From Promise-Making to Promise-Keeping: Why Great Ops Starts with the Customer Journey with Julie Hamada

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com and powered by the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. And today my guest is Julie Hamada. She's the Chief Operating Officer at Monarch Dentistry in— now I forget the city in Canada, but we'll get to there. Julie.

Go ahead. Toronto.

Toronto. Okay. Julie brings a perspective we do not hear often enough in operations conversations. She came into operations through marketing, and that background still shapes how she leads today. She thinks deeply about customer psychology, retention, the full customer journey, and the gap that often exists between the promise marketing makes and the experience operations actually delivers. I love that. In this episode, we explore what ops leaders can learn from marketing, why retention is still undervalued, agreed, how customer experience and operational design are tightly connected, and why some of the best leadership conversations happen when you stop staring at the numbers for a moment and just talk. Julie, welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

I was glad to have you. And I'm sorry, I thought it was Toronto in my head and I was like, wait a minute. I know so many people now from Vancouver, you know, like those are very different. Can I get my—

Yeah, no, no, we're in Toronto. I, the, like the clinics we have are all over the GTA, um, but we're based in Toronto.

Got it. Okay. Well, why don't we start with, maybe walk us through, I did touch on highlights of your career that you went through marketing to get into a COO role, but could you walk through maybe a little more detail and, um, Kind of what are some of the key points and transitions that led you to the COO role?

For sure. So I started my journey in marketing. I loved the people aspect of marketing, obviously the creativity as well, but just, I was really passionate about understanding the customers, what motivates them, you know, how to get, how to communicate value to people to get them to be interested in a specific product or service or whatnot. And as I was going through my marketing journey, I realized the gap, uh, operations and marketing were not always aligning. And a lot of the times, you know, the, as marketers, we create the campaigns, we put all the money and the effort in it and months and months over, uh, working on through the campaigns and launching the campaigns. And then when it comes to execution, you have, you know, the customer goes in and we hear a different experience. And that was just heartbreaking because of the amount of work. And so, I always wanted to understand because that part of the business is not always visible. So, the moment the customer walks into the door, how are we now starting as marketers? How are we tracking what that experience looks like? We can perhaps map it, but to actually have control over it is now into the operations arm.

Yeah. And when you say walking in the door, you're like literally walking through the door for you, right?

Yes. Yes, literally. It'd be people walking through the door and it's, if you're not delivering on, you know, what was communicated through the marketing, or if the staff there or the employees are not aware of what we're Kind of the messages we're sending out to marketing, through marketing, there's a gap that we destroyed the customer experience and now we've, you know, we've acquired a patient or a customer that's going to come in once and might not come back again because of the flow of their journey and the experience that they had. And so, I wanted to understand what happens. What happens? Why is it, you know, instead of arguing with the ops team, you know, and like, oh, you overpromised or you did this and we weren't ready to launch. And there was a lot of these conversations where it's like, you know, it's us versus them where it really should be just one team. And, but because there's 2 different departments, you do start having that conversations where it's like, no, You did this on our side and we did this on your side. So, I really wanted to understand and I wanted to be part of that process of saying, I want to make sure, I want to be the person that makes sure the patient is getting the experience we promise because that's what matters. That's high-value retention capabilities there, which is way more, it's easier long-term for growth.

Right.

Retention will result in long-term growth, whereas acquisition will keep the business going and that keeps the momentum going, but retention is where the real growth is. And so I wanted to understand that process better and I got involved a lot in with the operations team. So I was, you know, hands-on and I wanted to go in when we launched campaigns. I was in those, I was in the food industry, so I was in those restaurants. Doesn't matter how far away. I'd go to the busiest restaurants and I'd try to see what is happening. How are they talking to the customer? You know, where are the missing links at? And so that was really eye-opening because I saw also the deficiencies that there were in the operations of how, you know, our messaging and our vision as a company and where there were things missing. And I thought, I'm like, I want to fix this. I want to be part of fixing this. And so That's how I slowly started getting into operations and I started enjoying it and managing the operations team became easy because I understood people and operations is people dealing with people every day. So my approach when I came to operations, it wasn't just like, this is a process, this is our system, this is how it's going to go. It was me talking and getting feedback from them. And, you know, operators would look at me and they're like, no, that's just how we do it. And I'm like, okay, but I want to know what they feel about it. How did they think about it? Like, I want to use that feedback loop that we use in marketing to actually fix our systems and process and relaunch campaigns or do better campaigns the next time around. And so when I started applying that, me implementing processes and system in the operation realm started becoming more successful and when people were like, what are you doing that's different? Talking to people.

