Creating Well Oiled Operations with Stacy Tuschl | POP 803

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A photo of Stacy Tuschl is captured. She is the CEO of Well-Oiled Operations and the founder of the Foot Traffic Formula. Stacy is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Where can you find the time to invest in your skillset? Can you step away from your practice for extended periods? Which systems can you put in place to give you more flexibility as an owner?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks with Stacy Tuschl about how to create well oiled practice operations and business systems.

Podcast Sponsor: Pillars of Practice

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Meet Stacy Tuschl

A photo of Stacy Tuschl is captured. She is the CEO of Well-Oiled Operations and the founder of the Foot Traffic Formula. Stacy is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Stacy Tuschl started her own business at the age of 18 in her parents’ backyard and turned that company into a multi-million dollar business she still runs today. Stacy is a bestselling author, and founder of the Foot Traffic Formula – helping small businesses around the world get more customers in the door. The Foot Traffic Podcast now has over 1 million downloads and is frequently in the top 30 of all marketing on iTunes where she’s interviewed guests like Suze Orman. Stacy was named the 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year by the United States Small Business Administration.

Visit Stacy Tuschl’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

FREEBIES: Access Stacy’s Many Free Downloadables to Access Valuable Operational Assets!

In This Podcast

  • The Value of Learning Other People’s Systems
  • Building Systems to Support Multiple Income Streams
  • Common Practice Owner Mistakes
  • Managing Role Transitions
  • Stacy’s advice to Private Practitioners

The Value of Learning Other People’s Systems

It’s so valuable to be in a room where you can see different ways of how things are being done.

Stacy Tuschl

Oftentimes, business owners start out and find that they can’t step away from their business for more than two days without operational hang-ups.

Nonetheless, it’s important to invest in yourself and your skillset, because you can learn how to put systems in place that will allow the business to operate when you’re not around.

Attending business courses and conferences will give you access to other people’s experience and expertise, which you can then incorporate into your own business.

Building Systems to Support Multiple Income Streams

The thing that I want people to see and understand is, before I ever open a second location, I was completely removed out of the first one.

Stacy Tuschl

Be careful of starting a second business or moving to a second location when you haven’t fully separated from the first business. This often leads to burnout.

Instead, train and teach someone to take over the business, and only then transition into the next one.

It’s about getting the right people in place with the systems they need to have success moving forward.

Stacy Tuschl

Common Practice Owner Mistakes

I promise you, there is nothing in your head that you couldn’t be teaching.

Stacy Tuschl

Practice Owners often make the mistake of assuming that there are jobs that only they can do. They then end up with too many tasks on their plate, when they should actually be delegating them.

The first step to resolving this is to believe that someone else can do as good a job as you – but acknowledge that it will take time.

The second step is to train someone before you delegate the task to them.

Managing Role Transitions

The challenge for an owner transitioning away from a role is that clients and employees still expect to see them performing that role and fulfilling those responsibilities.

To transition out of a particular role in a company, you should try to “shine the light” on the abilities and strengths of the person succeeding you. That way your clients will be more comfortable with the transition.

Stacy’s advice to Private Practitioners

If you’re committed, you can figure out any problem you have.

