061 - Unlocking Success: Entrepreneurship & Building Strong Teams In Medical Practice with Dr. Michael Neal

Dr. Michael Neal talks about his entrepreneurial and optometric experiences in this episode of PRACTICE: IMPOSSIBLE. He discusses the difficulties of staffing medical practices with qualified individuals based on his own experience in the field. Instead of looking at prior work experience, Dr. Neal recommends recruiting for innate abilities. Analytics and AI as they pertain to the employment process are also topics he covers. In sum, the discussion shows how crucial it is for medical offices to have solid teams if they want to succeed. Dr. Michael Neal explains why it's beneficial for private offices to hire people based on their resourcefulness. He talks about how, even with little resources, he was able to hire people that stood out Next, we go on to discussing how to broaden the hiring process to encompass physician and nurse practitioner positions. According to Dr. Neal, their method goes beyond just looking at a candidate's work history to evaluate their character traits and frame of mind as well. Problems with current evaluation methods and the need for a personalized strategy are also discussed. Dr. Neal encourages clinics to contact Build My Team for help and highlights the advantages of targeted recruiting. Those who are having trouble with hiring in their practices will find this episode helpful and thought-provoking.

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Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.174)
Welcome back to season two, episode 13 of the practice impossible podcast. Before we get into the episode, I wanted to make a special announcement. March 2nd, that's March 2nd, 2024. We're hosting the radical remission workshop in Tampa Bay area. This will be a full day workshop where you'll learn how others have beat cancer against all odds. Check out the link below for more information.

I want to say thank you to our sponsors, Adomi Bella Spa, as well as Advanced Cancer Treatment Centers and the Tampa General Hospital North for helping make this happen. Now, to our 60th episode. So in this episode, I interviewed Dr. Michael Neal, who is a founder and chief executive officer of Build My Team. He's a practicing optometrist in a private practice in Howley, Pennsylvania. He founded Build My Team to solve his own

hiring struggles in his practice by modeling how companies like Disney and Four Seasons hire. The process works so well that he expanded it to his friends and now build my team services clients in eight different healthcare professions in over 40 states and in Canada. So take a listen to Dr. Neal and I'm sure you're going to get a lot out of this conversation.

All right, welcome to the practice and possible podcast with your host coach, JPMD. And today we're joined by Michael Neal, who's a CEO of build my team. And I had the opportunity of reaching out to Michael and discussing some of his work in the field of hiring and, and staffing medical offices. And I thought it was a fascinating thing that he's doing for small offices. And so I'm not going to get into the details while that.

Michael, get into them as we have our conversations. But as you know, here at Practice Impossible, we try to help physicians understand the business of medicine, helping populations live long by increasing awareness of spiritual, mental, and physical health globally. So our goal is to help you as a physician, as a healthcare provider, in this crazy world that we're living in, and to bring knowledge, bring experts in the field of business and health and spirituality.

Coach JPMD (02:28.098)
so that you can live powerfully so that you can take care of your patients. So Michael, let's hear more about you and what you do. Well, thanks for having me, Coach JPMD. This is a terrific opportunity to talk with you again. Yeah, for sure. So I know that you're an optometrist, and you've been practicing for how many years now?

2000. what's that? 23 years. that's about the same time I actually graduated residency in 2000. So that's interesting. Same timeframe. And so what's the difference between optometry and ophthalmology? Because sometimes patients ask that and sometimes even in my mind, I get a little confused because I know that some ophthalmologists do some optometry work. And so is there an overlap? And how do you differentiate?

Yeah, sure there is. So generally speaking, ophthalmologists are more aligned for surgery. I think in terms of cataract specialists, retinal specialists, oculoplastics, things like that. And optometry has subspecialties as well. In our practice, do, I mean, obviously glasses and contacts, that's generally what a lot of optometrists do. But we're also by, I think by definition,

Revenue wise, we're well over 50 % medical. So we're the proverbial country doctors. Whatever walks through our front door, we end up treating for the most part. And sometimes that can be a little bit surprising. But as optometrists, you don't do any surgery at all? Or are there any surgical procedures that you do do? We do. And some of it depends on state by state. Some states allow laser surgery. What's called a YAG procedure.

Some allow refractive surgery, some allow all kinds of stuff. We're in Pennsylvania where it's a little bit more restrictive, our practice is practicing right to the fullest extent of our scope and license. And what do you like to do for fun?

Coach JPMD (04:33.39)
Well, as of the whopping March 2022, I'm officially a runner. So how's that for a late start in life? But started out running, did my first marathon, which is the Philly Marathon. Didn't die, but boy, boy, it felt like it at the time. And then second marathon, and I just qualified for Boston October 8th. Now Boston's a little tricky because you can qualify, but it doesn't mean you get in.