It's funny how I remember I had somebody work for me who had come from a military background. He, I, he was transferred to my team, came from a military background leader and came to me one time with a problem and asked me what to do. Like he wanted orders basically, right? And I was like, But you know this better than me. Like, I wanted to, like, he knew better. And I think people underestimate, like, those people who are the feet on the ground, you know, that they can provide, they know what's going on and they just wanna be heard.

It's, their feedback is everything. And just, it's funny, earlier today I had a meeting, a Women of Influence event where we had different leaderships and we were talking about You know, how do you lead people? And I mentioned that. I said, talking to people, understanding the why, understanding what's really happening, where are the challenges, where are the bottlenecks? Because that's where marketing takes a big hit too, where there's a bottleneck, right? It's like somewhere across this customer journey, somewhere across in those steps or in those department handoffs, something goes wrong. And You can't know from sitting in an office. You can't know what went wrong. You gotta either be at the front end or talk to people in the front end and try to understand where, where something went wrong. And until those fixes are done, then it's an organic feedback loop. Like it's marketing will be more successful if those things are fixed. And if those, and, and then if those things are fixed, The marketing improves naturally internally from the retention point of view, and then you've got this organic growth. And so, and it genuinely has worked. It's, I used a lot of my, you know, understanding people's psychology, knowing things in the world. As marketers, we have to be aware of what's happening in the world, you know, what's trending, what is, what's the in now, you know, what even politics, what's happening politically, economically, because that all impacts our campaigns, how we deliver messages.

Yeah.

Who do we target? And so, I actually use that, but with employees that I oversee, right? I mean, we have over 200 employees and I say, okay, gas prices the last few days has gone drastically up. The morale, there's a lot going on in the world. There's this feeling of insecurity for some people. What's happening next? There's the uncertainty. And how is that going to impact the morale of my staff? Do I want to be coming down hard on them on numbers now, or do I use this as an opportunity to gain their trust and say, hey, listen, let's address the elephant in the room. I know things are tough. I know gas prices have gone up. I know these things are happening. I want us to work together and I want us to work this way to overcome this time and be there for each other. And that's something I did take from marketing because we have to understand demographics. We have to understand people.

Yeah.

And before delivering those things. And so, Using that in the leadership aspect of operations has worked so well.

It's funny, 'cause that hearkens back, I've probably referred to this dozens of times, but one of our early guests was Brandy Sanders, and she said that to be a good operator, you needed to know how to play chess and to understand human psychology, right? And it's like, isn't that a great analogy?

I love the chess part. Like, the understanding human psychology, I say it all the time, but the chess, That's a really great analogy.

It's interesting. So I want to go back to something you said reminded me of something in my career. This like going, when you said you would go do a campaign, then you would go actually see what happened in the, I'll call it in the field, right? I remember in a consulting job I was doing years ago, completely different context, but we were doing some work for a bulk fulfillment of a pharmacy that was part of a big grocery chain here in Texas. And, um, we could gather all kinds of information. We got feedback from the people in the bulk fulfillment one, but it was amazing how much more, uh, complete the picture was when we actually did site visits to the store. And we went to different kinds of stores, different sizes, different locations. And it was so helpful to get that like actual, like, oh, this is what they're going through. This is a pressure.

Eye-opening.

Yeah, it was.

Yes.

Because you make assumptions, right? We all do. And it was, and, and we were getting, or even if we weren't making assumptions, we were trusting. And it's not that people were not telling the truth, but it's that what they call it, the telephone game, right? Because we were hearing it from someone else's perspective who wasn't living through the day. Um, but just on the total aside, like the way I handle myself at pharmacies has completely changed because those people are Under pressure. Like seriously, like, uh, all kinds of things. Shortages, shrinkage, cause shrinkage when stuff disappears. Yeah.

