MASTERMIND: Systemising Your Clinic Without Losing Its Soul | GYC Podcast 302

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In this episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast, CM Team Ben Lynch, Jack O'Brien and Hannah Dunn come together for another Mastermind to discuss the critical role of systems in clinic operations and how they can significantly impact your clinic's success. You'll gain insights into systematising your clinic without feeling overwhelmed and hear personal anecdotes about the practical benefits of effective systems, including how they saved Jack's family holiday. Additionally, Hannah shares a straightforward feedback mechanism that can immediately enhance those clinic systems.

What You'll Learn:

🌟 Goal Setting vs. Systems: "You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems."

🔍 Identifying Challenges: Learn how to pinpoint where your systems may be lacking and how to address them effectively.

💡 Feedback Mechanisms: Discover simple ways to gather feedback from your team to improve clinic operations.

📈 Asymmetric Risk and Reward: Understand how to empower your team to take calculated risks while minimising downsides.

🛠️ Practical Tips: Get actionable advice on systemising your clinic without feeling overwhelmed.

Timestamps

[00:01:01] Systemising clinic operations.
[00:05:26] Systems versus goals in success.
[00:08:04] Systems and best practices.
[00:12:51] Systems to achieve reliable outcomes.
[00:15:14] Quality systems in clinics.
[00:20:45] Teaching teams how to think.
[00:22:41] Infusing core values into processes.
[00:27:20] Optimising unnecessary clinic processes.
[00:30:26] Decision-making processes in clinics.
[00:35:50] Critical thinking in clinics.
[00:37:26] Constant iterative improvement culture.
[00:41:03] Feedback culture and communication.
[00:46:24] Asymmetric risk and reward.
[00:50:59] Adoption of Policies and Procedures.
[00:52:24] Time blocking for clinic efficiency.

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Transcript

0:00

Well, OK, I feel leveled up already No, I just figured uniform reflects the significance Oh, the tech billionaires. I can take it off you. That's great. No, We won't point it out at all. G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to We want to blame the system and not the person. And so we really try to remove that emotion and look at the facts of what we're giving Asymmetric risk and reward. Potential upswing, but What are you loving in your role right now? And You're either growing or you're dying. You know, things are getting better or they're getting worse. They rarely stay the same. And when we get asked questions, one of the most powerful responses as a clinic This episode will be right up your alley if you're looking to systemize your clinic without it feeling overwhelming. We're diving into clinic operations. Plus, stick around for when Jack drops a personal story about how systems saved his family holiday. And you'll want to hear Hannah's take on the simple feedback mechanism to improve systems immediately. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AliClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Ali. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinics, policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AliClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email helloatclinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. Here we are again. This is episode 302. Wow, we're getting lots of new people join the podcast, first-time listeners. Lots of people are sharing it with their colleagues and their friends, which is fantastic. Thank you, as always. My name is Ben Lynch. I try and be the host here and extract as much gold out of Jack O'Brien and Hannah Dunn as I possibly can. If you are new to the podcast, Hannah Dunn, one of our co-hosts here, owner of the DOTS paediatric clinic in Melbourne, Victoria. How many people have you got at Wow, just growing and growing. I'm also joined by my business partner, former clinic owner and physio, Jack O'Brien, Jacobren. Good to see you again. Now, you've got a couple of bits I do. Yes. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Just wanted to share a couple of reviews that have come through on the podcast recently. If you haven't yet reviewed or rated the podcast, we'd really appreciate you going over and doing that at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen. It really does mean a lot to us and helps us help more clinic owners. So we've got one here from Daniel. So a quality podcast, a must for clinicians and clinic owners, great insights from genuine down to earth health professionals who encourage and motivate us to build clinics for good. And Nick says, well done, keep rocking it. I've been meaning to message for a while saying well done and how much I appreciate the team and enjoy your podcast. So thank you, Nick. I appreciate your kind words. If you are listening and for everyone else, who's been meaning to message or meaning to review, now's your friendly reminder that your player has a pause button. and you can go and review, and then come back and press play. So there you go, this reviews Ben and just a quick shout out and welcome to the latest members to join our community. There's every week, almost every day, we have new clinic owners finding their way into working with us at Clinic Mastery. So a huge shout out and welcome to Adam and we've got Nicole here and Shannon in the last week or so. So welcome to the Clinic Mastery community. We love amplifying the impact of health professionals and I'm super Very nice. Well, I did put the offer out in a previous episode that if you give a review until stocks last, I overordered, or at least I have surplus of these great assets behind me. You can see if you're watching on YouTube from the imperfects, which are the vulnerability cards. And if you do a review for us, send me an email, bennettclankmastery.com, and we'll send you a pack of these cards, which are terrific for any culture day or team training that you're doing as a way to say thank you. Well, to kick us off, I want to get your reaction to a quote that resurfaced in my feed and serves as a really great anchor point for today's conversation. And it's from James Clear. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Hannah, talk to me about how you've straddled setting goals and being ambitious, but then backing it up with standards and systems to Yeah, absolutely. And comes back to Brené Brown being clear as kind. And I think it's often the first question that I ask the people that I'm mentoring or working with when they say that their goal isn't being achieved or that their teammate hasn't achieved something. I will always fall back to what systems are in place, what's written, what information do they have? And it's often there that we see the gap and therefore isn't allowing us to achieve that goal, which is so important. I Just give us some of the line of questioning or the things that you would do quite specifically with a clinic owner when you're trying to uncover these insights to find out where to go. Because the other side of it is, clinic owners often say to me, probably say to you guys as well, I want to systemize everything. And they want to build something bigger than Ben Hur and then roll it out to their team. And so often the challenge with systemizing your clinic is actually knowing where to start. So how do you help people Yeah, absolutely. So we might be talking about a challenge in a clinic. So let's say that the challenge is putting appointments in a calendar for admin and that it's not working with the clinical team, that something is breaking down there. I recently had this where I said, OK, talk to me about what processes and policies you've got in place and where they are. And they said, we've got it all written out. It's all in our handbook. And I was like, okay, great. And I said, pull up the handbook. Let's have a look. And they were like, yeah. So they pulled out the handbook and then they couldn't even find it themselves because there was so much information in there. The keywords weren't there. And they were like, actually, maybe we need to review this. So it's not just even about having the process there, it's about the accessibility of it as well. But just I think where to start is where is our biggest challenge and then what is the communication that we expect. So making sure that that process is being followed and if there's holes in that process. So running through and seeing where the links are back to where the holes are in what's going and you always say we want to blame the system and not the person and so we really try to remove that emotion and look at the facts of what we're giving What I love here as a connection point, it sounds like you're actually identifying what is the goal, what is the challenge, maybe, or the opportunity, and how are the systems aligning with that, which is fundamentally different from where a lot of clinic owners start, which is, all right, I'm going to just systemize everything, and there is no kind of reference point or anchor point. So Jack, In you thinking about this, I think you actually gave me this quote many years ago from James Clear. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. How Yeah, good question. And I think that whole adage of rising or falling is the key point here. It's not so much about goals or systems. It's that, you know, Daniel Gibbs often says, you're either growing or you're dying. You know, things are getting better or they're getting worse. They rarely stay the same. And so the point here is, do we want to be falling or do we want to be growing? And do we want to be rising? I think We can probably play on that quote a little bit as well. You can actually rise to the level of your systems. Systems call people up. And here's what I think about when I think about systems. I think it is an awareness and a commitment to what is best practice. A system is an agreed upon best practice for doing something. There might be three or four different ways of doing something, but the system in our clinic is what we've agreed is the gold standard best practice. And so we can call people up and rise people up to the gold standard, the best practice. That's how And I also, on that Jack, I was really, you know, when you've got a team of 30, you can't be present every day and physically they're guiding people through every step of a process. And one of my hurdles that I overcame with the support of TB or Tony, one of our other coaches, was around the way in which you overcome that is through your systems, because you've touched the systems and those systems show them how you want them to work. And so that is how you get your personality or the way that you want your company run into the rest of your team. So communicating that way. So when someone says, I don't want to let go, which we've spoken about leadership in another one of our episodes, when they're like, I don't want to let go because I don't want it to be different to the way that I would do it. Well, that's where your systems come into play. And if they're not doing it your way, then what is about the system that's not I think about these things often, Hannah, and I don't know about you, but systems... For some reason in particularly allied healthcare or even the administration side of our businesses, we get a little bit uncomfortable or don't like the notion or feel pigeonholed. And yet I compare and contrast that to say a restaurant or a cafe where there can be so much variability in the output in the food. If I'm served four different cheesecakes, caramel cheesecake, if you're looking to surprise and delight me, caramel cheesecake, I digress. If you've got four caramel cheesecakes in front of you, there's going to be a better one and a worse one. And I want the best one. And I want, if I was the restaurant owner, I'd want that consistently created, made and delivered. And that's what we're trying to do in our clinic is create consistency around what are the best doing? What is the best way to do this that consistently delivers the outcomes and the experiences that we want for our team, our clients, our community, and I like that distinction. I want to ask you both about the hallmarks of a good system in a moment. But just to add to that, what I've found really useful internally and also working with clinic owners is to anchor it to a specific scope and outcomes specifically. For instance, if at the moment you're trying to hire a therapist or an admin, then it makes sense for us to look at what are the systems we ought to update or include that help us predictably get that outcome moving forward. Because to your point, J.O.B., of the caramel cheesecake sounds delicious. It's like, how predictably, reliably can we achieve a certain outcome? In that case, it's like produce that piece of food. In this instance, for a clinic owner, it might be, how can we predictably and reliably recruit when we need to recruit? So I'd be looking at what are the systems we need to do there, rather than feel