I’m Dr. Gary Rademacher from The Business Academy, a management coaching and training company. Today, I want to spend a little time going over the most common reasons why things go wrong when you hire an associate. Now, 97% of the time, it’s because you as the owner hired the wrong associate. And here’s why.
The Associate You Hired Has the Wrong Personality
The number one reason why hiring an associate goes bad is that you hired someone with the wrong personality. Let’s say as an example, the associate cannot get new patients, they don’t know how to do an effective report of findings, and they don’t communicate with patients well. Obviously that’s not going to work depending on your business style.
They’re not motivated, they don’t have conviction. They’re in it just for the money. They decide, “Hey, I’m going to be a chiropractor, because it’s a profession that I can make some money doing it.” There’s no conviction of why they are doing what they’re doing.
You Didn’t Train the Associate You Hired
The second most common reason why hiring an associate goes bad is that you don’t spend the time training them. It’s a problem. For instance, you have no step-by-step systems. As the owner, you’ve got to have step-by-step systems for hiring and onboarding an associate. I’ve seen this many times, you bring in an associate, you have them follow you for a couple of days, and boom, you let them go off adjusting patients.
Now, hiring an associate is the easiest position to bring in because they typically have some training. They’ve been adjusting patients. You spend some time showing them your technique, so they can do it easily. But if the training stops there, you’re going to have a problem. If you’re not in it to win it long-term and training every single day, you’re going to have a problem. So, you’ve got to have your systems down.
Four Levels of Competence in Associate Training
As you train someone, they go through four levels of competence:
- There’s unconscious incompetence. That means the associate doesn’t know what they don’t know.
- When you first start to train, they become consciously incompetent. They know they don’t know.
- Then, the more times you train and go over things, the more certain and confident they will be. Then they get to conscious competence. Now, they know that they know.
- Where you want to get them is unconscious competence. This is like the black belt. This is the person who has all their scripts down. They have their table talk down. They know exactly how they’re going to adjust the patient. They’re experts in that examination process. They’re experts at patient communication.
You Hired an Associate So You Could Take Time Off
Another thing that causes a breakdown is if you’re hiring an associate just to take time off. That is a nice perk, but if you’re only bringing them in so that you can take some time off, you’ve got to have a plan for that associate for when you come back into the office.
Learn More About Hiring from The Business Academy
Those are the top reasons why failure can happen when you hire an associate. You just don’t have a good plan in place, and your training systems are not up to par. I hope that helps you. And if you want more information about hiring, give us a call at (727) 477-8576 to book a strategy session.
Dr. Gary Rademacher founded Downtown’s Healthcare in Denver in 1997, eventually growing that chiropractic practice to 600 patient visits a week. In 2011, he integrated medical providers into his office, believing that the combination of chiropractic and medicine would provide the best care for his patients. He fully believes in the innate power of the body’s ability to heal itself and that medication and surgery should be a last resort. Dr. Rademacher received the Colorado Chiropractic President’s Award in 2011 and currently co-owns The Business Academy and owns My Injection Training a medical training company that has trained over 200 medical providers on ultrasound guided joint injections.
