Episode 784: Differentiating Between an OM and a Personal Assistant

 Kiera breaks down the difference between these two positions that are game-changing in the best way. She talks about tips to hiring, what to consider for assigning tasks, and more.

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Transcript:

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0:00:05.6 Kiera Dent: Hey everyone, welcome to The Dental A Team Podcast. I'm your host Kiera Dent and I have this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner, and I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep, we don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental and I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams, grow VIP experiences, reduce stress and create A teams. Welcome to The Dental A Team podcast.

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0:00:50.3 KD: Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and oh, it's been a while. Today is car casting, I am actually headed to an office today and so I decided I've got a nice four-hour drive ahead of me today and thought, "What better use of time than to sit here and car-cast with all of you?" So for those of you new to the podcast, welcome. I'm Kiera Dent, I love dentistry, I love helping other people be less stressed and happier and car-casting is where on the road when I very first started Dental A Team, I used to travel about 265 days a year. And so with that, I did a lot of podcasting on the road. So when I'm podcasting on the road, I call that car-casting. And so for those of you that are new, just imagine me, I've got a microphone right now, I look ridiculous, driving down the freeway, I did... I am a little safer today than what I used to be, I used to drive a manual Audi S4 while I was also trying to car-cast and I upgraded, I still have my Audi, but today I decided to take our Tesla. That way it could drive for me and I would be a little bit safer car-casting. So don't worry all of you podcast listeners, I am safe, but truly thank you for being a part of the podcast family, because this podcast has been with me for so many years. I have done so many podcasts on the road and I'm just appreciative of all of you because this podcast has kept me awake many times on late-night drives.

0:02:18.0 KD: When we go into practices, just to give you a little behind the scenes glimpse of Dental A Team, a lot of times the consultants are kind of like cruise ships. And I know Tiffany has left an office late one night, arrived midnight 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, Dana, I think, arrived at 3:00 AM one morning due to delayed flights. And then we're usually in those offices for their morning huddles, so depending upon the office, I know I've flown East Coast. So going west to east, it's definitely a time zone change and I had an office start at 6:00 AM. So you better believe I was a little tired and groggy, but the consultants really when we do come into your office, we wanna give you guys maximum value, maximum feedback on your practice. And so we try really hard. And so this podcast has definitely kept me awake many times and kudos and thanks to all of you listening. Hopefully we've been able to go on some fun car trips with you, some good road tripping and just maybe even on your daily commutes to and from the practice. So that's just a little behind the scenes of how the consultants work when we come to your practice. We're usually there for a day and a half, we come in, we see your morning huddle, we're watching, observing, we're implementing things that we know will help your lives be easier.

0:03:24.5 KD: And then after that, what we do is we then do a whole team meeting with you, which is super fun. We always enjoy it, I have my little bag of tricks here today for the office where it's just fun. We get you guys out of your element, we have a lot of fun, we do some good team building. And then after that, what we do is we'll set goals together as a team, give everybody some action items that they'll work on for the next six weeks. And then we check in to see how did that go? What things did really, really well? What things might need some fine-tuning? Because all of us, I think, can change and improve for six weeks, that's pretty doable. And the things that we implement are always easy, I don't believe that things should be hard, I don't believe that teams like things that are hard, I don't believe that teams need to do things that are hard, I think let's make things change and more effective and efficient for everybody. So that way you have less stress, you're happier and you have a better patient and team experience. So that's what we do when we come to office. So I'm excited to go in to an office today and be able to help this practice alleviate their stress and really organize from a bird's eye view, and with someone who's been there, done that and done that successfully. So just a little behind the scenes, I know some of you have been interested, some of you are in our family.

