Ep 35 How To NEVER Hire Another Nightmare Employee

Hey everybody, Matt Scologli, and today on our weekly podcast, I want to talk to you about employees, and I want to talk to you about how to make sure you never ever hire another nightmare employee again. My name is Matt Scologli. I'm the host of the Practice Profit System. I am your guide on everything about how to grow to a 7-figure medical practice and beyond. If you'd like to get some free resources, you can check us out at srpmedicalmarketing.com. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com. Now, let's talk about employees. So we just finished up a 2-day mastermind with everybody in our private client group. So to kind of give you a background, everybody in private client group, they pay a minimum of $24,000 a year to be able to work with me one-on-one. Some pay a little bit more depending on my level of involvement. And I keep that group right at about 15 people. But the most important thing is, is that It's really a great group because of the fact we are built around a couple of common values. And these common values come out every single time that we meet. We meet a couple times a year. We meet every single month online. This time we did kind of a blend of live and on Zoom. And really what we're doing each and every single time we meet is that we are digging deep into everyone's business. Now, the interesting thing is that I can pretty much tell where people are going to be and have kind of a sense of what the topic is going to be. But one of the big issues that we talked about was employees and staffing. Well, you know, if you're watching this or you're listening to this podcast, you know how challenging it can be to hire people these days. And it's certainly of hiring systems. And in the future, I'm going to bring on— hopefully Nancy Schlesinger will talk about her hiring system. She's one of the best that I know. But what I'm going to give you today is I want to give you something that is going to be foolproof that you can use not only with hiring your employees, new future employees, how to actually re-educate and reculturize your existing employees, and how to make sure that you have the best act— best patients possible coming into your practice. So it comes down to 2 very specific things. And the first thing is the vision of your organization, and the second thing is the value. Now, when we get together with my doctors, we have what's called a one-page plan, and they basically plan out their entire next quarter in this one page. And in that, we always start with what's your vision, what are your values. Now, I'm not going to talk about vision today, but I'm going to talk to you about values. And what's even more important, and I got this from my longtime mentor Rob Berkeley, who unfortunately passed away a number of years ago. But I always like to give credit where credit is due. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story here. So I was running my practices and we were growing like crazy and we ran into a buzzsaw. All of a sudden we were hiring like crazy and people just weren't meshing and gelling. And Rob had me go through a process of creating values for my organization. Now values aren't these big long statements. They are one word, okay? And this— these one words, we then defined what they meant for our organization, and then I taught them to our team. And that took a little bit of time, but everything we did was built around those values. So in my clinics, our values were reliability, accuracy, teamwork, and enthusiasm. Everything that we did was based on those values. How we solved a patient problem, how we dealt with an angry patient, how we dealt with staff, if they showed up or didn't show up or didn't do their job, everything was based on those values. So we're sitting in the mastermind in this, I'm taking people through the values worksheet. And I also have this other process called the values oil change. Now the values oil change comes down to 5 very simple questions. And I'm gonna reveal those questions to you, a couple of those questions to you in just a moment. I'm not gonna share the entire values oil change with you, but I'll share some of it with you so you can understand it. I'll share that with you in just a minute. But first, I think it's important that you understand a couple of things about my values and the values of my organization. So there are 2, there's actually 5 values to my organization. Okay. 2 of them are, are like above and beyond for when it comes to me to like picking people to work with. You'll notice that I said choosing who I'm going to work with. Okay, so all of my doctors possess these 2 values. If they don't possess these 2 values, they don't, they don't get invited to work with me. Okay. And the second thing is all of my staff, everybody in my team has these 2 values. You ready for these 2 values? So these 2 values are grit, G-R-I-T, grit, and the other is humility. Okay, now let's start with humility. Humility is not meaning that we're like, woe is me, I'm not worthy. That's not— we're not talking the Eeyore process. We are talking about someone who realizes they don't have all the answers. Okay. Now, the interesting thing is this is not a trait that I naturally possess. I actually am not a very humble person. In fact, sometimes— okay, a lot more than sometimes— I think I know all the answers. Okay. I read a lot. I study a lot. I push myself. I just think sometimes I just have all the answers. I don't possess naturally a lot of humility. humility. And the reality is, is sometimes that's hurt the growth of my companies and my own personal growth and sometimes relationships as well. So I decided to put humility into the values of my organization, SRP Medical Marketing. Now, why would I put that in? Well, it comes back to, catch this, my vision. So my vision for my organization is that our vision and our mission is to help 100 medical practices scale to 7 figures a year by the end of 2023. Okay, it's a pretty big mission. It's a pretty big vision. On top of that, part of my vision too is to not have an office. I use independent contractors. I use international staffing. I use a lot of VAs, a lot of people in places like Jamaica and Venezuela and Nigeria and the Philippines and all of that. Okay, and the reason why is the vision of my organization is to allow Katie and I— Katie's my partner— for us to be able to live wherever we want to live. Now, I'm not talking about surfing in Nicaragua. Okay. We're talking about going to the beach or playing golf. I want to be able to— I enjoy playing golf. I enjoy going to the beach or even to the mountains. We want to be able to have a lot more flexibility. At the time of this recording, I'm in my early 50s. You know, my kids are almost pretty much gone. I have one left. She— her kids are gone. So, you know, for us, it's— I don't want to have to have a place that I've got to go into every single day. I can run my organization just via Zoom, something like this. So in order to do that, I can't make all the decisions. I never should be making all the decisions, but in this environment, I really can't make all the decisions. So I have to be incredibly humble to realize I don't have all the answers. I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm really good at doing. I'm really good at teaching. I'm really good at coaching. I'm really good at those kind of things. I'm good at this kind of thing. I'm great at coming up with systems and things like that to help people grow their practices. But a lot of the other stuff, I'm just not that good at. And so I had to have the