What Would Walt Disney Do?

You're listening to Podiatry Marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald. Welcome back to Podiatry Marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDannald. Joined as always, my trusty co host, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

Oh, I'm fantastic today, big Jim. How are you doing?

Good. Good. All is good here in Montreal. It's summertime. Loving life.

Enjoying the sunshine and warm weather. No complaints.

Does it ever get to 30 degrees Celsius where you are?

Yeah. It's supposed to be like 29 later this week. So, yeah, it definitely gets into the low thirties. Nothing in the high thirties, but, you know, when you're in winter, I'm in summer and I'm actually a little warmer than you sometimes.

Yeah. We were having dinner the other night and I said to somebody that for my sixtieth birthday, I wanna go on Alaskan cruise. So it'll be during July, which they said is the best time to go there. But they said I'm pretty sure they said in July in Alaska, the sun doesn't go down for like the month or something. It's it's sunlight twenty pretty much twenty four hours a day.

And then in January, the sun never comes up for like thirty days.

Yep. Yeah. I went to Alaska during July and actually in the Yukon territory in Canada, and it was you definitely need blackout shades to make sure you can fall asleep at night. If you like it to be dark when you fall asleep, you definitely need those blackout shades.

That's amazing. And then it led on to I said, oh, did you ever see that movie thirty days of night, which was all the vampires turn up in Alaska in January because it's it's dark for thirty days, so they could just, yeah, party on and create carnage. And they said, no. I must have missed that one.

Yeah. I haven't seen that movie, but maybe we should jump in. Instead of talking about vampires, we should jump into a little bit of podiatry marketing today.

Okay. So the topic for today is WWWDD, which is what would Walt Disney do?

Alright. I'm I'm excited to hear what you think Walt Disney would do in the world of podiatry.

In the world of podiatry. Wonder what wonder what he would do with the world of podiatry. Imagine if he looked at podiatry and Walt Disney is still loving it. If I had a podiatry clinic, this is how I would run it. How awesome would that clinic be?

Be pretty instinct for sure.

So what I wanna talk about is more about the organizational chart or how how you set up your business, and and then sort of put on the thinking cap of what Walt Disney would do at certain stages. When anyone's setting up a podiatrically, normally, they're a solo practitioner right from the start, and they'll be doing everything themselves. They might have a virtual assistant or a virtual receptionist in the beginning to answer the phone calls or to sort of help out and do certain things, and then they eventually will employ a receptionist. Once they employ the receptionist, the next step is that as the business grows, they will start to employ maybe a podiatrist, maybe two podiatrists, maybe three. As the business grows, it just keeps getting bigger.

The problem sometimes with some of the business owners, instead of moving up and putting on their entrepreneurial hat, what they do is they move up and they put on a manager's hat and never really take the manager's hat off. And at certain times, how a manager thinks and how an entrepreneur thinks or a business owner is different. And this got me thinking about what would Walt Disney do. So that's sort of what the the topic is actually all about.

Yeah. It's a good overview. I and I think everyone that starts in private practice goes through a similar thing, right? It's like like you said, you're a receptionist, you know, other podiatrists, know, medical assistants, you know, how do you decide about, you know, when you start delegating and giving other people responsibility and letting other people manage situations. So, yeah, I'm excited to have you kinda run this back.

Well, the example that I heard someone mention that if you've got your own business and you continue to wear a manager's hat, it's almost like owning a Porsche or a Ferrari and never taking it out of first gear. If you've got the thing there, potentially, it could do so much more by taking it through those gears. It could go so much faster. But by you keeping that manager's head on and trying to work as a podiatrist and also manage your team and look at all the other aspects of your business, then it just it stunts the growth of the business. So the first thing I think everybody should do so you gotta you gotta work out what your organizational chart is and and draw it all out.

Look at all the different tasks and try and delegate these tasks to different people. And some people may, yeah, do more than more than one task. Even you as the business owner, you might be doing certain tasks that are still a managerial until somebody else can can take them over. So the first thing I reckon everyone should do is get a sheet of paper, start it from whether it's 07:30 in the morning till 07:30 at night, and every hour write in what did you do during that hour, and don't lie. Because you're only lying to yourself.

Yeah. No. It's important to really kind of audit your time and your schedule. Right? Because time is the most valuable resource that we have.

And you may be thinking that you're getting certain things done, but until you actually log it and have a document in front of you of what you actually did during that hour, you can tell yourself stories by by not kinda keeping that log.

Yeah. So if if in the morning you read for an hour, then just write read a, you know, read a book. If you're on Facebook for an hour and you're just buggerizing around and next thing you're watching a cat play the piano or just some funny videos, then write it in there. Wasted an hour on Facebook. You might be with patients for four the next four hours and then put there with patients, with patients, with patients, with patients, stock ordering, cleaning up the sterilization room.