Even, even my industry right now, the dental industry, we have huge shortage, huge staff shortage. So everyone's overwhelmed. That's, I say that's the most common word I use, I hear every day. I am so overwhelmed. It's becoming such a recurring thing and When you go, I have a rule, at least once a month I have to go to locations and more than one location. Even if I just say hello, you know, put on my runners, walk around, see how the clinic is, see how what I put in papers and in emails, if it's actually translating all the way down because as the chain gets larger, you're having, you're talking to management and then management's talking to leads and then leads are talking to friends. And a lot of the time I find that the messaging at the top is not even actually getting to the bottom correctly. You know, I would deliver a message, and again, similar to marketing, you have the main message that you're trying to get to your audience, and then, you know, it can be misused and completely misunderstood by the time it gets to, you know, it funnels down. And I see that all the time. So You know, I remember thinking when I was in marketing and it was, it was a mid-sized company that I worked with at the time. And they said, you know, you can do that. I met with another company that had thousands of units and they actually brought me in to talk to their marketing team to see what am I doing? Because we did really well.

Sure.

Our marketing was, you know, we had 2, 3 people and our marketing was top-notch. So at the time, the CEO said, I want you to come in and talk to my marketing team because we have like 50 people, how are you doing things differently? And the first thing I said is, how many people here have been to Units? And they said, well, we have thousands of Units. And I was like, but there's, that's actually better because that means there's probably a Units 10, 15 minutes away from your house because we're talking about a huge brand, right?

Yeah.

So have you ever just taken your laptop and gone and worked there? They don't even need to know who you are. Go there and observe what happens. You will come back with so much feedback.

Boy.

And then you look at reviews and then you start piecing the puzzle together and thinking, oh my God, here's, you know, people are not communicating the messages or the product does not look nothing like the images that we've put on, right? I ordered the product and it doesn't look good. And I think I don't care how big a company can be. I do think that people can find the time to go to the front line.

It's huge.

And as leaders, it's important. It's very important. It changes your perspective. And for me, it's always, as I build system, I go back and improve systems as well. And I can only do that by not getting, like you said, assumptions, because numbers tell you What's happening. They don't tell you why it's happening. And I look at numbers every day. Yeah, I look at numbers every day. I'm like, I look at them, they tell me, I know what's happening. I can tell you a full analysis of what's happening, but to know why it's happening, you need to talk to people, observe what's happening, and then come back with that feedback and see where you can improve.

The equivalent of that for people who are listening or watching who are like B2B marketing ops is to do, I've said this a million times too, like go sit with your salespeople, right? Because it's like, if you don't know, you're doing all this work to generate leads and then you go like, why aren't they doing anything? Maybe you need to go spend some time and see what it's like for them when they receive the leads, quote, right? And then what do they actually have to go through? It is, and really the hardest part for someone like me when I started doing that was to just keep my damn mouth shut. You know, like I—

Very, very, or you come off very angry. Like I, I sometimes left like locations, I was so frustrated. And then I tell my boss, I'm like, I hate it because I start seeing so much and I go back with a huge to-do list.

Yeah. So it's, but it's, I mean, if you sit there and you go, 'cause again, if we all like, especially if you're close to something like how these systems work, Um, and you go like, we build all this stuff so they're getting these leads right away. And then, but you don't go like, okay, well they have to go and they have to go open Salesforce and then they have to go find the queue, pick the next one. They have to open it up. They have to change the stat. Like there's all these things they have to do that all seem small, but they all take away a little bit of time.

And they all, uh, and the easiest thing to measure, Michael, is the leads.

Yeah.

