The Power Of Good Meetings With Will Humphreys Of Rockstar Admins

If you're a business owner and you've always wondered why you feel like you can never talk about metrics or production or production standards without resistance, it's either because your people aren't in the right mindset, or it's because it's not being balanced with the correct amount of culture or purpose. Right? When we develop that purposeful why, then we talk about metrics, then it makes sense why we're talking about it. And that's when the bleeding heart physical therapist can understand why there's a minimum standard of production and why we want to keep growing. Because it's about driving that company purpose.

Welcome. You've entered the Physical Therapy Owners Club podcast where your host, Nathan Shields and other successful PT owners and leaders share their experience and insights on how to build successful PT businesses. They'll share the stories of their paths to success and show you how you can also obtain greater freedom and more profits from your business. That's what the PT Owners Club is all about. Greater freedom and more profits. There's plenty of room for you as well, so come on in and join the club.

Hello and welcome to the Physical Therapy Owners Club Podcast. I'm Nathan Shields. Got my good buddy Will Humphreys on the line. Thanks for joining me again.

Thank you, brother. Always a pleasure to be with you, Nate.

It was good to have you on a couple episodes ago and talk about rockstar admins and how to utilize virtual assistants. But one thing we wanted to talk about today that I'm semi excited about because I've never talked about it before on the podcast and it has little to do with physical therapy, but more to do with entrepreneurs, and that is about meetings. Never would I consider meetings to be exciting. But there was a huge benefit that we noticed over time as we really nailed down our meetings and the agendas and what that were, I believe, a huge benefit to our company, don't you think?

Absolutely. It's interesting because oftentimes those simple things are the most impactful and oftentimes because we don't understand the benefit of them or how to execute them correctly, we don't do them because we're so busy. Again, like in the PT world, we're so busy that we don't take the time because feel like we have the time to learn about them and understand them. So that's why I love today's podcast too. I actually love talking about meetings because of what that did for us.

Well, I think the one of the reasons people don't do meetings is because they haven't Witnessed what successful meetings look like. Oh, yeah, right. I think a lot of us have gone through the meeting cycles, and most of the time, would you say maybe a majority of time you come away from the meeting like, I don't know exactly what happened right there, but I don't know if it was very productive. Right, right. So people haven't experienced what successful meetings look like. And once we got to a point where I feel like our meetings were successful per se, productive essentially, then it would made a huge difference in our company.

Without a doubt, they are part of the lifeblood of the company culture, which we'll get into in a little bit. At the end of the day, it's the main tool that we leverage for communication. When people talk about why they don't like the company they work in, the number one answer is always more communication. And so I think the hard thing is, as business owners is that we understand concepts like Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni is an actual book. Right. Like, meetings held the wrong way actually are counterproductive, drain the living soul out of people. And when we don't know what to do, we just get people in a room for an hour. For some reason, every meeting is an hour when it doesn't have to be any specific length. It can be 20 minutes. It could be an hour and a half, depending on what's needed and wanted. But we go in there, we get people together for an hour, and then we totally overwhelm and burn leaders out, especially merging leaders with meetings, because we don't know how to leverage them. And frankly, even in those cases, we're grateful to have them just because some touch points give us a little bit of clarity and reality as leaders, even if it doesn't move the needle as much as some meetings could. Right. So I love this topic. It's one that most people wouldn't see as an exciting topic.

What would you say were some of the benefits that came out of the meetings that we eventually developed into what made them so successful? What do you think? Some of those. What were some of the results?

Yeah, number one, first and foremost, and this isn't like my opinion as much as what's been documented, is that meetings held correctly within a any business, especially a physical therapy practice, are the number one cause of driving culture. So what does that mean, to drive culture? Remember that culture in a company is the experience that people have when they're there. It's what they feel, it's what they think. And so when a good company leverages meeting rhythms in a Productive way at the beginning. The first thing they always do is create connection. So a bad meeting is where you have one person in front of a group of people talking. A productive meeting is where you have a leader facilitating connection and collaboration. And so that was the first thing that came to mind when you asked what would be one of the greatest things that occurred in our company? Because once we started meeting correctly every single week in our weekly meetings, and we'll talk about what types of meetings they have in a minute. But like in our weekly meetings, there was always a dedicated spot for someone to give a two to five minute thought about a company value or the company purpose. And that's what we do at in the Black. Now we have words of 50 employees at this point. And so every single week someone talks about our company purpose or value. And it's so cool because that is how the values and the purpose start evolving over time. That's how they can recite them from memory is because they are lived in these meetings. And so the meeting rhythm, the meeting structure is, creates the space for connection through the culture of the company.

Yeah, I think the only way you can really maintain excitement, engagement, remembrance of the values and purpose of the company is reiteration. So many times I've gone through with owners generating a purpose and values and if left to their own devices, they're just going to collect dust on a shelf or maybe they'll paint them on the wall or on a hanging of some kind and. And they just see them once in a while. But the beauty of implementing that as part of a meeting agenda and every meeting agenda, honestly, whether it was a leadership team or a full staff meeting, entire clinics is what I mean by that. Whatever it is, would start with a recitation of the purpose and values. Right. And even small two to five minute thoughts like you mentioned, where it wasn't upon the owner to talk about the value, but one of the team members to talk about the value. And if they wanted to take it to the next level, how they've seen that value lived out within the clinic or company within the past period of time. Right?

Yes, yes.

And that's where you start. That's where the rubber meets the road. And I think that's where people who are misaligned kind of roll their eyes and have poor body language during those periods of time. And those people who are aligned really love it. They love that portion of the meeting. They like to talk about the feel good stuff and how it's more than just the technical aspect of treating patients.

