can be punted to the next year's playbook. So that's why these constraints, we call them the Magic 8, because it really does help us not get too far into our ideas without making sure that we've considered how this would be implemented. So if we have vision we're excited about, but we can't implement it because we didn't consider the facility, you begin to lose trust with your teams and Create chaos.

Yeah, that's a great point. And so it's really fascinating. So as you're going through this list, then you're identifying where there may or may not be constraints. And for example, if the clinicians are excited, like, okay, not much constraint there. I mean, maybe they need to get some training or they need those different things, but all easy. But then when you hit a constraint that you stick on, sometimes you don't even give up on those and you say, hey, that could be something for the future, because maybe we want to move the practice to a new location with more square footage and now we can accommodate that new service or that new offering that's going to come, or you might anyways. There's all kinds of. Maybe you rent a small satellite office where you could fulfill that one thing and it bring great value and great momentum to everybody. So that's really interesting. And all of a sudden now it's a priority to say, hey, that's not going to be on this year's playbook, but let's make sure it's on the list for us to discuss for next year, and we can have our team start to do some analysis of what would the cost be and is this all going to be worth it? You know, once we get to the point of saying, let's get this added to a playbook, is that a fair way to characterize that?

Yeah, that's great.

Awesome. Okay, so we got clinical patient facilities, and then this fourth filter that it goes through is staff. Is that correct?

Yes.

Okay, can you walk us through then what your thought process is there and how you think that, think that about, or think about that?

The question is, this point is, does this enhance the staff experience? Does this make them better? Now, sometimes it's not applicable. Right. But the goal is that we make the staff experience better. Also, what capabilities would they need to have in order to support this and what structures there around staffing now that may need to shift or change? So I really do like to focus on the top four, because typically if a project hits a constraint there, we're not going to move on to the technology and all that. And compliance is always considered, you know, as like a foundational piece. Yeah, but the. But the. But as we look at those four, we can clearly say, hey, if we're going to support. And it's doable on those four, this is a strong story. And when you get more into playbook, and this is later on, you start to do ROI calculations on every project. But initially up front, you really Just want to consider, you know, what are we excited about, what's possible and who can we serve and what constraints should we actually be considering in this brainstorm while we develop this list that just helps with the prioritization. And again, it's to be modified, but it gets you a really good draft.

Awesome. So now we've gone through this concept of like the questions, the predictable platform which is asking all these questions. We're documenting, we're organizing and now we're starting to get some level of prioritization based on going through these, I'm calling them filters or potential constraints, which is clinical and patient facility staff, and then so on. So now how do we get, as you go through this now, how do you end up with this playbook that you said? The purpose here is to give transparency to the organization, let everybody know where we're going, what they should be working on, what matters the most and how we're winning and succeeding. How do you get this organized into a playbook? Because I realize some people could stall out here because there's a lot of information and there's a lot of research and discussion. But how do you, like, how do you close this into that nice, clean, tight playbook of here's our initiatives and this is what we're doing this year.

So one of the things that we work on is we organize and prioritize. We want to make sure that our stories are epics and that's a hard thing to get to where there at least like takes a year to get there. So we want to make sure we're thinking big. But even if we're not, it's okay. You can have more items on your playbook if there are more projects versus, you know, year long epics. And it's okay to start there. But the next part that you do is you ask yourself who does what. And that's an exciting part because you're looking at your initiatives and you start assigning your team members who's going to own this, who's going to make sure that there's results happening, whether it's by department, but usually there's an individual that's assigned and then they'll have their support team. So it doesn't mean who does this impact and only that person holds that story because typically you're going to hit every department, especially if your stories are big enough. But it's who's going to at the end of the day, lead through that and own that end result and make sure that it's successful. And this is a fun thing to do with your team because now all of a sudden, they know what part they're going to play in the big picture, and that's the energizing side and the engagement side that starts to go up because they're going, okay, that's really neat. I know how I'm a part of this playbook. I know how I know what my role is. And also I feel valued because I've been assigned responsibility. And this is a big, you know, exciting thing to do. And it's not as, like, how many things you're assigned, but it's what are you good at and where can you make the biggest impact? And now it's called out at a project level or an epic level.

Yeah. So, yeah, there's something interesting in that. I think there's a call out here, and that is if you find that what you've talked through here, you've got these different initiatives, and you can assign it to one person and they can go and do it, get it done, and not have to collaborate or work with anybody else or get support from any other teams. It probably isn't really an initiative. It's more like a task, something easy, like, hey, we need to just paint this one wall a different color and done versus something that's more complex. So that's one call out. This isn't for organizing just basic tasks. This is for key, complex initiatives that are going to ultimately have real, tangible, huge value that come through. So then as you, as you start to answer that question, so who does what in terms of that initiative? What are the remaining steps to get this built out into the playbook and get the team aligned?

