Episode 379: 4 Staff Red Flags That Will Rip Your Practice Apart

Ignore these red flags and it's going to rip your practice and your profits apart. Creating a successful healthcare business is not about you being the best clinician or earning a reputation over time. It's about you becoming the best strategist, marketer and leader so that you can create a powerful business that grows fast and does not defend on you. For the last ten years, Tristan Bond has been advising healthcare practice owners just like you to do exactly that. If you want to double your income, have your clinical hours and build a powerful practice that doesn't depend on you, keep listening. If you want it faster, visit practiceacceleration.com/themachine. Here's Tristan. Hey guys, Tristan Bond here, CEO and founder of Practice Acceleration. Today we are talking about the four red flags that are rip your practice and your profits apart. That's what we're talking about. I want to make sure that you guys, the good people, those people out there that are working hard, helping lots of patients, making a really big difference in healthcare, are actually looked after yourselves. I want to make sure that you guys can run an incredible practice, rock up every single day, feeling amazing about life. In the one thing that's going to destroy that, are these four red flags and we need to make sure that we intercept them from the absolute get-go. Here's the thing, so many practice owners that I talked to put up with way too much from their team. Ask yourself if that is you. Start rocking out weight, start being unaccountable. We've got pushback, we've got behavioral issues, we've got people resisting changes, we've got all these things going on. What I see happen is, as a practice owner, unfortunately, typically you adapt and you accept and then you think that this is the way there it is. Then you talk to other friends that also own practices and they tell you the same thing because they don't know how to actually make a shift either. Then you go, "Hey, this just must be the way business is. It must just be hard." We hear people saying in public all the time, "Oh, being a business, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard." The reality is, the bigger your business gets, the more fun it should be, the more profits you should make, the more fulfillment you should achieve. That is not possible if you have these four red flags and you don't stamp them out. Believe me, I've experienced this. At the point of this recording, I personally fired 54 people face to face. I've had a fair share of experience with moving people on and also we help people hire people for a living. We help them advertise, hire them, onboard them, train them, manage them, ascend them, we also shouldn't have had to move them on quickly if things aren't working out. What are the four red flags that you need to avoid? As this, the toxic, higher performer. What is the toxic, higher performer? Well, as a person, your team, they're smart. They're good at what they do. Heck, patients probably even love them and they make you a lot of money. But, think about that term at the beginning. Toxic, they are not good for you or your culture. Patients love them, team, not so much. Maybe a few team members like them, maybe the event's starting up internal battles inside of creating office politics. But you accept them because patients love them, they're busy and quite frankly, sometimes you're scared of dealing with them because they are toxic. They can be very confident, they can be very charismatic, they can talk you around. If you keep a toxic higher performer inside your business, what's going to happen is those people around them are threatened by that and that want to have a harmonious workplace. They will never ascend because they're in a place of anxiety when they're at work. They will not get better at their role. Toxic higher performer is where he or she wants them to be. They're at the top, they're dominating and they will ever stand below them and they're keeping them down there through intimidation or through bad behaviour. And guess what? Those people that are good that could perform at a high level, they leave. And what you start with is toxic higher performer and a bunch of people that enable that toxic higher performer. My advice to you is get that person out right now. They're the worst person to have in your organisation. Even worse in my opinion, they're a toxic low performer. If you're a toxic low performer, at least they're easier to move on because you're not getting any reward for that behaviour. Toxic higher performer is the absolute worst. That is the first red flag. Number two is this, team members avoiding accountability. Your team need to be held to account. They need to hold themselves to account. They need to actually follow through with what you need from them. You need to be doing one to ones with your team every week. If you're not doing every week, start off with every fortnight. But when you actually demonstrate to your team what is required of them and you set goals for them and you set numbers, you set KPIs. If they don't achieve those, if they're sure-king accountability, if you're having to chase them up all the time, you're going to be absolutely drained of energy. The whole point of having a team is that you can get more done more effectively and give you more energy so you can grow your vision and you can actually make more profit. But if you are following up your team all the time that is energy draining from you, it is a time suck as well. And overall, you are getting dragged into their drama. So team members avoid accountability. That is a red flag. Give them two strikes and they're out. So make sure you elevate them, but if they don't elevate, you need to get them out. Get them out of there really, really quickly. That is number two. Number three is this front desk chaos affecting the patient experience. Wow, this is a big one. You know, it's patients come into your practice. They're in that front desk area. You've got to make an incredible impression. From the moment someone picks up the phone or the email that someone sends or the DM