Transcript of the Conversation
RJ Martino:
Welcome to the iProv Made Podcast, where we help you build a better, more profitable healthcare practice. Jordan Smith is my co-host.
Jordan Smith:
What’s up everybody? How are you, RJ?
RJ Martino:
I’m great. we’re going to do something different today because we talk and we reference our framework all the time. If you’re a normal listener, you’ve probably heard enough where you get it. But for a lot of people, they’ve never heard our framework for how we build a practice, but not only how we build a practice, but how we design a marketing solution for a practice, how we hold people accountable in a practice, how we make sure that we’re just meeting our goals. We’ve got this overarching framework.
And Jordan, do you want to talk a little bit about it or do you want me to jump straight in?
Jordan Smith:
Yeah, I want to say that we felt this was an important podcast to do, and we hope to do more of these, just to explain our thought process. And a lot of the times whenever we call guests or we talk or engage with listeners of the podcast, this is one of the things we talk about. Is this is the reason why we’re doing all of this. We both have plenty to do. We love this. This is fun for us, but we’re also hoping that somebody gained some little nugget of information that helps them grow their practice the way they want to.
I think it’s important to step through the process that we go through with all of our guests on this, but to make sure that it really hits home for you guys too in the way that we think about running practices like a business, and the way that we advise our practices that we work with on the iProv side, which is our marketing agency, how they should run their organization. So I think we start where we start, so tell us a little bit about the first step RJ.
RJ Martino:
Jordan, when we get a call or someone talks to us, really, we look at running the business in eight simple steps. I’ve got my iPad here that you can see. We’ve got an eight step process and it’s simple. It’s just as simple as eight steps, but we know just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean that it’s easy. These eight steps are work, but inevitably whenever we start consulting with a practice or healthcare business, the first thing we do is we sit and we get to listen to lots and lots of problems.
If you’re in the healthcare business, you would call it symptoms. The neat thing about symptoms is they show themselves and they’re easy to discuss, but we’re actually digging to figure out what the real problem is. A lot of times the symptoms you’re talking about, the fact that you can’t get enough patients through the door, or every time you get someone who you think they’re forever, you lose the, and how do you keep more of them?
Usually those are just symptoms to a deeper problem. Often as you know, a lot of times it’s a people problem. The problem might be the front desk girl who’s been there for 12 years and is an in-law so you can’t fire her, and you know it, but your symptom is everybody complains about how rude your practice is.
Jordan Smith:
Well, and I want to hit on something that’s important that I don’t want to overshadow something that you mentioned, and we talk about all the time, is the symptom is part of a larger issue. The symptom is never the problem. That’s why we call it the symptom. Think about it from … for the listeners or watchers out there, because we’re going to put this up on YouTube also, think about when patients come to you. They might have a sore throat, but that’s not the underlying issue that you need to solve. That’s a symptom of something larger and business is the exact same way.
RJ Martino:
So we’ll spend a lot of time listening to the symptoms because just like providing healthcare, you’ve got to hear all the symptoms so that you can then dig into it. The second step though, before we even get into triaging any problems, we look and we make sure that we’ve got the kind of person who’s willing to step up and do something about it. Do we have the person that wants to take complete accountability for the problem? Because unfortunately in a business, especially in your business, nobody’s going to walk around solving problems for you. We want to be the four year old kid that kicks and screams and stomps and tells people how mad we are and the problem goes away, but business doesn’t work like that.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. Hey, Keith. Sorry. Pause.
Hey, I’m not seeing what you’re writing.
RJ Martino:
Oh no.
Jordan Smith:
It’s still blank. That’s okay. We put that pause spot in there. I don’t have a timestamp, but I can go back and get it.
Yeah. I see your mouse moving.
RJ Martino:
Come on.
Jordan Smith:
Should have left it on there. We got too cute.
RJ Martino:
I can’t see the meeting. Crap. Keep on top. So you don’t see anything right now?
