Module 7 Speaker: Dr. Jamey Schrier Topic: Right Fit Hiring

Transcription

1 Page 1 Module 7 Speaker: Dr. Jamey Schrier Topic: Right Fit Hiring AUDIO START: [0:00:01] Hi, welcome to the Right Fit module. My name is Dr. Jamey Schrier. So, today we're going to talk about hiring the best possible people to your practice. You know, hiring was without a doubt the most difficult and frustrating aspect of my business, and it took me such a long time to really get the right people on board. I mean, let's face it, if you don't have the right people on board in your practice you are never going to be able to get to that next level because you need really good people to help you leverage and delegate to get to that next level, and we talked about that in other modules how important that is in order to grow your practice is to focus on what you do best and let your staff focus on what they do best. So, I started realizing, I was like, Why was hiring and really attracting the right staff, why was it so difficult for me? And one of the reasons was I wasn't very clear on what I wanted. I wasn t very clear on who I wanted. So, I had kind of a general idea, all right? Like, I kind of said, Well, I kind of know who I wanted, but I wasn't very specific, so when people ended up showing up I was kind of more reacting to people coming into my office instead of really identifying and knowing who I was looking for. And I think the other reason, and this is probably the bigger reason, is I just absolutely refused to understand the employee mentality, and you owners out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't know what it is, maybe I'm old. You know what? I am old, but ever since I can remember I just don't get the mindset of these PTs or the mindset of these front desk people. I just don't understand it, so I kept trying to make them understand my mindset and where I was coming from, and the reality was that wasn't going to happen, they're not going to try to understand me, they don't care about me, you know? They care about themselves, people care about themselves, and it was up to me to really understand them, sound familiar, right? You know, it's up to us to understand our prospects and our patients, not the other way around. So, I think that was really the big limiting factor for me that took me years, I mean, years to finally get this in a way that was less stressful hiring really great people and to this day we have a fantastic staff, we have a small staff, but it's a fantastic staff. Everyone is engaged, and productive, and people bring ideas, and aren't afraid of getting bashed, or getting verbally abused, Hey, you don't bring ideas to me, I'm the expert, I know all. People feel like they can bring stuff to the table and really make a contribution, and that's what it's all about. So, really, I owe the success of my practice and the ability for me to even be sitting here today talking with you guys, today is a Tuesday, you know, normally I'd be slaving away at the practice if it was a few years ago, but the reason I can do this is because of great people and a great staff. So, that's what I'm really here to talk about

2 Page 2 today. So, I gave you kind of a little insight of kind of what my mentality was like in kind of refusing to kind of give in to these employees and that mindset and that kind of victim and I deserve $75,000. Why, because you have a license? You know, I just could not for the life of me get over that mentality, you know? Front desk, You deserve to be there because I can answer the phone and all that. So, way back when, actually, not too long ago, but for the first, I guess, it's 2001, so probably the first nine or 10 years, I'm going to give you a little sense of what it was like. So, my friends used to make fun of me all the time is because every time they spoke to me, it could be every week or every other week, I was always telling a story of who I fired this week, who quit this week, or who I was hiring this week, and it happened week after week after week, I mean, month after month, year after year. [0:05:10] I mean, literally the joke was my practice was a revolving door and for the most part I just kept saying because I read a lot of books, I take webinars and seminars, I work with consultants and coaches and mentors, and a lot of times when you read that stuff I was like, All right, well, it's just not the right people, it's just not the right people. So, I would basically justify people leaving my practice as in, well, you know what, when you start organizing your business and you start getting very focused on what you want not everybody's the right fit. So, I would kind of justify it in my own head that these people weren't the right fit, and that worked for a while, but eventually even I started to laugh. I mean, crying inside, but kind of laughing on the outside with my friends and my neighbors that I started looking at how many people have come in and out of my practice, and it was 10s of people and I have a small practice, so we're talking about 10, 20, 30, 40 different people coming in and out of my practice in like a year's time, I mean, that's insane. How much time, and money, and effort did I put myself through and the people that actually stayed with me through as well as the patients having this non-consistent type of business? And what I started to kind of come to grips with, well, let me tell you this, what kind of what the trigger for me was is when I had this PT say they were leaving and this was one of my most productive PTs, a PT that I felt that I had a connection with, I felt this Physical Therapist really got it. I mean, I looked at this person as one day you could really be an integral part of Schrier, you could be a director, you could be all thees things, and this PT just kind of got up and quit, and that kind of effected me, and the reason it effected me because I couldn't lie to myself. I couldn't blame that this person wasn't the right fit, I knew this person was the right fit, and I was just kind of, I don't know, just kind of hurt or effected or, Wow, this person thought so little of me and my practice that they were willing to go somewhere else even though they say they loved it, but they had to move on for what, I don't know what reason they gave, but it was kind of a bullshit reason to not make me feel so bad.