That's why people always look into acquisition. It's, it was so easy for me to tell, oh, I got 30 patients. I did my due diligence. And then, you know, where, well, what happened to those patients? I mean, it costs us, I'll give you an example. We have a referral program and we run Google Ads. We have search engine optimization. We run all those sorts of things. And with each clinic, there's different dynamics. So like, You know, depends on the demographics. Sometimes flyers, they work amazingly in certain areas. So people are still, you know, into traditional marketing there. And, you know, I do the flyers, I do the mapping and all this stuff, and it works. It, we get a lot of patients and it's with some clinics it doesn't. And so over time we've come to know, you know, what works where. And we have a referral program that I put together where if you refer a friend, you get a gift card. And then they get a gift card for coming in and it's like $30 gift card. And Google, when I get patients through Google, average acquisition in dentistry is about $150 per patient. In each of my clinics across the board, doesn't matter what demographics it is, on average, I get 30 to 40 patients through the referral. cards, the referral program. And through Google, I get on average 5 to 7, some clinics. The most I've ever gotten was 10 to 12, but that would still cost me more than the referral card. And the referral cards, because it's a referral, those patients are more, I'm more, I have a better chance of retaining those patients because they came in through, you know, the good word and the experience that they have. And so for me, I think a lot of people focus on acquisition and, and, and as marketers we say, okay, you know, we, there's the 30 patients or we got 150 patients and, and not understand the journey of what happens after that, the handoffs and where things could go wrong. I genuinely think that those 2 teams should really just be one team. And, you know, so many people would disagree. I, they do different things, but. They're work— you can't clap with one hand. And operations and marketing are like 2 hands together. They have to meet.

I actually interviewed with a company one time where they were wanting someone who had more of a marketing background to work in, in this case it was support. It was a software company. And I was like, oh, that's actually a really clever idea, right? You should be, every opportunity, like every interaction through support is a potential to build or lose trust with those customers, right? And therefore have an impact on retention. I don't think they ended up doing it, but I thought it was a really interesting idea to embed marketing in, like a marketing-oriented person in that kind of space.

I would actually, the times have been changed, like times have changed so much. And I read something interesting in the last few days and it was, Things are changing where we are introducing AIs and softwares into companies, and a lot of the time job descriptions are not. So, people would've had the same job descriptions for years, and I think for, from, especially from an operations angle, I used to tell them, I want to go and hire marketers as managers too, because I want If you behave a certain way with patients, if I have a patient walk in and they are greeted well and, and feel, you know, one time there was a pa— I, I went into a clinic and a patient walked in and it was an older gentleman. And I got up and I said, hi, how are you? Oh my God, it's very cold today. Why don't you let me take your jacket? 'Cause he was struggling to take his jacket off. And I'm like, let me take your jacket. I'll hang that for you. And And then I put, I hung his jacket. I'm like, have a seat. Would you like some water? We'll be right with you. And then, um, the, you know, everybody's like at the front desk is looking at me. They're like, oh, like, that's nice. I'm like, that's, that's our job.

That's so funny that that is no longer like, that sounds unusual. It's, it's weird to me.

Yes. They were just, their eyes were open and they're looking at me and they're like, I'm like, he's like, oh, but he's like an OT, like, you know, he's like, I'm like, it doesn't matter what industry. I don't care what anything about this person. They walked in. Do you know how hard it is for us to get you people to walk in? Like when people walk in, there's so much work behind the scenes. Marketers are working very hard to ensure people are walking in. And we need very strong people with some sort of marketing knowledge. So all of my managers go through marketing training, every single one of them. In operations, they have one day of their training is marketing. They have marketing weekly calls, um, and monthly updates. And I've actually, the marketing person that I have in charge, I've also trained on how to use our software. Because I'm like, okay, if you see something that if we are getting new patients and then some number's not making sense, I want you to have the ability to go in and check for yourself. That way you'll know what the software is and you know what they go through to, you know, if they didn't make a note on a new patient or whatever, you know how to go in and audit that. So I do, I do a lot of cross-training because it's as simple as this. Brands make promises, operations where the truth is.

Yeah. So you used a phrase when we talked, I wanted to get into that, right? You said, I think it was marketers are promise makers and operations are promise keepers or something like that.

Yes.

I love that.

Yes. Yes. Because that's where, again, marketing is the messaging. It's where the promises are being made to patients or to consumers. And operations is where the real work happens. So again, as a marketer, I can say, well, I did my job. You've got all these new leads now, and it's your job to take it from there, right? Well, take it from there how? Have we created a workflow? Is our training program incorporating marketing? How are they supposed to communicate with the patients? How are we streamlining the process to be continuous? Because patients don't understand that there's a handoff.

Permission?

