00:00:04:09 – 00:00:55:23
Welcome to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. I’m your host, Jay Shorr. I’m the CEO and founder of Shorr Solutions, a national and award-winning consulting firm, assisting aesthetic and surgical practices with their operational, administrative and financial success. I have an amazing team of practice management experts and clients across the U.S. and as an industry expert with firsthand experience owning a multi-million-dollar cosmetic dermatology and plastic surgery practice. Listen in as I lend you my expertise and best tips to successfully manage and grow your aesthetic practice. I will also be bringing in guests along the way, so get ready to be equipped to operate your aesthetic practice strategically and profitably.
Welcome to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast.
00:00:56:01 – 00:02:23:22
Jay Shorr
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. And I’m your host, Jay Shorr. Today we’re going to be speaking on the top tips to improve your teams task completion. When do we do it? When does it do? And who’s responsible for it? And I am so happy to have a special guest with me. Our own Denise, quote unquote, Dini Lee, who is our director of operations. And Dini is in charge of all tasks, completions both internally and externally, whether it’s for our internal clients, meaning our partners, our staff or our external clients. And we try to have and make sure that we’re able to get tasks completed in a timely manner. Because what happens when we don’t? I’ll talk about A and B priorities and a little bit, but you have to learn how to improve your tasks and the completion of these tasks. We have no financial or formal disclosures to acknowledge. So Denise, Dini, let’s say hello to everybody listening.
Denise Lee
Hi, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here. I am the Director of operations here at Shorr Solutions and very excited. Talk about this episode. Help our client and our audience.
00:02:23:23 – 00:06:10:11
Jay Shorr
It’s great. Before I get started, Dini, I have a real quick question for you and why is task completion a common challenge in Aesthetic practices or or practices, for that matter?
Denise Lee
Well, that’s a good question. There could be a variety of reasons why task completion can be difficult in practice. One of them could be at the very beginning when you’re opening up your practice and it’s just you, you don’t have staff with you. So you could be trying to do everything in one row and you might need to hire more staff. Maybe you’re in the process of doing that, but at the beginning, you’re definitely going to feel that. You’re going to feel that a lot, but it’s going to be hard to manage. Getting everything done. Another reason could be that you’re not necessarily setting up your team for success. And that could be by not giving them the vision for their role, their goals, their proper job descriptions that they need what’s expected of them. So that can also provide a challenge and things getting done. It could also be a lack of organization and systems in place. Sometimes if you don’t have again, those processes, those protocols, who needs to do what by when, how they need to do it. That can really hinder the task completion in your practice. And also if you’re not leveraging tools in your practice, for example, there’s a lot of tools nowadays that can help to automate things like patient reminders. If there’s anything like that can go out to a patient automatically to obtain a review. We recently helped one of our clients look into AI technology that can help them scribe during their appointments with their patients. So if you’re not leveraging tools as well, that can also hinder things getting done, because technology can really help take things off your hands too.
Jay Shorr
I’m exhausted already. I haven’t even done the first test and I’m exhausted. All right. You mentioned about staff, you know, in many other, webinars and our podcasts, we speak about staff, our number one resource. And you know who is supposed to do this. You mentioned about hiring staff and that is what I call the ugh word. you know, hiring more staff. I can’t afford it. And then I always say, but you can’t afford not to do something like that. Let’s expand on that. Who was responsible when you mentioned the word staff? But in our businesses, we have a director of first impressions. We have medical assistance. We have as estheticians. We have patient care coordinators. We have marketing people. We have providers, whether they’re nurse practitioners or physician assistant physician associates. And naturally, we have the doctor. So who was responsible for completing this?
