Dr. Mike, it is so good to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you so much for having me, Tracy. I'm really looking forward to talking with you and hopefully helping your clients. Yeah, me too. You know, when we were kind of talking in the green room, I was thinking a lot about just how challenging the hiring process is, how much time and energy it, it's a thief of time and energy for the practice owner.
And I just, I think that what you're doing really serves a really broad purpose and everybody wins from what you're doing. So I just wanted to start with that because I think, I think we're about to have a really great conversation. So before we dive in, I like to tell our listeners where you are located. Absolutely. We're in Northeastern Pennsylvania in the Poconos. My private practice is there. I'm a practicing eye doctor and build my team is located down
the road in Holmesdale, Pennsylvania. So I'm not sure if anybody's been to the Poconos, but that's where we're at. I have. Yeah, there you go. I've been to the Poconos. So beautiful. What a lovely place to live. Yeah. I've been vacationed there with my kids once. It was all great. Yeah. A little chilly for July, but we had a good time anyway. Well, maybe down South where you're from, but where we're at, it's nice and warm. Yeah. Yeah. We're used to like melting
hot. So exactly. Oh, but it was so beautiful. We had such a great time. So I can imagine it's a really beautiful place to live. Absolutely. Yeah. So tell us about, well, tell us about how you got to where you are. Like you have these, you have your practice and you have this company build my team. So how did you get here? Oh boy, that's a great question. So being in private practice for about 20 years, we've, we've noticed just hiring changes and it became more and more
difficult to get great team members. Primarily because as it turns out, my wife and I were hiring wrong. That's that was the big realization. And you know, we're in eye care, but everything I'm about to talk about is completely transferable and applicable to any private healthcare practice. It doesn't matter if you're in dentistry, eye care, chiropractic. I mean, we have clients, build my team has clients in eight different healthcare professions around North America.
So just want to get that out right away. And the main reason we were hiring wrong, we were looking at resumes. We were trying to pick the best people from a document that's mostly BS and interviewing folks. You know, we were hiring with empathy. We were hiring.
I hate to say it, but like the, you know, the wounded puppies trying to nurse them back to health people who, you know, when we were talking earlier, healthcare is a business and you're in the business of serving people or providing outstanding care, but it's a business. And in order to be successful in healthcare in America, North America, you have to be able to provide that service at a high level. And unless you've got terrific team members,
you are not going to be able to do that. You know, and as you touched on earlier in school, we're taught, it's all about the doctor, the doctor. Oh my goodness. It's so egocentric. It's ridiculous. And then you get out into private practice and you provide the healthcare shirt, but you're judged based upon your team members. You might be the best doctor since sliced bread. But if your secretary gripes about something to a patient, that's what they
remember. That's what the Google review is about the Facebook review. And, and is it fair? Of course not. We can all agree on that, but that's how healthcare is. So we were, we were hiring the wrong way. And what do we do about it? Well, boy, oh boy. Unintentionally. I was in executive coaching at the time. And I was looking at how do other, how do other businesses do this? Like get way out of healthcare and say, what are these, these rockstar businesses doing?
You know, how does Disney get people who smile all the time and who are actually happy people? We stayed at the four seasons in Maui. This was a life-changing event for a wedding. We had some friends who flew all of us out to, to this wedding and at the end of a week at the four seasons in Maui, over 50, five, zero staff members. And I counted were addressing us by name. Now I didn't know that level of service was a possibility on planet earth. So how does a company
like that hire? Well, the, the short and the long of it is they weren't hiring based on resumes. They were doing everything the exact opposite way. We were, they used assessments. It turns out there's an entire field of psychology that is, is based on assessments and you can use assessments to figure out what a person is naturally good at. We do this all day long. When you take a person who is naturally good at something, you put them in a position that requires the strengths and
talents that they're naturally good at. Guess what happens? I mean, this isn't going to be rocket science to anybody, but guess what happens? They flourish. The magic is made. That's how you make magic. And it's just as applicable to healthcare as it is to Disney. And as it is to the four seasons, people in those businesses love to serve and people in healthcare really need to love to serve. But most of the time, that's not the case. We are people as clinicians
who get up in the morning to help others. That's what we do. Whether you realize that anymore or not, whether you're burnt out, whether you're having all kinds of issues in your practice, that's the foundation for why we are doctors and healthcare providers. And I think that so many practices, it's such a slog some days that you forget that. And I wonder how many of your
listeners are nodding their heads saying, oh my God, boy, oh boy. Well, that's how it was for me until we changed how we hired. How did it change? I want to know what you did, but first I want to know how it changed. Well, there was a massive amount of desperation. Necessity is the mother of invention. Well, desperation is right behind it. That's for sure. My wife and I were hiring the wrong way. We were hiring for empathy. We were hiring proverbial wounded puppies. We wanted to help people,
to nurse them back to health. We weren't hiring for business. We weren't running a business. The business was running us. Was the dog wagging the tail? No, the tail was wagging the dog. That was our average day. So what changed? Looked at how those other companies hired. They did not use resumes. They flipped the pyramid, the hiring pyramid completely upside down. And before they brought a person in for an interview, they knew that that person could
do the job. So what I did was created a process that I, this is a nightmare. I did it all from my cell phone. So I was on texting candidates back and forth using a cell phone. And that was as big of a nightmare as you could possibly imagine it to be. But it started to work and got them, they were doing some assessments that I flat out purchased. Saw a little bit of hope, but what ended up happening was the assessment industry was talking about one assessment does
everything for hiring. It's not true. It doesn't actually work that way. What we ended up having to, what I created was a system where the first thing that it does, and this is automated now at this point, and we do this in something like 40 states plus Canada. The first thing it does is it texts the candidate after they apply for the job. So they get a text within about five seconds.