3 Page 3 But then when I sat there and realized that, you know what, that reason was a bunch of crap, the real reason was is I created a practice that was not the kind of practice that I wanted, and it kind of was a wake up call, and I think was kind of the real, I don't know, whatever that thing was that put me over the edge. I said, I've got to get serious here. I've got to attract the right people. I've got to know how to get the right people on board for this thing to grow. I can have all the great systems in the world and I've written blogs and articles about McDonald's and all that, but, I mean, let's get real, I mean, I don't run a McDonald's, you don't run a McDonald's, we can't pay someone $7 an hour to take someone's order. We need some really, really good people on board and I know at least for me if I had really great people on board it would grow the practice a heck of a lot more effortlessly than having not good people on board and causing this anxiety and stress, and really lack of productivity and lack of money and opportunities and time off and things like that. So, having that PT leave was really the biggest ah-ha breakthrough for me. So, like I said before, the staff now is fantastic and we got this engaged and productive staff, and that's what I want to share with you today is at least my system of how I hire the best people. So, I know you're thinking like, Jamey, okay, you've said your story, tell me the good stuff. Tell me how to do this, tell me how to bring in a great staff or even make the staff that I have so much better. So, let's go to the board. [0:10:01] So, I'm going to split this up into three areas here and what we have here is recruiting, let me grab my marker here. So, we have recruiting, hiring, and training. So, that's where we're going to start. Okay, so with recruiting there's a couple different areas. We have ads, and we have word-of-mouth, we have the interview process, and lastly we have the offer. All right, so when I talk about recruiting these are the three areas that I include in recruiting. Now, some people may include part of the hiring into this, but this is the way I do it. All right, hiring, really what I have here, and we'll go more into this, is hiring I have a checklist and we'll talk a lot about that. And then training, I'll call it a training checklist,but I have a training process really depending on what position it is. So, this is how I do it; recruiting, hiring, and training. So, with recruiting, recruiting is really about one thing, it's about attraction. How can you attract the best people, okay? Because if you can attract the good people, this is what I found out, if you can attract the good people then it becomes a whole lot more easy to hire the good people. If you're attracting crap, and I used to attract crap upon crap upon crap, you know, basically people that were just nowhere near the right fit for my company and my vision of where I was going. If you are attracting that sometimes just because of desperation or reactiveness, so many times my recruiting came from being reactive. I needed to find a therapist, why? One just quit. I needed to find a front desk person because one just quit. So, everything

4 Page 4 was high stress, like, Oh, my God, we've got to go, everyone running around like chickens with their head cut off. I mean, we were just reacting so quickly to something and when you're recruiting and hiring crappy candidates to come in a lot of times what you do is you hire the best crappiest candidate, and that's what happened with us. We just hired the best of the crap. I'd rather hire the worst of the great people than the best of the crap, but guess what? There wasn't really great people walking in. So, what I started to look at is let's take kind of each one of these things, so what I started to look at is how are we attracting people to our office? And the most common way is through ads or WOM (word-ofmouth). So, I don't have to tell you that every one watching this at one time or another has put an ad onto Craigslist or in the paper, if you're still using paper, or if it's a Physical Therapist, maybe in your state association ad or the APTA or whatever the case is. But writing some type of ad to attract somebody is how many of us do it, and it's how I always did it. So, let me be real honest with you here, I mean, I'm honest with you, but I'm going to be real honest. You know how I did my ads? I went on Craigslist and I just looked at how other people did their ads and I just copied and pasted them, that was my secret. So, what did that get me? It got me the same crappy people that the other people were hiring, and that the other people were interviewing. In other words, it was the same friggin' ad that said, Fast pace and exciting PT office looking for great team person to answer the phones, and yadda-yadda-yadda. I mean, it was the same crap! You know, Great benefits, competitive salary, and in a very great location, awesome orthopedics, sports medicine. I mean, it's the same crap. So, I did that for years. Why? Because I was reacting to everything, I really didn't understand how to write an ad. I was just like, Whatever. Once that person comes in I'll be able to figure out who the best fit is for our company, but what I realized is that the right people were not going to be attracted to that just average run-of-the-mill ad. So, that had to be changed and I changed it. [0:15:36] One of the things that I did here is, get out my trusty thing, is I went deeper. So, when you're writing an ad you want to go deeper into the ad. See, the ad is to attract the right person. There's no difference in writing this ad then writing an to prospects, to patients that want to come in. So, what do you need to know in your when you're writing the patients, first of all, you've got to know your target audience, all right? So, going to get this stuff off here. Let's just take this one thing here. So, who is your target? Who is the person that you want? So, you're going to have to know, of course, what position you're hiring and all that, but what other qualities does that person have? When you envision this person at, let's say, the front desk how do you envision that position being done? See, you as the owner have to do some work beforehand, you've got to prepare beforehand. The more you prepare beforehand the better you are going to be at attracting, and interviewing, and hiring that great, great person for your practice.

