Grow Your Clinic

Lou Bibby: From Blind Spots to Breakthroughs, Understanding Team Dynamics in Healthcare | GYC Podcast 291

• Lou Bibby • Season 5 • Episode 291

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In this episode, we chat with Lou Bibby, the passionate owner of Central Mallee Healthcare and an award-winning osteopath. Together, we explore the unique challenges and creative solutions of running a clinic in rural and remote communities. Lou shares her passion for supporting her team and the local community, emphasizing the importance of creating a culture that balances support and accountability. The conversation explores innovative strategies that country clinics can implement to attract talent and enhance client experiences, highlighting the advantages these clinics have over their metropolitan counterparts. 

What you'll learn:

🌟 The importance of understanding your team and fostering emotional intelligence

🏆 How to create a supportive and accountable clinic culture

🤝 Strategies for building partnerships with other healthcare providers

🏉Insights from football structures to enhance team dynamics

💡 Tips for engaging resistant team members and promoting a positive work environment

🌟 Packed with practical insights, this episode is your roadmap to building a profitable, sustainable, and people-focused clinic!

👉 Subscribe to the Grow Your Clinic Podcast for more strategies to grow your clinic sustainably and confidently.

Join us for an inspiring conversation that will help you lead your clinic to success! 🚀

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This is the Grow Your Clinic podcast from Clinic Mastery. We help progressive health professionals to lead inspired teams, transform client experiences, and build clinics for good. Now, Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. My name is Ben Lynch. If you're passionate about serving underserviced communities, perhaps rural or remote communities, or you're based in the country and you're trying to attract some of the best talent to come and work with you and experience the wonderful life and career variety that so often happens in country locations, then this episode is for you. I'm in conversation with Louise Bibby, Lou, who is the owner and operator of Central Mallee Healthcare. Lou is also recently an award-winning osteo at the Allied Health Awards. The one thing you'll hear through and through in this conversation is Lou's passion. Passion for helping the people in her community, whether that's team members, and it is definitely the local community. We discuss some of the challenges with growing a team, creating a culture that is in somewhat equal parts supportive and accountable, especially from a country location. Even if you're based in the metro CBD locations, perhaps things come a little bit easier for you, but the creative solutions that country clinics have to come up with, the think different, the act different strategies they need to employ, are so often where clinics in the CBD can gain an edge. So we're going to uncover a few things here about building and growing a team, serving local communities and doing great partnerships with other healthcare providers to expand your reach and amplify your impact. All right, let's pick up the conversation with Lou now. Lou, you've got a method that involves or is inspired by some football structures I actually think it probably goes back a little bit further before that, Ben, when it comes to the method. I think to set a good method, you need to probably understand your people a little bit more. I suppose in business behind everything that I sent her a focus around is my actual passion for understanding people. I have this vibe or this frequency, I like to collect and connect people. So understanding, it's been a career of not just professional growth in osteopathy, but a real interest in understanding things like emotional intelligence and really understanding your people. I think any good coach that has a team, if you don't understand who they are, and they're going to have two different types of values when it comes to their skills, which is like your KPIs and around their professional skills, but then there's also those other soft things around their values and their character and identity. And I don't believe that you can really get the best out of a team until you actually really understand your people. And it goes back a little bit further. So in this whole idea around setting a method, there was a lot of people who contributed to that originally. I've had a meaningful mentorship with Jade Scott over my whole career. I met her as a in university, she's my supervisor and I did a small contract for her on the basis of, you know, if I come and work for her that, you know, she'd teach me everything I ever needed to know about business. So, you know, that developed that really important aspect of making sure in life you have a really, really good solid mentor that you, you know, you support fiercely and in return get their support. And through her mentorship, it was actually her that sort of established my passion for for empathy and understanding emotional intelligence and really taking a deep dive into, you know, those values. So, and she was the one that really sort of helped me shine a light on perception of yourself. So in regards to, you know, how do you see yourself and also where, you know, we like to see life as a mirror, like the things that we put out come back and we see ourselves as we would look in a mirror. But she really helped me identify where all my blind spots were. So when you've got your blinkers on, what are the parts of you that you don't see that in fact could be dismantling your effect as a leader, coach or boss? And that was a vulnerable deep dive really early on, which actually got me really, really inspired because there were situations in life where I probably wasn't doing a great job. got thrown in the deep end. I was a 22-year-old Mallee girl that started a business by myself. I was, you know, just trying to do everything possibly that I could to, you know, to grow a business. And I just thought, you know, I'm not a business owner, but I had to be one because, you know, rural practice and being the only thing for four hours in every direction, I just, I had to be that by default. So that was the real shine the light on the stuff Right, back to the episode. Can you share a little bit about what was revealed to you when you did look It was just the reality that there is so much to learn about yourself before you actually learn to coach or mentor others. There's that little quote that sometimes they say until you walk in other people's shoes, but you have to learn to take your own shoes off before you put other people's on. So that really started to unpack in a really early phase. And in doing my own personality profile types and all of those sorts of things, I started to see the true value. It started to shine a spotlight. on parts of me that when I'm healthy, I'm at my best and I look like this, but when I'm struggling or under pressure or this is what I look like. So to shine a real spotlight on yourself, it doesn't feel good, but to then be able to have a really great self-awareness of how to start adapting yourself as a leader and coach. The next real sort of big kick up the bottom came just when you think you've got it going on well, but then there's still these things within your culture that it's not fancy mirrors and rainbows and butterflies, as you said, you might think it is, but there still is this undertone of something's not quite right. And it's one thing to pick your values and to tell your team that this is what your values are, but if they're not actually anchored in it and believe in that as well, you're just not getting it right. And it's not as simple as saying, hey guys, do you just want these to be the values? And what we did was we were having some difficulty. I had learned through some transitions in my career over where some contracting and things didn't go well, some real kick up the bums. I had learned that I really needed to be better at it. And I'd learned to create and foster and be proud of safe, vulnerable space to talk, which led to some really great work with Nick Pappas. So he's a values guy. And I really, really valued one day when things weren't feeling right He came in and did this massive value sessions on gratitude and