Episode 5: The Reality of Growing a Business
0:00 - 3:11 → Intro
Erika: As health, wellness and beauty experts, you know all about keeping a calm, peaceful space. But what about your business? Is that pretty calm? I’m Erika Dowell, Business Operations Expert and your host of the Business Flow Formula podcast. Each episode, you'll get real-world advice and strategies from people who have been there, done that and lived to tell the tale. So you can clarify, streamline and elevate your practice from the inside out.
Luc: My name is Luc Mahler, I am a chiropractor and the owner of the Movement Company - we are going on year 8 (opened November 15th, 2017) in the Glebe. I graduated school in 2013 and spent the first 4-5 years of my life as a chiro working for other people, figuring out what I liked and didn't like. One thing led to another, and I ended up moving back from the United States to Canada, in Ottawa, to start a practice here. I did my undergrad here, so I kind of fell in love with the city, cycling community, size of city and everything it had to offer - it was a good mix of what I was looking for. Having grown up in a small town (Huntsville, ON), I didn’t really want a full-on big city, and Ottawa felt like it threaded that needle. Now, I live here - my wife and I live up in Chelsea with our two young kids. The next chapter of my life is learning how to balance all of that, and frankly, she makes this 100% possible because we are rowing the boat in the same direction, which is pretty remarkable, frankly. A lot of the mentors that I like to listen to would say picking the right spouse makes a big difference - whether things work out or they don’t. But we are doing this next chapter with two kids, and she has helped me figure out how to navigate all sorts of uncharted waters - it’s been pretty cool.
Erika: That’s amazing - having the right partner in life (and business), but in life makes such a big difference and making sure they are your cheerleader, having someone who can support you even when you completely doubt yourself is a big game changer - so that’s great.
Luc: Sobering thought sometimes - as the person who calls the shots here, I know for a fact people don’t tell me exactly what they think. Even the people who have the stones to say something counter culture to what I am thinking, it’s not the version they really want to tell me (I think), most of the time. I think we have an honest and open culture, but there’s the truth behind it that you usually don’t say exactly what you are thinking, so having someone that will be direct and question things that maybe you hadn’t questioned (even if it’s irritating) is definitely important.
Erika: I totally get that, the ranting versus problem solving, and there is a line – it takes practice to figure out, are we ranting/raving/problem solving. Having someone who can check us is good.
Luc: Yeah, you need both. Someone who can tell you you’re doing great, and someone who can tell you that even though you are doing great - that idea is dumb
Erika: Yeah, that is a great analogy there.
3:11 - 11:40 → The Movement Co Background
Erika: So, back in 2017 - how and why did you start the Movement Co.?
Luc: It was actually a project that started a few years before. I was living in the Midwest and was back in Ottawa for cycling. They had cycling road national championships here, and I was here as a fan, hanging out with some friends, and one of my friends was competing. We were on a bike ride, shooting the breeze as one does, and he was spitballing about “oh, it would be fun when I retire to start something together.” He would do the coaching side, and I would do the therapy side, and I thought, yeah, sounds great, but in the back of my head, I have this - don’t work with your friends - everyone says it's a terrible idea, even though I do think it is a much more nuanced stance. So I told him, probably not up front, but then I started thinking about it when I was back home. I thought that actually would be what I want clinic-wise and location - I wanted to be in Ottawa, and it checked all of the boxes. So I thought, let’s do it - I started planning and the coaching side actually never happened (he’s still racing his bike, as a pro now) and I don’t think coaching is in his future at this point or at least not in this particular format but it lead to me coming back to Ottawa and figuring out how to start a business - a year and change putting it all together and then took the leap in September of 2017. Drove all of my stuff, and my dog, across the two countries, and ignorance is bliss - took a month and a half in Ottawa to find a location and secure some bank loans. At this point, it was still just a pipe dream and business plan. Came home and figured out how to get it off the ground – we are still in the same building as we were then, but now we rent the second floor too.
