BEN:
G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery.

JACK: Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. Your highest performing clinician doesn't necessarily need to be your clinical team leader.

HANNAH: I think having the access to other clinicians that are working at the same level is really powerful.

BEN: I see a lot of clinic owners not want to talk money and revenue, so this is definitely going to turn off a lot of people.

JACK: Revenue is a sign of how much your patients appreciate you.

BEN: Where do you find the most signal in understanding how well your mentor is performing?

JACK: Two words, utilisation rate.

HANNAH: That was what I was thinking too.

BEN: Hannah, what made you jump straight into utilisation?

HANNAH: Because it's Jack's.

BEN: This episode will be right up your alley if you're looking to build a stronger clinical leadership team. And don't miss Hannah's hot take on the best free training resources to provide your leaders. And stick around for Jack's recommendation on the way to assess your return on investment. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organised 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 AllieClinics.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 hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. All right, welcome to episode 301 of the Grow Your Clinic podcast. We made it. We made it. We're in our 10th year of helping clinic owners grow their clinic sustainably, and we're about the fifth or sixth year behind the mic, maybe even longer. It's all a little bit warped. But judging on the feedback and some of the stats of this new format, People are loving it. So I'm really excited to continue this. And if you're new here, welcome. I'm Ben Lynch. I'm joined by my ever reliable business partner and recovering physio, Jack O'Brien, and the always dependable Hannah Dunn, clinic owner of DOTS Paediatric OT Practice, and one of our senior consultants here at CM. Today, we are diving into something that matters to clinic owners who are really growing and they're looking to build a bit more of a leadership team, a mentoring team. But before we do, JB, you got some listener feedback during the week? I did.

JACK: Well, I got some random followers on my personal Instagram, which was always nice. And I make a habit ever since I ran my clinic's Instagram and running the Clinic Mastery Instagram of welcoming new folk, not welcoming, but saying g'day to new followers, you know, being a human. And so this is, uh, at the knee physio underscore at knee physio underscore is real names. Angus Angus followed me and I, I replied, I'm like, Oh, this is interesting. G'day mate. How you going? How did you come across my profile? And he said, I listened to the podcast. I listened to the grow your clinic podcast. There's some great stuff. Clap clap emoji. And, uh, yeah, I was curious. I'm like, what, what resonates? And he said he really enjoys the digital marketing and social media stuff. So, Angus, g'day. Hope you're listening to another episode. And I just love all the feedback from listeners who have listened to 300 episodes. In fact, it was January 2018, we started the podcast as a trial. I thought, I'm going to give this a crack. And if it works, great. If it flops, then my mates have got stuff to ridicule me for. And, uh, here we are 300 episodes later. Uh, yeah. What's that seven and a half years of podcasting. So for those who will be listening the whole journey, uh, welcome back. And for Angus and those who are recently joining the fold, uh, welcome to the dark side. You're in for a treat today.

BEN: Yeah, very nice. And great to have Hannah on here recently. We've got this new format where we like to mastermind common challenges or problems that clinic owners have. I've really enjoyed hearing each of your mental models for how to approach different and, you know, kind of poignant topics in a clinic owner's journey. And today we're going to continue on that around clinic leadership or clinical leadership, because in a previous episode, we talked about practice managers. the role they play, when to think about hiring a practice manager, etc. Go check out that episode. But today, more on a clinical side, Hannah, you've built quite a big team at DOTS. You've had a number of different leaders at various times. To kick us off, what are some of the key mistakes you see clinic owners make when it comes to forming that clinical leadership team?

HANNAH: Yeah, thanks Sven. I think there's a few errors or mistakes that clinic openers make when they're building their teams. I think often clinical rectors aren't sure how to let go and how to bring people into their leadership system. And I think sometimes there's that mistake of sort of putting someone in the position, but still holding on to a lot of the jobs themselves and not really letting go and giving them that freedom to lead. But I think on the flip side, there's also times in which people give people clinical leadership roles without training, without support, without education, and that can also fall down too. So I think it's really important that we get those things right around how do I support our team to be leaders, because not everyone has had that experience.

BEN: What are some of the things you see them hold on to? They don't hand over, you know, in a timely sense or in a thorough sense. What are some of those things, if you could talk to that?

HANNAH: Yeah, I think supporting clinicians in managing their clinical questions, I think they're really good at handing over. I think they're very good at saying, yep, you can manage those clinical questions. I think when it comes to more of that admin side of things, like managing calendars, what the revenue is, how to support a question around whether someone can go to a PD or not, what the budgets look like. That sort of support, I think, stays with the director. And I think that can be tricky because I think hand in hand goes management of calendars, managing of notes, managing of all of those tasks together. And I think when we hold on to part of it, we end up holding on to a lot more of it from a cognitive mental load, which doesn't allow us to then go and do other areas of the business.