Yes. And it's so cool that you said, like, it's a filter. So, like, it's a definite filter for our teams. When we have people who roll their eyes on it, it's either a, because we haven't been as a company living it. So it's not necessarily a bad thing if we're introducing and it's new. And maybe as owners, we haven't been really integrous in terms of what we said we stand for. I also want to highlight that maybe your values and your purpose need to be reworked, in which case you need to work with a Nathan Shields or a Michelle Bambanack or whoever. Talk about better defining that, because those weren't things I just figured out on my end or your end. We figured that out with the help of Scott Fritz together.

Right.

And so when we have the right coach helping us create the right language, that can be a driver. But once that language is created, then it serves as a filter, like you said. And what's cool about that is it filters both ways. You get people that you think are pretty cool who roll their eyes and you're like, wait a minute, they're really not buying into this. And then you have other people who are quiet, who you just start lighting up when they see that. And when they share their 2 minute to 5 minute value, it moves you. They talk about how in the review they love the values. But here's the thing. It's a natural segue, I would say, into the next benefit of having meetings. Because when we create connection in culture, and by the way, highly emphasize doing it in a fun way too, there's games that we play in that first half of the meeting. But after the connection is done, now it's time to get to work. And then we can talk about metrics, we can talk about production. And it no longer comes across like a stat push. Because when we've just spent time honoring the humanity of our team, celebrating each other, connecting on this interpersonal level, now is the time we can talk about numbers. So if you're a business owner and you've always wondered why you feel like you can never talk about metrics or production or production standards without resistance, it's either because your people aren't in the right mindset, or it's because it's not being balanced with the correct amount of culture or purpose, right? When we develop that purposeful why, then we talk about metrics, then it makes sense why we're talking about it. And that's when the. The bleeding heart physical therapist can understand why there's a minimum standard of production and why we want to keep growing. Because it's about driving that company purpose.

And making those back to back. In any meeting, I think just builds upon exactly what you're talking about. Because a forward thinking owner can talk about the numbers and reflect back to the values and the purpose. If they were to take advantage of that opportunity and say numbers are down. And when our numbers are down, what value are we not aligned with? Or are we really fulfilling our purpose if our numbers are down and making that connection? Because there are many times the the team listening to the leader is doing the thing, you know, they are reciting the values and the purpose and they are showing the metrics that they've performed. But maybe they're not making the connection and getting the two brain cells to rub together. But a leader does that once or twice and starts creating that connection for them, then they can start thinking for themselves. Oh, I see why we're talking about it now. I see why it's important, right? And that we're falling short based on what we say we believe in. And that makes it a lot easier for those leaders to make that connection and get buy in totally.

And once they have buy in, that's when the meeting structure starts to become a platform like a container that holds water. Like the second we have a team that buys in to the culture because we really are living our purpose and our values and we're celebrating the team as a result of that. And by the way, they're contributing to the idea of how to develop our company culture and the charities that we sponsor in the name of culture. Like once that's established and we start talking about production and they buy into that. Another benefit, by the way, this is the third benefit so far is that the structure of the properly held weekly meeting allows for group accountability instead of individual accountability. And once we're talking about production on the back end of values and purposes, then we can have everyone show their individual graph of production of how many visits they've done. And it's no longer about the owner or the clinic director. It's about me and my integrity with the company and my team, the people that I care about and love working with. I don't want to be left out as the person not pulling their weight in helping drive this very altruistic purpose of helping other people. So my numbers become a reflection of the greater purpose and I don't want to be deficient.

So.

So that was when things really took off for us. Is when we started having teams of people who really believed that their numbers represented something greater than money, and in a group sense, they were holding each other accountable, then the leader became a mentor and a coach versus an accountability holder. And that's right there leads to the fourth benefit of the owner actually stepping away. That's the only way I was able to step more into the recruiting space you into Alaska was because we had these amazing leaders, but we built it first where they were containers unto themselves that held the water of the production of that company. So I think that's an important piece to recognize is group accountability changes the game.

There's something to be said when a team is able to show their individual statistics and to the team, like you're mentioning, having group accountability and not to a singular authority or supervisor over them. Right. Because honestly, if it's just a supervisor over them who's holding them accountable for that particular statistic, then there could be a lot of emotion. There could be a lot of, what about this and that? And I didn't do that and what about this? And you didn't give me this and what about that patient? How am I supposed to control that? When you're in a group setting, it's hard to get past everybody or pull the wool over everybody's eyes.

Right?

Right. When you're held accountable to a full team, that's a different story. And especially if that's seen week after week after week after week becomes rather objective and less emotional.

Agreed. And it becomes more about praising the people who are exceeding the people who are bonusing. It's like, hey, Mark, look what you did. We're so excited for you. Look at that. Everyone give him some applause. He's crushing it this week. Mark, how did you do that? And Mark shares how he did it and he's getting all this praise and we're just like, listen, we want to thank you for really driving our company purpose of being the light and hope in the lives of others today. And thank you for sharing the light and growing in that way. Thanks to you, our company a strong future. And then Mary is sitting over there with her graph that's like below everyone else's. And we don't call Mary a loser because everyone has down statistics. Right. It's nothing personal, it's just objective. So it's kind of like when Mary gets there, when she sees all this, nothing even needs to be said. There's no extra time taken away between the director or owner and the therapist who's below production because Mary is sitting There feeling like the dorky kid in a group of cool kids. And she knows it's important, so she's going to do everything she can. So when we get to Mary, it's like, all right, Mary, we can see your statistics. What would you like to say about it? You know, we don't kick into it. What we're expecting from Mary is to be like, yeah, I'm really down and here's what I'm doing about it. Or, guys, I'm really down and I don't know what else to do about it. Can someone please help me? I'm trying to figure this out. We can do magic with that.

Stop the meeting. Let's focus on helping Mary at that point.

