Welcome to another episode of Online Marketing For Doctors TV & Podcast—your go-to resource for growing and scaling your practice. I’m Huyen Truong, a Strategic Marketing Consultant for medical clinics. Over the past decade, my team and I have helped clinics across Australia, the UK, the US, Singapore, India, Canada, New Zealand, and beyond to thrive using our proven patient generation system.
Today, we’re going to dive into the special episode “How Only Working With A Player Will Change Your Game?”
Only Work With A-Players
I’ve heard from many clinic owners who refer to their team as a family. This sentiment seems nice but is deeply flawed. Here’s part of a memo Netflix shared with their employees:
We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure.
I have friends and family members that I love deeply but would never employ. I’ll help them in any and every way I can, but that’s partitioned off in my personal life.
My business needs to run like a sports team and have players who are there based on their performance.
Early on in my business career, I hired people who were “OK.” They weren’t terrible, but they certainly weren’t awesome. They had the skills to do their job but lacked drive, motivation, and ownership. They were B- and C-players, and because of this, many things fell back on me.
I thought my job as a business leader was to inspire and motivate them. The results were fleeting at best, and I never succeeded in turning B- and C-players into A-players. This was very expensive and frustrating. I often felt like I was running an adult daycare center.
Today, I refuse to have anyone on the team who isn’t an A-player. I do this for two reasons. First, A-players are a great deal. You pay them more, but they produce much more than they cost you. Secondly, having B- and C-players on your team slows down, demotivates, and drags down your A-players.
It feels bad to get rid of B- and C-players, especially when they haven’t done anything majorly wrong and are nice people, but you’ve got to do it. Your organisation will always bottleneck with your weakest team members. You get the standards you tolerate.
Real A-players almost always seek out jobs and opportunities that they’re currently unqualified for but know they can grow into. They’re driven by pay, for sure, but they’re equally driven by the challenge of the role and learning opportunities. If you find that certain people on your team constantly need to be motivated, they’re not A-players. A- players don’t have to be motivated; they have a high intrinsic emotional need to succeed. They come with “batteries included.”
The money you save on hiring B- and C-players, you’ll spend many times over on supervising, micromanaging, and motivating them. It’s a terrible deal for you and everyone else on your team.
Be a Magnet, Not a Jail
Business is an amazing vehicle for positively impacting the world. You start with improving your own life. Then, your impact crater expands to encompass your family, your community, and your customers. An important group you want to positively impact is your team.
Earlier, I expressed that you should hire based on attitude and invest in your employees by training them with any additional skills they need to succeed in their role.
A common objection to this is, “What if I invest all of this time and money into training people, and they leave?” The counter to this objection is, “What if you don’t train them and they stay? How expensive is that going to be to your business?” We’ve all been customers of businesses whose staff were incompetent. As a customer, this is frustrating, but as an entrepreneur, it’s disastrous.
It leads to poor satisfaction levels, high churn rates, and lots of stress all around. So, while it’s simply good business to have competent, well- trained team members, to me, it goes further. I want to have a positive impact on customers, but I also want to positively impact the people who help make my entrepreneurial dreams a reality.
I want them to take away more than just a paycheck. I want their lives to be better by being associated with my business. I want them to take away skills and experiences they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.
When you create this kind of environment-where your team is constantly learning and being challenged they’ll do great work for you and won’t want to leave. They’ve likely experienced boring work environments and micromanaging “bossholes.” If what you’re offering is the opposite of this, they’ll want to be a part of it for the long haul. And if the day comes when they find a better opportunity or want to start their own venture, be generous. Help them in that rather than trying to hinder or hold them back. There’s nothing more satisfying than being mentioned in someone else’s success story.
Do this, and you’ll be a magnet for other hard-working, ambitious, and motivated people. You only need to be a jail when your team doesn’t want to be there, and hopefully, that’s not you and your business. If it is, I’d urge you to rethink your people strategy. The fish rots from the head down.
The One Thing
Objectives and key results (OKRS) are in vogue in many organisations as a way to measure employee effectiveness and conduct performance reviews.
Initially, I was enthusiastic about OKRs, believing they could modernise performance reviews and goal-setting. However, my excitement waned after learning about their origins, and attending a full-day OKR workshop with an executive team left me disillusioned. In theory, OKRs seem ideal, but in practice, they often succumb to bureaucracy, leading to increased complexity and reliance on costly consultants and HR interventions.
Here’s a much simpler way that won’t require countless meetings and lots of documentation. It comes from billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. When he was running PayPal, he insisted that every employee have only a single focus, and he would evaluate them only on that one thing. Not five priorities or ten areas of focus. Just one. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with that employee.
The most important benefit of this approach is that it forces focus on the highest-impact challenges of the organisation. Without it, employees tend to focus on easier and less valuable wins. The most important priorities are usually the most difficult or are ones that lack a clear solution. If you give an employee three priorities, most will gravitate towards the less valuable tasks with clearer paths to success.
There are two major objections to this measurement approach: firstly, the need to work on multiple different things, and secondly, it can have unintended consequences. It’s true that most team members need to do multiple things, but there’s usually one standout thing that, if they knocked it out of the park, would render their other priorities obsolete.