like, oh, I've got all these gaps in my policies, behind the scenes, how we deal with patients. There's only so many hours in the day, in the week where you can focus. So I think the best anchor point is, okay, what is the number one outcome you're trying to achieve this week, this month, this quarter, this year? And then what are the systems that we need to do to reliably get that outcome? So I love to anchor to, results first and then work backwards to the system. Which kind of answers another point, I feel. So many clinic owners will say, I've got all these policies, procedures and systems, but I'm not even sure if my team use them, know they exist. And so the question is, How well are your team using it, I think, is in the outcomes that they get to the point of the recipe. JRB is a really simple, good analogy. Is You're absolutely right. It needs to be a commitment to the result and the output. That's ultimately what we need to be precious on. And the way And I think as clinic owners, we're always wanting to help. Like we really love helping our team and all of those things, but it comes back to when someone asks us a question about something, and if we've got a policy and procedure in place, that we're saying to them, have you checked the hub? Have you checked Ali? Have you checked wherever it is that we're storing those documents? And we're not just providing the answer, which we know would be simple and easy, but we're creating those habits where we're putting it back and then we can follow that So I want to just press on something there, Hannah, that you said that is something that clinic owners skip over all the time. And when we get asked questions, one of the most powerful responses as a clinic owner is to ask a question back. And so, we don't want to jump into that guru, the advice trap or the advice monster as Michael Bungay calls it. We want to respond with a question. When someone asks us something, respond back, did you check? Did you follow? How was the system? Rather than tell them the answer, ask What do you think, Jack, some of the symptoms are of a clinic not having enough or enough quality systems? Well, for a clinic that doesn't have quality systems, that doesn't have enough systems, it usually, in my experience, stems back to a mindset or a philosophical approach problem. It's similar to the pilots who would say, oh, I'm just going to fly a plane, you know, just off the cuff today. I'm going to see how I go. It's like, no, if I'm stepping on a plane, I want that pilot to follow a consistent process every time. I don't want the pilot to rely on their intuition today. or to rely on what they think would be the best flight path, or to rely on the system that defines the right flight path. And so the flaw in thinking is that there are many ways to get something done, and all roads lead to Rome. That's not true. There's a fast road that leads to Rome, and there's a slow road that leads to Rome. Actually, where's that Right. I digress. But you're clearly going to think, I don't need systems. It's going to box people in. There's many ways to go about this when ultimately what we want to do when it comes to defining systems is we're trying to bottle the collective genius of our team and agree on what is the best, most consistent, reliable, and predictable way to get the outcome. And so ultimately, for people who reject systems, you actually are rejecting the notion that there is a consistent, reliable, predictable way to get things done. And I'd challenge you to reflect upon Yeah, absolutely. And I think I just want to know that it can feel so overwhelming when you feel like you have no policies and procedures in place and where to start and where to go. And I think I do go back to like Eat That Frog, that book that just talks about really attacking the biggest challenge at the moment and starting there and having this success there. And then we can work on the other hundreds of policies that we might put in place. But I also think use your team. Like if your team are doing the do, and they've got the time and space to write out those steps, then support them to be able to support you to be able to get those policies and procedures in place so you can get that consistency across the board. a good point. I think clinic owners sort of believe, typically, that there's some utopia of like, one day I'll have all my systems done and it'll be complete. It's just not true. We see startups who probably have more systems than some of these bigger clinics, right? Because they've gotten and done the work. So systems aren't necessarily a guarantee of you growing. I think we've seen a lot of clinics grow by some key measures of revenue, of team and headcount that are fairly unsystemized. And so I want to make the distinction that I don't believe it needs to be all documented. Because to your point, if people are getting the outcome reliably and consistently, perhaps there's just a behavior set that's happening to do that. Documenting it, I think, allows us to transfer that knowledge fairly seamlessly, asynchronous, timelessly to other people. But I think a lot of people start from the basis of, I need to sit down for a week and type out everything that we do in every department. And that's just not a realistic base to think from. So they feel this, I don't know, guilt or overwhelm that they need to do this and I haven't yet done it. And so I'd just say remove that because no one's done it. And come back to the outcome of what you want to achieve. I think some of the key symptoms I'm seeing are like people will open up their inbox or their Slack or their Google chat and they'll just have so many inbound questions coming their way. From typically small things, like what's our policy for seeing family and friends at the clinic? Should we discount or not? Through to what's our annual leave policy and process for applying for it? And insert a million other things. I think for clinic owners, they get that overwhelmed because so much is coming to them. So I think actually an interesting alternative lens is, do I need a system? to go with the alliteration, JB? Do I need a process, a policy, or do I need a person? Do I need to actually recruit? Is that one of my systems to reduce the reliance on me? Because I think that's where it kind of comes back to is some sense of this is all coming to me. And I feel like it's because I don't have my systems in place for people to do it I'm not so sure. Tell me more. I don't think that hiring is always the right answer. So what we, what you're describing to me sounds