The Secrets To Inevitable Growth With Jim Stoker, PT

Business goals usually look and sound good when written on a piece of paper or hung in the office, but most of the time, they are easier said than done. By putting an effective workplace culture in place, these goals can be brought nearer to reality. Nathan Shields talks to Jim Stoker, PT, advisor for 8150 Advisors, about the importance of nurturing employee relationships, frequent company meetings, and integrating accountability in reaching every goal laid out for the success of a business. Jim also talks about going beyond the usual team-building strategies, emphasizing the one thing every leader is afraid to explore – challenging your goals and seeing if they are truly worth the shot.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Secrets To Inevitable Growth With Jim Stoker, PT

I’ve got Jim Stoker, an advisor with 8150 Advisors, and also a past partner with Clemson Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. I came across Jim because he wrote an article in the November 2020 issue of Impact Magazine, talking about how to review past goals, adjust your expectations, and create goals for the upcoming year. It’s a good time to reassess, adjust and projecting the plan for 2021. Thanks for coming on, Jim. I appreciate it.

Nathan, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

I know you’ve got plenty of experience to draw from, and I’ll reference the article as we go through a bit because he hits some great topics in terms of assessing and creating goals for the future. Tell us first a bit about yourself, your professional experience and what got you to where you are as an advisor.

I’m a physical therapist. I’ve been practicing for several years. I joined Clemson Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation when we had just three offices. Over the years, we grew from three offices to 30. That culminated in August of 2016. We were acquired by ATI Physical Therapy. I continued to serve with ATI Physical Therapy for South Carolina, overseeing the operation of 60 clinics for about three years. During that time, what shaped my appreciation for planning, goal setting, and even more specifically, strategic planning was a lot of my involvement with our state association, the South Carolina Physical Therapy Association. I have served as the Vice President, President, Legislative Chair, Reimbursement Chair, many roles with our PT association. In one of those roles, we completed a strategic plan a number of years ago. That was my first introduction to strategic planning and goal setting, and how that’s such an important part of any organization.

What’s interesting in the way you approached it in the article is that you started by reassessing your goals from the previous year. I don’t think that’s a step that a lot of us take. Me as a coach, sometimes that’s a step I overlook, like how did we do in this past year? We’ll think generally we hit some targets and whatnot and things were great, but we focused a little bit more on the ideal scene going forward and what we want to hit. Tell us a bit about what you recommend in terms of reassessing the past. Do you spend a lot of time on that? How much energy do you put into it?

You have to be willing to be objective and self-critical to look at the past and be honest about what did we do well, but at the same time, what could we have done better? Hindsight is 2020, so there is some knowledge to be gained from looking at the past, and take an opportunity to say, “Where did we fail? Where could we have done better? What would we like to do better in the future, and how would that translate to improving value for your company or for your organization?” Many times, acknowledging your missteps can teach you where to do better in the future and what you may want to avoid.

I liked that you referenced the willingness to look at some of those KPIs and assess them against not only progress in your own company but against national benchmarks. Nowadays, you can find those benchmarks here and there. They’re more easily available to the PT industry than they used to be. It’s nice to say, “Our arrival rate improved. We got to where we wanted it to be.” How did it compare nationally and what should be expected? That gives you a better sense of where you truly stand.

A shameless plug for the Private Practice Section that I’ve been a member of for years and have benefited from the knowledge of that group and the network that provides. The Private Practice Section published some benchmarking studies. We didn’t have those several years ago, but many times it can be difficult to look beyond the thought that patients love me and like me. Unfortunately, there’s more to business success than patients like me, and they recommend me to their friends. It’s having a standard but appreciating there are significant regional differences within those national standards. Something as simple as revenue per visit, then the KPI that people look at. If you delve into that, we understand there’s a significant variance in the geographic price index that determines the Medicare fee schedule. There are some variations you have to appreciate per region. You can drill down to your practice setting in your region and compare it to some of that normative data. It is a beneficial exercise.

