September 4, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode of the Healthy Wealthy and Smart podcast, host Dr. Karen Litzy welcomes Dr. Michael Neal, founder and CEO of Build My Team and a practicing optometrist in Hawley, Pennsylvania. They discuss best practices in hiring, drawing inspiration from successful companies like Disney and the Four Seasons. Dr. Neal shares his personal journey of overcoming hiring challenges in his practice, providing valuable insights for practice owners and business leaders. Tune in to learn effective strategies for building a strong team and improving your hiring process.
Time Stamps:
[00:02:03] Hiring challenges in healthcare practices.
[00:07:03] High-end customer service in healthcare.
[00:09:37] Hiring the right team members.
[00:15:53] Candidate-practice matching importance.
[00:19:25] Hiring process resistance and risks.
[00:20:40] Hiring challenges in healthcare.
[00:27:57] Affordable hiring solutions for practices.
[00:29:34] Advice for 20-year-old self.
More About Dr. Neal:
Dr. Michael Neal is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Build My Team. Dr. Neal is a practicing Optometrist alongside his wife, Dr. Amy Neal. Together, they founded Lakeside Vision in picturesque Hawley, Pennsylvania. They are celebrating their 20th year of servicing Northeast Pennsylvania.
Downtime is spent with Amy, their two boys, and two dogs. Both Drs. Neal has recently taken up running and even runs when not being chased.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart podcast. I
am your host, Dr. Karen Litze, owner of Karen Litze Physical Therapy, located
in New York City. And today, you are in
for a treat. So if you are a practice
owner or a business owner, you are going to wanna get
out your notepad, get out your phone, and take some notes, because
(00:24):
today we're gonna be talking about best practices in
hiring. And I'm really happy to
have as our guest, Dr. Michael Neal. He is the founder and
CEO of Build My Team. He is a
practicing optometrist in private practice
in Hawley, Pennsylvania, which is, you know, my neck of the woods. It's
(00:45):
where I kind of grew up. He founded Build My Team
to solve his own hiring struggles and his practice by
modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire.
Oh, thanks for having me, Karen. And it was so great talking with you before for
everybody listening. We've been yapping for about 10 minutes about all kinds of
(01:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Talking about my. So if you don't know
where Holly, Pennsylvania is like Google it, it's a great it's
a really beautiful part of Pennsylvania. I can't stress that enough. And
I grew up in a town maybe what half hour, 40 minutes
from there. Yep. And I played softball
for many years and I played in Wayne County and we played in Holly, a
(01:30):
lot of my games. So we were kind of talking about that. And anyway, fun
part, fun part of Pennsylvania. Highly recommend going there. But
this is not like a podcast for Pennsylvania tourism. Instead,
we were going to talk about best hiring practices. But before we
get to that, Mike, can you give the listeners a little
bit more about your background and how you are
(01:53):
how you kind of went from full-time practicing optometrist,
medical provider, to build my team consulting
Oh boy, yeah, that took several years, that transition. But
it didn't, Build My Team never started out to be anything
at all. It wasn't even a company. What caused
(02:14):
me to start this entire process were the
problems we had with hiring, how awful resume-based
hiring is, how it just produces
awful, awful results. And when you're trying to run a practice, You
know, you've got people streaming in the front door and you've got these
employees who weren't hired
(02:37):
well, so they aren't working in their natural strengths and talents. It
was just one problem after another. It was really, really awful. And
so the entrepreneur in me turned around and said, well, somebody
does this. better than us, probably everybody because it was
that bad. So let's go take a look at how they're hiring and
try and figure out what they're doing. That turned into basically an
(03:00):
entire process that I used to run
from my cell phone. if you can believe that. I do. Well it
was a hot mess disaster trying to talk to candidates from
the real live internet from a cell phone but
that ended up being automated, refined over several years and
now we're doing it in over 40 states for people in
(03:22):
over 10 different healthcare professions, physical therapy practices included.
Amazing. And was there like a specific aha
moment when you realized that your hiring approach needed
Yeah, I would say we had
(03:42):
some serious issues hiring because we were hiring like doctors would.
And what I mean by that is we're hiring to take
the person sitting in front of us and fix them. Well,
look, I'm here to tell you that that sounds great for the
Hollywood movie approach, but that's not how you hire
performers at all. High performers, I mean, you
(04:04):
can't make people into something they're not. That's
the wrong approach. What you do instead is meet them exactly where
they are and look at what their strengths and talents are and
figure out if that's a great fit for the job that
you have open. And we've been able to do that and created
(04:25):
And how, you know, in the intro,
I had mentioned that you kind of took some cues
from Disney and from the fourth season. So
how do you bridge that gap between hospitality industry practices
and a healthcare hiring practices? Because these are two very different
(04:48):
Oh, I would disagree on that. I would say they're incredibly similar.
So when you are at your practice, you're
in New York City practicing, about
how big is your practice and how many team members do you have, that type of thing?