like perhaps some team or team members who have really low level or superficial thinking, like they'll follow a process if it exists, but if there's no process, they're kind of like a deer in the headlights. And I would say at that point, you don't have a recruitment issue. You have a leadership issue because you have, you've, they're waiting for you to tell them what to think or what to do when in fact the best clinic owners teach their team how to think. not just what to do. So, some of the best systems, we know some of the best systems teach people how to think about a job. What is the outcome? I love the little phrase. What is the definition of done? Define what is a job well done. What does this look like when it's completed to a level of excellence, a standard that we're happy with? And this is how you want to think about approaching this process. We lead with our core values. We want to make sure we know their coffee order. That's the principle that undergirds this client experience system is that we know the person and we connect with them. And so when we teach our people how to think about a process, not just what to do in the absence of a process that tells them what to do, they know how How do you do that though? There's a lot of how going on here. Just to get like super practical. Someone's listening and they're like, great. Sounds awesome. Well, what do I do to teach my team to think more like me so that perhaps they can figure out problems, even And I was just listening to you, Jack, and just thinking about like a example, you know, in clinic mastery, we talk about sort of 10 to 12% of our costs being attributed to admin of our revenue. And I think sometimes we have clinics who have you know higher than that percentage and they say but I also feel like I need more admin and so that's when I would sit with them and say let's do an audit of the time like let's have a look at what is the time going towards and that is often where we end up identifying these gaps in processes and saying well this is taking x amount of time when really we could automate that or we could look at systemizing that to be better and so I think that's really powerful when we look at the time if we're really looking at but the job specific tasks and how they align with Yeah, and I think how do we infuse the how, Ben? It really comes back to our core values, right? And making sure that we've identified our core values, that we amplify our core values, that in every process, policy, system, document, we describe how that policy connects back to those values or those distinctives or what makes us us, what is the way in capitals, inverted commas, of our clinic. This is the DOTS way. This is the CM way. This is the teres physio way. And if we can infuse that all the time, it just rolls off the tip of our tongue. And we know that this is what underpins, undergirds the process and the outcome that we're looking for. It makes it so much easier to follow along in the absence of And I think with Tim Ferriss for our working week, I think he would say, don't create a system that isn't related to one of your goals. Going back to what you said at the beginning, Ben, like we just need to make sure that and maybe that goal is getting more time back. Maybe it's assessing whether we need more team members, but just making sure that we're not sitting down and looking at a list of policies that we've Googled or asked ChatGPT for and starting at the top. that we're really being practical in what we're doing. And I think there's so many blocks when we talk about procrastination, and we can break that procrastination by having something that's already been started. So there are so many examples of policies on Google or on ChatGPT or in Ali as well, Ben. And so there are starting points for lots of It's a really good point around how we teach people the anchor point I often come back to. It was used in a different context. It was from Gary Vaynerchuk. He was talking about creating content. People would say, I don't have time to create, I don't have a team to create, etc. His advice was document. don't create. And I think that's such a brilliant little heuristic when it comes to systems. Because people say, I need to allocate that day, that week to sit down and just crunch out these systems. And that inevitably never get to it because there's always spot fires to fix. But next time you're doing the thing, could you turn on zoom or loom or even have your camera record audio or video by a side? It doesn't need to be super polished, but it allows you to document as you're doing the thing rather than schedule this perfect time where you get to create systems from scratch. The other thing that I think a lot about is if you're a fast-paced clinic, if you're growing pretty quickly or you're pretty ambitious and want to grow more quickly, so often systems become outdated pretty quickly. And so you actually need brevity to your point, Hannah, of this person that you gave the example of, like it's this Harry Potter novel with all these things. It's hard to digest. It's hard to read. It's too long. People don't use it or they can't find it. Actually, brevity is the key point, because you want people to adopt and use it. Probably the biggest challenge with systems is people not using them or not knowing what are the steps for me to get the outcome. Again, they don't need to pull up a document every time they need to do something and read the IKEA instructions. I mean, that's going to cause frustration. But it's just an anchor point for training or reference moving forward about how to get the outcome. I want to throw to you to get your reaction to another key thought around creating systems. And it comes from a quote from Elon Musk, which he said, one of the biggest traps for smart people is optimizing something that shouldn't exist in the first place. So often, how many people do we see that it is like busy being busy? doing the systems work and work that is so much on the periphery of actually providing value, which is very simply allowing more people to be seen in the week, impact hours, appointments. That's the core of our business. There are things that keep the lights on and the show on the road, so to speak, behind the scenes. So much that I see are people trying to create this perfect back of house with every document that's so crisp. It's just not needed. Coming back to the outcome. Jack, when you hear that quote, what are some of the big mistakes that you see when clinic owners go to systemize Optimizing something that doesn't need to