opening up and saying what we need to say, and he facilitated that. And out of that, we got an opportunity to create our values. But there's this one little thing that I took off him that I'd like to teach others now, is that we've got beliefs and values. I remember from him saying, a belief is a story that you believe, yeah? So a belief is a story that you tell yourself that you think is true in your head. And that story that you continually tell about yourself, about who you are and what your purpose is, when you get the ball rolling, if what's going on in your head is really starting to play out, you will start to see those things play out in front of you as well. So I believe I'm this, I believe I'm that, and I believe about this in the world. And when you start living like that, it starts to establish all of those actions, habits and behaviors that start to categorize our values. So if we're thinking a certain way and we're acting the way we think, we can actually start to play and categorize our values. And the thing about those values is, is that they actually only start to become true when we're talking about perceptions, when other people can see that in you as well. So I always run this thing by people, a filter, just to make sure that I'm checking my mirror and my perception and my blind spot. And I have my personal values, which is, you know, energy, passion, generosity, and, you know, ultimately just being grateful for the collecting and the connecting of people. And if I asked anyone that I know, did these not ring true to you or whatnot? Like, you know, I'm very, very well aware that my actions, attitude, habits, and behaviors are focused on that all the time. So we ran our values at the clinic through that type of filter, you know, is what the story that we're telling ourselves in our head, is that helping us turn up to work, to do things, to say things, to be the things that we wanna be, to establish that we're living by these values. And we actually realized that the values we were living by were a little bit rubbish. And that enabled us to start collecting another 30 or 60 words, and then which ones are alike and narrowing it down. And then once we narrowed it down to collaboration, dedication, generosity, growth, and energy, we put that in a big frame and we put that next to our back door. And that helped us to anchor ourselves into our values, but then also not just having a random mission, a mission that we're going to be a big clinic or the best clinic, or we're going to look after people in a way that makes people thoroughly cared for. We needed to make sure that our mission was something that everybody that they believed in. So anybody that joins your team, you know, the doggies we had, you know, that it's going to be a diverse and inclusive environment for females to play sport. And at Central Mallee Health, we had to make a decision to change our mission to that no Mallee person goes without access to healthcare. So the idea is that in joining up to our team, and later on, I'll touch on how all these value systems tie into, you know, getting your team to do amazing things, is that They've all come on board believing in that's what we're doing. The Mallee is a big place, deep seated in that mission. So straight away, people that commit to our clinic are devoting themselves to that. So that's that massive part of understanding your team, which is the reason why I'll always talk to people, like if they're having difficulty in work, have you ever actually sat down, created the safe and vulnerable space and do you know your people? So at Central Mallee Health, it is just a prerequisite now that we do. personality profiling with the disc profiles. We do the wealth dynamics, we do love languages, we do the humor profile, and we also do the enneagrams. Because there's all different ways of looking at different energy, the way that they can create success in their wealth and what their skills are, whether they're a mechanic or a Lord or whatever, and then what's their disc profile. For a long time, I just taught people and even myself, I didn't see people for people, I saw them as red, yellow, green, and blue. And then knowing that I'm a red, but then in a social setting, I'm a red, yellow, I go from a direct to a social, you know, knowing then to then teach my team that when I'm talking to you, I may talk to you like this, or when I'm under pressure, I may talk to you like this, but I know that you like to be talked to like this, so I'm gonna meet you in the middle. So there'll be days when I can sit and listen and be quiet, but then there'll be days that I need to say, hey, I've gotta be direct with you. When we have those ideas about our team, we know their love languages, we know what to do when they're sad, we know how to communicate with them when they're at their best and when they're at their worst. This then helps by the time you throw key motivators on top of that. You can then start only then really truly understanding how to create a career pathway for people, how to then put that proposal out and go, okay, well, what is it that we now want to do in our career? Because this is who you are, this is what your strengths are, this is what your weaknesses are, here's your mirror, here's your perceptions, here's your blinkers and your blind spot. what do you think your career could look like from here? And I know there's a lot there and it takes years to get over this with your team. It doesn't happen overnight, but to self foster that early. So then I think then the success as you talked about football, right? So then the hardest part, I think, like a lot of people think the running of the business is the hardest part. But for me, the true reality is that it's the relationship handling. It's the people management that I think is, one, the most important, two, the hardest. you know, I'm going to put my hand up and say I'm the absolute worst when it comes to finance, budgeting, creating SOPs, all of that stuff. And I might not have my business down pat to the nth degree with all these operative sort of things, but I believe that I understand my people better than most. So segue then into like this other journey of the crazy nut. So the crazy nuts, the guy that dances at the, what do you call it? The festival, yeah? We've all been there. And there's a famous YouTube that I really, really love where there's a guy, he's taking whatever, he's having a great time and he's dancing around, he's the crazy nut. And he's not making it difficult. What he's doing is really, really easy to copy. And everybody's looking at him going, oh, he's a bit weird, but Jeezy looks like he's having fun. And so we talk about that obviously affectionately being known as the Flint, yeah? And then we've got the first follower and everybody always highlights how important the first follower is. I've had a massive lifetime of actually manipulating and fostering and finding people that I could encourage to be, you know, first followers. Like Daniel Gibbs up at the Clinic Mastery Conference saying, if you just walk to the gate, they will all follow me to the dance floor next door. But if you stay on this chair, they won't, you know? So I've been known to do that a little bit. So in the first follower, whether it's at the wedding, off the chair, you know, at the conference where the dance floor starts or at the festival where someone gets up off the grass to join the crazy nut, the thing we love about that obviously is he's given that crazy nut some purpose and validation and the permission for others to be involved. So leaders are important, but having people in your business who follow you is really, really important. More recently, I've taken that crazy concert or that festival analogy to a new level when I unlocked this little thing with Beck from Clinic Mastery a couple of weeks ago. It was this little missing link that, how do you get the people that are on the grass? Because obviously, more people start joining, starts a movement. even to bring the energy, create the energy, inspire light, create flight, which is my legacy statement. Everybody starts to get up, but there's still these few little people that are sitting on the grass. For me, that's where my challenge is, because I have no problem being a flint or making someone a flint or creating the fellowship or the movement. But what I'm really passionate about is the difference in