And there's some learning stuff behind this. The key thing we learned with that, you won't believe this, but an average candidate doesn't remember the job that they just applied for. Okay. Now all the people listening are scratching their head. They can't possibly be true, right? I mean, why wouldn't they? They're on to the next job after they click the button. That, and I hate to say it, is the reality of how people are applying right now.
So what our texting system does is it gets them in that five to 10 second window where they actually remember what they're applying for. And it starts them down the process of going through our assessments. Now, why assessments? Well, about half of them immediately stop. They don't move forward. I don't want to fill out an assessment. Why would I want to do that? I'm lazy. I got to get off my butt to do something like that. Well, congratulations.
We've just pulled all those people out of the process, right? And now that they go through this, we assess their mindset. We measure their learning. We are measuring a ton of stuff, like how do they respond to stress? How do they work with others? Are they warm and friendly with patients? You name it. We've got all kinds of information on them. And when this process is
done, we now know whether or not they would work well in the job. And the most remarkable thing about that is about half of them that apply for job A don't actually get put into job A. Their natural strengths and talents are a better fit for another position within the practice. That was something we never could have predicted. But it just illustrates that these folks applying, they don't know what they're good at. They just flat out have no idea
what they're actually good at. And you're not going to get that out of a resume. You're not going to get that out of an interview. You just have to get that a lot of times through trial and error. Oh, my brain cells are popping all over the place. I think what's super interesting and probably poignant is that people don't know what they're good at. It takes having conversations or doing assessments and drawing out what lights people up. And I think there's some
people who are like, just apply the job, do it and whatever. But all of my clients who have gone through with every one of them has at least one nightmare story to share about hiring and then subsequently needing to fire or whatever. There's something to recognizing what someone's good at and also what they really enjoy doing. And there's always going to be parts of the job
that you may not love and it's just part of the job and you just do it. But if most of it is what you're good at and you love, oh, it just makes it so much easier to connect. Exactly. Right? And yeah. And so how do you determine fit? Before you post a job or start looking for candidates, have you decided the kind of fit that you're looking for or do you go with the job description and let the candidates or let the system figure out who you're looking for?
Well, I would describe it as it's algorithmic for the different positions. So in an eye care practice, a great secretary has certain characteristics. They're identical to what a great secretary in dental, in chiropractic, in every private practice, it's all the same. So it's by position. A medical assistant, a dental assistant, a chiropractic assistant, all these different positions have an algorithm behind them. Here's what a terrific candidate
is like for that particular position. And that comes through just oodles and oodles of feedback that we've received from practices because docs love to give feedback. We all know that and we suck it up. We just absolutely absorb as much of that as possible because the feedback loop that we've created makes our algorithms better. And the more we hire, the better and better they
get. So instead of a practice who is hiring a couple people a year, whatever that number might be, our team members are doing that before lunch on a Monday because it's just the same thing over and over and over again using these feedback loops. So the type of person that we're looking for for a particular position is very specific. And going through these assessments is one thing,
but at the end of the process, we also include a video interview. The video interview is excellent for making sure that the person in front of us is actually the person that went through the assessment process, that there's no surprises, that somebody who is excellent on paper, air quotes on paper, is actually excellent when they're in front of you. And then once that entire process is done, depending on the position, we've eliminated 97, 98% of the applicants.