exist. That was essentially the essence of the correct. Yeah. And so the question then begs, well, does this need to exist? Does this need to be optimized? I think that's a really simple one percenter that we can all ask ourselves when it comes to what we're doing in our week. Does this process, does this activity actually need to happen? And here I've seen this time and again in my clinic and dozens, if not hundreds of clinics that I've personally coached. is that particularly health clinic admin team members make themselves busy to justify their existence. They are Murphy's law with a heartbeat. They have 38 hours in a given week, and so they will make themselves busy for 38 hours a week, which comes from a beautiful, noble intention. In part, it's probably human nature. But we fill our time because we've got time to fill and our admin team probably have this subconscious or unconscious concern or fear that if I really optimize my week and I free up two or three hours, then the boss might take those two or three hours off me. Maybe I'm putting my job in jeopardy. And so there is this really unconscious or subconscious bias against productivity and against efficiency. So we do things that don't need to be done or we optimize things that don't need to exist. So I think it again, back to our responsibility as leaders, we are responsible for everything in our business period. And so we need to make sure that we're creating a space that is safe for our team to be more productive, to be more efficient. I want to say to my team, I want you to do less. But what you do do must be high impact, must be high value, must be values led. That's what matters, not busy for busyness sake. Hannah, is my observation accurate or have you seen team members, admin teams make themselves busy for their own Yeah, I think they do it, as you said, from a place of goodwill, like they want to help. And I think it's about us not having those jobs ready to go or having clear pathways that if we can identify that there's clear pathways that if we get this systemised or this done, then that will open up the hours. And then this is what we'll use those hours for. I think that creates that safety. And so, yeah, I think it's often these jobs that, as you said, are optimising areas It comes back to the outcomes. I think one of the key things you mentioned there, J.B., of so much of what we're trying to do is teach the team to think more like me or at least understand the thinking, because maybe I certainly appreciate some independent thought. We don't want too much groupthink, but I take your point of like, understand the reference point that I have, how we go about making decisions. One thing that we have internally here is a version of a blog, which is called Inside the Mind. And what we do is it's part of, here's how we made a decision. Here was the thinking behind the decision. And in the vein of, I forget who mentioned this, but a pre-mortem and a post-mortem. Sort of the pre-mortem is like, here's the decision we're looking to make. Here's why we wanna make it. Here's sort of the consequences of that decision, the outcomes of that decision. And what, you know, essentially what could go wrong and how are we gonna mitigate that risk. The postmortem is kind of doing the review, like what happened? How did it go? What did we learn for next time? And so I found that a useful place, even for myself, to be able to say, here is some of the thinking that went into it. So you understand the lens each time. and that can be shared as openly or as close as you want with relevant team members. But I think coming back to the outcomes, JB, that's what you're saying is, how do I think? One of the things, I don't want people to feel like they have to necessarily make themselves busy, but if you understand everything we're trying to do is to get some outcome and you know what that outcome is, for instance, an admin one, like a really obvious one, Is accounts receivable, outstanding accounts? Like that is absolutely on the admin to keep that low. So what are the systems that we have in place to keep that low? A benchmark that we use internally is 10% of your monthly revenue. So if you make a hundred grand revenue in your clinic on any given month, we want $10,000 or less ideally to be outstanding at any one time. If it's beyond that, then what are the systems that we have in place to reduce that? What are the scripts we use in email or in voice with the phone calls to chase people up? How do we report back on it? We have a great process where people just send a Slack message once a week. Here's the outstanding accounts, dollar value, here's the target, hit or miss, here's some context and a link out to the tracking form. That system is like super simple as a more reporting system on a much larger process, but it just keeps it anchored to outcomes. What are some of the other ones in an admin context that you see, Hannah, clinic owners should have? What are the best clinics have in place to ensure their admin Yeah, I view the wait list on the other end. Like if you have a wait list, that management of that can be really tricky if you don't have good systems in place. And calendar management, like being able to be really clear about how we manage those calendars of Let's double click to use JB's term there on So I think some clinics say like our senior admin person can book new appointments, but none of our other team. And that can be a real bottleneck. And then if we create a training program and a system in which everyone can book a new appointment when they answer the phone, then we don't create this bottleneck, which then allows that client to go to another clinic who didn't have the same bottleneck. So that can be really impactful and one of the biggest mistakes I think I see a lot of clinics making that it's a certain person who can only do one job to try and streamline it, whereas maybe the downfall there is not that it's a skill deficit, it's a policy or a procedure deficit. And so getting clear on that. And I also think, as we spoke about before, with filling our time, admin are in there doing the do, but we have that bird's eye view. So sometimes it can feel like a priority for them to be optimizing the system in which they're working on. But if we had been clear about, hey, from our position, we've noticed these different areas, these are what we want you to prioritize. then that can help stop that optimisation of things that maybe we don't value as higher priorities than what the priorities are that they can see from their vantage point. But