Jordan Smith:
No, I see the numbers. Okay. Now I see that you stopped sharing. [inaudible 00:05:42] started. Bam. Now I see it. I don’t know what happened.
RJ Martino:
Great.
Jordan Smith:
All right, Keith … or actually whenever I do it, I can cut this piece out [inaudible 00:05:56].
RJ Martino:
You want to restart it all together or just keep going?
Jordan Smith:
Nah. I liked the symptom part. We’ll just start from take accountability.
RJ Martino:
Okay.
Jordan Smith:
Because you already had a good thing there. Okay.
We’re going to start back-
RJ Martino:
And action.
The other thing that we like to do as business owners is we like to just throw money at problems and then get mad when the result doesn’t happen that we thought. Well, we spent so much money and guess what we say? We tried that. And no, you didn’t try it, you threw money at it and you let somebody else try it. To fix most problems, especially important problems in a business, you have to take complete accountability for that problem. It’s funny because it is a self fulfilling prophecy where you say, “If I want anything done, I’ve got to get it done myself.” And the truth is, no. But to meet your expectations, you do have to play a part because most of the time your people are successful at the expectations you gave them. You didn’t give them any expectations. So they come back and they say, “Oh, I’m successful.” And you say, “No, it didn’t meet my expectations.” Well, if you’re going to put your expectations on it, you got to take accountability for the problem.
Jordan Smith:
Taking accountability is also, I mean, I think you mentioned something really powerful there, is empowering … and I know we’ll get to that here in just a second, but empowering your people. Just because you are the problem, doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to be involved with the solution either. So, I think taking accountability is an important step there.
RJ Martino:
Good point. The third thing that we talk about our third step is really a triage process. Because triaging, sometimes you need help on part A and sometimes you’ve got part A done, and so we move into part B. It’s important to talk about steps four, five, and six together, because Jordan, what you and I are doing, you’re asking questions about, if where they fall at in that triage process, because the very first part that we look at is, have you defined the culture that you want?
So we call this, this corporate culture. We all want this culture of great service, of awesome results, but some of us have never verbalized that to our people. Some of us have never painted a picture that anybody can get behind, let alone your people. You don’t even have it confirmed in your own head.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah.
RJ Martino:
When we talk about building a corporate culture, the first thing, we’ve got lots of steps within these, but the first thing we do is make sure that they’ve defined core values. That they’ve defined what the vision of the company is. The reason why this is number one is because until you’ve told people where you’re going, where you want them to go, until you’ve given them a step by step process of where they’re going, they’re guessing at what they should be doing. They can’t prioritize their issues. They can’t even identify how and when they need to talk to you about the problem.
Jordan Smith:
And a lot of the time as a business owner, we understand how scary that is to even verbalize it much less to strangers like us, but to people who’ve been on your staff or folks who look up to you. Sometimes, there’s that fear of, “Oh, what if I’m wrong?” Or, “What if somebody disagrees with my vision?” I’m telling you, once you start speaking it out into the universe, you’re going to be surprised about how powerful it is and how much it motivates those individuals, not only within your office, but it also helps to build your brand.
That’s a big thing, people always talk about is building your brand. There’s lots of meanings to it, but this is where it starts. It starts with building out that corporate culture. Where do you want to go in 10 years? Hell, what’s your 100 year vision? Put it on paper and express that to your team members.
RJ Martino:
Well, it’s important to do this, but the biggest key for me to say, “Hey, they haven’t talked about corporate culture. They haven’t really dug into it.” Is when they say, “My people can’t get anything done without me. I got to be there all the time.” I hate to say it, but usually it’s our own faults. The solution is we’ve got to tell them where we’re going. We’ve got to give them a framework in which to answer questions without us there. We have to back off. We are almost the killer of our own development of our business. We refuse to let people make mistakes and therefore our people [inaudible 00:10:51] better.