BEN: So holding on to things or not handing them over appropriately, and then the lack of training for that person as a mentor, as a leader. J.B., to build on that, what are some of the common mistakes that you hear and see from clinic owners building this clinical leadership pathway?

JACK: When it comes to like clinical leaders, you know, I see clinic owners think about promoting their best clinician or then, you know, I'll say nerdiest, like the quintessential therapist. And that's not necessarily the right thing. It might be. might not be. You know, I think about I've got this book on my desk, The E-Myth. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see it. If you're listening, come and join us over on YouTube. What we're talking about when we're talking about clinical leaders is promoting someone from technician to manager. And the best technician doesn't always make the best manager. in E-Myth language around technicians and managers. So your highest performing clinician doesn't necessarily need to be your clinical team leader, depending on the objectives you've got. If part of that clinical lead role is really, I'll say clinical, overseeing CPD and professional development, then yes, maybe there is a case to suggest your nerdiest, most intelligent clinician should be in that role. But if that clinical leadership role is around the management of people, that's a different skillset. to being a great therapist. That means someone who is technically proficient with things like management rosters and people skills and developing the characteristics and traits that we want to see in our team. So just promoting the cleverest clinician isn't always the right move. And I'm curious, like, have you perhaps done that with your team or what do you see? Who do you see clinic owners promote?

HANNAH: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely see that happening and have definitely had that, you know, experience as well. And, you know, I've had team leaders say to me, I actually want to go back to just doing more clinical work than doing the team leader stuff. I don't love the team leader stuff as much as I love the clinical work. And I think that's important to keep those conversations open. Um, I think alongside that, I think sometimes we have reactive directors who have a clinician who sort of been there for a couple of years and then feel like, Oh, they should be moving into a team leader role and, or into a mentor role or into something more than just a clinical role. And so I think sometimes people can promote without there being the structure behind it or a position description or understanding fully what that means.

JACK: So I see this, sorry Ben, I see this as a real tension for clinic owners. I would bet my hat, proverbially, that there'll be clinic owners listening along here who have this tension of I want to create pathways for my team. Often retention and longevity of career in healthcare is shortened artificially because we don't have pathways. And so we end up manufacturing these career pathways for clinicians and it doesn't always necessarily suit. And then on the other hand, we've got this tension of trying to empower others to take more of the load of the business and get some things off our plate. And so it is, Ben, I see this real tension of wanting to create career pathways, wanting to empower others, but then you end up in this place of sometimes round peg, square hole. And I reckon there's some clinic owners listening who are going, you are reading my mail, help me. Ben, what do you think?

BEN: Yes. It's such a good point. What came to mind was essentially what problem are we trying to solve? And I think that is such a good point. Clinic owners' main problem to solve in this instance is, I want to retain this great therapist, and they're looking for some version of progression. So I'll solve that problem by giving them, you know, half their week. But perhaps, you know, in a different reframing, it's like, how do I solve the problem of therapist utilisation and then performing better without feeling burnt out, as an example? And then who might be best to do that? So it's a really good point, JB, of like, what problem are we trying to solve in this season of our clinic growth? To add to that, I would say people jump, one of the key mistakes is they jump to some version of like full-time way too quickly. So they're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to provide you this pathway and let's allocate half your week to it. All of a sudden, your best income earner is now off the tools. And they're untested often in being able to be effective mentoring others. So you've got quite a ways to make up even to get back to break even. So that's probably one of the big mistakes is it might be the right path, but don't make such a big change straight away. I would say, you know, can we do half a day a week, not half a week?

JACK: If I can double click on that. There's a mental model in there that clinic owners really need to consider. How do we see the best clinic owners think? They get really clear on what the problem is. What are the potential solutions to solve that problem? And then which solution am I most confident in? The mistake that clinic owners make is go, here's a solution, clinical leadership pathways. And either they're solving a problem that doesn't exist in their case, or it is a suboptimal solution to the real problem that they have to solve.

HANNAH: And I am totally owning that I found myself in this situation in which I had some great team members who'd been with us for a long time. And at one point in DOTS history, I had four team leaders for like 24 team. And that's a lot of team leaders, but it was, they were all doing a day. One of them was doing two days a week. So we had five days of team leadership, but over four people. And I was like, this is great. I've provided pathways for four people, but I'd also created this situation in which every week for an hour, four of us needed to meet and four of us needed, or five of us with me. And so five of us needed to be over the top of all of these different things that were happening and then handing things over day after day. So we all get ourselves into a muddle of times.

BEN: No, you go, Jack.

JACK: You calling me Hugo. That's interesting, right? Because part of me thinks, oh, that's a really good distribution of responsibility. There's no key person risk or dependency. But also what we see with teams like that is that there's skill variety. Leadership and management is a skill that can be learned and developed. But if you've got a team of four or five, including yourself, you're going to have a variety of proficiency, which means a variety of outcome, or at least unpredictability of outcome, right?

