38: Upside Down Leadership as a Dental Practice Owner: Part 1

Hey, dental associates and new practice owners. Welcome to the Associates on Fire podcast, powered by Practice cfo. This is the podcast that teaches you what you never learned in dental school, the financial side of dentistry. We cover topics from planning for ownership, buying a practice, to student loans, taxes, and all things financial for the hungry to learn Dental Associate. So let's light it up.

Welcome everybody, to a new episode of the Associates on Fire podcast. I am excited today to have a returning guest and that guest is Bob Spiel. Welcome, Bob, back to the program.

Thank you, Wes. Really excited to be here.

Last time you were on, we talked about your business called Dentist Partners Partner Pros. And we had your colleague Brighton was with us and we talked about what Dentist Partner Pros is doing to help.

Dentists with established practices find, recruit and onboard an associate into that dental partnership. And there are so many virtues of a well run dental partnership. And this episode will be different. We're going to talk about the other aspect of your life and career which has been about coaching and creating great leaders in the organizations that you have worked for, for and practices that you have consulted too. And Bob has a book which I have in front of me. It's a great book. It's called Flip youp Focus Igniting People, Profits and Performance Through Upside Down Leadership. Now, Bob, you mind if I give a quick, just a real quick intro to your kind of background in this field of leadership?

You bet.

Wes. Leadership has been a passion of mine since the very beginning, even way back in high school. I was really, really lucky in the first part of my career to be mentored by a gentleman who actually had been a graduate student for Stephen Covey when he was a professor of organizational development at byu. And.

I don't know all of the history behind this gentleman by the name of Jim Faber and Covey, except I know that Faber worked for him and Covey was his first mentor. But here I am some 22, 23 years old, way before 7 habits even came out, way before probably most of the people on this podcast were even born. But we had cassette tapes, if you can remember what those are. Okay. Or you know, you saw me parents car. Okay. And mimeograph copies of this material. And we had to teach each other, we had to train each other on it. And it just electrified me with this whole concept of leadership, personal leadership and group leadership and the difference that it makes when an organization is effectively led. And so based upon a lot of the things that he taught me and that I've had with other excellent leaders along my path, and others that weren't excellent at all that you learned equally as much from seven years ago. I decided, you know what, let's write a book and try to encapsulate the lessons that they provided and put it into something that a small business owner can read, understand and digest and start to implement. And I'm excited with the feedback that I've gotten from Flip youp Focus because it teaches one very simple paradigm and three very simple things to do. And if you succeed on adopting the paradigm and incorporating it into your end, your kind of leadership mantra and then take these three actions and begin to really execute them, well, man, you're going to be so much further ahead than 95% of the businesses that are out there. But the coolest thing is as a leader and owner, your stress levels are actually going to go down. You, your productivity is actually going to go up and you're going to have a happier team.

And that's a lot to.

But I've seen is, you know, I've thought a lot about leadership as my own company practice CFO is evolved. I started in 2014 really with just me and somebody I'd met recently named Richard, who's still here. He's a partner of our firm. And, and we have about 35, 36 people now. And it's been a bumpy road at times because I was trained as a financial clinician, so to speak.

And, and although I did have trained as a. Just like a dentist care engineer.

Yeah, that's right. Except I spend most of my time in Excel and softwares instead of somebody's mouth. But, but I mean, the process is somewhat the same where we go through this, this journey academically to build a skill set which then you can convert into, into a monetary value in exchange for delivering that skill set right to somebody's life. And then when I started my practice, which is a practice just like a dentist owns a practice, I had a. And still have so many of the same issues that I confront as a dental office. Now I have a different P and L structure, so to speak. I don't, I don't have labs and supplies, for example, but my labor costs are also significantly higher than that of a dental office. But I still have facility costs. I still have again, that large that, that team of people with different positions and all trying to be effective in their roles and trying to lead them. I've got marketing plans or ways to basically make ourselves known out in the community to draw new prospects to us. Just like a dentist has new patients that's an important part of our lifeblood. So, anyways, there's so much similarity here and I'm, I think as we talk today, I'm going to just weave in my own personal experience.

Love you too.

As a practice owner, I'm using a platform, a business platform called Traction or also known as the entrepreneurial operating system eos. And Bob, you mentioned before the show that you've heard of it as well. And from reading some of your book, there is so much that applies to EOS as well. And I'm finding that they're just common attributes of good leadership. And when you've seen it, you realize that there are these threads that are the same across great leaders. Even though they all have their own personality and maybe their own unique approach and nuanced style, they're still just these common building blocks of great leadership. And I'm excited to go through this with you today, Bob. The way that I have proposed to Bob that we go through this is I'm just going to go through each chapter in his book because each chapter touches on a very specific building block of great leadership. And we're going to sort of outline the title and the main message and then we're just going to chat about it. Is that okay, Bob?

I'd love that. Sounds like a blast.