5 Page 5 So, let's say you were looking for a front desk coordinator, okay? How do you envision that person to be? What kid of communication skills do they have? I can't tell you how many offices I've been to in the medical field that have the absolute worst front desk people I've ever met. They couldn't have hired any worse. You walk into the person and the person is sitting there doing some work and says [in a snarky tone], Hello, can I help you? I mean, come on, really? We can't do better than that? So, is that you want at the front desk? Is that what you envision? Or do you envision someone that just has a natural energy, a nice smile, answers the phone with almost like you can tell the person is smiling behind it? See, those persons exist, but they're not going to come to your practice with an ad that says, Looking for front desk person, good hours, competitive salary. I mean, come on, it's just not going to happen. So, you want to think about, you want to write down what does this look like to you? What is this position? Who is the perfect candidate to come in? Rather than all the candidates come in and you pick the best of the bunch, that's what you don't want to do. You want to have very clear, or as clear as you possibly can, who you want filling that, and the reason I pick the front desk, not a Physical Therapist in this particular example, is because I believe the front desk person is the most important person in the practice because that's the first person and the last person that you're patient interacts with, and that person, if you have lots of employees, that person can make or break anybody's day. So, you want to have a very strong and solid front desk person. Okay, so we talked about the qualities you want them to have, what kind of dress, I mean, some people like to do scrubs at the front desk which is fine, I know at our practice I like to have my front desk dressed up, not in full suits necessarily, but I want them dressed professionally. I don't want them wearing a T-shirt at the front desk. I want them looking good, them looking good, feeling good, but it's whatever you want. This is your practice, that's why I can share with what I'm doing and hopefully you get nuggets out of it, but don't do what I do necessarily. You've got to figure that out for yourself, what can kind of practice do you have? What kind of business do you have? How do you envision it? All of this goes into creating your ideal practice, okay? [0:20:05] So, we talked about that. Now, let's talk about really, the best way to attract someone to your practice, and the best way by far in my experience is word-of-mouth. So, word-of-mouth employees are the best. Why? Because if you have--now, there's kind of a double-edged sword here, all right? So, I'm going to show you my amazing art work here. So, all right, that's my feeble attempt at a knife, or a sword, so there's a doubleedged sword, there's this side and there's this side. So, word-of-mouth can work and word-of-mouth worked great for our practice. The problem was our practice had so many really bad employees in it, I laugh now, I wasn't laughing then, the practice had so man bad employees is the word-of-mouth, the people would get more bad employees, right? So, the bad would attract the bad.