HANNAH: Yes.

BEN: So I was going to quote you, JB, double click, which is showing some age there and reference points of using a mouse.

JACK: Hey, I've got it. Look, check out my mouse.

BEN: For those who are watching, Hannah OTs, you'd love my little ergonomic thing. Give me a spell. That is ergonomic plus. I just run with the old track pad here. It's much easier. Sorry, slight digression. Hannah, what were some of the lessons in hindsight that you had about that? Because I'm sure you share this with clinic owners, but what were the lessons that you had in maybe creating a larger team than what was needed?

HANNAH: I think mainly it was that needing to have so many of us present and off the tools for an hour a week, and having to have so many conversations and having all of us all over everything. So it didn't really reduce the cognitive load for me, I felt like. And also just the team also fed back that they were like, it's really confusing as to who I reach out to on what day and the mental load of who's on for what, no matter how we use Slack status and all that sort of stuff. It just was a bit confusing. And then we had a lot of systems in place to keep track of how we were doing things. Whereas now, And, you know, this isn't necessarily the golden solution, but at the moment we've got a principal team leader who then supervises two other team leaders. So, or clinical mentors as well. So that's how it's divided at the moment. And that helps streamline. So I'm only meeting with the clinical, the principal team leader, and then she is meeting with the other two team leaders, which actually works really well with the size we're at now. and the responsibilities that we've delegated that way.

BEN: What I get out of that, Hannah, and it's something Jack, you and I have spoken a lot about, is the real cost of meetings. Like if you audit your week, your fortnight, your month, depending on the rhythms that you're running, and you just look at the hourly rate that you're paying team members to be in meetings, you know, it's like, it will shock most people if they do that simple audit and go, wow, there's a lot of non-billable time that's happening here. And also just, this is a real cost to the business. So I think we'll come to that in terms of, we'll go there now.

HANNAH: That was one of my massive learnings, like the biggest game changer around this.

BEN: Around the meetings and how much we're sinking in. I think coming back to what are some of the outcomes, how do you actually assess the effectiveness of this clinical leadership team? Because one that you're pointing to and coming back to the problem we're trying to solve is like, For some clinic owners, it might just be, I spend half my week doing this. I just need more time and space in my diary to do other things. They're going to judge that by, to your point, Hannah, how many questions are maybe coming back, how much they have to be in solution mode. That could be a reasonable trade-off. But I guess one of the things that I see I got the privilege of running a session recently on behalf of Peter Flynn in the Mentor Mastery Program, where we support a lot of clinical mentors. And the question that I opened with, because I always like to do a bit of a reflection first, was, as a clinical mentor or supervisor, how do you know that you're doing a good job? And it was very surprising to see a lot of people had very subjective, not specific ways to know whether they're on track or not. And I would say this is quite characteristic of a lot of clinics set up when they put some middle leadership management in place, that the primary outcome is the clinic owner doesn't have to do the job. And so that's the outcome. Oh, it's not on my plate. Which is reasonable, it's okay. But J.O.B., if we come to you, you're the spreadsheet lord. In terms of quantifying the investment, because we're paying someone's wages to step into that mentor role.

JACK: Yes.

BEN: What do you believe are the best ways to quantify the investment in clinical leaders?

JACK: Okay, so when you're thinking about quantifying that investment in clinical leaders, you could even think in terms of time, dollars, or clinical performance. And so innovative Dan Martell, buying back your time, you might be paying someone, I'll ballpark figures here, don't quote me on this necessarily, but you might pay someone $50 an hour to oversee your clinical leadership, and that allows you to go and work on something that generates $100, $200, $500 an hour for the business. So you might be buying back your time, number one. you might be able to quantify the investment in that clinical leader in terms of dollars generated additionally for your business. So if you're able to improve the utilisation and productivity of your clinical team, you might be able to increase the revenue of the business by $100,000. And so that additional ballpark $20,000 salary might result in $100,000 extra revenue. or $50,000 gross profit. So it's 20K out, 50K GP back in. That's a good deal. Or finally, you might look at it in terms of your, what we call CEIs, clinical excellence indicators, or KPIs, essentially clinical metrics. We used a spreadsheet dashboard for a long time. These days we'd use Ali. Ali is, you know, it's world-class. It is the gold standard software to manage and lead your clinical team. And so we'd be looking at things like the improved utilisation rate, decreased cancellation rate, decreased DNA rate, improved rebooking rates, improved PVA, improved dollars per consult. And so if we can quantify the improvement that we want to see across the clinic and in individuals, that justifies the existence of a clinical leader.

BEN: How's it changed for you, Hannah? You mentioned that you made some mistakes early on, maybe having too many team members. As you've evolved, how has your tracking of the effectiveness of your clinical leadership team changed?