Useful Links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 803. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast, where we cover everything around starting, growing, scaling, and sometimes exiting your private practice. It’s so exciting to help so many of you whether you’re just getting started, if you’re just getting going, we have an amazing checklist and all sorts of e-courses for you that it’s totally free over at pillarsofpractice.com. We’ve got these eight-minute expert videos where I set a timer and I interview people around a specific topic like money or websites. For eight minutes we just go crazy talking about it. If that sounds good to you and you’re just getting started, head on over to pillarsofpractice.com. If you are growing a practice, we have another course over at pillarsofpractice.com that you can opt into, and you’re going to get a ton of email content, a bunch of checklists, a bunch of ways that you can level up your growing practice. Make sure you check those out. I love talking about multiple streams of income, about e-courses and podcasts and all that sort of stuff, because I remember back in 2012 when I started Practice of the Practice, I was listening to Patt Flynn’s Smart Passive Income podcast, mowing the Lawn. I had a little baby girl who had just been born and I was working at the community college and Patt was the first guy that really captivated me as a normal person first, and wasn’t just like a slimy person selling business stuff. It got me thinking about, well, what could I do beyond private practice or beyond just the counseling work I was doing at the college? It really was starting a new business from scratch. That’s why I’m so excited about our guest. Today. We have Stacy Tuschl who started her own business at the age of 18 in her parents’ backyard, and turned that business into a multimillion-dollar business she still runs today. Stacy’s a bestselling author and founder of the Foot Traffic Formula, helping small businesses around the world to get more customers in the door. The Foot Traffic Podcast now has over a million downloads and is frequently on the top 30 of all marketing on iTunes, where she’s interviewed guests like Susie Orman. Stacy was named the 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year by the United States Small Business Administration. Stacy, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. So glad that you’re here today. [STACY TUSCHL] Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me. [JOE] Yes, yes, I always love when I have a fellow podcast around because they’re mic’s, just right from the beginning sounds awesome. It sounds like we’re in like the same room hanging out, so yes, we kind of are. I mean, you’re over in Wisconsin, I’m in Michigan. We just have a small lake between us. [STACY] Yes, absolutely. [JOE] Well, I want to hear about this business you started when you were 18. Yes, I mean, when I was 18, I was selling vacuum cleaners door to door, definitely not starting a business [STACY] Well, and it’s funny because I didn’t know I was starting a business. I right before, or I should say during high school, I was on the dance team. I fell in love with it and while I was going to school, I thought, okay, I’ll maybe just start a middle school competitive dance team for fun while going to college. So simultaneously I was getting a marketing degree thinking I was going to go work for somebody else. Little did I know that this backyard dance studio that I was doing just on Sundays, it went from 17 kids to a hundred kids within three years. That was no marketing. I had, even though I was getting a marketing degree, I was not somebody who knew how to market or even realized I was really building a business. Thankfully I grew up in a family small business. My grandfather started it over 50 years ago. We dig basements for houses here in Wisconsin, so my parents, my grandparents, I mean, that’s what I saw growing up. Then they said to me, we don’t know anything about dance, but I think this could be a business. I think you could start charging and get a place to call home and all of that. So we ended up incorporating three years in. We now have over 1500 dance and music students that come to us on a weekly basis, which is insane. We have two locations, I own both of the buildings that the studios rent from and it’s just crazy what it’s turned into. That’s sort of how I started consulting because people were wondering, how did you build this? What are you doing? I’m a big believer in working on the business, not in it. So I haven’t actually worked in the buildings in almost 10 years, so it’s just incredible, like what this has turned into, it could never have meant. [JOE] Wow, so who really, like when you, I feel like when you’re that young, you have to have some people that know some things. Like what professors, family members, friends came around you and really helped you see the vision of what it could be? [STACY] Oh, that’s a great question. I think what happened was when I incorporated and then I found a place to rent, I really got in over my head right. When it was the first three years, it was free, it was fun, it was easy. Nobody was expecting anything because I wasn’t starting this real business. When I incorporated expectations changed and I got a postcard in the mail. This was back in like 2005, so this is pre-social media, we are not on Instagram and places like that, but basically it was your Facebook ad of today that I got in a postcard