0:04:30.8 KD: So if that resonates with you, if you want someone to come look behind the scenes, look into your practice, give you tangible feedback from people who have done it hundreds of times successfully, reach out [email protected]. Also, for those of you that are listening, this podcast, the goal of it is to bless the lives of millions. And so if this podcast has blessed your life in any way, positively impacted you, served you in any way, please go leave us that five-star review, because those five stars, those reviews really do help keep our podcast relevant. So when people are looking for new dental podcasts, your reviews, your subscribing, your downloads are the reason that we stay at the top of the list. So please do us all a favor, subscribe, download, share with someone, leave that review that way you keep us serving as many people as we possibly can. Alright, today's topic. I was thinking about this as I was preparing for today and the office I'm going to, I texted the doctor last night and I said, "Do you have a personal assistant?" And she said, "No, I've been dreaming of this and I've been... But I don't even know where to start." And of course that definitely spurred me thinking of a podcast for today, because I think so often doctors don't quite know when should you have a personal assistant versus an office manager? And when are you at that point? How does this even work?

0:05:43.6 KD: Because I do believe that personal assistants can be game-changing for practices. But I was trying to think of like, "What holds doctors back? What holds offices back?" And I genuinely could see it being, "Well, I already have an office manager, Kiera, what's the difference between an office manager and a personal assistant?" So I wanted to educate you on the difference between the two. And then if you do wanna hire a personal assistant, just some really good tips for that, things that they can do for you that would really benefit you and your practice. So an office manager, their job is to truly manage and oversee the practice. So kind of think of like a COO in an organization, no, they're not to that level, they don't need to have that much experience, they don't need to be corporate level, C-suite level, but really a COO of a business is the chief operations operator. So they're over all the operations of the business. So they are really the right-hand person to the doctor, so they should be looking at the business as a business, they should be looking at the practice... Don't guy, worry. Tesla is just having her heyday right now, everything's fine over here if you heard that beeping in the background. But that's what an office manager should be doing, an office manager should be looking and partnering with the dentist as the owner of the practice.

0:07:00.0 KD: So you're looking at the financials, you're managing the team, you're overseeing the operations of the practice, those types of things are what an office manager should be doing. So I say top to bottom, doctor is more clinical, office manager is more operations. So that's going to be every single piece of the practice, so from the billing to the collections, to the personnel, to the team meetings, to the one-on-one meetings, to all the different KPIs of the practice. So when I look at the KPIs of a practice, we're really looking at our overhead, we're looking at the profitability of the practice, we're looking at our month and year-to-date production and collections, we need to keep that at a 98% or higher. We also need to make sure that what we're producing is covering the cost of our overhead and expenses, meaning we need to make sure that it is, at least the goal is a 20% profit margin or a 50% overhead, pending upon how you wanna look at it. Both versions of math make sense, just depending upon how you and your practice want to look at that. They also need to be overseeing every single department. So the treatment coordinators, what are the case acceptance? The schedulers, what's our open rate on the schedule? Overseeing the billing department, making sure our A/R, our claims, our over 90, our over 60, our over 30, are all overseen.

0:08:18.0 KD: And then the hygienists, making sure hygienists are producing at least three times their pay on adjusted production, making sure dental assistants are all fully trained and can do every single procedure, that we have patients coming in and out on time. That our handoffs are well done, that the training of the team is really well done, and that the whole organization operationally is functioning, so making those protocols. That's a lot for an office manager, and so just kind of laying that out there, that is what is expected of office managers. And so office managers listening, if you're not doing those things, that's your job. And I understand that there are other people in the practice, so having lead hygienists delegating this to treatment coordinator schedulers, because an office manager truly cannot and should not be doing all of those things, but you need to be overseeing them and if there's a problem, you need to be fixing them. So that's the role of an office manager, you're really the right-hand to the doctor. Doctors, you're more overseeing the doctor calibrations, making sure our clinical skill set is there, helping guide the clinical team members as much as is required for us to be successful. That is what your position is to do. So it's a yin and yang, a clinical and an operational, that's an office manager's job.