Erika: That’s incredible. So, you mentioned before we got on the call that you’ve had some incredible growth over the last almost 8 years, and you started on one floor and now you are on two floors - what do you contribute mostly or were there processes that you implemented that allowed you to skyrocket your growth as a business?
Luc: Yes, not at first, though. When I started, I had some ideas or principles of how I wanted to do things and also the draining bank account that said I had to figure this out. Part of being successful early was honestly just staying busy and staying on task. One of my other friends, one time I was on a project with him (a lot of my life revolves around cycling, so all of the stories are the same basically) - on this project with him I was working with a bunch of athletes that were good but not going to win the race and they were young kids. So we had to give them something to focus on that was positive, because there’s only one winner and 150 people at the start line - he had this chart that he made and it was great but he also had process goal like “did you talk to your teammate”, “did you go back and get a water bottle”, stuff that had little bearing on the result but was something that you could say you 100% control that variable and if you want to be successful then you have to do all of these little things well. On days when my schedule was pretty empty and basically we were losing money, I always came back to what was the process goal - what was the one thing I could control 100% and if I did it, I could go home and maybe it didn’t make me money today, but I could check a box.
A lot of that revolved around marketing - I did my undergrad in Ottawa but had been gone for seven years, so people remembered 21-year-old Luc (college student and bike shop mechanic). They didn’t know this version (or 2017 me), and so I had to go meet people and go out there and figure out how I was going to get people to come see us at the clinic, pay money basically. I did a lot of networking, a lot of marketing - I was at all of the places where someone would let me bring a table, basically. I read in a book somewhere where one guy summed up his business philosophy as early days, say yes to everything and then eventually if it’s not a hell yes, then it’s a no. I figured I was still in the early days, and I just drank from the firehose, said yes to everything, overcommitted to a bunch of stuff, and spent the only thing I had, the only currency I had to spend, which was my time.
It sounds easy now, but the reality is I also had a lot of support. Early days, I lived on someone's couch for free, and then I had someone split rent with me even though they were never in the house (ended up spending more time at their parents' house than ours), and so I had a whole house to myself with half the rent. Massive things that if they hadn’t happened, I would’ve had to take more money out of the business, and it wouldn’t have grown.
Those were the first things I did; I just started building the start of a process, but none of it was written down - it was just things that I had done. Then I would bring staff on, and this is probably a story you have heard a thousand times, but because none of it was written down and it worked for me to the point that I needed staff - they would ask what they should do when they weren’t busy and I said just go do stuff - and obviously that doesn’t work well when they don’t have the same motivators or same sort of personality. So, a lot of times they didn't, and they were frustrated, and I was frustrated, and the business wasn’t growing. We had to start figuring out what the systems were to be able to actually reproduce what we had done in the early days, which was a lot of hard work and a lot of inefficient work. So it was - how can this be more efficient, what are the things that are working for us, what are the things that aren’t - do more of the things that are and less of the things that aren’t. This took a lot of self reflection, took hiring the right coaches – I had a business coach from day 1 but they weren’t the right fit, they weren’t industry specific, early days it helps if they are hyperspecific to what you do because they have been there and instead of being a generic business coach that says “you have to market”, then I have a business coach who does rehab the way we do it and said here is the checklist - it was quantified, they said you should do a few hours of this and one of these a month - brilliant. The cool part for me was that we were doing most of those, but I just didn’t have it quantified for my staff.
So it was like, ok, we have to do social media and they would say what? Now I can say, okay, we need to post once a day minimum but because there are seven of us, that is once a week for everyone - and we started with that and it was an uphill struggle, everyone wants to do it but no one has time, so we just had to keep hammering away on that. Now, our social media runs like a well-oiled machine. We have a woman named Rhapsody who is behind the scenes; she edits it all and is young enough to know all of the trendy stuff and is keeping us on point with that. More importantly, we said we have had to do it long enough that it is just standard that it happens and people lean into it, are starting to let their personalities come through, and it’s quirky and fun and us. I think that matters.