form in my mailbox that was inviting me to a conference in New York, which for me was a very scary investment, but I knew that I needed all the things they were promising, like how to get my time back and how to get the business to grow without me and just all the things. So I flew to New York, I attend this conference and seeing these people in the room, some, not everybody, but some of them had their act together could, was staying in New York even longer on vacation. I could barely fathom coming for two days in and out to run back to my business and they were taking an extended vacation. So I do think that has been an important part of my journey is I have always put myself in rooms where I can see, like visually see the next step and what it could be. That has been so transformational for me. [JOE] What do you think the value is of actually being in the room with people and hanging out with them and talking to them and understanding their systems? [STACY] I mean, for me it has resulted in millions of dollars. It’s just, I don’t know that I would have thought, like you had said, it’s like somebody had to have shown me or shared something with me. My family was in a construction business. I actually didn’t start dancing till I was 15. So nobody in my family grew up like watching the studio owner or understanding what they were doing. This was very new for all of us. Yes, they could guide me in a few ways, like, hire this CPA or you need a bookkeeper, things like that but there was a lot of stuff they didn’t know. I had shown my mom actually the postcard in the mail and said, I don’t know, what do you think? It was a thousand dollars. I mean, 20 years ago, a thousand dollars to me was just like the most amount of money possible. She had said like your grandfather goes to a lot of conferences and this is what they do and they invest in themselves. Even just having her normalize paying somebody to learn how they did what they did. So it’s just, it’s so valuable to be in a room where you can see it, you can see different ways of how things are being done. You can see what other people have already tested and tried and either got successful at or failed at to save you some time as well. So I am just, I’ve never stopped going to conferences. I’ve never stopped being a part of masterminds or getting coaching. I mean, I am a lifelong learner for sure. [JOE] So I know one thing that you really specialize in is balancing multiple streams of income. What are, just so people understand what you’re doing, what are all the different sources of income that you have coming in? Then I’d love to hear about delegation and systems and also that like squirrel syndrome where you just go after the shiny object and it’s really not moving the needle forward compared to no, this new venture actually could be big. So we’re going to cover a lot of ground? Take us through like what streams of income you have right now. [STACY] Yes, so currently, and yes, I’ve been doing this a long time, so there’s been, I haven’t done this all in just a year, like all of a sudden, I would add one and then add another. Obviously, my studio is my first stream of income. I started, I should say the first studio, I then decided, okay, I’m spending a lot of money on rent here. How do I invest that money into my own building? So I did that within a few years after the business started to really grow, I built my first dance studio and so I am the landlord in that studio. My studio is the tenant I should say. Then it was doing really well. I started to systematize. So I pulled myself out of that business and I thought, well, why can’t I do this again? So I opened up a studio about nine miles away. I did, I tested the waters, rented again for a couple years, saw it was working, saw it was profitable, I went and I bought another building. Then even with that building, what I did was I could see the power of having a tenant, but I thought, what if I had more than one tenant? So I am actually about 75% of the building. I’m the studio that owns or rents that. But then the other side, we have a nail salon renting from us, so that’s another stream of income. Then we looked at that building and saw potential to add on. So we even have a phase two we have not built yet where I’ll be able to have about three more tenants so that’s, I’m very excited about that. Probably very early on we, I think there was just a real estate guy that came in and talked at one of the conferences I was at and talking about how to be able to start building your wealth through real estate. So the first home I ever bought in my early twenties, my husband and I bought a duplex and we lived in the bottom. We rented out the top. Within two years we were able to rent out both units and build our home. Then we bought a lake house, like a short-term Airbnb and just a home at Disney World and rented that out. So we started like a little bit of that as well. I’m like, what else do I have? Then obviously now I have another business, which is my online consulting business so it’s another stream. What I realize now, especially after the pandemic of having two very different types of businesses, one that is local service-based, and then another that is, I mean, 90% virtual and online and nationwide, that has been a really big factor in just being secure in one area, one another is not secure. So there’s a lot there, of course, I do affiliates and sponsorships and things like that but that is, I mean, there, that’s, there’s a lot of