Do You Run Your Business on Emotions or Metrics?

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Alright, welcome back tribe. Welcome to the Align your practice with Dr. Cliff and Dr. Joe brought to you by line life where we give you the tools to find and create your aligned life. I'm super excited to dive into this. And so my question of the day will be, do you run your business on metrics or on emotions? So Joe, what's your thought I know what I do.

Well, that's changed over the years, I think any Radek emotional vision and based on how I felt during the that particular day. But yeah, over the years, trying to move from emotions to metrics, and actually run the business based off data versus feeling. Now we all have intuition on intuition on how we think things should go or hiring or decisions with patients. But not that you forgo intuition. But you have to have a foundation of data that you can utilize your intuition more accurately. Because if everything is based off feeling, you're you're apt to make some pretty massive mistakes on the journey.

And then if you just do it on data, too, that'll be a really slow process, or can be a slower process. Like sometimes God will fast forward that so lean into that, but make sure you have the data to lean into it.

Yeah, always follow your oil always follow your intuition is the way I think of it. But too many people have no data when they're utilizing intuition. And they end up making very costly or very dangerous moves in the business. And the way I look at a clip is if I was to walk into an office and go to their office meeting, and the managers like says, Well, I feel we should do this. And someone else says, well, in my opinion, I think this and you the meeting is all based on opinions and feelings based on their own individual experience in their own life. And the business is moving in a direction based on one person's feeling or opinion. And it could be destructive, especially the bigger you get. And the more decisions that are made a level below you or two levels below you, that's when it can become destructive and implode the business. So you have to in the meeting, what I want to hear is our conversion rates dropped by 29%. And I think it's because of x or our attraction or lead gen, our cost per acquisition has gone up 42%, the last 30 days, I'd like to have a conversation about how that how we can get that back under control, and then use intuition and use data in order to refine what behaviors you're going to change. But the conversation should start with data from my opinion.

Yeah, I agree, Joe, I think that data, it's so important to have the right data, the right information and sport to have accurate data. No data is bad. But the wrong data is even worse.

We've talked about over the years garbage in garbage out when you're looking at data. So you want to use data that is computer generated and not staff driven as much as you can. And small organizations. If you're running one clinic, you're not part of a group, like a line life where we have auto generated data systems into dashboards and whatnot, you have chance of human error. And those human error can cause bad decisions on direction of the company because the data is wrong. Or you're just looking at the wrong data set, right? I mean, there monster of a discussion in your business.

So I kind of jumped way ahead. As far as diving right into it. I guess I should have said, you know, hopefully, from last time, I hope you guys got your vision story. That would be one of my things, you got clarity on that. And then you pass that on to your team. And so once you have that, then this is where data really comes into it. Because it's one thing to have this vision it's another thing to have the path to walk it out like okay, we need to go here then here then here and this is how we get there. And so that's really what the data that's what today's about is really like because I I'm with you, Joe I started running my office totally on emotion. Oh, I have money in the bank up. I'm good. We had a good week. There was very little data and then I graduated and graduated graduated and you seem to get I seem to get more granular because I want to know where the issues are at. And so

yeah, the beginning it's a hustle, you're doing practice. It's you and a staff member and you're hustling your vision, you're convicted and you're driving once you start adding people costs go up. And now people are either an asset to your team or liability team based on their ability to produce outcome. When it's just you and a staff it's just drive. Now once you have one staff you have to have a dataset. Once you have two staff it's more data three data, you have more management, more and more data is necessary to effectively run the business. So you're moving from hustle to leverage, leverage other people's expertise, time, energy, focus and money, not money, but energy focus of those people contributing to the vision. And the more you have, the more data sets you need, and it gets more and more granular, I look at a business that has 100 clinics under their management, that data is insane. Compared to you and one staff running one clinic, there may be six numbers you're dealing with. So it doesn't have to be so intense this when you're smaller, but as you grow, you want to be more aware of the data that you should be managing. In a line life we we've integrated, spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars building data tables, data sets, dashboards, reporting mechanisms for our own internal team, but also to create transparency to the doctor running the clinic. And it takes a lot of effort to get to that level, an average clinic isn't going to have access to that level of data. But like you said, Cliff, at least know the number, make sure it's a correct number. And then as you mature, get more granular on your data.

Yeah, and I love like, I know, for me, like, you know, I'd be flying blind without the, you know, practice diagnosis for each of the clinics that I have like it just like one page summary, I can just go through highlight things, I have a meeting with the office manager and clinical director, here's my thoughts. It's, you know, it took what used to take me two to four hours to do like three minutes, and then I spend the next half hour to an hour reviewing it and then putting my two cents in, but I would take me three to four hours to even get that data. And I'd even have all the data that we have.