Yeah. And then she feels love and support. It's like, Mary, we want you to be successful, by the way. We want to acknowledge you for asking for help. We do want you to come up with your own solutions next time. But hey, regardless, you asking for help is what matters most. But how nice is that, Nathan, people listening. What would it feel like to have somebody come to you after a week and just say, or even better, before the week is over and just going, hey, I'm, I'm looking at my stacks, I'm at my stats. I'm predicting my stats are going to be below my minimum, like expectation. And here's what I've done about it and I'm stuck. Can you help me? Who wouldn't want to go help that person, right? That's when we stop becoming dictators and managers and we become real leaders. Then we're inspiring the willing, not motivating the complacent.

Right. And you brought up the next point and that is they can be leveraged as a tool to develop future leadership. One of the easiest things I've noticed with myself and with clients is to hand over some leadership responsibilities. An easy, simple initial handoff is, hey, I want you to run the meeting.

Totally.

You know our agenda, it's pretty fail safe because more than likely you're still going to be present but they're going to lead out. And you've already set up the successful agendas, hopefully. And how they're run, they just need to run them and assess how well they're engaging with the team. Are they asking good questions? When you get one on one in the back room, you can give them feedback as to how they did or how they would, could have responded better or taken a different tact or whatnot, or, or praise them in front of everybody. Hopefully you can really start Developing team members and see how they respond to their peers. Right. Or how the peers respond to them in some of those meetings as well.

Yeah. It's so true. And, you know, one of the coolest things we did in that last year was, like, in our big director meeting. Actually, every clinic meeting was run like this, too. The clinic director was the person who was, like, presiding over that meeting, just like the CEO was presiding over our director meeting.

Right.

Every week rotated who was in charge. And so, like, who would run the meeting? So, like, it was literally like, in a clinical setting. There'd be a technician who would run the weekly meeting. There'd be Katie, our finance director. She's over billing, but she's in the director meeting, so she's running the team meeting. And now she's a CEO of a company. It's like, she would never have had the skills to do what she's doing now if I hadn't been selfishly and you and I selfishly offloading to her. It's not a big deal, but it still takes work to run a meeting. So, like, I loved just having other people run the meetings and, like, watch how nervous they get. But the coolest thing is when they run the meeting, they all take turns running the meeting. They start showing up a lot more connected to that meeting and buy in because they know what it's like to be in charge and have, like, no one answer a question. All right, guys, what do you think we should do about this problem? No response. So the next time someone else is running it, they're like, oh, I'm going to help them out. Because that sucks. It creates group accountability, but also creates group empathy.

Yeah.

In that culture.

And I think there's a lot of opportunity to, again, build on the culture, because once you get past. And again, we'll talk about some of the structure of our meetings in a little bit. But once you get past the recitations of purpose and values. Talking about statistics. Yeah. You're going to go through your calendar of upcoming items. Who's got a birthday this month and what are we doing? I mean, it's October right now, as we're recording, and it's National Physical Therapy Month. What are we doing? What are we going to do in October for National Physical Therapy Month? How do you guys want to celebrate and have those kind of conversations? But you also get to talk about real trainings. Like, hey, we are. Take, for example, our cancel rate was high this past week. What are some of the reasons why our council went up this week? What do you guys think what's happening? What are you seeing? All right, this is what our policy states. If you have a written policy, this is how we could possibly address it. Role play is a great way during these team meetings to develop the capabilities within the individual team members to address problems as they come up. Or someone says, hey, this patient said this last time. This is why they can't show up. How do you guys think we should address it? There's a great opportunity there to do trainings, is what I'm trying to say, and address some of the common issues that are coming. And where else are you going to do trainings ongoing basis, if not in some of these team meetings?

Totally. The training piece is wonderful way to create connection, too. It's like learning and connecting. So at the end of the meeting, you hit it perfectly. You know, if the first third is about connection in the middle third, and that's like culture and, you know, celebrating wins and all that. If the middle third is about statistics and identifying out points, the last third becomes about education and improving, dealing with specific problems. They say every week you want to move one or two rocks. So we have maybe 20 things we're focusing on, but that's when we move one or two rocks in that last part. And so like you said, it could be a training thing because we've had a consistent trend of a specific issue, or it could be a matter of like, hey guys, staffing for vacations is a real problem. Let's address that as a group and figure out collectively how we're going to do this over the next three months, whatever those issues are. That last part, we want to encourage that the team writes them down and puts them, their items in a parking lot. And we have to. We're going to. There's a whole thing around prioritizing them that we can't get into today. But like, essentially there's a way to prioritize the issues that people put on the parking lot. And usually we only get to two or three of those based on what's going on. But when we can effectively address the top priority issues every week, one or two or three items every single week. After a year, 52 weeks out of the year, looking at 150 or at least over a hundred significant issues in that company have been addressed by the team within that year. So when you're starting this out as someone who's listening, the owner of the meeting, the director or physical therapy owner, typically is the one driving the entire parking lot at first. But the group Accountability kicks in. It's surprising how quickly they start. The team members start putting their items on the parking lot.

They're adding to the parking lot items.

Yeah, they do. They start adding. And it's funny because when they start doing it, Everything is a 10 out of 10. The urgency and importance is because they wouldn't put it on there unless they wanted some help with it. But then when you teach them how to take their issues and compare it to what's the bigger issues at play, then they start to deal with their own issues a little bit more proactively and understanding how to prioritize them effectively so that they're not like always knocking on your door, like, which is what happens when you don't have any meetings. People have issues, they come straight to the owner, hey, what about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? When there's a meeting and there's a structure, they have a place to kind of put something somewhere and then they can weigh that against other issues and realize, oh, that really isn't that important. Yeah, feel stupid for even bringing it up.

