Announcement:This is the Grow Your Clinic podcast from Clinic Mastery. We help progressive health professionals to lead inspired teams, transform client experiences, and build clinics for good. Now, it's time to grow your clinic.

Ben Lynch: Welcome to the podcast, everyone. We've got another special guest, Peter Flynn. Welcome to you, Hannah Dunn. Jack O'Brien back for another round of things. We're going to get straight into it. The first part is around practice managers. Specifically, what are some of the criteria that make a great practice manager?

Hannah Dunn: So I've been really fortunate in that I had Lisa come on as admin and then she worked into being a practice manager and then Louise came on as an admin support person and then she also worked up to that space. And then since then we have moved them into other positions and we've brought on a practice manager. We absolutely look for someone who's had previous experience working in medical or scheduling and being able to support teams. So we really want someone who can multitask and be able to manage not just their practice, but being able to communicate with the team and be able to support them on a day to day, but also know when to sort of set a boundary that that is not their job. That's a clinician's job or someone else's role.

Ben Lynch: Which is quite interesting because Peter Flynn, I recall many years ago, I believe PhysioFit actually looked for the anti-practice manager. There was a lens on customer service, like being a barista or maybe working for like Virgin or Qantas here.

Peter Flynn: Yeah, I think, I mean, don't let Sammy hear you call it the anti-practice manager, but we were actually looking for a reception at the time for that one in particular. And we just wanted to flip Flip it. Basically, we, we imagined going into a medical practice. And when you walk into a medical practice, that feeling of like, sterile and just like, didn't feel warm. Like, it just felt like you're here to wait for an hour or two as the first appointment of the day for some reason. And It just didn't feel good. It felt cold. So we want to flip that. We want to feel like you walked into a five star hotel or at least a four and a half star hotel. Like you're going business class somewhere. Like we wanted you to feel special, seen, heard, known, addressed by name, remembered, like little things like that. Like what was your coffee order? All those things. So that was what we wanted to change. And at that stage, it was reception. We didn't even know what a practice manager was at that stage in business.

Ben Lynch: J.O.B., what makes a great practice manager in your mind? Hannah said past experience. Pete was flipping the whole experience on its head, starting from a five star. What do you think really are the core ingredients of a great practice manager?

Jack O'Brien: Good question. There are a couple of key ingredients to leave out of a practice manager. And so maybe I'll start there. We don't want to hire a practice manager as someone to just do more back admin, back office admin. That's not a practice manager, that's an admin role. And so that is often a key mistake that people make, I think. And also hiring too early. You know, we often just need more administrative or reception, customer support, client support. We need more of that. We don't necessarily need a practice managers. We sometimes hire those roles too soon. I think a practice manager, in my mind, needs to have two key functions. Number one, they lead the practice administration team, the client support team. They're a leader of people. Not just a roster of people, but a leader of people that develops people, grows the skill base of the admin team. And number two, that they take weight off the clinic owner or the director, that their role makes the clinic owner's life better, not worse. That sounds obvious, but I coach so many clinic owners that their practice manager is the bane of their existence. They avoid time with them. They annoy them. They butt heads. I'm like, what is going on here, folks? And so your practice manager is not just a highly paid administrator, nor are they a thorn in your side. They are someone who leads your people and takes weight off your shoulders.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, it is actually crazy how often you hear that they butt heads or that there's some friction there.

Jack O'Brien: I was going to say, in a lot of ways, they're your, like they're a key business partner, certainly a key stakeholder. You want to, you're working very closely. You are hand in glove with your practice manager. These folks carry the weight and the vision of your clinic. You want to be like, chemistry would be my highest priority when it comes to a practice manager, not competence, chemistry.

Hannah Dunn: And just the initiative that they can show really sets them apart from those administration roles, I guess, where we're sort of providing direction and policy and procedure and they're following those guidelines and absolutely our admin team are at the heart of our clinic. But that practice manager is just that next level of being able to look at a policy and procedure and know when to sort of bend the rules a little bit or know when to be a little bit flexible or know when to come to you and say, hey, You actually aren't great in this area and I thought we could improve this or as a team we could improve this. They're really looking for those opportunities.

Ben Lynch: Did you know that you could send an email to hallowettclinicmastery.com and request a free assessment of your clinic? and get a report that outlines detailed action steps for how you should sustainably grow based on the findings. Just send an email to hello at clinicmastery.com and we'll organise a time with one of our growth specialists to review your clinic and outline the path to sustainable growth. All right, back to the episode.

Jack O'Brien: And to your point earlier, Hannah, like they have to have had experience to be able to have that insight. That's not something that you can learn from a cert for anywhere. You need to have been in the trenches to, to garner that intuition almost really, isn't it?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah and we actually last time we did interviews, we did them as a group interview and so it was really interesting. The first round we did as group interviews and the second round we did as one-on-ones and the first round there were some people who really excelled and some people that really struggled but we still brought back someone who had struggled in the group situation because their resume was quite good. And interestingly, one-on-one, those candidates sort of flipped. And we did have someone who excelled in both those areas, which was great. But it was really interesting to see a difference between those two ways of interviewing and how comfortable people were in those settings.

Jack O'Brien: Sorry, Benny, what does a group interview look like?

Ben Lynch: No, that was going to be my question. The best questions.

Peter Flynn: What's a group interview look like?