So we'll see what that turns out like. There's usually a couple minutes differentiation there between the two. So there's some frustration possibly coming my way, but I've also got another marathon coming up in April. And then the next goal is to try something a little longer around the 50 mile mark. So 50 miles would be like a or half? What's it? No, they're called ultras. Ultramarathon. Like an ultra marathon, yeah.

I don't know if I'll be able to do that or not yet. Time will tell. in the meantime, my next goal is to run a sub three hour marathon and not die. That's always a caveat for that stuff. you have to kind of train all year round for that. Yeah. Right now I'm at about 50 some miles a week, more or less. Sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. Wow.

So do you do any strength training or is it just running? No, there's strength training, which as anybody who is in the physical therapy space will tell me I need to be doing a lot more of, if you have any listeners there, or ortho. But strength training is definitely mandatory as part of it, stretching, all that stuff. How do you protect your knees and your hips? Because we see a lot of patients with

Arthritis and you you asked them what do they do when they were younger? They say well, we used to run a lot So are there any things that you should be doing to protect them that you know? Yeah, I mean there's a couple things one of them is I don't overwear my shoes I've got a couple different types of shoes just some early research on the running side of things I mean, I think you're at somewhere in a 30 40 percent in increased chance of risk if you're running in just one pair of shoes So I've done that I've done

Coach JPMD (06:50.636)
It's the strength training side of things and ice ice and then some, some ibuprofen when necessary. Try not to overdo the ibuprofen obviously. Yeah. Are you doing cold exposure? Are you doing any plunges? No, sir. It's not that I'm against it. It's that I haven't, haven't gotten that extreme as of yet. But you know, there's a lot of people, especially the online folks, the influencers and stuff who are

are dumping all the, what, eight or nine bags of ice into a bathtub. I currently, I'm not saying anything negative against this, I currently have different uses for my time than hauling ice to the bathtub. Yeah, it's interesting because there some companies that actually creating these tubs now. They're actually creating these ice baths or plunges or whatever you call them. Well, the folks who use them swear by them. Yeah, that's right here. So I might be missing out. And from a recovery standpoint, it makes a lot of sense.

Perhaps I'm just too lazy to haul bags of ice to the top. don't know. Time will I would suggest you start with the cold showers because I started doing that a couple months ago and it's painful initially but then you have energy. You have a lot more energy during the day and there's some research that says that increasing dopamine and all that. So know it has nothing to do with optometry in your businesses. Well, I'll tell you what, I grew up in Western Canada and so I was having cold everything.

growing up as a kid without knowing that it was special. So we always had lots of energy, so maybe they're tied together. don't know. Hey, hey, who knows? So before, were you an entrepreneur before after you were an optometrist, or was that something that you did at the same time? Definitely before, during, and I mean, I've had, built my team, I started, not to start a business, but I was started back in,

2017. And that was a, again, not intentionally done to create a business, but I solved a problem for our practice and that grew to also solving it for some friends and then grew to now we're in, I think, 40 some states in Canada. So a little bit of an unintentional business. you know, I think the strangest business was I founded a billboard company.

Coach JPMD (09:17.986)
This was years ago, founded and exited a very successful billboard company of all things. And so once I exited that was looking for the next big problem to solve. And that's how I started build my team. So the billboard company was that in Pennsylvania or is that nationwide? Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Okay. Had two states. Yep. Was it digital or is it? We had almost all digitals. I think two, two stat, what they're called static boards, which is just the big.

glorified poster in the sky. That's awesome. You know, I always thought it was either that or cell phone towers. I always was fascinated by that business model because people can rent space on that. so billboards, you know, I know my practice when I first started, we had like 10 billboards in the county and that was really impactful. I remember my kids, you know, always seeing the signs and seeing who was on the billboards and would repeat the slogan. So.

Well, they work in certain areas and we're in rural Pennsylvania. So it started out kind of centered around our practice. And then that grew down through some corridors in New Jersey and such. But if you're in a rural area where you have to drive everywhere, you're exposed to them. That's right. That's right. And if it's digital, you have an impact. Yeah. And if it's digital, you don't have to get the manpower, I guess, to change the ads. Yeah. All done just like you would edit a website, that type of thing. So would that

Would you say that was one of your most successful ventures? That was my biggest exit so far, That's awesome. what do you like most about your practice now? I know that you're still practicing optometry. Just kind of get a feel of what you do and how you do it. How many practices do you have? How many employees? What is your background in optometry? So yeah, you betcha. So to answer your first question,

in a kind of a roundabout way. We've acquired two practices and we've rolled them into our one location. So our single location practice, we practice four days a week. So Monday, Tuesday, then Thursday, Friday with one half Saturday a month is what it works out to. And, you this is not a, it's not a difficult day on average. But I'm going to compare and contrast cause there's two.