Beauty of having that opportunity in those weekly meetings, then they can be addressed by the team and not just the owner. Like, they can ask the owner, hey, what are we going to do about blank? And the owner can very easily kick it back to the team, like, what do you guys want to do about it? And then obviously you have veto authority over everything, but within reason, if they follow certain parameters and it's within their values, there's a lot of leeway that can be given to the team to come up with their own decisions. And if it's not going to ruin the company, they can try something that maybe you wouldn't have recommended to begin with because it's something you haven't had experience in. And they can try it, but you can always pivot, right and say, okay, how did that work last week when we implemented Blank? And if it worked out great, let's keep doing it. If it didn't, what do you guys want to do? How do you want to change that? Because there's a great opportunity to get the buy in from the rest of the team. And it's not just the owner coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and them listening, but it's them creating their own culture and actually having a, a say in what happens in their company. And that can go a long way.

Oh, man. I would say that was one of the life changing moments in our journey. Because when just so cool. Like if I Was run, running the meeting. Like, my experience of that on my end was like, you know, okay, team, how do you want to handle this issue? Then they would work it out. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is so great. Because normally, what would happen if it was one of my teams and I was going to go in there and make an adjustment to the team? It's like, okay, this is what it is. Here's why we're doing it. Here's why, like, this whole process, they're figuring it out. They're making a decision, and then we as owners, Nate, are just like, yeah, let's give that a try. But what was so cool about it is that immediately they knew it was a pilot. They were less critical of it because it wasn't being mandated from on high. When they worked through it, if it failed, I mean, and they got all the credit. That was the greatest thing. They did all the heavy lifting, and they got all the credit. Which, ironically, keeps people engaged in the company and keeping them working with you longer than. It's the most ironic thing. We're giving them the work to solving their own problems, and they love us for it when we do the opposite. The opposite happens when we solve their problems for them. Their failures are our fault, and then they hate us for it. But if we solve it, there's no acknowledgment on that either, because from their perspective in that relationship, then we're just doing our job at a minimal level. But when we're like, what do you guys think? We believe in you. Not I'm lazy. Just don't want to have to deal with this. It's ironic because then they solve it better. Most of the coolest things, I think Rise rehab, our old company created was this weird accumulation of multiple ideas that merged together where literally, it was almost hard to know who started the idea. Like, this idea had so many facets to it, because someone would go, well, that's good, but what about this? And then someone would go, well, we could do this for that. Oh, that's a good idea. And at the end of it, there were so many times, like, standing up going, I don't know how you guys came together and did this. You guys must be an amazing team. After a while, they start believing it. And what's really cool is the day when we can say to them, I am confident that this team can figure anything out, and they believe it. That day is the day that the owner doesn't have to be present, because at that day, not only do they own it? They love it, and they are grateful to you for trusting them with it.

Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I was surprised that they would come up with a solution to a problem. And I honestly would say, okay, listen, you guys came up with the solution. I'm cool with it. I don't want anything to do with it in terms of. I don't want to be the one tracking that statistic. I don't want to be the one calling and making sure this gets done, that gets done. Who's responsible for getting it done by when? And people you wouldn't think of would raise their hands like, I'll take care of that. Like, it's no big deal to them. I just didn't want to do it. And, okay, well, I guess you'll report next week at the meeting or whatever, due date. And they're like, yeah, no problem. Okay, let's go.

And they'd hit it out of the park, and we just get to be like, holy crap, you did such a great job. How did you figure that out? I don't know. I'm just great. They walk away feeling so validated and so acknowledged and honestly, so many times coming up with better solutions than we could. I could have ever come up on my own, no question.

A perfect example. And just because it is that time of year. But National Physical Therapy Month at our clinics was a big deal. All kinds of. We had interclinic competitions going on that were not our idea. We had costume days every Friday. We had quizzes, we had games and raffles and minute to win it. Games for the patients. And it was a party in the clinics that entire month, essentially. And the patients looked forward to it. The clinicians looked forward to it. It was a lot of fun. And none of it was any of our ideas.

No. And that's why it worked. Because if we had had the same idea, it would have been just because of the nature of our position in the company. Especially without meeting rhythms, our culture would perceive that position as authoritative. So who wants to be told to have fun? Like, no one can mandate fun. And culture, but group pressure can totally mandate that. And it. Because it's not singular to an individual. It's not the hierarchy anymore or the patriarchy. It's us. It's our family that wants to connect. And then it's like, yeah, that'd be cool. And then people buy in, and then the experience becomes amazing. And then next year they build on it and repeat.

Right, well, let's talk a Little bit the benefits of having these meetings and how they might look. And we didn't get into too many details just yet. Let's do that now before we talk about the meetings that we're going to have. And this is kind of a skeleton structure of what I. What we've used in meetings before and maybe evolved a little bit with what you've been doing in the black. But this is how I remember them starting. We always had the one word open. Right. How is it, what's. Get a gauge of where everyone is at in one word. How are you feeling today as you're coming into the meeting? And that just kind of gets a temperature of the room as to what the tone is for everybody. Right. We do that at the beginning and we could do at the end we have a one word close. We'd recite our motto, Production is the basis of morale. Right. Then we'd talk, recite the purpose, recite our values. We'd have the two to five minute thought about one of the values. Am I doing well so far?

Killing it.

Right. And then we talk about. Look immediately at our statistics. Does that sound right?

Totally.

We look as a group, as a clinic, as a whole and also as individuals, especially if there were department heads or individual providers. We look at the individual statistics and we statistics and we're only looking at one key stat that we chose for each person.

Every role had one key stat. There was a graph over six week trend that they would all show it and the curve of the graph determined if they were growing flat or dying. It was really black and white and.

They would essentially just talk about where they, where what their battle plan is for the next week. Are they going to continue doing what they're doing? Are they going to do something new? Do they need to do something different? And they that they'd share their battle plan for the next week. So it was expected that they come prepared for the meeting. Right. They needed to come with a little bit of thought. And then we talk typically about maybe calendar items. Right.