Patients, and they shouldn't. No, it's a continuous process for them. So you're coming in and, and, and to you it's just all one process. We, the way I look at things, and again, that helped me with operations, is I always look at it as like this touchpoint, this touchpoint. You know, I'm looking at it as a funnel system. I look at it from like a customer journey and I'm like, okay, so patient is in the, in the clinic. How do I want my front desk to greet the patient? How are we communicating with the patient? Do we notify them about the marketing programs? Do we offer them, you know, the cleaning kit, the whitening kit that we have? And so what I realized is there's, yeah, there's that, like, it's a gap because, oh, well, we didn't know we had to give, we can give him a fee whitening. Oh, we didn't know we had to do this. So I said, It's moving forward. It's mandatory that everybody gets trained on marketing and on customer experience, on customer from hygienists. So we had a training for hygienists. How do you greet the patient the moment you go to the front desk when you grab the patient, say, hey, could you please come with me? How, how's that going to look like all the way until they leave your chair and you walk them out to the front? How does that look like? Because that's marketing too.

I'm curious.

That is—

I totally agree on all that, that that's— I'm curious on how, when you go through that process of going like, what is this process going to be like? Do you— I'm going to guess that what you do is you give them sort of general, like, these are the touchpoints. I think I'll use your term, right? Touchpoints or steps in the process. Um, it, but it feels like what, what you're going at is you're doing that. But you're leaving room for personal adaptation to that, right? Like, so, but then you're layering in, you're teaching whether you call it marketing or customer experience to those people so that they know like, here's the process and the flow. Here's how I can—

Yes.

Because every, in this, in your case, right? Truly every client is gonna be unique and different at a different stage going through whatever they need to be able to be flexible about how they interact. So is that, so the process is clear but not rigid? Is that a fair way?

No. Yes, it's not rigid because each clinic actually has a dynamic too. Like each of our clinics, and I allow for that because that's the culture. Like in the industry, you can't, again, you can streamline and create processes, but We can't strip the culture of that clinic away from them. Each clinic has something that works for them. And same thing when it comes to how they deal with patients, right? They know their patients more than I do, right? And sometimes when I go in and I'm like, hey, why don't you say this to the patient? Because I always sit at the front. They don't like it. I'm sure they don't like it. But I like to sit at the front, not only because I want to show them how I would speak to patients and how I would approach things. But I also wanna kind of see what, you know, what's happening in the conversation. And sometimes, you know, I would say like, oh, why didn't you say this patient, like, why didn't you tell this patient this? And then they're like, oh, because, you know, this and this and this. And then, and so I, you know, there, I can't just be like, no, you have to do it this way. I give them a process and I say, If you provide— what I've learned to do is put both on the table in the sense numbers and people. So when we had a hygiene department meeting, I said, if we do everything you're supposed to do in that flow of patients, like what you're supposed to provide as per your college, Yeah. when a patient sits in your chair, if you educate the patient, if you provide the treatment that is required by your college for you to give to this patient, and if you are kind, if you do those 3 things, your numbers will go up.

Yeah.

And that's a guarantee. I don't even need to look at the numbers. I will know that if you do those things. So I'm not asking you to put up, I'm not asking you to increase your numbers. I'm asking you To do your job in the kindest way possible, because nobody wants to be sitting in a dental chair. It's one of the hardest services to sell. Nobody comes in saying, yes, I'm going to the dentist, you know? It's, people are already nervous coming in. People are scared coming in. They don't like to be there. You know, some people are anxious. And so, kindness, yeah, kindness is the best marketing tool.

Yeah.

Internal context.

What's coming through to me is, you know, I guess this goes back to your sort of focus on human psychology a little bit, is it feels like what you're doing is you're building enough structure and setting expectations, um, but building a trust, like a trusting situation. So where, yeah, they know that as long as they're trying to do the right thing within some guidelines, right, they're not going to be— you know, slapped her on the wrist or whatever, but also being open to getting feedback. It sounds like you're open to that too, 'cause it's like, yeah.

Yeah, it's my, that's my strategy. It's always listening to people. So again, when we first started, I was, I had 40 to 50 employees. Now we're at almost 200. And so now I've done it in, departments because I can't, it's more and more people. And again, I'm sure leaders of thousands of people, well, how do you communicate with everybody? But you can kind of structure it. So I do hygiene departments alone. And again, you can always train people to think with the same, to come across with the same mentality and the same values. And if they practice that, then you can trust these people to lead another department and another group of people. So I do quarterly department feedbacks where we don't look at numbers.