6 Page 6 Now, what started to happen is once I started getting rid of these guys, what really happens is the good starts attracting the good, and not only do the good employees bring in other good people, the good employees protect your business by keeping the bad employees out. So, word-of-mouth can be a very powerful positive thing as long as you have some really good people on board because they can bring other people. So, another great word-of-mouth I know a lot of people do, and I know we started this program several years ago, is a student program. Bring in students, bring in top-notch students. I know with us we would only accept students going into their last year that really had a true interest in orthopedics. Why? Because we knew that they potentially could be employees. The great part is we get to train them and they get to work for us and it's like a two month interview, or a 10 week interview, and then stay in touch with them. So, yeah, have them join your letter. If they're in town have them attend some of your events, keep them connected. It's amazing, they very quickly become Licensed Physical Therapists and they can very quickly come into your practice, so that's some of the best ways as word-of-mouth can work to get great people into your practice. All right, so we got that, we got first part of recruiting, we got the ad, and we have the word-of-mouth. Now, in your member site all of this included, all right? I'm giving you sample ads. I'm actually going to give you a couple things, I'm going to give you the sample ads of the crappy ads I used to write, and then I'll give you some sample ads of some newer ads that I write. Again, look at the difference, look at the emotional connection that the ad has, or the first ads really don't have much of an emotional connection, but the second ad has more of an emotional connection because we're looking for a very specific person. So, as we get clearly identified of who we want the ad then becomes attracting that person. See, I'd rather have two or three candidates of the right person than 50 candidates of the wrong person. So, you're going to get all that, so I'm not going to go into specifically how to write an ad and all that, you're going to get all that type of stuff. All right, let's move on here. So, the next thing we're moving on to is the interview process. So, the interview process, very interesting. I break up the interview process in a couple different things, so let me go over that. This is some good stuff here. So, the interview we have a couple things; we have phone interview, we have the inperson interview, and we have the working interview. It's amazing how many people have the in-person interview only, but I will tell you I get more out of, believe it or not, I get more out of this one and this one than any of them. And, again, before you're like, Oh, my God, you've got to explain! I'm going to give you my phone interview. I'm going to give you the questions that I ask. I'm going to give you my in-person interview, I'm going to give you the questions that I ask, and with the working interview, pretty straight forward. [0:25:07]

7 Page 7 So, let's start with the phone interview. So, with the phone interview, kind of the reason I like the phone interview is a couple things. One, what I realized is there are some spammers out there. So, there are people that literally will apply to any position that is like a front desk position, it doesn't really happen with physical therapists at all, but it does happen in front desk positions and it does happen with the PT aide position. In other words, you'll get, I think last time we put out an ad in we got like 110 or something like that, front desk positions. So, what I like to do is when I call is I ask them, What position are you applying for? We have a few ads out there, I just want to know what position. And it's amazing the answers I get, sometimes I get, I don't know, what position do you have available? Or, I'll do anything, something like that and I usually say, Thank you very much. We don't have that position. I just hang up. But when someone says, Oh, I'm applying for the ad that you put on Craigslist yesterday about the front desk position at your office in Gaithersburg. That person, oh my God, I mean, look how much that just told you, that person is very clear, very specific, they know that I'm calling for that specific position, it just tells me so much. The other thing that I do with this is I want to catch people off guard is really what it is. So, when you call someone kind of out of the blue because they're not expecting it, you're going to get their true authentic way of communicating, and this is so important because I can't tell you how many times I've had front desk people in there and during the in-person interview they were awesome. Oh, they said the right things, they were all dressed up, they were very good communicators and it's like they read an English book right before there and they were all perfect, you know, How to Communicate to the Owner During an Interview, they were great. All of a sudden they got into the position, weeks later, you know, they started speaking a little differently than they did and they started treating people a little differently and they were a little bit rude to the staff and rude to the patients, their phone skills weren't exactly what they were. Well, their true nature was coming out, their true authentic self was coming out, and I didn't want that true authentic self. So, I can't tell you how many times that I would call, I said, Hello, can I speak with Liz please? Yeah, who's calling? And I go, Oh, this is Jamey Schrier, I'm calling from Schrier Physical Therapy about the interview. Oh, hi! How are you doing? And they would immediately switch, right? They would immediately become this really nice kind, most of them would switch, some of them would still not switch. They would say, I don't know no Jamey Schrier. But anyways, but they would switch and that would just give me the first kind of inkling, and then usually if that happened, if I kind of have a strike one there then I would ask, Hey, I just wanted to call and just ask you, listen, we have a few positions available, which one in particular were you applying for? So, that would help me really identify what they wanted and then if I really had like not a great feeling on that initial I may ask another question too, just, Why do you think you would be best suited for this particular position? Just something, I just want to get them talking more. If it was no problem, like they answered the phone, I go, Hi, is Liz there? Yes, this is Liz. Who's calling please? Oh, this is Jamey from Schrier Physical Therapy. Do