Hannah Dunn: I'll just go to Pete first. It actually came from Mel Webber's recommendation. So Mel had first done a group interview, another one of our CM coaches. With that, we had sent out two different times that they could just get into the nitty gritty of the actuals, that they could choose two different times, and it ended up to work out fine that they could select them. You could limit the number, so they just ended up falling into the other group. And when they came in, we just sort of got them to do a run around and introduce themselves. Then we sort of asked them to problem solve some scenarios but gave them opportunities to work. There was six in the interview and got them to work in pairs and present it back and we also gave them opportunities to give us feedback about challenging situations they'd had or times that like similar interview questions but use chat GPT or another AI to help you create your questions. And, and we just found like sometimes they were giving each other feedback in a really supportive way on how things went or sometimes it sort of just rubbed you the wrong way you just thought that could come across quite. aggressive or I don't know how well that would go down or judgmental. And so it was good to hear them present how they had handled a challenging situation and if anyone had anything else to add or how they might have handled it.

Ben Lynch: And then how do you decide what were the criteria you used to invite people back? Was it purely gut judgment that you had of like these are the standout or did you have a screening sheet to do it? And were there a few of you on the team who voted on that?

Hannah Dunn: Yes, there was a couple of us in the group interview. So Eleanor, our current practice manager, was in there for one of these interviews. And then we have had, I had another admin person sit on another one. Usually I would have had Louise, our operations manager there, but she was away I think at that time. So it was good to have a second person. I think a mistake that we made was not having the same second person in both of the interviews, because then we had two people that we weren't sure about in both interviews and which one was the stronger applicant, contestant, basically.

Ben Lynch: You've got to sing and dance for the role?

Hannah Dunn: The Hunger Games. So we, I think that was a mistake because then it made it tricky for me to sort of say who was the stronger candidate out of those two. It was just sort of my view. So I would definitely recommend having the same two people, not just one of the same people in those, which we were using it sort of for a learning opportunity for those staff team members as well to be able to increase their interviewing skills.

Ben Lynch: Did you just swear? Yeah, I was about to jump in and say that was a swear. You said staff, team members.

Jack O'Brien: You corrected yourself subconsciously.

Ben Lynch: That was autocorrect. Just one of the things we talk about at CEM. I think we talked about that last episode about language and the importance of it. It was actually Hannah's idea to talk about that. That's good, but it was self-correction happening there live. Jack O'Brien, you spoke about people being recruited to a practice manager role or a clinic owner recruiting for a practice manager too soon. Let's just double click on that and expand on it more. What does that actually look like and why is that the wrong thing?

Jack O'Brien: There's a couple of different lenses to consider. Firstly, a practice manager isn't a directly revenue generating role. It is an overhead. That salary will come directly out of your profit, which is from your back pocket. into someone else's hand. So you have to be ready and willing to make tens of thousands of dollars in donations to someone to join your team. There needs to be an ROI on that. And I think we just misdiagnosed what we need. Often we might need more client support. We might need more administration. We might need more bookkeeping or financial control, or perhaps a higher order of support or non-clinical function. It doesn't necessarily have to be a practice manager. And, you know, often when we advertise for a practice manager type role, that necessitates a higher salary. Often it attracts people with certain experience, which may or may not be useful. In my observation, those that have practice management experience, particularly in the medical field, it's not useful experience. Oftentimes they're used to being a secretary for a, you know, a really stressed doctor. or they're used to billing 47,000 codes through Medicare, but they're not used to managing a practice for allied health. And so I think the key there is to get really specific with what your clinic needs right now and hire for that. Likely it's probably more admin or client support and how that will provide you a return on your investment, whether that's financial or freeing up your time, freedom, or allowing you to work on more higher level strategic things, get clear on the role and get clear on the return.

Hannah Dunn: And I think on that, Jack, like making sure your policies and procedures and processes are in place, because sometimes it's not about needing more team member even, sometimes it's about streamlining those processes and freeing up time for the team you have currently.

Jack O'Brien: Like even to that point, and you're probably, I'm assuming you're going to be very good at this, Hannah, is that you mentioned a practice manager, part of their role is to refine policies, processes, procedures. There's this really great website that does a lot of that these days. Yeah. C-H-A-T-G-P-T. So do we need a humanism? Some of that function, some of it, not all of it is replaced by a chat GPT or other AIs.

Jack O'Brien: So that's a really important consideration.

Ben Lynch: I was going to spell it A-L-L-I-E. But anyway, that's a good one. Check that out, allyclinics.com. This episode is brought to you by allyclinics.com. If you want a single place for all of your policies, procedures and training, Ally is where to go. You can test it for free. You can download our library of policies, procedures and training in three clicks of a button, immediately share it with your team and see whether they've read it using the custom acknowledgements function. This is great for compliance purposes. You can also upload police checks, working with children, CPR and first aid, professional indemnity insurance and make sure that you have all the compliance docs that you need to run a good business in one place, not scattered systems, making sure everything's efficient and you never have to answer the same question twice. This is the brain outside of your brain, a key tool in helping you grow your clinic that's less reliant on you. You can test it for free. Go check out allyclinics.com. All right, back to the episode. Yeah, I was going to throw to Pete as well, in particular around the finance side. Jackie and Hannah, you're talking about being able to afford a practice manager. Typically, they're paid higher than your typical receptionist. Pete, you created the rolling breakeven calculator, which helps people plan scenarios like hiring a new therapist or hiring a practice manager so they can see the financial consequences of those decisions. How do you go about coaching a clinic owner who's hiring for the very first time a practice manager role? They're not replacing an existing role. How do you coach them through knowing when's the right time and affording it?