I came across an article that yes, it’s a worthy exercise to consider why we got the numbers that we got. Sometimes our perspective can be a little bit tinted, but more importantly than looking forward is, how do we improve? How do we get to another level? How do we correct some of the missteps that we made prior and move forward in that direction? That starts a different conversation rather than looking backward and saying, “Why?” Yes, that’s a worthy exercise. There was this, that, and the other, but “how” then generate some more forward-thinking. That was the takeaway message from the article that I was reading. It was focused on how and what we need to do going forward to those changes. As you’re looking from the past, how do you then shift to looking towards the future as an advisor?

Looking past you essentially helps you determine where you are. You’re focusing on where do we want to go and how are we going to get there? How do you bridge the gap? One of my colleagues at 8150 Advisors is Steve Stalzer. We were both passionate about our belief in the benefits of strategic planning. Strategic planning can look and feel different for many different organizations. If you’re a one-person practice, if you’re a large practice, or if you’re a hospital department, there are a lot of different moving parts. The basic framework of strategic planning provides the necessary steps to objectively address the questions you outlined. You start with the strengths and weaknesses of your own organization.

This whole process requires honesty and the ability to be self-critical. You identify your own strengths and weaknesses. Where are we good? Where are we not good? Where can we improve? You then expand that strategic planning process to an internal plan, internal assessment, and then external. Most people can have the ability to control and influence their internal environment, much more than you can your external environment. There has to be a willingness to commit to the plan. Once you decide, these are the obstacles. What is it going to take to overcome these obstacles? That’s where you use the strategic planning process to drill down to initiatives and action items that are going to take to address each obstacle to move you towards the goals you want to achieve.

As you’re doing something like this, and you’re referencing the SWOT analysis, do you start with that ideal scene first like what I want my clinic to look like and some of the numbers I want to see at the end of 2021? Do you do a SWOT analysis before that or does it matter?

It does matter. I mentioned to Steve, years ago, I was one of those individuals that felt a mission statement and a vision statement was mostly fluff. It was something that looked good on a piece of paper and it felt good. It wasn’t until years later that I completed this type of process with our state association, and then went for our own company that I did appreciate how important mission and vision statement is. It does drive your goal setting. You start with your mission and vision statement and then determine what our overarching goals are. Do we want to expand our clinics from 1 to 3 in the next year? Do we want to go from 3 to 5? Is it a goal-setting just for your clinic? It improves aspects of that clinic. Is it a business goal or revenue bottom line? Do you have a philanthropic goal of community engagement?

A lot of people only think of business, which is important, but there are other worthy goals that may not be directly tied to your bottom line. I like to think of it as start with an agreed-upon mission and vision statement that helps you drive your overarching goals, and then you drill down. You start the big picture and drill down to the details through the specific goals. What are the specific KPI goals that allow us to achieve the overarching goals? What obstacles are in place, what initiatives, tasks, and specific action items do we need to take to achieve those goals? It was going from the big picture to small detail.

I love that you brought up that it’s more than the clinical stuff because we’re talking to individual and independent business owners here. In my experience, and maybe you’ve come across this as an advisor, I’ve had clients come to me and say, “What should my next steps be? Where should I go next?” I can’t answer that for them. Much of these things originate from what the owner or the partners in that owners want to achieve. You have to be clear and figure that out first because not all of it is about clinical growth, financial goals, you name it. Some of it is maybe you don’t want to treat 40 hours a week anymore, or you want to go to part-time treating or not treating at all. You want the freedom to explore a hobby, or there’s a household revenue goal that you have for your household, and your business needs to create 100% of that, 75% or whatever. Some of these overarching goals stem from our personal and household goals that we need to be a bit clearer on as well.

When you have partners in a business, the more partners you have, the more potential obstacles. You have different personalities and characteristics, and those can potentially lead to different goals. One of the things that were a challenge for us that we do ask when engaging a client that has more than one owner is, is the leadership aligned with her goals? Many times, they’re not. Without question, the personal goals of the owners directly impact the goals of the business. Business goal achievement is directly tied to an owner’s personal goals. You do need to have that question. You need to have an agreement among the leadership of what are the goals together. You can’t have two people pulling in two different directions. Many times, you have that down South here in the Bible Belt, we call that the Come to Jesus meeting place. You’ve got to get the leadership and ownership on the same page in agreement with, “This is our goals. This is where we’re headed.” If you don’t have alignment at the top, you’re going to struggle to have alignment moving forward with the rest of the team.