And we'll get through as much as we can. And if the content is just so rich that we want to dwell on some of these topics, then heck, we'll do a part two to this.

You got a deal.

I do want to start off by just emphasizing to dentists. And now having worked with dentists for really, I started working with dentists in 2009. So I'm going on about 13, 13, 14 years working with dentists and just being in a lot of practices and working with a lot of personality types in dental practices and specialty as well. I have learned that leadership is, is just as important in a dental practice as it is in, I believe, a Fortune 500 company. And even though maybe the numbers are bigger and the scale of maybe headcount and things like that are larger still, so many of the characteristics are the same and that those practices that I find are just producing more, the teams are excited. They feel like they, you know, they feel like they're living with the purpose in the practice and financially they're able to, you know, apply that to accelerate their financial security. Which there's, which is a great thing. It's a great thing if you're able to make your patients happy, make your staff happy and have even a strong economic result out of that for you and your efforts. That is a win, win, win across the board. And so my bottom line as we sort of go into this in thinking about leadership is that it absolutely 100% applies to a dental office without question, and the ability to succeed and thrive and grow. And a lot of these young dentists these days, I'm finding maybe you are too, they want to grow something kind of bigger than themselves or even bigger than their practice. The way to do that isn't through another clinical ce, don't get me wrong, you need that. But it's by thinking about the skill set of a leader. So I was reading in your book and you mentioned that your dad was in the navy and the military takes a very top down approach to authority and to.

And to leading and sort of central command and whatnot. And that carried forward a little bit in maybe your dad's style. I'm sure you have a great relationship with your dad, but it seems like that was one of the first triggers to you thinking about leadership and authority and just how to get things done and how to motivate people. Tell me a little bit about those early triggers for you that led you in this sort of thought process about what leadership is and how you arrived at instead of a top down approach, a bottom up approach. And then we'll go into some of the details of the chapters.

Thank you. And let me just preface this by saying that I agree with you completely that leadership.

Is absolutely an enormous differentiator in a dental practice. And in fact, that's why I'm in dentistry.

Before getting into dentistry, I was a hospital and surgical center CEO and prior to that worked as an operational director running really large distribution and light manufacturing facilities. And I found in those environments that leadership really can inspire people to do great things.

Healthcare was really interesting because, you know, leadership should matter in a hospital setting or in a medical clinic, frankly, it doesn't.

It's really sad. But just Wes, 15 years ago I had the opportunity to have a friend of mine invite me to go with a friend who was a dental consultant to be on a new patient or new client consultant. And at first I thought dentistry really, you know, it's 15% of healthcare GDP, what's the big deal about it? And in two days I fell in love with it because I was able to see through his eyes what dentistry is really all about. And it's the perfect setting to create a team that becomes your hands where you make money through them. But at the same time they become optimized and love their jobs.

Much like, you know, your practice, you started pretty much on your own doing it, all right? But you can't be doing it all on your own today with some 35 people. And that I think I'm going to bring back now to this whole idea of command and control leadership is what I just view as a pyramid. There's a person at the top, all right, and that person in the top is in charge of everything. And that the whole idea is that we wait for orders and we do exactly what we've been told to do. And I understand that in a military context, why that can seem to matter. But even if you really boil it down to how things perform even in the field, in the military, that it's not that clear cut.

Because you have to engage your people to be able to actually achieve the big picture, which is the outcome that you're seeking for. But my dad was a typical command and control type leader. That's what he'd learned on the submarines there in San Diego. He actually took his basic training in San Diego some 80 years ago. And that was how things worked. Okay.

And the problem with it is, and I think we can resonate with that today, is when we're in that type of a structure, it breeds resentment, it breathes short term compliance, but long term.

I'll put it this way, bucking, okay? It just doesn't work because each one of us want, I believe, to create something bigger than ourselves. You mentioned that about the, you know, younger dentists that are coming out. They've got big plans and big hopes because they, they've grown up in this world where it seems like anything is possible. So why not shoot the moon? To make that happen, though, they have to be able to engage their team because if it runs all through them, you've seen the typical practice west. It just plateaus after five or seven years and it never gets better. Why? Because of the Doctor.

All right? But the practice that continues to ride that curve further and further up. Once again, here's the irony. It's because of the Doctor, but it isn't because the Doctor now has gone to more CE and learned this or that, which really helps. But what they've really done is learned how to, how to light the fire underneath their team and put together a team that then rises to the top. And to contrast command and control to my model and upside down leadership, or flip your focus with the idea of upside down leadership is it's very simple. In a command and control structure. Everybody exists to see that the person at the top succeeds.

And in an upside down structure, that person at the top is there to see that his or her team succeeds. And when you make that flip in terms of your paradigm as a leader, it changes everything.

Well, let's talk about how to do that. I know your book starts off chapter one, the silent cry for Help. You indicate that the CEO stands for chief everything Officer. I love that because that was pretty much Bullseye Wes when he started.

Yeah.

