Scott Marcaccio: Scale Team and Culture, Emotional Mastery in Leadership, Myodetox, and more | GYC Podcast E270

In this episode, Ben speaks with Scott Marcaccio, the CEO and co-founder of Myodetox.

They delve into the topic of building a reputable brand and maintaining a distinct culture while scaling a team. Scott shares insights on attracting A-grade talent, replicating culture in different locations, and the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in leadership. They also discuss the role of journaling and reflection in personal development and decision-making.

Tune in to gain valuable insights on building a strong brand and team culture in the healthcare industry.

Quotes

• "Culture is this amorphous thing that is continuing to evolve."
• "We want to make sure that therapists that come through our system and work up through our mentorship over a period of years just become the best version of themselves."
• "You should almost completely ignore social media."
• "If every single small business owner within a couple of miles from you is not coming into your clinic regularly, that's an issue."
• "Brand is what people say when you're not in the room."

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:53 Scott's Bio
01:39 Culture evolution, intentional design and creating raving fans
07:21 Culture is key to growth
10:21 Integrating new team members
13:12 Scaling and hiring strategies
14:11 Self-awareness is key to effective leadership
16:59 Journaling for better decision-making
21:09 Measuring job performance
26:23 Ensuring long-term client retention
28:37 Shift in mindset towards proactive care
33:09 Importance of role-play in training
38:01 Focus on local community impact
42:29 Continuous improvement is essential for success

Connect

• Myodetox website
• Scott's LinkedIn

If you found this episode valuable, please give us a thumbs up, share, comment, and give us your ratings on:

• iTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grow-your-clinic/id1332920944?mt=2
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/03nmt7gYDfeeOPV6qBmVTu
• Watch on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@clinicmastery

We appreciate your support and feedback!

Transcript

Transcript

00:00 Scott
So I think in the first few years, it was much more about let's push away from the status quo. And actually, let's start to differentiate the experience as much as possible. So people generally come to the company, they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. You know, culture is this amorphous thing that is continuing to evolve. And I think some of the best companies in the world struggle with it.

00:16

This is the Grow Your Clinic podcast from Clinic Mastery.

00:19 Scott

You have to really think hard about how you delegate, how you work through your managers. The fun trick over time is when you can actually identify truly what you're strong and weak at and then start to bring in people that are strong where you're weak. That's where you really start to see the scale. When you actually get to the manager and manager levels, it's much more of an emotional game than a skill set game. You can make one great decision in a month and it completely changes the trajectory of your company or your team or your business. Yeah, that's where a lot of the change happens. And I think that's the most important thing is as leaders, we have to demonstrate willingness to change things when there's a better way.

00:54 Ben

Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. My name is Ben Lynch. In this episode, I'm speaking with Scott Marcaccio, the CEO and co-founder of Myodetox. We discuss how Myodetox has become such a reputable brand and destination clinic for clients in their healthcare and wellbeing, and especially for A-grade talent. The team members that they attract have allowed them to go from just a handful of team members a few years ago to hundreds now. I've been interested to unpack what have been the key elements for them to be able to grow and scale their team and maintain that very core distinct culture. Let's start the conversation with understanding what it's like to work at Myodetox. I have watched Myod etox from afar on socials, on website and had great admiration for the attention to detail, the quality and the brand, the partnerships that you've established. and in particular, what appears to be a raving fan culture of team members. I see from afar team members really representing the brand in a really great way. And it seems like you've put a lot of intentional design into the culture that you've created. I'm interested to know how you would actually describe or characterize the M yodetox culture.

02:22 Scott

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's changed a lot over time. I think in the first few years, culture was a lot less intentional. I think it was more of a function of the first five or 10 people you have sort of come together to start a company and join a company and start to build it. Sort of just sets culture for a few years around, you know, what we all believed and how we communicated and everything. And I think in the early days, it was much more about sort of rebellious upstart energy. It was like, if every clinic's painting the walls white and putting these silly anatomy posters on the wall, let's paint the walls black and put some really cool artwork or like, you know, light box with some beautiful anatomy that's really just different. So I think in the first few years, it was much more about, let's push away from the status quo and actually let's start to differentiate the experience as much as possible. And the culture reflected that, right? It was a little bit more edgy, a little bit more masculine. It was just, that's kind of what you need to get off the ground. And I think what's happened, especially over the last few years, you know, over time, not only has the core team gotten a lot older, we all have kids, we're just talking about kids. But really just the breadth and diversity of people that had joined the team as we went from 10 team members to 100 to now north of 300, you just get such more of a kind of fabric of the company. And that creates so much more nuance to the culture. So today, I always think about the company as we have some of the smartest therapists working with us and not just therapists, but non-clinicians. Everyone's super humble. And ultimately, we look at Mayo as a vehicle for personal development. So people generally come to the company because they want First of all, not to be complacent right they want to learn they want to be inspired they want to push and ultimately they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. So I think today the cultures. got into a place where people are humble, hungry, smart, they want to just continue to do great work and be in an environment that supports that. Yeah, so it's been fun and it's gonna continue to evolve, I'm sure, as we progress down this journey.