That even goes so far as alignment with your spouse or significant other that might be a significant part of the business because there are some spouses that are a part of the business.

We recommend if a spouse is legally part of the business, potentially not officially part of the business. Input from all influencing factors is important.

What I thought was interesting in your article that I hadn’t considered so much, as you look at these goals for the upcoming future, you go so far as to consider the ROI of change. Tell me a bit about that and your thought processes regarding the ROI of change and going past more than the goal setting, but what it’s going to take to achieve that goal and considering if that goal is worth it.

As you go through the planning process, something might look nice, fun and pretty on paper, and it might feel good. You might determine as you drill down to the individual tasks and action items that are required to achieve that goal. You may find out it is going to take a Herculean effort to move the needle a bit. When we talk about the return on investment as you vet the various goals, you’ll want to turn and say, “How much a difference is that going to make?” I’ll give you a specific example. If a particular company looks at a common KPI of visits per day, I don’t think you can meet a physical therapist in outpatient work that doesn’t talk about how many people do you see a day.

If we move the average visits per day from 10 to 10.4 or 10.5, is it clinically relevant? Are we able to maintain the commitment to quality that we always have? You answer all those questions, and they say, “Yes. It’s doable. It’s reasonable. It’s a goal.” What’s the monetary return on that? You can objectively put a dollar amount. From January 1 to December 31st, if we’re able to achieve a 0.5 increase, or maybe there’s a percentage increase, you know your revenue per visit and your expenses, and you put that number on top of it. You know exactly how much value you’re creating for your entire company and your organization.

That makes me think about some clients who might say, “I want to double my gross revenues this year.” That’s nice and good, but it is also important to recognize doubling your gross revenues means doubling your number of visits. Do you have the capacity to do that? Do you have the square footage? Do you recognize the staffing that it’s going to take to double your revenue? Do you have it in your marketing budget to increase your marketing spend to get double the new patients? There are other things you can do to improve the efficiency and productivity of your clinic that can get you a bit more business, 10% to 20% better if you short things up. You’re talking about a large investment. It’s worthy to consider an exercise in which you’re looking at not just the goal but also what it takes to get there. Is it feasible? Is it realistic? Do you have the capacity to do that?

That’s the process we vet with clients about. If someone suggested that goal, “I want to double my gross revenue,” we’re going to ask the difficult questions of, “Is gross revenue the best goal that measures value for a company? Is it net revenue?” If you focus on net revenue, you’re acknowledging both sides of the business equation of income and expense. You drill down to where that can come from. How much of it are internal efficiencies through visits, appropriate charging, clinical efficiency, front office efficiency? Are we losing revenue because of authorizations or denials on treatment? Those are efficiencies you can create internally. How much is going to come from internal factors that we can control? How much potentially needs to come externally? How many more new patients are we going to have to generate? Do we have physical space? Do we have the staff? Can we recruit the staff? How long does it take to recruit and hire and bring someone on board? That would be an example of a large overarching goal that would have many sub-goals that would come for different aspects of the company to try to achieve.

I love the drill down to maybe focus a bit more on net revenues. See how that affects your business a bit better. I love the way that you redirect a little bit there. I also liked how you talked about how does that change occurs with the team that you currently have because then you further go on to talking about change management. Many of us as entrepreneurs have grandiose ideas and visions, “We’re going to hit the arrival rate. We’re going to improve it. It’s going to be a 95% arrival rate this year. Let’s go. Here it is, team. We’re going to push.” A month later, “What did we talk about last month?” There’s a lot of energy and spark at the beginning. How do we get a change in management to occur?

You described the mistake I’ve made more times than I care to admit. It’s multi-factorial. There are many moving parts. I do believe that so much of your planning success begins with the culture that you have. There’s so much at the end overall industries about how culture is important in an organization. At one point in time when I was more black and white, science-based, and right out of school and focused on clinical aspects. I didn’t appreciate that as much as I do now. I learned that the hard way. To truly have a culture that will accept change, accept challenges, and focus on goals and improvement is paramount to the success of any plan.