Okay. So somebody has to answer the phone. Somebody has to
(05:09):
get people on some type of schedule. Somebody
has to get you paid. Let's not forget about that one. And
then somebody has to help you and I
mean, a team that size, you don't need any level
of manager or anything like that. So you
contrast that to the hospitality industry. I'm not talking about a
(05:29):
super eight motel, okay? I'm talking about higher end experience
where you're there for an experience. One
of the reasons why, I'll tell you this quite candidly, one of the reasons why
people want to see you is you are incredibly outgoing, incredibly
friendly. You fit the bill for the type of person we
would want as a physical therapist. Now, our company doesn't hire licensed
(05:51):
professionals. We do all of the admin and the clerical team members. But
imagine if your team members were all
as outgoing as you are. Patients are going to flock to
you guys, flock to you. You won't know what to do with
the patient volume because your referrals will be crazy. How
(06:12):
do I know that? Well, because I know what it takes to
make a great health care practice. And the happier you are,
the more helpful you are, the more you want to care for people, the
better off you are in health care. And there's
really almost no exception to that. Like even, well,
I guess the high end, it would be surgeons, some of whom don't
(06:35):
have those types of personalities, but they have incredible outcomes. That's
what makes people seek them. For all the rest of the team members,
you want folks who are very similar to a high-end customer
Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. And I used to say years
ago, this was probably over 10 years ago, that I
(06:57):
sort of based my practice off the Ritz-Carlton,
being a very individual,
high-end, experiential, and
that I was sort of the concierge Right.
So I was treating patients, but also being that hub for
(07:19):
helping them if they needed referrals, if they needed, you
know, X, Y, Z, I was there. And so I did kind
of base my, um, I wanted my
practice to be an experience for patients, not
(07:40):
because the patients and the
clientele that I was working with, I don't take insurance. So I'm
a cash-based practice. So I know that people are
spending their hard earned money on me. And
I wanted to make sure that I exceeded expectations, that
I was going above and beyond what they thought a
(08:03):
Right. So you have a very unique practice. You have
almost a boutique type approach versus a volume
model. And imagine the team members that
you're bringing to the table. What
if their version of exceeding is
your version of barely meeting those needs?
(08:29):
Right. So that's one aspect. Things
that build my team will approach us is you have a
very specific practice and that's amazing because
it makes our job easy to put people on your team. Our
team would know exactly the type of people you want to work with.
Most importantly, exactly the people you don't want to work with. So
(08:51):
that's very straightforward. In most practices, it's
not that crystal clear because the volume will be higher, insurance-based practices.
You've got people who are going to PT because they have to,
like you said. They may not be looking forward to it. You
never know. Those
are just realistic situations and we have to meet people where
(09:13):
they're at. So that type of practice, nothing wrong with it. They're helping people
all day, but we have to make sure that we get team members who wake
up in the morning and get excited to go to that type of practice. And
that type of person is very different from the type of person you're describing.
Those are not the same employees. So let me ask you the
magic question. When you're sitting in an interview, looking at resumes, how
(09:37):
Well, the people that I've hired, I have been
very lucky in that I've hired physical therapists.
One I had known for many, many years. So I knew his
personality. I knew what he was like, and it was super
confident. The other person that I hired a
few months ago was a direct referral from him. And
(10:01):
so I thoroughly trust him. And I met with her
and just like got a feel for who she was. And immediately
she was outgoing. She was warm. She was charismatic.
She knew what she was doing. And from my current
employee, he said, you know, they both work elsewhere.
(10:23):
So they're doing like PRN for me, but he said, you know, she's one
of the best therapists I've seen ever. And
so I knew that she
would be a perfect fit. And what I love to hear is
when patients that they're seeing, let
me know, like they love you guys. They
(10:44):
love her. They're referring more patients to
So you hit the nail on the head with that. What
our business does is we find those types of people for
practices in volume. We built the
machine that picks that magic needle out of a
(11:04):
stack of needles. So when you have a whole bunch of resumes on
your desk, you don't have the faintest clue who's going to work out, you don't have the
time to interview, none of that stuff. Our automated
process goes all the way from
writing the job description to getting all of those candidates. All
you have to do when you're a Build My Team client is
(11:24):
talk to two or three people. That's it. Our team does everything
else. So the point is to try and get those
candidates to the practices that perform at
a level where the owner of the practice says, wow, we need
more of that person. We need to duplicate Karen,
Right, exactly. Clones, no, that's crazy. I
(11:47):
wouldn't want to clone. I wouldn't want to clone of myself, that's for sure. But
now you've kind of alluded to the different assessments
that Build My Team does. So it kind of incorporates psychometric
assessments so that it's sort of
a scientific, predictable way to hire team members. So
(12:08):
what key performance factors did
you identify as being most predictive of
success in practices? So it's kind of
what you were saying. It's the difference between looking at people from an assessment
Well, first of all, it's got to be crystal clear that a resume doesn't tell
(12:29):
you anything about what they're good at. It's
what the candidate claims that they may be good at, and they'll tell you
whatever you need to hear in order to get the paychecks rolling. That's
reality today. And most of them even take that even further.