We used to do the announcements towards the beginning. Like it would be the pieces I would add would be after the one word open there would be the meeting rules. It was always like I forgot about our. Our culture was meeting rules.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, be the first to share, own your own experience, remember who our customers are.

Right.

And sometimes we'd take time just to talk about that. But one of the big meeting rules I just want to punch real quick was gnome pink elephants. And this is a big One, because what that means is someone doesn't feel complete or safe in a meeting. They have to speak up. And this became a game changer early on. So everyone's connected with the one word open. You've gone through the meeting rules. The pink elephant people, they'd say clear or they would bring up their issue. And at first it was like, yeah, I'm just kind of tired. Okay. When the team safety grew, you know what, Josh? I set up this marketing and I went into the clinic and it wasn't there. And I appreciate all that you do, and I'm just curious why that's not up. I'm really worried about it. Like, did I do something wrong? You know, it's like they're calling each other out in that meeting. And we've had whole meetings where people are just clearing pink elephants. And those are the best meetings you've ever had because they're like 90210. They're not like a reality TV show calling each other out. It's real, like, respectful. You're debating and people are like, well, I actually don't get the point of the wheel. I remember that meeting. I didn't put it out there. I'm should have. I'm out of integrity. And if I gotta be honest, I don't get it. I don't see why we're supposed to do that. And Stacy, our marketer would be like, well, Scott or Josh, we talked about it that, you know, like, they would go back and forth and then by the end of it, we'd go, well, the CEOs just like, well, why do we do this? And like, Josh, is there another way to have handled that? And by the end of it, everyone feels so much more connected and we move the needle. But like the pink elephants in the rule and then the announcements are usually, you can do them in the middle like that, or you can do them in the beginning. Of course, it doesn't matter. It's not like there's one way. But I love the way you talked about the stats and the battle plans because that was a big deal. Just like, they had to come prepared. And what we started to do was took your advice, Nate, on the one thing. Because people will use that time to talk about their battle plans and just politic. Well, you know, it's the slow season and da da, da, da, da, versus my one thing is I'm going to call past patients and get my visits up because I'm below staff.

Yeah, exactly.

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And then there's opportunity. That's where the leaders, of course, have to be prepared. Going into the meeting, are we going to talk about an issue? Are we going to talk about vacations coming up? Are we going to talk about the holidays? Are we going to talk about a policy that's falling out and seeing that it's not being followed at this time? A key issue, and this is something that usually comes up because of prior meetings where there's been an issue or there's an outstanding issue that's just not being addressed on a regular basis. So there's opportunities to train in there. Of course, if you have students, they're going to have to present right. During the course of their internship. And so that can be put in there somewhere. Right. Some kind of continuing education if necessary. Consider all your OSHA trainings that you're supposed to do, the HIPAA trainings that you're supposed to do on an annual basis, even documentation trainings. But I guess if you're doing documentation trainings, you want to do that more provider specific. But. And then if there's time then. Yeah, time for parking lot issues like you mentioned. What are some of those things?

Yeah, I love it. I think that's a great overview. And then when we're closed, like you said, and you move a couple of needles, you review the statistics, people walk away a little bit more clear as to where they are in the week and in the company. It's amazing how much power those meetings can generate. In our reviews, when we would do reviews, the number one reviewed, hands down the number one reviewed part of our company that people said they loved the most was the meetings at Rise Rehab. And it's true for in the Black as well. They say that the meetings are the best part of the company, their experience.

It's impressive.

Yeah, it's, it's impressive. When we, we did, which was give it to them, like when we really use it As a tool, the right way to like empower them and let them solve problems and offload us.

Yeah.

Again, they thank us for it.

Yeah. And some of the meetings that I would imagine in, on a smaller scale, of course, there are your whole clinic meetings that involves anybody who's in the clinic. Right. I have had some clients who do provider specific meetings, maybe separately weekly or bi weekly, where it's just about the providers and issues that are specific to them that can or have to happen. But then if you have any form of leadership, then you're going to want to have a leadership team meeting between those top two or three people on a weekly basis as well, to make sure you're all on the same page. And then in that meeting. Yeah. You can focus on, okay, what are some of the topics of our upcoming team meetings? Right. What are some of the issues that need to be addressed and is a team meeting worthy or is that a one on one conversation with somebody? And what are some of the key statistics we need to drive? So it follows the similar agenda. Right. This, the agenda is really not much different, but the conversations are more global. And then instead of specific unless necessary.

Yeah. And it's cool. Some people will call that meeting the executive council meeting.

Right.

I think organically we've kind of hit the main meetings in the right order. I think if people are looking to put in meetings into their practice. Nate, I think the weekly team meeting like you and I have been talking about is number one, the clinic by clinic weekly team meeting. The second meeting would be executive council. Depending on your size, you actually might need to put that in first if you're a multi location business. But I don't think you get multi location if you haven't already been doing the weekly team meetings. I think you get to that point where you have the executive council meeting and like you said, it's very similar agenda. I think the key differences are introduction of like we ended up doing Tony Time, who used to be in charge of recruiting. She would come in and do 5 minutes update on what's been requested for hiring and what she's working on and where she's at. So it's like we could. All the directors knew, okay, here are the positions that are open and here's what we're filling. And then there was the marketing minute with Stacy. Right. Stacey would come in and go, all right, here's the events were scheduled, here's the doctors where I'm working on. And so those two. And then there was a Katie moment as well, where she would come in over financials. That wasn't really with the executive council. That was specific to the owners and.

I think that was the clinic director meeting, right?

Yeah.

Where they approached.

That's right.

Where we have the multi clinic directors come together.

That's right. I'm sorry, because that I'm combining the director meeting and executive council. The executive council was you and me and like Michelle.