In the early days, that’s basically what I did. I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I knew if I was going to market, I would rather do it at a bike race or a running race than a mall - so I said I’m not going to malls, but I went to all of the races that let me come. Lo and behold, people want to help you, and it’s a value add for them as well to be there, and it was a pretty smooth relationship. One of the big ones early on was Somersault races, they were in Brockville, but also in Kingston and a bunch in Ottawa. Still to this day, they have us out to all of the events we want to go to, and they are a massive support. I figured out what I wanted to work with and tried to be where they were - that was the early theory.
Now, because there is more than just me, we’ve got frameworks and processes. The biggest thing that we started doing recently was implementing standards around a few things that we think matter. So like, practicing communication with our patients, practicing how we are going to deliver the plan of care, practicing that kind of stuff. We have a standard that you need to practice that at least twice, and you need to practice it at least once with someone on the team - it can’t just be you in a mirror or you and your spouse. We have started putting standards in so that it’s not about motivation anymore, it's just what we do here.
An analogy I heard the other day was, you don’t need motivation to brush your teeth because the standard is you just do it - you do it in the morning and you do it at night, and that’s just the standard. That is what we are trying to bake in here: things that you don’t think about, you just do.
11:40 - 18:53 → Implementing Standards and Processes & Hiring
Erika: When it comes to implementing those standards and processes, or expectations of your team, how do you go about that? Do you ever get pushback from your team? How do you work through those challenges?
Luc: We have a great team, and they still push back. Our team is awesome, and the only way this business has grown to where it is now, and continues to grow, is with good people. But, people don’t like change, everybody is busy - they have their own lives outside of here, whether kids/hobbies/all of the above. So when you give them more, or what feels like more, there is an initial ugh, why. The thing I learnt through my own frustration is if it is important, say it often and social media is a perfect example. Every time I hire someone, they say, “Great, can’t wait to do it, and I’m going to post every day,” and I say, woah pump the brakes. Because they say that and then reality hits - they have a week of ideas and then all of a sudden it's oh no I’ve got no ideas and have the social media equivalent of writer's block. So we just have to keep reminding them of the standard, which is less than what they want to do. The standard is one, just do one - Rhapsody will give you the idea, and I just need you to film it, you don’t even need to edit it, just give her the raw footage and she will figure it out. Inevitably, someone drops the ball, and you get to figure out if that’s just an exception or if that is something that can’t change. Luckily for us, when the ball drops here, it's most of the time exceptions, and we’ve got the right people - we just need to keep them on point.
Erika: That’s amazing. Moving a little bit into hiring team - not just your practitioners but your admin team. I know that you work with Rhapsody, your social media person. When did you, between 2017 and now, decide and make the risky leap (some would say)? I’ve been talking to clients about when is the time to hire, is it too early/too late. When did you decide, especially as someone who was so hands-on with your marketing, that you could hand off some of that responsibility and, quite frankly, control? When did you know it was time?
Luc: I’m not sure I have a super direct answer. In my coaching group, it’s a mastermind group, and there are a bunch of other clinics throughout Canada and the US. This is something people have a hard time giving up control. I know that every time I have done it, my business has gotten better, so it’s like I want to try and give up as much as I can, as fast as I can. Way back when, I’ve always done team sports - I think team sports are fun, some of my best friends and memories are team sports growing up. I think that instilled a bit of “I like people” in my brain and I know that I do better when I am hanging out with people and do worse when I am sitting around by myself - so there is that part of it, I just want to spend my time with people that are challenging and progressing where we are going.
The first non-therapy hire, because the therapy hires are pretty easy - it’s a direct line to if you fill their schedule, everyone wins. The revenue goes up, the profit goes up, you’ve created the job for someone - everyone is winning. The admin ones are the tricky ones because there is not a direct line unless you create one. The cool thing about the current climate we are in is that there are all sorts of piecemeal and fractional work out there. So it doesn’t have to be straight to - I think people see the price tag of an admin and whatever that is, and it's tens of thousands of dollars a year, and they do the math and they don't have it. My mentor put it to me this way - you’re not getting married to them, this is not a permanent thing. It’s a month-to-month, week-to-week trial, and if it doesn’t go well, the relationship can end. It’s not set in stone, you aren’t signing off on a $50,000 cheque on day one. Obviously, after the probation period, it gets harder to transition someone out, but if you need to do it, there’s precedent. Honestly, most people, if they are being transitioned out, they are ready to leave too - they just need someone to leave them.
