How to Gain Control of Your Business

by Kerry Johnson, 7/11/23

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Often in a practice, the staff toils “un-led” and unsupervised. Whether you have one part timer or 20, you are busy making sales and closing deals. You are paid hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to interact with your clients but don’t have the time to deal with staff issues. After all, why can’t they just do their job on their own without you having to look over their shoulder? They know what to do, why don’t they just do it?

There is an answer. You don’t have to become an administrator. All you have to do is follow a daily information protocol (DIP). A few years ago, I hired Tammy as my assistant because a friend said his daughter needed a job. A proud father, he said Tammy was an amazing worker. Of course, he was biased, but I know how honest and hard working my friend was and thought his daughter surely had inherited those traits. I asked Tammy to send out a mailing after she entered the names in a database. A week later, I asked her if the mailing went out. Tammy reported that she was still working on it. Another week passed and I remembered that I needed to follow up on the mailing, so I asked when it went out. She said, “Not yet.” Curious, I asked when it would go out. She told me she didn’t know how to input the names in the database and was too embarrassed to ask me for help – after two weeks.