E628 | How Retain Employees For The Longhaul

In this episode, Doc Danny dives into the topic of retaining high-quality employees, especially as businesses grow beyond the owner. He opens the discussion by highlighting a concerning trend of physical therapists leaving the profession due to burnout, with 15-20,000 professionals leaving in the last year alone.

To address this issue and retain valuable team members, Danny suggests focusing on three key variables: culture, pay consistency, and work-life balance.

Culture, he explains, is the embodiment of core values within a business. It is crucial to define and maintain a strong culture that aligns with the company's values and goals. Additionally, pay consistency proves to be more important than the actual amount of money employees earn. Establishing a compensation plan that provides a sufficient amount of guaranteed income can significantly contribute to employee satisfaction.

Lastly, work-life balance plays a crucial role in employee retention. People are often unwilling to trade higher salaries for a lack of personal satisfaction or the inability to spend time with their families. Danny shares his own experiences in offering better work-life balance and how it can create a win-win situation for both employees and the organization.

In addition to Danny's insights, this episode also features the perspective of a family member who works for a major consulting firm. Her role involves retaining and motivating employees, and she highlights the importance of direct one-on-one mentorship. Structuring regular mentorship sessions, understanding employee learning preferences, and even implementing a book club can help foster motivation and progress.

Providing a clear path for growth and advancement, whether through titles or paid differences, is vital for employee retention. The episode emphasizes the need to reflect on what previous employers could have done differently to prevent employees from leaving and also touches upon the significance of culture, pay consistency, work-life balance, and preventing burnout in retaining the right individuals and maximizing their potential.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick before we get started, head over to Facebook and join the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. If you haven't done so yet, we have monthly live trainings going on there. There's an opportunity for you to join in the conversation instead of just listening to what I have to say on this podcast, as well as the people that I bring on.

And it's a really cool place to join about 6, 000 other clinicians that are. Honestly, trying to change the landscape of our profession through these cash and hybrid practices. One other thing that's really cool is we have a guide in there. That's a quick start guide. When you join, you can go and check this out.

There's about seven videos that we've curated that are the most common questions we get in the best case studies that we've found to really help you start, grow, and scale your practice up to seven figures. So if you haven't done so yet, head to Facebook request to join the PT entrepreneurs, Facebook group.

You have to be a clinician. We're going to check you out. We don't just let anybody in, but if you are. Hey there, go ahead and get signed up. We'd love to have the conversation with you in that group.

So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't want to see 30 patients a day, who don't want to work home health and have real student loans, create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about? This is the question. And this podcast is the answer. My name is Danny Matei and welcome to the PT entrepreneur podcast.

All right. What's going on PT entrepreneurs, Dr. Amitay here with the PT entrepreneur podcast and in the Facebook group, the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. Once again, today you got me by myself. I am solo. My wingman Eve Gigi isn't feeling so great. Got a little stomach bug and can't make this one.

So I get a chance to go over a topic that I think is incredibly important, especially as you start to really grow your company past yourself. And that's how you retain really high quality people. If you haven't, really been paying attention to the profession maybe you're in it every day and you're grinding there is a ton of.

turnover within our profession as a whole, not necessarily just within, small businesses like we help, but in the profession in general, I was having a conversation with a PT that does a lot of clinical education work just the other day. And he told me. that there's estimated 15 to 20, 000 physical therapists that just left the profession in the last year.

Now, that's people that are just leaving the profession, they're probably burnt out, they're doing something else. So we're dealing with fewer clinicians that are in the profession. And, we have to find the right ones for our business that, that fit the model that we have that align with our values.

And really. More than anything, be able to build an opportunity for them to have an amazing job. That's the way I look at it, right? I was always told that, if I couldn't find the job of my dreams that I should go and build it, go make that job that I couldn't find anywhere else.

And to be honest, when I left the military, if I could have found a really cool job. Had a cash practice, like treating patients the way I wanted to, I don't think I would've ever started a practice. None of those existed in the way that, that I wanted to to practice. In fact, I only knew of one other cash practice in the entire city of Atlanta at the time.