The first thing I did was hire a virtual part-time assistant, Lori. She is awesome. I told someone else who needed a VA and sent them Lori’s way because at that point, she had moved on. She did such a great job that we needed someone full-time time and to me, this is the best praise I can give you. When you work yourself out of a job, my business has grown, and that is the whole point. I hired her for part-time, started offloading small tasks that 1) I was bad at, 2) she was better at, and 3) I didn’t want to do them. So those got offloaded, and lo and behold, my email is organized, I have folders for my documents, my stuff is where I thought it would be and that all really helped. So, Lori worked herself into a bigger role where she was handling some of the back-end finances and that type of stuff, and we built trust that way.
That was my first hire, and then we got to the point where I was like, I need someone full time, at our desk, scheduling, emailing, really kind of orchestrating all of the things, and that’s when Lori decided she couldn’t be in person. So we started to put out an Indeed ad for admin, and the nice thing about admin is that it’s such a wide net that you get people from all walks of life and really get a diverse pool of people to choose from.
One of the things we did was we put a request for a quick video on what they do and why they would be a good fit. That filtered the indeed ads from about 200 in a weekend to about 6 and to this day, we still do this and we still get people and it cracks me - they send an email that says they are a great fit for the clinic, super detail oriented and there’s no video or mention of it and it’s like ah just read the whole thing. So then we added one admin, we’ve got Rhapsody who is doing networking, we have an office manager named Hollywood who has really helped take our clinic systems and smooth them out, and just be that quarterback that we need. It’s not always easy to lead professionals as a non-professional, but really, we need her to lead them/us because professionals are good at one thing, and that’s their thing, and they are pretty bad at all of the other stuff because they don’t want to focus on it, and it takes up brain space. So we need someone who can say, “Look, you aren’t doing this well,” and she definitely can do that. Then we have a part-time admin named Hunter who is here in the evenings for us.
Erika: Then you also had to reschedule today because you were meeting with your bookkeeper. When did you know that you needed to hire or outsource your bookkeeping? I am a bookkeeper, of course, so I am always finance-focused, numbers nerd - self-declared. When did you know you needed a bookkeeper? Was it day one - “I need to make sure my finances are in order”?
Luc: It should have been.
18:45 - 24:25 → Reflecting on Previous Decisions
Erika: Well, that was one of my questions, if you could go back to 2017 and tell yourself what should you do - walk me through a bit of realizing you needed the external support.
Luc: One of the things would have been to tell myself to not be so cheap on some of the important things (bookkeeper, accountant, corporate lawyer) to set things up. To me, they are annoying expenses (the bookkeeper not so much), but the corporate lawyer to get the structure right, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be this complicated (maybe it isn’t to other people), but it is to me to set up a corp. Most business owners aren’t law professionals. If that would be easier, you wouldn’t need them, but you do need them because when it’s done right, you have peace of mind.
Same with a bookkeeper, I had a small part-time clinic in the US, and I did my own bookkeeping because it was simple and easy to do, so I figured I could do the same here because I was starting from zero, and I was desperately wrong. Basically, from the end of year 1, when I had to do taxes, I tried to do the books, and it was just wrong, and the accountant said, “What is this mess?” and that he wouldn’t do it unless I hired a bookkeeper. So I found Jen, the same bookkeeper I have had this whole time, and she has been working with me ever since. At this point, we meet monthly to go over any changes in the business, any questions I have about the numbers, any red flags - she has an accounting background as well, so she has a diverse ability to see the numbers. She isn’t an accountant, so she doesn’t do accounting things, but there is a lot of “if I was your accountant”, “if this was my business, you know the broad strokes. Which is crucial because I am not a numbers junkie, math gives me anxiety, but to run a proper business, you need to know your numbers. It starts and ends with that - if it can’t happen on paper, it’s not going to happen in real life.