It's whatever AI cooked up on their resume to
get those paychecks flowing. So what are those key hiring
(12:50):
components? It all depends on the practice, because what
makes a person successful in practice A may set them up for
failure in practice B. Give you an example. So
one of the things we measure is stress tolerance. Sounds like a minor thing. Your
practice, we don't worry at all about something like that. If
you're seeing six to eight patients an hour, with
(13:12):
a PT assistant or two, guess
what, guys? Stress is baked into that
day. If you don't have a level of stress tolerance, your
PTAs, they're gonna leave. Your front desk
team is gonna leave. all of those types of things. We measure how
they communicate, we measure how they like to be communicated with,
(13:33):
we measure if they're individual contributors or if
they are folks who like to be part of a team. We
have pages and pages of information that
comes out of this very, it's about a 10-minute process and
just pages of information about these folks. we
can tell if candidates can sell, if they're comfortable selling. Now
(13:54):
in healthcare, that's not a big deal, but in some parts of healthcare, like let's say dental
treatment coordinators, that's a big deal. In eye care, the
folks who do the glasses, the opticians, that's a big deal. So
there's oodles of these criteria and
the key point of all of this is it has to match,
the candidate's strengths and talents have to match what you're looking for. If
(14:17):
they do, all kinds of things fall into place. If they
That's right. And have you been able to kind of validate some
of these factors that correlate with long-term employment?
Yeah, we most certainly have. So over 90% of our people
(14:40):
that we place end up staying at approximately a
year longer. It's in now that do
we wish that was higher? Everybody in health care wishes that was higher. Sure.
But the very nature of that means that we have
much lower turnover for the people that we present to the practice for
hiring than what they're used to. And it
(15:01):
all boils down to asking the person who shows up for work to
be themselves. So if like
if you were asked to go into a PT practice that
I wanted you to be really kind of formal, kind
of uptight. And you know what, Karen, we
don't really like to talk a lot to our patients.
(15:24):
We're just going to be really like stiff and formal with
them. And Karen, I think that it's really important that you
get on board with that. How's that working for you so far? I can
But what if you were a team member on that practice
and that's what you rolled into each morning? How
(15:53):
Right. Yeah. And that's where the match is so important because
the type of person that would fit into that practice
would be extraordinarily different from the type of person who would fit into a
Yeah, absolutely. So it's not just,
so at Build My Team, you're not just looking at the candidates, but
(16:14):
you're also looking at the practices as well.
We are, yeah. And the tighter that
match, the happier the practice is, the happier the
Yeah, makes perfect sense. And you just sort of
alluded to the cost, right? So there's definitely
(16:36):
a cost of hiring staff, right?
So given that many practice owners were obviously very
cost-conscious, how do you help them understand the financial impact
of bad hires versus the investment
Well, right off the bat, our process is not expensive. We're
(17:01):
not based upon the income that the person, like
their paycheck, it's a flat fee. So our goal is
to get you people that don't cost a
fortune. And quite simply, you're not gonna continue to work with us if we
don't perform. The next thing about that
is that, we really look to
(17:22):
work with the individual clients because that match has to be so good.
So when we start off all of the positions with
the consultation call, we wanna hear all about your practice, all
about what you like, what you don't like, the
volumes, we do internally a profile on
the practice so that we know exactly what they're going
(17:43):
to be looking for. And that's put into our search algorithms when
Makes perfect sense. And
what is, I guess, what
is the pushback that you get? You know, it's kind of
common pushback to a business
(18:06):
changing their hiring practice because, you know, nobody likes change,
So what is some common pushback that you may get?
And what advice do you have to business owners to like,
Oh boy, where would I start? So some of it is, well, we
(18:27):
do, let's say disc assessment that assesses personality, puts
you into a couple of quadrants. That's great.
We are operating at a level that takes that up by a hundred times.
There's no magic test. That's the
key point here. There's no magic anything. I can't
(18:48):
run you through the Harry Potter assessment that
will wave the magic wand and all of a sudden we know that
There's no sorting hat.
It's a two-way match. That's
(19:11):
one of the items of pushback. The second is I think that
practice owners as a whole are extraordinarily risk
averse. They don't like to try new things. Well, guess
what, folks? Try it. Don't try it. But
this is a completely different mousetrap that's been engineered from
the ground up to produce one result. And
(19:33):
that's a fantastic candidate for your particular practice. Resumes
don't do that. So imagine
that you have a new patient. They
come in. You can't tell what's wrong with them.
(19:55):
They're behind a screen. You can't tell what's wrong with them. So you sit there
and you ask them to tell you everything that's wrong with them. You
don't have a clinical report. You didn't get any prescription from
an orthopedic surgeon or anything like that. You just got to listen to them. And
then you make your decisions based upon what you're going to do,
based upon what a person tells you. And
(20:16):
that's it. You're not allowed to physically assess them or anything. How
comfortable are you with moving forward in that environment versus You
have the entire operatory report from the orthopedic surgeon.
You've examined them. You've figured
out that they're telling you about their sore elbow. It's actually their knee that
(20:36):
they had surgery on. These are the types of things that we
were kind of joking about, but that's an interview. You
are listening to a person tell you how great they are. And
you're listening to a person who has to make their
car payment by Friday. or
their rent payment. They're going to tell you whatever you need to hear. If
(20:58):
you don't believe me, try hiring more people. I'm
not trying to be arrogant about it. It's just it sucks. It's awful. And
in health care, as providers, we are hardwired to
help people. In our model, the
doctor, especially the doctor, has to be kept as far
(21:20):
away as humanly possible from the hiring process. Because
the better doctor you are, the more empathetic you
are, the more you like humans, the more you want to help people. the
further you have to be away from this process or else you will continue to
hire people who are basically wounded puppies that you need to
nurse back to health. These are not high performers for your
(21:42):
practice. I'm not trying to be insulting in any way.
It's just an inverse relationship between the better clinician
you are versus how your performance will
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And, and, you know, hiring is
stressful. It's uncomfortable. We,
we want to do what's best for the health of our practice.