Denise Lee
There’s going to be multiple roles in your practice. We want to make sure everything is being delegated correctly. You’re letting each member know what they need to do. For example your patient care coordinator. Maybe the team member that’s in charge of calling patients back, helping with any upcoming appointments, checking in, making sure that they’re confirming the appointments if they need to return any phone calls. Who’s helping update the lead tracking spreadsheet? Who’s the team member that’s going to be posting to social media? Who’s going to be ordering supplies and inventory, for example, like your medical assistant, who’s going to be sterilizing equipment and your instruments. These are all important things that as a practice, you need to make sure that you are delegating them. And each team member knows their role. So you’re assigning tasks correctly.
00:06:10:13 – 00:06:28:19
Jay Shorr
That’s great. So how do you know when your team is struggling? You have so much to do. You’ve just exhausted me again, talking about all the things that all the positions and all the staff members have to do. So how do I know that my team is struggling?
00:06:28:21 – 00:08:10:00
Denise Lee
Okay, well, there’s going to be indicators that tell you that your team is struggling and you want to look out for those. One of them is missing deadlines and they have a backlog of tasks. And there’s a lot of incomplete tasks that could be a sign that your team is struggling. You know, you want to always hope for the best, and you have a team that you’ve hired and everyone is on board. Everyone wants to do a great job. But if they’re struggling to complete things, that might be signaling to you that something is going on, and then you need to sit down and ask them what’s happening, and maybe you get a lot of feedback about the workflow and how things are going. And you can improve things in the practice so that things can actually get done. There may also be patient complaints and dissatisfaction. So if you’re getting negative feedback again from patients in the service, that can also let you know something’s not going as smoothly in the practice. You want to take a look at your workflow and see what can be improved there, if there’s complaints or the satisfaction from patients. They can also be inefficient use of resources as well. So if you have implemented technology in the practice but you don’t, you see that your staff is utilizing it well. That can also show you that they’re struggling. Maybe they need more training. So you want to make sure that there is coordination among your team that each team member is able to know how to use the technology that they’re given, that they are not missing those deadlines, that everything is communicated to them, what they need to do, when and how. And if there are any hiccups or any things that are not being done that can signal to you that your team is struggling.
00:08:10:02 – 00:08:27:11
Jay Shorr
Okay, so you mentioned a very important word that we speak about all the time training. Awesome. Who’s supposed to divide and who’s supposed to conquer and who’s supposed to provide that training?
00:08:27:13 – 00:09:27:16
Denise Lee
Yeah. So a lot of the times you can also have vendors to assist you to provide any trainings for any of the specific equipment and devices and technology that you offer your practice. You can also have any experienced team members that already know how the process and protocol works. To be able to train new staff or be able to train staff again. And if there’s anything that needs to be done, like HIPAA compliance, for example, running through all the regulations and being compliant in that area, you will make sure that there’s a coin person on the team as well. Practice manager, that can train the staff on those items. We want to utilize people and outside vendors and consultants like us too to be able to train your staff and help them if they need phone skills training, if they need training with lead conversion, or even if they need assistance with social media posting and things like that.
00:09:27:18 – 00:13:59:16
Jay Shorr
That’s great. So let’s talk about project management and customer relationship management for a second. And look I want to make a disclosure. We have no financial disclosure with Monday.com. Monday.com is a tool one of many tools that we use. And, Denise Dini is certified in monday.com. And let’s talk about that, Dini. How can project management tools like Monday.com help to improve task completion? Because there’s so many things to do. And even in our team, we use Monday.com come for all of our clients internally and externally. It’s a great time tracking software. It’s a great project management software. And naturally it’s great because you control it for our entire team. You set it up whether it’s lead management, whether it’s project management. So let’s speak about how project management tool like Monday.com, you know, can help to improve the task completion.
Denise Lee
Yes. I’m so happy we’re talking about project management tools because this can really help with getting things done and get rid of like the sticky notes, your pen and paper relying solely on memory to remember to get things done. It’s going to almost help you build a second brain.
Jay Shorr
Yeah, they’re my favorite Dini! I buy cases of these things that, by the way, I have him in all different colors because that tells me the different task. Not a good idea? You said to get rid of these?