And a lot of hats. I mean a lot of hats. I'm doing data entry, I'm meeting with clients. I'm doing buyer rep for, for doctors buying a practice. I'm. I'm doing accounting reconciliations.

Yep.

I'm not home a lot. I mean, I was working, I was regularly working 80, 98 hours a week. My, my highest week was 109 hours. It was right around 110 hours. It was during tax season. And actually lost our lead tax person this back in, I think 2016. And that was a. Just learning by fire, you know. And when you start up a practice, in my case, you don't have revenue beyond what you're actually delivering. There's no pre existing sort of hygiene retainer coming in and you're stepping into it. But this still applies to somebody who acquires a practice as opposed to starting up a practice that you step into it and you're in a practice practice that was owned by somebody for 20 years, 25 years. Then there's so much you want to do with it. You have this, you have this vision about adding new procedures or equipment or renovating the office or marketing plans, or adding this and that to the culture and the practice. And you want to cover it all. And so you start doing a lot yourself. Now this is an area where I struggled with, with my kind of CPA background. I think dentists are similar to CPAs in this regard in that we like to do things ourselves. The consummate DIYers.

And because you believe in yourself, you have confidence in yourself. You've got through dental school, which wasn't easy, and you've made some big decisions in your life and you've gained some level of confidence there. And when you come in, it's kind of like that classic parenting style where it's just easier to do it yourself sometimes.

Exactly.

So you'll stay late and do it late. You'll get early in the morning, do it early in the morning, and you are doing everything. And that creates a lot of chaos. It will start to create some burnout. And it's not empowering other people to do it. The challenge is how do you convey the importance to other people and the kind of the balance between oversight and freedom to help people find themselves in and complete those things that you were doing? How do you take off these hats and start to place them on other people? And that's been an ongoing discovery process for me over the past eight years or so.

As we've grown. Practice cfo. And so you mentioned in there the best businesses run on Hart Power. Talk to me a little bit about that, Bob.

I'm glad that that statement resonated with you. That's actually from H.J. heinz, who was a dear friend of my great grandfather, the guy who started Heinz Ketchup. And, you know, now there's a whole Heinz empire. But the whole idea is this, that, well, I'll put it this way. Simon Sinek, who, you know, has written a lot of great books, begin with why and other things. He put it this way so succinctly. We don't follow other people because of what it does for them.

We follow other people because of what it does for us.

And I love that statement because it is so spot on. The best businesses run on heart power. That means that when, as a leader, we engage our people and you ask the question, how do you go from this kind of sole proprietor world where it's all up to you, to a world now where you've got to have teams that do different things. And yet it's the whole concept of releasing control without losing control. And it's a jump for an entrepreneur especially to do that. It's a jump for a dentist to do that.

I have found a few things need to stop in order for this to take place. And I may be jumping ahead of the book. And if I am, let me just say this real quickly and then we can get into it later. But one of the things that happens when we start to get into this mode of doing more and more and more and more and we start to feel to the Jim Collins phrase, the flywheel gets faster and faster and faster. You know, we hear Dennis use all the phrase all the time, I'm on the treadmill or I'm on the, I'm on the hamster wheel. Well, it's because.

They'Re not letting go and they're not letting their team. And instead, what starts to happen as you get faster and faster on that treadmill is then you start to blame others.

And I hate to put it this way. But the anger and the venom that starts to come out as we start to really burn out is real and profound.

And I suppose the good news in that is that there's only one person who can solve that, and it's really you.

So in my model, in the book, the very beginning of it actually is not about leadership. It's about letting go of blame.

Okay? And how do we stop pointing fingers at others and realize I've got to hold the mirror up to myself and say, you know what? This is really all about me?

That can be scary for a business owner because it's that spot of real personal pain, you know? And that's the point that I make in the book, is it's amazing with adults that we elect to change when we view the path we're on as having greater pain than finding another path. Okay. But we eventually reach this point where we realize what got me there isn't going to keep me there.

And so I wrote this to help them see the path forward first, is to a realize it's not all about you and that your job as a leader is not to create control, is to actually create energy. Okay? And that's what I think what it means to run on heart power is those are energized. Employees love what they do. They love who they serve and they love who they work for and with, because they know being a part of this, they're actually getting better as a professional, but they're getting better as a person.

And that hard power feeds into so much about leadership, from vision to culture, to trust. These things are concepts weaved throughout your book. You know, I want to talk about that kind of. That first stage of creating this leadership, this upside down leadership.

Sure.

As I see it now, there's a practical, at least for me, and I think for most people, too, there's a practical element to this that you can't necessarily just say.

Lead and just poof, this platform suddenly comes into place and you got everybody doing the right thing for the right motivation. In some ways, you almost can't get around wearing quite a few hats in the beginning. In fact, you have to step into it. It's like, yeah, it's like there's all this chaos and you just got to juggle it for a period of time. But the key thing and the ones who step out of that is they start to reduce the number of balls that they're. That they're juggling one by one in a very deliberate way.