04:46 Scott

Yeah, I think the Early days was really just one on one recruitment. We're sort of selling people in this dream, this vision of what we could be and what we could do together. And that attracted a lot of the right people that I classes like the early adopters people that were willing to take a chance with their career and, you know, might have been only a couple years out of school. So they didn't have that much to lose. I just want to be a part of it. And what's happened over time is, as we've really just kept focusing on a culture of clinical excellence, a lot of our clinical leaders who are both in business positions, but also really hold the torch of being incredible clinicians. I think what's happened is we've penetrated into the schools. So, for example, every region we operate in, we have partnerships, you know, here in LA, we're with USC and Toronto, University of Toronto and Vancouver UBC. We have our therapists, kind of our senior clinicians in those schools, mentoring, teaching, lecturing, and making sure that next generation of students coming out understands not only does Mayo have this beautiful brand and we really care about the experience, but at the core of everything we do is clinical excellence. And that's something we say internally all the time is like, good therapy equals good business. Like we can get a lot wrong, but if our therapists are incredible, That's really the foundation where we need to start. So I think that's changed over time because in the early days, Vin was obviously an incredible clinician, but we're attracting a very young team. And just over time, there's really this commitment to learning and development and mentorship. For example, in every single clinic now, we have a lead therapist, which is a senior clinician, and their sole explicit focus is take, especially junior team members, mentor them. If you come out of school and you go work somewhere else and it's going to take you know five years to get to some certain level skill, we want you to come out of school and with my I'll get there in two years. And how do we build a mentorship system and a ability to support your caseload such that we can fulfill that growth promise. So that's been a big focus for the last three or four years and we're really seeing that translate into much easier recruitment now.

06:43 Ben

It's a really great sort of backbone and through line in, I imagine, being able to expand to the team size you're at now. So when I'm speaking with clinic owners, they're concerned about going to that next location, especially if it's their first time going to a home base. How am I going to replicate this awesome culture that I have at this clinic site into the next site when I'm recruiting a whole bunch of new team members that don't know who we are? They don't understand the fabric of who we are. What are some of the lessons that you've learned about successfully being able to duplicate, replicate the Myodetox culture to different locations as you've grown to above 300 team members?

07:33 Scott

Yeah. That's in hindsight, I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that from, I'd say, two locations to five, it's sort of like the Valley of Death. You know, because you don't, you don't have enough resources coming back from the clinics that you can actually build, you know, real infrastructure and you have extra therapists that could be traveling across every single location. So, you know, we had this problem and I talked to many, many clinic owners that they go from one location to two and they could still be at those two locations and sort of keep an eye on things and all of a sudden they get to three or four and it's just such a juggling game. And, you know, there's a fire here or patients don't want to see them and it just becomes this really critical challenge that is almost unsolvable because you don't have the resources until you kind of pass four or five locations. So, you know, I don't think we've gotten this right for many years and then it started to click a lot over the last few years and I think the the ultimate thing we learned is like regional autonomy is really important. We need people in place in Toronto and Vancouver and Los Angeles where we operate that whether I'm there or Vin's there, you know, some of our other senior folks, the culture feels the same, right? They're able to reinforce that and they're able to sort of be the culture, the culture bearers. And I think that comes back to being very, in the early days, you can be, culture is not really written down. It's sort of just how we do things. Over time, we've gotten much more explicit around how we do things, right? Not what we call freedom within a framework. So we still want people to be themselves and do their thing. But ultimately, there's a way that we do things at Mayo. And over time as our clinical leaders who really created that system came to embody that system in every region. We have what I now call like regional harmony. There's a lot more peer mentorship and teamwork and I can drop into other clinics and the culture feels very similarly. But it's really hard. It's really hard. And I think some of the best companies in the world struggle with it. I think it's something we pay attention to all the time and it feels know, culture is this amorphous thing that is continuing to evolve. So it's not like we get it right. And that's it, it's something that we have to keep fanning the flames on over and over and over again. So we've got some initiatives that has been really helpful as we've gotten past a certain number of folks. So for example, our onboarding, we spend a lot of time on our evergreen material. So every single new team member that joins the company, they watch, you know, a half an hour video with Vin and I talked about the founder story and how we think about the company and what we've learned through the journey. We also give every single person a brand book, which is like a hundred page book. It's a beautiful kind of curated book. I'll send you a PDF after our chat. That basically talks about the story of the company and key milestones and key people, even some of the people that are no longer in the company, but that we want to celebrate and honor because they were here. So I think getting people out of the gates properly in the company is what I've learned is so important. If the culture is working really well, How do you actually bring someone into that culture and integrate them in that first 30 days? So I think it's something we talk about still constantly. And I think that makes or breaks the company as they grow. But we try to look to the best in the world. We look at the Nikes and the Apples and the Lululemons and say, how did they propagate culture over many countries and experiences? And are there playbooks there that we can learn from?