that someone sends or the text message someone sends, it's going to be an impeccable experience. It doesn't matter how good you are clinically or how much your patients like you or your new practitioners. If there is chaos out the front desk, there's going to be bungalow appointment scheduling. There's going to be all sorts of problems happening where the experience drops off significantly. Your patients can't sign appointments. You know, patients are disappointed. If they're running late and they're running behind, they may get flustered. They are only going to remember that at first experience they have there. They're also going to remember the last experience they have there. So remember, when they come in your front desk, there's going to be like the client concierge. They're going to come in. They're going to have an absolutely incredible experience. Now, I've had clients in mind that have got incredible team members. I mean, the owner is an incredible leader, but things just fall apart. The fall to crap at that front desk when it comes to that experience. And patients simply don't want to come back. And then when they finally move on that front desk person, the patients only then finally say, hey, I actually haven't been coming back for a while because I didn't like talking to Janice who was out the front desk because she was just so down rude and negative. So you need to make sure that you are really protective of who is meeting and greeting your patients. Who is representing your brand? You need a brand consistency across you, across your practitioners and across your front staff. So that is number three. Number four, this is a big. Experience arrogance blocking growth. What does that mean? Well, quite simply means this. If you've got team members that have got a good level of experience, perhaps a lot of experience. Perhaps they do clinically heck the more experienced the worst it is because if they are saying, well, I know how to do that. Or I used to do it this way or I don't do it that way or this doesn't work for me. That is experience arrogance blocking growth. It is a way of them saying, I'm happy to not grow in life. Now, that is not acceptable. That is totally not acceptable. And it's one of the reasons I do a lot of personality profiling when we hire people. Is this person actually open to growth? What are they like under pressure? What are their anxiety levels? How can we best work in them? Is this someone we can actually work with? Because the reality is this. What used to work in the old days doesn't work anymore. What works today isn't going to work in three months. The world is moving so crazy fast, right? So the thing is nobody knows everything. You need to be open to learning. One of our core values here at practice acceleration is growth. Now growth means we're moving and growing as a business. We're growing as a company. We are growing in profits and we are growing in our mentality in our personal development. Now, if you've got someone in there saying, hey, I know it all and I'm not going to change. Guess what? That is going to block progress. And you know what they, you know what they didn't become? That is another symptom of the toxic eye performer. So if you've got someone making excuses that I can't do this because of or actually I already think differently. No, everyone in your team needs to follow your systems. Everybody. If they do not remove that person very, very quickly, otherwise it's going to block your growth overall. When you are running a big practice and you want to get bigger, you need to make sure that all of your performers are aligned. They're all following your systems. They are all accountable and they're all grateful for your leadership and they're looking to grow. They're only part of this vision where they we're all rolling together. So if someone has individual goals and they're not a team player, get them out. We need to make sure that everyone is committed to the overall vision and the team goals of the entire practice. So there you have it guys. They are the four red flags that are killing your practice, rip it apart, destroy your profits. Number one, toxic eye performer number two. Team members awarding accountability number three, front desk chaos, really destroying the patient experience and number four experience arrogance blocking growth. Heck, if you're experiencing this rich out, we can help. We do this all day every day. We've done this right now with over three thousand practices over the last 18 years across five different countries. Make sure you follow me on Tristan on official on Instagram where I share a lot of really valuable videos in this every single day. And I also share a lot of resources as well. So if you're growing your team. If you've got any team dramas right now or you simply want to avoid them, hit me up on Instagram. I do make sure I reply to all the messages personally. It's Tristan Bond official over on the Instagram's. Thank you so much for joining me today guys. Absolutely pleasure and one more favor I have for you from you rather. I really appreciate you guys being here. We get tons of feedback about the lives we are changing with our podcast. So I'm going to small ask if this was valuable to you and I really hope it was. Please share this to someone else that you believe would value this information benefit from it to you. So share it via text message, share it on the DMs, share it. Share it in your Slack channel, share it on email, share it to someone else that will benefit from this message. And together we're going to make it greater impact and we're going to make the lives of practice owners a whole lot better. So I can earn more money, have more time out and have a whole lot more head space and make a much greater impact within the healthcare industry. Thank you so much for joining me guys. Big love, appreciate you all. I'll see you in next week's episode. Bye for now. Cha Cha, whatever that cha want to set up. Thanks for tuning in to the Practice Acceleration Podcast with Tristan Bond and the team. For more information and to get the resources mentioned in this podcast, visit practiceacceleration.com/podcast.