That’s part of the looking back process that you start initially. You answer the difficult questions about what culture is in place now. That involves communication style, frequency of meetings, are you a top-down culture? Do the owners decree, “This is how it’s going to be. Do it my way. This is how we do it?” Do you have a culture of engaging your staff and your leaders, and empowering them to be part of the problem-solvers and decision-makers? You have to understand the environment in which you are going to implement the plan. That’s part of determining what obstacles are in place, not just physical obstacles, but environmental obstacles, and how does the team function?

I’m glad that you took it in that direction. Was it Peter Drucker or was it Brené Brown that said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast?”

That was Mr. Drucker.

She quoted it though in her book, Daring Greatly. You could have many plans and ideas, but if your team isn’t willing and isn’t prepared in a place of reception from what you’re bringing down from the mountain per se, then it’s going to fall flat. If someone is reading this and they’re like, “I don’t know if I have that kind of team,” or “I need to work on my culture,” would you recommend they start improving their culture first before hitting some of these KPIs?

I do because it will be part of the entire plan. If an owner believes that and they acknowledged that that is an obstacle, we’re going to help them create initiatives and action items to overcome that obstacle that is going to be occurring in concert with your other goals and your other action items. It boils down to leadership development. Developing leaders and identifying the champions may not be owners. That’s going to differ greatly between the size of the organizations. If you have one clinic, that’s three FTEs versus one clinic that’s ten FTEs, versus 3, 5 to 10 clinics. You’re identifying those champions that are going to help foster change. You need to begin with one level of leadership training, maybe it’s two levels of leadership training.

When you were following the leadership training, you’re investing in your team. You’re communicating with your team. During that process, they become part of the team. That is building the culture. They are appreciative of the development in themselves. They see that there’s more to this process than simply showing up at 8:00, seeing ten patients and going home. You’re part of the bigger picture. As you include them in the process, you provide transparent communication. They begin to appreciate the bigger picture, and then now being able to implement goals that impact the larger picture, which is the organization is much easier to achieve.

I talk to clients about leadership development. The limitations of the clinic are the limitations of the owner. If they are unwilling to delegate, train and develop these leaders, then the clinic will expand to the limits of that owner’s time and capabilities, and also will mimic the weaknesses and strengths of that owner. Whereas you can be a much more well-rounded business. You can expand and grow if you expand that leadership team. When I bring that up to owners when I’m on a conference call, I get the deer in the headlights sensation because they don’t know where to start. I don’t know what you’d tell your clients, but I’m telling them to do what you did. If there are books that were influential for you, invite them to read some of those books and discuss what you learned.

If there was a consultant or a group or a training program that you went through personally for management training, invest in particular team members to take that same training or follow your path. You don’t have to recreate the wheel. I’m sure there are companies out there that can provide management training for you. If you want to start from scratch, do some of the same things you did, and then give them morsels of leadership when it comes to leading out on a team meeting. If there’s a charity that you want to endorse, let them start the toy drive or the canned food drive. Get that going and get everyone involved instead of you doing yourself as the owner. Those are opportunities for leadership and growth that you’re talking about and can help with the culture.

I’m a firm believer that step one is getting to know your team. All those great examples that you mentioned may not apply to clinician number one versus clinician number two. Joe Brown is going to have a different skillset, characteristics, and value system than Jill Smith. In order to understand how to communicate and how to connect with your entire team, you need to understand and get to know the team members. I’m an old broken-down athlete myself. I’m an old basketball athlete with two old knee surgeries back in the ‘80s. Thank goodness they don’t do those procedures anymore.

When I’m talking with folks, I equate to being a coach of a team. There are team members that responded to grabbing your face mask and physically challenging someone, versus your teammates that they more respond to put your arm around them, support them, ask them what they need and be more of a friend. It’s one example that many people relate to having play sports throughout the years. Your various team members are going to communicate differently. They’re going to absorb knowledge differently, and they’re going to respond to challenge differently. Learning how to address and communicate with each team member will help you build that culture. That also develops trust because as you’re getting to know your staff, you’re developing trust.