8 Page 8 you have a few minutes to talk? Well, sure I do. Yeah, I just wanted to know what position. Oh, I was applying for the front desk position that you posted yesterday on Craigslist. Oh, great. Well, when would be a good time to come in? I'd love to have you come in. So, you can just tell right away in this phone call, you're really using this phone call to weed out people. This really isn't a call to say this person is going to be my next front desk person, or my next PT, or my next Physical Therapy Aide, or biller, or whoever. It's really to weed out the people that their resume looked good, but that wasn't really it. And by the way, we're not doing how to scan resumes here, that can be a whole other thing, but yes, before the phone here you want to make sure that they have the qualifications you're looking for. So, going back before, knowing the type of person you want, knowing what kind of experience and all that stuff that you want, obviously, that's you first clue of reviewing the resume before the phone call, so I just wanted to put that in there. [0:30:08] So, we have the phone here, now we have the in-person. And, again, however yo normally do your in-person interview with us I recommend doing it with somebody else in your facility. It could be anybody. It can be a Physical Therapist, it can be a front desk person, it could be your office manager. If you have a very, very small facility and let's say you have a small cash-based practice then bring in somebody that you trust, bring in like a friend or a neighbor and kind of just say this is one of your consultants or something like that. It really doesn't matter what you say, but you want to bring someone else in here because somebody else will have a different opinion and a different view of the person that's in front of you. What started to happen is I always did my interviews always just with me and I am easily, believe it or not, I'm easily influenced, like I'm impressionable, so I want that person to like me so much, I want that person to be really thrilled with my practice. Like, I would almost give them the answers. I go, Don't you just love our practice and where we're going and all this cool stuff? And almost just like helping them just say the right answer and they would say, Yeah, that's awesome. See, I knew you would be the greatest fit here. I mean, I would just kind of give them the answers and then hire them and my staff would tell me, What the heck? How did this person get in here? So, having that other person in there really helps you just have that different viewpoint especially if it's an employee, I mean, you want a top-notch employee, you don't want one of these negative people, but especially if it's a top-notch engaged employee. You want something that has a vested interest in your practice, and it doesn't mean that they're an owner necessarily, but they just demonstrated a vested interest. Once I started bringing somebody in there I would come out. I go, What'd you think? They were great? They were like, No way. Or I'd be like, Oh, that person was okay, they didn't really have the energy that I was looking for. And they would be like, No, Jamey, that person was awesome, they're a billing person, they don't need a ton of energy, but they are really good at being very specific and detail oriented, and stuff like that. So, it was really nice to have that other person there to help.

9 Page 9 Again, the interviews I'll post the interview questions that we've asked in the past. I don't think it's really anything special. What you're really looking to do is you want to get them talking. You want to get them answering the biggest question. Give me examples of why you think you will be a success here in this position. Examples is the key word there because they can talk about, Oh, yeah, I think I'd be great and all that, but you want to give past examples. Now, it doesn't matter where the examples are. Like, sometimes when we're hiring somebody they may not have experience at the front desk. I remember one time I was hiring a kind of a marketing person, they didn't really have experience as a marketing person, but they had a whole lot of experience organizing people, and putting events together for I think it was her church group or I think it was something like that, and I was like, There's difference in putting an event for me for runners than it is for a church group. If you're able to do that then you have that ability to bring people together and communicate. So, we ended up hiring that person. So, again, it's all what you're looking for, but sometimes you do have to kind of read between the lines and realize that if this person has life experience that directly relates to what position hiring you're hiring for then that's pretty good versus they don't have any examples of what thy did. So, that's in-person. So, then the last of the working interview, we've always done working interviews for Physical Therapists, but I really didn't do it for my other staff until later on. So, now we do working interviews for every single position and when we do working interviews there's a difference between the employee standing there and watching shaking their head versus in there doing it. So, one of the things that really kind of flipped the switch for us and working interviews is really getting people involved with that position, especially the front desk. When we had people involved, oh my God, we could tell right away whether they got it or not. So, we would say, Okay, this is how we answer the phone, 'Good morning, Schrier Physical Therapy, this is Liz. Can I help you schedule today?' You got that? Practice it, good. Answer the next call coming in. [0:35:15] You just want to see what they do, even if they kind of messed it up it really doesn't matter, you just want to see how they handle things, how they handle people coming in. Was it natural? Or was it like, Oh my God, this person's an introvert, this person doesn't even like people. We've seen that, we've seen it when they got into that position it just wasn't the right fit versus someone that was just a natural, they took the thing over. They said, Hey, I got this, this is awesome. So, it also gives them, really, a real life tangible hands-on experience of what the position is going to be. So, we've done working interviews for an hour, we've done them from two hours. Some people just stay, they're like, Can I stay here? I really enjoyed it. So, it really depends, whatever your time frame is and whatever their time frame is, but these are the three different interview processes that we use. So, by the time they get through this we are very clear on who that person is. So, now we're going to go to the last part, and remember, we're just in recruiting, we're just in hiring the great person because