Exactly.

And then there was the director meeting with all the clinic directors with us. And then when you were working in ak, obviously you wouldn't have to be in those as much. Then there was the clinic by clinic meetings and so there was three weekly meetings and sounds like a lot of meetings but it's really like how like information gets, you know, brought up to the top and how decisions get made and how it gets disseminated. So when you really think about it, sure, there was, in a four location company, you count every single weekly meeting, there was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours of meetings. But across 50 people, like in me personally, I only had two hours of meeting a week. The directors only had two hours of meetings a week. Like it wasn't that. It wasn't as much as it sounds. And when it starts flowing you wonder how you lived without it. That's for sure.

Yeah. And people who say well that's a lot of wasted time when they could be out on the clinic floor producing. Oh yeah. And I can totally understand that because that's my driver. Right. I want to see production, I want to see money and I'm going to judge my self worth on my bank account. However.

When we looked at our financials compared to the others that we sold with at the time, we were head and shoulders above on profit margins compared to the other companies. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that we had a, had built a culture and an accountability system through the meetings in which we could drive productivity.

Heck yeah. Like I like to say, because this isn't a brag on us, it's a brag on the people is that when merged with those four other companies we weren't the biggest, we weren't even the second biggest in terms of patient volume or number of locations. Right. We had two other companies that were bigger in both of those regards, but we were the most, we had the highest net margin, we had the highest net profits, meaning we worked, we didn't see as much gross volume but we had more profits than anyone else because that means we work smarter, not harder. And what does that mean? We delegated Delegate. You know, magnification is delegation and delegation requires space. And that's where the meetings come in. The meetings come in to collaborate. Delegate. Any other word that rhymes with delegate. And commissary, you know, whatever. Commiserate. Don't be late. Try not to hate. Do you remember that in Excess song?

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Yeah, that was a good one. Anyway, it's like that. It's. The meetings are every. Exactly that regard.

Well, and so the one meeting that we didn't discuss was the quarterly town halls. I actually wasn't around when you started implementing those. I had moved by that time and so. But the quarterly town halls were a great opportunity to bring all the teams together and really cast a vision and do some vision sharing and training on a greater level. Magnifying that training. Right. Tell us about the benefit and how you ran those quarterly town halls.

Free extra chapter that you download on on the website. So we download. So what we just talked about is like bare bones. Like once you get your executive council director, depending on your size, maybe all you need is a weekly clinical meeting. You're a single location provider. You just need one meeting an hour a week. So once you get your regular meetings in place, then you can escalate things to a quarterly town hall. So by the way, we used to close down the clinic on the quarterly town hall. We would shut the entire company. Usually it was. We were open to about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. We still ended a little bit earlier on those Fridays, but we shut down at noon. Four locations, almost 20 providers. We shut down patient care per provider for three hours on a Friday, once a quarter. Think about that. That's almost 50 visits a week. So let's say 100 visits a week, $5,000. We were, quote, unquote, losing in that regard. Smartest investment of growing our profits ever. Because when you shut down and you get your tribe together and you connect at the deepest level, it was a tear fest every time. And it wasn't because of one person. It was just this. We would give space to acknowledge each other over the company values and the purpose. And one of the main things we did was we would stand up and go through one of our company. We'd go through four of our values and we'd say, okay, we're going to talk about accountability. Who here? Close your eyes. Everyone here can think of someone in the company that exemplified this value. You can think of someone. Raise your hand. Don't even worry about it, raise your hand. And literally from day one, people would raise their hands. We'd have three to five people per value, stand up in front and recognize each other and go. Susan would stand up and say, I want to talk about Carrie and how Carrie for accountability changed my life. Things would come up that we didn't know about. People losing family members or having to deal with cancer or, like, all these things would come up that we had no idea as we grew until it was brought up by the team members. And the love was so palpable that, like, people would just know that we were really committed to each other. That commitment thickened over time. The trust grew to the point where we would just walk away from those quarterly town halls knowing that we were risers. And that was something that was really unique. I think when we merged as well, is that everyone loved their company and thought it was the best. Our company to this day, those people who used to work together, they still refer to each other as risers or the rise way. I hear that all the time. Like, when I talk to people, it's like, well, you know, so and so they do it the rise way. So that kind of commitment, that's when things go from like, this really cool company that is being run by wonderful people. And it's not like this burden. That's when it becomes this thing bigger than any one of us, and we start to look at it as.

And we have to give credit where it's due. This is something that you just pulled out of nowhere. A lot of it came from Verna Harnish's scaling up. Am I wrong? Oh, sorry.

No. I said that at the beginning. It's a free chapter. It's all in there. Like, there was no the play in the playbook that we took out. And even if I took that play out of the playbook, it was Michelle Babinek, Stacey Sullivan, it was Stephanie Borland. It was the directors we had at the time that took that and said, okay, let's do this. Let's do it right. And it wasn't one of us. It was literally this collaboration. The way the town halls worked was that we would get together on a Thursday night. Well, first of all, it was Thursday morning that the executive council, the four people would get together. There'd be planning over the next quarter. It'd be review of the previous quarter, planning for the next quarter. It'd be a kickoff dinner Thursday night. All the directors came in, and we'd all have dinner. It was usually at Boca de Becko's or whatever that name is. That Italian restaurant's name is. And then Friday we bring in a facilitator like a Scott Fritz or a Corwin. And then in a room, map out the next quarter. Right. And then the week from that Friday, a week from that Friday was the town hall so that we had time to create targets, goals in those town halls. There was a lot of love, but there was also a lot of like, okay, here's the red, yellow, green focus for next quarter. And we want everyone to write down what, how their role, their commitment and their role is going to move the needle. And so you have technicians writing down how they're going to break the record of it's in the next quarter, in the summer months when it usually slows down. And then the first thing you would do in the town hall after you warm up is you would recognize if we hit red, yellow, green. And there was always a really sexy price to it, Right. Like if it was green, it was something really big if it was red. So like again, it was such a collaboration to get there. Anyone can do it. It's really a matter of starting small with the meeting rhythms really gripped the most. Right. Like the weekly meetings have to be in place. They have to be bought into metrics. They like that has to be in place before you throw a town hall out. Once that's there, you can accelerate it to this huge degree.