the ones that do remain on the grass, because the ones that remain on the grass, there's still something in them that I haven't unpacked. there's still a reason they're not getting off the grass. And that's what I'm finding really interesting lately. And the thing about what Bec taught me, she showed me another YouTube, sorry, I don't have the references, but when you've got this unease, when we have like, I like to sort of start at gratitude because gratitude starts can create all of this positivity and optimism, right? If you're expressing gratitude, it's impossible to be negative at the same time. So the thing about expressing gratitude though is you have to be able to communicate. If you can't communicate, you can't express gratitude. Positivity never exists. You have to be able to look someone in the eye and say, hey, Ben, thank you so much for inviting me on this podcast today. I've never been on a podcast before. I've been excited on morning and it means a lot that you've noticed the work that I've done to invite me on the podcast. So thank you so much for that. So to be able to do that properly, yeah. So to do that properly is important. And you have to have a community that you can do that in. So in doing all of that though, the big block to someone getting off the grass or getting out of the wedding chair or to express their This episode is brought to you by AliClinics.com. If you want a single place for all of your policies, procedures, and training, Ali is where to go. You can test it for free. You can download our library of policies, procedures, and training in three clicks of a button, immediately share it with your team, and see whether they've read it using the custom acknowledgements function. This is great for compliance purposes. You can also upload police checks, working with children, CPR and first aid, professional indemnity insurance, and make sure that you have all the compliance docs that you need to run a good business in one place, not scattered systems, making sure everything's efficient, and you never have to answer the same question twice. This is the brain outside of your brain, a key tool in helping you grow your clinic that's less reliant on you. You can test it for free. Go check out allyclinics.com. All So tying it right back to confidence in this YouTube, and then as we're talking to Beck, is that, Confidence, for it to exist, it needs three things. It needs the permission. The permission gives birth to it. It needs the community, a safe space for it to happen. But it also needs the curiosity and what we call the courage to actually be inquisitive enough to go, hang on, if I say something, what will be my impact? So the concept of confidence, Having confidence to communicate helps with community. And then that community and that confidence and that communication leads to that positive ingratitude. So for me, when we come back to the festival, or the people at Clinic Mastery that don't come out to the nightclub or whatever that is, you still have an anchored in giving them confidence and permission to be involved in the way that they feel comfortable. So for me, diving even deeper into confidence and permission to join, it's almost like, yeah, the Flint, the spark. But for me, I'm looking at the next step beyond that. And that's sort of been something I've been trialing with, not just Central Mallee Health, but in the creation of Central Mallee Fitness in the Mallee. And then also the new Sea Lake Striders Club, giving people permission in a township that's been torn apart by recent tragedy. where things exist in silos with a lack of leadership, how you can give people permission to be involved in something brand new. And then we take it back to the team environment that you then create at work, is that once you understand everybody and therefore that's the hardest part, the method of how you run your business can be then quite simple. So this is where we get to football, right? And the reason why we get to football is I've played state league football for the doggies. You know, I've got a myotherapist currently playing for Williamstown. You know, we all mad footie tippers. We play local football netball. It's just a language they understand. So from a really, really early point, we wanted to come up with a method and One, a method, a coach that has a method is easy to follow. The crazy nut, you just have to be easy to follow. The method just has to be easy. People have to understand it and they have to love it. This is our clinic. We love our coach. We think he's a great guy. He communicates the plan really easy. We're on board. We love it. And we're going to win a flag. Yeah. I can relay that to my sports team. I can relay that to my family. I can relay that to work. So the coach has a simple method. Our method, we take a 38 hour work week, for example, this is how we break it down at Central Mallee Health. We've got 60% of the week, that's treating clients, that's our A kick, out of the back line. It's that big, long kick, the big part of the week, we just wanna get it out of there and get it done. We then have our B kick, up the wing, which is about 30% of the week. That's our admin. It's everything that we have to do that pertains to the 60% of work that we did train clients. So we've done the 30%. There's a bit of grit. The wing position's a pretty tough position. You gotta make sure you get right up and down there and get it done, right? So that's the 60, the 30. Then we have this little 45 minutes to an hour of the week. And this for me is the most fundamental part. This is the 5% of the week, which is our C-kick. into the forward line. And we can deliver this poorly, or we can deliver this super well. We can pop it right on the top of the goal square if we do it well, or we can just do this crappy fat side kick that sort of sits 45 meters out in a tight angle. So the quality of this 5% needs to be super high because we're delivering it in, that C kick to the forward. This is our nurturing. This is our dashboard stuff that we sit with. It's the new client journey. It's the, was lovely to meet you. Can't wait to see you next week. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Or hey, I know it might seem a bit difficult or confusing right now, but I'm looking forward to teaching you more about this next week. Or it's the, I haven't seen you in a while. You forgot to book. How was your holiday? How did that surgery go? I'm sorry to hear your mother wasn't well. Just following you up to see if everything's okay. And the quality of that 5% sets us up, not just for this game of footy, but the whole season, right? So we deliver it in and we pop it on the goal square. And then we've got our D kick, which is that last kick, yeah? It's the full forward having a shot. And the thing about the full forward is just finishing off the week. It's a beautiful part of the week, yeah? That little 5%, what we call attraction or growth, yeah? So that for me is, excuse the language, I'm not a shit person. It's the, I'm not a selfish person. I see my effort, but I also see the effort of my teammates, my workplace and my boss and my clients, my position in the business and the team and the community. And I'm going to do something this week that fills my cup. Um, that makes me feel a valuable part of the team. It ticks off the collaboration and the contribution part. And for me, it's the attraction hour that we do. Um, it's I've learned something. I prepared something. I went on outreach this week. I went to a school and did a careers talk. I did an hour down at the footy club. I went and did team gym up at the leisure center, or I worked on some practice academy stuff, or I learned some modules, or I prepared because I'm hosting team time next week. It's anything that you do, a social media post, extra attraction because you're organizing a new student to come up for outreach internships, something that's beneficial. Because then what truly happens is that's the 100% of the week. And I always say, just imagine there's these big goalposts on the back door, yeah? Before you turn the light off, you know, the last little things is we have slack. You say hello, we say goodbye. We say thank you, some praise and progress, and we make sure that we tell everybody have a great weekend before we turn off the light and walk out the back door. Because what that's done is then essentially set us up really, really well for