Correct.

Otherwise, if they try to keep juggling those Balls or taking morons, suddenly they can't do it and they all fall to the ground. So when I. When I talk about this kind of platform of leadership that I'm going through here at practice cfo, just know that it just didn't happen overnight. In fact, I'm in the middle of it right now, and that I'm still wearing some hats that a year from now I'm not going to be wearing.

Yeah.

And it's. It's taken years to take off some of these. Some of these hats. But the first thing that the entrepreneurial operating system has you do is what's called a Vision Traction Organizer, a vto. And the vision, it's a single page. They kind of give you an outline or a template for it. But the very first thing you do, and this is very Simon Sinek ish, is you create your. Why? What's your mission statement? What's your purpose? And I actually took our partners about three years ago out of the office, and we spent almost an entire day on this one simple thing. What do we exist for? And out of it came this statement that we exist to help doctors thrive financially. Now, it's very simple. You're thinking, what, a whole day?

It took a whole day to create that statement.

Yeah, we went through so many iterations, and at the end of the day, we just wanted it to be very understandable and digestible and simple, helping them thrive financially. Now, I could carry on so that, you know, they can meet their life goals and, and do those things that matter to them and their family, but really to help them thrive financially and then thrive. And I mentioned this a few times on my podcast. Each of those letters is. Stands for something, so it's an acronym.

I love it.

And, and then what we did is we have this in our conference room on our wall. It takes up the whole wall, so it's nice and big. And now it's a part of our vto, our Vision Traction Organizer in the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And everyone has their own login to a software we. We use to organize these sort of leadership modules. And. And then from there, you have to repeat this so many times, so many times for it to really sink in for people to say, okay, we do have a mission. It's not just Wes speak to it, spouting off, live it. You know, it's a real thing. And so when we make decisions, everything is kind of driving back to this theme. And, and so what, do you have any recommendation for dentists? How do they start with that? Original inception point of creating a why, as Simon Sinek says. And if you're listening to this and you haven't watched the TED talk, the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek, that is an absolute, absolute must for anybody who owns a business and I think anybody in general. But, but why don't you share your thoughts on, on that, Bob?

Yeah, thanks, Wes.

Unlike any other type of creation on this earth, human beings are driven by purpose. We almost in I. Not almost. I think we innately and intuitively are looking for purpose.

The best thing that I found in terms of creating this why is to really sit down and have somebody interview you. In fact, I do that in this course. I teach a course for Gordon Christensen every year at his office in Provo called Igniting the leader in you. And one of the exercises that we go through in the first day is to have two doctors interview each other, ask questions about what do you love about dentistry and why did you get into dentistry and what was your pathway into dentistry and what do you love most about it, what don't you like about it? And just to be able to get things out, you know, and one doctor striving while the other doctor is just talking. But then the assignment, the homework assignment I give them for that night is I now want you to take what they just captured and have you come back answer three questions. And it's really very simple. A vision statement is, you know, your vision statement is very, very basic but because you went through the process, it has power for you.

And I want them to come back and explain what do you do, how do you do it and why.

And that's a vision statement right there. The bigger the why, the louder the wow is what I found. The more you are hooked into that real vision of this is my purpose, this is why I am here and why I've been given these gifts. It creates a ton of power and you can share that with your team. And then your team starts to self select on as to those that buy into it.

On this VTO where we start off with our vision or why it carries on, it's a one pager and anybody who's interested can actually just pull up VTO and type in traction or entrepreneurial operating system and it's there for, for the world to see. You can download the PDF and actually go through use that if you would like to as your tool to go through this process. But, but from that vision you start to work into who is your, what type of company do you want to be and and ours is we want to have an awesome company with awesome clients, with awesome people. We just kept it very colloquial and, and that's a theme that resonates throughout, throughout our our trainings and throughout our company is we just want this to be an awesome experience for everybody all around and then it forces you to think about your niche. Who are you specifically focused on? I think this is also very relevant for a dentist which is are you taking PPOs? Are you wanting to focus on cosmetic dentistry? Are you a multi specialty practice? Do you just take everybody? Which isn't something I recommend, but really distilling it down to who do you service best and then.

Building a model in your practice that gives that type of patient the absolute best experience that they're going to get anywhere. And it takes time. It takes some branding, of course. It takes maybe some training, certain equipment, certain types of team members to be able to carry that about. But really defining that and then using that to drive a lot of your decisions as you build out your model for ours. We like to work with dentists who have a practice doing more than a million in collections, preferably 1.2, who are coachable as well. And dentists, most of you are coachable and I love you all. At times we run into somebody who is not terribly coachable. And just like all of us in our own fields, there are people that aren't terribly coachable.

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And so we have that very specific niche and also that they are motivated. They have, we have this theme we use in exactly in eos and it's called the entrepreneurial operating system that's called gwc, which is does this person get it, do they want it and do they have the capacity to do it?

Yeah.