Peter Flynn: and consequences is such a harsh word, isn't it? Let's say impacts. And good spelling by the way, I was rather impressed with that one. I might even jump back a step because I think when it comes to like, what's the most important, I guess, trade or factor in a practice manager for me, it's that they act and think like a business owner. I want them to, like, they're going to be dealing with money. They're going to be making investment decisions. They're going to be buying things, stock control, all those things. I want them to think about the money as if it were their own. And I want to try and incentivise them and we'll get to the financial side. I want to incentivise them to do so as well. And I think exactly what Jack said, your practice manager should make your life easier, not harder. And it should essentially be the person who becomes a pseudo business owner, shareholder, director of the business. that people look up to as the figurehead within the business that they come to. All those little things, whether they're sick annually, all those things that take time. That's what they can do. They're there for relationships as well, because if you as the business owner want to step back and be able to have more time and create more time in your world, you need someone else there. You can't just have this gap of leadership there. And so they have to fill this leadership gap for you. So that's probably how I think about the practice manager role. And when it comes to the finance side of it, I would look at how can this person actually generate revenue? Now, they're probably not going to see clients. I mean, that's not allowed, I would say, unless they're actually a therapist themselves. I wouldn't recommend doing that. But if I use the example of Sammy, who is our practice manager, now business owner, We looked at, well, how can we remunerate Sammy even better? And let's link this back to key outcomes. And so she became the key relationship manager for the NDIS. So she's bringing in direct NDIS referrals, and that became a part of her role. Um, you know, she wasn't doing any digital marketing, but maybe the person you hire is a wiz at digital marketing, and they can actually generate referrals coming in through that. So I think if you start to think outside the box of, you know, if we were going to have another director or business partner here, what would be some of those roles we could give this person? that we don't want to do or we're not particularly good at doing but we could hire for that or we could train that person in this area and I think there's a lot of opportunity when you look at through that lens and then even with remuneration last thing I'll say here remuneration like how can you link their bonus or their rewards to the overall profitability of the business because the second you start doing that I guarantee you they start looking for ways to cut expenses that don't need to be there to better manage team hours and to also look for areas where we can improve revenue generation. So aligning their incentives with the clinic success.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point, Pete, because we've referenced here, there's so many things on a clinic owner's plate that they want to just get off their plate and have somebody else do. And maybe naturally, that's a practice manager that they've got on the team or they decide to recruit. But I've also seen, I'm sure you have, the practice manager who's kind of doing all these things that they're quite diffuse They're different. They're not overly impactful in the sense of like commercial outcomes or progress and the practice manager ends up kind of burnt out or overwhelmed doing everything and not particularly well. So I like your framing there Pete on. outcomes, what are the outcomes that we want this role to drive in the clinic, and also looking at some of the things that they could take off the plate of the clinic owner. I got a favour to ask. Would you mind reviewing and rating this podcast, please? It helps us attract great guests and partnerships from companies who want to do business with you, and we can negotiate the best possible deals and discounts so that you can grow your clinic sustainably into the future. Just open up your podcast player and hit the review. It looks like 70% of you use the Apple podcast player to listen in to this show. So next time you open up the show, can you give us a review and rating? Every single review counts and we are so grateful for it. All right, let's head back to the episode. So I'm interested to know, Every role is different for every clinic. But what are what are like two or three core capabilities or responsibilities that a practice manager should take from a clinic owner to make their life easier? I'll go to Pete and then over to you, Jack.

Peter Flynn: I'd say. Problem solving, like problem solving and initiative, like those two key things. And then the ability to have like these two fall together, but have tough conversations and build really strong relationships. And I think If I was to sum it up in one sentence of how to think, do you have a practice manager or do you just have a really good admin person? If they can say my job consists of doing these things in this order, in this structure, and it's very defined, it's probably an admin person. And if they say my role, whilst it has specifics, is kind of doing everything and handling all kinds of things. And so no two weeks look the same. They're probably more of the business owner slash practice manager in my mind.

