How to Motivate Your Team to Care About Your Business

We share how to get therapists invested in cancellations, retention, and growth without pressure by using clear metrics, meaningful incentives, and a shared mission. The focus stays on data that guides action, systems that remove friction, and profit sharing that builds ownership.

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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

Chapters

• 0:00 The Ownership Loneliness Problem
• 1:40 Why Team Buy-In Matters
• 3:24 Give Them The Numbers
• 7:31 Defining Core Metrics
• 12:21 Impact Beyond The Numbers
• 15:55 Money Driven Not Money Focused
• 18:38 Bonuses And Non-Clinical Pay

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

It can often feel like we are the only ones who care about our business. And a lot of practice owners feel like only they're worried about cancellations and retention or the bottom line of their finances. How can we motivate our team to be invested without making them feel pressured? My name is Craig, and I'm the owner of DAC Financial Coaching. Our team is on a mission to make your therapy practice permanently profitable. If you own a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money, and serves more people. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. A lot of therapists start their business as just them. It's a solo practice. I know for me, when I started my business, it was just me doing coaching and consulting for people and businesses. And so the idea of getting other people to buy into my mission, my purpose, all of these things of my business was pretty foreign to me when I started my team. In fact, it felt kind of weird expecting them to care about how much money the business was making, that we were prioritizing cancellations, that we were trying to close clients. It felt strange asking this team to care about that because if I'm being honest, it felt like I was being selfish, I was being greedy. I wanted them to make me more money. And that just felt like there was a disconnect between what I really care about and what I was asking them to do. But here's the thing: it's really important that they buy into it. And in fact, what I've come to find with my team is they genuinely care about what they do. They want this company to grow, they want us to reach more people because they understand that there is a greater impact that can be made by having that bigger outreach, that greater outreach, and it bringing in more clients. So, how can we motivate our teams to care about this? If you're facing this problem where your team isn't really too bothered by last-minute cancellations or clients canceling, or they're losing clients, or clients aren't staying as long as you would like, or maybe they are not closing as many clients as what you would like to see. They're not taking on many new clients, they're not doing outreach. There's a lot of those areas that we want to focus on, and we want to make sure that your therapists are engaged in that because it's super important, not only for them, but also for the business. Now, there's a few things we're gonna look at to help you motivate them to help bring them in on this thing so that they they have some skin in the game, they care about what's going on. And truthfully, I do want to lead with I have a feeling if you hired right, if you've hired the right people, they probably care. They probably do care. And if you're might just be like me, where you're just assuming why would they care about my business? Why, what what's in it for them? They probably care because what you're doing is important, you're making an impact on your community, you're making an impact on people. And I would wait you to say that somebody who got into therapy or physical therapy did it to help people, to serve people, and you are giving them the platform in order to do that without them having to go start their own business to do all their own everything. You've given them this platform where they can serve people, they can help people, and we want to make sure that they have the ability to care about your business. So, what I've found is we don't always give them the opportunity to care, if that makes sense. And so the first thing we can do is share metrics. A lot of times when I say we don't even give them the opportunity to care, is they don't even know the data. Maybe they don't even know that cancellations is a problem. Maybe they don't even know what retention is, that they aren't retaining as many clients as what you would expect or what we think is the norm. They may not be aware of those things. They may just be humming along thinking that this is what it's supposed to be. So we have to share the data of what are your numbers? What are we expecting, or what would we like to see so that they have something they're trying to attain? They have a clear picture of what's going on. I've found that a lot of times they don't even realize that their cancellation policy is high. You know, it may feel different than what the actual numbers say. I've I've felt that on my end too. On the sales side, you know, we may, I may be thinking we've closed clients, or close rate has been really good. But if I sat down and looked at the data, it might tell a different story. Or maybe I've been kicked, you know, feeling down because of the opposite. I feel like we haven't closed a client in a while, but then I go and look and go, wow, our close rate this quarter is