And we actually use the GWC and quarterly reviews across the entire company to really evaluate people's place in the company and their excitement for it and their capacity to do those things. So that's our niche is a high producing dentist who has the GWC and is very coachable. And dentists need to go through that same process themselves. And then, and then really defining what is your, what are your three value points? That's the final item on, on this. And if you were talking to a patient, everyone in your staff, everyone on your team will remember these three things to communicate to that patient. And it might be high quality dental care, it might be responsiveness to their needs, it might be that you provide a great service at a great price. I don't know whatever that is. But it needs to be almost hard coded into the mindset. Some of these big financial institutions like Vanguard, they have it wired down to the person answering the phone that they want to make the experience as user friendly and as positive as possible to everybody across the company. Even though they've got thousands of employees, they do a great job at that.

Yep.

There you go.

Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause it real quick, Bob. We've got our camera crew coming in.

Okay, that'll be great.

We will pull this part out. Come on in, guys. Are you just gonna stay out there? No, no, we'll come. We'll do some panning in. We'll come in, but you just do your thing. Okay, that sounds good. All right, let me see where we left off.

Okay.

Okay, I'm gonna say three, two, one, and we'll. We'll pick back up.

Okay. Three, two, one. Bob, let's move on to chapter three of your.

I'd love to.

Go ahead.

Just go back for a second, though, just to frame this for the audience. Okay. Because what you just really described, you know, I try to boil it down to what do you do, how do you do it, and why? That's exactly what you just, you know, spoke to that they have to be very clear about what they do, and then those value points are how they do it. But that why is the foundation. Okay? The why, it's almost like a. This is a pyramid pretty much. Okay. That why has to be really substantial and exciting and something that's inspiring. And I would dare say something that you ought to work on together as a group or as a leadership team, like you did. You know, you spent a day and you came up with a phrase, but.

You were involved in the process. Do you think sometimes owners don't give that enough due diligence, enough time, because it feels too fluffy, it feels too irrelevant? So let's just come up with something. Throw it on paper. Exactly. And then let's move on to the real stuff and really don't give that credit.

Right. They don't. They don't. Because, you know, going back to the phrase that you quoted out of the book, the best practices run on heart power. That applies to the dentist as well. All right. That ultimately.

The dentist has to run on heart power, too, which means his heart has to be totally bought off on the why. Okay? What they're all about, why they're doing it, because it leads to everything else that happens, you know? Now you don't have questions about what CE to take or what type of marketing to do. It creates the foundation. So anyway, it's an exciting thing to talk about, and it's real. It's not fluff.

It is not fluff. You. You mentioned that the business or the practice cannot run faster than its leader.

In your book.

That's in chapter. That's in chapter two, I believe. What do you mean by that?

It's a. I think it Spiels Law 101 of leadership that if you just reflectively look back on any organization that you've ever been a part of, that your leader automatically sets the vision, the direction and the pace. And it's almost like being at a.

Stock car race where you've got the car out there to start with, you know, before they pull off and then everybody starts to race around. It's the same thing in an organization that that car, the pace car, is literally your leader. And that's why to me, leadership is such an exciting topic for dentists.

Because part of my experience with them is that they shy away from the subject thinking, well, you know, I'm in this because I love the clinical work. I'm in this because I really want to make a difference in people's mouths. But don't bother me with the team stuff, okay? Because that's, that's not my, that's not what I've been trained on.

And that type of dentist is still a leader, okay? By default, they are a leader. And that practice is going to be capped at a certain point because their leader is only going to run so fast and have so much capacity. But when the cool thing is that leader, just like us, starts to make decisions about what do I want to do different and how am I going to take this and dial this up to the next level. It really boils down to you to start with.

Because your team will follow where you lead.

Now, you mentioned this in chapter. This is actually a good segue into chapter three, which is flipping your focus, thinking like an upside down leader. The lesson is leaders are trustworthy and care about their team. And so they're trustworthy. They build trust with their team. I want to talk about that. And you mentioned seven deadly management sins and seven winning management skills. Now, we don't need to go over all 14, but I'd be really interested to hear what are those, some of the main points in those seven deadly management sins or winning skills that help build that trust across the team to be an effective leader.

Thanks. Well, man, there are so many. But I think it really boils down to consistency versus inconsistency.

Clear direction versus no direction. Okay? Duplicity versus honesty and sincerity and in caring about them versus caring about you.

Okay?

One of the things that I love to do in a course that I teach, like next week I'm going to be in Dallas at the Dallas.

County Dental Society meeting. And at that, in those meetings, I'll ask people to go up with post it notes and put up characteristics of great leaders that They've worked for and poor leaders that they work for. And we've got this big old long banner in this big old conference room with, you know, 200 post it notes up. I'll grab two people out of the audience and just ask them. Just go scan and see what you see on the good and on the bad and then come back and tell us what, what the net result is and what's surprising. Wes. Whether we're talking Atlanta, Georgia, Adelaide, Australia, Portland, Oregon, Boston, Massachusetts. You know, it all boils down to the very same set of characteristics every time, regardless, because we know intuitively who we're going to follow. The leaders that we follow are those that, you know, employ the seven positive traits. They're trustworthy, they tell the truth, they care about their people, they mentor their people. They're involved in building them and growing their career. And the people that we won't follow are dishonest, they're selfish, they're crude, they're mean.