0:09:28.6 KD: And then we delegate that down, we have KPI scorecards, following, checking and making sure that those metrics weekly and monthly are on track, and we're not missing them. And if we can truly make that work, fantastic, that's what you should be doing. So that's like just to give you guys that overview of what an office manager should be doing and if you don't have that, I know for quite a while, and office managers, I say this respectfully, I just didn't know what I should be doing as an office manager and hearing that list, I would have said, "I don't even know half that stuff." And then all the pieces that tie into all those metrics, I'm responsible for. And that's okay, because sometimes office managers are truly glorified treatment coordinators, sometimes they're glorified schedulers, sometimes they just have the title because of seniority and tenure. And again, this doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means let's really identify what an office manager is and then check to see who we are as an office manager, who the office manager is in our practice, are they doing these items? And if not, do we need to get training for them? Do we need to change the personality and position? Or do we need to hire somebody else? So those are just a few things to think about. And I really think for doctors when you're listening to this, it's hard sometimes to assess your management team because you think, "But this is my right-hand...

0:10:44.6 KD: And they've been with me for so long, Kiera." And I wanna say I'm not here to fire them, I never go into offices and fire. I'm just here to say your job as CEO of the business, think about yourself in corporate setting, your job is to make sure that you have right person, right seat. And if that office manager is not able to do these things, we either need to hire more support, change positions or hire somebody who really can do all of these tasks. So on that note, I want you guys to look and assess who is your office manager. So that's really what an office manager should be doing, they can be doing and then what you can be expecting of your office manager. Now, what's the difference of a personal assistant? Just like it says, a personal assistant does your personal things. And I think there's varying shades 'cause there's an executive assistant and then there's a personal assistant. So personal assistants, by definition, do your personal things, so, go get your dry cleaning, which I don't even know if people do dry cleaning, I surely don't. But they would go get your dry cleaning for you, they would help with your personal items, paying your bills, booking your travel, some people have personal assistants help them with buying food, things like that. So on that, maybe that's what you would have this personal assistant do.

0:11:55.8 KD: For me, when I hired a personal assistant, what I realized, and there's a good book for reference if you guys wanna listen to something a little bit more. It's 'The EOS Life' by Gino Wickman. So the traction series, Gino Wickman wrote this book and I really loved it because it takes the traction model for businesses, which I'm a huge fan of and it applies it to your personal life. And something he said in that book that really just resonated with me was "never do anything that's less than $100 work, $500 work". So Dentists, if you look at your production per hour, which if you don't know that number, it's a great metric that you should know, we love to get doctors at least to $500 an hour. At least that's a like bare minimum for me, $500 an hour means that that dentist alone should be producing on an eight-hour day $4,000 of production. Now, if you add your hygienist in, that's where you're going to get your $5,000, $6,000 days, that's a minimum number. I really strive, like I love doctors to be producing closer to $1,000 per hour, and that comes from having great block scheduling. Again, other things that office managers should be looking at, 'cause if our production is not where it needs to be, figuring out why and being able to fix that. Remember, office manager is really the operations within the practice, that's their job, all the pieces, all the operations, that's what they're overseeing and they should be responsible for all of that.

0:13:15.7 KD: Now, doctors, if you're producing $250 an hour, $300 an hour, $500 an hour, fantastic high five, I'm not here to critique that. What I'm here to say is, never do work that you could outsource for less than what you're producing. And so really thinking of, if we could hire somebody, same thing for office managers, if we could hire somebody who's less than that dollar amount that's us working at, "the top of our license", what would you be able to do for that? So for example, booking travel, could I hire somebody from college that's an intern or a college student for maybe $15, $20 an hour and they could book my travel, they could mow my lawn, they could take care of my bills, they could do those types of things and I wouldn't have to do that? That way I could be working on things that would cost me $1,000 to outsource, what types of jobs would those be? And so when you start to look at yourself from that point of view, we all think, I think we all grow up... And I know I grew up in a family where it was all hands on deck, everybody does everything. But as I've grown in business, that's not the most efficient way for business owners to operate. There are people that you can outsource to, there are people that can do it better than you can do, it's just you letting go of control, being willing to train and then really making sure that you're executing properly. So when I think about this, that's what a personal assistant, that's why you need a personal assistant.