HANNAH: I think all those things that Jack's talking about and also making sure that they have access to the data and they understand the data so that they are… Including dollars? Including dollars for us, yes. which our team also knew our dollars until recently, we've changed to the impact hours, but it was revenue up until six months ago, which now I don't know what I'm saying. Now, yes, dollars. So I think in regards to understanding those numbers, and that's probably one of the things that when I'm coaching other clinics, they say, oh yeah, no, they don't have access to the clinician's dashboard or they don't have access to Ali or whatever it is. And I just think, how are you, how are they supporting them then if they don't know? Because we're then just basing it off maybe a calendar Maybe we're basing it off what they tell us or how many numbers of clients they're seeing. It's just, we're sort of flying blind a bit. And so I think the numbers are really powerful in being able to support those clinicians. And it's just that language around, we're not blaming, we're just using the data to support us, to see where the gaps are, to see where we need to improve skill development. Where's the gap between skill and the numbers that we're seeing?

BEN: Tell us more about your journey there, Hannah, with respect to getting your team on board, talking about performance numbers. What are some of the things that you found particularly useful?

HANNAH: I think what we found useful is ensuring that training's in place. So what we found was that we were sort of saying to someone, oh, you've been a really good clinician, you're ready to take on another clinician. But then we found that they weren't confident in understanding the numbers themselves even and understanding how to support them. So we've brought everyone's mentoring back to two team leaders now, three team leaders, two to three, it depends. One's going on that leap. So we've just made that change to two. And so that's really streamlined it for us. And they're able to see patterns across other clinicians as well. And I think having the access to other clinicians that are working at the same level is really powerful because you can sort of think it's normal or you can totally understand why someone's not able to hit their CIs or KPIs. But then when you actually say three other clinicians who are at the same level doing well above that, the question becomes about what's the difference between this person's skill level and the others or where's the missing element. So I think the more data you have access to, the more powerful it is to be able to learn those skills. And I think just creating a safe space in which you can ask those questions and not feel silly. But we also have worked on our focus sheet. So the questionnaire that people fill out before they come into a mentoring session, we will alter that at times. So whether that's a quarterly or every six months so that the focus becomes something different. So our first focus was that one week ahead and then four weeks ahead. And then it became around cancellations and supporting the team around the language that you use, because it's easier to say like, oh, cancellations are out of our control, but they actually can be quite in our control. And so looking at what that actually means and providing support around that is where we found the greatest change and benefit to create consistency across the team.

BEN: So to clarify there, for those that are listening in or watching, use what we call a focus sheet here at CM. It's a Google form, typically, or any survey form, where there's a bunch of questions that the therapist fills in prior to their mentoring session so that they come prepared, they come focused for the session. There is a focus for the session. And so you're changing up those questions periodically, depending on the things you might be working on so that there's a self-reflection before that mentoring. It's such a practical way to add value, make sure those sessions are valuable. You touched on a really good point, Hannah, and I want to get your perspective on this, J.O.B. I've been surprised at how many clinic owners will put a mentor clinical supervisor in play and then have ad hoc meetings with that mentor. It's kind of like, I've handed it over to you. I don't want to hear any of the problems or challenges. And then they wonder why their mentor or their therapist team aren't performing as they would desire many months down the road. Talk to me about some of the things you see the best clinics doing or best clinic owners doing to support their mentors.

JACK: Sounds like there's a bit of a stress response in there. Isn't there a trauma response of like, I'm out. Good luck. Call me when it's burning. Uh, yes. So if you need, if you need a brief break just to recover as a clinic owner, sure. Take a week or two. What I see clinic leaders, clinic owners do with their clinic leaders is invest in their development, invest in their skills. That might look like, um, a crash course in leadership and mentorship. For us at our clinic, I think of the story of Chris, our clinical team lead. So we gave him a couple of books, some podcasts, a YouTube playlist. I'm like, right, here is your crash course. You went to uni, spent 50 grand of four years of your life to learn to be a physio. Now you're going to spend four weeks of your life crash course in learning leadership. And so sometimes clinic owners forget to do that. The best do that and are really deliberate with the skill development of their leaders. Number two, for those who are inside our Clinic Mastery Business Academy, we've got Mentor Mastery. Mentor Mastery is a package deal. If you're in the Business Academy, you get Mentor Mastery. Your clinical team leads are mentored by the best. It's a unique coaching environment specifically for clinical leaders. And so getting them enrolled in that. And to your point, Ben, it's having regular meetings and that doesn't need to be as frequent necessarily, but what it looks like is accountability for that clinical leader for the work that they do. And so in my case, with the story of Chris, we would meet on a four weekly basis and it'd be like, all right, talk to me about the team. How are they tracking collectively and how are they tracking individually? What have you been working on and what's the tangible outcome of what you've been working on? And he would go along to say, Oh, we'll been, you know, working on X utilisation, right. And that's the outcome we've been working on her follow-ups with her, with her clients and nurturing touch points. And we're seeing an improvement and be working on Jake's cancellation rate and, you know, some of his communication skills that have been practicing with him. We're not seeing it move yet, but we're confident that we will see it move. And I've been working with Laura on her average dollars per consult. And she seems to have a lot of mental barriers around additional product selling along the way. And Chris would say to me, can you help me help Laura? Great, let's do this, let's work together. So it was very much around what are the nitty gritties of each individual therapist? What are you working on? What's the outcome we expect? And how can we collaborate and work together?