really, like, I think that point, Hannah, is teaching our team that critical thinking is welcomed, encouraged, in fact, is a necessity. You know, so often, particularly for these, I'll say, highly systematic jobs, we forget critical thinking. We forget to question the status quo. And I think about a circumstance I came across with a clinic I was coaching recently. Their admin team were, they were checking the post office box every single day. And someone was walking 10 minutes down, having a 10 minute chat with the post office lady and 10 minutes back. And they're spending half an hour a day checking the post, which what comes in the post bills, like you don't need to check the posts really. And so, but why do you check the post every day? Well, cause that's what we've always done. Yes. What if you just check the post twice a week, once a week, once a fortnight, who cares about the post office box? You're spending so much. So we forget that critical thinking matters. We want our team to challenge and question and to understand, and maybe a system is really well optimized and doesn't need changing, but it's absolutely okay. In fact, it's a necessity to ask the question, is this the right system and Sorry, I was just going to say that comes back to that time audit. Like if you can do that time audit on any one of those jobs, you'll find lots of those items that you'll be able to systemize better. You Yeah, we can ask our client connection team to write down what they're doing. Like, we've done it just as a manual process back a little while ago, where they just wrote down the jobs that they were doing as they were doing them. We also have had Slack posts, but also a little bit more labour-intensive is people adding it into their calendars as to what they've used that time for. Just over a week period or over a two-week period, even over a couple of days, you can start to see some patterns emerging. And I think it's important to really keep in mind that the process you're trying now, as you said, Ben, can get outdated, but also that we can try something for the next month or so and then we can reassess it as well, and that that's not a problem as long as we're communicating that. with I wouldn't do it differently. What I would add is, I had it written down here, our focus sheet. So we had a version of focus sheets for our admin team, whether that's a Friday Slack check-in or a Google Form or however you want to do that in your clinic. For me, it was a weekly little Slack thread and I would ask each of our admin team to, one of the questions was, which process did you improve this week? And so we're creating a culture of constant iterative improvement. And like it becomes standard that you have to approach a week, making things better. That was one of our core values, make things better. And so we want to practically reinforce that week on week and keep front of mind, how am I making things better? How am I improving processes? And so it keeps process top of mind. It keeps critical thinking top of mind, and it keeps progress top It touches on creating that space for that conversation to happen, like you've created a space in which you're asking about a process. Similarly, when we ask for feedback from our team as to how likely they are to rate our clinic as somewhere to recommend to their friends, our next question is, let us know about the wins you've had, but also the opportunities in which we may have an opportunity to improve. And that is sometimes where it comes out to say, I'm actually taking a lot of time to do X, Y and Z. This isn't flowing for me. And so sometimes those things are things I'm totally blind to, but have been able to get insights from. There was a thread that came up in our Slack channel recently around getting feedback in the community from leaders, clinical leaders, and also practice leaders, practice managers, or admin teams about how to improve different processes. This is a conversation we had recently on the podcast around seeking feedback from clients predominantly, but also the opportunity to seek feedback from the team. How would you go about seeking feedback from your team about I'm going to go first. I would usually let you go, but I'm just going to go for it. I would to that point earlier of like asking questions back to them and really driving them to think properly. And so one of the questions that I always had in my tool belt would say to my team, like, what do you think I would do? What do you think I would say? What do you, if it was your clinic, what would you do? if you were paying wages, how would you make that more productive? So really like pushing back on them. I know some people might call that mining for conflict. It's not necessarily a conflict between people, but we're mining for friction so that friction can be solved. So specifically to answer your question, Ben, I'd be throwing it back to them. What do you think I would do? What do you think I would say? What would you do How do you balance that? And I'll come to you, Hannah. How do you balance that of like, how would I do it? And creating agency for them to think for themselves rather than, well, I think this is what you would do. And then they maybe kind of distance themselves from owning their decisions. And to that point of using the values, how Well, the question evolves. So once you practice that long enough, it's less about what do you think Jack would do and more a question of what do you think we do? What's the clinic mastery way here? How do you think we would collectively tackle and approach that? Again, evolving that question to how would you do it if you were in charge? That, that's the answer. Go for it. And then you reinforce their thinking. It's like, right, your thinking is directionally accurate, values aligned. It's best practice. Your thinking is accurate. Next time, trust your judgment. I back you. Please go ahead and tell me later how well it went. Don't check with me beforehand. Just So in regards to how we get feedback, we have multiple ways, like through Google forms that are either, as Jack mentioned, like the focus sheets, but also through six monthly or nine monthly anonymous feedback from our team as well, which some people can feel a bit more confident giving you some truths. And we've created a culture in which we say everything will be solved with good communication. So there's an expectation that people are coming to us if there's a problem that we want to hear about it and that that is the solution that we will find. And then, yeah, asking people and we say to