We talk a lot about this and we’ve got a process to develop the corporate culture, but if that’s developed, if you know where you’re going, step five is what most people are really asking for. What they think is going to happen is they’re going to call in, ask a question and we’re going to develop an awesome strategy. The strategy is the high price consultant who can tell you how to get the culture or the vision, the future that you want, let’s build a strategy, so that gets done.
Most of the time business owners, we don’t do it. We don’t strategize first. We see a competitor who’s doing some tactic and we copy.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. Get me on the news. I see Bob’s on the news. I want to get on the morning show.
RJ Martino:
And a lot of times your competitor might have an overarching strategy that says, “Hey, I’m going to be on the news. And here is why.” It meets some bigger vision. Because if you just look at tactics alone, those things change all the time, and that change all the time, kills your team’s momentum. How many times have you worked for somebody that says, “Do, A.” Then the very next day they come in and they say, “No, the world’s changed. We’re doing, B.”
Jordan Smith:
Oh, yeah.
RJ Martino:
What we do as humans is the next time that same issue rolls around, we do nothing. We say, “You know what? His mind’s going to change tomorrow.”
Jordan Smith:
Yeah.
RJ Martino:
That’s our people. Think about, how do you react if your people start saying, “Nah, he’ll change his mind.” Now you’re looking at your people and you’re saying, “My people are just lazy. They don’t do anything that I want them to do.” But no, it is you have trained them that, hey, when I tell you to do something, I might change gears completely tomorrow.
Jordan Smith:
Well, and I want to make sure that everybody out there understands how important it is to start with that vision and that corporate culture before you get into strategy, because what RJ just said, and I’ve heard him say it a ton of times, and so have some of our guests, which is, if you don’t define a company culture, it’s going to get defined for you.
RJ Martino:
Yeah. Oh, great point. And worth saying again. Either you can be intentional about defining your vision and your culture or it’s going to get defined for you. You’re not going to have a say in it. When we talk about this strategy, it should be a strategy that gets you to a future vision of future reality.
Jordan Smith:
[crosstalk 00:13:38]. Where is their attention? Who were our most important customers? How do they think? What is their value system? Those are the things that we’re talking about with strategy.
RJ Martino:
Our default mode of acting is just finding somebody who’s doing it already and just hire them and get them done. You know, and that’s fine. Sometimes you just match up with the perfect consultant, the perfect employee, and they just somehow get it. But most of the time, that’s not the case. Most of the time, the vision you have in your brain is completely different than the vision your employees have in their brain. Because there’s not a common vision, the strategy is different, and because the strategy is different, you’re unhappy with the results.
You don’t like that they are going in a different direction, but in their head because you haven’t defined a vision, it is the right move.
Jordan Smith:
Absolutely.
RJ Martino:
So, Jordan, you talked a lot about this strategy already. Anything else to add on step five? The question is, do you have a strategy?
Jordan Smith:
No. I mean, like I said, figuring out who customer base is going to be, who are your patients? What do they look like? Where do they spend their attention? What are their core values? How are you matching those things up? What’s the shared value between you guys? Those are strategic things that you need to figure out before you do anything from a tactical perspective.
RJ Martino:
So again, a lot of times you can look at the next step and you can figure out if the prior step is done, because the symptoms will show themselves. When you are doing lots of things, but nobody can tell you why you’re doing it, you can say, “Hey, we don’t have a vision, not a shared vision.”
Now, let’s talk about step six, Jordan. This is what us as business owners love doing, is just saying, “Hey, let’s hire somebody to post on Facebook. Let’s hire someone to fix our finances.” It is very tactical stuff. This is the thing that everybody says, “Here’s what I do.”
Jordan Smith:
This is job description, yeah.
RJ Martino:
And a lot of times you can tell that there’s no strategy because as business owners, we say, “Hey, we’re posting on Facebook.” And you say, “Yeah, yeah, but what’s the purpose of posting on Facebook?” They can’t tell you. That says, “Hey, you need to define the strategy a little more.” It’s not saying that’s the wrong thing to do. “Hey, we need a new front desk person.” Why? Well, this one answers more phone calls than other ones. You get the point, is tactical is very short term. It’s got a short term horizon.