If people hadn't bought into the culture by that point, they really did or just solidified that culture and that environment and the all the feel goods prior to that, it really solidified the team.

As a whole by, by really using those quarterly pushes to connect and move the needle.

Yeah. Became a lot easier.

Agreed. And it was cool too because at that point that's when recruiting and hiring became a non issue. Yeah. That's the hard thing to teach in Rockstar Recruiter is that like you first have to have those things in place to really create the magnet draw for people to want to come work. But it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. You can't create that culture unless you hire those people. So you just keep fighting, you fight the battle. Right. We hire people, we don't have the culture to keep them long enough, but we hire again. We don't get quite as good at people. So we work them out, we bring a better person in and on, on and we on we go. And over time, if we don't give up and we are willing to let go of the fact that our treating is everything, we can let go of that one Core limiting belief we can get there. I think you and I are living proof of that. The fact that you and I got to that place with our team is more of a reflection of it being possible for anyone than anything else. Yeah.

Because I'm usually afraid about talking about culture because people say. Think that there might be a switch or a certain one thing that needs to be done and within a couple months my culture is going to be better. I mean, you've got to look at culture as a. It's got to be a long play, it's going to be a long game. And I would say it took us a couple three years before we could have said that our culture was a significantly positive impact in our business.

Yeah, I agree. And to your point, I think about those first year, it was way worse before it got better. When we first reconnected and created Rise after having our whole journey of Pinnacle and Affinity and all those different companies we used to own together and whatever, then we got all of them together and created Rise. That first bit we had, that first connection and drive for culture actually stirred the hornets nests in such a bad way that some of the worst professional memories of my life.

Right.

Occurred in that journey with one location in particular whose name will not be mentioned because it turned out to be great after we. You got that cleaned out. But yeah, it was hell. It was absolute hell and just so miserable. If I could go back in, in time and. And talk to myself, then I would. I would have loved to have taken a video of one of those later town hall meetings and been like, hey man, this is the price you're paying to build. And then it wouldn't have been hard. I don't. What would you have told yourself going back in time in those days of like, when you.

I think it would have similarly would have said, listen, what you're doing is going to pay off. Because you were. Even though you're losing people now who you think are valuable, the people that are going to come in their place are going to be aligned and you'll get more fulfillment from them than you ever have before.

Yeah. You'll be so fulfilled by what's coming that whatever price you pay now is more than worth it.

Right, exactly. Because I think that's what we saw, especially as those who were not value aligned shipped off and people who were more closely value aligned came on. Then pushing production, pushing accountability, getting people to see the visions that we saw and the desire to do more and be better became so much more easier. It was easier to talk about numbers. It was easier to talk about getting things done. It was easier to get volunteers for projects. It was easier to find leadership team people who wanted to join leadership development programs, all these things. As we gained more people who were aligned with us and we had a culture that supported those same people, then leaders just started bubbling up. Right. And people wanted to take on more and more off of our plates. And then leadership became so much more easy.

Agreed. And it's a flywheel concept of, like, you're cranking at first so hard, and then the wheel starts picking up momentum and then it starts pulling you, and it's. It's an amazing thing that happens. And I would just say, as you're talking, it kind of made me realize that the one thing that we did right from the beginning was we knew our job. And what I mean by that is you and I knew that we were not going to serve anybody treating. We weren't going to ever grow any of that if we were treating. And it's not. I'm not bagging on treating, but I do want, whenever possible, to make mention to the many wonderful, talented PT owners that are listening that there is a greatness on the other side of treating that, if you could see it, would make you want to put down your goniometer right now and step into leadership full time. It is one of the most amazing reward. It blows out any patient care experience I've ever had out of the water, which I loved my patient care. And I thought. I mean, for years, I never thought I'd just like you. I never thought I'd ever be anything other than a passionate provider. But building a team to help thousands of people at that level of commitment and trust is just indescribable. If you and I were still trying to treat patients and do that, it would have never happened. We would have stayed in our routine. So if people are like, what am I doing that's keeping me stuck? You're treating well. How can I survive without. I've got, you know, what do I do? It's like, well, then go get a coach and figure it out. But you've got to be committed to step one, getting to work on your company full time. Little by little at first, but then getting full time because it took Nathan and I being full time on the business for years to get to that point.

And I. The people who are stuck, I don't think they recognize that they are the limiting factor. They are stuck because once you say, well, you need to go treat, they've already got These self limiting beliefs or false postulates. Well, if I'm not treating, who's treating? They can't treat as well as I can and they don't care as much and well, okay, so how are you going to get them to care as much and how are you going to train them even if you do hire them and find them? How are you going to keep everything in and do the things the way you want them done according to the values and purpose that you've already iterated? How are you going to do that? Do you think these people are just going to naturally fall in your lap and stay fully aligned all the time and run all your policy and procedures without you telling them how to run policy and procedures? Right. So what systems are you going to use to keep everything humming?

Right.

And what else can you use besides well planned and thought out meeting rhythms? How else are you going to spread your message?