the next week. So that is our football method and everybody understands it and that's what we follow. So on top of that, that's our method. What else are you familiar with, with footy clubs? What else do We have footy tipping. So from a social aspect over the year, we have a footy tipping competition. Yeah. What else do clubs have? When you go, if you've ever had, if you've had a, like a session with the boys where you get fines. Yes, for sure. And I've had lots of discussions on this. Um, I had it with Mel Joseph from solution psychology and she was like, my team would never be able to do that. Just explain it for folks that are listening. The idea being is, is that if you set this up the right way, communicate it the right way, for me as a boss, what the gold of this is, is that I'm removing myself from the chain of accountability for things that are expected from both a performance, you know, just being in the clinic or, you know, just a life thing. So it's important to understand people. You can't give this to your humor profile, your sniper. You can't make the fines master, the conscious person, or the sniper, or the direct person, or the conscientious person. You have to give it to the steady S. They have to be your sunshine, your gratitude. Because we know that they never say anything, but when they say everything, it's generally right. They deliver it well. They make sure that they're you know, dealing with everybody's emotions. And they're your first sparks type of people. They're, you know, we know they're going to deliver it well. And they're so well loved by the whole clinic that whatever comes out of their mouth is okay. So you've got to have the right setup. But what we do, Ben, is we have the fines, the standard ones. You appear in the media because you had the netball photo on the weekend, you know, the media stuff. Yeah. You know, all the way down to the other things like, You know, it's not okay to put the recycling in the normal bin. There's a dollar. It's not okay to leave your overnight oats in the fridge for 17 nights. That's a fine. It's not okay to leave the air conditioner on in your room over the whole weekend. That's a fine. It's not okay to park over two spaces in the carport so that someone else has to bang their door. It's not okay that sometimes funny things come out of your mouth. That's humorous to everybody. Sometimes there's a fine there. You didn't post your attraction. You didn't post your goals for the week. Some of those little accountabilities. You know, you drop the coffees because Bluey, we've got a blue tongue lizard in summer. You know, he jumps out, scares you, drops the coffees, record it on CCTV, there's a fine. But the reality is the purpose of that. What's the money going to? You know, is it going to our retreat? Is it going towards whatever it's going to? The best thing about this is, Ben, is that if someone turns up late to work, they get a fine. You know, someone notices it, they pop it in. You got a $2 fine because you were here two minutes late and I had to lose two minutes of my morning, counting to your two patients, you know? And I think that's okay because no one wants to be that person that gets fined. And the reality is sometimes this happens more than once and it's okay. It's not a problem. But when it starts to happen three, four, five times, if it's overnight oats, I can say to you, Ben, stop being a grub. I know you bring your brekkie to work, but could you please make sure it goes in the bin? But then something more seriously, I don't need to deal with anything until there's been someone who's turned up to work two, three, four times, or I've noticed in the fine and say, Ben, have we got a problem with punctuality? Yeah. So they believe in that system. They're okay with that system. And we make sure that we frame it really well to anybody coming in. So it's okay if you get a fine, but just use that because that's the way your team are actually communicating with you about things in your blinkers that you might not see. Yeah, because we think we're doing everything right. But sometimes, you know, leaving those overnight oats in the fridge is really, really annoying to the girls that like to have a clean fridge. And that's a really easy thing to fix. And aren't you glad we told you? Because, you know, your future wife's going to love you because you're just going to be more self-aware about throwing out your overnight I was going to ask about, because you mentioned it at the top, that you have some values and you don't really use them. They're sort of platitudes on a wall kind of thing that you walk past and don't fully embrace. And going through that process that you mentioned, a really highly valuable process in getting values that resonate, that you're going to use, that you're committed to using. But then you go through that process and there's still values on the wall, so to speak. I think just as important as coming up with values that resonate is the practices, the habits that we have to refer back to them, to anchor back to them, to use and infuse them. This sounds like one lighthearted, fun, peer accountability way for you to do it. How else do you continue to keep them front and center so So we had the third part. So what else is in footy So we've got the method. We all do footy tipping. We've got our fine system. So a player accountability thing. Yeah. Um, because yeah, again, you don't want to be at football club, leaving your boots behind all the time and you know, those things. starts tying into sweep the sheds and all those important things. But there was a little issue. And again, it comes down to this confidence part as well, which only until about two months ago, I actually put this in place, is that any footy club that has a method and a fine system, where's the reward system? So what I noticed Was, um, one of my staff members actually, I'm sorry, not staff team members. One of my team members, um, I was so proud of her. She, um, she's super dedicated to her local netball club. Um, these Mellie netball, you know, these places are tiny. She does an incredible amount of work. She's so dedicated to her, her local community and, and being an A grade coach and these things. And she got to the end of the year and I think she surprised herself, but she was awarded the club person of the year award. And I was really touched by that because sometimes it made me reflect on, you know, the one thing our team was doing well was expressing gratitude, but probably not enough. And then we had this fine system, we have these values, but the reality being is, is it needs to be an accountability for that. And so I thought, well, if someone can be a club person of the year outside the work environment, shouldn't we be aiming to have that within the work environment? And some people will vote on values and all those sorts of things. But actually, it's one thing to say, hey, Ben, you've been a great team member this month, and we're going to give you the values award for the month. I sometimes think, again, that can be a bit superficial, unless your team have come up with the values and what it means to win that award. And so I sort of sat them all down one day, not too long ago, and I sort of said, I'm giving you confidence. We're going to start with a gratitude circle because it's important to get vulnerable. So what we're going to do is we're going to give gratitude, but in doing so, you're going to look them in the eye and you're also going to tell them something amazing that they've done. But it's, it's got to be, you know, you know, what they've done and how that made you feel about them, not about yourself, about them, just give them gratitude. It's not about you. Right. So we did that and we found this nice little vulnerable space. And I said, now, welcome to, you are now on the committee for the club person of the year criteria voting, you know, we're going to come up because what I've realised is we don't have a club person of the year. But I bet you if we all put our heads down on the table right now, and we thought about a club that we're involved in. And I said, who out at your local club or in your family or somewhere else, you know exactly who that club person of the year is. You know, you know that the volunteerism that they do, they're the last first to arrive, the last to leave, they help out, they chip in, they do every job, they do it without, you