Jordan Smith:
And most of the time whenever we talk from, when I say we, from the marketing company perspective, a lot of the times we’re talking to practices that are just fed up. It’s because they’ve spent a ton of time and money and effort on just tactical stuff, because they can’t answer that third why, that RJ just asked, right? “Well, why are you on Facebook?” “Well, because so-and-so, they’re posting a lot on Facebook.” “Okay, why?”” I don’t know. Because if you’re a practice now you have to be on Facebook.” “Why?” “Because that’s where patients are going to potentially find me.”
That’s the why. But if you don’t align that out with that vision, then the strategy and then figure out tactics from there. All you’re doing is, you know, it’s fish in a barrel. You’re just turning your wheels and not getting a lot of anything besides just that activity.
RJ Martino:
Well, and we’re talking a lot about marketing, because we talk about business development and marketing in advertising a lot, but really this framework is a way in which you manage your entire organization. From a department level we’re managing and using this system. So after those tactics are defined, we do a lot with those tactics, a lot with the strategy, a lot with the culture. We’ll do things like employment reviews based off of the information that we develop here. So we can go into that.
The tactics. What tactics are we going to do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? Those things become job descriptions for us. Those job descriptions become how we evaluate our people.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah.
RJ Martino:
Those daily, weekly, quarterly tasks create what we call a scorecard, and that is how we measure our people’s performance. All of that really turns into, once you’ve got this built out, how do we make sure we keep alignment?
Jordan Smith:
Yep.
RJ Martino:
And for us, Jordan and I believe that alignment is the best way to organize resources around a central vision. How do we make sure that everybody’s row … we call it rowing in the same direction. We talk about it like it’s a drone. If you’ve ever seen a drone in the air, Jordan, they simply drop waypoints. A waypoint tells the drone where to fly to, and the wind, you could get a 100 mile an hour gust of wind and you’ll watch that drone get knocked way off course, but immediately it will come back and fly straight toward that waypoint. So how do we drop waypoints for our people? How do we make sure that they’re all flying toward the same place? That’s step seven, is alignment.
A lot of our questions that come in, come in after the fact that they built a vision, they’ve got a great scorecard. How in the world are my people still not able to get this done without me being there? And alignment is the way that we figure that out.
The number one question I get whenever I think, hey, we’ve got to talk about alignment is, “I don’t feel like I can go on vacation.” And you ask, “Why?” “I don’t know, the anxiety is killing me. I don’t know what I don’t know.” The employer that can’t go on vacation really needs to look at the alignment piece and confirm. I mean, in triage, we still confirm all these things. You’ve got a vision, you know where you’re going, you’ve got a good culture, you’ve got the right people, you’ve got a good strategy in place. Alignment is a process where you engage your team to make sure that you’re all rowing in the same direction.
The hard part about alignment is that you can’t answer it alone. Your people have to be in alignment with you. They have to understand that. So much of our training is geared at your people, not just the business owner. It’s trained at how you onboard your team. How you off-board your team if it’s not working out. How you change your vision. How you make sure that as a business owner, you don’t do what we were talking about earlier, which is come in one day, say we’re going to do A, B and C, and then the very next day say, nope, that’s garbage, we’re doing something completely different.
How do we make sure that doesn’t happen? Because that’s just who we are as humans. Well, it’s in the alignment piece that we talk about that.
Jordan Smith:
Absolutely.
RJ Martino:
Eighth step is the final step. This is really where you engage your team. We put this last mainly because, you can’t engage your team, you can’t rally the troops until you’ve worked it all out in your head. A lot of this process that we’re talking about here is working it out in your head, making sure that you’ve built something that other people can get behind. It’s not until you’re done here, that you can really engage your team.