Jack O'Brien: Two things that come to mind, first are people skills. This is a leader of people. We want them to lead the client services team, hire, fire, roster, inspire. Do you like that, Ryan? I do. Yeah. I thought so. That's it. But it's a people first role. They must have high emotional intelligence and social awareness and leadership capacity, people skills. And number two, commerciality. They need to be cognisant of the commercial realities of running a clinic. They must be across dollars and cents, revenue in, expenses out, and run a tight, tight ship. Be aware of the second and third order consequences financially of their contributions and leadership. They'd be the two key ones that come to mind for me. Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I mean, I think you've both spoken really well to what they need. I think just that openness to learning and their real hunger for wanting to learn and to know more, because I think that practice manager role is so tough to get your head around when it's it's often someone who has progressed from an admin role or has a background in that area. And so that hunger to learn and hunger to want to listen to the books and podcasts that, you know, Clinic Mastery recommend or business leaders recommend is really valuable in that space too. I also think just on Pete's point of just getting clear on what that director needs support with in those roles, it's something we've done in our clinic a number of times where we've sat in a room and just written out on butcher's paper like all the jobs that we do and we do them as jobs I want to keep, jobs I want to get rid of and jobs I want to delegate or jobs that I don't need to do. And so that might be me as the director, it might have been Lisa when she was in more of a financial role or Louise in her operations role that really helped us to determine do we just need a better system or do we actually need a person to take over Is it another like accounting, finance, bookkeeping role? Is it a practice manager? What is that actual role? And not being blinded by just it potentially being a practice manager, it could be a number of roles.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, once you've done that exercise, you might actually reveal a number of roles in-house or external to the clinic. In terms of that financial management and decision making, what have you got to add there on the rolling break even?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned rolling break, even Pete earlier, I wanted to substantiate my comments around, you know, people often hiring too early as well. So really practically and specifically, we talk about the, the admin costs of a clinic being in that ballpark of the eight to 12%, depending on your style and structure of clinic. And so you need to be cognizant of when we add in a practice manager with salary and potential rewards and tools for the job, we're talking in the ballpark of $80,000 to $100,000 fairly easily. That's 8% to 10% of a million dollars. So really, unless you're doing at least a million dollars a year in rev, there's no room in your budget for practice management. That's often the long and the short of it. And there's often not enough complexity in your clinic until you're doing a million dollars plus. And so the reason I mentioned that is A, because we're boots on the ground, we're specific, we're tangible, we know how this works in the life of a clinic owner. But if you're a startup, you're growing, you've got two or three clinical team and one or two admin team, you don't need a practice manager and you can't afford a practice manager. What you need is to invest in your clinical team, invest in your clients to grow your business to a place where you can substantiate perhaps a practice manager.

Ben Lynch: Pete, how do you sort of balance that through your thinking of maybe a practice manager is able to free you up from behind the scenes staff to do more clinical work if you're really trying to grow the financial side of the business? Jack's obviously put some benchmarks there. How do you go about thinking about the financial decision to hire a practice manager?

Peter Flynn: Part of it just comes down to what do you enjoy doing? What are you good at doing? I agree with Jack that you should be hiring admin to start with. An admin person is one of the first hires to just get those basic things off of your plate. And at some point, you may need a practice manager or someone to come in with that leadership type skill. And some clinic owners as well, when it comes to I guess, thinking like, what should my next step be? Like, what should I be doing right now? Should I be stopping seeing clients and coming off the tools or X, Y, Z? And should I come off the tools completely? And then do I need a practice manager to do so? They may be really good clinically as well. So that helps them out there financially by doing so. You could look at it using something like the rolling break even and go, right, if my average spend is let's say per client, $120 per client, if I'm gonna be paying. You know, two grand a week for a really good practice manager, like a really good practice manager. How many clients do I have to see personally in order to make that happen? And let's say that's a day and a half of clients. Am I willing and happy to see a day and a half of clients in order to get someone to come in to do the building of the systems and the stuff behind the scenes, which I may, if I use myself as the example, objectively suck at. And I didn't have chat GPT back then, and we barely had Google. It was 2016. So that was an interesting time. And I think for, say, me, hiring the practice manager a little bit earlier made more sense. purely because those things I didn't really want to do, nor was I particularly good at doing them either, if I'm being honest. But I was really good at seeing lots of clients in a 14 hour day or something like that. And so part of it is just understanding your weakness. But you do want to make sure I think Jack alluded to it quite specifically. I'm not sure that is the right word, but you don't want to be too top heavy. You don't want to look at your P&L statement and look at, you know, your 40% of your income is admin per se. And I've seen clinics that have almost no admin use ChatGPT well and have VAs that run extremely profitably and well. So I think that's my kind of scattered perspective on it.

Ben Lynch: It's a good sort of segue and evolution from practice managers to reception team, because I'm gonna go via Jack to you, Hannah. In just a moment, you said, you know, our admin or client connection team is what you call them, are the heart of our practice and we really need to invest here. But Jack, you're dealing with clinic owners predominantly at the start of their journey. And the question that always comes up is, Do I hire a therapist or do I hire admin first? Perhaps they're the solo provider, service provider in their clinic. They've built their caseload. And now it's like, great, who's the first person on my team? How do you go about answering that? And then we'll come to you, Hannah, and build on building a great reception team. Oh, that's a loaded question. I'd say both can be right.

Jack O'Brien: It's finding out what's right for you right now. That's the way to think about it. There's no right and wrong. Both are right. What's right for you right now. Generally speaking though, hire clinically first. There you go. I'll put my neck out.

Ben Lynch: Yeah. I was going to say, is he going to sit on the fence here or not?

Peter Flynn: I was going to say, Jack, there's definitely a right or wrong here.

Jack O'Brien: Go clinical. That's my answer. Clinical. I'm happy to substantiate that, Benny, or go around the room. I want to know what Hannah thinks first before I convince her that I'm right. What do you think, Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, no, I absolutely think that you need to team there for your clinical team there first. And I think there's a lot of nuances in regards to where the value is with the client connection team or admin. We have gone through a few different changes with what that looks like for us. And I know there's some teams who've automated a lot of their front of house check-in side of things that saves them a lot there. And that might free up dollars for a practice manager, for example. But it just sort of depends on what works for your setting where a team of pediatric OTs who really love to have that physical support of people on the front desk there and our schedule works out that way. So we do invest a lot in our admin or our client connection team. But I definitely had the admin team, the clinical team set up before I had any admin support.