different things going on for sure. [JOE] I definitely want to underline what you just said at the end there about having different businesses in different types of industries because I think about the pandemic in 2020 and had two short-term rentals, Northern Michigan is this like super touristy area. I mean, we are getting three to five grand a week for our Airbnb for a three bedroom house. So for any week that we had in the summer, it would often cover two months of mortgages so it was a no-brainer. Then the pandemic hits and it’s like nobody’s traveling. So even then to be able to shift, to put a little more into Practice of the Practice, but then as we went on the road with our family during Covid then to have Airbnb’s come back and to just not have all my financial eggs in one basket to be investing aggressively into index funds for my retirement and then tax optimization with all these other areas. Like I don’t have to rely on if all of a sudden, I have a month that’s down with Practice of the Practice by 20%. I know there’s other areas that there’s a buffer there. How do you like, think through when you’re starting a new business? So when you are starting your online consulting like how much do you try to automate other parts of the businesses you operate first before you do something new versus concurrently building businesses? How do you think through that? [STACY] Yes, that’s a great question. A lot of times when people see me with multiple streams, it gives them permission of, okay, well, Stacy’s doing it, I’m going to do it too and then they start too soon. But what I just told you in a couple minutes was a 20-year span of getting something and then really maximizing it and getting it delegated and passing it off to somebody before I would do another thing. There would be years in between a lot of those activities. That is the thing I want people to see and understand is before I ever open a second location, I was completely removed out of the first one. If you aren’t removed out of one location and then you’re doing a second one, you are just going to burn out or have to be hustling twice as hard. So I’m a big believer in like getting this new thing set up. I’m the one in there getting my hands dirty, figuring it out, and then I’m training and teaching somebody what I’ve just figured out. Versus sometimes people will say, oh, well I’ll just get an Airbnb and I’ll just hire somebody to do it, but they don’t know how to do it. Then they hire somebody who doesn’t know how to do it either, and then they’re just struggling. I’m the person that starts it up and then gets it ready to go and puts it on maintenance mode with somebody while I am tracking their KPIs, I’m seeing their metrics. So if there’s ever a red flag of wait a minute, what’s going on over in this business or what’s going on over here in this revenue stream, I can step in to say, why are our numbers down? What happened from last week to this week? I think there’s, I want people to see there’s a lot of monitoring, but also getting the right people in place with the systems that they need to really have success moving forward. [JOE] Yes, I think that’s so important. Then if that person leaves, you have a system of documentation rather than it being based on the person and having that brain drain, leave your company. [STACY] Well, and not only that, because I’m the one that typically usually starts up all of these projects. If they leave, I can jump back in if I need to because I know how to do it. But like you said, the systems are in place, so to hire somebody is a whole lot easier as well. [PILLARS OF PRACTICE] We brought together all of our checklists, videos, and other free things in one spot, so you don’t have to opt in all over the place just to get another checklist. We’ve put it all together over at pillarsofpractice.com. Whether you’re just getting started or have an established group therapy practice, we have a free e-course for you as well. We have eight-minute experts, which are short eight-minute videos around specific topics completely free. If you want to take your practice to the next level, head on over to pillarsofpractice.com to get access to our free e-courses. Again, that’s pillarsofpractice.com to get all of those free e-courses. [JOE SANOK] So when you think about maybe some of the things people don’t do well when you’re doing consulting through well-oiled operations the average clinician that I think of, they’ve started a practice, they’ve worn multiple hats; they’re the bookkeeper, they’re the marketer, they’re the blogger, they’re answering phones, and then they might hire a virtual assistant and then they might hire a couple clinicians, and then they’re a group practice owner that is wearing all these hats and they want to take the hats off, but they don’t know how, for those types of people that are either solo practitioners wearing lots of hats or a group practitioner, what are first things that maybe those type of people do wrong that they need to reframe their mindsets? [STACY] Yes, so I think in the beginning, a lot of times we do have this belief of like, it’s got to be me. I’ve got to be the one to do it, or no one is going to do it as well as me. Or, but they don’t understand, or I could never teach this skillset. It’s just, I can’t believe how many times I’ve heard clients say, no, you don’t understand. This is not something I could teach. I promise you, there is nothing in your head that you couldn’t be teaching those tasks to get off your