know, wanting any gratitude or recognition. We know in our lives across any team who our VIPs are, right? And I said, but when you look within our team, if I had your heads down on the table and I went through everybody's names, you'd probably know innately, secretly, who is our club person of the year within this business. But in knowing that, if it is someone else than you, you're also admitting that it's not you. You are not the club person of the year if you are thinking there is someone else in this business. that is deserving of that award more than you. And that's not a bad thing, but it helps again. We got to find a little bit of a spot on this blind spot. So I said, right, let's go through some situations. Let's do a task. We've got a situation. We're going to describe what the club person of the year is doing in these situations. And we're going to mention why that is important. And for me, this was just going to be them giving the answers to me. And so I said, turning up to work, what does the club person of the year look like when they turn up to work, the start of a new week? And straight away, one of my team members went to, they come in, they turn on the lights, they turn on the computer, they put towels on the table, they turn on the music. I said, no, what else do they do? And they were thinking for a while, I said, who's in the clinic? I'm talking about the receptionist. What's her job? What does she do? And what do you say to her? Hello. What else do you say to her? How are you? What else do you say to her? How was your weekend? What else do you say to her? Is there anything I can do? Maybe touch a bit deeper. Maybe have a look at things that they might need and what you need to talk to them about. And then what's her job? So what's she gonna do for you today? She's in charge of helping you write all your letters for the week. So what could you ask her? Oh, are there any letters I need to write for the week? Great. And then how do you repay her for doing that job for you? Get them done and let her know. I said, who else is in the clinic? Oh, you know, team members. Okay, well, how do you say hello to them? Oh, do you walk in the back door, sit in your room? Or do you actually go up and say, hey, good morning, how's your weekend? Great, and who else is in the clinic? Oh, clients. Do you just walk by them, even if they're not your, what do you do for them? Oh, say hello, welcome them, make sure if someone's running late that you engage, and good, and all of these things. Okay, and why is all this important? And all this importance, so they'll list off of things, you know, well, it helps connect with team members. It helps us take a deeper dive to actually say hello properly. You know, if we've come in a little bit upset or a little bit negative for the week, it's a way of helping us snap into a positive mind frame before we invite that new client into the room. Great, great, great. So then the scenarios then kept going for the hour. How do we take a break? How do we end the day? How do we end the week? How do we say goodbye? How do we turn up to team time? How do we attend clinic events? So if this is what the club person of the year would do, what are you currently doing? We know why it's important. And so let's try to foster that. And so we're coming up with these ideas of potentially, you know, the Christmas party, actually reflecting on that, not just giving out a value because Ben, you know, I thought you did a good job for the month, but actually really reflecting on those parts. So yes, our values are important, but sometimes when, you know, positivity and the things, the impactful things they do gravitate away from those values I've got a favour to ask. Would you mind reviewing and rating this podcast, please? It helps us attract great guests and partnerships from companies who want to do business with you, and we can negotiate the best possible deals and discounts so that you can grow your clinic sustainably into the future. Just open up your podcast player and hit the review. It looks like 70% of you use the Apple podcast player to listen into this show. So next time you open up the show, can you give us a review and rating? Every single review counts and we are so grateful for it. All right, let's head back to the episode. What do you say to the clinic owner that says, that sounds amazing, really great that you've got a culture like that, but just, I've got one, two, multiple team members that just want to come in, clock in, clock out. They're not as engaged as that. I'd love that, but I just don't think they would be on board with this sort of stuff. Maybe you've got some lessons in your own journey as to how you've supported, influenced the resistant ones. I'm sure not everyone comes equally prepared to get on board straight away. So how would you go about working with a more resistant team Well, I just, it's again, understanding them and what value they can bring. So for again, um, you know, when it comes to the method, well, what's important to you having portfolios and things that anchor them into purposeful work, you know, again, our job is our job. We treat clients. And if you're not, if you're not motivated by meaningful service, you actually are motivated by money and doing other things. That's okay. Your job is your job to you, but what is meaningful to you? And if it's mental health and, You know, we've got one who's anchored in a portfolio of, you know, working with, you know, ahead of the game, Movember and the AFL and going down to footy clubs and delivering, you know, mental health support to 15 year old, you know, teenage football players. That's his attraction, you know, because at the end of the day, that lights him up. He knows he's got that for the week. So it's a give and take. If your job's your job and whatever, understanding that this is a method, there's no I in teams. It's why I also stopped contracting. We don't have a contractor model, we employ. Because I'm the boss and I do exactly the same amount of work as my graduate, my second year, my fourth year. We all contribute the same. We all work the full-time hours. We all nurture our clients. We all do something meaningful to business. As you get older, that might start curtailing towards leadership or whatever that little bit of hour or whatever that is. But if they are more hesitant, more resistant, we just go, well, hang on, any team is only as strong as their weakest player. So there's got to be a way that you foster and develop them in that. I would never just let that go. In a team, if I was playing football, I would never allow that of a teammate because you can't win a game, you can't win a flag if four of your bottom end of your players aren't following the game plan. It's just not possible. So again, you don't have to love everything that we do as part of this plan, but you just need to participate because if you're at least following the method and at least trying to be your best, you might not need or want to be the club person of the year, but you're also not allowed to be a crappy human. Because at the end of the day, you might not, you know, even if you're a bit introverted or whatever and like walking in the back door and sitting in your room, that's just not something we do at our business, you know, those sorts of things. So it's actually just having the vulnerable conversation about, well, I need you to do this, but in exchange for helping and sticking to the method and whatever, I'm gonna focus on you and I'm gonna help you achieve some of the things that do light you up. So give and take, you know, you might not like cooking team, we have team time lunch, someone, we have a roster. We have a roster. Someone different prepares lunch every Tuesday and we have a shoot all at the clinic at once. And you might not like preparing lunch, but that's OK. You only have to do it once every eight weeks or so. But, you know, you might be just the person that, you know, just is a bit of a spark, your energy might be just bringing some biscuits. You might not be high energy, but energy in terms of value might be at least, you know, don't scuff your feet into team time and bring a packet of biscuits, have 10 of them in your car so you can just at least bring biscuits, right? So yeah, that's how I would just generally attack it. What is the unease? And even if it's hard, you know, how can we get you to participate? And otherwise, what