They're gently exited out of our process and their finalists are sent over to the practice. And at that point, we already know that the candidate can do the job. What the practice does is they just pick the person that's the best fit. So in my practice, I build my team, does the hiring for our private practice. And about two hours before I hop on the recording of this podcast, we just had an applicant that was hired for a front desk.
We're bringing on a second person on our front desk because thankfully the volume's enough to do that. And we have a terrific person on our front desk. We're getting a second one. I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. My practice manager worked with build my team, spent about a whopping half an hour on this to determine the type of, it starts off with a consultation call. Here's the type of person we're looking for. Here's the position, all that stuff.
And then after that, it's all the, build my team writes the job description. And the job description is designed to get as many applicants as humanly possible, because we know we're going to remove most of them. And that translates to our practice does nothing other than just wait for the candidates to be sent over. And so I don't know how much time it saves, but it is, we can hire a person in about an hour of net time. What's
that worth to a private practice nowadays? And not only financially, but the, Oh God, the amount of stress. I mean, it's so maddening looking at a stack of resumes on your desk. Who's the winner in the stack of resumes and who's that a player or worse yet, I don't have a stack of resumes. I got like two of them on both of them suck. Right. I mean, that's, that's the reality of hiring nowadays. So that's, that's where we're at on the practice end of things.
I would imagine that this helps the whole practice, especially the, like the leadership or the people in charge of hiring kind of work around that. I hear this a lot. Nobody wants to work, but I'm like, this whole thing about not wanting to work is less about not wanting to work and more about wanting to work in a good environment. And I think part of what makes a good environment,
you know, assuming that the leadership isn't toxic and whatever is fit. Right. And being aligned with your skills and your personality and what you bring to the table, your passions, what drives you. And so I'm curious, like, what is the success rate then of hiring? So they bring somebody on, do they tend to be pretty good fits? Like, do you know what percentage of people stay, whatever the requisite amount of time is to be considered a successful hire?
Yeah, we, we hear back from clients that our people that we send over stay at a much higher rate. And the thing is, even with that, we have to change how we think about hiring and healthcare because post COVID a lot of people flat out don't want to work. That's statistically accurate. The ones that do don't want to work with B or C players. And I cannot stress this enough. An A player loves working with A players. They tolerate B players and they will quit their job
because of C players. This is how life works. And it's magnified now in today's hiring environment because you just don't have as many people looking for healthcare jobs as you used to. So it just makes it flat out makes it harder. And, you know, what I would challenge your listeners to do is to really think about transitioning from the old way of hiring, their old approach to, to meeting hiring where it's at nowadays. And the, you know,
the old approach of taking a week or two to make a decision on somebody. Well, here's a pro tip to your listeners dead. That is absolutely dead in the water. Um, our practice has to make a decision within a couple of hours, like two to three hours, um, on the, the people that build my team sends over. And that's a little fast, uh, because we choose to make it that quick. We want to jump. We want to always be the first response for an
A player because we want to be decisive. We want you, you know, we're not telling you maybe we're not thinking we can get somebody better. We want you, we want to work with you. We want you on our team. Um, no indecision whatsoever. I don't want to see any of that stuff coming over, uh, because indecision will turn off an A player and you can be the best fit for them. And just that little bit
and off they go. And once they're on the team, um, it also helps from a cultural standpoint that they're allowed to do things on, you know, um, with decisiveness that's, that's kind of a requirement. Oh, if we could stand on a mountain top and shout this out, this would be the thing that decisiveness, right? That, and this comes from in the coaching world,
this comes from a place of clarity. So being super clear about what you want, why you want it, why it's important to you and creating a really clear picture and description and all of that, of what you're looking for, for fit, for productivity, for results. That's, that is the key. Right. And so it, it gave me a little, a little, some heart palpitations of thinking about making a decision within two hours. However, when we've been hiring at my company, we're quick.
Like we're like, you know, we don't, we do it a little bit differently because we don't have an agency that does it for us, but we have one interview, we make a decision and we're done. That's it. Right. Yeah, exactly. And it's worked out well. Exactly. Um, yeah, we, I mean, in the old days we used to have two to three interviews and old days might be four or five years ago, you know, before the build my team process. Um, and we'd have people come back and, oh boy,
it was a colossal use of time by the practice. I question whether or not, I mean, we just tried to make the best decisions we could because we didn't have scientific, you know, psychometric data about the person. Um, now we do. So the, um, there's a concept that I use at build my team called talent certainty. And this is a little bit, um, a little bit out there. How would you, here's a challenge for your listeners. How would you operate your practice?