HANNAH: And on that, not just those in-person meetings, but having a communication channel in which they can reach you to ask those questions if they come up and they need some support in the background before having a meeting or before doing something, whether that's a Slack channel or whatever it is, a Slack channel works really well for us, where it's just those team leaders in there to say, almost like a client help channel where you say, this is what's come up, but I just need a bit of support around how to word this or how am I, what am I missing something?

JACK: Yeah, it's huge. And when I think of Chris, my clinical team lead, he's a clinical genius, firstly. He had a little bit of resistance around all the, I'll say quote, numbers and spreadsheets to begin with. And so if you're a clinic owner and you encounter some resistance around numbers, which is pretty much all of us, to some degree, our team will be resistant to varying degrees. Ultimately, when we all got into healthcare, we studied uni and we embrace data-driven healthcare. We look at p-values less than 0.05 in all the journal articles. Oh, you're triggering me on Slack. Oh, gee whiz. Independent variables. Stat 1070 for those. Shout out University of Newcastle. That was horrendous. As healthcare professionals, we are data-informed. It's data-informed care. Clinical leaders, their role needs to be data-informed because it's the data that informs us how clinically excellent we are. Now, it might not be a specific causation, but there will be a strong correlation. And it's super important that we use data to guide our decisions. Because if it's not data, what else is it then? It's gut and intuition. And you can rely on intuition so far, but it won't get you, it usually won't get you to where you want to go in totality.

BEN: If you were to look at a small basket of numbers, or questions that you like to use to assess the effectiveness of the mentor. Jack, what would they be? I'll come to you, Hannah, as well. But as part of sifting through the noise, where do you find the most signal in understanding how well your mentor is performing?

JACK: words, utilisation rate.

HANNAH: That was what I was thinking too.

JACK: Was it? Oh, high five. No need to call a friend. Yeah, that's all I've got to say on that, Your Honor.

BEN: Okay, well, utilisation rate. And talk a little bit more about utilisation rate, maybe even in the definition, the calculation, because yeah, in seeing how people do set it up, I see quite a variety from employment utilisation through to clinical utilisation where maybe they're minusing a whole bunch of things. Just talk to me about the definition and having a solid reference point so that the numbers aren't massaged.

JACK: Okay, so when I think about utilisation rate, here's why it matters and here's how I think about it. It's the primary metric for me and all the other metrics matter and contribute colour and definition and depth. But utilisation rate is the key one. Now, if your utilisation rate is healthy, but your PVA is trash or your cancellation rate is high, that's a problem. But utilisation is the key. And so how we measure it in our clinic and how I think is a really good way to think about it is hours available. compared to hours seeing patients. And so some clinics will look at that as impact hours, service hours, but how many white hours are in the diary and how many of those are coloured in seeing patients?

BEN: And the distinction there, if I'm understanding you, Jack, is available for clinical services versus how many are used. And what we're sort of leaving out there is saying, hey, there might be mentoring, CBD, a team event, breaks, lunch, et cetera, et cetera, which add up over the course of the week and are not available for clinical care. So we don't want to use them in the calculation. We want to actually use only what is white space in the diary available for a booking or an impact hour to be had. OK, that's that's a really important point. Hannett. You jumped in very quickly there. You're on the same page telepathically with J-O-B.

HANNAH: Absolutely. He's a numbers guy and I'm just learning about them. Always learning, always. You are understated, Hannah.

BEN: What made you jump straight into utilisation rate? You said that with quite conviction. Tell us more about why that's your reference point.

HANNAH: Uh, cause it's Jack's. No, because, um, because I think it shows us how we are supporting our clinicians to be able to utilise their diaries. And I think all those other numbers flow into utilisation as Jack said, like even if we're thinking about like numbers that are really important to us, uh, one week ahead and four weeks ahead, what that looks like in the diary, but they are essentially what is going to result in a utilisation rate. So that number. is affected by those other numbers, but ultimately it's the utilisation that gives you a really quick snapshot of how things are going. And the same with cancellation rates and patient visit average. And so I think that is where utilisation comes in. I hear a lot of talk and Jack came to hear your advice, I guess, around this, around people taking out annual leave and sick leave and how to manage that. And when people have other leave.