And it wasn't like one that was employing anybody that I would've even gone to work for. So I didn't really have much of a choice. But nowadays people do have those choices and they can find great employers, great practices where they can work with people that are very, specific populations.

And you get a chance to employ them. And that's actually like really one of the key benefits that I've seen happen over the last probably five years is that these practices, these cash and our practices are far more scalable and they create opportunities to allow clinicians to really work in an environment that is better for the longevity of both their time with an employer, but also for their career, because a lot of people are leaving the career.

So I'm going to get into some retention. Techniques things to think about and best practices. And a good chunk of this is based off of our own practice our combined information and practice of right now just within our mastermind, we have about 225, 230 businesses that we're working with that are actively trying to grow most of those are cash and hybrid practices and hiring a ton tons of hires, always looking to hire.

If anything it's more of a problem of finding talent sometimes because there's so many people that are growing and trying to hire on other people, but this this also in some ways is somewhat of a. unique advantage that I have where I get to take a glimpse into a far bigger company.

So one of my family members she works for a huge consulting company and her job is she's a director of talent retention is what they call it. So basically how do we keep people In our consultancy for as long as humanly possible, and some of the ways in which that they're doing that and maintaining long durations of periods of employment with people is very interesting and things that we can apply to the smaller business as well.

So I'm going to share some of that as well. So let's start with some of these variables that really lead to whether people stay or leave. And the first big one The first one that is probably going to make or break your business in general is your culture, and there's a phrase, I don't know who said it, I'm going to try to, it's not me, so don't quote me, but somebody else said this first, and they said Culture eats core values for breakfast, right?

A lot of people will say, I have, these are my core values and they put them up on a, on the wall and they reference them and that's cool. I think it's important to understand what your core values are and to, embed them into your business somehow, but your culture is really your culture is the core values.

in practice. It's like the living variation of your core values and your culture is something that people can feel. It's something that, that employees understand that potential clients coming in can feel. And it's like the energy of your company. It's how you guys work together. It's the the way in which you work, the uniqueness of it and culture is something that you get a chance to define when it's your own company.

It's actually one of my favorite parts of. Owning a business is defining what the culture is. You decide what the important things are and what are not important, right? You decide the decisions that you make. On a day to day basis and how that aligns with your culture, right? You have a culture of super hard charging and always working.

You may have a culture that's very laid back. You may have a culture that's fun and, you enjoy whatever, activities that are outside of the business together. You may have a culture of excellence, where everyone is striving to be the best they possibly can be. You may have a combination of all those things together.

But, We've all been in different environments where we've had work cultures that are really good and some that are really bad. It's very similar to teams. If anybody's played on a sports team, you have been on teams where there's just like everyone clicks and works together. There's an understanding of what's expected and acceptable on those teams, and a lot of success can follow that.

And then you can have teams where there's a lot of talent, but the culture is really bad and people are not working together and nothing really clicks. And there's a big difference in the outcomes of those. And the culture of your company is very similar and you get to define that, right? So is it.

That you guys do, a meeting once a month at a brewery, or maybe you do a team workout together somewhere once a month and follow that up with, catching up on what you need to do on the business side. Maybe it's that on Fridays, everybody cuts out of there and at noon, you don't want anybody there any longer than that, so they can enjoy a long weekend.

Maybe it's that you have very specific maternity policies. Maybe you're, a female entrepreneur and you've had. Kids and you have a bad experience with a six months maternity leave or six week maternity leave policy and all of a sudden you're back and you're always like felt like that wasn't enough and now you get a chance to change your own maternity policy and you make us a very like.

In welcoming place for someone that wants to have a family, you change the culture based on that family first or work first or whatever it is you're going to do, but the culture that you have is going to be a reason why somebody stays or leaves. So if you want to again attract this, let's say you have a women's health specific niche.