They'Re not caring, and they're in it for themselves.

Let me apply a little bit of this to my own situation. Can I take a second do that?

Yeah.

Because I think it'll resonate with a lot of doctors who go through their own experience of their own path of building their, their practice and their leadership is. I always have energy and I always have a lot of excitement because I authentically feel that when I come into the office every day, even if I'm feeling not in it for that day, I will put on the game face. I think that's really important. But generally speaking, I naturally feel that enthusiasm to be here. I love what I do. I love the people that we, that we work for. And so I've been able to, I think, build goodwill and trust from that regard that people feel, the excitement people do, they feel energy. Energy can be contagious. And I feel it when people around me have energy.

Energy is tangible. Yes, it is.

One of the.

One of the negative outcomes of my energy has been that I come up with a lot of ideas. I come up with a lot of ideas. And in fact, in the, the traction system, this leadership system, my title is called the visionary. It's literally called the visionary.

Yeah.

And that I'm supposed to delegate everything outside of being a visionary. And what does the visionary means? Well, it's somebody who inspires. It's somebody who creates culture, it's somebody who creates purpose. And it's somebody who comes up with kind of ideas. Ideas? Yeah, big ideas. The. For the business and sort of looks at it in the future and says that's where we need to go. And then they make sure that the garden is being attended, tended to carefully here within. But they're never really down deep into any of the processes, which has been a big struggle for me to not be involved in the processes as. As we've got this sort of integrator role. The integrator is the support person for the visionary.

Yeah.

And is the executor very grounded, never in the clouds, very process driven, et cetera. Well, before we had this divide between the visionary and the integrator, I was essentially playing both of them. And I had for a period of time.

Exactly. So what happened was I was managing a lot of clients, I was managing the visionary, I was managing being the integrator. I had all these hats. And the business, as you said, can only run as fast as me because I'm that lead caller. And if I can't move all these things forward at the right pace, then we're not going to cover ground very, very quickly. And so before we got an integrator, who I have now, her name is Janine and she's phenomenal.

Congratulations.

I would build or come up with an idea and I would get it halfway built. I'd maybe have a process and our process management software with a title and maybe a couple steps. I'd maybe have an email go out explaining how this new process is going to work, this great idea. I'd have maybe a single training on it. And then you'd be on to the next big idea. I'd be on to the next one because honestly, that's what I love to do. I love to come up with those ideas. I love to think, wow, this is going to change our client experience. It's going to change the way we work and everything. But I got the reputation and this was one of my partners, Greg. Greg came up with this very good analogy of Wes. And I mentioned this before in a podcast, but Wes will go and he will start to build a building and he gets all the scaffolding up and. And you got the base is in, but about a third of the way up, the building really stops. The scaffolding is all still there. And Wes decides to go across the street and start digging for the next building.

Right.

Well, while the scaffolding is still in place on. On the previous building. And why, because I learned, and I had to learn about myself, is that I am not. It's not my strong suit to necessarily carrying. Carry something through the finish line. Yeah, it's just, you know, in football, you, you've got a person who's your fullback, you know, whatever position, their job is to get those. Take the ball all the way needed. Yeah, exactly. And, and so I had to really learn about that, that about myself. And then the struggle when I did learn that was letting go and letting somebody use their own discretion and their own mindset to create the building plan for the blueprint essentially that I came up with and let them execute that and let them make mistakes and mistakes. I've just come to believe you just have to have a high tolerance for mistakes as a leader. And if you don't have a high tolerance for mistakes as a leader.

It'S gonna, I, I think it will be difficult to really get these plans built out.

Mistakes. They're the seedbed of success really. Yeah. And that's why, and it's hard though.

To see it that way because you have it, you see a mistake and you may have an upset client about it, dentist case, an upset patient about it because you gave somebody some autonomy and weren't directly involved with the clinical delivery of that. Or it might be how somebody was reviewed internally or a new software that was selected that ended up going south. All these different things can happen when you give somebody the discretionary ability to make, make these decisions without you.

Right.

But those will be the greatest lessons for them and also great points of counsel and discussion between the visionary or the leader and the integrator or the executor. And I'm still going through that process right now of knowing how to let go and be comfortable with that. The other thing too is this is really important. I think every practice, especially once you get north of 1.52 million, you start to get a bigger practice. Maybe you've got partner or partners multi specialty at some point. I guess the executor would be the office manager, I guess. Or maybe you hire somebody who really focuses on operations. And it can be hard for a dentist to say I'm going to pay somebody in a role that most dental offices maybe don't even have. And that's true for me. We pay Janine an integrator to oversee this sort of execution of these things when if she left today, the business would still continue to go on. But the evolution of and progress of the company in time will really falter with, without her.