JACK: Hmm. Look, as long as we measure consistently, that's the key piece, right? And, and so therefore it makes it very difficult to compare across clinics, but it makes it very easy to compare in your clinic over time. Yeah. For example, if you're going to take out meetings and sick leave and public holidays, all of these things, your utilisation rate needs to be close to a hundred percent.

HANNAH: Hmm.

JACK: But by the same token, if you're gonna leave in public holidays, meetings, leave, it is impossible to get 100% utilisation. Your ceiling might be, and at our clinic, for simplicity, we would often just leave it in. And so therefore your ceiling is 95%. It is impossible to be 100% utilised because there's going to be a public holiday here or annual leave there. So as long as you measure consistently and don't bother comparing with your neighbour down the street or your colleague inside the Business Academy or Elevate, you don't need to compare to them. You just need to compare to you last month, last quarter, last year. And are you making progress? I think don't sweat the small stuff either, Hannah, you know, do what's simplest, do what's easy. If Allie gives you a utilisation rate, just use that. Don't get hung up on what the formula is. Just use it and compare it over time. It actually, look, I'm the details guy. This little granular detail doesn't matter. Yes. You can take that one to the bank and quote that Benny.

BEN: Yes. I'll be using that back to you. That's interesting. I would have picked revenue and revenue against a target. And the reason is sometimes depending on the caseload that you've got, it's gonna be different for different clinics. If I see a Medicare client at 53 bucks and I see a private paying client at 110 bucks and I'm a physio, then I might be highly utilised in seeing a certain cohort, but I'm not generating a lot of revenue to be overly profitable as a therapist. And there can be swings and roundabouts, whether there's products or additional services that are offered. So my go-to would actually be revenue. I think utilisation is a great proxy for it. And I think you want to be across it. I see a lot of clinic owners not want to talk money and revenue, so this is definitely going to turn off a lot of people, but that would be at least my reference point. If I was to pick one, I could only pick one, I would go revenue as the one at least that I'd be looking at. for how my mentor's going, for the cohort of people they mentor, and comparing it to the target that I know I need them to hit in order for us to achieve our goals for them to be profitable.

JACK: That's really good, Ben. And if you're a clinic owner listening who does feel a little bit uncomfortable when Ben says track revenue, I want to encourage you. I feel you, but lean in. That's okay. That little bit of discomfort inside is probably a little green light for you to go, oh, there's an opportunity for me to, you know, perhaps change my thinking or perspective because revenue absolutely matters. In some ways they're tied. Yes, you're right. If you have a highly utilised, but non-profitable clinician or service or profession, you need to think long and hard about because ultimately revenue is just another word for sustainability. Yeah. Really, that's what we're talking about. If you're not profitable, you're not sustainable. And if you're not sustainable, you can't help anyone over the long term. And so, yeah, you're absolutely right. It does matter. And I'll give you another example. In my clinic, we had a clinician who had a very heavy DVA patient load.

BEN: Department of Veteran Affairs, just to clarify.

JACK: That's right, military veterans. We live in a military area near a RAF base, high population, and they're a beautiful population. We wanted to help and serve them. In some regards, we saw it as our contribution to the community to care for our military veterans. Anzac spirit is strong. But if you just have a caseload of DVA patients, That is a surefire way of going broke, unfortunately. And that's not my fault, nor the patient's fault. That's the government. Take that up with Albo or your local federal member. And so, yes, if you want to make a donation to the community, see DVA patients, but it's not a sustainable business model.

BEN: Yeah, it's very interesting. Intentionally or not, I've just seen a few numbers massaged. You've probably seen that, both of you as well, over time. I feel like you can't massage revenue. It's a lot harder to do so. It kind of cuts to the chase, I feel. I'm interested, Hannah, to throw to you in a sec there, but come back to Jack, the references and resources that you said were key to training up your clinical leader. We'll come back to that, but Hannah, you got something to add there?

HANNAH: I was going to say that we did actually use revenue right up until January this year as a key marker and change to Uh, the other, uh, but, um, yeah, the impact hours. And so we were doing revenue first, the impact areas and now utilisation. And I think it is so important to take all of this information in the context of your clinic. Cause you make a good point, Ben, like for us, we are 193 99 for all of our sessions. Like we don't have any fee variation, but when there is those fee variations, you need to have that into consideration. And so. there are nuances with each of those clinics that make a big difference as to what number really drives home.

BEN: There's also the distinction of what you use in conversation with the mentor or clinical leader or, you know, part of your mentoring of the mentor. Perhaps the lens I'm looking at it firstly from is as the clinic owner assessing that mentor. That's my go-to. Whether we talk about it with the mentor, I mean, that depends on the clinic, right, and how open they want to be about it. But I definitely want to know that and I'd encourage every clinic owner to know their revenue reference point or target. Jacoba, it looked like you were also going to open your mouth and not for a sip of coffee, but to jump in. No.