Just whatever you were doing in those in that hour is just keep writing those things and do it day after day after day. Do it for a couple of weeks. Just every day, start recording what you're doing. And you'll probably find there's a pattern that you're doing similar tasks around the same time each each day or each week or each month. Then when you look at all those tasks, then write one huge task list of all the different things that you actually do.

Then go through that list and ask yourself the question, what would Walt Disney do? Every task, look at the task. Would Walt Disney do that, Or would Walt Disney have somebody else do it? And and and keep running through that list, and just keep asking yourself that question. And you'll sometimes realize some of the things that you're doing, how silly, and why am I doing these things when you know you shouldn't be.

Yeah. You know, when everything kinda falls on you, it's easy to kind of, like you said, just not delegate. Just take it on yourself. But when you have that log and that laid out list of tasks and list of to dos, you know, you can really help kind of optimize your time and delegate that out to someone else on your team to kinda get that that off your plate.

Yeah. And it doesn't mean that you get to a point where you go, okay. I'm never gonna see patients because I'm doing all this other stuff. You get to choose what you wanna do. So Walt Disney, I was telling before we press record that I'd heard stories where Walt Disney, every now and then, would just turn up at a hot dog stand and would start selling hot dogs because he wanted to.

He just wanted to see have that interaction with the with the guests in the park. I'd heard that every now and then he put on the Mickey Mouse or the Goofy costume and actually ran around the park just interacting with the guests that were actually there. What Walt didn't do was have, yeah, John from recruitment ring him up and go, hey, Walt. Bob hasn't turned up at the hotdog stand. You're on today.

And and Walt while he's in the middle of drawing a new character or coming up with a new story or just coming up with some something magical, he's just dropped all that so he can go and serve hotdogs all day. That's what he didn't do. Now if Walt could eventually set up a structure to get around this, I think everybody can do the same thing. But I think it all starts first working at how you're spending your time, then working at a big list. Each of those tasks that are on there ask, what would Walt do?

Some of the things he he might do. And then go to your organizational chart, who you've got working with you, and find out who can I delegate these tasks to in the most logical sort of format or the most logical way?

Yeah. You could free up some time. Like you said, there's things that he just kinda wanted to do on a whim. And since he had the freedom of time and ownership and he had his other these other tasks that were, you know, mission critical to the park or his, know, job in animation all kind of dialed in, that level of freedom could allow him to go do those things. Right?

If you're try if you have to if you're kind of the the hub of every single activity that goes on in your clinic, if you're not doing those things, then the wheels fall off. Right? So you have to delegate those things out and what that does that it gives you the freedom and allows you to do more of the things you wanna do in your practice. Not necessarily more things, but just you know, the things that you can focus more on what you like to do in your in your clinic.

Well, it's definitely it's one of the things too that when you've got your business owner's head on your entrepreneurial head, that's where marketing is involved. That's where building and improving the brand of your business. And that's what that's what lead that's what drives your business long term is by having that head on. If you're doing low paid tasks or basic problems are coming straight to you instead of going to somebody else first to see can they deal with it? Does it really need to fall on your desk or on your lap?

And because every time you're thinking about or doing something else that some that your thinking gets interrupted, it's totally it it just destroys the momentum of whatever you're doing. So you and I could be doing this podcast now. We're chatting away. Everything's going great. And if all of a sudden there was a knock at my door, my wife said, oh, can I ask you a question for a sec?

I know you can edit this out. I go, oh, yeah. Okay. Let's just do that. Now I can say, excuse me, Jim.

Just need to talk to my wife about what we're having for dinner tonight. I do that. I guarantee if I came back in here, even if it was only for twenty seconds, we wouldn't remember where we were at. We go, hang on. I was talking about this, you go, oh, yeah, then that.

It would take us five minutes to get back on track. And then even then, when I'm doing the editing afterwards, I'll be going, oh, did that really match or did it not? This is what happens with business owners in the clinic. Every time, every little task gets thrown at them and it interrupts the thinking on the big picture.

Yeah. The whole task was task switching aspect of things can really know, like like you said, if your wife interrupted, know, just nicely to ask you about dinner and things, know, it it could set us back five or ten minutes and then, you know, could have done with that five or ten minutes that we had, you know, we could have maybe wrapped up the podcast, we could have, you know, gotten on to something else, we could have had more of an in-depth conversation on topics to work kinda, you know, work out doing sometimes a podcast may not feel like work, but we're having a deep conversation about something. And if you if you break that up or if you break other similar types of tasks that are kind of more, you know thought work, it can really really set you back you know minutes or sometimes even hours. So getting you know identifying what your tasks are and kind of like allowing yourself to dive into them in on inconsistent blocks can definitely save you even more time at the end than just, you know, switching back and forth with things.