There’s a lot of special sauce that happens on engaging your team. Some of it is just education. Some of it is getting them involved in training that we have in place. Some of it is getting them educated and making them use this same framework. But again, you can’t do this, which is what everybody wants. Everybody wants a silver bullet. “Hey employees, here’s what we’re going to do. I need an hour of your time.” You can’t get this done in an hour. I hate to tell you, you just, you can’t.
The engaging your team requires an hour meeting at least every week, of you or a leadership team member running a meeting so that you feel good about leaving, so that they feel good about obstacles that are in their way. This is very important. This is a simple framework, but it’s not easy.
Jordan, if we look at the questions that come in from people that we’ve worked in the past, those that we’ve consulted with in the past, how do most of these people find out that they need help, professional help? You know?
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it you nailed it in the beginning, which is those symptoms. It’s always symptoms related. They either want something new or they know that they need to change something, they just don’t have an idea of what. They know they want new patients. They know they want new customers. They know they want to get in front of new clients or new people, but they just don’t know how to start.
A lot of the times it’s because they have those symptoms. They’re at number one up top and they jump right down to six because that’s what somebody sells, or that’s what they think is going to solve that problem. I love what RJ said and I’ll keep repeating it. It’s a simple framework, but it’s not easy. It’s a lot of introspective time. It’s a lot of taking responsibility and accountability, and it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot easier just to sit back and throw tactics at an issue than it is to take a step back and look at this. But this is the way that we believe and that we’ve seen, and we’ve helped organizations execute a corporate vision that actually drives real life results.
RJ Martino:
Well, and I think you said it. As business owners, we’re just used to action, and introspection is usually something we’re not real good at. To us those are the guys that don’t ever jump to action. They just think about stuff a lot. So, we’ve prided ourselves on action oriented and just doing, and this is one of those things that you do need to take a little bit of time and think through and agree on, because you’re going to get challenged.
You’re going to get challenged by your own people, by your best friends, by your competitors, by your mentors. I mean, some of my hardest discussions have been with my mentors, telling them how we’re moving forward and them disagreeing with it and me having to continue to buy into it. So, you’ve got to spend some time on this. ‘sI think that for me, why I noticed I needed [inaudible 00:25:27], is I need a sounding board. I need someone to challenge me on some of these things. That’s what a good coach, a good mentor, a good team does for you. Is they actually make you think through and buy into what you’ve put on paper.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a lot of steps, but it’s the right way to do it. Don’t throw tactics at a symptom, figure out what the larger issue is and follow this framework. Our hope is that we can dive into each one of these deeper and deeper as we go through this. But we thought it’d be a good opportunity to step back and let you know what our thought process is behind all this.
RJ Martino:
Well, Jordan, if we don’t have any other questions or don’t have any other thoughts, this was a great time. I hope it was simple. I think I rambled a little too much still and we could do it quicker, but if you are listening to the podcast, you’ll see and hear us talk about [inaudible 00:26:29] our framework that we talk about. This is the VSTA process.
Jordan Smith:
Yep. So, vision, strategy, tactics, and alignment. That’s what we say. That’s what we mean when we say VSTA.
Like, comment, share. We’re going to be putting out polls on our Facebook page. So please take those also. We’re going to be launching all of our podcasts moving forward on YouTube. So if you’re listening to this and you’d like to see the written out framework, go visit our YouTube page. You’ll see it on there. RJ, this was awesome, man. Thank you.
RJ Martino:
Hey, thank you. And thank you for everything you’ve done to help me develop this stuff. This is a team effort, but you know how we’ll get better is by questions. If you’ve got questions on how we deal with specific problems, we’ll tell you how it falls into the framework. I’d like to do more of these, just you and me discussing our framework.
Jordan Smith:
I think so, too. So I hope the listeners love it. And a good place to start, if you say, “All this is great, where do I start?” The same thing that RJ mentioned earlier, ask yourself why three times and you’ll get past that symptom to the real issue.
RJ Martino:
Yeah.
Jordan Smith:
All right, thanks everybody. We’ll talk to you next time.