I was talking to another client about creating culture. It’s something that owners might think comes naturally, thus there’s nothing special about it. As he’s developing and writing out policy and procedure, I told him, “It’s as important to be intentional and write out policy and procedure to generate your culture.” That sparked something in him. When we think about culture, we might think it happens naturally because it comes from us who are the leaders, and we generate the initial culture. If we want a certain culture, there are things that we can do intentionally with our clinics to generate more “culture.” You mentioned meetings on a regular basis, how those go, what you highlight, and how you address and communicate.

What I was talking about with him is he enjoyed a lot of crosstalk in the clinic between providers and patients, and patients with other patients. What are some of those things you can do to generate crosstalk? Whether that’s a TV in the clinic, watch certain game shows or a sporting event, or a whiteboard that has a nice saying or a trivia. Some of those things can be intentional to generate culture. I’m assuming you would agree that it’s almost as important to have things that do generate that culture in the clinic, as it is to make sure people are wearing their name tags and coming in on time.

I’ll give a lot of credit to one of my former partners and mentor Skip Hunter. Skip Hunter was a PT and athletic trainer, one of the more fun individuals that you’ll ever meet. He said from day one when I started as a staff therapist, “The most important piece of equipment we had in the physical therapy gym was the radio.” Having the radio on the created conversation. It created much of the culture that you described. It creates an environment that is inviting that’s professional but relaxed. That was the culture that we chose. That might not be the appropriate culture for everyone. Everyone has to choose theirs. We were in an orthopedic sports medicine environment that did encourage communication and cross-talking between clinicians and patients.

One example of how we encourage that, we felt it was important and best for the patient that they get to know other team members on day one. It’s important for our clinic to be available to the patient at their most convenient time. If they have a stringent schedule and they need to be there at 4:30, we all know how popular that 4:00, 5:00 appointment is. I can’t see everybody at that one time. On day one of the evaluation, before that patient leaves the clinic, I’m going to put my arm around them and we’ll introduce them to at least two if not three of my team members. I tell them their name, have them wave and introduce them. I’m going to talk up my team members. I have known this person for 10 years, 5 years, they are one of the best shoulder specialists you can have. We worked together much. When the opportunity arises that is in the patient’s best interest that they need to see a team member, it is a seamless transition. It creates that team environment and culture in the clinic. That’s one example of something that we emphasize that I felt helped greatly.

This conversation has gone in a different direction than I thought it would go. I thought we were going to talk about some KPIs, what the important ones are, and how we need to do that, but we ended up talking about culture and the importance of it, and I’m glad we did.

That’s the mechanism that allows you to pursue the goals that you set, the KPIs. To jump back to our initial topic, the planning process allows you to drill down to the KPIs that you believe are most meaningful and are going to have the greatest impact on your organization. At the same time, it also helps you stay focused and know when to say “no.” You can’t do everything all the time. If everyone on the team has agreed that these are the goals, these are the KPIs we’re focused on, and we’re not going to get sidetracked with the latest and greatest idea over here. This is what we’re focused on, and this is where we’re going to work towards in that alignment. The culture that we enjoy talking about fosters the ability to work towards those common goals.

As you have a team and a culture like that, then you can say, “We’re doing our patients a disservice because only 20% of our new patients are completing their full plans of care.” The team is going to recognize. You talked about why that’s an important statistic that we need to measure and how it affects our patients in our business. You get their buy-in and a sense of urgency, and then you work together. You can generate a plan as the owner, but as you start talking about it and get their feedback and input. We talked about how we’re going to measure this and see for making growth and progress towards our goals.

When you have that culture that tends to stay in place and setting up some structure from the ownership side and being intentional about, “We’re going to measure it at this stage. We’re going to measure it the next month. We’re going to address it at this meeting. We’re going to see how we’re doing, and we’re going to have this conversation.” Having that structured implementation and a strategic plan on a solid culture keeps those statistics in front of mind, then you can see some real progress and change.