Denise Lee
Yeah.
Jay Shorr
All right, forgot about it. There it goes. Bye.
Denise Lee
Yes. Hey, it could be helpful for a quick little thing that you want to remember at the end of the day, but to keep things consistently operating, and you want to have these weekly tasks, and then you have these milestones for project, having a project management system is going to be very helpful. And again, it’s almost like you’re building a second brain. You don’t have to have everything up here. You have everything out in front of you. The tasks, the deadlines, their statuses and who’s going to be doing what. And it’s really just going to help prevent things from falling through the cracks. And there are a lot of project management tools. As we mentioned Monday.com is one of our favorites. We use it internally. I am certified in that program and platform, but there are other ones like Asana or there’s Trello or there’s Jira. There are other tools that you can utilize as well, but it’s just going to help you again with task assignment and tracking. If things are being done and by when and by which team member. And that’s going to help to enhance accountability on your staff as well, so that you can be able to let your team now, okay, we’re going to be implementing this system. We’re going to be logging all the tasks that are here. I would like for you to update them when you’re done. And you can also review things. It’s going to be helpful for you to also even implement any workflow automations as well. So you can integrate certain platforms. You can automate things like your Google Calendar, and there’s a lot of different workflows that you can implement for your practice. But it’s going to be especially when it comes to your marketing roles. It’s going to be very helpful making sure that social media posts are created and edited by when they need to be published. Your email marketing. We’ve also seen some of our clients use it for some of their medical assistant positions and their PCC roles as well. When it comes to like the lead tracking spreadsheet or their CRM system and the tasks you need to do pertaining to that as well. As I mentioned earlier, like if you need to perform a spore test or you need to sterilize instruments in your surgery practice, you can make sure that your team member is and it has a to do list and is checking those things off because when we’re talking with our clients, there’s a lot of tasks like that that are falling through the cracks and that are not being done. So it’s going to be helpful for your team to use a tool like this.
Jay Shorr
I’m glad that you mentioned that the lead management here, because that is going to be episode 111. Stay tuned for that. I’m also glad that you mentioned about a second brain, because the one brain I do have burned all the hair off of my head, so a second brain would be good. Maybe I’ll come back okay.
Denise Lee
You needed that second brain, Jay. There you go.
00:13:59:16 – 00:16:08:21
Jay Shorr
There you go. So tip number two. Dini, what would you say you do here? All right. How important is it to define the roles and responsibilities within your team? I mean, you manage a team, you’re a director of operations. You manage all of us, you know, up and you manage down and sharing with us all of our roles and responsibilities. So how important is it to define roles and responsibilities within your team?
Denise Lee
Oh, it’s extremely important. It’s almost like a symphony. Everything needs to sound well together and, everything needs to be like a well-oiled machine in your practice. And defining those roles and responsibilities in your team is going to be crucial. You want to effectively delegate. You want to make sure tasks are assigned according to your team’s strengths and obviously their credentials and that role. But it’s going to help to just create operational efficiency and there’s just so many moving pieces in a practice. And when everyone knows what they’re doing and everything is assigned to each person according to their strengths, their roles and credentials, everything is just going to work very well. And it’s also going to improve your patient care. That’s the bottom line. That’s why you show up. That’s why you’re running your business. Of course, you want to make money, you want to have fun, but you’re also serving your patients. And when you have this in place with your team, you’re going to ensure that it’s going to be the greatest experience that you can give your patients. And that’s what you want to do, and the service as well.
Jay Shorr
I’m going to use that line in future podcasts. So ladies and gentlemen, listening beware is has to be like a symphony. I like that because it’s true. You can’t have the horns and the strings and the drums all out of beat. It’s going to sound it all right.
Denise Lee
Oh, yeah.
Jay Shorr
And you need to be like a well oiled machine.