Humans are powerful, but we can’t will things - when the math doesn’t math, it’s not good. That is one of the things I had to learn along the way because there is such a set in stone way of doing things in this industry - it’s good until it’s not and I got to a point where it wasn’t great anymore and I needed to transition for the health of the business to a different model and that is where my mentor helped me a lot with taking people from independent contractor commission split to salaried employees with guaranteed hours - which made a big mess for Jen. It changed our format, and now every month she is like, “Okay, are we hiring anyone new this month?” and I’ll say, No, we are good this month. She has been a massive help and rolling with the punches. One thing she does well, like I said, if I didn’t have to focus on bookkeeping, I would not, she is stern enough to be like, “Look, you have to do this, I know it’s annoying, but you have to go to the bank and figure out what this charge is for.” She puts her foot down and tells me what is what, and I’m sure if she didn’t, she’s part-time time not in person, she would just get steamrolled, meaning I just wouldn’t do it, and we wouldn’t have the answers, and we would be in the same spot we were. She is definitely very good at being the bad cop when she needs to be. But the numbers are important.
Erika: I often have discussions with my clients of: I know that this isn’t why you started your business, but I need you to tell me what this charge is, what you want to do, what the goals are - because fundamentally, whether you like it or not, the business does revolve around finances. In every which way, money in, money out, hiring, firing - all comes down to money. There is also culture fit and people fit, and that kind of thing, but a lot of those decisions are based around money and making sure your business is profitable. Being the bad cop is hard, but also necessary.
Luc: That part, I think, is hard in health and wellness for sure. It often feels like the business results and the health and wellness results can be at odds if not done well. By that I mean, in a lot of industries, if you do good for your client/customer/patients, you see more of them, they spend more money on you, and that's usually a straight line. In ours, it's the opposite. You do well with them, and oftentimes it’s like, okay, you are better, you can go do the thing you want to do. Maybe they stick around for maintenance, maybe they don’t, maybe you believe in that, and maybe you don’t. But even if they do, that's a very infrequent visit. So you have done this thing where the patient gets better and you see them less, and the business still needs to run.
I’ve always thought, Ah, that’s such a weird business model. The goal with the oath you take is first do no harm and then do well to your patients so that they are happy and healthy - that’s the goal is to not see them. Eventually, you want to high-five, and you know, I was laughing because people say some version of it will be nice to not see you for a while. It’s true, and it makes for business life being different.
Erika: Yeah, my husband is a social worker, he’s a therapist basically, and he always talks about working yourself out of a job. Ultimately, you want your patient to be better, of course, and I’ve had my own medical things (I had a heart surgery), and I told my cardiologist, like respectfully, I hope I never see you again.
Luc: Same result, the goal is health. How you get there is different from field to field, but a lot of them, the end result is that the patient is able to manage themselves and has the tools to take care of themselves. As a doctor, you are like box checked - great. As a business owner, it’s like, okay, now I have to find another.
24:25 - 28:40 → Learning from Failures
Erika: Yeah, exactly. As we start wrapping up, hard question, but is there something that you tried to implement in your business that failed? There was no uptake from clients/patients/your team, or maybe from you, thinking I will be better on this, and it just failed over the last eight years. What did that look like? What did you learn from it, and what would you recommend?
Luc: First of all, lots of things have failed, I think we have failed forward every time. I think we should not necessarily celebrate failure, but at least embrace it. It’s the most painful way to learn, but it's the way you actually learn. It sucks when it happens, but you look back on it and think that was necessary or important or made me better.