I wanted to get to this.

I do not look at numbers. We just have a meeting, a conversation just like this. A lot of the times, of course, with upper management, you have people who are hesitant, more people are quiet. It just takes one person to Speak up. And sometimes I call on the people that I know are more, you know, have more courage to speak. So I'll call on a certain, a hygienist that's been with us for 7 years and I say, hey, how do you feel about this new process that we implemented? How do you like the new software? Tell me how you think about it. Do you have enough time for your appointments? Because it seems like a lot of patients are not getting the education that I would like them to get.

Mm-hmm.

I have walked into ops and just in the middle, I just put my gown and I walk in and they kind of get like rigid. Like, why did she? But I'm like, I wanna see what's happening. And you know, of course behavior could change when I'm in the room, but I say, okay, well, I've been noticing this. Why is that happening? Is it because you don't have enough time with a patient? Are they giving you enough time in the schedule? And then as soon as I said that, people started jumping into the car.

No.

Because we need this long and sometimes we have back-to-back patients and we need to clean the room and we need to do this and we need to do that. And I was like, okay, this is great. And I was making notes and then I had a meeting with the operations team and I said, moving forward, unless we're working, they're working out of 2 ops, I need them to have at least that 5, 10 minutes to clean the rooms and get their, you know, other patients Like the, the other, the room ready for their next patient and procedures and so on. 100%. I'm like, give them that ease when, because if they're working under time pressure, of course they're going to be so focused on getting those logistics done and they're not focusing on the patient. And the moment we strip away that patient care, we're going to get in trouble. We're going to go into patients are not leaving with that good. experience. And then that feedback loop again, it's not a negative one. So, and I did the same thing with assistants and I met with them and I said, how can we make your job better? You know, what would you suggest? What are some of the challenges you guys face on the daily? And some of them said, okay, we don't have enough time, we don't get lunches, or we don't do this sometimes. And I went back to operations and said, okay, when the clinic gets to this capacity, I need to have a temp assistant. That's only gonna sterilize for them so they can just prep the rooms. And that's how I've been improving processes by just having those conversations. And, and we see the numbers within a month, you know, the boss comes and he is like, hygiene numbers are really up. Like, what did, you know, what did we do? And I'm, you know, I'm looking at him and I'm like, well, we had a conversation. He said, you're telling me you talked? And I'm like, yes, we talked, but we also fix things. So we talked, I talked to them, they felt heard. They felt like people are willing to take job cuts, salary cuts sometimes, Michael, just to work in a place where they feel like they've been heard or that people care, right? And I just—

How about I fight back on you? I don't think it's just heard. I think it's heard and then seeing that what you heard actually made a difference.

Yes.

And I think that's key. It's easy to go and say, I want to hear all your feedback, and then just do nothing.

Let it go. No, yeah, when we put it into action, and I get feedback from managers, oh my God, my hygienists are so happy. You should see how they're working. They're giving the toothbrushes. They're doing what they're supposed to do, and they're doing it happy. Like, they are wanting to do it. They don't feel like they have to. They want to do it because I also did— Bring in the perspective of we are here for the patient.

Yes.

If you just give the patient what your college teaches you to do, don't worry about the numbers. The numbers will come. But all I'm asking of you is you have to spend time talking to patients and educating them. And so, when it, when the conversation took out the numbers and we had that open where they were able to share the challenges, and I did address them, And they could see that it was addressed because I actually sent out a memo saying, this is how we're going to do things. And I copied all the hygienists so they know that, hey, they, you know, I was seen and heard. It made a huge difference, an immediate difference in numbers. And so that's why I always say the two have to be on the table together because that's how you get things to, that's how you get the momentum to keep going.

How long have you been doing those quarterly kinds of It's quarterly, right?