(22:06):
And so I think to have an outside perspective
to kind of take your emotions out of
it is, is probably exactly what most people need.
But it's not that it requires a practice owner
to admit that. It's just the practice owner needs to ask himself,
hey, what if this works? What if this actually works?
(22:29):
And what if I can get people in?
Hiring with Build My Team, the entire process, soup to nuts, takes about
That's it. And this is, you contrast that
to anywhere 20 to 50 hours. Sometimes
it can be absolutely ridiculous for position. So
(22:51):
when you take a look at the effectiveness and the time savings, obviously
I'm biased, but even in my own practice, the
results spoke for themselves. It was just, the
team became so functional that
it went from just dreading going to work to,
(23:12):
this is gonna be fun, we're gonna have a fun day. Like every day was a fun day.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is isn't that what everybody wants? Right. Yeah.
And so as we said at the beginning of the show, you're in
northeast Pennsylvania. I mean, would you
consider it rural? I guess more rural when compared
(23:35):
Yeah. So how did the hiring challenges differ between
rural and urban practices? And Did
you have to make any modifications to your system to work across different
Yeah, we sure did. So in urban New York City versus
Hawley, Pennsylvania, like rural small town America are
(23:56):
polar opposites on the labor market. if
let's say somebody's commuting a mile to
get to your practice and work, how many PT clinics are
It's a ridiculous number. In Pennsylvania, commuting
(24:25):
No, nobody does. In our world, it's
a completely different labor market. We will have very few,
relative to an urban center, you're
going to have a completely different labor pool. One
of the specialties that Build My Team has is we generally do
not hire people for experience. It's very,
(24:48):
that's a pushback that we hear a lot too. Well, I need somebody with experience. No,
that's what you're used to doing. And it's working out very poorly for you,
respectfully. Then when you bring in people without experience, um,
that works exceptionally well. When you have
people who learn incredibly quickly, which we measure folks
that are a natural fit for the position. So you give them, um,
(25:11):
some training and two to three weeks and they're
up and running in ways you can't even imagine. And
folks say, well, another pushback is, well, we have to train them. Yeah, but you have
to do that anyway. Even a person coming in with experience, what you
don't realize with experience is you have to untrain. Well,
we did it this way at Dr. Jim's practice. Yeah,
(25:33):
but you're not at Dr. Jim's practice anymore. And we do it a completely different
way, and here's why. And trying to
untrain that behavior versus telling a person who has
no experience, we do it this way. And they're like, OK. off and
Right. Right. Yeah. And there's, there's
(25:54):
There is. And the other part is if you're trying to bring in people with
experience, especially in a rural area, you will,
you won't find them. but you can grow your own. And
what I mean by that is you bring in these super intelligent
people who are just on the ball and you're hitting all
of their natural strengths and talents, you're gonna spend two or three weeks and
(26:18):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I always said, like, I don't really hire
for experience either, because I can send someone to
go to a course. I can show a physical therapist how
to do X, Y, Z, but I can't teach a physical therapist
how to be kind and how to be empathetic and
how to be on time and how to be professional. You
(26:38):
know, these are a little more things that I think are kind of
So I've always felt the same way. Anybody can learn anything.
Yeah, and well, what a lot of people who interview folks
are scared about is, well, I don't want to have to
train them because they're so used to the people that they
(27:00):
bring into their practice as being functionally
untrainable. And they're right. Yeah,
some people aren't trainable. That's not who you get from Build
My Team. But I've had all kinds of people like that in the past. And
It's like Groundhog Day over and over again. Well, they
(27:22):
would have been gracefully cut from our process because
Got it, got it. Well, this is all making a lot of sense. And it sounds
like it's a real service to healthcare
practices, especially those like smaller businesses where
maybe you don't have the time to, like you said, put
(27:44):
in hours and hours and hours of work. So as
we begin to wrap things up, what are the main takeaways that you
incredibly affordable, hardly any time commitment, about
an hour per hire. And that's actual, this isn't a sales
(28:04):
pitch. Mind-blowingly effective
when you match strengths and talents to what a business
actually needs. And that that matchmaking concept is really
funny because that's the main thing for a practice. We
find people are going to be able to excel at your position,
your particular position in your particular practice. We
(28:26):
do so very affordably for a tiny time
And where can people find more information if they want to get in touch with you
Perfect. And how
about, can they find you on social media, LinkedIn,
(28:48):
Yep, absolutely. We're on the major platforms. I do suggest that
they go to buildmyteam.com and simply schedule a consultation. It's
free. You talk to one of our team members about your practice and
your hiring woes. Tell them, be as honest as
possible, because we've heard all the horror stories, but the more honest you
(29:08):
Perfect. And if you were not taking notes, like
I suggested you did in the beginning, don't worry.
You can scroll down to the show notes and the links to everything that
we spoke about today will be there. So one click will take you right to
the website. Now, Mike, last question.