10:46 Ben

I love that continual commitment to fanning the flame, as you said, but getting better at culture and nurturing, supporting that and that it's changing. It's not kind of like getting to this point and saying it's fixed forever. You're always improving it. And I imagine you and the leadership team have gone through a number of really breakthrough learnings from experience, but also transformations in how you view the business and your own role. What are some of the key things that, when you look back on your journey so far, you feel have been real breakthroughs or level ups for you personally as a leader?

11:27 Scott

Yeah, I was chatting with one of our team members about the stages you go through earlier today, and I think about it almost in kind of three phases. So in the first phase, you're an individual contributor. If you have one location and you're there all the time. I remember the first location, I was answering all the emails, I was picking up all the phone calls for the first year. I was sitting there at the reception desk and I was checking every single patient out and having these conversations. It was an opportunity to not only be in the business, but then working on the business. And every second I was wearing every hat, whether that was HR or legal or running payroll or paying the bills, like that was just the job. And most clinic owners, especially with one location, like that's sort of where you're at. You're at this individual contributor level. Over time, you start to hire team members, right? Maybe you hire an operations manager, you hire a payroll manager, and you start to become a manager of people. And as a manager, it's a very different skillset and it's a different way you have to show up every single day and think about your time and energy than when you're an individual contributor. And then the jump that I've seen over and over, it's the hardest for folks to make, especially if they start out as an IC, is to become a manager of managers, right? And when you start to get into that five plus locations, you really become a manager of manager and have to really think hard about how you delegate, how you work through your managers to drive business performance. And what I've learned through the journey for me was I'm a really good IC. I struggled for years of sort of the manager piece. And then something clicked a few years ago when I sort of became a manager of managers and I really had to learn around surrender and letting go. And, um, You know, I think people hear this all the time. Like a lot of people struggled to hire folks because they think they can just do it better. And that's true, but that's going to stop you from actually scaling. And then the fun trick over time is when you can actually identify truly what you're strong and weak at, and then start to bring in people that are strong where you're weak. That's where you really start to see the scale. And I think in the early days, especially I see, or even as a manager of individual contributors, you can't really see what you're great at and what you're not great at. Um, and it really took me until we had like multiple hundreds of team members and we had a corporate team of, you know, 15 to 18 people that I started having all these light bulb moments of like, Oh, you know, I shouldn't touch that. I'm very disruptive when I sit in those types of meetings, right? Or the way I communicate feedback in this certain forum or this setting is really disruptive to the team and totally throws off the operating cadence. So a big unlock for me was our president and COO, Aaron, he joined the business almost four years ago. He's been a great foil because he's exactly strong where I'm weak and vice versa. So I think just over time, being really clear headed and building some self-awareness around where we all have our strengths and weaknesses and I think in the early days it's hard to accept that you have so many blind spots and it's hard to clearly see your weaknesses. And just, it takes a lot of self inquiry and reflection. And, you know, I work with an executive coach I've worked with the last few years, basically on a weekly basis, sort of sitting back and looking at what happened in the business. How did I react to that? What was my emotional reaction and what came up for me? And I think the last big learning that we're sort of taking some of our senior leaders through right now is that when you actually get to the manager and manager levels, it's much more of an emotional game than a skillset game. So for example, my mother died when I was quite young and as a team got to a certain size, I started realizing in certain situations, I was like. Massively overreacting to stuff, not outwardly, but I was having some emotional reaction to certain situations. So for example, if I had to have a hard conversation or I had to put myself in a position of vulnerability, it's getting a lot of emotions coming up. And one of the things I started working on with the executive coach is actually how the death of my mother impacted my leadership style as I matured. And so I actually now have that exec coach working with five or six of our top people, mostly our clinical leaders, because ultimately when you get to being a manager of managers, it's again, not a skillset game, it's an emotional game. And it's just been amazing to see the unlock in their communication style and their expressiveness and their ability to lead their teams, not through learning more about business, but learning more about themselves. So we spent a lot of time in our company talking about self-leadership and self-development, because ultimately that path of self-leadership is what allows you to be an effective leader and manager over time.

15:58 Ben

I've heard you talk about the role of journaling and reflection for you personally in creating some self-awareness to be able to make progress, learn from, you know, recent mistakes or challenges or where you've gone particularly well. Is that something that you still do? And what role does journaling and reflection play for you in becoming a better leader?