Quarterly meetings. So I'm doing them. We've been doing them this year. So this year we started quarterly, but before that, I talked to everybody. So we have WhatsApp groups and I would actually message them like once a week I'll message the group or I say, oh, hey, I've been noticing, I seen it, I know what you're doing. I look at numbers and I talk to— so managers, we have weekly huddles. So, I tell them they have to share wins and challenges and whatnot. And so, managers sometimes will text me and say, my hygienist worked so hard today. She did 1, 2, 3. And so, I would email the hygienist and say, you know what? We're going to do 1, 2, 3 for you. Thank you so much. You've done such a great job. And it would mean the world. Like, it would mean, because they'd email back, oh my God, thank you so much. I didn't know that you knew I did that, and I appreciate it. And sometimes it's like a gift card goes a long way. Um, and I don't even think it's about the gift card. I think to have upper management acknowledge good work as well as, you know, the bad that's happening or things that are not happening correctly.

Yeah. No, it's, yeah, the parent in me is like positive reinforcement always worked better than, you know, negative reinforcement.

Absolutely.

Um, no, and I'm thinking like there are times where I've like, I've done this before as, like I end up working in a big company and working with somebody in another team who maybe I knew that team had maybe a negative reputation about their ability to help teams. And had a great experience with someone. And I would make a point of sending an email to that person's boss telling them like what a great, like how great it was to work with that person. And I think, and I copied the person, right? Like I'm not, but I wanted, I wanted, I wanted the documentation. One, I thought it was deserved, right? It was the right thing to do. That's probably the most important thing. But I also wanted to make sure that it, it got to both of them so that when it came time for reviews or whatever, right, they had a specific thing they could point to.

Yes. And again, marketing teaches us what makes a customer feel good, they will buy into it. It's all related back to feelings. And I think managing people is the same way. It's if they feel good and that they feel valued, appreciated, and same thing with customers, you appreciate and value customers, they come back. Um, you appreciate and value, um, employees, they'll want to work harder for you. Uh, and not because, oh, I get paid. No, no, no. They'll do it because they value the fact that you value those.

Absolutely.

And they appreciate that.

And sometimes there's, they'll even, like brand loyalty implies paying a premium or some sort of, yeah, there's a premium that you're paying. Like you might opt for something that's more expensive or more difficult to get to because you appreciate the, it's not even like maybe a real value. It's like not a dollar, but it's a, like you just get satisfaction or intrinsic value from that interaction.

Yes, for sure. And I think in dentistry that goes such a long way because again, people don't want to come in. So that kindness and that making somebody feel good in a time where they don't feel so good goes such a long way. I've, we had like, had patients get gifts. There's patients who come to managers with food every week. Like they build such beautiful relationships.

Yeah.

And, and, and when I go in and see it, the other day there was some, a patient celebrating their 90th birthday and they were, they were with us since the clinic opened, which was 20 years. And they did a huge birthday party for him. Like, like they got him cake and flowers and balloons at the clinic.

The dentist office?

Yeah, they were, they were liking the cake. I know. And then they were singing for, it was so nice. And I, I, I happened to randomly go to the clinic. I didn't know this was happening. And when I seen it, it was just, it was a moment of realization where it was, okay, these are the things that matter. This is why. This clinic does well.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so, that's so interesting. And I, you know, I, I had this conversation a lot. I actually had one today with somebody about KPIs and, and just sometimes to get a KPI that you ideally want is a huge amount of effort. And in some cases, right. Um, and you may never get there, whereas you can do something that's more like what you're talking about, right? Which is, it's more about, it's a little different in like, this is like what's working, what's not working, like in sales and marketing. I found a lot of luck doing stories, like, so finding, you know, deals that we won and what's the story about how we won together, right? Sales, marketing, whatever, you know, what were the things? And then how can we take that and the lessons we learned there and apply it more generally? So that we continue to be successful. And if I've focused on attribution reporting or, you know, building some really complicated math solution for how to measure it, I don't know that it would have the same impact.

I couldn't agree with you more. Like, it's hard to measure. It's very like, you know, and when, and Sometimes people tell me, you know, how did you achieve these results? Because I look at numbers sometimes and I'm like, wow, wow, you know, that's amazing results. And when I look back, it's like, how did you get to the numbers that you got to there? And when I look back at the process, it was so much of that. Like, you know, when we have a manager's meeting, I say, okay, you're doing so good. Can you get up and just tell us what you're doing?

They probably have to even know what it is. It's just sort of Just, this is what we do.