If you had talent certainty, if you knew for sure that within a reasonable amount of time, you would be able to get a person in whatever role you wanted them to be in, that would be terrific at their job and did it just showed up every day and just did a great job. If it was really, you know, learn quickly, of course, and it was really nothing that much more than that.
How would you operate your practice? And I love posing that question to people because I get a lot of blank stares, just silence and blank stares. It is so hard to put your arms around that because it's the exact opposite of what we expect on a day-to-day basis. And that is the number one thing that build my team has solved for a,
for my practice is talent certainty. We now know that within a reasonable period of time, we can bring in an A player, sometimes a B player, but we do not have C players on the team. Those folks are gone. And I can't begin to describe how big of a difference that is. Financially, our net income has soared. Our head count number of employees is down by,
I think, 30 some percent and our volumes of patient care are up. So we not only have fewer people on the team, we've got higher volumes and better net income. So it sounds like with the right fit, your efficiency has increased. Dramatically, drastically. And do practices, will they take a C player and let them go? Most won't. The ones that do, they're not mediocre practices anymore. I mean, that I would say is a mental switch that can be voluntarily flipped by the practice owner.
If they want to just start becoming a performance-based practice, if they want to go from mediocrity to well on the way to excellence, flip that one single switch. And as soon as you do that, you've just decided that the culture that you're willing to accept just raised, the whole bar just got raised. And that's something that I've seen practices do. And I would say it's their first step on the way to becoming really high performers.
There's definitely something to that. One of my clients referred to kind of my approach to working to like looking at how you work operationally, meaning hiring and training and how you, how you greet people and everything is wellness hospitality or healthcare hospitality. And it was, I mean, a lot of the things that I worked on her team with were things that I learned working in the health club industry and what we trained our front desk people to do, right? All these,
you know, rules of walking the door and blah, blah, blah. And that's it, right? When you have, I think you have to train people really well too, but you got to start out with the right fit for the hire because whoever is the first point of contact in your practice
will be the one who makes the impression. So they're either, I mean, I left a pediatric practice when I could tell that the staff was unhappy there because my child, when my children were really little, they picked up on it and it made going to the pediatrician incredibly stressful. We left, we left because of the staff. Exactly. And the provider could have been the best doc on planet earth, but wouldn't have mattered because my kids screaming on the way in already,
right? Yeah. Or whatever, whatever it might be. Jim Collins has that quote from good to great, where it's all about getting the right people on the bus. And I've experienced that in our practice where the right people are now on the bus. That was the start. The second step of it was to get them the right seats on the bus, which we have. And the third step, which was like the
advanced class was let them drive the bus. Now docs were all control freaks. So, you know, we don't want, there are some caveats to that, but the way I describe it is I put the guardrails on the road. That's my job. So I'm putting the guardrails on. I want to drive that bus as fast as possible. Do not crash the bus and try your best to keep it off the guardrails, but it's your job to drive it as fast as you can. And as long as the team does that,
which they have, the results have been spectacular. But so many docs can't do that because you go back to the foundation concept there. Do you have the right people on the bus? Hell no. So you don't get to drive the bus if you're, you know, if you're the wrong, if you're driving that bus drunk and all, you know, all those types of crazy,
right. You're not getting the keys, buddy. No, you're just not. So you have to do almost a tactical retreat, a strategic retreat even to say, I got to get those right people on the bus first of all. And then we can talk about putting them in the right seats. And just the reality is that has to be done. Well, you've got a 40 hour work week, clinical work week, seeing patients. You've got all these responsibilities. You've got.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ You've got your kids. You're trying to go to the soccer game. I mean, there's a local dentist. She's now our client. She, oh boy, our kids, her kids, same age. So we go over to hang out with her at her pool. She's sitting on the edge of the pool reviewing resumes.
Oh, painful.Dictionary. And I said to her, hey, I got an idea for you. There's this little outfit called build my team. Why don't you consider this? Gave her the standard walkthrough of what we do. And she was just dumbfounded. She's not reviewing resumes at the side of her pool anymore. She can be present. How much is that worth to to a parent? Priceless. Priceless.
In health care, we seem to have this hero complex where you're not a great doc unless you're working 60, 70 hours a week. Well, we all know that our kids could not possibly care less about being the great doc. They just want their parents home. And, you know, when when I'm home, I want to be the best dad that I can be. I sure as hell don't want to be thinking about a resume of this about the other thing.