It's one that I ask everyone. Knowing where you are now in
(29:28):
your life and your career, what advice would you give to your 20 year
Boy, what a great question. I think that I
would say, there's so many ways to go with this, but I
would say that studying older material,
(29:50):
older business material versus the new age fat
of the week type stuff will provide an
incredible outcome long-term
for you. I mean, I'm a big reader. Some
older books that I
(30:10):
think of, I mean, one of them, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow
Rich, not a book about making money per se, but about how incredible
industrialists thought about how they built the careers,
that type of thing. You
read a bunch of stuff from Warren Buffett, his shareholder letters, not
a book per se, but that man has some wisdom of the ages. And
(30:34):
that type of approach, you say, well, what does that have to do with my practice? Oh
my goodness. It is exactly what you're doing all day in your practice. You
know, those types of things. So I wish I
I think that's great advice. And thank you for sharing those books and those resources
with the listeners. I really appreciate it. So thank
(30:54):
you so much, Dr. Neal. Again, if you want
more information, go to buildmyteam.com. Click
right below in the show notes on whatever platform you're listening on. So thank
And everyone, thanks so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart podcast. I
am your host, Dr. Karen Litze, owner of Karen Litze Physical Therapy, located
in New York City. And today, you are in
for a treat. So if you are a practice
owner or a business owner, you are going to wanna get
out your notepad, get out your phone, and take some notes, because
(00:24):
today we're gonna be talking about best practices in
hiring. And I'm really happy to
have as our guest, Dr. Michael Neal. He is the founder and
CEO of Build My Team. He is a
practicing optometrist in private practice
in Hawley, Pennsylvania, which is, you know, my neck of the woods. It's
(00:45):
where I kind of grew up. He founded Build My Team
to solve his own hiring struggles and his practice by
modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire.
Oh, thanks for having me, Karen. And it was so great talking with you before for
everybody listening. We've been yapping for about 10 minutes about all kinds of
(01:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Talking about my. So if you don't know
where Holly, Pennsylvania is like Google it, it's a great it's
a really beautiful part of Pennsylvania. I can't stress that enough. And
I grew up in a town maybe what half hour, 40 minutes
from there. Yep. And I played softball
for many years and I played in Wayne County and we played in Holly, a
(01:30):
lot of my games. So we were kind of talking about that. And anyway, fun
part, fun part of Pennsylvania. Highly recommend going there. But
this is not like a podcast for Pennsylvania tourism. Instead,
we were going to talk about best hiring practices. But before we
get to that, Mike, can you give the listeners a little
bit more about your background and how you are
(01:53):
how you kind of went from full-time practicing optometrist,
medical provider, to build my team consulting
Oh boy, yeah, that took several years, that transition. But
it didn't, Build My Team never started out to be anything
at all. It wasn't even a company. What caused
(02:14):
me to start this entire process were the
problems we had with hiring, how awful resume-based
hiring is, how it just produces
awful, awful results. And when you're trying to run a practice, You
know, you've got people streaming in the front door and you've got these
employees who weren't hired
(02:37):
well, so they aren't working in their natural strengths and talents. It
was just one problem after another. It was really, really awful. And
so the entrepreneur in me turned around and said, well, somebody
does this. better than us, probably everybody because it was
that bad. So let's go take a look at how they're hiring and
try and figure out what they're doing. That turned into basically an
(03:00):
entire process that I used to run
from my cell phone. if you can believe that. I do. Well it
was a hot mess disaster trying to talk to candidates from
the real live internet from a cell phone but
that ended up being automated, refined over several years and
now we're doing it in over 40 states for people in
(03:22):
over 10 different healthcare professions, physical therapy practices included.
Amazing. And was there like a specific aha
moment when you realized that your hiring approach needed
Yeah, I would say we had
(03:42):
some serious issues hiring because we were hiring like doctors would.
And what I mean by that is we're hiring to take
the person sitting in front of us and fix them. Well,
look, I'm here to tell you that that sounds great for the
Hollywood movie approach, but that's not how you hire
performers at all. High performers, I mean, you
(04:04):
can't make people into something they're not. That's
the wrong approach. What you do instead is meet them exactly where
they are and look at what their strengths and talents are and
figure out if that's a great fit for the job that
you have open. And we've been able to do that and created
(04:25):
And how, you know, in the intro,
I had mentioned that you kind of took some cues
from Disney and from the fourth season. So
how do you bridge that gap between hospitality industry practices
and a healthcare hiring practices? Because these are two very different
(04:48):
Oh, I would disagree on that. I would say they're incredibly similar.
So when you are at your practice, you're
in New York City practicing, about
how big is your practice and how many team members do you have, that type of thing?
Okay. So somebody has to answer the phone. Somebody has to
(05:09):
get people on some type of schedule. Somebody
has to get you paid. Let's not forget about that one. And
then somebody has to help you and I
mean, a team that size, you don't need any level
of manager or anything like that. So you
contrast that to the hospitality industry. I'm not talking about a
(05:29):
super eight motel, okay? I'm talking about higher end experience
where you're there for an experience. One
of the reasons why, I'll tell you this quite candidly, one of the reasons why
people want to see you is you are incredibly outgoing, incredibly
friendly. You fit the bill for the type of person we
would want as a physical therapist. Now, our company doesn't hire licensed
(05:51):
professionals. We do all of the admin and the clerical team members. But
imagine if your team members were all
as outgoing as you are. Patients are going to flock to
you guys, flock to you. You won't know what to do with
the patient volume because your referrals will be crazy. How
(06:12):
do I know that? Well, because I know what it takes to
make a great health care practice. And the happier you are,
the more helpful you are, the more you want to care for people, the
better off you are in health care. And there's
really almost no exception to that. Like even, well,
I guess the high end, it would be surgeons, some of whom don't
(06:35):
have those types of personalities, but they have incredible outcomes. That's
what makes people seek them. For all the rest of the team members,
you want folks who are very similar to a high-end customer
Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. And I used to say years
ago, this was probably over 10 years ago, that I
(06:57):
sort of based my practice off the Ritz-Carlton,
being a very individual,
high-end, experiential, and
that I was sort of the concierge Right.