10 Page 10 if you can do this well, this part is easy, if you can't do recruiting this part is impossible. So, the last one is the offer. So, having that offer. There's one thing that I've always done that there was a big difference because what I used to do is we would kind of talk about offer, nobody likes talking about that. I haven't met a business owner that likes talking about the money and the benefits and all of that. I mean, I'm the best generalist there is, Well, I don't know, we pay, well, what are you looking for? I don't know, what are you looking for? Oh, we pay $60,000? Uh, that's kind of low. $70,000? Like, I would just kind of try to find out what they're looking for and I would say, Well, what else? We have insurance, sure, we have insurance, what else? You know, we're very competitive with everybody else and the reality is I really didn't have all that stuff in place, so I wasn't really sure. I was like, They shouldn't pick us just because we don't have a 401K program or something like that, so I guess what I'm saying with the offer is be very up front, ask them what are they looking for. First of all, they should fill out an application, that's one thing I didn't mention here, but before you do the interview have them fill a standard application form, very important, and sign it! Sign it, what they're signing to is the information that is accurate on that form, but on that form there's an area that says, Salary desired. Now, we just use a standard form, nothing fancy, I think we get ours at Staples or something, but it says, Salary desired, and it's amazing how many people don't fill it in, especially PTs, they never fill that thing in. So, with the offer, when you start getting to that kind of conversation is what ultimately are you looking for? What are looking for now and what are you looking for in a year or two now? I want to see, do they see themselves going somewhere? Do they see themselves having more than where they are now? Or are they just looking to be a Physical Therapist and get a raise three percent a year or something like that? So, I want to kind of put the whole picture together. So, with the offer letter, and you will receive our offer letter so you'll see exactly what we give people, that offer letter is pre-done. So, before I leave interviewing, before one of my staff leaves this interviewing process, the offer is discussed and already agreed upon because there's no point in me sending an offer letter to somebody and having this back and forth negotiation thing unless you agreed on the major principles. Now, I have gone back and forth negotiating, but we started with a starting point, you know what I mean? Like, we started somewhere and once they saw it they were like, Hey, I want more of this but I'm okay with less of this, or something like that, that's fine. That kind of negotiation is fine. It's when you're just way off because you never talked about it, or you get the proverbial, This person's great, I love it, I love your practice, I want to come work here. You send them the offer letter and you don't hear from them for three days and they get back in and say, Oh, I took another job. And you're like, Why? Oh, your offer was too low. Well, why didn't you tell me that? I could've come up. I was just giving you a starting point and we could've negotiated from there. So, I was getting so frustrated with that, but I said, Look, let's discuss the whole package while you're here. If you like them and they like you then the next point is

11 Page 11 money, let's talk about it. What kind of vacation are you looking for? What kind of opportunity are you looking for? When you talk about how much money you want to make are you including bonus with that? So, here's the bonus, here's the base salary. [0:40:35] So, without getting into specifics of how to do all that as far as what to pay them and the bonus structure and all that, that's not what this module is really for. You can, again, see our offer letter and you'll see all the things that we offer, but really just getting to that discussion. I think the biggest thing that I found that was beneficial was just having that discussion with that employee. Having that uncomfortable discussion with that employee, but once you started talking about it then it became easy, so by the time I sent somebody an offer letter all I was really doing is sending them in writing what we already discussed verbally. And what happened was there weren't really any surprises. The person either said, Hey, can I have more of this or less of this? Or the person said, Yeah, sounds great, I'm in. Sign it, return it back. So, it just became much easier. Now, if it never got to that point because we were still in negotiation, let's say, they wanted $100,000, it was a Physical Therapist and they were a new grad and we were offering $70,000, I would never even send them an offer letter. I would say, Look, we're so far off let's just keep talking about this right here and see where we can come to terms or not. So, the other thing is be prepared to walk away. Be prepared no matter how great you think the person is, if it is way out of your compensation package be prepared to walk away, you have to. If not you might give in and regret it. Now, the other thing that I'll say, and this I got from Steve Jobs, Hire A plus people. A plus people can help you create a 10 times return on that investment than B or C people, and it took me so long to realize that because I was so money conscious, but what I wasn't was investment conscious. I look at every employee as an expense and I've talked about this on other modules, employees are not an expense, they are an investment, and if you look at it that way and you talk about it that way, and it really doesn't matter what you're paying them. What matters is the investment you're getting in return. So, if you're paying someone $100,000 a year, great. What's the investment you're going to get? Is it $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 in return or is it $150,000? So, if you start looking at it like that then your whole perspective starts to change because A plus people are not going to want pennies, they're going to want money, but they're also going to come to you with, Look at what I've done in the past, you're getting a proven commodity. So, that's another thing with A plus people, they've done it. So, just a little side note there. Okay, so that was the recruiting part, it was long, it was involved, but the reason is it's the most important. We're now going to start speeding up here a little bit. So, now we're in the hiring. The hiring phase is where we get to the person has the offer, right? So, they accepted the offer and now they're coming on board. So, what we've done is we've created, and again, you're going to have this, but the hiring part actually is pretty easy.