16:21 Scott

Yeah, it's definitely core part of my toolkit. I've come to recognize there's really two types of people. Some people need to talk out loud and that's how they solve their problems. And some need to introspect and I'm the introspective type. So I take a lot of time to write and think and go on long hikes by myself. That's what I need to problem solve. I've intentionally set up the majority of our team to be more collaborative. They love to talk. They love to have meetings, that sort of thing. And I've recognized like, that's just not my strength or where my energy goes. But when you start to build a big enough team, you need enough of your leadership team to be wired that way because that's otherwise the culture gets stuck, the conversations get stuck. But for me, journaling, the way I think about it is most people think that they think, but they truly just feel and they don't think. So when you start to put your, thoughts on paper and you can start to unwind the emotions a little bit and just unemotionally just be able to get it out and look at it and get it a little bit separate from your emotions. It's just an incredible tool for problem solving and I think as I've gotten deeper in my leadership journey I've realized like the the nuance and the subtleties of how I react to certain situations. So for example, I'm very focused on like calming the noise in my system. So, you know, for the last three or four months, like I haven't had any caffeine or any coffee because I recognize when I have coffee, my decision-making is flawed a little bit, right? I'm a little bit more impulsive. I'm a little bit less kind of tuned into my instinct. So I spend a lot of time these days, even when I'm journaling, I'll put this out in public for the first time, but I, um, probably three or four times a week, I'll journal with my laptop and actually wear a sleep mask. So I can't see my words. And I'm just actually listening to like the emotions coming up. It's almost like a bit of a meditative practice. And I'm just typing and I'm typing and I'm typing, I'm typing and I'm, I'm trying to break through that first or second layer of, um, how do I say this? When you start to actually think and you start to press into your emotions, it's almost like this bounce back effect where your mind will play a trick of saying, oh, I'm really tired. Or, oh, I should go do this. And like, there's all these distractions that come up. So one of the disciplines I think of emotional mastery over time is starting to be able to like settle through that bounce back. And I've found actually journaling without being able to reread it at the moment has allowed me to get really crisp insights And then over, you know, half an hour later or the next day, I'll go back and reread it and sort of be thinking about it. But yeah, so much of what I'm practicing now is actually about like the emotional nuance of making really good decisions and recognizing so many of my decisions in the past were from a place of, you know, like an emotional hurricane that I thought I was just making good decisions. But as I went back and read previous journals, I recognized I was, I was feeling my way through decisions versus actually thinking about them. So journaling is just a way to really sharpen up your thinking and it matters, right? If you're in a CEO seat or you're in a senior executive seat, like your job is to make very good decisions and it doesn't have to be a lot. You can make one great decision in a month and it completely changes the trajectory of your company or your team or your business. So yeah, very focused on quality these days and not, I think that ties into how I think about my time and calendar and scheduling and all that stuff. But yeah, high quality decision-making is ultimately like the first bullet point of my job description.

19:53 Ben

In that job description, how do you know that you're doing a good job? Like you're the CEO of the company, how are you measuring that? Or internally, how do you know that you're being effective?

20:04 Scott

I mean, first of all, that's one of the hardest things, I think, as folks that if you've never been in a senior manager role or a VP role or a CEO seat, most people get terrified the first few years you're in there because there actually is not necessarily a scoreboard to say, hey, you're doing a great job. Over time, I've come to recognize a couple of things. Like one, there's the quantitative performance, right? Is the business growing, right? Are we hitting our targets? Are we meeting our budget? Great. I mean, ultimately if I can create more value, you know, that's clearly a part of my job. But the other thing for us is, so we just did a, an annual engagement survey. So we had 95% of our organization participate and we asked them, I don't know, like 60 or 70 questions, something pretty deep. And it gave us really, really interesting qualitative data around just the engagement level of the company. What are we doing well? What aren't we doing well? Where are there opportunities? Where are our strengths? So I think finding a path to getting a touch point around culture and engagement level. Because ultimately, if the team is happy and the business is performing, and to me personally, our next generation of leaders are developing, and it's very clear that we're growing people. To me, those are the three boxes I need to check. And if those are all checked, I'm doing a great job. In the past, though, I think that you hear this term imposter syndrome, or people getting in the role and trying to figure out, how do you know you're doing well? You don't. you have to get very comfortable with the anxiety that comes from how gray the role is. And over time, each business is a little bit different. And if you know your business, you know what great performance looks like and what great culture looks like, over time, you can get a bit more settled with that.