We enjoy talking about culture. In general, when you talk about culture, you start with the fun part and about the fun aspect of culture. There’s a significant business professional aspect to culture. That’s accountability. Accountability has to be part of your culture. Your entire staff needs to be aware of expectations beyond the only time and your patients like you. The expectations of every third Tuesday of the month, we’re having a staff meeting and we’re going to review the prior month. Every Monday at 12:30, we’re going to have a fifteen-minute huddle to review our KPIs from the previous week. We do that every week. That’s what we do. That’s part of our culture. We’re open and honest about, “My KPI of arrival rates slipped last week. Why in the world did it do that? What I could have done differently?” That conversation quickly expands to, “How can we as a team help each other manage?”

I had this conversation all the time. If you’ve worked in a clinic, your schedule never happens the way it looks at 8:00 in the morning. You get your schedule, and you see it’s nice, and however often you schedule it, be it every hour, every 30 minutes, every 45 minutes, whatever you do, it never happens the way it looks. Things go haywire, people show up late or they cancel. That’s where that culture of teamwork helps you achieve efficiencies that help drive those goals. The professional business aspects of culture boil down to accountability and the frequency and follow up. Everybody has these great either end of your meetings or beginning of your meetings, “This what we’ll do next year.” A month later, everybody’s forgotten about it. The problem is you have to engrain accountability into your culture, so it does stay top of mind.

Meetings are a huge part of that. There are many clients that I talked to that don’t have regular meetings with their team and with their leadership team to expand it out, or even with their billers. They should have meetings with their billers. It’s in those meetings that you have the opportunity to maintain traction towards the goals and you take that. What we’re talking about is a year-end projection, and you break it down by months and like, “How did we do in the past month? What are we going to do this next month to improve that? This is where we are, guys.” That meeting rhythm is important to the growth and acceleration and progress of the company. I love that you shared that. When we think about culture, sometimes it’s about the fields, the atmosphere, the parties and how we engage with people, but there is a business culture that’s also a sub-part of culture. That business culture involves regular team meetings, one-on-one meetings, and how we act and perform and how we hold accountable. I love that you brought that part of it.

That made me think of one of the obstacles. It’s common that many times impedes the ability to have frequent meetings is accessibility and visibility to your KPIs. One thing we talk about with offices is, what’s your visibility? How can you extract information from your system? Can you drill down to the individual clinician? How frequently can you calculate the arrival rate? Can you calculate visits per day for a clinician? It is common in any team and industry, if you put a handful of teams of individuals together and there’s a team, you’re going to have high performers. You’re going to have middle of the road, and you’re going to have those folks that you have to bring along. That directly impacts how you coach and what you do.

For example, you have a clinic and you believe they’re a little bit low on arrival rate. “We can do better.” If you address that clinic as a team, say, they’re five clinicians. You’re addressing the team and challenge them, “This is what we need to do.” If you never drill down and see the details behind that number, you may see that you have three that are 98% knocking it out and they love it. There’s one person that may be at 82% or 80% bringing down that number a bit. You’re spinning your wheels because your high performers believe you are lumping them into the problem when they’re not. Visibility to the KPIs and to the numbers, and correctly identifying where the opportunity is, and then addressing the opportunity as a challenge, but also thanking your high performers. Don’t lump your high performers into the problem or the challenge. Thank them and then incorporate them into how they can impact, influence, and potentially lead the other folks that need some support.

I love talking to owners about their accessibility to numbers, and can they get the statistics that they need. Many EMRs aren’t that capable, unfortunately. Some of them are behind the curve, but to get that down to an individual practitioner level is huge. You could be cracking the whip on your whole team like, “We’re trying to get to 92% arrival rate and we’re stuck at 90%. What’s going on?” The high performers are like, “I don’t know. What more do you want me to do.” You shouldn’t be cracking the whip on the team but drilling down to that individual provider. It’s equally important that they are capable of being able to track and find their own individual numbers so that they can see what their scorecard is. There might be only 1, 2 or 3 KPIs that you assess some of your providers on, but getting them to know the system well enough that they can see their own numbers can be labeled, so they can see how well they’re performing.