JACK: Although I had a wonderful Colombian single origin this morning, I can still smell it. I was going to say that revenue, again, here's just another lens for clinic owners that feel a little bit ick about dollars. Here's a great way to feel a little less ick. Think of dollar bills as certificates of appreciation. Shane Davis taught me this way back when. So revenue is a sign of how much your patients appreciate you, of how much value we're adding to their life, that they would willingly engage in a transfer of value. And so the more revenue you generate as a clinician, the more people you are helping and the more they appreciate your help. Revenue is a really, really important metric. And I think finally on the revenue piece, then we'll get to the resources bit. On the revenue piece, it is a great way for mentors to help their mentees or help their clinicians to progress in their area of interest and speciality. if you want to see a particular cohort of patients and become a perceived expert in that area, the more you niche down, you'll be able to charge more. You'll be able to help those patients more and more in terms of lifetime value and PVA and all those types of things. So revenue is a really key metric to help mentor clinicians. Absolutely. Good distinction.

BEN: I feel like we could talk all day about this. Just to throw in another point. I was reading the APA workforce. Oh, because you've got insomnia. That's right. You read reports for your insomnia. Yeah, just, you know, thrilling reports. And it like comes up so often, you know, therapists leaving clinics because they want more pay or they want more progression. and stepping into mentor or supervisor roles. And so like, to your point, JB, this needs to be discussed. And it's about the framing of it. You mentioned on the last episode around a team member who had left in KPIs and it was like, we were doing this before, but it's all in how we talk about it, that, you know, people become open to using it and referencing it always. So find the way to speak about these numbers that resonates with your therapist and firstly resonates with you as a clinic owner. So from revenue to resources, Hannah, now is the time to answer that question. What are some of the resources that you found particularly useful that you send the way of an emerging leader in your clinic to say, hey, if you want to level up your skills, as a clinical mentor supervisor, these are the ones that you got to go to first?

JACK: I'll answer that one first. The Coaching Habit is a phenomenal book. Subsequently, The Guru Trap is the other one. And that's a key note. Your clinical team leader doesn't have to be the guru. They need to be a great guide. They need to be able to help clinicians to level up. You don't have to feel like you need to know everything.

BEN: Tell me more about some of your favourite questions, because I know you love The Coaching Habit. It's a great book and there's a great like seven part video series on YouTube. I actually found it really tricky to find, but maybe if you YouTube it, Google it, Coaching Habit video playlist where the author speaks through some of the key chapters and questions. But yeah, what it's it's like seven questions, right, JB, in this book? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. What's your favourite?

JACK: Well, I think before I get, I don't have favourites, it's like children, right? Every question is valuable. The art is in not being the guru and not telling your mentee or telling your therapist what you want to tell them, but rather the art of getting them to say back to you what you otherwise wanted to teach them. And so rather than saying, you know, your utilisation sucks and I need you to do A, B and C, That's not great leadership, mentorship, managership. Rather than that, the way we want to do it is let's pull up Ally together and talk me through what you see. First of all, what are one or two areas you want to acknowledge yourself in for crushing it? Where do you see that you're doing well? Cool, great, high five, kudos, this is awesome. And when you look at that, where's one or two areas that you see are opportunities that you could improve? Oh, my cancellation rate isn't trending the right direction. Cool, took the words right out of my mouth, right? Okay, so if we wanna improve your cancellation, like what's one or two things that come to mind for you that you think you might be able to work on? And hopefully they'll say A and B, and then we might say like, And what else? And that's a key coaching habit question. And what else? And then they might say C and D. And you go, okay, so out of those, which one do you want to work on this fortnight? And they'll say B. I'll say, great, so if we work on B, that means at the minute we're saying no to A and C and D. Is that right? Yes. And then we go, okay, cool. Well, if I was to help you, if I was to guide you, here's some thoughts that I would add around strategy B. So if, you know, what do you think about that? Give me some feedback. Asking for feedback and opinions are really powerful questions. You know, what's your opinion on this script? What's your opinion on this approach is a really key question. And then we would finish that up with, so if we work on B and that should improve our cancellation rate, what sort of improvement would we expect to see? And is it okay that if we maybe missed that by a little bit, we readdress that in a couple of weeks? And by the same token, if we hit that in a couple of weeks, Burgers are on me. Lunch is my shout from an accountability perspective. So that's loosely how I guide that conversation. But to answer the original question, the coaching habit is a really key resource, the guru trap. I love Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. And, you know, ultimately a leader needs to be growing as an individual. And so I often come back to some Robin Sharma books, you know, the greatness guide and the everyday hero manifesto, brilliant personal development books. And as the leader gets better, so their mentees get better.