Coach JPMD (11:41.326)
two versions of me. There's the one that currently sees patients and there's the one that has PTSD from seeing patients in our old model. And the old model was simply one where I was involved in doing the, my wife and I were doing the hiring, you know, and unfortunately a lot of firing ourselves and our new model is that build my team has taken over the hiring for the practice and I'm not involved with that at all anymore. So the,

Old Way was trying to be an HR expert, trying to use witchcraft and the force and voodoo to figure out who this person in front of me actually was when I'm interviewing them. It was water witching. It was every conceivable ridiculousness to try and stop the revolving door team -wise. And I break it down into

kind of a before and after that, because that's the most realistic way I can describe it to somebody. It was so stressful. An average day was a grind. It was rough. All kinds of team member based problems. were also, we had three extra people and they did less work than the team we have now. So I can go on and on and on about this, but I don't like thinking about that in a way that it was a

was a tremendous failure and it was also the best that I could possibly do. And the reason it was a failure is we were hiring the wrong way. I just flat out the wrong way. We were looking at, we were posting jobs, the job descriptions weren't written to attract the proper people. We were looking at resumes. The resumes didn't tell us a darn thing about the person most times. And then we would interview people and the interviews, we would inject a lot of emotion into them.

You know, we were looking to hire people, not so much for, from a business standpoint, but to try and help them. It's extremely, I have to warn listeners. If you are a super empathetic person, stay the heck away from hiring. You have to find somebody else to do it for you because you're going to hire, as I like to call them wounded puppies. They, you're going to nurse them back to health. You're to hire people who are just flat out not good at providing.

Coach JPMD (14:04.206)
great customer service, we're operating in the business of healthcare. Because it is a business folks. And you know, the faster we all accept that and wrap our arms around it, you know, the better the outcome is. But you're describing most physicians and most healthcare providers are empathetic. They feel for their patient, they want to understand and want to be able to provide the best care for them. So they have to be or have some sort of empathy. mean, that's part of the job. So you're saying physicians should never

Interview for an office staff?

They're not your patients. This is a fun topic. You and I, I don't know if people are listening on audio, but we're both smiling ear to ear right now. No, if you want a different outcome. So look, if you can do that and you have a wonderful team, God bless you. Call our number. We're going to send somebody out to practice and reverse engineer all your magic. I'll hop on a plane myself, likely.

It doesn't happen very often. This is the exception. An exceptionally small amount of people can actually do that. The vast majority of folks on the interviewing side of things, when you're interviewing with empathy, when you're digging deep into that person to try and figure out what makes them tick, what you're going to find, and I'll back this up a little bit, statistically, we've done this all over the country, what you find in those types of interviews,

is that the person sitting in front of you is not telling you anything other than what you want to hear. That's an average interview. They're not being forthright about their strengths or weaknesses. And I'll tell you why it's straightforward. Most of them have no idea what they actually are. They simply don't know. They don't know themselves. They have no idea who they are. do not. Nope, not at all. And you think about the average person who applies for a healthcare job.

Coach JPMD (15:59.362)
You know, these aren't entry entry level jobs, but they're not far off of that. You know, you're not going to be laying bricks or digging holes all day long. These are nice office jobs for the most part, but they also deal with people and they can be very stressful. So if a person doesn't have a really high stress tolerance, that makes it challenging. If they don't like working with people, that makes it challenging. If they prefer to be

left on their own and operate by themselves, that's very difficult in a team environment. And of course there are positions in healthcare where that's possible to do by yourself, but most of them are team -related. So there's all these different traits of a person that we're looking for on the build my team side of things. when I was doing it by myself, nope, simply wasn't looking for any of that stuff. I was approaching it almost upside down and got upside down results.

And I can say that I'm probably very, very near there as well. had my current administrator or office manager tell me, she fired me from the team meetings. I used to have weekly team meetings and I was told that we would say things, do things in the meetings and talk, but no results because I was probably too empathetic to the situation that we had in front of us.

And as physicians, we are proud and we want to be right. So how do we how do we create that awareness around physicians that are listening to the podcast? Well, you did it already unintentionally, perhaps unwillingly, but you did it already. Your practice manager told you can't be part of that anymore. Yeah. The the solution that I found was came through

We had a fellow apply for a position within Build My Team itself. My team told me to take a look at this fellow. I didn't want to, there were a couple of reasons why. Came from a banking background of all things. And I said, know, we're, a banker wouldn't work within this position. Well, boy, was I wrong, flat out wrong. Very, very quickly, so went for dinner with him.