Yeah. And then, and then one of them was like, I did employee incentives and I have a BAM. I love that. She, that BAM, the BAM effect, she calls it the BAM effect. And then it's like if somebody hits their numbers, they do like a BAM effect where they all stand up and like do like a high five. And, and I was like, that's so, that's not, and it wasn't, uh, like a company-wide because I do give them autonomy. I'm, I tell, I tell them all the time, if you come with an idea that would work for your clinic. By all means, well, let's try it out. Let's try it, see how it works. And so, you know, she's talking about the BAM, and all the managers are making notes, and they're sharing what would work, exactly what you just said, like sharing stories, but they're making notes. And the next meeting, 2 of them were like, oh, we applied the BAM effect, and it worked so well, and the staff are so motivated. And so, I think it's— It's hard to measure that and say, this is how much it improved. But then you look at the numbers and the numbers have improved. And it's interesting. There's a lot of unmeasured value.

That's, I think that's great. That's about as well put as I think I have ever heard it. Well, we're kind of up against time. Maybe end with this last question, which, so we've covered a ton of ground. This has been really, really interesting. I think Um, people are gonna get a lot from this. Is there anything that we hadn't covered that you wanna make sure that like we, we walk away from this, that people heard? Like, I, I mean, I, I have lots more questions, but we don't have time, so.

Um, trying to think. Um, honestly, I think the one message that I want to relay over is listen to people. And the front end, and for operations and marketing, it's not a rally race. It's one team.

Yeah.

It's not like I've handed this off to you, now we're taking it from here. It really needs to be together all the way through. And some organizations, I'm sure, do it, but I think a lot of the organizations out there are not doing that, and they're continuing to function as these 2 separate departments. You know, like there shouldn't be finger pointing. Oh, like operations did this and marketing did this. I think the takeaway here is if those 2 departments work together, it is so powerful and I've seen it. I apply it every day and there's so much I take from marketing and I apply to operations and now vice versa, operations are starting to take away from marketing. And so, I think to work together as one unit and build a journey that goes from, you know, the beginning of the funnel all the way to customer journey, to the point where the customer leaves the store and work with operations and training with those different handoffs would change the ballgame.

Yeah.

It's like an immediate organic growth.

Well, I think you hit on the key thing there, which was listening and truly listening, right? Not, I mean, and that's, I know for me, like, that was really hard for me to learn not to be thinking about what the next question I was going to ask was or what I was going to say, uh, or worse, getting defensive or offended by what somebody would say. Right. I mean, it's, um, Yeah. You know, and it's that, like, that is definitely, when I was able to do that, it shifted my pers— like, it was made the kinds of conversations I could have much more robust where I could open it up to like, give me the feedback, right? And it doesn't have to be, you're doing great. Like, I wanna hear what could be better and I'm not gonna be offended, like, um, unless you start attacking personally. As long as it's not that, we're good.

Yes. Yes. I've heard some tough feedback too, where I've actually stopped and I'm like, and I, that whole night I could, it was just going, I'm like, what am I doing wrong? You know, is there something I can do right? That, does that mean I'm not really giving enough positive feedback? And I took it and I was like, and, and, you know, it was, my colleague was like, you need to take it, like, it's okay. You can't take it to heart. And I'm like, but no, there's gotta be some truth in it. And I need to take that back and maybe fix some of the things or that some of my approaches. And I appreciate it. It's hard to take, but I love constructive criticism.

Absolutely. No, I, it's hard. Well, I think it's hard for a lot of people because it feels painful, but I think also part of it is like, you know, too many people who are in a position to give feedback do not know how to do it well. And I think that's a whole, that's like a topic for a whole nother conversation, but—

That is, that is it.

We just opened up a whole can of worms.

I can go on about that.

I could too. I have too. Julie, so much fun. Enjoyed it. This has been a lot of fun. I wish we could continue on. If folks do want to, like, if they wanted to learn more about what you're doing, want to, you know, get into the referral program, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Oh, to connect with me? I would say LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. I post a lot. There's a lot happening with the company too. We're going through a huge growth stage right now. But yeah, I would love to connect with people, have conversations. I'm always open to that. Appreciate it.

Well, again, thank you, Julie. It's been great. Thanks to all of our listeners and audience out there. We appreciate you as well. If you have ideas for topics or guests who want to be a guest like Julie, please reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me. We'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye, everybody.

Bye.

All right.