But you have to get buy in into that person. You have to support that person. I found that I've had to make sure that throughout the company they know that I'VE got Janine's back, that I support her, that she has my green light and my sort of simulated authority to make these decisions for. For me. Now she's not making decisions independently. We meet every week for 90 minutes as a entrepreneurial system leadership team.

Your L10 meeting.

Yeah, exactly. The L10 means we do it every week, 90 minutes. We define our. Our rocks and what we're working on and. But it's been a struggle to get some of the other partners on board with Janine. Initially, the thoughts were she doesn't have the background for this, or her emails are a little bit too long and they take me too long to read. And so we should find somebody who has a degree in an mba, you know, like. Like Bob, you know, we find somebody like that and, and there are a lot of valid points to that, but at the end of the day, you need to get everyone to. To buy in, to agree, and to all start rowing in that, in that same direction. So there, there, Bob, are just a few of my challenges and thoughts on that process of creating a vision and then creating an execution of that vision. Any comments before I go on to the next chapter?

Yeah, absolutely. I think what you're really hinting at, and the phrase that I use in my book is clear expectations.

Okay. That once, once you've created. Well, let's step back for a second.

If you can take the jump and realize that your job as a leader is to see that your team succeeds.

And then realize that the next point is I've got to decide where we're going to go and why.

I can have people help with that. But ultimately, vision, direction, and pace are up to you. Then you begin to set expectations clearly.

And that's where I see things start to break down in a lot of practices. But at the same time, practices that are really clear about expectations.

People begin to perform at a much higher level because they know why they're there, what they're doing, how they're doing it, and also how we know if they're succeeding.

You know, what I'm doing on that front is.

I always thought, okay, you meet with somebody, you explain their role, and you set the expectation, and then you check in with them periodically or have some sort of review system. What I'm finding is it just takes more than that. And what I mean by that is we have created a. What's called the accountability chart.

Okay, great.

And on the accountability chart, different than an org chart. Org chart is something you sort of propose to the world outside of you with familiar titles and things like that. The accountability chart is you are grouping functions into a given person, a given seat, and then you're putting somebody in that seat and then you GWC it. Do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity to carry out the functions in that seat? But every seat has a set of bullet points or what are, what are the main functions? And it would be easy if you just had stopped there, but it's not. Is we're creating a narrative of that particular seat that's just more thorough, it's more laid out. You have to strike that balance. So you're not micromanaging. But it needs to be really clear what the expectations of that seat are, are. And then when you have your quarterly GWC reviews, as we call them, we are mapping their performance back to that, that narrative or, or that seat. And it takes a. It takes some time to actually really build this out, but it also creates the clarity that I think people really, really want.

To understand their role, what's expected of them, and then how do they even get promoted financially or promoted to a new title? So my only comment there is that it takes a very deep, deliberate thought process to create expectations.

I love what you're doing, Wes, and I think it's fantastic. The practice that I talk about in Flip youp Focus is what I call rgems, which stands for Roles, Goals, Expectations and Metrics.

And it's a process of, a cascading process of looking at that seat, so to speak, or that position and saying, you know, we used the phrase hats earlier today. What are the hats this person puts on and takes off all day long?

And then from those, if those, if those roles are played superbly well, what does that look like? Which are their goals?

And then finally, on the metric side, if they did those roles superbly well, how would we know it?

Okay, and how would they know it ultimately? And is there a way to measure it? Not everything is, but actually there are a lot of things that are. And then I recommend that you start with the leader creating those RGMs. Not because it's going to land with the leader and stay there, but I found that so often, for instance, in a dental office, you hear often the doctor saying, well, I don't know what the front does, I don't know what the front does. Well, you know what, by the time a leader goes through an RGEN process with his treatment coordinator and his financial coordinator or her hygienist, etcetera, They've got a really clear picture of how their office runs and who does what. But the cooler thing behind that is just like you've got the accountability chart. I find that one of the reasons we don't hold people accountable is when things are ambiguous, but when the expectations are clear. Accountability is nothing harder than asking questions.

It's magic. You know, you sit down and you've gone through the RJAMs, you've had buyout from your team in terms of what they are, you've asked for their feedback, you've agreed upon. These are your RGEMs for your role. And then every three to four months, you sit down and go through and you just ask, how are you doing and what are the numbers telling us?

And when I said earlier, it takes away stress and it actually frees you up to do more. That's one of the biggest deliverables in terms of being a leader. An effective leader is to have clear expectations with the mindset that my job is to help them succeed and then they take off and run with it. Assuming you've got the right people on board.

One of my favorite activities during the week is updating what in our system is called the scorecard.

Okay.