So I was treating patients, but also being that hub for
(07:19):
helping them if they needed referrals, if they needed, you
know, X, Y, Z, I was there. And so I did kind
of base my, um, I wanted my
practice to be an experience for patients, not
(07:40):
because the patients and the
clientele that I was working with, I don't take insurance. So I'm
a cash-based practice. So I know that people are
spending their hard earned money on me. And
I wanted to make sure that I exceeded expectations, that
I was going above and beyond what they thought a
(08:03):
Right. So you have a very unique practice. You have
almost a boutique type approach versus a volume
model. And imagine the team members that
you're bringing to the table. What
if their version of exceeding is
your version of barely meeting those needs?
(08:29):
Right. So that's one aspect. Things
that build my team will approach us is you have a
very specific practice and that's amazing because
it makes our job easy to put people on your team. Our
team would know exactly the type of people you want to work with.
Most importantly, exactly the people you don't want to work with. So
(08:51):
that's very straightforward. In most practices, it's
not that crystal clear because the volume will be higher, insurance-based practices.
You've got people who are going to PT because they have to,
like you said. They may not be looking forward to it. You
never know. Those
are just realistic situations and we have to meet people where
(09:13):
they're at. So that type of practice, nothing wrong with it. They're helping people
all day, but we have to make sure that we get team members who wake
up in the morning and get excited to go to that type of practice. And
that type of person is very different from the type of person you're describing.
Those are not the same employees. So let me ask you the
magic question. When you're sitting in an interview, looking at resumes, how
(09:37):
Well, the people that I've hired, I have been
very lucky in that I've hired physical therapists.
One I had known for many, many years. So I knew his
personality. I knew what he was like, and it was super
confident. The other person that I hired a
few months ago was a direct referral from him. And
(10:01):
so I thoroughly trust him. And I met with her
and just like got a feel for who she was. And immediately
she was outgoing. She was warm. She was charismatic.
She knew what she was doing. And from my current
employee, he said, you know, they both work elsewhere.
(10:23):
So they're doing like PRN for me, but he said, you know, she's one
of the best therapists I've seen ever. And
so I knew that she
would be a perfect fit. And what I love to hear is
when patients that they're seeing, let
me know, like they love you guys. They
(10:44):
love her. They're referring more patients to
So you hit the nail on the head with that. What
our business does is we find those types of people for
practices in volume. We built the
machine that picks that magic needle out of a
(11:04):
stack of needles. So when you have a whole bunch of resumes on
your desk, you don't have the faintest clue who's going to work out, you don't have the
time to interview, none of that stuff. Our automated
process goes all the way from
writing the job description to getting all of those candidates. All
you have to do when you're a Build My Team client is
(11:24):
talk to two or three people. That's it. Our team does everything
else. So the point is to try and get those
candidates to the practices that perform at
a level where the owner of the practice says, wow, we need
more of that person. We need to duplicate Karen,
Right, exactly. Clones, no, that's crazy. I
(11:47):
wouldn't want to clone. I wouldn't want to clone of myself, that's for sure. But
now you've kind of alluded to the different assessments
that Build My Team does. So it kind of incorporates psychometric
assessments so that it's sort of
a scientific, predictable way to hire team members. So
(12:08):
what key performance factors did
you identify as being most predictive of
success in practices? So it's kind of
what you were saying. It's the difference between looking at people from an assessment
Well, first of all, it's got to be crystal clear that a resume doesn't tell
(12:29):
you anything about what they're good at. It's
what the candidate claims that they may be good at, and they'll tell you
whatever you need to hear in order to get the paychecks rolling. That's
reality today. And most of them even take that even further.
It's whatever AI cooked up on their resume to
get those paychecks flowing. So what are those key hiring
(12:50):
components? It all depends on the practice, because what
makes a person successful in practice A may set them up for
failure in practice B. Give you an example. So
one of the things we measure is stress tolerance. Sounds like a minor thing. Your
practice, we don't worry at all about something like that. If
you're seeing six to eight patients an hour, with
(13:12):
a PT assistant or two, guess
what, guys? Stress is baked into that
day. If you don't have a level of stress tolerance, your
PTAs, they're gonna leave. Your front desk
team is gonna leave. all of those types of things. We measure how
they communicate, we measure how they like to be communicated with,
(13:33):
we measure if they're individual contributors or if
they are folks who like to be part of a team. We
have pages and pages of information that
comes out of this very, it's about a 10-minute process and
just pages of information about these folks. we
can tell if candidates can sell, if they're comfortable selling. Now
(13:54):
in healthcare, that's not a big deal, but in some parts of healthcare, like let's say dental
treatment coordinators, that's a big deal. In eye care, the
folks who do the glasses, the opticians, that's a big deal. So
there's oodles of these criteria and
the key point of all of this is it has to match,
the candidate's strengths and talents have to match what you're looking for. If
(14:17):
they do, all kinds of things fall into place. If they
That's right. And have you been able to kind of validate some
of these factors that correlate with long-term employment?