0:14:39.0 KD: So all these tasks and a great way for you to do it is for you to look at it and say, "Okay, let me write down every single thing I do in a week, in a month, and let me look back. So a day, a week, a month, what are all those pieces that I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, week-to-week basis, and what of those things are maybe less than my dollar per hour production?" Office managers, you can also look at this too of how much are you paid? What are all the tasks and are there some of those tasks that maybe if we delegated to someone outsourcing it, we could pass that through? Now I will say delegation can result in lower quality, which is true. So like insurance verification, billing, things like that, I could outsource that for cheaper, but is it going to cause me more problems in the long run? That's a decision you have to make and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong, it just might mean that we haven't trained them. So remember, there's a level of control and accuracy versus a level of training and you have to be willing to decipher between the two of them. So for me, when I first did this exercise, I'm different than you guys, I did a lot of traveling. So a lot of my time was actually spent on booking travel, it took me a good couple of hours every week to book all my travel, to follow up with all of my offices, to send the forms to my offices and I thought, "Really, is this a technical thing that only Kiera can do?

0:16:00.0 KD: Only Kiera, a CEO of a company, can do?" And the answer is no, my little sister could do it, my mom could do it, several other people could do this job. So that's how I knew that these were tasks that I could delegate. So what I did and the way to do this, to look to see what could you maybe outsource to a personal assistant is look to see, write all your tasks down that you did over the last week. You can go back in your calendar, you can write everything down, just be honest with yourself, it's a really important thing for you to do and look to see what on all of those tasks did you have going on? Once you get that listed out, I go back through and you take a highlighter. And this is one thing about time blocking, we've talked about time journaling. So again, similar thing, but we're just doing it with a different lens today. So and if you haven't done this in a while, probably a really good time for you to time-journal, figure out where you're spending your time, every position in the practice if you want, and then let's see what could be shifted around, delegated, to make things a lot easier. So once we got that figured out, you then go back through, highlight only the things that you can do, only the things that you at the top of your license can do. Now be careful that you're not too critical and saying, "Well, I'm the only one who can do this right."

0:17:09.7 KD: It's not that I can do this right, it's that truly, if you guys were out for an entire month, nobody else in the entire organization could do this. For example, if you're the only doctor in the practice, you are the only one who can be doing dentistry, for me in my company, I'm the only one who has the vision, I'm the only one, literally no one else has the vision of Dental A Team. They don't know where I wanna take this, that's literally a job that only Kiera can do. So you've got to look at it, what are only tasks that you can do? I used to think I was the only one that could do the podcast, well, you guys have heard, we've got the consultants that are helping on that. But I do the bulk of the podcasting, I do the guest podcasting and just because I could delegate that in the future, maybe I'm not ready to. So make sure it's something where if, yes I could delegate it out, still highlight it, so I like to highlight in three different ones. And if it helps you, you could kind of do a red, yellow, green model. So red would be only things for you, like that's a stoplight only you can do. Yellow are like the podcast, could I delegate that out? Potentially, but it's not an easy thing to delegate yet. I don't quite know and I don't even know if there's people that could do that. And then green are the green ready-to-go, I could delegate this to any person.

0:18:19.6 KD: So if you really set it up a red, yellow, green, when you're highlighting, then you're able to quickly assess what are my reds that are my musts? What are the yellows that I would like to at some point? And what are my greens that absolutely 100% I could delegate today? Once you get that list built, or even tasks in your head, things that just suck the life out of you is also another really good way to look at this. Because if tasks are sucking the life out of you, you might be good at it, but you don't enjoy it. And as CEOs, the number-one thing you have to protect is your time, and so protecting your time. What are those tasks? What are the things that honestly, if you never had to do it again, you would be so much happier? Those are also green-light tasks, even if there may be yellow or red, we've gotta find a way to delegate those in the next three months would be my recommendation. So then you've got your list. And that's really where a personal assistant kicks in, this is different than an office manager. Maybe some of those tasks could go to an office manager, be careful of the catch that I hear a lot of people saying, they're like, "But, Kiera my office manager is still so stressed out." Well, odds are your office manager probably has a lot of tasks that they could delegate, therefore, don't be afraid of it.