So you assign who does what, and then for the more detailed people that want to line out the projects and line out the task, you can let them put in all these sub items. So we use a platform called Monday.com but you can do this on Google Sheets or anywhere where you have now your major story. You have this assigned, and then everybody's thinking through, especially if you're more detailed, you're going to want to write down, what does that mean? What do I have to do? What projects are going to follow this? And then you have your playbook. Right. So you bring that all together, we bring it in a PowerPoint, we have our graphics designer add some components to it, and it starts becoming this document that really starts to lead the company, that executives, project managers, directors, anybody can look at and present on, which is exciting because they all know the message. So you're not relying on one person understanding the vision. Everybody has a vision and everybody's supporting.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. It really ends up accomplishing this whole concept where everybody in the boat or in our company is, you know, rowing the same direction and in the same pace and cadence, and we're just, like, humming along as opposed to a lot of the inefficiency that can come from chaos. So I think that's why ultimately you've named this whole process going from chaos to amazing results is the chaos dissipates because there's just so much clearer and everybody knows exactly what they're doing. And if there's any hiccup, there are. There's a mechanism because of this whole who does what. There's a mechanism to get everybody back rowing the same direction, you know, very quickly and not leave people wondering or struggling to figure things out. I love it. I. Jodi, this has been awesome. I think we're out of time. There's two last steps in this process once the playbook is done and organized. So would you take a minute and just give a teaser to our listeners about what the last two pieces are? And we're going to. We're just going to have to do this again next week and kind of wrap up the entire series around how to go from chaos to amazing results. So the last two that we'll cover next time will be we're talking about

the cadence of accountability and then the cadence of celebration. So the cadence of accountability really is what is the structure that you put behind your vision and your initiatives, your playbook that allows you to get amazing results? And when we say accountability, we're really talking about empowering team members to take ownership and to solve the problems and to implement. And so empowerment of your teams, and then really looking back and celebrating that publicly as a company, recognizing what's happening, recognizing the efforts. And that really is a formula. You can't just hope that happens. I've tried it. It doesn't work. So you've really got to make sure that you have a formula around those two things.

Yeah, that's powerful. So before we wrap up, I want to just do one endorsement around this concept of the playbook. When I was growing up, I played football, and the older I got, the more intense and sophisticated the scheming and the plays. And the ultimate playbook was. And coaches would watch game films all weekend long and build out what the game plan was going to be for this next thing. They'd watch films of the team. We were going to Play. And then we would go through repetition after repetition. And I remember I would even all through high school, during football season, I never even ate lunch with my friends because I was in watching game film and watching that team we were going to play. And understanding. And ultimately you develop this playbook that you are going to execute on when you go to, you know, the Friday night game. And that repeats itself, you know, because each. Each competitor in this instance is there. The value of. And the comparison or the analogy that I draw over into running a group dental practice is from a leadership perspective. What this does is it simplifies down decision making. So you're not making hundreds or thousands of decisions a day. What should I do with this? What should I do with. What should I do with this? It's a very clear, hey, what's our number one priority in the company? If we're done with that, then what's number two? What's number three? And then for each individual employee, they can know what the number one priority is. And if that comes on their desk, we tell them the first thing you work on is if it is, you have to organize based on our playbook priorities. And then if you. Once you. All the playbook priorities are off your desk for the day, then you can go work on some of your other daily, you know, those kind of things. And I just remember there was one time, very tight game, one second left on the clock, and we had one play left to run, and we had to score in order to win the game. We were behind, and if we scored, we would have won. And I just remember this process where my coach would come over the sideline, and in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? How are they going to call this play? And my coach just calmly, coolly, he went down through the playbook, and he had already made the decision about what play we were going to run to win the football game. If we were in this situation, knowing them, knowing the competitor, knowing what the constraints were, really the competitor is just the constraints we have to rolling out our vision and our initiatives. So I just, I get a lot of energy around thinking about the playbook and how that level of detail and organization can create so much clarity and reduce so much noise and ultimately this whole concept of chaos, reduce it down to, hey, everybody's just aligned and driving the amazing results. So, Jodi, I just have to, you know, thank you again. Thank you for being on the show. It's been a pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much. I love being here, so appreciate it.

All right, and now going into OR for the listeners, the last and final episode. With the playbook in hand, Jody's going to walk us through these two elements of cadence, which is how do you drive the cadence of accountability and then what is your cadence for celebrating the wins and the milestone achievements and all of those things along the way. So hopefully you will engage in that next episode when it comes along. Feel free to ask any questions over at DSO Secrets. We have got a great platform there, the Facebook group. Great platform to ask questions, engage and share back and forth. Jody and I are both there as well as others I am sure will have lots of opinions on this. And until next time, as Emma always says, keep smiling.

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