Coach JPMD (18:23.742)
Great guy loved hockey. I'm a big hockey fan as well that always helps but what made made the decision very easy is that he came from an operations background and he was Is Methodically goal oriented to achieve whatever is put out in front of him and Just does this all day long and so he Easy decision to come on board with build my team

started literally at the bottom, rose all the way to the top. Now he runs the company in that fast. That's how fast that was. Now, why did I move that quickly with Frank? And you can read about him on the buildmyteam .com website. The reason I moved that quickly is because quite simply, I could see that his strengths and talents were naturally matched to the largest problems that our company face. And that was one on the operations side of things. So

my strengths and talents are more providing a visionary approach. But on the visionary, you don't find a lot of visionaries are actually good at doing anything. And that's entrepreneurialism in a nutshell. So he was very good at doing all of those things. And took that one step further. And one day we had a conversation about, do you want to run into practice as well? And he said, yes. And

He would want one of our team members to do To help him out with that. So there are structure that we have now is that he runs build my team day to day and He also runs the from an executive standpoint not a practice management standpoint from an executive standpoint He runs our practice and what does that mean? Well from a listener standpoint, it means that we eat our own dog food that old term when build my team does the hiring for our practice we

we have to live with the people that the company supplies to the practice and finds to the practice. That also means that are from a performance standpoint, if those people don't work out, then Frank and myself as, as, leaders of the practice, we have to deal with that. So how does, what does that translate to? We get great people and those great people perform and they perform very well because they're working for a great leader.

Coach JPMD (20:44.206)
on Frank's side of things who lets them be themselves. And it's not a hard job for him because we get the people in place who are naturally, they have natural strengths and talents to do the jobs that are required. They're A players and you know, the thing with an A player is you can just let them be themselves. Just let them do their thing. You got to put the proverbial guardrails on the road. You have to define the outcomes that you want, but you let them drive the car.

and they're going to get there faster than you could possibly imagine. And that's what he's been able to do with our team members and the results to speak for themselves. suppose you're in an area where you don't have that A team player that you can even find, because that seems like either it's an excuse or it's a fault of hiring, a fault of what we're doing in our processes. But it's very difficult to find people in our area.

to work. So how do you deal with that in a small area? Because I think you're in a small town. then you are. And then how do you have any practices in big cities? And how does that how does that play and play a role in your hiring? Well, in our practices, we don't have a talent pool. We have a talent puddle. It's about a couple inches deep. And that's it. We we don't have people who apply with experience. It's unheard of.

In fact, we stopped even looking. And the whole concept with Build My Team is that we're finding people with natural strengths and talents for their position. And each position requires different ones. So somebody who has, let's say, a front desk role is going to require different strengths and talents than somebody perhaps who has a bookkeeping role. They're very opposite. In an area where you don't have many

job speakers or job candidates, the first thing you have to do is realize you're not gonna hire for experience. And that's what we went through. What we do instead with Build My Team is one of the things we measure is how fast they learn. So guess what? We sent somebody over to your practice, you interview them, you're really happy with them, you move forward and hire them. They don't come with experience. A lot of docs really get freaked out about that. But when you don't have experience, you don't have to undo the bad habits.

Coach JPMD (23:07.992)
They're coming to you as a blank slate. We get them into the practice. They're trained very quickly. And they, of course they train quickly. They're smart. We measure that. So they train very quickly. They learn very quickly. And now all of a sudden you've got somebody who's up and running in a couple of weeks without the bad habits. Now contrast that. would ask you listeners to contrast that to the way that it normally happens with, let's say somebody who comes in with experience.

you end up spending somewhere between a medium size and a large amount of time trying to undo. So some examples, well, doc, you know, at my old job, we did it this way. Well, I know that you want me to type all that stuff in, but at my old job, I didn't have to type all that stuff in. Okay. Or vice versa. It doesn't matter, right? We've all heard these things over and over again. Now take somebody who has natural strengths and talents for the position.

who used to, let's say, run a meat slicer in a deli and get ham thrown back in their face, which we hired a person who did that, she thought the front desk role was fantastic. And I know I'm talking about the front desk role a lot here, but this applies to all the roles in the practice. They come in, learn quickly, are naturally able to do what you want them to do, and they don't even think that it's special. That's an approach that has scaled exceptionally well for Build My Team.

throughout practices around the country. Now, can you do it the opposite way? Can you bring somebody in with experience? Can you do all that? Yes, and you will continue, and I say this respectfully, to get the results, the same results that you've been getting up to this point.