And you have a lot of female providers, and you have this very strict maternity policy, and you expect people to be, right back to work in six weeks. And, you don't have anything that really supports them. You're not very good about, giving them time off when need be, when their kids get sick.

The culture doesn't coincide with the type of people that you're trying to. to and to maintain. So there's missed, there's an incongruency there that's going to cause friction and that's going to cause people to leave, right? If your culture is that you guys, you want to be the best providers in your area by a long shot and yet you never do any sort of ongoing case presentation work.

You don't really prioritize the clinical education or research or any of the things that are going to lead to a better provider. You're going to lose people that are looking for that because that's the type of culture that they're looking for. So you've got to define it, you've got to stick to it.

So your culture is huge and you need to define that. Which is really like one of the more fun parts of owning a business. Pay consistency is a second variable. The amount of money that somebody makes is one thing. And that's fine. But the likelihood that somebody makes that amount of money is more important when it comes to retention.

And what I've seen, and I've been guilty of this myself, is especially in the cash world, we are very quick to build out compensation plans that have very low base salaries and are heavily compensated via performance bonuses. And this is really something that's much more common in the sales world.

So if you look at somebody that's doing like software sales or they're doing medical sales or whatever, they usually have a very low base salary and they'll have a really, big compensation based off performance, which, can drive people to really want to sell. The challenge in our profession is.

Most clinicians are looking for security, not for a medical sales job. And you can't pay somebody the way you can pay somebody to student software sales, medical sales, either, because you're not making as much money as they're making, they're not selling a, a screw to somebody for some sort of joint replacement that's going to cost three grand just for the screw.

Like it's not going to work that way. So the amount they can make is far lower. So security and likelihood of payment is actually really important. So being able to get a comp modeled down correctly that has, a high enough amount of guaranteed income, if not potentially all guaranteed, is going to be far more likely to keep somebody around than somebody that has You know, a base salary that makes up 30%, 40% of what they can make in a month.

And the rest comes off the back of the volume that they're seeing. And this is very much how we set up our compensation early in in our career, and it was because it took risk off of me as a business owner and put it onto that employee. But what does that do to that employee? Now they realize, okay, I have a lot of skin in the game.

I'm taking a lot of risk. Why would I not just go do this myself? Because this is not a safe place to work. I have ups and downs just as if I had started my own business and it definitely did create turnover for us by doing so. And I've seen this again and again, when people do that. And now if you really look at it, retention really comes down to the big part, the pay consistency, the likelihood of income occurring, not just how much.

They can make, because if you get somebody that has a really low salary and they have a big compensation opportunity on the upside, you're basically hiring entrepreneurs and eventually they're going to lead to be become full fledged entrepreneurs. So you're going to want to back into what works for your numbers, but as much consistency, as much guaranteed income as you can, is going to be a really big key for them.

All right. Number three, work life balance. So we have been able to hire now in multiple companies, multiple people that came to work for us. At a pay decrease from a more advanced, more, requirements in their job, more demanding job. They came to work for us both within our, physical therapy practice, as well as within PT biz, that they're incredibly talented people and they were getting burnt down at these other jobs because they had terrible work life balance and they got paid well, but they have awful work life balance.

So if you can give somebody. A really good work life balance, like to the point where their job doesn't become their life. And now all of a sudden they can enjoy things that they really that they really like outside of work. You create A better opportunity for that person to work for longer, to not get burned out and find satisfaction in the place where they work.

So I'll give you a couple of examples. We've been able to bring someone multiple people on the PT biz team, but one person in particular who was managing big construction projects 50 million. Buildings that were being put up as a construction project manager. This is a a well paid job.

This person is a really good job of managing projects, of managing people, multitasking, being able to understand financials and being very detail oriented. All of these are very important skills, especially for what this role turned out to be within a PTBITS. And what we're able to do is have a conversation with this person and say, okay, we like you. We like your skillset. We cannot afford to master salary for what you're making with this huge construction company. And also what we're asking you to do is going to be far different in terms of work hours, work intensity, no travel and to be able to offer a better work life balance with still a good compensation package, allowed us to get somebody on our team.