Ben Lynch: Nice. Well, Jack, you can be quiet now because Hannah agrees.

Jack O'Brien: Well, if anyone else needs any convincing, here's why. If you're a solo clinician and you're working your butt off seeing as many clients as possible and juggling some admin, you're like, oh, I just, I don't love this admin. I'm going to hire admin. That'll make my life better. What will inevitably happen, and we've seen this now across hundreds of clinics, is you'll hire some admin support and you'll still be working your butt off and you won't actually be generating a whole lot more revenue. You've just added an extra cost base to your clinic. And so your headaches just got worse. Or maybe you replaced a simple headache with a larger headache. What we know is that when you hire clinically, it adds more oxygen to your clinic. It adds more cash. Cash is oxygen. And so you are then faced with a different set of problems. You need to lead this individual. You need to generate caseload, et cetera. Again, one problem solved is another set of problems created, but better to have problems with cashflow and oxygen rather than have problems with overheads.

Hannah Dunn: And we'll just free you up to be able to get some of that admin done, potentially, if you felt like you couldn't do before.

Peter Flynn: Yeah. Pete? Pete? There's a really good quote from Nabar Ravikant. He says, money doesn't solve all your problems, but it solves all your money problems. And I think solve your money problems early on, have great cash flow, and then you get to make decisions from a place of abundance. And they're typically much better decisions as a clinic owner.

Jack O'Brien: And, you know, there's so many, it's not so many, there are a number of solutions before you need to hire an admin human. And we love our, you know, practice leaders and client care team, et cetera. We love all of those folks, but there are so many automations and tech and things that you can do before you need to invest $50,000 to $80,000 in a salary. You can spend hundreds of dollars rather than tens of thousands of dollars to take care of a lot of the operations.

Hannah Dunn: And I think looking at the cost, like Allie, for example, there is a fee to having Allie, but it also saves you so much more. Like if you're looking at a person to come on and do that, you're looking at the wage compared to the cost of Allie and Allie is going to be able to support those policies, procedures, staff onboarding, and be able to do that in a way that maybe you don't necessarily then need someone else coming in to do that work for you.

Ben Lynch: So for those that have a reception team, they have maybe two, three, four folks on their team. What do you think is key, Hannah, to your point around they are the heart of our practice? When you said that, what did you mean?

Hannah Dunn: I mean, they are the first point of contact for a client who is calling and they are answering the calls. They're also managing clients on really tricky days when something has gone wrong. So they need to be able to have that understanding. They're the first person that they see when they walk into the clinic. And they're also available when other team might not be, when every other clinician is in a session and you've just had a really tough session, that they are at the front desk and available as an ear as well. for our team.

Jack O'Brien: I love that, Hannah. We refer to it as our client experience team. And for me, what I found when we started soliciting feedback from our clients, you know, through NPS scores or quizzes, questionnaires, et cetera, more often than referencing the clinical team, our clients would reference our reception admin client experience team. And, um, a qualitative indicator of the health of your business, but the health of your client experience team is do your clients drop in for a chat when they don't have an appointment scheduled? For me, that was actually one of the questions that I would ask my clients. How many people just dropped in without an appointment just to like say good day and have a cuppa? And that's when we know like they're connecting with our clients, connecting with our community. That is invaluable to the brand and the reputation of your clinic and the loyalty of your clients. I can't speak a high, it's a double negative, isn't it? I love speaking highly of the value of the client experience team.

Hannah Dunn: And when they're excited to, yeah, just come in and share their news, like the therapist will walk out and you'll see them still chatting to our client connection team. And they're like, yeah, coming.

Ben Lynch: What are some of those pieces of feedback that you pay most attention to in, in the clinic or encourage clinics to capture of their patients?

Jack O'Brien: You don't want to box in people's feedback too much. You want to keep it fairly open-ended, but the cues that I would look for, the signs, the indicators in some of the responses would specifically be around, were they heard? Did they feel welcomed? Was it warm? So what feeling do our clients say they get when they engage with our team specifically? Yes, the environment and those external factors generate feelings, or hopefully. But what feeling do our people leave with our clients? For mine, that was key. Are they heard, welcomed? Is there a warmth? Is there a joy? Do they make them smile? These are the kind of words that for me tell us that we're on the right track.

Ben Lynch: It's great to hear a spreadsheet guy talking about feelings. You are human.

Jack O'Brien: Believe it or not.

Ben Lynch: I love it. Hannah, what's the feedback that you like to capture, encourage clinic owners to capture of their client's experience?

Hannah Dunn: Yes. And this might be just on the other end of feedback, but if we have a client, like it's awesome to get the active feedback while your clients are with you, But we never have a client leave our service without us getting feedback from them with a phone call from our client connection team. And so that feedback is so critical as to why they're choosing to finish with us if that is what has happened. For example, they might say, oh, we just moved to another area, so we've just got someone else. We'll still ask the questions about how their experience was with us, whether there was anything we could do to retain them, or whether there was any other supports that they needed. Not for clients that we actively have really good discharge notes on and we know why they're finishing up, but those that sort of just disappear or exit, we always want to get that feedback because sometimes it's a misunderstanding or something and it gives us opportunities there as well. So we do seek a lot of feedback from our clients at that point.