So, I remember you saying you're in 40 states. I think so, that was the last question. How do you manage that in 40 states and knowing that there are different areas, different talent pools or puddles, what are the metrics that you use or what are the tools that you use to go into different areas to assess that talent pool? Sure, well, we built a

Coach JPMD (25:21.002)
A process that's all the same. The process is quite simple. The practice wants to hire somebody. They call us for a consultation call. Our team members will talk to the, usually the doc, the practice owner, and find out what they're trying to get the person to do. Most docs want them to do five or six things. It doesn't work. We like to think in terms of a job and a half. So here's your main focus. And when you have extra time,

Here's other stuff that you can do. So you're not just sitting around. Sitting around doesn't work in a private practice, right? So then we write the job description, and the job description is written with very particular language to elicit the type of candidates that we want to apply in the first place. Okay? So the job description matters up to a point. When we publish that to about 20 -some job boards, and then the candidates start coming in right away.

As soon as a candidate applies within five seconds, and yes, I personally timed it, their cell phone bings. The cell phone gets a text from Build My Team that asks them to start the process, the assessment process for the job they just applied for. And by doing that, we catch them while they still remember what the heck it was they applied for. Just as an aside, it is shocking and freakishly ridiculous

ridiculous how People are applying for jobs nowadays. So click click click click click they will Through the job boards you can apply for jobs so quickly that don't even think that a lot of them are even reading the job description of course some do but a lot of them don't a lot of them are just going by job title and the job boards It's to their benefit to get as many applicants as possible

regardless of whether they're reading the job description. So, sorry to interrupt, but why are they doing that? Are they looking for jobs or are they just satisfying a requirement for unemployment? No, I think they're actually looking for jobs. mean, of course there'll be people doing that as well, but from a practice standpoint, the old days are gone where somebody would sit and sort through all these jobs and read the entire job description. They don't do that.

Coach JPMD (27:45.966)
they're looking at more of a over quality type job approach. And in fact, there's a, last week I saw a website, it's a company that uses AI to let you apply for jobs with, think, once you get it set up with one button click, this fellow applied for 5 ,000 jobs. What's the point? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the point of that.

That doesn't make sense. Well, he got something like 20 interviews for 5 ,000 jobs. I can't possibly imagine if he wouldn't have read any of them maybe once he got the interview, but that's an extreme, extreme example. However, that company exists and it's looked upon as, the, you know, the path of least effort for somebody who's, who's applying for a job on the private practice side of things. It's nothing short of a nightmare. Yeah.

because you've got now people who will be submitting to your job that you're going to have, you're going to reach out to them, you'll email them, you'll text them, or maybe you call them. They don't respond. Maybe they do respond. They're just jerking you around. I mean, there's other ways to say that, but that might be the polite version of it, Completely wasting your time. Now, if you're a doc doing this yourself,

grab your stopwatch and think of how much you're bringing into the practice, your gross revenue, do it by net, it doesn't matter, and then take that stopwatch and start to think in terms of how much it's costing you to be jerked around by these folks. So very rapidly it becomes expensive. And that's the least of the concerns. The real thing is the stress behind it. It will eat your soul if you realize that

These people are continuously putting you in a position where you can't win. That's one of the most frustrating things that we see from our clients. No matter what they do, they just can't seem to find somebody. we, it's in psychology has learned helplessness. I mean, you, no matter what you do, you're still going to lose. And with, with our clients, one of the biggest things that they tell us

Coach JPMD (30:06.574)
is that our team is working, I mean, the software and the team work 24 -7 to find these people, the A players that we provide.

What makes it special is that we've developed the system and the processes and the software that are doing that. We don't have leprechauns manning the phones at three in the morning or anything like that, but the software is. Now, a doc can't do that, right? You just can't. What a doc is used to doing is getting a couple resumes, trying to make the best decision out of a couple people.

And what if there aren't any eight players in that stack of resumes? What if you've got B and C players? You end up, you end up settling. If you're, if you're desperate for a position, you settle for that, be your C player and you try to make it. was the last time, when his last time of practice wasn't desperate for a position, like it's almost baked into the equation. When you have a small practice, you have somebody leave, you need that person replaced right away. And

That is an exceptionally difficult problem to be in because you have to find somebody who is going to do the job. You hope. Yep. Yeah, we've all been there. The build my team approach is to have to cast the widest possible net, get as many applicants as possible.

and then filter them down to the point where we're rejecting on average for a position 97 % of people. Now who's left? Well, the cream of the crop. Yeah, that's who's left. And so when, when our, our team sends over these, these cream of the crop candidates to the practice, we already know that they can do the job. We send over what's called an insight report and that documents all of the different strengths and talents that the candidates have.