00:16:08:23 – 00:17:36:21
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00:17:36:23 – 00:23:20:07
Jay Shorr
So tip number three. How can regular check ins and progress updates boost your task completion rates? Now look, task completion rates is not a contest. It’s an internal contest because you don’t want your completion rates to be 25- 50%. Remember, in the very beginning of this podcast, I mentioned that I would be speaking about A and B priorities. There are C priorities, but here about regular check ins and progress updates to boost our task completion rates, A priorities need to be done right away. In French, it’s tout de suite. In Spanish it’s ahora All right, they’ve got to be done. right now they’re the A’s. Now when the A’s don’t get done, they fall to the B’s All right, the B’s are the ones that will get done. And hopefully, you know, you have that pile on your desk. Those beans can move the A’s because it’s on time deadline. So they have to be done. The A’s are ones that are always patient centric. They must be done. All right. Safety issues and concerns and patient dissatisfaction. Then there’s that C pile. So what’s that C pile Jay? You know that pile that’s been on your desk for the last three months six months a year. And you keep looking at it. What you do is you shuffle the paper around a little bit. Take your hand and put a trashcan next to it and sweep it off of your desk. It’s never going to get done. All right. So if a B goes to a C, you’re in trouble. A B should only go to an A, never to a C. All right. So you have your A and B priorities. So how can the regular check ins Dini update and boost your task completion rates.
Denise Lee
Yeah that was a really good tip Jay. with C priorities. I’ve been experiencing that lately, but yeah, you do want to do regular check ins and progress updates. That’s just going to allow you you want to check in with your team if you’re assigning things to them. Things need to get done. Check in with them, see you if there are any struggles that they’re having with time with completing the task. Maybe they don’t know how to do it properly. That allows you to get feedback on how things are going, and if there’s any way you can jump in to assist. You can also prioritize and modify expectations to what can feasibly be done by your team at this time. And that’s when maybe you really want to do certain things, but you need to hire another team member to get those things done. Maybe you can’t do those things as soon as you’d like to get them done, and that can probably happen a lot with marketing, for example, but that that can signal to you that you need to hire more staff. Again, it can also let you know when you’re checking in with your team. You’re checking on those progress updates. It’s just going to encourage collaboration and communication. That’s just a great thing to have within your team. Just letting them know that you’re there for them. You’re here to help them. You want to know how they’re doing, and that’s just going to create a good feedback loop and you can make adjustments as necessary. It’s just going to be a very positive thing overall to do those check ins.
00:20:55:06 – 00:22:37:01
Jay Shorr
So let me share kind of like what we do with our team. Now Dini, you’re responsible for our entire CRM. You’re responsible for the entire job board of all the clients of what has to get done, who is responsible for doing it, and when does it need to be completed. And we have a weekly email that goes out to each one of our team members that for each person that is assigned or group of people that are assigned, what are your deadlines, what’s coming up and what is past due? Now, I hate getting those past dues because other things stood in the way. In other words, a B priority may have become an A priority. And now that other one that’s overdue is now fallen to the C priority until I have to go in and complete it. But you know, you’re responsible for doing those and you’re responsible for that task. What if a practice doesn’t have that person that can do it? What do you do? How do you create it? Because we have a collaboration. We have weekly or bi weekly team meetings where we go over all of our client’s needs and where we are with it, and it could be done internally, for example, because really you have your internal client and your internal clients are your team. All right. So therefore when you’re saying who’s responsible, shouldn’t you have this collaboration and communication between ourselves and between themselves to say, hey, where are we with this?
Denise Lee
Yes, I would definitely say your practice manager would be a great person on this team to help assist with that and check in with how are things going and kind of be like the accountability piece, the reminder piece of what’s needed on the team. And again, when you’re starting out and you’re opening up your practice, that might be you for some time, but it’s going to be helpful if you could delegate this responsibility to someone that’s like a manager or an admin position, and they can be the one that’s following up, checking in kind of being, yeah, the one that’s keeping the team accountable to things and reminding them about things that need to get done.