plate. So I think the biggest thing is just understanding that it is possible, but it takes time. Sometimes we have such unrealistic expectations of how fast it should happen, how smart this person needs to be when they join immediately. Like I just had somebody ask me last week, this person had been with them for a few days and they already were like, this is a red flag. We have to let them go. I’m like, whoa, wait a minute. You haven’t even given them the training and the support they need and you are judging them. I really want people to see there’s so much that we need to do and we need to get ready to properly train before we delegate. A lot of times they go straight to delegating assuming this person knows how to do it or can handle it. For instance, let’s say you hire a social media manager. So you’re like, perfect, I get to get social media off my plate and they just pass it to them. They check their Facebook or their Instagram a week later and they’re thinking, oh, I’m not happy with this. This person doesn’t know what they’re doing. Or, I can’t believe that this is so off brand. I can’t believe they posted this or any of that. But the problem is that when you’re hiring somebody, a lot of times, especially if it’s an entry level person doing your social media or like you said, virtual assistant, you have to still be there as the trainer, as the expert, as the person who’s there to support them. You just want them to follow your system. If you’re expecting them to come with all this knowledge and to show you how to do your social and how to do your email management or whatever it is, then obviously you need to be paying them at a level that would attract the right person who’s already been doing it for somebody else. But a lot of times we pay low and expect really high expectations, which just doesn’t make sense. Then we get so confused and so frustrated that delegation doesn’t work, but it’s just really the way that we are attracting and delegating. Does that make sense? [JOE] It does, it does. Now when I think about people’s initial hires, I think a lot of times they don’t even know what they want or they’ll say, I just want someone that can do it all. So they want that unicorn which I usually advise against. What would you say are things that people should think through before they ever start hiring people? Like you had said early on you want to get your hands dirty and understand the process. What other sort of things like that would you say are really essential for someone to get to that next level and to be hiring people and to do that well? [STACY] Absolutely. So there are three areas that I want you to look at with your business. There is the marketing piece, there is the client fulfillment piece, the service piece, and then there’s operations. I want you to look at who owns that department or that like category. A lot of times the CEO is saying, I own all three of them, which is why we feel so overwhelmed and so stressed out because these are three full-time positions. We could hire three different people to run this and to really help scale the business. So what happens is, in the beginning, we are all, we all start by ourselves. We are all really owning all three, but the question is, which one are you naturally the best at and which one are you naturally the worst at? Like, what is your weakest link? So what I always recommend to people is, all three of these need to happen. These are all three really important pieces. So which one are you weakest at that maybe you need to hire somebody there? What I always look at is especially marketing and fulfillment, these are massive. Marketing is getting new people in. Fulfillment is keeping current people happy so they keep coming back so that they’re not switching businesses, that they just love you and they’re going to refer people and they’re going to keep coming back to you and all the things. So hiring somebody in marketing or hiring somebody in fulfillment, it’s not how can I afford somebody? It’s look at how much money you’re probably leaving on the table by you sharing that responsibility of all three different departments. Does that make sense? When you — [JOE] Well, even just looking at your website, how clear it is, if you want to work with Stacy, here’s how you do it. Then it’s like you go to your page and I mean, it doesn’t seem like you’re leaving much money on the table because every phase of someone’s development, it seems like there’s a very clear call-to-action. So like to be able to evaluate your counseling site or your coaching site or whatever to say, how easy is it just even to like, work with me, is it buried or is it front and center? So when you think about other aspects of creating a well-oiled practice what would be some other steps or some other things for people to evaluate once they get some traction and they’re doing the things you already said, they’re getting going? What’s that next level stuff? [STACY] Yes, for sure. Really no matter what level you’re at, I always go back to these three phases. It’s the plan, the people and the process. When you’ve mastered those three, you will break something in it to have to redo it again. When I say the plan, I’m talking about what is the strategic plan for this year, for the next three years? Here’s a big one. How often do you stick with that plan? What I see a lot of times is people changing their minds, they’re changing their goals, they’re changing their revenue or their profit margin because all of a sudden