0:19:26.6 KD: The goal is let's just find the list right now and we'll find the solution in the future. Okay? So we're building the list now, we're going to find the solution and the answer in the future. Once we get that dialed in, you're then looking for that personal assistant, someone who could book the trips for you, who could send the follow-up emails for you. I know I've got some doctors who have personal assistants go through their emails for them, if you're getting hundreds of emails, have somebody go through that. And I know you're freaking out right now and saying, "But Kiera, I can't have people reading my personal emails." Don't worry, I'm gonna get to that in a second, I'm just teaching you how to do this first. So once you get that list built, look to see, alright, "Could I pass these things off?" For me, the biggest time piece was honestly booking travel and following up with all of my clients. I had a lot of clients back in the day, I had about 50 clients and I really could not keep up with them successfully. And so once I realized and identified that, I said, "Okay, I'm now gonna place an ad." So really the next step was placing an ad. I knew at least a couple of tasks that if I pass those off would free me up about five hours a week, I then was able to take that posted out exactly what I needed and I hired my first personal assistant. I was terrified, I felt too like posh for this, it felt snooty, it felt stuck up.

0:20:43.0 KD: I'll tell you, it was game-changing for me, literally life-changing, because now I had somebody doing all these little menial tasks that were taking up so much time, they loved doing these tasks and I was able to do tasks that I genuinely loved and enjoyed and that I was really good at. So it freed me up, I didn't enjoy booking travel, could I do it? And was I good at it? Yes, but it was such a time suck, I didn't want to do it anymore. So your biggest goal in all of this to hire a personal assistant are to find the one, two, three, four, five items that either suck the time and that are easy or suck the life that we could pass, okay? So then you place ads. We do have some sample ads for you really truly, I have found that my personal assistant ad is the number-one applied-for job. What I'm looking for on a DiSC profile or a Culture Index is I want someone who has... They need to be faster paced to fit my personality, if your personality is not fast paced, you might want someone a little slower paced. You want them to match your pace as the person hiring this personal assistant, you want them to be more like you, but complimentary to you. So I know one of my weakest skills is that I just don't care for details, I don't enjoy it, I'll do it if I have to, but really, if I didn't have to do the minutiae of building all the pieces, I don't want to do that. So I'm gonna look for someone who's got a lot of details, faster paced and truly I want someone...

0:22:08.7 KD: So for me, my standard, I've hired several, I've hired about five personal assistants in my career, and usually what happens is my personal assistants, they grow up and they love me and they're just so driven and they wanna go on and do more in the company. So Kaylee Taylor, I'm sure you guys remember her, those who've been on the podcast for a while, Kaylee even did an episode on the podcast. But Kaylee ended up going, she was in school when I hired her and she is now an incredible elementary school teacher, I still see her often. I've had a few others and they've moved or they had babies at the time when I hired them and then their kids got older. Shelbi Stevens now is my personal assistant, but as you guys know, Shelbi wears many hats and probably will be graduating from being my assistant. But the biggest thing I look for, the ones that I've had the most success with are, they have a massive drive for growth that's why they leave me. So it's okay, but they're driven for growth, they also super organized, have high attention to detail and this has been the key piece for me, they genuinely love people. So Kaylee and Shelbi, I'll use those examples since you guys as the guests know them the most. They're the two that have been with me the longest, really, really, really have been shining examples of this. Both of them come from service industries prior to me hiring them, Shelbi was a waitress.

0:23:26.4 KD: So you think about it, she can be fast paced, high attention to detail and loves people. So on that, I knew when Shelbi told me she was a waitress, she probably would be a really good assistant, Shelbi also is a little bit more quiet of a personality, I want that, I don't want the waitress who's outgoing, bubbly, they're gonna be my best friend and we're never going to get anything done. I want the quieter one, the one who has high attention to detail, the one who I know would be loyal to the bone. So if you're looking for personalities, I'm looking for that steady eddy, fast paced, loyal-to-the-bone personality is who I want for my personal assistant. These people you write an ad directly to them, you wanna write to that person of, "do you love to be like over high-level CEOs constantly growing? Do you have a knack for being organized beyond? Or is your calendar color coded so that way nothing ever gets missed? Do you love a challenge? Are you up for being able to be up at 6:00 AM and going to bed at 10:00 PM to make sure that your CEO has everything checked off, buttoned up, tailored?