Coach JPMD (32:10.678)
And it's matched to the position, but it's also matched to the type of practice you're in. you and I were talking before this and I mean, you're a pretty easy going guy. You're not well and super tight. You're not going to be some type of dictator doctor in a practice. Some people might say no. Don't ask my team. We would send a

certain type of candidate to you that would be very complimentary. Now, if we're working for a dictator, we need somebody who's a different type of candidate, and that's okay. It doesn't matter. I mean, what we're looking for from the clients is the truth about how their practice operates. And when we get to that, then sending over terrific candidates for a practice becomes straightforward. And so of the practices,

and you may not know this off the top of your head, how many of your practices that you work with are in big cities and versus small cities and large? don't know the, I don't know the answer to that, but that reminds me, I forgot to answer that part of your question earlier. Big cities aren't big cities from a hiring standpoint for these types of jobs. And what I mean by that is you're not going to have somebody drive from Brooklyn to New York city to be,

you know, to the West side of New York city to be a receptionist or take the train or otherwise, because they're going to pass a hundred different places where that are closer to them, that they can get a very similar, if not slightly better or close enough type job. Okay. So when one of the things we look for, these are, these aren't strengths and talents of a person. They're just flat out.

Nuts and bolts characteristics of this person's situation. So how far away are they from your practice? Well, you know in a rural area 20 miles might not be that that far Okay, 20 miles in a city is ridiculous. There's no way that's gonna work long term If they're 10 minutes from like let's say when we're hiring if they're 10 minutes from the practice we jump for joy That's fantastic. We're in rural, Pennsylvania

Coach JPMD (34:31.105)
That means that it's a very achievable commute for them. And folks who are working in administrative positions in a practice are thinking in terms of how much gas does it cost me? How long does it take me to get to work? Like those are, you're not talking about the CEO of a company here who has a driver, right? Those are the types of things they're thinking about. What our software also does is we'll determine here are the hours, ask them, here are the hours of your practice, that your practice is open.

Or I should restate that here are the hours that the position requires. Can you work these hours? Now guess what? It's a yes or no. There's no well, I can work till Wednesday at 3 PM and then my babysitters has to know no, no, no, no. This is a business and we have to get you people who can actively work in your business for your business. And if they can't do that, totally understand.

there are some rare exceptions where we will take eight players and send them over to the practice anyway. but for the most part, that's a disqualification type question. We ask a whole bunch of those types of things, including how long are you planning to be in the area for, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think there's eight or nine of those. And if they don't answer, you know, in the, the affirmative for the practice, they get disqualified and they gently exit our process.

So what does this mean for a doc? Well, those are nine different questions that our software asks the candidate that you don't have to. And every single one of those is going to derail your entire hiring experience. Yeah. And you have the date. So what happened? I'm sorry. So you hire somebody who unknowingly is 20 minutes away from you in a 50 minute drive. How long do you think that's possibly going to work out for? Because they're not thinking in terms of, you know,

I can only work at a medical practice. They're thinking I can work at a dental practice, an eye care practice, a chiropractic practice, an audiologist, a plastics, whatever it might be that they're driving past on the way to work. They can be a secretary, they can be a technician or an assistant than any one of those. That's how they're thinking. And it's not limited to your particular type of, you your profession or your brand of healthcare.

Coach JPMD (36:57.93)
And do you you take salaries into consideration in the application process in terms of suggesting certain salaries for positions? Because let's say we take on a client and they're paying two dollars less than the average practice in the area. Do you suggest certain prices? Yeah, sure. We do both ways. We ask the candidate what hourly rate they're looking for because virtually all practices are paying hourly and they'll come up with a number. So

You know, if your practice is paying, let's say 15 bucks an hour and they want 12 terrific, you don't necessarily have to pay them 15 bucks, but I'll tell you what they're going to jump for joy when you offer them 14 and they're going to stick, at a much higher rate. Now you're, you're paying 15 bucks an hour. They want 25, 27. No way. I'll, I'll teach you go. mean,

with some exceptions because that type of person might be able to operate at a higher level, let's say a practice manager or something. And we have clients that will flat out tell us, we want this position. But by the way, if you find anybody who could do this, keep your ears open because we might be open to that. And so it's not just a, you're not talking to a robot here. We have our team members goal is to understand what makes your practice tick.

so that we can get people who stick. That's our long -term goal, is people who just work out long -term for your practice. It makes our clients ecstatic, they can't wait to work with us again, and we get rewarded with super happy clients. Yeah. So what do you, do you have an analytics program that identifies certain things that would help you in that process, or is it reports that you use? Do you use AI at all in that process? Cause I would imagine, you know, AI is coming fast and furious.

Could you take some of this information and just spit out the things that independent of, you know, someone reviewing it based on certain criteria and certain questions? Well, we, we use kind of all the above. So our software, the backend process for our team members to review the candidates is literally a thumbs up. That's how we know we have somebody who will meet the criteria for the position. it's as simple as it could possibly be a thumbs up from that point. What?