For significantly less than, what their compensation was working for this other company and for them to say, yes, I want to do this. It's not all about money. It's about, what else am I able to do at a certain point? people are not willing to exchange more money for less satisfaction and not being able to see their kids and things that are very important to them.

So keep that in mind. On the flip side, we've had the same thing happened in our local practice where we've been able to hire senior clinicians that are clinic directors at other places. And they're working, 50, 60 hours a week, sometimes documenting, every Saturday morning just to catch up.

And all of a sudden we can say, Hey, like you can be amazing clinician. You can just be great at that. You don't have to worry about all this additional stuff. Like your documentation is going to take a fraction of the time because we don't have to try to justify it to blue cross and try to get more visits.

And it's very much a direct patient to provide a relationship. And it's a pure sense of that. So people that are looking to be. Amazing clinicians. They want to be world class at being a great clinician. They thrive in that environment. They look for that environment. They don't want to do all the questionnaires that Medicare wants, you to fill out.

They don't want to do all the work comp stuff. Like they just want to get somebody better. And you strip away that stuff and you let them focus on that. And all of a sudden they go from working, 50, 60 hours a week to let's call it 30, 40 hours a week. Now they've gotten, 15, 20 hours of their week back.

They can go do other things and they're not as mentally stressed out. So what's that worth? It's worth, a ton to them and they'll take less potential, income from it. They're not generating as much income either. But to be able to have a better work life balance is huge. You can do this now.

You can have people that can have more flexible work schedules, that they can have more flexibility with time off, with when they're, coming in or not, if they want to be involved in pick up, drop off with their kids if, they want like flexibility with the things that are important to them.

And it's not always family for some people don't have families, but there's other things that they enjoy doing. And if you can match up your job. That you're creating for them with the things that are important to them. And it still makes sense on the financial side for your business. It's a, it's an absolute win.

And it's a great way to not just retain talent, but to find talent and attract talent that wants to come and work in that environment. And that again, really fits your culture. So the first three, these are the three big ones. It's culture, it's pay consistency, and it's work life balance. These are the three big ones that we see really help maintain a great employee relationship for a long period of time.

The next two come directly from my family member that works for this big consulting company. And when I say big, one of the big four in the entire world. They're enormous. And her entire job is to really work on retaining people, keeping people in this consulting consulting firm. And what I thought was interesting was there was two things that she said, really do a good job of retaining people and keeping them motivated and happy.

And the first one I was surprised by when she told me that it's the number one reason why people stay or go within this organization. So it may not be a complete one to one, it might be apples to orange comparison, but it's it's probably pretty close. And I've seen the same thing And what she said was direct one to one mentorship.

Is the number one reason why people say or go with your superior, whoever your direct report is. In this case, if you have a small company, you're the owner and there's 2 clinicians, it's going to be you, right? You're the direct report. And in this big organization, maybe it's that this is like a.

Initial like consultant one, and then they're reporting to a manager or something, not all the way up the chain to like the people that own the consulting firm. So that one to one mentorship is literally the most impactful way that they decreased churn of their employees. And I thought that was just so interesting because you would think it was like all these crazy benefits packages and what they're making.

Career opportunities, all this stuff. And no, it came down to whether they felt like they were progressing individually and in their career and that they were getting face time with the people that would help them really continue to grow along the career path they were on. Now think of this yourself, right?

If you have clinicians that are coming in and you're not mentoring them one to one, what an easy win is going to be for you to start doing this on a regular basis. This could literally be on. A monthly basis you have a conversation. You sit down individually with each of your team, your two staff members, and you have lunch with 'em individually.

This is maybe structuring more quarterly mentorship sessions. This is asking them what they would like to learn more of. This is even like something as simple as a book club where you could say, Hey, I think this would be a great book for you to read. I've read it. I'm going to read it along as as well.