Totally. It is the ultimate start of like when people, I think giving a lot of people for listening the benefit of the doubt. I think the reason they still treat isn't just because they're safe in treating. I think there's legitimate. Exactly fear and not understanding what to do. If they weren't, you know, they might lean on the excuse of like, well if I don't treat then we're going to lose money or not even exist. And that might be the case in some rare cases, but in every case it's possible to work yourself out of treating into leadership full time. But that's why coach, it goes back to coaching again, hiring you or Adam to talk about how to build yourself out of the day to day in a way that then they can put in meetings. Because then that's the thing, once you're out of treating, you start putting these meetings in Takes work. Man, this is not easy, but it is doable. Anyone can do it.

Right? Exactly. I think there's no other way to really develop that culture than what we're talking about. I mean I can't think of it. You could do one on one accountability meetings all the time and have your annual reviews, but there's no other way to bring a team together. I mean you could have.

No, I used to do all those. I used to do one on one five question interviews with every director, every key player, every biller and like it was exhausting. And there's still a lot of people in my network who still do that in my business network outside of physical therapy. And I just kind of like want to say no. Just go to a group Accountability thing. They love it more and it takes so much. You get so much of your own time back.

Yeah, exactly. What books do you recall were influential in helping helping us develop some of these meetings and recognize the importance of them. We talked about scaling up.

Any others that's the best for structure. Like that's like the skeletons anatomy of it. If you think about comparing a business to learning how to treat patients, the anatomy of the meeting structure and really most things business are in scaling up. It's a bible. So it's a heavy read. It took years to go through that kind of like. Cause you'd have to read it and implement and so on. When it comes to like the culture of what you're wanting to build within the structure and five, dysfunction of a team. Patrick Lencioni is number one, hands down. And then just an overall cultural builder would be Leadership and self Destruction. Self Deception.

Self Destruction is a different book.

Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbiter Institute is an incredible like if you're wanting to learn about like those types of things, those were the best three resources I would recommend because if those three things are hit then it's really does help create the structure and then with content that will be valuable.

Yeah. I think one of the really basic ones, one of the first ones that we read was Mastering the Rockefeller Hibits. Right. Also by Vern Harnish. A smaller read than Scaling up but. And the precursor to scaling up, but that was a really good one.

I thought Scaling up was Rockefeller Habits.

2.0, something like that.

Is it a separate book?

Yeah, it is. But Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. There was that first one and it was. It was smaller.

Yeah.

From what I recall another thing that.

You brought to the table, a book that I loved that became part of the meeting rhythms was the one thing because we went from like battle plans which came from measurable solutions to. All right, create your battle plan. But just tell us the one thing that matters most from your battle plan. For simplicity. It eliminated all the politicking and it was just kind of like, you know, like we were talking about. So that's a good book to kind of fill the content. Exactly.

I like that idea too. Really good books. Cool man. Anything else you want to say about meetings?

Yeah, I just think. I hope people are like can see like the power of it. Right. Like we've just been going off on. This is such a cool thing because again, it's something that we all have at our disposal and just takes a little bit of organization. The impact is exponential and so, yeah, I just hope that people, as they're listening to this, they. They can feel that the possibility of what they could do if they started the meetings or improve them. And to remember, most of all, to not negate yourself. PT owners are the worst at this. I put myself in this category of beating myself up. Oh, I'm not doing that. I should do that. It's like, no, no, no. Just take one step. Just take one step. Like, if you don't have a coach, start with a coach. Don't worry about meetings. Get a coach. Step one. Step two, talk to the coach about meetings. Break it down into chewable pieces.

If you want to start meetings, don't look for the best times in which to put them down. Every week we had ours, what, every Tuesday at lunch. So it wasn't a surprise to anybody. They started at lunch, 11:58 or 12:05 every Tuesday. Come prepared. So it's not a surprise for anybody. Right. And it just takes a little bit of effort to do that. And once you do it, then it's on the schedule for every week. Now. Let's go.

Yeah. And then the consistency alone creates value in a way that if you don't have the perfect structure or the perfect culture or the right people just doing it every week, it's going to get better.

An event ends up only being 40 minutes.

Great.

People would love the extra 20 minutes, I'm sure.

Yeah. End the meeting. If you feel like it's going sideways, go, well, that's it for today and let it go. It doesn't have to be an hour. You know, we feel the need to fill the hour every time. When the meetings take off, you'll be doing the opposite. You'll be cutting things out of the meeting because you have so much content that you are feeling or you've handled so much.

Right. We've got a lot of stuff that we've handled this past year. And I remember in one of our meetings, it was like, we talk about how to handle the holidays every year because Christmas falls on a Wednesday or a Friday or what are we going to do when the. When Christmas falls on a weekend. I remember we spent one meeting, took us about 10 or 15 minutes, and just set up a policy for how we handle holidays all the time so we never have this conversation ever again.

Yeah. Yeah. If you find yourself talking about the same things in the meetings, it's like, maybe we should do something different.

Let's just make one decision that affects every conversation going forward regarding this topic. And there are Some people who are going to act out during these meetings, you know what, that's a good opportunity, like you said, to shut it down or hey, I guess we need to have a one on one conversation. Let's go, let's do that. Let's set that up for some other time. Right. And we can talk about it. So those things come up, but you can handle them and that's fine. But I'd rather handle them.

I love this.

I'd rather handle them there or know that that came up during the pink elephant conversation instead of letting it brew and then, and then you get a two week notice or someone not show up for the job.

Yeah. When someone quits after having really powerful meeting structures and review structures, both of those things in place. When someone quits and you're surprised 99 of the time, it's on them at that point, you know, oh, I wasn't happy here. It's like every week we're asking why you're. If you're not happy about something, every so often we're checking in personally with you. That's on you. And that still happens, but it happens so much less. Right. And that's just one of like dozens of problems that are resolved by simply having meetings.

Well, thanks for your time, dude. I think it was awesome that we could talk.

Thank you for having me. Hope all your listeners are safe in their cars. They're driving home.

All right, thanks, man. We will catch up again later, I'm sure.

Okay, talk to you soon.

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