12 Page 12 See, the hiring process is nothing more than a checklist, and if you see that checklist that we've given you we've split it up in at least our practice as in who does what. So, the initial part we have directors, we'll call them Clinical Directors. Clinical Directors have their part, so their part might be, Show them the handbook and sign off that they saw the handbook and they'll agree to the things that are in the handbook. So, that's the director part. The other part might be the payroll information. So, we have this payroll information and CD is going to make sure that the employee gets a packet and they fill it out. There might be some other stuff in there, we don't have insurance, that's later on, but some other forms that you need in there if you do background checks and things like that. You do personality things, you can put personality testing in here. You could also put personality testing or background checks in the interview process. We don't normally do that, we usually put it in during this hiring process. [0:45:33] So, this is how we do it, you'll see that under Clinical Director we have a checklist of everything the Clinical Director must do. The next thing is kind of the admin person. The admin person has their part. So, what happens once all of this stuff is filled out it gets sent to our admin, all right? Really, it's my assistant that does this. So, the admin person then, first of all, makes sure all of this stuff is completed. I can't tell you how many times we've hired people and then months and months later saying, Oh, I never filled that out. Oh, I never did that. I never had that. I don't think I was ever credentialed, I've been here for over a year and I'm still not credentialed. So, what I realized is this is nothing more than a process, so how about we just get everything that we have to do, list it all out on a piece of paper and then just determine who's going to do what part based on our staff. And once I did that this whole crazy hiring process became so simple, I mean, simple. It's amazing how much stress this caused in the past to us, the employee, to everybody. Now, we just simplified it through a process. So, the admin person makes sure all this stuff is complete and once it's complete the Clinical Director is done. The admin person then forwards it to Payroll, all right? It's because you've got to make sure people are getting paid in direct deposit and all that. The admin person, let's say, we offer health insurance after 30 days, the admin person will send the health insurance application and they can determine whether they want health insurance or not. The admin person will do the background check, so there's a form that we have them fill out that allows us to do a background check, so they'll send it to a background check company. So, really, this admin person right here could be your office manager, it can be your assistant, it can be a front desk person. If you have a small company they could be helping out here, but again, it's just a checklist. So, we keep everything in a Dropbox folder, very simple, so all of it is in a Dropbox folder and when we hire someone this just gets accessed by the CD, printed out into a nice little packet, and given to the employee, very simple, very easy. CD does their part, admin does their part, and we even have kind of an IT person that makes sure the person's picture is on our website and their bio. They make sure the person has an