Or you mentioned metric. It's, it's our scorecard and we have a scorecard for the year. So this gets into page two of this VTO document I mentioned earlier. And vto, the V stands for vision. That's your page one. It's your big, it's your big whys, your big house, your big who's right. It even has a three year and a kind of a three year and a ten year financial target. And then page two is the T which stands for traction. And it's all about moving the needle.

All about.

So you have to then. Yeah. Creating that momentum. So how do you convert this vision, this vision idea, this why into actual movement in your company? To get people rowing in the same direction, to get people excited about that progress and to be growing the company economically. And so you come up with your annual initiatives and then you live in a 90 day worldview every quarter where you're working on rocks, which are sort of milestones of your annual initiatives and you usually don't want more than maybe four to six.

Right.

And.

Exactly. And that, that's one of the things that I did wrong for a long time and I'm, and I'm in the process right now of correcting that through the traction leadership system is, is I just had so many initiatives going on at one time without clarity of who is owning those initiatives. And what the timelines and goals are. So one of the most important things that I can tell in your leadership program is that it helps.

It helps create organization around that chaos so that people understand what the initiatives are and specifically what we're working on right here, right now, today, as a subset of that overall initiative. So every week, going back to my, my, my, my, my comment, I love to complete the scorecard update.

Right.

That's the first thing we look at in our weekly L10 meeting. And our weekly EOS leadership meeting is the scorecard. And everybody on our EOS leadership team, there's five of us, is responsible for one portion of this scorecard. And me being a cpa, I put it in Excel. And so they all have their own tab and it has the annual initiative.

Yes.

One example is we're putting into play NetSuite, which is an ERP system, an accounting system, for example, which is. We're doing that. We are going to be changing our accounting technology platform from what we're currently on, which is a Thomson Reuters accounting platform, to a different platform. And we've got these big initiatives, but within each initiative, we broke it down to somewhere between five to maybe eight sub initiatives or milestones. And then under each one of those, I have a. You basically indicate I'm, I'm percent done with that milestone. 5%, 20%.

Yep.

And then that sort of averages out and we move that over to our, our scorecard and we talk about that. But I love to see the progress. I love to see how everybody knows, here's what we're focusing on. And anything outside of that, that's for another time, another place, another day. We are, we are blitzkrieging these specific items right now. Going back to your chapter three about building trust. For me, trust isn't about people knowing that, you know, Wes is an honest guy. That kind of thing that needs to almost go without saying. If they're questioning your honesty, you got bigger problems. For me, trust was, does Wes know what he's doing? And if they believe that Wes knows what he's doing, they trust me that I'm not going to just partially build the building and then leave it. And it's a big mess that everyone's, you know, not sure what to do with, Does Wes know what he's doing? So when I'm able to show the team every quarter in what we have are called our state of the company meetings, and we show them the progress that we've made in these initiatives. We just had our first one two weeks ago. And it was. It was a really cool event because I could see and I could feel, and the feedback was, this is.

This.

This is actually happening. Wes has been talking about it for eight months, and they thought it was just another big idea. But, no, this is actually happening. And it's coordinating, really, all these efforts throughout the company. And that's how I'm attempting to build trust. Trust with everybody.

Hubby talked about years ago that trust has two components. There's character and there's competence.

And I think that's true. The character side is the trustworthiness side, the honesty side, the integrity side. The competence is, can you actually do what you're supposed to do? Yeah. And as a visionary, one of your challenges is that you can come up with six rocks a day.

And then if you get in deep into those rocks, the other phrase I've heard is that you pull up the flowers to see how the roots are going, and then you go to the next one and do the same thing. And then your people are tasting their tails because they don't know what really important. So kudos to you, Wes, for figuring out, you know what, this is my strength. This isn't my strength. How can I bring somebody on who complements me and then we can become a team and then start moving this ship forward, Which I think is a great example of the phrase, you can't run faster than your leader. The corollary to that is when the leader starts to make personal change that's effective.

Everything picks up behind them. And that's what's the most exciting thing to me, is to see when a dentist finally gets this. This concept, you know, I can lead.

And I say to them, what was it like the first time you went into the lab and did a crown? Did it feel natural to you? Did it just fit? Did everything feel right? Heck, no. It took a lot of time to be able to do that, to create a competency that then says, you know what? I'm an expert at this. Leadership isn't as hard as the clinical side of dentistry, but it takes time and it takes focus and effort. But if they'll spend some time with it. Just like somebody attended my course last November, he just purchased the practice from his dad, nervous as all get out. What do I do? How do I do it? And in a day and a half time, he gained the confidence to say, you know what? This isn't that hard. I can do this if I just will capture the idea and work on these concepts. And his practice has grown 20% this year.

That's great. I once read in a book that great leaders ultimately are the ones who make space in their lives to be deliberate about leadership, that we all sort of think about it at different times. We may read books on it, we may even go to seminars on it. But the ones who are great leaders are the ones who stop what they're doing and they it's like writing in a journal. You actually pen to paper and you actually do it. Those are the ones that make great leaders.

Sa.