And I pay somebody to do that. Yes. Does it cost a fortune? Of course not. Is it affordable? Yes. Is it going to cost me less than what I'm paying myself to do it right now? Well, yes. Those were all the questions that I I looked at before. And now I get to go to the soccer games.
Yeah. You know, I don't have to worry about we can go to the water park on the weekends with the kids. I take my kids ice skating. We went last weekend and I ended up falling, which is unusual. But, you know, we we did all of that stuff. You know, great stories.
Yeah. And because you're present and, you know, you mentioned I think before we started recording, like maybe we don't know how to fully measure stress, but it's the stress reduction shows up presence, sleeping better, you know, absence of or mostly absence of, you know, those crazy weird, you know, teeth falling out dreams and things like that. Like the quality of our life improves when our stress levels are reduced.
And I would say of the top three, you know, complaints, air quotes, complaints that like our clients come to us with hiring is up there always, always, always up there. I mean, this is just such a great solution and everybody wins. The job seeker gets the satisfaction of not having to take hopefully three months from start to finish for getting a job and a good placement and everybody is positioned better for success when it's done this way. I think that's the thing that really stands out to me.
Well, exactly. And it just doesn't have to be the old way anymore. You don't have to go through that anymore. From my own perspective, I have no interest whatsoever in ever going back to the old way because I know now how, you know, how straightforward it is to assess what a person is actually good at and then match them with the position.
I mean, that's a mindset shift. And one of the questions I'm always asked is what about resumes? Well, how do you figure out which the good resumes are? You're leaning your ladder up against the wrong wall if you're asking that question. What you're asking me is how fast can I climb the ladder that's positioned against the wrong wall by asking that question? You're not going to be able to get what a person's good at out of a resume.
It's a different game now. And the challenge I would ask your listeners to consider is to switch the mindset from trying to get good at the old way that's not applicable anymore to using the tools that will get them success in the new method. I think that's a perfect time to ask how people can find you. How can they get in touch with you if they want to learn more about this?
Really easy. Buildmyteam.com. You can schedule a free consultation. Our team members, the way that works is they hop on a call with you and ask you a bunch of questions about your practice. We want to find out certain things about practices that make them unique. Are you a really busy practice, more quiet practice? What type of health care are you in?
On the doctor side of things, what do you like? What don't you like? The positions that you're looking for. Most docs want one person that can do six different things. Well, those days are gone. That doesn't happen anymore. What our team will do is help you isolate it down to one, maybe one and a half type positions. And then our team writes the job description, goes through that entire process, as I said, and then sends you over the finalist candidates.
It's straightforward. It all starts at buildmyteam.com. Amazing. Well, Mike, I feel like we could talk about this and really keep going for a long time. My biggest takeaway really is that the practice wins, the candidate wins, and the chances for success are so much higher. That's sort of a two-part takeaway. That's huge to me because I love these win-win scenarios.
And I think the other is just the reduction of stress, taking all those things off your plate that shouldn't be on your plate, but often land there because you're the provider and you're the face of the practice or whatever.
And I get the drive to thinking that you ought to be doing this. But if it's for an administrative position and you have a practice manager or someone who could fill that role, that's the person who's going to be training, who's going to be spending the most time with them, and who probably knows the administrative side of the practice better than anybody else does.
So it makes sense that it would work that way. So I think that that makes everybody's life better. And you're right, things have changed so much. And this business of taking two, three months to fill an admin role, I don't think it should be that way.
Well, it's not anymore. And just eliminating this from something that is on your plate altogether. Outsourcing it costs less than it costs you to do it yourself. We did a study on that in my own practice. And what we came up with is that if we hired the wrong person and fired them in 14 calendar days, it cost us $4,500. Now, when was the last time somebody was hired and fired in 14 calendar days in healthcare? I would assume that it's rare.
Exactly. Yeah, incredibly so. And so, you know, just things like that we don't think about in healthcare, because we're off to the next patient. You know, we're focusing on the clinical care, because that's our jobs. But on the other hand, the CEO hat that you are teaching us to essentially wear, we have to make time for that. And this is one of the ways.
Amazing. Well, I have so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for coming. I have one final question, and you'll probably be repeating yourself, because I think we talked about this. If you could offer one piece of advice, what would that be? Straightforward. Hire for strengths and talents, not experience or personality. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, Tracy. This was fun.