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Every team needs focused action, positive culture, and to have a clear cadence. As the CEO you don't only initiate these mechanics but you infuse this structure from the very beginning. It's nothing short of intentional action to ensure the results and you can take these 5 steps even if you've been in practice for years.

1. Start with you.
There is a strong misconception around the team going first in training, development, and overall course correction. This concept of leaders going firsts enables the CEO to lead better because they aren't taking a back seat in their development; Leaders go first.

2. Reconnect with your team.
 It can't always be possible to connect to every team member on a personal level, but if you are deeply connected to your executive leaders and you infuse your values and culture into their expectations, you will be able to ensure that your command structure stays fluid and healthy as possible. Having a deep connection with your executive team will...

6 Signs You’re Ready To Be A Director Of Operations

Most practices will have an Office Manager and most of the time that Office Manager is promoted from within. The practice continues to grow, change, and make progress.

Until they don’t.

There comes a point when it feels like the practice has hit its glass ceiling and the OM feels the same. Where is upward mobility? Does the practice stay stagnant or do they break that ceiling and evolve and grow?

The practice hits this crossroad nearly as timely as the OM hit’s theirs. Coincidence?

No, and here are 6 signs that you are ready to be a DOO for your practice and break that glass ceiling.

Sign #1: You value responsibility and not the reward. 

When you perform tasks for the betterment of your practices’ processes and gains and not for the credit and recognition from your colleagues, that’s when you know you value responsibility and not the reward. It is not about boosting your ego, rather seeing yourself thinking about the moves of your practice moving forward.

And when you take more responsibility, you do more. This is a sign to the provider that you’re ready for that leadership role. You do your responsibilities head-on with a laser-like focus. It’s not all about being quick. It’s also because they value other factors which lead us to the next point.

Sign #2: Seeing the big picture and deciding when it’s needed.

A Director Of Operations is an executive role that entails the management of a larger purpose and vision. This means that you would oversee the whole practice in a continual forward progression and not just your role and your team—understanding that your work and decisions will affect the totality of where the practice is going...

At this point, you should’ve mastered the basics (if not, you should start now). Take the initiative to sit down with your provider and let them have the hot seat. What’s their big vision for the practice? What do they need as the Visionary to hold their role and let you step in yours?

At the end of the day, seeing things up top gives you the privilege to touchpoints for improvement, and you’ll only be credible at this when you know the intricacies of business management, high-level strategic planning, and operational efficiency.

Sign #3: Opening communication to be reached by your team.

Have you noticed that your team seeks you out? Whether it’s advice, a suggestion or idea, or help to problem solve? If you have paved communication into your culture and seek to have a collaborative team, you may find that you opened up more channels than what you may have started with. This means your team has high respect for you and is seeking the betterment of the practice at a collaborative level. If you are mindful in your tactics and you engage team members in decision making processes, although it will ultimately come down to the provider if you are not given this responsibility. This leadership style will continue to promote relationship building and make the team feel they matter and are part of the practice. 

Sign #4: You’re no longer a, “yes ma’am”

Have you found yourself starting to challenge ideas or changes because you see gaps in the steps? Or perhaps you understand the objective and start to reverse engineer the map to success? Well, you may be finding you no longer quick with that YES and finding you're becoming more of a strategic counterpart in the equation rather than the bottleneck. Of course, if you’re not there yet verbally it’s a dynamic boundary that’s actually limiting you. Start with, “yes, but first..” and slowly work to offer a different viewpoint or suggestion while keeping the respect factor in place as you and your provider work together to adjust the boundary blockage. 

Sign #5: You continue to hone people and their skills and talent

As you move up in leadership more people will come to you for mentorship. This means that you have enough experience to teach ways to be successful in your practice

Use this time to learn from them, too. Make it a two-way channel to improve each other in the process. Since you’ve been in their position, you know that building strong and goal-oriented teams require a leader who is in the same mindset. Especially when you start recruiting people as you build your own team, they rely on you to develop and nurture them for the practice. 

Be mindful that this is a talent that will continue to give back to the practice again and again. Don’t take this innate ability as anything less than wildly important and imperative to the practice growth and long-term success.

Sign #6: You’re being recognized as a leader.

And lastly, you’ve been considering upward mobility in your position. Even though you have a heavy workload, the quality of your work doesn’t suffer. You’ve been trusted with more work. Therefore, that means your provider is confident to trust you and the natural next step is an executive role in the company, too.

Don’t feel pressured if the day that you’ve been waiting for hasn’t come yet. Rather, take this as an initiative to step up your career ladder and put your best foot forward. Talk with your provider about furthering your support, service, and reliability to your partnership and getting trained and certified as a DOO.