21:51 Ben

I think having that sort of scoreboard available to you is a good feedback loop to calibrate, make better decisions, know how those decisions in the past have gone, talked about journaling being somewhat of a internal way to get a feedback loop on how you're going. What are some other ways that you use feedback loops? to navigate decision-making across the organization, whether in your role or empowering other managers and leaders to be better at decision-making?

22:24 Scott

Yeah, I think it's something that we still think about constantly of how do we make sure that all the right stakeholders are feeling like they're being expressed and they're being heard by everything. So the culture survey that we just did last month is a great example of like that's sort of a wide net we're going to cast this and make sure we kind of get a feel for everything. Something that I think we've gotten better at is what again, I'll call it regional harmony. So we're a completely remote company. And I mean, that was pre COVID. We had some offices in Toronto and Vancouver, but we've never, I think in history really had like all the team in one city. So it's taken us some time to sort of figure out our post COVID rhythm. And what we found to sort of be the optimal rhythm now is that every three months, every 12 weeks, We get about 15 people on our corporate team, sort of the senior folks together in one of the cities that we operate in. And we spend two full days together, really talking with the business. We spend the first two or three hours actually more on the emotional side of things, right? What's everyone feeling great around? What's the frustration, right? If there's one thing in the business today you could change, what would it be? And for me, actually in my seat, that gives me a really healthy range because our regional leaders are there, some of our operations folks, some of our people and talent folks. So it gives me a really nice, it's almost like my little focus group every quarter. And I get to sense like, where's the health of the business? And then our regional leaders do something similar with our clinic directors or lead therapists. They get them together for recharges or sort of regional recharges where they're able to sort of assess that and sort of have that feedback coming back. Ultimately, I think of clinics as this symbiosis between, you know, clinical thinking and business thinking, and there just needs to be a flow of information in and out. And there's many ways to do that. I think every culture is different. We tend to have a bit of a younger culture, so they're more comfortable with, you know, we run our business on Slack and Notion and we share video updates and then you know, try to reinforce that with our in-person get-togethers. So, yeah, thinking about how do we cast wide nets for the whole org and then for me, how do I make sure that I'm really listening to our key leaders and, you know, because they're in the field every single day, they're able to dredge up some things that, you know, I just can't necessarily see if I'm not in the clinics every single day. So, I think it's a work in progress. It's something that we're always thinking about of, you know, that flow of feedback both upwards and downwards.

24:48 Ben

At an individual contributor level or individual practitioner level, part of the feedback loop is how well are they doing in their role. There's a crucial element to their role of being able to be sustainable in supporting their wages. How do you balance or address the performance-based measures that a therapist will be supported with, held to account on, and A-grade clinical excellence care? Perhaps at times, I certainly hear a lot of clinic owners or practitioners feel that those things are at odds with one another, really driving business performance and also providing great clinical care. How do you go about doing it in Mayo?

25:34 Scott

Yeah, I think our philosophy is that they are not mutually exclusive at all. Actually, they're overlaid with each other. We see best clinical care leading to the best business performance. Something that is a little bit different philosophically for us is the tagline of our company is future-proof your body. We believe our clinicians should be a lifelong coach and a partner to somebody through their lifetime. We always think of the dental industry. So I'm sure you go to the dental hygienist once in a while, and most people go a couple of times a year.

26:01 Ben

Next week, I think I'm due.

26:02 Scott

Perfect. So you think of dental, People go to the hygienist because they don't want cavities. You don't go for one cleaning and say, okay, I'm good. I never have to go back again because we use our teeth every single day. And just philosophically, that's how we feel about our bodies, right? If you're great now, you haven't torn your rotator cuff, your hips are in great shape. Like how do we ensure just like a dental hygienist, you're coming back on a regular basis. know, for us, ultimately, our therapists have their clinical autonomy and sort of make the decisions. But by and large, a lot of our clinicians opt to sort of get away from this idea of discharging, right? It's not about coming in, fixing your shoulder for six sessions, and then moving on to, okay, you're done, and I'll see you again when you get injured, right? We want to be in your corner, just like your dental partner? How do we make sure that for life you're really taking care of your body? So with that philosophy and I think with how our clinicians show up within that philosophy, we really see them focusing on visits per client and retention and how frequently somebody's coming back. And that changes, right? If somebody's coming in with an acute issue, you know, they typically follow a bit more of a traditional, you know, physio prescription or chiroproscription where they're coming back multiple times per week or higher frequency. But then once they get to a point where they're actually graduating to like restoring natural motion and building strength and just, you know, worrying about their movement health and optimizing for that. Um, how do we get them into a bit more of a consistent offering? Um, and it's been very interesting operating in Canada versus the U S um, and the U S over 50% of our revenue is actually driven by our members. So we have a membership basis here where people are coming in much more proactively. And over the next decade, I think that's ultimately the behavior change we'd love to see is that people get away from this reactive mentality of, Oh, I got injured. I need to go see my PT too. I don't want to get injured and I want to, you know, there's a sense of longevity around my body that I want to keep. So I should be coming on a regular basis to see my coach and my partner effectively in my body.