actually really good. So let's look at some data points. Here's some data I think would be really important to share with your clinicians. I would say if you have a team, I would gather team data, and then I would also gather individual. So getting together on a in a team meeting and saying, as a company, how are we doing on these metrics? And then also with a one-on-one, sitting down with each clinician, each therapist, and saying, Here is what your numbers are, where you're falling in these areas, and then some areas for I could see some growth opportunities. The first one is retention, right? So, what is the average number of sessions per client? So that's the easiest way to calculate that. Uh, we're not gonna get too complicated with this. So just when of all their clients, how many sessions have those clients typically attended? Now you know, depending on what you're doing. So if you're you may be in a specific type of therapy where it's always a set number of client sessions. So you might just be looking at have people gone from point A to point B? They've finished the the number of sessions that is expected. Physical therapists, same thing. You might have somebody coming to you for X number of weeks to rehab after surgery. So for you, it's just probably a completion. How many, how many clients are going are completing the whole program or staying for the exact amount of time? If it's more fluid, as in, you know, the my therapist and I, it's just ongoing. I don't know that they we have an end date in mind. I've been going for two to three years now. So for that, it's just how many sessions per client on average are we seeing? And then we're gonna compare that to our company, compare it to others, and then for you, it's just what would you expect? What would you like to see? Cancellations and no shows is the big one. And this is an area where a lot of people probably the biggest complaint uh I hear from practice owners is that their therapists just don't care too much about this. And again, maybe they just don't have the data. So showing them what is their cancellation percentage on a monthly basis, how many of the sessions booked, how many are canceling last minute? I would say um we could always do a different metric for rescheduling. Uh but for this, it's just people who cancel and maybe don't get back on the books right away. If somebody reschedules, maybe we include that in a different metric. But I look at a reschedule as we're just moving the date. You're still getting that income coming in, you're still seeing that client. Unless they are rescheduling continuously. But again, we're gonna simplify. So just the no shows or the cancellations, the last-minute cancellations. The next metric we want to calculate is new clients generated monthly. Whether your clinicians or therapists are doing their own consultations or their own outreach, we want to still calculate what is their new, how many new clients are they taking on monthly? And maybe this is an area where they can buy in and they can start helping generate leads, generate clients. And then lastly, if they are doing consultations on their own, what is their conversion rate? So people who show up to a sales call or reach out, and how many of those are turning into are booking their first session is probably the best way to look at that. What percentage of people that that either got in a consultation or reached out for help turned into and turned into a client? They booked one session with you. So those are some metrics you can calculate as a whole company, and then again on an individual basis, show them what the data is. And I have a feeling that you'll see more buy-in just naturally, just from them being aware of what's going on. Once we have the data, the next thing we can look at is just the bigger picture. Going back to what I said when I started this episode, your therapists probably care a lot. In fact, um I'm sure you can probably agree that this is not a business for somebody who doesn't care. You know, I'm a former teacher and I remember that was we didn't get paid enough. There was a lot of stress. It was um, there was just a lot of pressure put on us, the hours versus what our salary was. Basically, you you had to love being a teacher. You had to really care about the impact you were making on your students, you had to care about the greater mission. If you didn't, then you really those teachers usually only lasted maybe a year or two because it's just not worth it. And so therapy, I really feel like is the same. And even physical therapy is the same, where you really do have to care about what you're doing, you have to care about your clients. And so bringing in your therapists on the bigger picture is huge. The more clients that they help generate, the more clients that they help keep on, the greater the impact your company can have. And so, even going back to some data, you can share some metrics on the impact that you're having on the community. How many clients have you served this year as a company? How many people have you impacted in a positive light? Looking for those places where you can highlight how have we made a positive impact. Because again, we get into the day-to-day, sometimes we lose sight of that big picture of wow, look at the footprint we have put on our community and serving these people. Now, avoiding on the individual side, avoiding cancellations, avoiding or focusing on retention for your clinicians, that is on the relationship