Coach JPMD (39:20.224)
our team members will do is only then do they look at a resume. And we remember a resume has not been reviewed by our software or human up to this point. They look at the resume to see if there's any red flags. For example, an experience, a person who's had prior experience in that position is a red flag. Now that's going to hit completely oppositely than what folks are listening to or what they're expecting as they're listening. But

It is a red flag because now, as I said earlier, this is a person who you would have to undo. You would have to unwind those bad habits. And there are wonderful people who apply it with experience. Most of them aren't. Most of them left that job where they had all that wonderful experience because they weren't very good at it or they were fired or whatever. However, there's other things where let's say secretary who traditionally, maybe, maybe the spouse,

got transferred, moved, and the person likes being a secretary. Well, terrific. So that's a situation that one of our team members essentially reviews. Once that's all done, we do a video interview on the candidates. And this is where we get some really fascinating stuff. I can imagine. boy.

Well, hey, we're all in healthcare here, right? So we all work with the general public. So we can all think of the craziness that you get working with the general public. But from a candidate standpoint, the reason, like our assessments are all done. We know the person can do the job. Now let's do a little bit of a reality check. So the video interview asks them questions and our team reviews the video interview. It's a one -way video interview. So we're looking not so much,

what their answers are to the questions, believe it or not, it's how. There's a whole bunch of intangibles here that we process. How are they answering? What are they dressed like? We've had, I'll tell you some horror stories in a minute. These are exceptional. But I'll give you an example of something that really blew us away early on in the company. So we would get video interviews done

Coach JPMD (41:43.82)
by mostly young women standing dressed in their best outfit in a bathtub. What the heck is, follow me on this. What the heck is going on here? It took a little bit to figure this one out, but here's what it was. A lot of single moms applying for jobs in healthcare. The best lighting in their little apartment is in the bathroom. They would pull the

the shower curtain back, stand in the bathtub, all the lights on, they look fantastic. They propped the phone up on the bathroom, the sink, and they would do the video interview in standing in the shower in the bathroom. And at first we're like, boy. And then we thought about it and we hired some of those people and they worked out fabulously, fabulously. And here's why you've got a person who has virtually no resources. Okay. They

are presenting themselves in the absolute best light with virtually no resources. They're answering all the questions. They're being completely honest. The door shut because somebody on the other side of that door is making a racket or the dogs or the whatever it might be. They've taken themselves from a position of being just exceptionally difficult to presenting themselves extremely well using almost no resources. Well, isn't that what we're all looking for?

in a small, you know, in a private practice and that answer categorically yes. So when we got these folks jobs, they got incredible reviews. the, our clients loved them and we started thinking, okay, well, you know, we're, we're going to have to, we're going to learn from this. We're to have to change our internal review algorithms as to the type of person we're looking for. Then it doesn't matter what you look like in terms of, of any of the things that people think of. What we want is

to determine if that person is an A player, if they're presenting themselves in a terrific light, if they are giving answers that we want to hear versus giving, we ask them a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with jobs. And it's amazing to see people light up, you know? So we've got a lot of experience with regards to that. And that helps tremendously at sending over terrific people. Now, there are some.

Coach JPMD (44:05.41)
There's some other sides of that. So you ready for some horror stories? I always like a good story. Yeah. We had one person do the radio interview. We're pretty sure sitting on the toilet.

Yep. I'll leave out the second half of that description, but I made it sound like something like they were there. They were an A player that did not get recommended for that job. we had another person who this, this blew us away. doing the video interview, holding the phone up over the steering wheel of their car while driving. Yeah. Very responsible. Yeah. So this person,

had all the strengths and talents, but failed this one little thing called, like, you have to be kidding me, good judgment. It was terrible. I mean, that's ridiculous that that person would do that. from that standpoint, those folks, they just don't move forward in the process and they exit nicely and politely. So I know we touched on this when we first spoke about expanding this process for higher level executives or physicians, because sometimes

it's hard to hire a physician and you don't know their background. Is there some things that you're doing now that could actually translate to physician hires or nurse practitioners? 100 % of it does. Yeah, it all does. We don't hire physicians directly. And there are a bunch of reasons why. Our process is designed to not look for people with experience. And that's a completely different process. The way that we would service clients in that particular

with that particular need would be simply to have them fill out the assessments and go through that process. last week we had a practice reach out to us. They wanted three of their team members reviewed. And so we did. It's straightforward. Same thing could be done with the professional candidates as well. So you have a...