Yeah. And that's why I often say to my coaching clients, if you want to really do some really deep thinking, yeah, some critical thinking, just block out the time of your diary and get out of the clinic. Don't be there. Because if your team know you're there and you haven't trained them the right way, you don't have an organizational chart set up where when this happens, this is who who who gets delegated to. When this happens, it goes to somebody else.

You might have some people that look after some of the podiatry tasks in your business. You might have other people look after the managerial or reception sort of area. But if you're on-site, you haven't trained people to do that, there will constantly be that knock at the door. And I was gonna do a little knocking sound, but then the dog would start barking.

We don't we don't want the listeners, they don't did hear hear that dog.

No. The dog makes a lot of noise in the background here sometimes, squeaks its toy. I see it's going, my god. But so yeah. So just to review all that again, it's first, work out what you're doing every day on an hourly basis, and do it for a fair period of time so you can see the patterns on what's actually happening.

Then create a really detailed task list, and then ask the question, what would Walt do? And which ones would he do? Which ones wouldn't he do? And like I said, it doesn't mean Walt has a choice. If he wants to go and sell a hot dog, he can, but it's his choice to do it.

It's not forced upon him to do it. Then go to your organizational chart and delegate the task to different people. And and sometimes this is gonna it won't happen overnight. It's gonna take some training. And I know a lot of times when someone people go to make these sort of changes, they try it.

Oh, it gets a little bit hard, bit difficult. Someone makes a mistake. They're, oh, you know what? Stuff it. I may as well just do it myself because it's easier.

And that's the mistake that some people make is if you delegate something to somebody else and they make a mistake, find out why they made the mistake, help them get over that mistake, and let them do it again. Because if you keep jumping in every time they don't do it as well as what you did, then you're gonna end up doing everything.

Yeah. It's really when you have to have, know, kind of your teacher hat on or your kind of mentor hat and kind of, you know, work with them. You don't just need to go in there and put out every fire, but having kind of a, you know, talk with them about, you know, where do things go wrong or why did it not work out that time and letting them kind of figure out, you know, this is maybe a little bit different but, you know, I as a parent, sometimes you have to let your kids make mistakes.

Oh,

yeah. If I if I jump in and try to fix everything in the moment and they don't fail a little bit, You know, when when life gets hard and when there's actual true failure in life, you know, I I want my kids to be resilient and you want your staff to be resilient and feel, you know, helping them build confidence that you have you you put your trust in them and you work with them as they will sometimes have questions, that's fine. But you know, you can kind of ride along with them but not necessarily have to, you know, like I said, put out all the fire for them when things go wrong.

Yeah. It's I think it's understanding those hats that you put on the roles that you're playing and understanding as a business owner, if you really wanna drive your business and you wanna make your business different, you wanna make it unique to to every other podiatrist in your area. There was a a model that I saw, and it said that 80% of what happens in your clinic is expected. The the the mechanics of what makes your business run, how you treat your patients, how you greet them, all that, there's a certain expectation that every patient that walks in your clinic just expects that. The 20% that really makes you different is the magic, And you only will discover or understand the magic of your business if you pull yourself away from all those meaningless tasks that just chew up your mental energy, that make you tired, that you get to the end the day and you go, oh, I couldn't think of the last thing I wanna be doing is thinking about my business because I'm so buggered.

So if you can pull yourself away from those things, allow yourself a bit of mental space, then you'll come up with the magic and that's the 20% that will set you apart from everybody else. Otherwise, you'll just be another podiatrist.

So you have to kind of jump ahead or jump over some of that stuff and like you said, you have to have your vision of what you want to practice would be like and that take that that's work as well to kind of like figure out what the direction you wanna take things. So obviously the small details are important and some of these tasks are important but you have that's why you have a team. You can focus on the big picture items and you can work with other people that are you've hired, you you know they're capable to get things done within the clinic as well. It's not just all on you.

So I think if you ever get a chance to read any books written by Walt Disney or about Disneyland in general, So get hold of them and read them. One of my favorite books is called Be Our Guest. And have you been to Disneyland, Jim?

I've been to Disney World twice. I've not been to Disneyland.

Yeah. I've only been to Disneyland. I had a ball there. It it was so good. And I didn't read Be Our Guest until after I went to Disneyland.

And then when you read the book, you realize nothing at Disneyland happens by accident. Everything is so planned out right through to how do they how they empty the bins. You never see people walking through the park with a big smelly bag of rubbish. You never see bins overflowing. This this is all thought out, this would have been yeah.

Walt Disney and his team would have been spending time, and how could they make this whole experience magical? And he only did that because he wasn't there selling hot dogs when Bob the hot dog man didn't turn up. So I I think we can all learn from Walt in so many different ways, which is why his parks have been so successful.

For sure.

Okay. That just about covers that. I look forward to talking to you next week.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Okay. See

Bye bye. Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim Mcdonald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.