Accessibility and visibility, and then understanding which ones. Not to get lost in the big picture because you can be overwhelmed with too much. That’s where the focus of what we are working on is important. Something that gave me another thought is that you use the word intentional. One of the more common obstacles that I experienced and that I hear from many owners is the inability and the unwillingness to sacrifice treatment time or clinical time to designated time to work on the business. If you’re expecting accountability, the frequency of the meetings with your staff, the owner has to set that standard. They need to schedule time weekly, be it 1 or 2 hours, be it in the afternoon, whatever it may be that’s appropriate for that size of the organization. It needs to be scheduled, uninterrupted, and standardized. What am I doing with this time? Where do I start? Where do I finish? What am I going to focus on? The shotgun approach. I have learned from my mistakes many times. Life became easier when I followed that mantra and learned from many other people.

Do you find that it’s hard to convince some owners to take away productive time and hours from the clinic to have a meeting? I do. I’m wondering what you do to change their minds or convince them otherwise. What do you say?

That goes back to calculating your return on investment. If you’re saying, “If we move these visits per day,” or whatever KPI is, this percentage point over the period of time, the cumulative effect of doing that compared to one visit once a day and you compare the time. You do the math. Easily, you see if you improve a KPI over the course of the team. You compare those two. It’s easy to see the benefit of creating long-term efficiencies versus squeezing that one patient in that one day.

I have to challenge the clients to do some of the meetings first. They understand the reasons why they’re doing it because it’s going to benefit them and it’s going to get the team moving in the right direction. It’s not until after a few meetings and their team members are saying, “I don’t know what we did. How did we get by for ten years without having weekly meetings? How did we survive as a company?” They finally start noticing that things are getting done, things are improving, and numbers are improving. We’re able to do things that we’ve never done before they finally recognized the value of some of those meetings.

It takes time and commitment. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. That’s also what creates long-term success. It’s not a quick fix or a Band-Aid. You have to get over the hurdle of feeling like you’ve plateaued, and you have to stay the course. That’s where you’re going to appreciate the growth and the improvement over time. Many people get a little fatigued, “We’re not making progress. We’re still pushing.” It’s the commitment, accountability, and consistency over time that makes a long-term impact. Ultimately, it’s going to create value.

Those consistent little actions are eventually going to get us to that goal and that ideal scene that we want at the end of the year, but we have to stay the course and stay consistent. That’s where those regular meetings, holding people and the team accountable, over time, we’ll eventually see bigger goals being achieved. We’ve covered a ton of stuff. Jim, is there anything else that you want to add as we start wrapping things up?

I could go on forever. I enjoy the topic. We’ve proven that one topic leads to another. Many different aspects are intertwined. Bringing it back to the core of strategic planning, just as our conversation flow to many topics, that could also happen with an organization. You can get off track with chasing different topics and different goals. A strategic plan helps you focus on what you have decided is most important in this period of time for our organization. It helps you provide focus.

If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

My email is Jim@8150Advisors.com.

A simple Band-Aid fix cannot attain long-term success.A simple Band-Aid fix cannot attain long-term success. Click To Tweet

I’m going to do another interview with you. We’re going to talk about something else that you’re passionate about and you’ve had a lot of success with, and that is the utilization of athletic trainers and coordination with physical therapy clinics.

A little bit because we’re sports medicine in orthopedic clinics for so long. We’ve had experience with athletic trainers. I was a co-founder of a nonprofit organization entitled PlaySafe. We did that because taxpayer funds, state allocated funds for public schools are not allocated to public schools to hire athletic trainers. We tried to come up with a better way and a more sustainable way to help fund and provide athletic trainers beyond one entity, a PT clinic, a doctor’s office or a hospital hiring them all. It’s an interesting topic and it’s a passion of mine as well.

We’ll wrap this episode up and use that as a little teaser for those interested or who have athletic trainers on staff and how they can utilize the program you guys have started. Nonetheless, thanks for sharing your wisdom and being a part of this.

It’s my pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Thank you, Nathan.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• https://www.8150Advisors.com/
• Impact Magazine – article
• Daring Greatly
• Jim@8150Advisors.com
• PlaySafe

About Jim Stoker

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