Coach JPMD (46:13.772)
have hospital clients or private practices as clients or both? Yeah, private practices. That's almost exclusively our client base. We do have folks from outside of health care. We have a particular knack for hiring nannies, of all things. And that only came out of clinicians wanting

help. You if you can do this for our team members, can you hire an also hiring an anti for fourth position so that you can see in fact, all our family has worked with nannies and, just caregivers and we've always done that. It works out stupendously. Well, it's not an area that we're focusing on obviously, but, from, it's done for, for our clients who just want the extra help. Why would we say no to helping a client make better decisions about people they're working with? Right. and so,

the vast majority is simply done for healthcare. So why wouldn't, and this may be something that you're thinking about doing, but I'm ask some personal questions, personal business questions, but are you looking at an exit to like an indeed or a, why wouldn't they do something similar to this? They do have some levels of assessments and what, it's not just indeed, the companies do. The challenge is the difference between,

you know, a couple instruments playing without a conductor and an orchestra with a conductor. You need music to be made. And what happens with the assessments, there's all kinds of different assessments. We have, we tried to use off the shelf assessments originally. They don't work. One thing is not enough to encompass all of human behavior that healthcare wants in terms of team members.

So we created a healthcare mindset. That's the first thing that the candidate goes through. We have to make sure that they have a healthcare mindset. And you you hit that earlier on with like empathy and things like that. If you don't like caring for people, for crying out loud, I mean, don't be part of this unless you're doing a job like perhaps a biller, right? But if you don't pass our healthcare mindset, then you don't.

Coach JPMD (48:32.182)
continue through the process. And then we're looking at things like the speed of learning. Then we measure a whole bunch of different characteristics about a person. And that all culminates in that video interview. you know, things like the disc profile and some of these very simple approaches. The danger there is they're not giving you what you need to make a decision that's going to get you those A players.

What they're giving you is a bunch of information that could perhaps be misleading. Folks like it. They also don't match the practice. You can have a disc profile in one person, but if that disc profile is not matched to the provider of that practice, then it's going to be hard to match. The provider, the team, the environment, the types of patients. If you're dealing with a Park Avenue practice where five stars are your minimum,

that's a completely different practice versus a Medicaid practice, know, things like that.

So from our standpoint, we've been able to demonstrate that we can do this exceptionally well because we're doing the same thing over and over and over again with feedback loops built in. imagine you've got some specialists listening to this. Imagine I'll use the eye care example. So I'm gonna do cataract surgery all day, every day for four days a week, surgery, surgery, surgery. Well.

unless I'm an adult, I'm going to get pretty good at it. And that's, know, our team members, they're only asked to do that one thing. for practices that are hiring a couple people a year or, you know, five to 10 people a year, I would ask them to think about our team members. They're going to have done that by lunch. Yeah. And so with that type of concentrated focus, they're just going to get a different set of results.

Coach JPMD (50:37.112)
than a doc trying to do it themselves. Yeah, certainly it's a niche, definitely. Because the indeeds of the world and all these monsters and all these other companies, they cast an even wider net than you. Your net, your wider net is actually their niche. And it sounds like you've got what it takes to help small practices, independent practices that we are trying to help at Practice Impossible because it's...

That's one of the biggest stress points, stress point right now in my practice. And we're trying to figure out what the best way is to hire the right staff, right people, right team members. how do we find you? If anyone's interested in learning about your services, I know that you give a free consultation for practices looking for help. Yeah, by all means, it's very simple. www .buildmyteam .com. And all the practice has to do is hop on the website.

we ask that they schedule a call so that we respect their time. And the last thing our team wants to be doing is nagging the front desk team or whoever answers the phone to get ahold of the practice. We all love the gatekeepers up. And that it works in reverse too. When the docs ready, then our team member will be there. And that's where it all starts. From that phone call, we determine what your practice needs and then whether or not we can help you. And I'll tell you this flat out,

If our team does not believe they can help you, we do not want to work with them. That simple. We are looking for clients that essentially trust us enough through our competency and demonstrating that we do this very well, that have us just take over their hiring and do that over and over for them. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, they still do the interviews and all. It's still that part. But we supply the A -player candidates for the practice.

Well, thank you so much for coming out of the Practice Impossible podcast. It's been an informative and thank you for this conversation. And we appreciate what you do for small practices because I know that there are a lot of us struggling out here. So yeah, thank you. I've loved talking with you. obviously, you know, I love especially your practice. I'm sorry, your podcast, the practice impossible.

Coach JPMD (52:59.8)
Some days it feels like that and our goal is just to make it a little bit easier. Day to day. Well, thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing this podcast with your friends. If you know anyone, even as a patient, if you know someone that's struggling with hiring the right team members for your doctor's practice, shoot them this podcast episode. Let them know that we are out there to help and we really would enjoy a review. Leave us a review, leave us comments.

We're now a video podcast as well, so check us out on YouTube and Spotify and we appreciate any feedback that you can give us and continue to practice impossible. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing. Thank you so much for having me.