E469 | Are You A Dumper Or A Delegator?

Today I wanted to talk to you all about how you can be a better boss for your employees. As your practice starts to get busier you're going to be more and more time-poor. If you want to continue your success in your practice, it is inevitable that you will have to hire good people. You have to be a delegator and help these people win at the same time. Enjoy.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So there's all kinds of hidden fees within your business that are just part of doing business. One of those is credit card. Processing and for us, we didn't even realize how much we were paying in credit card processing with the first management software we were using for our practice. And when we switched over to PT everywhere, we just realized we were saving literally hundreds of dollars a month with credit card processing with their partner with Card point versus who we were using with our prior.

Software. This has made a massive difference. It's more than paid for itself. It allows us to decrease our overhead. It allows us to have more cash flow to reinvest in our people, in our technology, in our facility, in marketing and everything that's gonna drive the business. So don't get abused by credit card processing companies.

Make sure you're paying what you should pay. And if you're looking for a management software, highly recommend PT everywhere directly integrates. Processor makes it very easy and their rates are super, super competitive. So it's saved us a ton of money and it probably will do the same for you if you don't know what you are getting charged.

So head over to PT everywhere. Take a look at what they've got. I think you really like it. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about how you can be a better boss, how you can be a better leader when you bring people onto your team. In particular, when you bring the first person on, which in most cases, Is going to be an admin. Sometimes it's a staff clinician, but more often than not, it's either a virtual admin or an in-person admin.

Sometimes you pull your spouse into your business like I did. I trapped her into the business cuz I, I needed her skillset, her amazing brain and organization skills so that we can actually grow our business. But maybe you're not as fortunate as me and have an integrator for a spouse.

And you need to go hire once. You need to hire an admin. And this is a scenario that we find ourself in a lot. We get very time poor. Our practice starts to get busier. It's usually when we're hitting about, I don't know, maybe 15 patient visits a week. If you're full-time, if you're not doing anything else around that 15 visits a week.

Sometimes it's 20 people will hold off longer than they need to sometimes, but, Somewhere around this 15 to 20 range, we end up being very time poor and one of the best ways to get that back is to hire people to do things that are redundant tasks, in particular re repeatable tasks that you have to do over and over again that are lower skill than what you need to do as far as patient care goes or.

Marketing the business, or working on building systems out thi things that are higher level tasks. You're talking about handing off, 15, $20 tasks versus doing $200 tasks which might be a patient visit or doing, a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars an hour task, which might be, local networking or something like that.

So once you get to that point, you bring somebody on. The first step that we do is we usually just dump a bunch of crap on somebody that we don't want. So let's say you just hate scheduling. You hate scheduling workshops or local meetings or anything like to do with scheduling, like patients, all that stuff, right?

And you say, all right, great. I hired this person, and now they're just gonna schedule everybody. So you dump stuff on them, you dump them, you dump on email, inbox management for you, you dump accounting, bookkeeping on somebody. All these things. You're like, all right, here are your tasks and what you've done to this person.

If you just dumped a bunch. Tasks on their plate, and you assume that they're just gonna do it and do it correctly and do it how you want them to do it. I heard somebody talk about this recently. There's another entrepreneur and he was talking about like he had a lot of turnover early on in his career.

And what he said was, looking back, I thought everybody I was working with was the problem. And then what he realized was the common denominator was him. And as he came to that conclusion and had to be self-aware enough to know that he wasn't a very good boss, he realized that he was a dumper and not a delegator.

And it's a kind of a strange term, but he, by dump he means like dumping tasks on people instead of giving them structure and organization around that. So he was a dumper and not a delegator. A delegator gives somebody a task, teaches them what they want them to do, and supports them with.

Resources with systems with structure, meaning it could be time that you spend with them, it could be a screen recording that you have, that you share with them in an organized way of what you want them to do. For instance, you walking through how you schedule somebody in your emr. With a video recording that you put in, in, in a folder that can be stored in any number of cloud services that's under, operations scheduling operations.

Go here, watch it again. If you forget what we're talking about, I'm gonna walk you through it. Here's where the resources are. If you need to watch it again, I want you to start taking over scheduling patients. Here's how you talk to somebody when they answer the phone. Here's how you talk to somebody when they need to reschedule.

Here's how you set up local marketing. This is the kind of email templates you want whenever you're setting up a workshop at a new gym. Here's how you. Interact with somebody that has a negative interaction with our business. All these things, you're creating structure and systems around that.

Then you're handing off and you're delegating and training somebody on how to do these correctly, effectively, and to win at their job basically. And instead of thinking of all the things that you don't want to do which is usually an a good exercise to start with, like what are the things that you aren't good at that you hate doing?