28:00 Ben

When it comes to then therapists joining the team, do you find that you're attracting people who just share that same philosophy or there's quite an education period for people to understand how Myodetox goes about supporting clients through the journey of life?

28:19 Scott

Yeah, I think that The more and more we see that our clients and patients responding so positively to that methodology, I think the more and more we're taking a stand on, even through the interview process and how you engage with a company, we want to be very explicit with what you're signing up for. Because what we're trying to do is different. We're trying to really shift how people take care of their bodies. And we're trying to do that on a big scale. So what you're signing up for here is not the status quo. It's about you're part of this movement to actually educate clients and consumers over the next decade on why they should be coming proactively. Right. And it's just like, you go and see your dental hygienist. It's like, why, if you have high cholesterol, you're not going to be eating cheeseburgers or hopefully you're not right. There's just this whole epidemic around musculoskeletal injury. You know, I look at the stats in America. So it's over $400 billion a year spent on MSK injuries, right? So that's low back pain, neck pain, and mostly surgeries. And a lot of that's backloaded in the last like 10 to 15 years of life. And that is more that's spent on cancer than on diabetes, on heart disease. Like it was absolutely mind blowing to us of how much waste and also suffering there is and unnecessary surgeries and people that get hooked on pain meds just because we couldn't have an honest conversation upfront you know, if you don't take care of your shoulder or you don't take care of your hip mobility, like here's where you're heading. Um, so I think we're finding more and more people that resonate with that idea. I think post COVID there's been a real shift in people understanding, uh, the importance of self-care and also willing to spend money, um, not just on fitness, but on like holistic health and, uh, you know, good quality therapy being a key component of that. So more and more, we're seeing more folks, uh, get that and want to join the mission. And then other people that, you know, like the old model and stay reactive and they shouldn't come and work here. And I think over the last few years, especially, we're able to be much more explicit with, you know, we know who does really well in our system and we know who doesn't, and they're not gonna be happy. So let's try to be as upfront about that in our marketing messaging and our recruitment process.

30:50 Scott

Yeah, we, we, especially that first like week of onboarding we focus kind of on a nice mix of company onboarding culture brand etc. We focus on soft skills and the ability to communicate the value. And then the last piece is the technical piece and the actual, you know, how do you deliver the value. We find a lot of folks come to us because they're already, you know, they've been through school, oftentimes they've worked, you know, in private practice for a few years, so they're coming to us with an incredible toolkit. I think what we see is that first 90 days with us is actually more just about refining the toolkit, giving them lots of practice, giving them lots of reps, pairing them with a lead therapist in the clinic so that they can get personalized mentorship in those first few months and, you know, and beyond. But there's also a lot of unlearning, right? I think One of our clinical principles is that you're talking in plain language. If you're explaining something to a client and they don't understand it, but you're using all these anatomical terms because that's what you're taught in school and it makes you feel smart, it makes you feel like the authority, It doesn't matter if our clients do not understand you, um, you're sort of missing. The opportunity to actually meet them at their level and meet them where they are and empower them, right. To learn more about their body. So we have some key principles that we, we really focus on, uh, guiding people through in that first 90 days of onboarding. Uh, another one that's really important to us is providing an aha moment in that first session, right? We, we see people coming in, if they learn something about their body and they literally have this aha moment. they get excited to learn more and they get excited to come back and ultimately they we see much more engagement in somebody's treatment plan. So we've I think really dissected the psychology of what makes a great session and then try to show people and role play with them and you know we have looked into a lot of other clinics and people promise mentorship all the time they promise development it just rarely that promise rarely gets fulfilled. So for us, we take it very seriously. We want to make sure, you know, therapists that come through our system and kind of work up through our mentorship over a period of years just become the best version of themselves and able to not only deliver great therapy, but communicate that therapy because that's where a lot of the change happens as well.

33:06 Ben

You touched on something really important there. role play, just brings to mind, one of my partners here at Clinic Mastery, Shane, he says it's called role play, not role serious, meaning have fun with it, you know, you got to enjoy the process. And what I often find is that people aren't willing to give it a shot, or they do, but they just don't do it for a sustained period of time. And it's such an important way to master a skill, to get better at something. How do you go about introducing role play to new team members in particular who aren't yet perhaps familiar with this is the way we do things at Myodetox? And then what are some, you know, maybe pointers that you found useful for effective role play so that it translates into the consult room?