0:24:27.0 KD: Do you have a love for people where you genuinely live to serve?" That's the person I wanna hire because they are going to make sure that they will take every single bullet for you and they will go in front of every person who's in front of you and tell them they're not allowed to book in your schedule, or they're not allowed to do this. Or they'll take the initiative to respond to your emails sounding just like you. Shelbi and Kaylee both genuinely take the initiative to make my life easy, Shelbi realized when I did my coaching calls that she could make my schedule so much easier for me if she just would add all these different little pieces. I didn't ask her to do it, I didn't tell her to do it, Shelbi genuinely figured out how could she make my life easier and she did it. People will come and ask to schedule in my schedule and Shelbi will say, "Absolutely not, Kiera can't do that." Shelbi will stand in front of any obstacle that comes in front of me and she will protect me like I am her child and she's a mama bear and that's what you want in a personal assistant. So when you're interviewing people you can also have them do little quizzes and Shelbi has a desire. You guys let us know if you'd like this, email us in [email protected] and say "Shelbi make this." Shelbi wanted to make a personal assistant little training module, because what we do is we actually quiz people when they're coming in.

0:25:40.7 KD: We have them book an event for us, we have them book a sample travel, we have them go do a research project. All the things that someone would be doing in our company for us and we see how they're going to operate. Then we put them on hard challenges, we ask them questions, "What would you do in this instance? What would you do in that?" Because everybody actually wants to be a personal assistant, it's a pretty easy job to hire, but I wanna make sure I have the right one. An executive assistant, they've got to know how to handle a high-powered CEO who has busy schedules, who's not good at delegating and forces you to delegate, follows up with you, is constantly hounding you to get things done, that's what you need for a personal assistant. So dentists often get kind of weird because like, "Well, isn't that my office manager?" And the answer is yes it can be, your office manager, to a certain point, can definitely do these things and that used to be my role within an office when I was an office manager. But you get to a point as CEOs where there's a lot of other things, when you're going to a bunch of CE travel, when you're having team meetings and events, when you're working on projects that need to be done. If you have a secondary business, all those things that take up your time that's where you really wanna bring in this personal assistant. So hopefully that helps you guys see the differentiators between office manager and personal assistant.

0:26:50.0 KD: How to figure out what you need to delegate to each person. How then to write the ad, quizzes and questions to ask them for. And again like I said Shelbi does wanna build this, who knows, you guys need to send her an email and tell her you want this and then we'll see what happens. But really we do have quite a few samples, so if you want some samples or need some help on this email us [email protected]. A lot of our clients that we work with, I love being able to go through their schedule and being the outside voice that says, "I know you wanna hold on to this but this doesn't bring you fire into your life, you don't enjoy this. This is someone we need to hire and let's plan in the next one to two years to hire this person. Let's start grooming it, let's start creating the protocol so you can pass these items off." Because oftentimes we as CEOs don't see ourselves as a CEO, but we see ourselves as self-employed rather a business owner and flipping that script pulling that from one of our awesome doctors he said that, and I think it's a beautiful mindset, you'll start to realize who do you need to hire, what do you need to do to delegate so that way you're constantly working at the top of your license on the problems that light you up, invigorate your life and make it to where you genuinely are so happy every day in your work. You guys if you need help with this reach out at [email protected].

0:28:02.0 KD: Hopefully that was able to help you guys figure out the difference between an office manager and a personal assistant and when you need both of them. And as always I'm here for you, I'm cheering you on and as always thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team podcast.

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0:28:15.0 KD: And that wraps it up for another episode of the Dental A Team podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.

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