last month or this summer wasn’t as great as they thought, or for some reason September just wasn’t what they normally had. So then they change the goal, they change the plan, and the problem is, every time you change the plan, you change all the action items that are associated with that plan. I think a lot of times we forget how much our result goes back to the preparation of what we set out to do. So I want you really looking at what was your goal for this year? Is it exactly what you said it was going to be in the beginning of January or have you changed it and how many times have you changed it or do you even remember it? Did you even write it down? Where is your planning phase right now? Because I think, I mean, when I look at the last 20 years, I am getting better and better and better at planning and the better I get at planning, the more I can see the follow through actually happening. So we’ve really got to dial in that plan. Then not only that, but getting really good at, this is definitely a next level step, but getting really good at sharing the plan with everybody involved. So when you hire a VA or a social media manager, a lot of times we just say post on social once a day, check my email three times a day. Like right, it’s just like the task, but really do they understand the real plan, the goal, what we’re trying to accomplish, and how they play a part in that goal and in that strategy? That will make a big difference on how they start to step up to the plate as well. [JOE] Now I’d love to hear how you think through next steps in your own business. So we all have creative ideas and are inspired by other people and there can be a tendency to try to just copy what other people are doing or maybe comes from imposter syndrome or whatever. How do you either set boundaries around what you’re going to work on? How do you edit out bad ideas? How do you let new and creative ideas in? What’s that process look like for you? [STACY] Such a good question. So in our phase two of that people phase there is, it’s all about boundaries and communication. One of the things is because the people pleaser comes out in us. Maybe we have a client that’s pushing our boundaries or a team member that is texting you all day long or asking you questions and we just, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know and if you’ve never had great boundaries, you don’t know what good boundaries even looks like. You don’t know that a client, we don’t want them calling us on our cell phone or giving, one of your team members giving their cell phone out to a client or just all those things. You make the mistake until you realize, okay, I shouldn’t be doing this or this, there’s a better way to do this. For me it’s a constant evaluation of better boundaries. So what is acceptable in my mind today, it’s not what my calendar looked like two years ago and what I’m doing today is not what my calendar’s going to look like in a couple of years. So you want to make sure that you are refining the activities and just everything that’s going on in your day-to-day. You’ve got to ask yourself what’s the next level? Because if you want to grow your practice, you have to understand that, like the calendar, the activities that got you to where you are today will not be the same activities that will get you where you want to be next year. But the problem is a lot of times we think, well this is how I’ve always done it, or well, this is what’s made me successful, I’m going to keep doing this. But you have to keep letting go of your old identity to step into that new identity and you step into it before you ever get there. That’s what’s hard. You don’t want to let go of something that’s been working, but you have to constantly refine and say, does this make sense? Where should this be on my calendar? Should it even be on my calendar anymore? Should I be delegating this to somebody else on the team? These are all questions I am constantly asking myself. [JOE] Yes, I remember my dad said to me one time, I was doing supervision for newly licensed therapists in Michigan and I had taken on these groups and had all these people that came to this group supervision and it was because they were starting private practices and all these things and doing this four and a half hour supervision once a month was just so draining. I had two little kids at home and I just knew it was time to be done with it. My dad said, “Anytime you’re good at something, you’re going to disappoint people when you leave.” It was so refreshing, just like, yes, I’m going to help different people and the people that I want to also. So just having disappointment be part of that leveling up allowed me to just say, yes, yes, I did good work. I no longer want to do that work and that’s okay and people are going to be disappointed. [STACY] Well, and I love to look at that as well, yes, I agree with you. I’ve, every time I’ve up-leveled somebody has been disappointed, but I also think I’m also showing people an opportunity to have better boundaries as well. So when I say no to something or so, I have to let go of something it, as hard as it is for me or to know that maybe my client won’t love that I’m inviting them to reassess their boundaries and I’m showing them that you don’t have to do something just because you’ve always done it. [JOE] Yes, no, that’s so awesome. So when you think about like specifically how you can step back from a business, I’m thinking about so many businesses, it’s like, well if the business