00:23:20:09 – 00:24:48:12
Jay Shorr
Yeah. So that leads me into our tip number four. What role does team motivation and engagement play in this task completion.
Denise Lee
Yeah. And it all goes back again to some things that we’ve talked about previously. You want to have a happy work environment. If people are burnt out, if things are clunky it’s going to be stressful. You’re going to be upset that things aren’t getting done. They’re going to be upset. These things are upset. It’s just yeah, being able to improve this area of task completion in your practice, it’s worth investing time and thinking through even after this episode, because it’s going to really improve team morale, team culture, especially if you’re having good conversations with your team and actually listening to why things aren’t getting done because they can provide you a lot of feedback. And something I like to say is, I think the best of your team think that they actually want to work hard and do good, and if things are not getting done, that just provides a great opportunity to listen to why and ask them and work through that together. And it’s going to improve honest feedback, and it’s going to also help you reduce your turnover rates. And it’s going to improve the employee satisfaction because you’re improving the operational efficiency of your practice. Things are getting better. It’s becoming a better place to work. It’s just going to be a really great thing overall for your team.
00:24:48:13 – 00:25:13:16
Jay Shorr
Great. So on tip number five, what are the most common mistakes to avoid when you implement a project management tool in your aesthetic practice? Because there’s so much to do. So the best way to avoid any type of a mistake is to implement the protocol beforehand. So what are the common mistakes to avoid?
00:25:13:18 – 00:25:45:15
Denise Lee
Yeah, I like that. Implement the protocol. So common mistakes to avoid is under utilizing features or inconsistently using the platform. That can be a big mistake if you if you begin to implement a project management tool. The key is to consistently use it. Your team needs to be on board with logging of the to do items, updating statuses and deadlines, and really referring to this tool for their task list. That’s just going to be key. And I always say the key to consistency is to be consistent. Just keep using it. Even when you’re tempted to pull out your pen and paper, just open up the monday.com or whatever platform you’re doing and log it in there and just continue to use it and make it a habit within your team. Also, some common mistakes are just lack of specific goals and objectives and letting your team know what is it that you want them to accomplish, and being clear about those goals and objectives. And also if you’re not customizing it to fit your needs, that can be a common mistake. Every practice is unique and different, and we can offer a lot of tips on this episode, but your practice is very unique, and so you want to make sure that whatever project management tool or system or process you’re implementing for the task, completion is customized to your practice. And lastly, don’t fail to track performance and make adjustments. Again, don’t fail to check in and see if these things are getting done, and make sure that you’re making those adjustments. Because again, these adjustments are being made. It’s going to really affect the success of your practice internally amongst your team, but it’s also going to affect your patient care too.
00:27:04:15 – 00:33:11:05
Jay Shorr
So Dini I want to put you on the spot. All right. Here we go. I personally and I’m never, you know, afraid to admit my faults. I personally could not wrap my arms around monday.com. I used a different time tracking software. Now Monday.com is a time tracking software which I have really come to love. All right. However, it took over a year for me to embrace Monday.com. I kept wanting to get rid of it. So, Dini, how do you overcome? You mentioned the key to consistency as being consistent. How did you overcome an old geezer like me who wanted to use a different platform? But the hierarchy in our food chain is you have to be very careful about not upsetting the applecart with your team leader. However you won and now I embrace Monday.com to the max. So how do you do that with somebody that doesn’t want to embrace it? Especially when that person is a leader or at the top?
Denise Lee
Yeah, well, you want to be patient and maybe they’re not embracing it because they need help to understand how to use it. So that’s where training is going to be very important with anything, even with your EMR or any system you’re using. Want to make sure your team is trained, feels comfortable utilizing it. It’s okay if you have multiple conversations to walk them through how to do something, and just continue to point out how it is helping the practice and just keep it going on a positive note. And yeah, let them know, like, hey, this is helping the practice. We’ve been implementing this. Look at how it’s been helpful so far. And can I help you and then continue to have those conversations?