side with the client, the bigger picture of making that impact, showing that we care about them, we care about their journey, we care about them getting the support and the help they need. And you know that in order for them to be successful, whether it's in mental health therapy or physical therapy, they have to be showing up to every session. If they don't, then oftentimes missing time can have negative effects. Um, I've talked about this before in previous episodes, but again, back in education, when we would end the school year, then we have summer, and then we go back to school about two to three months later. We always called what we we had something, what we call the summer slide, and that is we regress because we're not going to school. So if a student was at a certain reading level in May, they may regress a reading level or two by August because they're not regularly practicing their craft, they're not working on it to improve and get better. They a lot of them don't even touch books in the summertime, and so they naturally slide. This can happen with your clients. If they're missing too many sessions in a row, then they may regress. And so showing, bringing up talking to them about cancellations, um, discussing it with your clients is going to show that you care about their progress and highlighting the importance of it. All right. Beyond the big picture, money talks. Okay. We don't want that to be the only thing driving your team because at some point it gets expensive. We may not be able to afford it. And do we really want I want money-driven, money-motivated people? I don't want money-focused people. Money driven, money-motivated means that they they care about what they're making, they care about generating more clients, working hard, building their caseload. Money focused means all they care about is that paycheck. They don't care about the people, they don't care about anything else. They just want to get money in their bank account. Money driven versus money focused. So having financial incentives can be really, really helpful. So here's just a few options. And so bonuses is going to be number one. And I would say highlight the area that you feel like is your biggest um weakness right now. If it's cancellations, if it's retention, if you don't feel like clients are staying on long enough, then we can offer bonuses for those to incentivize those things. This could be a short term. You could say, hey, this quarter or this year or whatever you want to focus on. We're going to focus on retention. And for every time you have a client complete X number of sessions, you will receive a retention bonus of X. So you're just incentivizing that retention piece. This retention is we're not forcing people to keep coming, but it is a matter of we're honing in our craft. We're trying to make sure that we are providing a service that makes people want to keep coming back to see us, but also that we're following up. If somebody cancels, we're not just letting weeks or a month go by before we're like, oh yeah, whatever happened to them. It's no, I want to make sure that we get them back on the calendar so that way we can hit those that X number of sessions to get that retention bonus. Paying them for non-clinical hours. I know a lot of you do that for maybe note-taking. But what about for marketing and networking and lead generation? Offer X number of hours per week, per month for them to spend doing those things. They could be writing blogs for your website. They could be reaching out to referral partners, they could be following up with old leads, making phone calls, sending emails. Paying them some non-clinical hours to do that is twofold for them. They're going to get paid for the time they're doing the work, and then they're also going to get more clients, which is going to pay them more money. So there's a lot of financial incentive to that. Paying them non-clinical hours for follow-ups and prospecting. Like I said, so not only following up with past leads, but maybe just prospecting in general, finding different ways to generate leads, generate clients. Now, another financial incentive, and this is one of my favorites, and I recommend pretty much anybody who has employees considers doing this, and that's an employee profit sharing program. If you are intentionally setting aside profit into a separate bank account, which I recommend, let's say you're setting aside five to 10% of all income into a separate bank account, at the end of the quarter, you can reward your team by dividing up a portion of this money to your team members. This is buy-in to the greater good of the company. And that's exactly what we're talking about today. How can we motivate our therapists, our team members, to care about our company? The best way to do that is to give them a little stake in the company, right? We're not giving them equity, they're not getting ownership stake, but we are rewarding them when the company as a whole does well. I like this over individual bonuses. Uh, I think both have their place, right? Individual bonuses, rewarding them for hitting milestones or having a certain number of sessions per week is great. I don't, I'm not discouraging that. This is the greater good. So if we as a company do really well this quarter, you're going to see a higher financial reward. Your profit share is going to be bigger. If we are struggling, if leads are down, if client sessions are down, if client cancellation rate is really high, then we're going to see that as a company. And that means the profit share is going to be a lot smaller. They're going to have that buy-in with the company. This is huge. Now, with that, you can decide, and and we can absolutely help you figure out how to best share that profit. A good rule of thumb is in that bank account, I usually say about half is going to go into retained earnings. Maybe one third or one half will go into just your emergency fund. So let's say we get to the end of the quarter and you got$10,000 sitting in there.