34:00 Scott

So we use, we think about sports teams a lot, right? It would be insane for LeBron, maybe not LeBron because he's had many years, but imagine you're the newest team member on a basketball team. It would be insane to only show up for game days, right? If you're not showing up for practices with a team and to get better yourself and to learn to work with the team, you're not going to perform. And intuitively, we all get that. That makes total sense. But when it comes to our careers and our professions, we're sort of wired to just show up on game day every single day and we'll get better in game day. Yes, of course we will at the expense of clients or patients not getting the best quality care, but really framing this idea of like the reason we role play is we wanna practice, right? One of our advisors has this great saying, which I love, which is great operations is choreographed, right? And I would say the same thing with great clinical care, right? Within the session, obviously you want to follow your instincts and intuition, but there's certain things in the session that you know are going to make that individual feel better, feel more engaged, open up to you more, etc. So how do we make sure that in your practice time you're finessing those where they just become automatic and such in game time you can actually focus on what is important. Um, so we introduce it as, you know, in that first week of onboarding. And I think most importantly, getting team members to practice with each other. It's very hard. I think having a one single manager onboarding a single individual, and they're trying to do this role-playing thing that can be a little bit stiff, but once you get a group of four or five folks and, um, it's yeah. Back to your thing of role play, like it's a little bit more of a fun opportunity and something we do in our first week is we'll do some role-playing and then we'll actually sit back and reflect on. How is this approach? How did you feel about that? We have an opportunity where we put our therapist in the patient's seat and they can then give feedback to the other onboarding therapist to say, oh, when you said this, it made me feel this. Or the way you did this assessment piece actually made me feel really confident in your technical skills. So it's just a practice of getting people open into it. And I think when you have the right team members doing training and leading onboarding, they can set the frame where it just feels very natural. And also, you know, people recognize there's a lot of growth to be had there. But somebody's got to break the ice and having good trainers helps a lot.

36:18 Ben

So if that's one of the key inputs to getting therapists to deliver this great clinical care, and that being a key element to which you've built the brand on and continue to attract great talent to then kind of almost spin the flywheel here and grow the company. One of the things that I see from afar is a great external communication of the brand. And that's one element in terms of the visuals, the aesthetics of the clinics, the way you show up in the content online, the videos, the blog posts. There's a great cohesiveness about what you put out. So often when I'm speaking with clinic owners, they're like, I feel like I've got something really great and I want to share it with the world. And I really want to develop my brand reputation. I'm really interested in how do you think about brand and how do you think about building that brand reputation so that you reach more people, whether that be clients, investors, or partners, therapists, how do you go about thinking about brand?

37:30 Scott

I think the most important thing with brand is like understanding the market you're playing in, right? If you're going to be in your hometown and maybe one day you'll have three or four locations. You should think about brand completely differently than if you're trying to expand nationally across your country or multinationally or, you know, to another city. Like it's just, it's just a completely different framework and therefore like a different level of investment time, energy capital that you'd want to put into that. So I'll give you two answers. One is, I think the conversation I'm 99% of the time with clinic owners that are really focused on just their local markets. And what I say is, you should almost completely ignore social media. I think the mistakes people make in 2023 is they spend way too much energy and time thinking about their digital brand and social media and everything, which is very a global channel. And they, they miss the impact they can have in their local communities and just becoming extremely well-known in the couple of kilometers or miles within their clinic. So I think people would be much better served. Most clinic owners leaning in 10 times harder on their local community impact and outreach and really getting to know, you know, if every single small business owner within a couple of miles from you is not coming into your clinic regularly, like that's an issue and that should be like your first step. Right. can continue to build from there. Um, but over and over just because we have had a lot of success with social media. Uh, we have a lot of people reach out wanting to know the secrets of social media and the secret is you should have started in 2015 because the Instagram algorithm from 2015 to 2018 was incredibly rewarding to educational content marketing, especially video marketing. And we built a lot of our early brands. efforts through Instagram, um, that we then leveraged into partnerships with like Nike and Lululemon and Equinox and these bigger brands. Um, no, but if I was starting today, social would be very low on our priority list. Um, that's, that's sort of my answer to like mom, pop, if you've got one or two clinics, that's, I think where the energy should go when you think about brand and ultimately brand is what people say when you're not in the room and you want to have a rating community of clients that are leaving five-star reviews, are telling their friends and family about you, that are sending referrals. And that's a huge success story around a local brand. So I would focus on that. For us, we've taken a bit of a different approach. Again, we just thought, I mean, first of all, my co-founder Vin, who's a physical therapist, and I was actually a patient of his, and that's how this all came to be. He's an incredible marketer, incredible networker, and rode that wave of Instagram very early, grew from 2,000 people to 100,000 to now over half a million followers and has been able to treat some incredible celebrities and athletes and people that were able to amplify a lot of our brand efforts. But from very early, we had a commitment. We wanted to have as a buttoned up, differentiated experience as possible, both in and outside of the clinic. And I talked earlier about painting the walls black, right? In the early days, we had no money, so we Like, what can we do to differentiate? Let's just do everything different. Um, and then over time it was instead of. Investing in certain areas that might've made more sense at the size of the company. We invest a lot in our brand and creative team early. So bring on a full-time designer, bring on a full-time brand director. Um, and that really helped us look a lot bigger than we actually were. And we then had this issue for three, four years where the brand was so much bigger than the business. This is when we had like three or four locations in Toronto. Everyone thought we were. way bigger which is really fun because we got to attract some great partnerships and we started getting all this attention but it's also stressful in the back end because we had again very little resources and we're trying to figure out you know what does this business look like when it grows up. So ultimately the way I think about brand is like it really comes back to like every single touch point somebody's having with your with your brand and your business and it's so much more than just your logo or your social media is, what are your front desk folks saying when people walk in the door? What's that follow-up email when somebody leaves? When you're doing email marketing to your list, right? Are you telling stories about your clients or are you talking about local events? Like how are you weaving the personality of your brand into every touchpoint? So we think about that constantly. And yeah, I think you'll see a lot more brand updates from our, and over the next year, we've got a lot of fun stuff cooking right now.