Yeah, we most certainly have. So over 90% of our people
(14:40):
that we place end up staying at approximately a
year longer. It's in now that do
we wish that was higher? Everybody in health care wishes that was higher. Sure.
But the very nature of that means that we have
much lower turnover for the people that we present to the practice for
hiring than what they're used to. And it
(15:01):
all boils down to asking the person who shows up for work to
be themselves. So if like
if you were asked to go into a PT practice that
I wanted you to be really kind of formal, kind
of uptight. And you know what, Karen, we
don't really like to talk a lot to our patients.
(15:24):
We're just going to be really like stiff and formal with
them. And Karen, I think that it's really important that you
get on board with that. How's that working for you so far? I can
But what if you were a team member on that practice
and that's what you rolled into each morning? How
(15:53):
Right. Yeah. And that's where the match is so important because
the type of person that would fit into that practice
would be extraordinarily different from the type of person who would fit into a
Yeah, absolutely. So it's not just,
so at Build My Team, you're not just looking at the candidates, but
(16:14):
you're also looking at the practices as well.
We are, yeah. And the tighter that
match, the happier the practice is, the happier the
Yeah, makes perfect sense. And you just sort of
alluded to the cost, right? So there's definitely
(16:36):
a cost of hiring staff, right?
So given that many practice owners were obviously very
cost-conscious, how do you help them understand the financial impact
of bad hires versus the investment
Well, right off the bat, our process is not expensive. We're
(17:01):
not based upon the income that the person, like
their paycheck, it's a flat fee. So our goal is
to get you people that don't cost a
fortune. And quite simply, you're not gonna continue to work with us if we
don't perform. The next thing about that
is that, we really look to
(17:22):
work with the individual clients because that match has to be so good.
So when we start off all of the positions with
the consultation call, we wanna hear all about your practice, all
about what you like, what you don't like, the
volumes, we do internally a profile on
the practice so that we know exactly what they're going
(17:43):
to be looking for. And that's put into our search algorithms when
Makes perfect sense. And
what is, I guess, what
is the pushback that you get? You know, it's kind of
common pushback to a business
(18:06):
changing their hiring practice because, you know, nobody likes change,
So what is some common pushback that you may get?
And what advice do you have to business owners to like,
Oh boy, where would I start? So some of it is, well, we
(18:27):
do, let's say disc assessment that assesses personality, puts
you into a couple of quadrants. That's great.
We are operating at a level that takes that up by a hundred times.
There's no magic test. That's the
key point here. There's no magic anything. I can't
(18:48):
run you through the Harry Potter assessment that
will wave the magic wand and all of a sudden we know that
There's no sorting hat.
It's a two-way match. That's
(19:11):
one of the items of pushback. The second is I think that
practice owners as a whole are extraordinarily risk
averse. They don't like to try new things. Well, guess
what, folks? Try it. Don't try it. But
this is a completely different mousetrap that's been engineered from
the ground up to produce one result. And
(19:33):
that's a fantastic candidate for your particular practice. Resumes
don't do that. So imagine
that you have a new patient. They
come in. You can't tell what's wrong with them.
(19:55):
They're behind a screen. You can't tell what's wrong with them. So you sit there
and you ask them to tell you everything that's wrong with them. You
don't have a clinical report. You didn't get any prescription from
an orthopedic surgeon or anything like that. You just got to listen to them. And
then you make your decisions based upon what you're going to do,
based upon what a person tells you. And
(20:16):
that's it. You're not allowed to physically assess them or anything. How
comfortable are you with moving forward in that environment versus You
have the entire operatory report from the orthopedic surgeon.
You've examined them. You've figured
out that they're telling you about their sore elbow. It's actually their knee that
(20:36):
they had surgery on. These are the types of things that we
were kind of joking about, but that's an interview. You
are listening to a person tell you how great they are. And
you're listening to a person who has to make their
car payment by Friday. or
their rent payment. They're going to tell you whatever you need to hear. If
(20:58):
you don't believe me, try hiring more people. I'm
not trying to be arrogant about it. It's just it sucks. It's awful. And
in health care, as providers, we are hardwired to
help people. In our model, the
doctor, especially the doctor, has to be kept as far
(21:20):
away as humanly possible from the hiring process. Because
the better doctor you are, the more empathetic you
are, the more you like humans, the more you want to help people. the
further you have to be away from this process or else you will continue to
hire people who are basically wounded puppies that you need to
nurse back to health. These are not high performers for your
(21:42):
practice. I'm not trying to be insulting in any way.
It's just an inverse relationship between the better clinician
you are versus how your performance will
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And, and, you know, hiring is
stressful. It's uncomfortable. We,
we want to do what's best for the health of our practice.
(22:06):
And so I think to have an outside perspective
to kind of take your emotions out of
it is, is probably exactly what most people need.
But it's not that it requires a practice owner
to admit that. It's just the practice owner needs to ask himself,
hey, what if this works? What if this actually works?
(22:29):
And what if I can get people in?
Hiring with Build My Team, the entire process, soup to nuts, takes about
That's it. And this is, you contrast that
to anywhere 20 to 50 hours. Sometimes
it can be absolutely ridiculous for position. So
(22:51):
when you take a look at the effectiveness and the time savings, obviously
I'm biased, but even in my own practice, the
results spoke for themselves. It was just, the
team became so functional that
it went from just dreading going to work to,
(23:12):
this is gonna be fun, we're gonna have a fun day. Like every day was a fun day.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is isn't that what everybody wants? Right. Yeah.