$5,000 can go into this emergency fund. Then we're going to take that other five and we're going to divide it up. The way I like to do that is a certain percentage, maybe 75% goes to you. So of that$5,000, maybe 75% goes to you. If let's just say, even if you wanted to do half, so$2,500 goes to you,$2,500 gets divided among the team. So that is a general rule of thumb. There's obviously lots of different ways to go about it. You could set up a bank account purely for profit sharing and put X percent into that account every single time a dollar comes in. There's a lot of ways to go about it. We're happy to help if this is something you're interested in and me talking about is like I want to do that. I don't even know where to begin. In the show notes, always is a link to talk to one of our coaches. We can absolutely help you get that system set up so that next quarter you're ready to pay out some bonuses to your team. All right. Lastly, is how do we get them to buy in is to collaborate on things that are out of their control. So we may be seeing the metrics, we may be feeling frustrated that cancellations are high for our clinicians or therapists, but maybe there is something that's out of their control that could be contributing to it. I won't say causing it. So maybe in a team meeting you collaborate and talk about are there things that we could do better that we could improve on that maybe would help? Is there, is our scheduling system, is it easy for clients to schedule and reschedule? Or is that difficult? Do they have to call in in order to do it? Do we have online options where they can schedule and plug in a new time or make sure that they're showing back up? Do we have a good follow-up system or a reminder system for these sessions? If you're seeing a high no-show rate, what is our reminder system looking like to send out those reminders to make sure that they are showing up? Do we have that? Do we have automations in place to make sure that it's happening? Are we asking our therapists to physically follow up and remind clients? Or asking our admin team to physically follow up and roll and remind clients of sessions. That could be an area. Are we enforcing cancellation policies? So if you say last if you cancel within 24 hours, you're gonna you're it's a$50 fee or a penalty fee, whatever it is. Are we enforcing that? If we're not, then of course clients will keep canceling last minute. They there's no penalty, there's no nothing to prevent them from doing that. And then are clients even aware of cancellation policies and the importance of regular attending. They may not even be aware that there is a cancellation policy, they may not even be aware of the importance. So, what I mean by that is your therapist, if if they're canceling a lot, if a client has canceled multiple times, having that conversation of the importance of keeping those regular sessions, just like we were talking about earlier with that summer slide, talking about it's really important that we keep meeting regularly. Um, also, it's really important that if you do need to cancel, that you give us prior notice, plenty of notice. Because when I'm looking at cancellations, typically I'm saying it's within 48 hours or last minute. And we need prior notice on that and kind of outlining the impact it has on the company. So your therapist can do this, you can do this with the clients. Just sharing this, not only does that mean that hour is now taken up on your therapist's calendar, that has an impact on the company as a whole. They may not even be aware that those last-minute cancellations are doing that. It may just to them be like, oh, well, I called and let you know, and I didn't even realize how big of a deal it is. So sharing with them the importance of showing up for their own therapy, but also just asking that they please give you more notice and make sure instead of canceling, we're rescheduling and reframing that verbiage. We're not going to cancel, but let's reschedule it. Let's push that our meeting to another day. If you're needing to incentivize, to motivate your team, we're profit coaches who focus on building financial systems in your business to grow it, but we're also business coaches. So we look at everything through the lens of profitability. And we have coaches on our team who specialize in team management and leadership and incentivizing your team to buy into your company vision and to feel a little bit of ownership with what you're trying to build. If you feel like that's out of sync in your business, our coaches can help. Click on the link in the show notes. We would love to meet you. We'd love to hear what's going on and see how we can best serve you and best help you move forward. Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practice owner that you may know. If your practice needs help getting organized with the finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspod.com to learn how we can help.