Ben Lynch: Just before I throw to you, Pete, Hannah, what do you then do with that feedback? Yeah. You know, literally there's a phone call that's happened, maybe it's transcribed or a survey form that's filled in. Does it slot into an agenda of a weekly meeting? How does this actually come to the team so that decisions are shaped and changes are made?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, so it goes to the OT leadership team who pass it on to the supervisor of that person and that person gets feedback from what happened. And we always seek feedback from that therapist as well. So we'll always say, this is the feedback we got from the parent, but we're really keen to hear what your experience was. And it's really valuable for us as well to just learn about where those teachable moments might be earlier for a clinician or where there may have just been that misunderstanding and able to go back and support that.

Jack O'Brien: I love that, Hannah. One of the things that we did in our clinic was any constructive positive feedback in this instance would go in two places. And one, it would go in a Slack channel so that we just want to make sure we shout from the rooftops and reinforce a lot of that positive positivity. Positive positivity, you get the point? And it went into the clinician's dashboard. And so in modern times, that might go into Ali or it might live in a practitioner dashboard. So there was a consistent log of what our clients were saying. And therefore, the reason it goes in the dashboard is because it reinforces training and development. And we can link it back to quantitative spreadsheets and link it back to quantitative CEIs, clinical excellence indicators. When we do these things, this is the feedback from our clients.

Peter Flynn: Pete, I might jump in on the feedback side of things. I think for me, anyway, the most interesting feedback is the people who don't give us feedback. Right. So I find almost useless in a weird way. When people give us fives, they're the raving fans. They love everything we do. And that's fantastic. That feels great.

Ben Lynch: Just to clarify, five out of five.

Peter Flynn: Five out of five. Yeah. When people give us a one, I look at that and I go, all right, well, this person was most likely having a bad day and we've missed the mark somewhere here. We can learn from that. And typically when you give them a call, there's been some huge misunderstanding or something went terribly wrong outside of that. But it's like when I'm going to go to a restaurant or buy something, I look at what are the three star reviews. I want people who can be critical. I really like this, but I thought this could be better. I want people who are actually able to critically say yes and no for these reasons here. I don't look at the five star reviews because I'm like, that's a lazy review. I don't look at the one star. I'm like, all right, you just really don't like this place. So I'd encourage clinic owners to think, how can you get feedback from the two threes and fours? Because they typically just don't give you feedback. They're not huge raving fans. So they're not going to sit on that side and they're not like, this is the worst thing ever. So they're not going to give you that terrible feedback. They're just kind of like, It was okay.

Jack O'Brien: I like that, Pete. So here's a bit of a hypothesis synthesised from Adam Grant, amazing author, behavioural organisational psychology genius, TED Talks, etc. I wonder, Pete, if we can find those twos, threes, fours out of five, how do we, can we ask them a better question? So Adam Grant says, don't ask for feedback, ask for people's opinion or advice. For these reasons, he says that humans can't resist giving their opinion when asked. Like it's kind of this innate limbic, like, oh, you want my opinion? Of course I'll give you my opinion. And advice is future oriented. It's like, what would you do different in the advice is future feedback is past. And of course there's some benefit in the past, but ultimately we want to know what could we do better, different. Have you got any advice? So I wonder Pete, if we could ask for people's opinions or advice would be, would solicit more useful data rather than just feedback. What do you think, Pete?

Peter Flynn: I think, I mean, let's test it. Let's do it. Definitely think that could be a go. And I'd encourage clinic owners to every month just pick out five or ten people who exited the service and who didn't leave any feedback. Either yourself or your practice manager, give them a call and just say, hey, we saw you've finished up. Hopefully you got some great results, et cetera. But just say, do you have any opinions or advice on how we could improve things there just to try and make that a safe space and try and get some feedback from people who haven't given you feedback?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Who is it that talks about mining for feedback? Like the superficial that everyone, there's those folks that always give you their feedback regardless. We need to mine for the rich feedback. Hannah, what do you think to that?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. I think we definitely need to be following those people up and finding different ways to communicate. And I was just thinking about like, whether there's even whether we have a multitude of ways to give that feedback, like whether there's the opportunity in clinic as well as being online. I know I was talking to some people recently who were saying, oh, we asked people if they could give us their email addresses to get feedback, and the answer was no. And it was like, yeah, we might not want to ask permission to send the survey. And then the next question being like, oh, why was it a no? Oh, they said they just won't do it. Like, I know our inboxes are so busy at the moment. Like, is there a QR code they can scan while waiting in the waiting room? Like, is there other opportunities in which we know we've got their attention because they're not trying to sort through a billion emails?