13 Page 13 address. If it's a PT they make sure that the business cards were ordered, they get a Schrier shirt. All of these things are very organized and very simple. It used to be everybody was kind of helping everybody out all over the place and it looked like a big mess. Now, simple, organized. So, again, you're going to get my checklist, use it, change it, modify it, but get the principle of it, and the principle of it is how organized it is and who does what, that's the key. It'll make your hiring process very, very simple and straight forward. And the beautiful part, because you know me by now, it is all delegated. I do not actually do personally any of this, why should I? This is all just task oriented things. I just get the person that's involved. Now, if you have a small practice you might do part of this, that's cool. I mean, I used to do some of this stuff, so it's okay. The good news is that you see that it's possible, actually, to get it off your plate and have someone else do it, but you're making sure it's all done because they report back to you. So, the admin person says, All right, Jamey, I received it on this person. Now, I'm sending it to this. Great, tell me when the whole thing is done. So, when this whole process is completed, and I use the word completed as completed with nothing else left to do, the insurance is done. If they want to do 401K stuff, that's done. I mean, completed, then it gets filed electronically into the employee's file. Now it's done, any time we need anything we can just look it up. I'm telling you, it's so straight forward and it's so easy that I wish I did this years, and years, and years ago, but I did it. [0:50:19] So, that's the hiring process we have, it's nothing more than a checklist. How simple is that? And the last one we have here is, what is the last one we have here? Oh, training, almost forgot my favorite, training. Training, believe it or not, is simple too. The problem with training is most of us really don't give a lot of thought into exactly how they want the position done, and the reason is is because we're overwhelmed. And I've said that before, but really being in an anxious, overwhelmed, low energy state effects everything in your practice and in your life. So, when I was just crazy, overwhelmed, and you name the word I was that, it effected everything including this. I didn't have time to think about training. Why? I had more important things to do. Now, to be honest, I can't even tell you what was more important than training a new staff person, but for some reason I justified it and I did something else. Or I didn't really know and it was easier just to disregard it than to tell the front desk, I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do there, but you do it and I'll let you know if it's right. And I can tell you right now I've never met somebody that could read my mind and I've tried. I have tried, and tried, and tried, and I haven't them yet, I'm hoping one day I will, but I also tried to hire people that could read my mind. And darn it, they never could! So, the only thing I could do is actually write down, and now I had to become accountable, so I had to actually write down what I wanted from the position, how I wanted things to be, what were the metrics of how I wanted, when someone was trained, what kind of numbers should they be hitting? If it's the front desk, under eight percent cancellation-no show. If it's a Physical Therapist I want 63 visits a week, like specific. So, the training should lead to not only hitting the metric, the measure, of the productivity

14 Page 14 of that position, it should also be how they do it, the manner in which they do it. So, you as the owner, you're painting the canvas, this is your practice, this is it, man. This is your thing, spend time figuring out how you want it to look like. When they've done this training what does this picture look like? Does it look like that? That's my drawing there. And then say, All right, well, what do they have to learn? Well, if it's a front desk person how do you want them to answer the phone? What's the process on scheduling? How do you want them to communicate with your Physical Therapists in the back with scheduling plan of cares? Do you want them to do confirmation calls for people? It's reporting, how should they do reporting? What kind of reports do you want from the front? It's whatever you want. It needs to be clearly put on a training schedule. So, with this I'm just going to kind of call it a Training Checklist. This isn't difficult to have and to do. What is time consuming and thought provoking is taking the time, and I would recommend taking the time with the front desk person, with your A-Physical Therapist, with your A-aide, and have them help you create how should this person be trained. As we start to grow how should we do this? Here's the beautiful part, once you've done it you don't have to do it again. You can modify it, but the bulk of it is done. So, what's nice is this only really has to be done one time, but once you have a training in place, now you just have to implement it. [0:55:14] So, we have, and again, I am going to share with you some of the training that we have used. Now, obviously, you've got to take it with a grain of salt because our training has to do with our systems and how we do it, but you'll get the gist, you'll at least get a template of what I'm talking about and how each area of our training has to be initialed by the person that's training them. So, initialed means they're competent in doing that, okay? I'm looking for competency. When they answer the phone, are they answering the phone the way we expect them to do it, yes or no? The answer is, Yes, they initial them, they're competent in that area, and basically it's a checklist. It's, Are they competent, competent, competent? If they're not competent more training is needed, okay? So, we have talked a lot about recruiting, I know, we exhausted recruiting. We talked about hiring and the difference between recruiting and hiring and how using a checklist is so important and so easy. And we talked about training, all right? Again, it'll make more sense when you actually just see the checklist, but I want you to get, really, the essence of what I'm talking about and incorporating these areas. Even if you just understand this it's going to change how you recruit and attract great people even if it takes you a year to put this is place, or two years to put all this in place, it doesn't matter. You're going to be moving towards a much more organized way of doing things that's going to reduce stress, increase productivity, and get this crap off of your plate, and you're going to attract super stars. So, we talked about a lot of great stuff today. I want to thank you for listening to all of this, but I'll tell you, you hire the best people, there's no replacement for that even if

15 Page 15 you have great systems in place and all that. If you just spend time on hiring the best people and creating a great way to attract them to your clinic your clinic will grow, you will seem like a genius, you'll make more money, you'll have more time off, and you'll have engaged staff, and things will be awesome. So, thank you so much for listening to this module. AUDIO END: [0:57:46]