them, we'd much prefer for you to try something and make a mistake or not do it the way that maybe I would have done it than to not try at all. So really creating that culture around nothing's unfixable, I guess. And people make mistakes, but we want to give them the confidence and scaffold it. Some people are going to be really good at going and jumping in, and other people are going to need a little bit more of that scaffolding that you're talking about, Jack, with breaking I really like that. And again, it's so much of this is our responsibility as leaders. It's our responsibility to create environments and atmospheres that are safe for people to bring their feedback. And so we, as leaders need to be explicit and plain with our team and say, your feedback is welcome. Your feedback won't be thrown back at you. It won't be lauded over you or held against you because here's the thing, right? People don't give feedback because they've given feedback before. Yes. And it wasn't received well, right? And so, we as leaders need to create environments where people are confident to bring feedback. It won't get thrown back at them. Now, there's a right way and a wrong way to bring feedback. It's important that you come with a curious open mind because there's probably context that you weren't aware of. There's a bigger picture at play here, etc. that your feedback is welcomed. It will be embraced. It won't be actioned upon every time. You can't do that. That's usually counterproductive. But again, And our responsibility, I think, Jack, to provide that update, like as you're saying, like to go back and provide the update about why or why not. And even the opportunity to, on your Slack channel, acknowledge and celebrate that this team member bought this up and we've reviewed it and this is a change and we really It's a great point. I have a question that I'm going to come to in a moment around how do you create that environment, J-O-B, specifically where there is safety in failing, especially because we emphasize the outcome. I'll come back to that in a moment. But some of the questions, Hannah, that I love in the survey, right, that you're asking, I'd love to know a couple of key ones that you really think, reveal a lot from your team about where the opportunities are. I'll just share a couple that I've used in the past that I feel particularly good. Number one, what are you loving in your role right now? and what are you loathing in your role right now? You know, I was scared to ask this question years ago, but I figured it was already happening anyway, and creating the space for them to actually air it and say, you know what, this is really weighing me down, it feels clunky, I'm really annoyed or frustrated by this, was an opportunity to either just one, hear that, and ideally to take some action to improve it and make their work life even better. But they're two that I've really loved getting from the team. And then there's another version around, where do you feel we could simplify and systemize more of the clinic? And it just gives a really open-ended question for them to share something and likely you're gonna find some signal if a bunch of different people mention the same thing and gives us an opportunity. But I do love that point around reflecting back, hey, you mentioned this three months ago, just to let you know, here's the action, maybe you've done it sooner than that, but here's the action, here's the outcome, thank you very much. And same is true if you don't take on the feedback. Here's why we're not doing it or why we're not doing it right now and give the relevant context to it. I think that's such a brilliant way to do it. What I love is this is kind of like a meta point. What is the system for getting feedback about the systems? And so much of our ability to iterate and grow is by getting that tight feedback loop that helps us evolve. So that's really good. But J.O.B., just to come back to this, and I'll throw to you, Hannah, as well. If we're going to anchor our clinic to outcomes and then ask our team, figure out what are the systems to repeatedly get that, and we emphasize the outcome, we are going to miss that outcome a lot of the time. We're going to fall short. We're not going to get the results. So how do you create a space where people can own the fact that they've missed the outcome What we're looking for when it comes to maybe not always hitting the desired outcome, but giving it a crack anyway, we're looking for like asymmetric risk and reward. And so when it comes to empowering our team to make calls, we want to make sure there's good potential upswing, but also limiting the downside. And so if there's very limited downside or if it's a controllable downside, it's like, The lessons that we learn are worth it. And so practical example in my personal case, we went on a cruise for family holiday once. Cruises are polarizing experiences. Yeah, that's a different rabbit hole. Nevertheless. The, the reason I mentioned the cruise is because there's no internet and phone reception, at least on the one we went on. And so it, it, part of it was fun anyway. And so we left our team and said, right, you guys have a whole bunch of systems probably like we've got a pretty dial clinic here, but if something comes up, you need to know that you are empowered. You are trust. We have absolute confidence in you to make a call as long as Here's the caveat. As long as you can describe to me when I get back that the downside was only going to be $500 or less. And so that was teaching them to think about the second and third order consequences of their choices. Now pick a dollar figure that you're comfortable with, but I was comfortable going, well, if they make four really catastrophically bad choices, it's going to cost me two grand. I'll be okay. We'll still eat this week. And so it was like, What I mean by that with them is if you can show me that you thought, well, this might impact one or two or three patients at worst, and if we lose a couple of those appointments, it'll only impact the diary to the extent of$500, or we decide to bulk order this fantastic end of financial year deal. don't go spending $7,000 on some wonderful end of financial year deal, just do it for $500. And again, if it's the wrong product, it's 500 bucks, we'll be okay. So putting that asymmetric downside risk in a container really gave our team confidence to be able to make the choices, knowing that the downside was limited, controlled for an acceptable downside. Because that's the point, right? Is like, what is acceptable