Yeah, the practice diagnosis, something that we've we've created over the last 15 years, it started with a group of data analysts that built dashboards for the banking industry that helped me create that many years ago, we're looking for we call practice diagnosis, because within a one document data set, we can diagnose a practice, we know by looking at this one set of data that's exclusive to align life custom built for alignment clinics, all computer generated, meaning that based on the services you do, you know, if a patient is accepted care if they're, if they stuck with care if they've dropped out if they're active, inactive, so many different automations in there about what my goal was is to be able to diagnose a practice within one minute of looking at a set of data. So it's interesting, because we could know if someone has poverty complex, they're scared of money, we could know if they're a poor educator, they're not doing Table Talk, because the retention staff, we know if they are bad at, you know, let's say communications so that they're not getting the referrals or asking for referrals, like within seconds, we have a good understanding of the management of that particular clinic and know what low hanging fruit that that is there to build a business. And really cliff. For me, data just provides the awareness to the behaviors and what behaviors need to change. So it goes from data. To to me even deeper than that you go from data to what is the current thoughts around these things. And then the thoughts, you modify thoughts, and you can modify the behavior, which will create different outcomes, and then number moves. So look at it in that that direction. So you got to be able to tie data to to behaviors. And what your goal is with that is what behaviors do you have to change? And that's really the purpose of data is to say, Okay, this is where we're at, what should we change in order to move that number? That's this, I love that. And to go a little deeper, if you're looking at data sets in a chiropractic office, you want to look at leading data and lagging data, lagging data's outcome data like collections. At the end of the month, you meet and you tell your team, we collected 50,000 This month, that doesn't tell you what to do. It just tells you what happened. So it's the war. What was the outcome after the race who was the winner? It doesn't tell you anything along the journey. But that's how we ended up the leading stats or behavioral stats. So it's like, we did six screenings this month, we made 50 calls to inactive patients, we that makes sense that we're like we're looking at what action you take. If we made 50 calls and got three reactivations. Maybe we make 100 calls and get six reactivations. If we did three screens and got 10 new patients, if we did six screens, maybe we get 20 new patients so you start having clarity on what outcomes you can create by behaviors. There's only really three things You can do to a behavior, you can stop a behavior, you can improve a behavior, or you can change your behavior. So you may be doing, let's say you're doing screenings to gain new patients in your clinic, and you're doing one screening a month and you're killing it, you're bringing in so many new patients, well, that's a refined process, you need to need to do more of it. Right? You just need to improve it. Yeah. Or you need to do better at it. So you got to train on screenings, you don't need more screenings, you're just not getting enough out of each one, you need to train on it, or you know what, it's not your forte, your energy's not around it, you don't like it, it's not enjoyable, you're not good at it, you know what we're going to move from screenings to, to, to lectures, we're gonna do more talks. So don't be afraid to make modification. What I urge you to do in business is not to dump, say it didn't work and drop everything and end up three years later, nothing works. You know, stay in something and refine, and refine, and train and train and teach, and leverage and keep working until it gets better and better and better and veteran business.

Alright, so thanks for that. And then. So we've talked about the metrics for the business now what we really want to look at, to build the metrics of a business, we need to build the metrics of each person. And that's how you don't get overstaffed. So many people will say, Oh, my team's like a liability versus like, no, your team's your best investment you can make. And the way you get that is by accountability. And that's what the scorecard does.

Yes, the scorecard is basically a list of outcomes that a staff member needs to create within an allotted period of time, like a quarter scorecard would be like Cliff, you're in charge of attraction. So you have three things, you have to accomplish this quarter, your three key performance indicators. And that would be you need to do five screens, you need to do write this many articles you need to whatever it may be, and there's deliverables there quantifiable that I could measure you and say, Cliff, you either did or you didn't. And then we could do a monthly meet up along the journey of the quarter to make sure you're accountable to those numbers. And that satisfies what you're saying is the investment in people, let's help make them an asset to the business personal liability, like keeping them accountable to some sort of outcomes, I think is the point of that.

Yeah, I know I love our scorecards inside of a line life, they add so much value, the best way to utilize them as you kind of do like the three big reasons why they have a job at the very top than the next space is their five main KPIs for that quarter. And typically, I'll do three or four KPIs, and then one will be a project. So that'll give me five KPIs. Then the next part is where we do our monthly meet up. And so every month we meet up we check, are we on track off track? Are there any roadblocks, that's what you know, my job is or the office manager's job is. And then the next one that we've added in this last year, which has been great is like, what's one of the team members personal goals like so that as a company that we can support him or their manager can support them in achieving those? And then at the very bottom, we throw in Strength Finders and five love languages, which seems kind of weird. But we've it's actually been really cool. Because every month the manager is looking at what's their strength finder, and what's their five love languages? And what's their personal goal. So we're building the company and the person right at the same time, and I know we'll talk about that more when we get to people. But that's where I see the scorecard being invaluable.

Yeah, I think it's really important when we look at scorecards that I think we start with building a scorecard if you're hiring one of your team members, and the second thing you do is a job description. And then you could write your ad to bring on the new person. So we could break more of that down under people. But But too often we focus on even even a job description over the scorecard. Really, the job description is a list of behaviors that you think is best to create the outcome, but it's all about the outcome. Right is which is the scorecard. So there you go. data's not only in the business side, the data should be based around each member of your team. I think that's crucial. So if you haven't, if you think there's gaps, again, your weekend to Howard project, like we talked last time on vision, this time, is sitting down and seeing where can I stop talking about the emotions of the business or what I feel? And where can I level up and talk about the metrics? So find those holes, whether it be marketing, conversion, retention, team building? Where are the areas that you don't feel you're measuring the business adequately enough, and try to figure out how you can acquire that data? I think that would be a good exercise to expose your business to better data, more effective data, more efficient data that you can report to the team.

Yeah, do you know what your data means? I think that's another big thing. And then I love the statement, you know, two parts data, one part gut, so, you know, like, that's just a great balancer for me. And so yeah,

that's awesome. Awesome.

Great job on that. Next time we're gonna be talking about process and so, do you have a clear process? Or are you the king of weighing? So, online life that's one of our strengths. We'll talk about that. We'll go into that and go from there. So have a great week. We'll see you guys next week.