For those interested in taking this conversation to the next step with their provider, I have attached The Providers DOO certification program outline.

I am so excited to welcome my good friend Kristen from Financial Fitness Coaching on to the podcast today. Kristen is an absolute giant when it comes to setting up systems that are not complicated, financial goals, and to avoid common pitfalls when it comes to financials in the office setting. She is a phenomenal resource to have and I am so excited to have her on the podcast today.

So we work in the business; first typically, inserting an implementing cash flow system, which I use Profit First and I'm a Profit First certified professional. So we are teaching how to pay yourselves how to make sure we get the optimal numbers, how to keep your expenses down, saving for taxes, profit all that good stuff, but then I want to make sure that once we take all that money home and we're rich that we did on dump it out the other end. So we work also personally with my clients In their personal lives making sure we maximize their finances there as well.

So my story is definitely...

Hello CEOs, welcome to another episode of the CEO Doctor Podcast! Today, I am so excited to Welcome, Kara Kelley. She is an HR consultant who shares her knowledge of the business side of Medicine and Dentistry. She is the founder and CEO of Clinical HR, LLC an education and consulting firm for dental and medical practices.

In addition to building comprehensive HR courses for Doctors, Kara works one-on-one with practice owners to cultivate leadership skills, manage employees, established complaint HR systems, develop employee policies, and procedures, and manage turnover by implementing competitive total reward systems. She is an absolute rock star and I am so excited to have her here to share her knowledge on employee needs with us.

What are Employee NEEDS?

Compensation

 I mean a lot of times you talk about employees and you look at Maslow's Hierarchy of needs and things like that and some of those do it? To the workforce, you know people need to be able...

Why your long command structure is debilitating your goals: The grande cascade

In most businesses goals are driven from the top down. Senior executives to department heads to the next tier of management, and so on.

This approach AT BEST forges unity- I appeal this, it should no longer be universal.

Why?

This approach leaves you with four ADVERSE effects:

A loss of AGILITY

A lack of FLEXIBILITY

Marginalized contributors are PUSHED OUT

One-Dimensional linkage.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. An amazing way to combat this and give you the way to sit your practice on the mountaintops.

Book a call here to get started -> http://go.oncehub.com/watsondentalconsulting

The ultimate coaching showdown!

If you’re like most practices, you know that most coaching is the key to creating success in your business, right? There’s a million reasons to do it:

• You get a new perspective on your practice which ultimately leads to fresh changes, new ideas, and better results.

• You can leverage your time.

• You can hit your income goals faster.

In other words, you can SCALE!

But maybe the thought of online coaching leaves you with one big fat nagging DOUBT that nibbles at your brain…

Does online coaching actually get RESULTS? It’s a big question, and you know what? If you’re asking it, then I want to salute you.

It means you’re actually a good client to have. You care about your results which means the work that needs to happen, will.

Well, let’s get to the bottom of it, shall we? Does online coaching in a group coaching format or 1:1 coaching get better results for you?

Well, it depends. Our Red...

Phase two is the Develop phase; This phase is the actionable steps in the turnaround process. Phase one gave us the ability to take immediate action steps but this phase is for the long-term effect of the complete turnaround.

We will begin with an assessment which can be broken into 3 key areas of focus: People, Operations/Procedures, and Finances. 

People: Some may find this odd, but I begin asking the practitioner about his practice. What is your purpose? What is your mission? Who do you serve? These questions not only matter in the big bigger of running a successful business, but they give a good indication just where the practitioner wants to be or if he/she are clueless. Next, is the team. Who are the key employees? Why? What is your business model? (Do the employees know it?)

Operations/Procedures: Some call this an operational audit- either way, it's looking at the way things get done in the business. Specifically, processes, customer...

Most problems are rarely anticipated and sometimes, practitioners cannot see the problem right before their eyes. 

I'm talking about the practices' financials. 

Then, all the sudden, there is not enough cash to last through the month, expenses are out of control, low case acceptance; all of this quickly become desperation. I've seen many offices appear to be doing well - on the outside anyway. After a quick review of the AR (accounts receivable), I begin to understand the true state of desperation its in. Other symptoms include low case acceptance, high customer complaints, and you, as the provider, are working too much. 

When practices are in this state the provider tends to go outward in desperate grasps to correct the course that practice had taken. More often the trend is to reach out to the accountant - surely there is a business model that's missing? The department budgets are incorrect? While this move isn't necessarily futile it's not where the attention needs...