Those are typically the first things that you want to give up to somebody else to do. That's gonna be in an administrative role. It's gonna free up a lot of mental bandwidth for you. You're gonna be a lot more productive, a lot more creative, and frankly, a lot happier. But the problem is you can't get there just by saying, Hey, figure these things out.

If they if they were just gonna figure things out, they would just go start their own business. They didn't come to work with you to figure things out on their own as much as they want to not be micromanaged, but to have enough structure to be successful. And I think that is where we dropped the ball.

And I know I did a bad job of this with Ashley whenever we first started working together. I was like, just figure this out. This is what I've been doing all these things by myself. I had everything in my. Of what I had been doing. Many of them were inefficient, honestly, and I just dumped a bunch of stuff on her to figure out, and it wasn't fair and it wasn't the right thing to do, and I honestly didn't know that it was the wrong thing to do.

I just assumed that she was gonna be like me and just figure stuff out. But that's not necessarily the case with most people, and it's honestly not the best way to keep somebody happy and make them very efficient or functional as an employee. And you will see a lot of turnover if you do not support people with resources, guidance, and give them delegated tasks versus just dumping things on them.

So I heard this guy talk about it. I thought it was really interesting. It's the way he described it between dumping things on people and delegating things to people. So ask yourself, if you have already hired somebody, have you done a good job of delegating? Do you feel like this person knows what they should be doing?

Do they have feedback? Do they know where to go if they need help? Do they know, if they're doing the right or wrong thing? Do they know the score? Do they know how they're being. Do they know, how they're being gauge on their, whether they're doing good job in their bus their business role in the company or not.

Everybody wants to know what are the rules of the game? How do I like what's off limits and how do I score, like how do I win? Everybody wants to know that they need the rules and need some amount of structure in place without being micromanaged. And if you haven't set them up for success like that, chances are you probably just dumped things.

And if you were lucky enough to find somebody that just figured it all out for you, that's cool. But that's also very rare. And that person might not stick around because if they realize, man, I'm just doing all this stuff myself, I'm building this myself, I probably could go do something on my own.

They might leave or they might just get frustrated and realize, this is not a good work environment. This person seems nice, but it doesn't I'm not happy here. I don't feel like there's any culture. I don't feel like I'm supported. I don't really know what I'm doing, and I feel like it's very unorganized.

They're probably gonna leave and go somewhere else. This is what we see with turnover. And turnover will crush you. It will slow you down more than anything that we've seen in these businesses, because if you hire one, You have one admin that you've hired and you've been in business for yourself for a year, and you finally got somebody on that person's there for three months, and then they leave.

You have now lost 100% of your employment workforce, a hundred percent of it. It would be like a restaurant losing every single one of their waiters, waitresses, and cooks at the same time. And then the business owner trying to figure out what to do with everything else. Like it cripples your business when you lose somebody for turnover.

Now, hiring the right people in the first place, that completely different conversation. I'm just assuming they did a pretty good job of vetting whoever you're bringing on. But remember, You have to delegate to people. You have to give them structure. You have to help them win, and let them know what the score is and how to play the game correctly within your business and not just dump things on them.

Because if you do and you dump a bunch of tasks on somebody, expect them to figure it out. The chances are you're gonna be back to being by yourself pretty quickly.

Hey, Pete, entrepreneurs. We have big, exciting news, a new program that we just came out with that is our PT Biz part-time to full-time, five day challenge. Over the course of five days, we get you crystal clear on exactly how much money you need to replace by getting you a. Ultra clear on how much you're actually spending.

We get you crystal clear on the number of people you're getting to see, and the average visit rate you're going to need to have in order to replace your income to be able to go full-time. We go through three different strategies that you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you can pick the one that's the best for you based on your current situation.

Then we share with you the sales and marketing systems that we use within our mastermind that you need to have as well. If you wanna go full-time in your own practice. And then finally we help you create a. Page business plan. That's right. Not these 15 day business plans. You wanna take the Small Business Association, a one day business plan that's gonna help you get very clear on exactly what you need to do and when you're gonna do it.

To take action if you're interested and sign up for this challenge is totally free. Head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up there. Please enjoy. We put a lot of energy into this. It's totally free. It's something I think is gonna help you tremendously, as long as you're willing to do the work.

If you're doing the work and you're. Information put down and getting yourself ready to take action in a very organized way, you will have success, which is what we want. So head to physical therapy biz.com/challenge and get signed up today. Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation.

So this is a one one-way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you. Into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about 4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.