Wendy Briggs: Many of our members seek us out because they are looking to grow their practice and accomplish more. So let's take just a few minutes and talk about that and how important it is that you align your team to your vision in order to help you grow. So I like to think about grow, growing a practice, as an acronym. The G in grow stands for goals. We've got to have a clearly defined goal. And often that starts with the team knowing what the doctor's vision is. Dr John's going to talk about that in just a minute. So as soon as they know what their goals are, being able to have goals that are measurable that they can act upon is really an important element. Too often we have goals that are, I would call fluffy or unclear and-
Dr. John Meis: - result in a feeling not necessarily something you can measure, team harmony, better communication. While those are things that are nice, how are we going to measure if we're successful with that or not?
Wendy Briggs: Exactly. So we've got to have a measurable goal. So goal is the first step. The next letter in grow is R, right? So for R we have to focus on our reality. And too often we don't have a clearly defined method of doing that. Now we look at analytics a lot and we have specific tools that help us do that. Our friends at Dental Intel do a fantastic job. We have to know our reality. And too often we find that dentists and their team members are often driving blind, right? They don't have a sense of where they are. So how can you decide where you want to go or how you're going to grow if you don't know where you are? So you've got to take a good stock of your reality and look at your numbers.
Wendy Briggs: The next letter is O, which is opportunity. You've got to seek opportunities that can help you inspire a pathway to growing, to having growth. And sometimes we find practices get stuck there, the team members don't quite know what to do or how to see their way forward. And one of the most powerful ways that we have found to inspire new thinking or new ways of thinking is to attend our practice growth retreats, those retreats are all about growing.
Dr. John Meis: So it's amazing to me how frequently we'll see a practice that has set a increased revenue goal, but has no plan to reach it, right? They haven't thought through what are the opportunities in our practice and how are we going to capture those opportunities? They haven't gone there. And so now the team feels pressure, they feel anxious, they feel stressed out, they feel pushed because we're supposed to be hitting these numbers, but we really haven't thought through the how, which opportunities are we going to capture?
Wendy Briggs: We see that all the time in hygiene. Right? And that's one of the key frustrations the doctors bring to us is, gosh, I wish my hygiene team would do better, but they really haven't defined a clear pathway for them to do better. They don't know how to do or what did you differently in order to get there. So you see that a lot.
Wendy Briggs: The last letter in grow is W, and that really stands for work. We've got to work. You've got to work to find your way forward. And we often say that what got you here won't get you there. Right? And insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So if you want to grow, that's your four step pathway. You've got to set your goal, you've got to figure out what your reality is, you've got to look for the opportunity and then you got to get to work.
Dr. John Meis: Yes. Execution beats strategy for lunch, right? There's no comparison between which is more important. So making sure that we are doing that work and executing what is a well thought out plan is so critical.
Wendy Briggs: So I think one of the most important elements is once you have this in place, the missing link really is having the team understand your vision. So we often see teams that embrace creative ways to help infuse their team members with the doctor's vision. So let's talk about a few of those. I mentioned before, our retreats. And this is one of my favorite things about our retreats is when we see on breaks or at the end of the day teams getting together and talking through what they learned and what they're going to implement. I think that is where the magic happens.
Dr. John Meis: Yes. So we can tell who's going to make the most progress at the end of the meeting. So there are some that scatter out early, right? And there are some that stay to the very end, and then they stay after the very end and they're sitting and everybody's sharing all the ideas they got at the retreat and they're deciding on the few that they're going to execute. So they're not trying to have a shotgun approach, they're trying to laser focus on the most important things that are going to send them forward. And so when I see teams doing that, I know they're going to make a tremendous amount of progress because number one, the whole team is engaged in this, right? So they're all throwing their ideas and their thoughts in and they're going through the same process as the doctor is in figuring out what are those things that we should focus on. So people support what they help create and that they help create that plan we know that doctor is going to have a lot of progress made.
Wendy Briggs: Absolutely. Another creative way to align the team to vision that we've seen is practices that do a retreat with either leaders or key team members. And they'll do this at least once a year, I would think at least once a year. We did this with our team and we are working through our VTO and we're setting our goals and we're figuring out how to accomplish our vision and getting into the weeds, right? Having a vision is just the first step, then you've got to get tactical about how you're going to accomplish it.
Dr. John Meis: Exactly. So we use a process called the vision traction organizer, and it is how our planning works. And so we do a quarterly planning session, which is shorter and smaller. And then once a year we all come together offsite somewhere and that's really where we create what the next year is going to look like. And then a year down you look back at that and you think, gosh, we accomplished so much in this year. And it didn't seem that hard. It was just well thought out and well executed.
Wendy Briggs: And this is what we're talking about when we say, okay, now it's time to get to work. You actually have to work on making those goals come into reality. If you really want to grow, it does take effort. There are some quick hits, we're always looking for those easy things, those small hinges that'll swing open a big door of success, but you do have to get to work. So those are just a couple ideas on how to align your team to the vision and hopefully a few of them make sense to you and will help you on your path to growth.