The biggest one we did - we wanted to respect our appointment times, but we wanted to try and have someone else (assistant) deliver the rehab portion of our sessions. Back then, we were doing half-hour sessions. I (or the physio or the chiro) was doing all of the hands-on, manipulation if it was happening and the rehab. We had a healthy mix of both, but we figured if we could offload it to someone else, then I could see double the amount of people while still maintaining that treatment time that people had come to expect from us and the philosophical underpinnings of needing both the hands-on and active rehab. Those are things we believed in as a clinic, and we didn’t want to lose them, but we wondered if there was a way to do it so that we could have more volume, basically.
We tried that, we hired an amazing strength and conditioning coach who had worked in a clinic before, Lloyd, great guy. We grossly underestimated how much more marketing we should do to fill in the gaps. It was right when I hired our first in-person admin and had Lloyd as well, so all of a sudden I had this significant increase in salary that I needed to fill and basically the same revenue. So, we bled a lot of money for 3-4 months, and then luckily (because it was coming to the point where I would have to let someone go), Lloyd and his wife opened their own clinic in Russell. So Lloyd left, which sucked because he is awesome - solid strength and conditioning guy, good culture fit, great person, but it just wasn’t going to work the way we were doing it; something had to give. So he moved on, and we went maybe we will just put a pause on this idea - we have paused it and stopped it.
It was an expensive lesson, but a good lesson to learn. Right around this time, I started working with my coach, Justin, and we figured out a different way to get to the same spot with a different format. That’s the biggest one that jumps out at me.
The other one I tried, we hired or had on staff an acupuncturist. Great person, good at what she does with acupuncture, but just wasn’t a good fit for our marketing and our patient base and basically the culture of the clinic - it just didn’t jive with what we were doing. So, we had a hard time filling that schedule, even though we were doing the checklist, she was putting in time with all of the marketing things we were doing - it just wasn’t adding up. So, that was a painful conversation - when we were like, look, this isn’t working, we can’t keep beating our heads against the wall. So, we had that conversation, it sucked - we hugged at the end, and she went to work at another clinic and is busy and thriving. It just wasn’t a good fit here - it’s not a knock on her as a provider, she’s really good, but it just didn’t work here, and that’s the worst part. No one did anything wrong, there’s nothing to be mad about, nothing to yell about - it’s just not working.
Erika: Sometimes, as business owners, we have to really align ourselves or realign ourselves and be like we offer these 4-5-6 things and that’s it. That’s what we are going to be good at as a clinic, and it’s okay that another service provider or offering doesn’t fit into that. As much as it’s complimentary, of course, sometimes it just isn’t what your current patients are after.
Luc: Yeah, and for the few people who need it, we can make that referral because she works close to here, we would just make that referral anyways.
28:40 - 35:00 → Dealing with the Awkward & Wrap Up
Erika: Is there anything else that you want to share about your business story? Anything that I haven’t asked you that you really want to share a story about?
Luc: Well, one, I mentioned it a bunch, but I do think it is worth finding a coach. Finding one that fits you, fits your personality, challenges you in the right ways, but ultimately helps you grow. I have had lots of people since I’ve been working with Justin who know indirectly because they see me on a recorded call or whatever, so they reach out and they ask me. It’s great, I like the people I have met, but I wouldn’t spend the amount of money I’m spending on coaching just to meet people. I’m good, I’ve got great friends here. The bottom line is it helped my business grow, helped me create a more stable business, it helps me to continue to develop and challenge myself in a way that I know will continue to push my business as well. To me, it’s got to check that box too - it can’t just be a social circle, it’s got to be a coach that helps you build.