And so as we said at the beginning of the show, you're in
northeast Pennsylvania. I mean, would you
consider it rural? I guess more rural when compared
(23:35):
Yeah. So how did the hiring challenges differ between
rural and urban practices? And Did
you have to make any modifications to your system to work across different
Yeah, we sure did. So in urban New York City versus
Hawley, Pennsylvania, like rural small town America are
(23:56):
polar opposites on the labor market. if
let's say somebody's commuting a mile to
get to your practice and work, how many PT clinics are
It's a ridiculous number. In Pennsylvania, commuting
(24:25):
No, nobody does. In our world, it's
a completely different labor market. We will have very few,
relative to an urban center, you're
going to have a completely different labor pool. One
of the specialties that Build My Team has is we generally do
not hire people for experience. It's very,
(24:48):
that's a pushback that we hear a lot too. Well, I need somebody with experience. No,
that's what you're used to doing. And it's working out very poorly for you,
respectfully. Then when you bring in people without experience, um,
that works exceptionally well. When you have
people who learn incredibly quickly, which we measure folks
that are a natural fit for the position. So you give them, um,
(25:11):
some training and two to three weeks and they're
up and running in ways you can't even imagine. And
folks say, well, another pushback is, well, we have to train them. Yeah, but you have
to do that anyway. Even a person coming in with experience, what you
don't realize with experience is you have to untrain. Well,
we did it this way at Dr. Jim's practice. Yeah,
(25:33):
but you're not at Dr. Jim's practice anymore. And we do it a completely different
way, and here's why. And trying to
untrain that behavior versus telling a person who has
no experience, we do it this way. And they're like, OK. off and
Right. Right. Yeah. And there's, there's
(25:54):
There is. And the other part is if you're trying to bring in people with
experience, especially in a rural area, you will,
you won't find them. but you can grow your own. And
what I mean by that is you bring in these super intelligent
people who are just on the ball and you're hitting all
of their natural strengths and talents, you're gonna spend two or three weeks and
(26:18):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I always said, like, I don't really hire
for experience either, because I can send someone to
go to a course. I can show a physical therapist how
to do X, Y, Z, but I can't teach a physical therapist
how to be kind and how to be empathetic and
how to be on time and how to be professional. You
(26:38):
know, these are a little more things that I think are kind of
So I've always felt the same way. Anybody can learn anything.
Yeah, and well, what a lot of people who interview folks
are scared about is, well, I don't want to have to
train them because they're so used to the people that they
(27:00):
bring into their practice as being functionally
untrainable. And they're right. Yeah,
some people aren't trainable. That's not who you get from Build
My Team. But I've had all kinds of people like that in the past. And
It's like Groundhog Day over and over again. Well, they
(27:22):
would have been gracefully cut from our process because
Got it, got it. Well, this is all making a lot of sense. And it sounds
like it's a real service to healthcare
practices, especially those like smaller businesses where
maybe you don't have the time to, like you said, put
(27:44):
in hours and hours and hours of work. So as
we begin to wrap things up, what are the main takeaways that you
incredibly affordable, hardly any time commitment, about
an hour per hire. And that's actual, this isn't a sales
(28:04):
pitch. Mind-blowingly effective
when you match strengths and talents to what a business
actually needs. And that that matchmaking concept is really
funny because that's the main thing for a practice. We
find people are going to be able to excel at your position,
your particular position in your particular practice. We
(28:26):
do so very affordably for a tiny time
And where can people find more information if they want to get in touch with you
Perfect. And how
about, can they find you on social media, LinkedIn,
(28:48):
Yep, absolutely. We're on the major platforms. I do suggest that
they go to buildmyteam.com and simply schedule a consultation. It's
free. You talk to one of our team members about your practice and
your hiring woes. Tell them, be as honest as
possible, because we've heard all the horror stories, but the more honest you
(29:08):
Perfect. And if you were not taking notes, like
I suggested you did in the beginning, don't worry.
You can scroll down to the show notes and the links to everything that
we spoke about today will be there. So one click will take you right to
the website. Now, Mike, last question.
It's one that I ask everyone. Knowing where you are now in
(29:28):
your life and your career, what advice would you give to your 20 year
Boy, what a great question. I think that I
would say, there's so many ways to go with this, but I
would say that studying older material,
(29:50):
older business material versus the new age fat
of the week type stuff will provide an
incredible outcome long-term
for you. I mean, I'm a big reader. Some
older books that I
(30:10):
think of, I mean, one of them, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow
Rich, not a book about making money per se, but about how incredible
industrialists thought about how they built the careers,
that type of thing. You
read a bunch of stuff from Warren Buffett, his shareholder letters, not
a book per se, but that man has some wisdom of the ages. And
(30:34):
that type of approach, you say, well, what does that have to do with my practice? Oh
my goodness. It is exactly what you're doing all day in your practice. You
know, those types of things. So I wish I
I think that's great advice. And thank you for sharing those books and those resources
with the listeners. I really appreciate it. So thank
(30:54):
you so much, Dr. Neal. Again, if you want
more information, go to buildmyteam.com. Click
right below in the show notes on whatever platform you're listening on. So thank
And everyone, thanks so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and
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