BEN: It's a great point. The thing that I take from all of that, and I know you introduced me originally to the coaching habit. Whether it's in this book or another book, I'm going to butcher it, but it's taming the advice monster.

JACK: That's the one.

BEN: Is that in that book or is that something separate?

JACK: That's that book.

BEN: OK, I just remember that soundbite. That's all I needed to remember. was, I think, to your original point at the top of the discussion today, Joby, where it's typically the nerdiest therapist or the best therapist, you know, quote unquote, that gets the gig or wants the gig as the clinical mentor. It's because they're so good technically. And when they jump into that seat, they so often go straight into the advice monster, which is here's what to do. Here's how to do it. And they don't create agency. with that therapist. They don't ask enough questions and actually their role is to coach the brilliance out of them. And what you're saying there and what I've taken from that book is you've just got to be really good at asking open-ended questions. Sometimes they're leading questions, like leading the horse to water, as you sort of referenced, or they're open-ended, exploritative questions where I don't know the answer as the mentor, and that is more often the case, and I'm just trying to get more context. So I love that. One, ask more questions. And the one that I love in particular, I think this is from the book, is tell me more. So I'm going to say something like, tell me more about that. Maybe in this podcast we've used.

JACK: I think that's a Brené Brown one. I'll attribute it. It's like the same old Brené.

BEN: Yeah. Well, because you don't know, like I'm trying to assume what you meant by that. So, hey, tell me more about this, um, is a really good one. Hannah, when it comes to resources for levelling up these emerging or established mentors, what are your go-tos?

HANNAH: Yeah, Brene Brown was top of mind with Dare to Lead, like it's a great group for our leaders, absolutely. Radical Candour as well, another really good one. I also think the five dysfunctions of a team, or seven, no, five, it's five, isn't it?

BEN: We could add two more though.

HANNAH: Yeah. Just like understanding team dynamics and understanding where their place is. And another video that I use a lot, just a quick YouTube one, is just above the line and below the line behaviour. Just understanding that and being able to put some language and normalise. We all go below the line, but how do we get them back above the line?

BEN: Just explain that above and below the line, Hannah, for those listening in.

HANNAH: That we're all predestined, essentially, to be below the line, which means that we're fearful, that we can be defensive, reactive. But our goal is that we want to be above the line where we're open, we're willing to learn, willing to change, and that it's natural when we're feeling threatened because we can't understand from our prehistoric brains about the difference between being chased by a lion or when it's our identity being threatened. And so we automatically might go into that fight or flight, but we really wanna find ways to come above the line and be open and willing to learn and take on feedback and be in that space.

BEN: Yeah, fantastic. Really good one. There's plenty of videos on above and below the line. We have had this question so many times over the years, like, hey, I've got a leader. What should I share with them? The books, the podcast, the TED Talks, the YouTubes, everything. So we actually created a list. If you head along to clinicmastery.com and we've got this section in the resources side, if you're on YouTube, you can see my screen. Resources, free resources. If you scroll down toward the bottom, you'll see downloads and it's called the Mentors Academy, different from Mentor Mastery that Jack referenced, where we can actually help build the agency, the quality of your mentors. This is a self-guided list of YouTubes, books, podcasts, et cetera. It's free on our website. Go to clinicmastery.com to check that out. And it's separated into different tabs like confidence, tough conversations, coaching questions, et cetera. Just with links out to books and YouTubes that you can go check out and pass on to your team. Well, this has been a very insightful conversation around building, you know, a leadership team more clinically inside of your clinic as you grow and reduce some of that reliance on you as a clinic owner. If there's one key message that you want a clinic owner to leave with from today's conversation, or maybe even one key action, what is that? J-O-B and then Hannah.

JACK: Start small. You don't need to give someone a four-day-a-week clinical leadership role. Just give them a small responsibility, test the waters, empower them with small responsibilities, and they can stack up over time. But don't overcommit. And said more positively, start small.

HANNAH: Hannah?

HANNAH: And I would say set the foundations right. So make sure that you know what you are asking for and where to go, but not to the point of paralysis where you're not taking action. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect, but just having some good structure and clear ideas of what you are asking of that person in need.

BEN: Very nice. My call to action is to head over to clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast and check out all the show notes. If you're looking at my screen here, you'll see all the latest episodes. And when you click on them, we're adding more and more resources and links to the things that are mentioned in the episode. So you can check them out. And I would say have a feedback loop. I think, Hannah, you mentioned that a channel in Slack where you mentor the mentor. I think that's kind of the key thing. However you choose to do that is up to you. But don't just leave them and hope that they develop and grow. They still need support. Well, for episode 301, Jack O'Brien, Hannah Dunn, thank you so much for your contributions. We'll see you on another episode very soon.

JACK: Bye-bye.