Jay Shorr
Yeah Dini, I think you hit it right on the head with somebody like me. What you really had to do. And I say this, my team knows I’m an old Sergeant Friday Dragnet kind of guy. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. You know, I respect your opinion, but I really will roll with the facts. And my team has got has gotten to know. Don’t come today and present anything to me unless you have your facts in order. Now, the one thing that Dini mentioned is, you know, I didn’t embrace this CRM for multiple reasons. Number one, because it was replacing one that I had already had that I had been using prior to us bringing this on. However, the new one that Dini brought on, Monday.com also included. It’s like an EMR. All right. It does newsletters or it does this or it does time tracking or inventory whatever. Instead of using multiple modules in the past, we had she brought in one module that included multiple modules. So how did they convince me? Showing me all the features that it had and yet showed me all the automations that it would do? And then it was like an infomercial. And that’s not all. If you embrace this now, let me show you another feature and another feature and another. And man, I wouldn’t do without it because I look back at the old primitive way I was doing things. I said, I can’t believe that this is how I wanted to run my business. It worked. It would just never drive me to the next level. And that’s what businesses is about getting to the next level. Because when you do what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always gotten. And that’s not good. Whether it’s operational, administrative, financial, marketing and your CRM and your project management tool will be able to show you how to do it all. Closing words Dini.
Denise Lee
Closing words would be you got this. I think that’s a good encouragement because if you’re listening to this, there’s you’re struggling with task completion, but there is a solution. And again, it’s going to go with taking a look at what’s going wrong with your staff, listening to them about what’s going wrong and implementing some something new. Like Jay said, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve always got. Do you need to hire more staff? We highly recommend implementing a a tool to help you with your task completion and getting that feedback from your team.
Jay Shorr
You know, I heard a line recently that I was listening, and it ties in perfectly to CRMs and I’ll share with you how Dini did this. My whole thing is I wanted to continue to use the system that I had, and it’s like, hey, Dini, don’t rock the boat, all right? Because I’m happy with what I have. Well, the saying that I just heard recently is, don’t rock the boat unless you have a plan to get us back to the shore, all right, because you’re going to tip over and fail. However, Dini had a plan. Because if I kept doing what we did, we were going to continue to get what we’ve always gotten. And that was we were getting nowhere. And then Dini showed us with the CRM system how we could get back on track.
So that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes our podcast. And it’s been a pleasure working with you all to speak about what are the key factors in your your customer relationship management and the top tips to improve your team’s completion? Until episode number 111, I’d like to wish all of you good luck and God bless.
00:33:11:07 – 00:34:44:05
So that wraps up today’s episode of Shorr Solutions: The podcast. If we mentioned any website links, you can find them in our show notes to work directly with me and our award-winning team of consultants to increase efficiency, increase revenue and decrease costs in your aesthetic practice, schedule a free consult with us today. We will help you establish and refine your aesthetic practice’s protocols for maximum efficiency and productivity, decrease your expenses and increase your profitability with an expert financial analysis of your business. Attract more patients, convert calls to consults, convert consults to treatments and keep patients coming back for more. With our sales training, coaching and complimentary access to our conversion cascade online course. Recruit, hire and train new team members and manage any staff turnover with our human resource expertise plus more, head over to our show notes and click on the link to schedule a free 30-minute consult with us today. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to spread the word and share this episode with your friends, colleagues and the rest of your team. Remember to also follow us on social media @ShorrSolutions and sign up for our e-newsletter. You’ll learn about our latest tips, blog posts, services, videos, webinars and more. Links to our social media channels, and to sign up for our e-newsletter are in our show notes. So see you next time and remember to leave us a review and subscribe or more valuable content.