Hey, at the end of the month, let's talk about what we learned and applying that to somebody. People love mentorship. They love people helping them and being a part of their journey and of their development. And we get very little of that. Like this idea of apprenticeship is just not, it's just not that common anymore, except you're, if maybe if you're in the trades, if you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, apprenticeship is.

is huge. One of the best ways to learn. And we get some of this in like clinical education when we're in school. But once you're outside of that, it doesn't mean that we're not still trying to grow. So if you can understand the lens of apprenticeship, that people want to do that, they want a mentor, they want someone to help them, figure out what to do next and to develop both personally and professionally, that right there might be one of the strongest ways.

You can retain people. Now this at scale gets hard, right? Because let's say you have 10 people that you're having to meet with every single month. This is where you really have a hard time making the decision of Oh, can I see patients anymore? What things can I cut out? Or do we need to get a manager in place?

That can be that direct report to really help with that. And that scale, it's not as easy. But if you have a small business, this is one of the easiest things, one of the biggest ones you can do. And it's completely free besides your time. That's huge. The second thing that she told me, and this is what I'll finish with before I wrap it up, is people love a clear path.

And when we have newer businesses our businesses are not big there, even if our businesses, let's say 10 years old our practices that's still a decade. That's not that long. If you think about some of these businesses have been around for a hundred years, and they figured out a lot of things and what their path is and the path for their employees as well.

When she broke this down to me, I thought it was interesting because they have, it's very similar to the military is the way that I thought about is when somebody comes in to work with them, they're a consultant like level one, and then it's like a consultant level two. And then it's like a manager and then it's like a manager level two.

And then it's a director. And then it's a director, advanced director or something like that. And then it's a partner. And this partnership track is what is dangled in front of. All these consultants to keep them around in a lot of ways. The same thing can be said for other types of big service businesses professional businesses.

I have a friend that's a partner in a engineering firm. And it's so similar. It's engineer one, engineer two, it's senior engineer, it's manager, engineer, it's then it's, then you, then if you get to a certain point, you have a chance to potentially become a partner in the company. So it's a true, partnership development, the way that they set it up and.

This is incentivizing for people because they'd like to see progress. It's no different than if you look at something like martial arts, right? So there's a belt system because it is, it's more engaging for people to see this micro progress they're making. Let's say you're, whatever you're in karate, you have a white belt and let's say you just go to karate class and you're training like crazy for.

10 years, and then all of a sudden, 10 years later, they give you a black belt, how many people would stick around for that versus, all right, you go to karate, you're a white belt, and then you get some stripes and then you get a yellow belt. And then, maybe an orange belt or whatever the next belt in the system, but they do that because it's motivating for people to see progress and they say, oh, wow, look at me now.

I'm proud. I got my new belt, and it's just a sign that you're making progress. You have to think about this with your own company as well, that people need to know what progress they're making. And if you can help them realize that they will stay motivated along the path, much better than no idea what's going on at all, because if you don't give people an idea of what's next.

then they start to view it as a dead end job. This is it. This is all the progress that I've made. This is my life now. And it's going to be my life now for the next 10, 20 years, whatever it is, however long the duration of time is. And that's when people start looking for other things. The grass is always greener somewhere else.

And if you don't keep them engaged and motivated to make progress. Then they're going to start looking other places. They're going to start looking for other things that they can do where they feel like they're making progress, even though it might be a lateral transfer. It might be the exact same opportunity.

They just see it in a different lens. It's something new. It's something that is motivating for them. So you've got to really give people a path forward, a clear path of where they're at, what progress they're making. And to have some sort of highlight as to what that is, it could be a title. It could be pay difference.

It could be any sort of. Motivating element of them making progress within their business, where you're rewarding them either with something that designates them as being different and, or compensates them in a different way. And those are the things that really end up adding a lot of impact to retaining people over a long period of time.

In, in summary for this, cause I think this is a topic, especially for those of you that have employees. Have bigger businesses, it should be very directly tactical and applicable to what you're doing. If you're just getting started, one of the things you can think about that I think is a great exercise is, let's say you're just starting to do your own thing.