Often, their one thing may result from them doing their other things. For example, if an employee’s one thing is the number of qualified leads who book conversations with your sales team, then achieving that goal might involve other activities like improving the website or ad copy and so on.
Unintended consequences are real. During British rule in India, the British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. To combat this, it paid a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was successful-large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. You can guess what happened next. People began to breed cobras to claim the bounty, which made the problem worse.
Poorly thought-through metrics will create unintended consequences and perverse incentives. The metric you choose should be easy to measure and hard to game. It won’t be perfect at first, so you must periodically monitor, calibrate, and correct course as you get more and better information.
Measuring too many things is suffocating and time-consuming. I love the simplicity and focus the “one thing” metric gives you. It ensures that when you do performance reviews with your team, they will be focused, fun, and devoid of the usual bureaucracy. You can get on with real conversations about their performance and role.
What, When, Who
Because effective marketing is a process, not an event, think about what are the recurring tasks that are going to make up your marketing system? When will these tasks be done? Which ones will be daily, which will be weekly, and which will be monthly or quarterly? In addition to these, you need to account for event- triggered, one-off tasks.
Finally, who will be responsible for them? Some of these processes will be run by automation, some will be done by your team, and some need a combination of both. An easy way to visualise your entire marketing system is with a table that has three columns labeled What, When, and Who.
Here’s an example of what this could look like:
What: Reply to comments on all social media channels
When: Daily
Who: Valentina
What: Write and send weekly newsletters
When: Weekly
Who: Martina
What: Write and mail a handwritten thank you note
When: a patient makes a referral
Who: Levie
This “What, When, Who” table is designed to give you a high- level overview of your marketing system and the processes that form it. Your documented standard operating procedures provides more detail on how each task is done. Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Project Management software system will play an important role in triggering, running, or supporting many of these processes.
The Who column represents the owner of the task. Even though multiple people may have a hand in completing a task, who is responsible for it? This applies even when a task is performed by automation. For example, the CRM system can likely fully automate emailing customers to ask for a review. However, even automated systems can have malfunctions or changes that yield unexpected behavior. Ultimately, someone has to be responsible for ensuring each process gets done.
These processes and how they’re performed should be tied to each team member’s performance metric.
Thinking about your marketing as a process rather than an event is very powerful. This will create compounding returns over time. As your business grows, you’ll add more processes to your marketing system. This creates a virtuous cycle that keeps compounding at a faster and faster rate.
The Dead Man’s Switch
A dead man’s switch is a device designed to be triggered if its human operator becomes unresponsive. It can activate the brakes of a train if the driver is, or appears to be, incapacitated.
An extreme example was Russia’s “Dead Hand” program, a Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons control system that allowed for the automatic launch of nuclear missiles should all Russian leadership be killed.
The biggest bottleneck to your marketing success will be you. I’ve seen this scenario countless times, and I’ve also been this bottleneck to my team. A project or task gets stuck because it needs my review.
Depending on how much an entrepreneur likes to micromanage, this choke point can prevent something as small as a social media post from being published right through to stalling an important revenue- generating deal.
The business and marketing equivalent of a dead man’s switch is an excellent solution to this problem.
Unsurprisingly, one of the processes in my marketing system is regularly publishing content to our website, email list, and other media channels. My team does most of the work involved in making this happen. It then comes to me for review, final edits, and approval to publish. In the past, if I was traveling or busy with some high-priority project and couldn’t respond in a timely fashion, our marketing efforts would effectively stall. We unblocked this by establishing a dead man’s switch.
Now, new pieces of content sit in my queue, waiting for me to review them. If there’s no response from me after 48 hours, they automatically proceed to be published. This default-to-publish policy means that variations in my schedule don’t constrain my team’s efforts. Most of the time, I can and do review content prior to publication, but either way, I don’t become a bottleneck to the team. If the team produced work that was way off the mark, this system wouldn’t be viable. Our system works because of our detailed standard operating procedures, style guides, and team training.
Some Action Items For This Episode
- Double down on your strengths and staff your weaknesses.
- Work with each team member to identify their “one thing.” Regularly review and update it as necessary.
- Identify the tasks and processes where you are a bottleneck and implement a “dead man’s switch.”
We also leave the link to our “How Good Is Your Website?” quiz on the show note so you can do a 2 min quick check up to see how well your website is performing now and if you have a strong patient generation system for your website.
By answering these quiz questions, you’ll gain insights into the effectiveness of your website. If you’d like a comprehensive audit and a 360-degree overview of your website, please reach out for a discovery call. We’ll schedule a website audit and strategy session for you.
Ok that wraps up another episode of the OMD TV & podcast show.
If this was helpful to you, please subscribe to the OMD TV and Podcast Show so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please share this episode with your staff and colleagues.
If you want to learn more about Online Marketing For Doctors offers and how our team can help you generate more new patients and referring doctors via creating a high converting website for medical and healthcare practices, please reach out to us and book a 15-minute discovery call with us as I mentioned above. I’ll leave a link to it in the show notes below.
Thank you so much and hope to talk to you on a discovery call soon. 🥳
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