else do we bloody do to In your own journey, you spoke to it a little bit earlier around some of the hard bits for you as a business owner being finance, it sounded like, you know, budgets, understanding numbers, talking about the performance of the clinic. Tell me a little bit about your journey in that area, the hard bit of business, because you love people. No doubt you put a lot of effort, as you said, that building your own confidence, competence, curiosity, and culture and people. The hard bit in business for you, as you mentioned earlier, was more around finance and some of the operation side of things. Tell us a little bit about your own journey Yeah, well, again, I've just had this massive resistance to it. I have this energy, this undiagnosed ADHD, passion, energy, whatever it is. I don't care what it is. It's my superpower. I've learned to lean into that and leverage it to get my life done. But at the end of the day, sitting down, again, understanding I'm a supporter. So I'm a motivator of motivators. A leader is part of the Wealth Dynamics profile. And it clearly states, put Blaze, a Blaze profile, in a back room with a spreadsheet and watch FI go out. Yeah. Like, I know that about me. I know that it takes a lot of personal productivity hacks to get me to sit down for 25 minutes, grow a tree and make sure I don't touch the phone and make sure I'm growing a forest while I'm doing tasks. You know, and, and the constant changes, I wasn't a natural business owner. You know, I had to learn these things, but at the same time for 15 years in rural practice, I have not had another adult in a leadership team to help me do anything. I'm the sole decision maker. And after 15 years, you get a little bit of responsibility fatigue and a little bit of decision burnout. So the concept is, is that if you're currently trying to run everything in your business. and you're also trying to update the budgets and do your P&L and rolling break even and pay the rewards and have all the meetings, do all the mentoring, you have to do everything yourself. Something has to give. And I'd much rather it be not perfect written down SOPs that are really, really time consuming. We've got a small team and things change quite often. So those time consuming things are obviously really, really difficult, but it's also the reason why. I invest in my supports. So that's why I have GrowthRx and Jade for my leadership. I have Clinic Mastery because Clinic Mastery is full of mechanics and accumulators and lords and people that are good with spreadsheets. And I'm not good at that. And if I, I'm going to pay a membership, I can get them to do that stuff with me, you know, and that's why I've got a great executive assistant in the Philippines to help me do the small things. Now, you know, when it comes to, you know, producing our dashboards and all that nurturing and, you know, clients, our practitioners all turn up to work every week and they've got all of those beautiful dashboards done to be able to do their job. So it is, it's leaning on your, um, your support services. and, and understanding that not everything in your life can be perfect, but you're doing the things that are important really well for the team that you have. And I think the best thing about this is, is that, um, in having this method and this vulnerability with my team, it's also something that people really struggle to understand. So, um, during COVID, we started outreach osteopathy. I always have done outreach osteo. So from Barry Woolick, you know, I worked in Wormalanga Birchardt and expanded to Swan Hill in 2014. Through some team members, we went to Karang, Sealake and Birchett. So we have four main clinics. They're all about four hours apart. We all work in Swan Hill, but the eight of my team members, they'll cover those other satellite clinics twice a week. But then outside of that during COVID, I gave my contractors this ultimatum. I said, you can go back to the city. You don't have to work here, but if you wanna stay and you wanna earn a lot of money, we're gonna go on the road. We're gonna do what I used to do. as a 22 to 25 year old and go around these rural communities, we're gonna pop up the tables. So we spent 2020 and it was actually one of the most significant years in terms of revenue that we've had. It was actually really, really profitable during COVID because we stepped sideways, we thought laterally and we did something different and had a bloody good time doing it. So that involved outreach osteo, which is a concept we developed. And we literally work out of fish and chip shops, beauty therapy clinics, the home and away rooms and netball clubs, anywhere that's a space. And we like to pay 50 to $100 to rent those rooms because that then gives back to those small communities to help tick over those small resource centres and those sorts of things. But our jobs don't have to be fancy to be fun. We don't have to make it complicated. So we got on the road in 2020 and we started to cover these towns. And up to this point, we've got about 30 locations. We've got 40,000 square kilometres of the Mallee that we cover. When we go out to these now, Our team will invest in one outreach effort a month. We've been recognised for rural and remote excellence at the Allied Health Industry Awards, two years, 21 and 22. We didn't win, but amazing to be on that spectrum. But people always say to me, how do you get them to do it? And the thing is, yes, they've all come and worked for me straight out of university, but they actually love what we do. Because the thing about it is, is people say, how do you get them to drive an hour and a half to Robbenvale on top of their normal day when they could just come into work? The thing about it is, is that no one really understands when you're in the depths of your clinic all the time, sometimes you just need to give people those meaningful and memorable experiences within their weeks that helps just change it up and get them out of whatever rut they're in. So to wake up at seven, get a coffee, watch the sunrise, drive an hour and a half, and you sit in a room And you're seeing these people who have no access to this allied health care. And the thing about it is normal day-to-day practice when you're in a place where people have access to health care, they come in like a haircut. Can you cut my hair? Thank you. Pay for it. Out you go. It can be very transactional. But any day on outreach when we go out, I might be treating you and it's not like we used to chase people at the door. Can you please come back? We know we're only there for a day, but you have a whole lot of people in the room that, you know, some in tears saying, please, can you come back? Thank you so much for coming. And it's not until you experience that real deep, authentic gratitude for the work that you do, that you remind why you love what you do. And sometimes we forget this when we're on top of each other in a clinic. We don't ever get to feel that. But if you get a whole day of that, you come back from outreach and you're injected with all this positivity, you know, yes, there are so many cons. It's a long way to drive and it can be really tiring up to Sauberline, up to your elbows for 15 hours, 15 clients with a portable table and your back's a bit sore. But I think and our team understand that the positives of that, doing that, it's meaningful contribution to our community. They know that there's no other clinics in Australia that are doing this across 40,000 square kilometers. I tell them all the time, this is world-class. And you don't actually understand how amazing it is of what you're doing. You probably never understand because you've never worked in another clinic, but what you do as individuals and as humans is actually incredible. And I tell them that all the time. So the one story from that that then helped me reflect on why or understand that what we were doing was so great was when I went and delivered what I'm talking to you about today to another clinic. We have this massive absence of allied health services, psychology, physio, doctors, paramedics, GPs. It's really, really difficult. Teachers, nurses. So we have to take whatever we can get. The thing about rural practices is that you have to build trust and authenticity. And I'm super proud that over 15 years of my career, the biggest success I've ever had is keeping my roots as part of my strategy because