The last thing, especially because I know your podcast talks a lot to health and wellness people, don’t be afraid of the dirty words that we think are dirty in this industry, even though they’re not, because this is life. Like marketing is a real thing, you’ve got to do it unless you live in a one pony town type of thing where there is only one chiro, there’s only one X - you gotta do it. Sales isn’t a dirty word; everything is sales, whether it’s a monetary exchange or not. I had to convince my kid to put his Crocs on this morning; that was a sales pitch. It’s all sales, life is sales. There’s a book out there, “It Sells to Be Human,” and it’s the truth. The quicker that people can have their heads wrapped around that, the easier being okay with the fact that there is competition. We have a clinic in the alley beside us, we’ve got two clinics on the next block over – there’s competition out there, people have choices. The person that solves the problem the clearest for the patient or client will earn the right to fulfill that promise and help that person out - that was not a clear way of saying that, but basically, if you are clear to your patient, they will stay - otherwise they will go somewhere else because someone else will be clear. That, to me, is “sales.” Now it’s gotta be done ethically, all of those caveats exist - you have to sell someone services they need for the problem they have.
Erika: Yeah, you have to sell authentically and ethically, of course. Do you have any tips, maybe top 3 things that could help someone get through feeling awkward about showing up for marketing or sales - and they are just like Ugh, I don’t know how to get on social media, I don’t know how to start marketing. I feel awkward. Do you have any tips/tricks/top 3 recommendations?
Luc: One - just start. Don’t create a plan, just start doing it. The plan is a distraction. The more time you spend doing reps versus building a plan, the better you will be. So, you may as well do reps - obviously reflect on it and even refine, but if you spend 5 hours building a plan versus 5 hours building content, you’re more efficient on the content rather than if you had done a plan. I think you need to start. Once you start, reflect and refine. For the sales bit, practice with people you trust who will give you good feedback, find people who can help you who have done it before and spend time practicing - whether you spend time practicing on your patients or away from your patients. But if you spend time practicing on your patients, it’s not going to go well, and it’s going to be unclear, and ultimately it probably won’t lead to a successful interaction. I think that is probably the thing that has helped our team the most. The practicing is huge - we role-play, every interaction is a role-play. It’s awkward, but if you can’t look the person in the face at first, pull a screen and just start saying it so that they can just hear it – but you gotta get past that initial stickiness and just start practicing.
Erika: I always just say I’m awkward, you’re awkward - let’s just acknowledge it and move on. Everyone is feeling a little bit awkward in this engagement, let's just keep going. Role playing is awkward. I’ve done so much of it historically, I’ve sat in for sales teams' role playing, and it is awkward, but it’s practicing what to say, when you are stumbling over your words, it’s a safe environment - just recognize the awkwardness and push through it. You aren’t going to learn and grow if you don’t get through it.
Luc: Totally. Someone explained sales once as creating a solution for a problem and creating clarity around that problem. To me, that sounds exactly like what I am doing when I am treating someone. I’m verbalizing how that plan is going to go, what we need to commit to to get them from feeling in pain to running the 5k they have in three months. Or whatever their goal is. It’s like tell me what your goal is, tell me what’s going on, and we will fill in the gaps so we can get you there. That’s an honest conversation. The dishonest thing to do is to be like - oh, it’ll be a couple times for the next few weeks, and then we will see. That is so not clear and so unfair to the patient because they don’t know what they are committing to, what it’s going to take, what they have to prioritize - it’s just not fair. It’s looking at it from the lens of the patient, like what would you want someone you care about to get care-wise, and hopefully that can move someone from feeling awkward to just trying and seeing how it goes. The other bit is humans are mostly focused on themselves, so you may feel awkward, but no one else is noticing. It’s such a raw way to put it, but it's so true.
Erika: Yeah, I was once told no one else is thinking of you as much as you are thinking about yourself. So stop stressing about what people are thinking of you and just focus on you.
Luc: And if patients haven’t been in your office, they don’t know what to expect, and so it’s a blank canvas. Just try your best and then debrief after. Next time you do it a little better, and it gets better. To me, in my office, if we are getting better, then what happens at the end is a byproduct of us getting better. If it doesn't go great, no one is 100% but tell me we did the steps - great we checked that box, tell me we tried something that we weren't trying before, we asked a follow up question and we leaned into the discomfort of navigating someone’s obstacle – and if we did that then we are growing and getting better and I can live with that for a very long time. It’s when we stop doing that. Can and won’t is a dangerous place to live.
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