humility, not the understanding, but the humility to understand there are people who are much more skilled and talented and to let them do that. Okay? So humility is, it's not about a woe is me. It's about understanding that we don't have all the answers. The second part of humility has to do with all feedback is just data. In the Four Agreements, the first agreement that you make with yourself is that you don't take things personally. If you know me, you know I take things personally a lot. So I'm sure some psychotherapist somewhere would have a field day with that. But the reality is, is that, is that this is an important component. This is an important part Of the values of our organization is the humility. Now I want to go to this second one that I mentioned: grit, G-R-I-T. Now humility and grit may not seem to go together, but they mesh together perfectly. So grit—if you—if I were to spin my camera around, you would see I have a sign in my office that says grit, and it's about perseverance. Grit to me is about perseverance, and I look for people. to hire in my organization who have grit. I look for people who have overcome. I want the overcomer. Okay? I want the person who has faced the odds and who has stared down whatever they stare down, and they have made it through. And they, they take on insurmountable battles and they fight And they have what I— what my friend Tim Winters used to call the smoke of battle on them. They are the drill sergeant in the Marines who has been shot at in the foxhole, not the one who has read about it in a book. If you look at my team, actually, you'll find that a large portion of my team are a little bit older and a little bit more seasoned. I like people like that. I like people that have been through the battles. I like the people that have a fight to them. Okay? And this was the same in my practices. The best people that worked for me were people who had overcome, right? People who had fought through the challenges. So what has this got to do with making sure that you never have another nightmare hire? Well, frankly, it has everything to do with it. You see, when I was running the organization, when I was running my practices, this— even though grit wasn't one of my values, the reality was that underneath it, it was. Okay. And I didn't, I didn't know that at the time, but I was actually looking for a type of person who had this grit, who had this— they weren't going to play victim. They weren't going to be the type of person that, you know, felt that if things weren't going their way, it wasn't their fault. I wanted people that would take ownership. And so when we were talking about these values, we did a part, a thing called values oil change. Now, the values oil change is 5 questions. I'm just going to reveal 2 of them to you right now. So we ask the question of all of our people in our, in our mastermind, in our private client group, based on the values of your organization, what is going well? Based on the values of your organization, what is not going well? Okay. Now, this became a really key point for people to unpack. They started realizing that if they compromised on their values, they compromised on their practice. And they started to realize, well, hold on a second, this staff member isn't really truly living the values. Every decision that you make in your organization has to be based on these vision and values. This is the foundation. This decides This is how you judge and evaluate vendors. This is how you evaluate lead gen companies. This is how you choose them. You don't tell them our values are grit and humility and fun and learning and all of that. You don't tell them that. You look for clues and signs that reveal that. You don't tell a prospective employee that these are your values. You look for clues and for hints that will tell you that they possess these things. Because when you have people that have your matching values, then it's easier to bring them back on course with your organization than it is to try and instill these into them from the organization. So they have to have these. You see, nightmare employees, they want to run the show or think that they know better. Well, in my organization, that's not exhibiting humility. And they would never ever last if they got hired. That's assuming they got hired. They probably wouldn't make it through the interview process. Your organization has to be in sync. There has to be one way to do things, and it's got to be your organization's way—not Judy's way, not Frankie's way, not Carol's way. There has to be one way and one way only. These values, as you work on these, will generally come from the things that are most important to you. Especially in a startup or if you have just a couple of employees, I'm not so sure it makes sense for you to get consensus or build buy-in. I think there is a time and a place where you have to say, this is what we stand for. This is who we are. Okay. Now, a couple of things on this. I want to make sure that you understand I'm not talking about, oh, you know, we're all inclusive and all of that. I'm not talking about that. While that's important for many, many organizations and a lot of people talk about that, you have to realize that your employees, your staff are going to look to make sure that you are living these values first. I'm not talking about long-winded statements. You'll notice fun, learning, humility, grit. Okay, these are the values of my organization, which leads me to this last bit. I'll go over a little bit, 15 minutes. Here's what else is interesting. These are also the values of the people who are in private client group. It is very rare that somebody makes it into private client group, that they do not exhibit the values of my organization. And if they don't exhibit those, over time they weed themselves out or we ask them to leave. Okay. One of— and I look for, I look for doctors that are humble. I look for doctors that realize they don't have all the answers. This has served me incredibly well. And this is a lesson for you with regards to your clients. I look for clients that match my values. If I have a client who doesn't have humility, they're not going to really— they're not going to want to hear what I have to say, and they're not going to follow the systems. Because I know that if you follow the systems in what I do, you'll be successful. If you want to redo the systems before you try them out, you're probably not going to be as successful. Same thing with a patient with you, right? You have a process and a system of how to make them feel better. If they decide not to follow it, if they don't have the humility to follow it, then they probably aren't gonna get the results. So you can see how these values intertwine with everything that you do. I'm gonna leave you with this final thought, and I'll also have a very special announcement here in just a moment, but I'm gonna leave you with this final thought. And that is the values of the organization are going to be everything that you do. Every decision that you make is going to be based on the values of your organization. So with that, I hope you have a wonderful day. I have a special announcement that I want to let you know is that I will be hosting a free event in Charlotte, North Carolina, About how to grow to a 7-figure medical practice. Yeah, you heard me right. I'm gonna be doing a free event. It'll be 2 days. It'll be a Saturday and Sunday. Details will be coming up. It'll be October 23rd to 24th, 23rd to 24th, but there will be information coming out on that. All right, that's all I have for today. Have a great day, everyone. Talk to you soon.