it's built a trust and authenticity that the things that I bring are worth supporting and that I'm actually doing it, building the gym and building these people for you. But making people realise that the future of allied healthcare and rural practice, it's not centred around obligated people that come and stay for years. Because Ben, you could come up tomorrow and you could help me once and we could go to that little town once or twice a year and teach 50 people about their feet or their back pain. they're going to teach everyone else and say, hey, I went to this person today. We could have helped a whole generation of people for two to three years, you know. So the idea being is, you know, if you can come once, but in order for telehealth and psychology and all that stuff to work, you've got to get your feet on the ground. They have to be able to touch you and see you in person, rural people. They've got to believe that you're authentic. So I went down to Solution Psychology because this year in March at the Clinic Mastery Summit, Mel just would come up to me and she said, I would like you to be our impact for the year. I would like to know more about your outreach. I said, that's fine. Absolutely. I'd love to have you up. But in actually doing that, she's like, I'm not sure how this would work. And I said, stop worrying about it. Just make a decision. I will make sure it's the funnest week of the year. Yeah. I went in. I basically told them everything I've told you for the last 45 minutes. And I said to them, you know, I literally, I kicked down the door of one of the treatment rooms and I said, you could spend every day of your life in this three by three, you could walk around there. But I said, at the end of the day, you've got this boss who is so desperate for you to find some joy. This is an amazing thing she's given you this opportunity to do. And at the end of the day, you will have never known the effect and to fall in love with what you do by coming up to the Mallee And having these people say, please, can you come back? Coming all the way back around the Moonee Ponds, after eight hours of travel and three days of hard work in the trenches, it'll be chaos and people will fly at you from left, right and centre. They'll be slow to book and take up all your time. You'll run late and you'll feel things you haven't felt before. And you'll get back to the city and you'll have this deep obligation that, oh my God, I'd left them all out there. And then you'll walk you five minutes the next day to work going, Oh my God, that was actually an amazing experience. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of why we love what we do. And, you know, that could be the difference between someone leaving a certain clinic or traveling overseas or the thought processes that maybe I need to start my own business or travel or move. So when I delivered this to Solution Psychology, it was an amazing experience to put up a piece of butcher's paper on the wall and just say, you know, like, Ben, can you please come? I just want you to trust the process. two or three days of your life, I'll make it the funnest, you know, trip of, you know, something meaningful for you. And it was really, really beautiful to have, you know, eight or nine of them stand up and, you know, like signing up for a baseball team, put their names on the wall. And I just sort of said like, my team do this every week, you know, every month. So, again, it can be really difficult for people I love that distinction. I hadn't really thought of it in those terms of maybe people look at other job opportunities, let's say they're city bound, and perhaps what they're looking for is variety in their role. They're kind of stuck in a rut, almost as you said. And so perhaps they can get that through the change of scene or location, some outreach work. And the second thing was, the deep gratitude that country folks have for people coming to offer great healthcare. I grew up in the country, I grew up in a place called Wyala in South Australia, there's about 20,000 people. And I remember in my uni studies as a podiatrist going, I did a placement in Renmark, which is about three and a half hours away from Adelaide, where I'm based now. And through, I was there for a month, we service Mildura, which is where my wife is from, country town in Victoria. And that's another hour and a half away from Renmark. We did Berry and Loxton the whole way through. And then we even went to Robbenvale, so as you spoke, which is maybe another hour and a half beyond Mildura into this GP clinic that just was so dated. It just didn't look like a GP clinic. It was horrifically styled inside like pastel pink and yellow walls. I'm like, hell, this is a GP center. But I just remember that day so clearly being there. One day, like you said, saw maybe 20-odd clients This is as a student on outreach and just the gratitude people had that you'd be making this trek and, you know, giving of your time. You weren't going to be there all week. So, yeah, thank you. That was a nice little like jog down memory lane for me of, yeah, the gratitude piece, like people in the country really are grateful and But the model of that, when we talk about outreach osteo, it doesn't have to be rural practice. It's just looking back at your team and going, well, what's meaningful to them and how do we actually create doses of those meaningful and memorable experiences that are impactful for them? We know that we know that the new generation, um, a transient, you know, then they potentially might not stick at careers for as long as, you know, for example, the 25 year GP that moved to the Mallee, because it used to be this honorable thing to have a career. To tell grandma that I'm a doctor and I've got a house and wife and I'm moving to Sea Lake and I'm going to be the GP there for the next 30 years. That was how we defined our worth and our career and that was an honorable thing. But as we know, the newer generations aren't as driven by that type of outlook and we know they want to change the world. We know they want to be impactful. But they're going to do amazing things, a million things, right? And they can see it, they consume it, they see holidays and travel and moving around. So my message is always, it's okay to stick for three years and to really enjoy your career, but to do that, You need to keep the joy. You need to keep reminding them of why they are staying in this place. So if your business focus is all just about KPIs and numbers and working in that three by three, I think that's the quickest way to kill culture and the quickest way to kill any sort of ambition or ideas or dreaming. The idea being is that if you can give them a dose of something that's purposeful and helping them understand, you know, their true purpose, their why, their beliefs and what they anchor in, even if it's a portfolio or doing some meaningful work and going, hey, you know, Lou, thanks so much for letting me do that. I'm feeling so invigorated and I've got ideas that I want to bring back into the clinic or, and even if it's not that, you know, that related, how are we giving them these meaningful and memorable experiences that help them stay content with where they are right now in life? to order to continue to, we know that we need to work with them for one, two, three years. And when we finally just get through the beginning and get them comfortable and their books are consistent, then we can actually really go, okay, well, really, what do you want to learn in your career? You know, where do we hyper focus now? And we need to get them through to that point. But sadly, we know that we don't get a lot of them through So... Lou, the work you're doing is incredibly impactful. And recently it was recognized with an award at the Allied Health Awards, Osteo of the Year, I believe the category was. Just talk us through what that meant to you and the process of going through the application, the judging, and just Yeah, I think it's always I'm not a person, I said, my life is a massive cross fertilization of things. And everything, it's a much longer game. I'm not motivated by money. I'm motivated intrinsically by the meaningful memory of experiences I can have with others. I love connecting, I love collecting people. So when it comes to these things, I don't really focus too much on recognition because I know that I'm, with or without it, I'm going to keep