and what's not? It was defining Hmm. I was, um, doing our practice latest program last week. I was talking to our practice leaders, including mastery. And one of them was talking about if the door can swing both ways. So as long as we can reverse the decision, that is a decision that can be made. But if we can't reverse the decision, then it is something that needs more support around it. So I thought that was a great way to look at when they can implement a change versus when they can't. And I think the dollar amount's great there, Jack. Going back to your questions, Ben, that you asked, I think another really powerful one along exactly the same lines is what's worked really well for you in another workplace? So hearing about what's gone well, and maybe sometimes I ask that as what are you missing from a previous workplace that we're not doing? And so sometimes that can give really good open-ended insight to around those systems that maybe worked better there. Um, and I think just talking to our team about like what went well, what could we have done better? And just knowing that everything is a learning opportunity and it's not, uh, there's no blame and Hmm. I like that. To use that quote you used earlier around, we blame the system, not the person, unless they are really screwing up. And there are definitely times where HR is needed and this is not the right fit, but we always look at what is the system for how you're operating and how can we improve that Yeah. Can I just jump in one last time, Ben? No. Well, I'm going to push through. I hope that Jack votes me in. So the other thing around people missing policies and procedures, the question I ask is where did we miss the mark in you knowing about that policy and procedure? So, and the feedback we've had sometimes is it came through Slack, or we need a weekly wrap up, or we need a way to check it off. So asking about not only why they haven't followed the procedure, but where did Yeah, it's a great point. It's in building Ali over the last two years, it's become very obvious that the biggest challenge to solve for is actually adoption. That's it, because you can create all these perfect systems. No one knows they exist. They know they exist, but they don't reference them or use them. They do something completely the opposite or not at all aligned with it. They're not getting the outcomes and there's no reference point for a system to know how to improve and get the outcome. So that's probably the big thing I think a lot of clinic owners miss is Great to have all these things documented and then useful for training references, ongoing or for a new team member. But if your team aren't on board, they don't understand why this is how we do it, and they don't understand the outcome of having the system, then they're going to be busy. They're going to be busy being ineffective and they're going to be inefficient as well. And so you end up with this mess. And some of the classic lines are the admin time, as you said, Joby, the admin team need more time. They say we need to hire. And you already kind of got a lot of admin headcount, a lot of admin hours, as an example, or in the therapist case. I think my default is always when people are asking for more time. is to come back to my natural assumption heuristic or shortcut is it's likely they're inefficient. It's highly likely. So let's explore and audit that first. As you said, Hannah, with a time audit, literally what happens in your week, something I found really useful personally is reverse time blocking, where rather than here's what my magical week is going to look like moving forward, What actually happened today at 2.30 p.m.? I put a little time block in the calendar and it went for half an hour or 40 minutes. I had this unexpected call or this meeting. And you look back at your week and you go, oh, that's actually what happened. That's why I didn't get done what I wanted to do. So that is a version of the audit that you're speaking to. Super quick and easy to do, very revealing, quite powerful in going, I see where there's some inefficiencies and where we can change it up with some tools or tech, maybe some different support in your mentoring, some different focuses in, say, the project work that you've got under your belt. So that's a super useful thing for clinic owners to do, therapists to do, admin to do as well. Well, am I full of time? We've covered a lot of different ground here. Joby, if there's a sign-off point for clinic owners about systemizing their clinic so that they can grow their A well-systemized clinic is a well-led clinic. Everything rises and falls on leadership and you are responsible. So own it and lead your team with courage, of all the things you've said, Hannah, how would you summarize for those people that are looking to grow their clinic sustainably and use systems to help that make a more easier, reliable, consistent Yeah, I think being open to your team's feedback and really doing the time blocking and looking at what the priorities are and not getting bogged down on the list Particularly if you're an NDIS registered clinic, because they'll give you a massive amount of lists of policies that you need. And I'd Fantastic. That is really good. I come back to think about outcomes first, and then what are the systems we need to achieve those outcomes that are timely for us now, and continue to iterate. No one has all their business solved and completely systemized, so release yourself of that burden if that is you. You can head over to our website, clinicmastery.com, not only for this podcast and the show notes, but we have a bunch of free systems that you can download. And of course, we have our own system, it's called Ali. You can go do a free trial there and you can download. Now there's over 120 systems for training, training admin, training team members, practitioners, that is. for your clinic overall, for NDIS clinics, you can just three clicks of a button, download it and install it into your clinic. Again, we're solving for adoption. We've just taken the first part out of your hands to make it super easy. Then it's about getting your team on board. So go check out Ali. Jack, Hannah, thank you again for your insights. We will see you on another episode very soon. Hopefully, we get to do one from the sunny north in Palm Cove while we're on our member retreat, but we'll see. We might be a little sidetracked, enjoying some of the sun, and we'll come back in a fortnight, but we'll see. Thanks for signing on, everyone, and we'll see you very soon. Jack, Hannah,