Ben Lynch: It's a great point. I've been bathed in feedback after working on Ali for the last two years in a different context. But I read this great article from Superhuman, and they essentially have an email alternative to Gmail. And they wrote about product market fit. So this is more in the software space, but it's so iterative based on feedback. And they said exactly that, JB, which was, you know, the people that said, oh, we love it. It's great. Like, I don't really need to follow them up. The people that are like super disappointed, don't love it. I'm going to kind of leave them out. The people on the fence, as you said, Pete, that are right in that middle, like a three out of five. We want to follow them up and figure out what would it require to get you to, you know, a four out of five or a five out of five. How could we move you there? Because they're the ones that are maybe open to your point, Pete, about a better experience. They may be a little more reasonable in their feedback. And so I love that, that distinction of being able to segment the feedback you do get and maybe thoughtfully follow up people rather than chasing lost leads, if that makes sense, or a wasted effort. The next Part that I found particularly useful, we've mentioned ChatJPT a few times on this episode, is to take all that feedback and put it into ChatJPT and help me analyze it, help me spot trends, do a word cloud, something that reveals what are people saying and what are the consistencies between them. Even get it to kind of coach you through the feedback, like what are some pieces of advice you have for me about improving the product or service? moving forward. So use some of those tools that just help you leverage time and skill sets that you don't otherwise have. It's got some great data analysis capabilities now.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I absolutely love that. Huge, huge proponent. Also, we perhaps, and this might just be a traditional type view, is that we sometimes look at feedback as one directional. We ask for feedback, we get it, and then we go and do things. Really, it needs to be the doorway into a conversation. We want to get them to say more, we want to engage, and particularly if part of the objective is to move folks from a three out of five to a four out of five, that needs to be like ongoing relational conversation. So, look at it as just the start of an interaction rather than a once-off, one-directional, finite piece of information.

Peter Flynn: When you said that, Jack, in my mind, you were like, it's going to be like both ways. I'm like, so someone gives me feedback. You're like, yeah, but Susan, you weren't actually that great at clients. You didn't do your exercises I gave you. Could you imagine being able to give feedback to clients? That'd be great.

Ben Lynch: Oh, gee whiz. That's really insightful around using feedback. So many clinic owners that we speak to would probably say, if you ask them, what do you want to do? What are your goals and objectives to be some version of create a great client experience, get great client outcomes? Well, to what degree are you tracking that, reporting on it, analyzing it? can you put in some systems to do this? It's fairly cheap. It's fairly quick. And it can help you actually prioritize the projects that you work on next. Certainly, you know, to open up another thread, how many times do we see clinicals just want to get to different projects because they've heard someone else do it or it seems like the shiny ball and there's no maybe anchoring hypothesis or thought or outcome specifically they're trying to achieve. So I think improving patient outcomes, patient experience, patient satisfaction. It's probably one that's just always on the top of the priority list and getting the feedback can help you figure out where to fix it first.

Jack O'Brien: Ben, if it's so easy, cost effective, productive for clinic owners to get feedback, Why don't they? I'm asking you to be Tony Robbins here for a second. Are we trying to avoid feedback? Are we subconsciously nervous? What do you think is in the psyche of the clinic owner who knows what we're talking about but doesn't actually get it done?

Ben Lynch: There's probably a few. I'm interested in everyone's thoughts here. I think number one, there can be just maybe a skills or technical gap. For a lot of people, they're like, what system do I use? And they get caught up researching things and never actually doing it. And number two, it's like, it's always just easy to see the next patient in the diary or manage that next email or Slack message or team member that's come to you. I think just so much is of a clinic owner's world is reactionary, that building some of these systems to carve out a morning in your week, build it, and then for a bit of maintenance over time, have it set and forget largely, is not that big of a deal. But I guess, you know, here we are in May, and I'm like, where'd the start of the year go? And I know that's true for many people as they just get so busy, they don't prioritize it. And there's a level of discomfort that comes with getting negative feedback that people probably subconsciously, consciously… Why is negative feedback uncomfortable?

Jack O'Brien: What is that?

Ben Lynch: I reckon if you ask most people, they would think they're doing a good job. And that would directly counter that. I think if you said, how good are you at taking care of your caseload? I haven't met too many people who would say, yeah, I'm sucking at the moment. About half my clients do well and half don't. And it's quite revealing, a bit of an ego hit to it. And depends how it's delivered so that you can receive it. And then two, if you don't know what to do with it, like how am I gonna change? That can be a limit. The other side is there's always another side. To your point, Pete, that client just wasn't a really good client, so I'm just going to disregard it. It's not really valued. I'm interested, Pete, you've done a lot in this space. You and I have talked a little bit over time about maybe not overweighting feedback that we get or analysis or reports that we get. Talk to me about how you think through dealing with the responses.