doing the things that I'm doing. So, you know, for context, you know, to start up Central Mallee Health at 22, which is now anchored in outreach osteopathy across 40,000 square kilometers of the Mallee, we opened up Central Mallee Fitness because in these areas we'd raised the health IQ of people, but there was no fitness IQ and it was an hour and a half to a gym. So now we're starting to get this, You know, we're a long way from emergency services. You know, we have a social responsibility to ensure that we're creating health and wellbeing into the community as well. But then we started a gym, but then people were a bit scared. So we needed a way to attract people and make them feel like they belong and included outside of Central Mallee Fitness. So we created Sea Lake Striders Club, where no strider gets left behind, you know, turn up on Sundays, we have coffee. And, you know, that is now innately the little micro you know, environment that we've created around there. People turn up to Stride, they realise they want to be a gym member, but then they hurt themselves. They have to come to Central Mallee Health, but then they've got an auntie that's out in Patchewolic. Yeah, so that will self-motivate, but hopefully that whole system is inspiring and something that's meaningful to a new graduate or someone who wants to come and work in real practice, a destination place. So I've always first and foremost kept rural practice as part of my strategy, but also, you know, the heartfelt thing that I love to do. There's no one in the world that I'd rather treat than my Mallee people that mean the most to me, yeah, and inspire others to come and work with me there. Um, so we were recognized for rural and remote excellence, um, at the 21 and 22 awards. And I wanted to win that award more than anything in the world. Yeah. Not just because I wanted to win an award, but I wanted the work of my colleagues. I wanted them to believe that the work that they were doing was world-class, you know, and we didn't need to win that award because I just don't think even people can fathom what 40,000 square kilometer, the Mallee looks like and that drive to work. So again, the other award nominees and the finalists were amazing, but we were up for that for two years running and I didn't need that for me. I wanted that for the team. But again, it doesn't take away from that. And then, yeah, to be nominated Osteopath of the Year and have several nominations this year again. Other people might affectionately know me for the work that I do as a professional, as Australia's first advanced sports osteopath in 2020. Just because of this attraction or frequency of who I am, Osteopathy Australia asked me if I'd like to go through the process. I'm not an academic, remember? In the back room with the pod, in the spreadsheet, watch the fire go out. What should have taken me two weeks to apply for took me about three months and they were whipping me like, get it in, get it in. But yeah, I was Australia's first advanced sports osteopath in 2020. I'd been playing state league football, so a really, really great affiliation with the Western Bulldogs and not just playing football, but helping grow great humans and this passion for leadership, helping other humans grow this way. But then also the innate realisation that we don't have an arena for sport. So creating Osteo Sports Network to enhance the representation of osteopaths in Australian sport, to enhance the skills, knowledge and confidence um, was super important because I can't create more of me. I can't, if I, even if I mentored another sports osteopath, there's no arena for them to jump in. So I need somewhere for us to belong and exist. So again, life is a massive cross fertilization between all of that stuff. And then being on the vice chair for sports medicine, Australia, we run the Victorian events, um, and then also do some work at the universities as well. So I love every role that I have. So, yeah, when I get these nominations, do I truly believe that I probably deserve to win it? Absolutely. You know, I know that I do a lot. Did I need to apply or nominate? Not necessarily. But, you know, I did take the chance on doing it this year. We had an amazing set of finalists. But I think in winning that award, it I got reminded by a good mentor of mine that I know you're already focusing on the next bloody thing to do or the next person to do everything for for nothing, but please just take a week to just pause and reflect because this part of your career is certainly super important. Well done, you know, that accolade is certainly well deserved. And I finally allowing myself a little bit of a permission to be proud of that. But I think from what was really the most important to me is that even on all the things that I say today, Ben, Everything is not, nothing that I say is of my own. There is a frequency that is my own, my innate value in my passion and my energy, to bring energy, create light, inspire flight, clinic mastery, NUSA conference circa four years ago. I live deeply by that. And it's also the concept of gratitude is in paying it forward, that nothing that I say is of my own. Everything that has been fostered in me has come from somewhere, whether it's Gandhi or more closely my mentors. So, at the clinic, at the awards, it was very much a thank you and a gratitude for being in the room, not just with the four osteopaths, you know, small in representation, but certainly close in terms of how they inspire me. also having a lot of other mentors and great colleagues and people in the room that I value for not only their mentorship leadership, but also their education of me. And for also being those movers and shakers that when we collaborate, I always come down to the two fundamental things is that people can't be what they can't see. And then also then now deeper to that, the permission in you can be what you can see, Ben, if you would like. But two proverb, one's a proverb, the African proverb, you know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And then the Helen Keller that Lenny Mastry like to rip up a little bit as well is that alone we can do so little, but together we can do a lot. That was probably my key message on the night. And just again, yeah, really super grateful for Clinic Mastery, for GrowthRx, for those individual mentors in business and leadership. And I'm sorry if I haven't mentioned a few of them today, but I'll be definitely sending this podcast to them all Lou, you are the person that creates the flint that gets people off the grass and on the dance floor. You know, whether that's in the clinic or inspiring other clinics to come to the Mallee, or literally on the dance floor at our noose retreat as an example. Yeah, there's you. You are a magnet for great people. It's awesome to see the impact and progress. And I'm sure for people listening in or watching this episode, just even if it's getting some of those vibes, some of that frequency to see the passion that you have to light up when you talk about the people you work with, clients and team, that's certainly What we love hearing is what we love seeing, because we're in such an impactful career and industry in health care. We are literally changing lives. And so to have really great places to work, like at your clinic, I think helps the sustainability of the profession and the health of communities. Good on you for creating the ripple effect and creating what we affectionately call a clinic for good. Thank you for sharing so openly and honestly and practically and covering so many different areas. Really looking forward to hearing folks' feedback and questions and comments on this episode. I'm sure we'll do another one in the future. Really surprised it's your first one. No, thank you, Ben. As I said, I'm known to be able to chase lots of rabbits down lots of holes. I'm a good country girl. So thank you for giving me that opportunity. It's nice to be able to finally have enough time as well to Well, we look forward to another episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast very soon. You can head over to clinicmastery.com for the show notes and any links to the funny videos that were mentioned. We'll find them and we'll put them here. But we'll see you on another episode very soon. Bye for now. Thanks, 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. 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