41:59 Ben

That's awesome. What strikes me in this conversation and from past conversations and knowing you is that you're always looking to improve, whether that be the one percenters or the bigger things, the attention to detail and the intentional design. Certainly more recently, as you said, maybe not so much in the early days, it was just kind of be the opposite. Yes, that's intentional. And so Mastery is core to what we do, and we believe it is about getting better every day. But what does mastery mean to you and perhaps to Myod etox?

42:39 Scott

I think that's it. It's just know, we, we talked about this a lot where we're building a one of one company. Like we don't sort of look at traditional physio companies as our direct competition. And when we look beyond just the kind of traditional space, we don't see anyone trying to do exactly what we're doing. So we always look at some of the best brands in the world to get our inspiration of like, what is possible, right? Can we actually build the first global brand of therapy and really shift how people take care of their bodies and I think that with that frame of, uh, like that, that word of mastery, it's just about continuous and never ending improvement because we're building something that hasn't been built before. There's not really a playbook we can look at and say, Oh, that's what great looks like. Um, we can, you know, look at the Nikes, the apples of the world and say, wow, that's very inspirational. But then we have to come back and bring it into like our unique circumstances of what we're building and, you know, what works in another company doesn't always work. in our company. So it really is just about a commitment. One of our five core values is never stop learning. And some of the subtext of that core value talks about we operate like tinkerers. We're always tinkering. And that's an interesting thing as a manager because human bias is always to be resistant to change and people hate change management. I think over time, we're not exactly where I'd like to be, but we're much better at just getting really comfortable that assuming things are going to be changing all the time, because we're always looking for a better way to do things. And if we're not stress testing the systems every time, You know, we're going to get complacent over time. So we just onboarded someone actually had a coffee with her this morning. And what I told her, I'm like, you have this amazing opportunity, the first 60 days that you're with Mayo, because your eyes are brand new. You're going to see things that we might've been looking at for the last four years. And it might be obvious to us, but you're going to come in and say, wait, why are we doing that that way? So it's, it's so important is what I told her the first 60 days to speak up, right? If you see something and question everything, like there's nothing sacred here. And I think that's the most important thing is as leaders, we have to demonstrate the willingness to change things when there's a better way. And ultimately our North star is, does this make this a better client experience? And does it make it a better experience for our team members? Um, particular therapists, because they're in the trenches every single day having to, to practice their craft. So how can we better support that experience for them? And therefore we're changing things all the time. So it's been a really fun experience actually having so many locations now because you start to see these patterns and you start to get a lot of, it's like the signal versus noise. You start to see these patterns come up and the feedback that we received. And that helps to inform us of where we can keep getting better.

45:25 Ben

I love it. I think it's awesome to hear how, as we would frame it, you're leading inspired teams to transform experiences and ultimately amplify your impact, which is changing the paradigm of healthcare. Thank you for sharing so openly in this episode. I'm sure we'll have another conversation soon enough when we hear and see some of the great progress that you're making clearly behind the scenes come to life in a public domain. Thank you so much for sharing.

45:57 Scott

I appreciate you having me. Great to see you.

45:59 Ben

That's it for this episode. You can catch all the show notes over at clinicmastery.com. And please like and subscribe on YouTube for more awesome content just like this. All right. We'll see you on another episode very soon. Bye for now.

46:15

Thanks for tuning in to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. To find out more about past episodes or how we can help you, head to www.clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. And please remember to rate and review us on your podcast player of choice. See you on the next episode.