Peter Flynn: Well, I think feedback is like, to your point, Jack, like as much as we all love to think that we can be immune to things emotionally at times, you and I, especially, on the Polyglot Spreadsheets. But it's true. You will occasionally get feedback and you read it and you're like, oh, OK, like, let's just hold on a second. And hopefully, like you worked on yourself to get to the point where you can sit with that. You can write it down before. jumping back on that email or calling them and having that reaction or have a response instead. So I think we all get that still and I think it happens more when it's closer to something that is maybe more personal to us or more meaningful to us or something that we feel we do really well. If someone tells me, hey, you're really bad at seeing colors. I'm like, I know I'm colorblind. That's okay. Everything matches. Everything goes together when you're colorblind. But if someone were to say, let's say, as a consultant working with clinic owners that, hey, I think you're really bad. You don't do a great job at helping clinic owners to grow their clinics or things like this. I think initially there would be a sting in that where I'm like, oh, all right, I need to step back and actually really think about it. It's good. This is something I pride myself on. Okay. So I think the distinction there for me anyway. To your question, Ben, of how to actually value feedback, because I think sometimes we go too far and we go, right, we need to take on every piece of feedback. And we also have to think, who is giving us this feedback? And then we have to run it through that filter, because just because we're getting feedback doesn't mean it's actually really useful to us. And so when we're getting feedback in different areas of different aspects, it's just considering how For the person giving us this feedback, how qualified are they to give us this feedback? Now is the client giving us feedback about how they felt? Obviously they're qualified to give us that feedback. We do need to take it with a pinch of salt and look at it through a lot of different lenses there as well. When it comes to specifics, you might run that through your own filter. But a mistake I've seen clinic owners make, just to sort of sum this one up, is they get a piece of feedback here and they go, we need to change this. And then they get a piece of feedback here and they go, now I'm doing this. And then they get one over here and they're like, now we're doing this. And now we're going back to this because I got a piece of feedback back here, rather than slowing down and thinking, How does this align with our strategic goals? How does this align with our values? Because the person who gave you that feedback may have completely different values to you. The way they see the world is a completely different lens. And as such, they may complain or give you poor feedback around something that doesn't align with your values in any way. Well, then you have to sit with that and decide, do we want to change our values as a clinic or as a business? Or do we hold firm and say, we're sorry, we're probably not the right clinic or not the right people for you? And I think you really need to sit with that question because you need to be able to decide who you are as a person and as a team. And what do you stand for? And be okay that that's not for everyone. We can't be for everyone. And it's probably my more mature perspective on that these days.

Ben Lynch: Pete, as we draw this episode to a close, there's been a recent announcement from Fair Work, a very important one. You did a video on our YouTube channel for folks. Go check that out. You did an email out to the database. You've got your finger on the pulse with this. Do you want to just tee it up and share some of the headlines around important changes that Fair Work are looking to make and the impact for clinic owners in the next few years?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, I think it basically was caught as could be decision sounds very ominous when they say like that. I was handed out on April 16. And Where it came from was Fair Work was looking at the gender pay gap and inequality in the workplace. And the thought process was, with healthcare being so female dominated, that we are systemically underpaying healthcare workers and that is contributing to the overall gender pay gap that we may or may not have. I won't comment on that. By looking through that lens then, what they've done years ago, well, we should be paying healthcare workers significantly more as a base wage for their first seven years to what the award says right now. And I agree, by the way, I agree. We should absolutely be paying healthcare workers more. We don't pay them enough according to the award, but also we don't, not many clinics pay on the award. So the headline change, a new grad would go from roughly 65, 66K, including super, and we're talking everything except psych so it's a little bit higher but we're talking allied health here and they'll be going up to about 85 to 86k including super Now, a lot of clinic owners are emailing through, they're talking about this, they're quite fearful and understandable, that's a 30% increase. Now, there's not a proposed timeline, but if we look at pharmacy as the precedent, which would be the most recent and relevant precedent, we would likely be looking at three tranches over three years, typically starting about a year from now. So it'd be mid-2028 before the whole 30% increase has happened, and that'll come across the first seven years, essentially. But when I looked on Seek, because I was like, I think we're already playing above this, to be honest. When I looked on Seek, it was hard to find a new grad job that was advertised as under 85k, including super. So I think if you look at the last four years, what's happened, we've had such a recruitment I guess, issue. So we haven't had enough grads. We've had a lot of clientele looking for services. And what that's done is it's pushed up the price. It's pushed up what we pay for a new grad or for anyone. And so we are already paying quite decent wages. So for a lot of clinics, I think it's either going to be a modest increase or it's going to be no increase at all. And so looking at that, I think The key thing for me, I love that they're recognising healthcare professionals better. I love that they're looking at that going, yeah, healthcare professionals don't get paid enough out of uni for the work that they do, which is not easy, right? It's emotionally challenging, I would say, and physically challenging. You've studied for four years. bloody huge help debt or hex debt or whatever they call it these days. So I think it's fantastic they're doing that. They just have to think about it with commercial sense and go, if we change this, the whole, if this, then that, what are the second and third order consequences here? Maybe we should, you know, unfreeze that NDIS thing that we've frozen for the past six years, because if we, and this is the, probably the biggest argument point at the moment, if there's mandatory registration that comes in, looking likely that that will happen, Does that then mean that we can't charge a gap? Because if we then can't charge a gap for a lot of clinics that are charging a gap right now, their average spend is going to come down. So their fees come down and their cost base comes up. And that is an equation that is not very effective for private businesses. And if we lose those private businesses due to them failing because of these changes, what happens? exactly the opposite of what we want to happen. Team members can't get a job. If you can't get a job, well, what's happening to the pay issues that we have? And then from a client perspective, if they can't access services, we're just going to create more problems. And so I love it. I think it's fantastic. It just has to be done with commercial common sense.

Ben Lynch: Well, you might get approached, Pete, to join the advisory council to help shape it up. But as always, you get your finger on the pulse. Really appreciate keeping our coaching consultant team up to date, as well as the community, the clients that we serve across all the important changes. Well, folks, we might put a bow on this episode. Another great round the horn discussion around the important decisions that clinic owners need to make to grow their clinic sustainably. All the show notes are over at clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. We'll see you on another episode very soon, J.O.B. Hannah, Peter, thanks so much.

Jack O'Brien: Bye bye.

Announcement: Thanks for tuning in to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. To find out more about past episodes or how we can help you, head to www.clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. And please remember to rate and review us on your podcast player of choice. See you on the next episode.