What could your employer have done from the place where you just left? What could they have done different that would have made you not want to leave? And do that exercise in your head and think about that when you go to then hire and bring other people on because that's going to really help you reverse engineer what you need to be doing within your own facility to make sure that people are sticking around and you're seeing progress.

And they're seeing progress and they're happy and they're enjoying, being part of your company and they want to be there for a long period of time. So in summary. There's really five big things that I went over. I think we said we're gonna do three. I added two bonus ones in. There you go.

Number one, culture. Your culture. It's yours. Decide what it is. Make it something awesome. Don't start a business just to have a weak ass culture. Make it awesome. Two, pay consistency. Don't make it so erratic for them that they feel like they don't know how much they're going to be able to make the following month.

You're going to pay their mortgage, their student loans. That's the stress that they don't need. Otherwise, if they're under that stress, why wouldn't they go take a bigger swing on themselves? You're driving them towards entrepreneurship. That's the way it works. Number three. You've got work life balance.

So being flexible with them, letting them have a better mixture of work and life and the things they like to do and finding meaning, not just at work, but outside of work. If you can do that's going to help tremendously with stopping burnout. We know burnout is what leads to a lot of people, not just leaving your business, but leaving the profession as well.

Number four is one to one mentorship. So this is you getting one to one time with your direct advisor, your direct report, whoever that is. And if you're in a small business, you're going to be the direct report for everybody. So spending one on one time with your employees, learning about them, learning about what they're interested in doing, helping them improve both clinically and professionally is going to be huge for you from a retention standpoint, as well as just the happiness of your employees.

And how long they they stick around in your culture. So number five, it's a clear path forward. What are they looking at doing? What are the next steps? What are the next roles that they can look at doing? What is the timeline on those things? What do they need to do themselves to be able to put them in a place to deserve those roles?

Like they need to know the rules of the game to know if they're winning or losing. This is really big. You've got to be clear with them on this. And this takes some time to really think about what that looks like, because too often we lose. Great employees, great staff members, because they don't really know what's next.

And if it's not communicated to them, eventually they just start to wander to other things, look at other opportunities, other. Businesses, career paths potentially, because they don't really know if they're making progress and a lack of momentum is very frustrating for people, it feels like they stifle their growth and nobody wants that.

So make sure that you're clearly letting them know what's going on. You're clearly letting them know what their next steps are. And if you can do that, you should have a great. Ability to retain the right people. And, you're going to have drop off no matter what people are going to leave your company great people are going to leave your company, it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it.

You just want to, you just want to set the stage to where you're not losing people that aren't going to leave anyway. You're keeping people as long as you can so that they can help you with your mission of helping as many people as possible. Get back to living a high performance, pain free life, like living and enjoying life actively with the people that they love.

If you can do that, if you can implement these things, then you're going to see a lot more progress in your business. You're not going to hit these roadblocks where you take, one step forward and then one step back because you just lost your entire workforce. And you're going to be feeling a lot less stressed about.

your employers or your employees and then what you're going to be able to do in the next few steps to really grow your business to the next stage for whatever that might be. So hopefully this helps as always. If you listen to this on the podcast, you want to watch the video of this, or if you want to ask questions and get involved in the conversation, make sure you head over to the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group.

You can request to join. If you're not a clinician, we're probably not going to let you in. If you are come on in, you're more than welcome. And one other thing we're greatly appreciated. If you listen to this on iTunes or Spotify, If you like the podcast, you like what we're saying, and really want to help us get this in front of more people, leave us a rating and review on that.

That actually helps us in the algorithm. No one understands how the AI algorithm works, but that right there is definitely something that helps us get in front of more clinicians to share this information with them and really help change their life as well. So if you take a few seconds to do that, I'd greatly appreciate it as always.

Thank you so much for listening and watching the Facebook group, and I'll catch you next week.

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