leader or business owner isn’t there, people need to see their face, they need to have some of that face time. How do you think through your involvement and how much you’re going to just be seen just so you’re seen as part of the business, not because you’re doing something but just being seen. [STACY] Yes, absolutely. So in my business specifically, I mean obviously we have a very different business, but there’s very a lot of similarities just in brick and mortar small business type businesses. So yes, I am the person that people wanted to see or they wanted me to be the teacher. They wanted me, they needed me. But at some point, I had to decide, like you said, I’m going to disappoint some people, but I’m also going to show them here’s another opportunity. What I would start to do is I would start to shine a light on somebody else. I would start to say, wait till you see like the rockstar team member we just hired. Wait till you get to experience this teacher. She’s incredible. Here’s her resume. The more I would start to show off and showcase other people, the more people would start to try other people. Then I would start to get a reputation of like, it’s not just Stacy who’s great, she attracts A players. Anybody that works for Stacy, you are going to love. That was where I started to have my reputation be just like associated with me. You were going to be good. People are going to like you. It took time to get people fully on board with that but I just kept backing myself out. Every year I would do less teaching, less teaching, then all of a sudden, I would be not at the desk anymore. People wouldn’t see me in the admin spot. Like I said, now you haven’t seen me in the building in almost 10 years. Nobody would say I need to speak to Stacy, but they might say, I want to speak to the owner, but we have a general manager and she will say, “Listen, I have full authority to do anything you are requesting or needing. This is my job and this is my role here as the general manager. So I will sit down with you and we’ll figure this out.” I haven’t spoken to an angry client concerned customer in probably maybe four years. I want you to see, I just said I haven’t been in the building in 10, but it took me still a few years to not have to step in every once in a while, to put out a fire. I mean, now it’s just not even an option. I will not speak to a client or customer who is saying like, demanding the owner, not because I’m being selfish or I’m not, I’m too good to speak to them, but because I have hired somebody who is a phenomenal general manager and there is nothing I don’t trust her to handle. That is a, so when I say it like that and my customers hear that they have more faith that, okay, she actually, this person can help me. It just sets the tone and the boundary of there’s no reason you need me to step into this because she can do it. I always say too, I don’t want to disrespect my manager by jumping in and making her think I don’t trust her to handle that situation. [JOE] Such great points. Stacy if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [STACY] So many things. I’m hoping that you can look at my story as just one of those examples of what I saw back in the day when I went to that first conference and I just saw what was possible. If there was even just a little piece, a part of my story that you’re like, ugh, I wish that could be me 100%. It can be I am only in my position because of somebody I saw, the possibility and just said, I’m committed to figuring that out. If you’re committed, you can figure any of this out as well. [JOE] So awesome. If people want to connect with you, if they want to get some resources, what are the best resources to grab and how can they connect with you? [STACY] My favorite place to hang out is my podcast. You can search for Foot Traffic. It’ll come up anywhere where you listen to podcasts. My biggest platform that I really participate on is Instagram at Stacy Tuschl. Then, as far as a free resource, I have like an overview of the well-oiled operations training where it really dives into the plan, the people, the process. So if you want to dig into that even more the best place would just be DM me on Instagram. Use the word, you can actually just type in woo like well-oiled operation, type in woo and I can send you that over. It’s just a free training you can watch. There’s no pitch or anything at the end. It’s strictly just showing you our process. [JOE] Oh, that’s so awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast. [STACY] Thanks, Joe. I appreciate the time and just having me on. [JOE] We have been having some amazing guests where I’m running out of paper because I’m just taking notes like crazy. I like to take notes, handwritten and then figure out what I want to do with it. Lots of notes today and we’ve got awesome show notes where our team listens through every single podcast puts it up. It’s a well-oiled machine over here. Really, we couldn’t do this show without our sponsors. Pillarsofpractice.com is the leading e-course for you when you’re starting a practice or when you’re growing a practice. You can get free eight-minute videos, it’s eight-minute experts that will help you level up around a number of different topics. You’ll get free checklists and all sorts of other things that will help you start your practice or grow it totally free over at pillarsofpractice.com. Thank you so much for letting us into your ears and your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.