How I Tested That

David J Bland (0:1.220)
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Michael.

Dr. Michael Neal (0:4.052)
I'm excited to be here, David. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for having me.

David J Bland (0:7.000)
I'm so excited that you're on here. We can talk about all the cool stuff that you've done with hiring and team building over the years, but I would love for you to share some of your background history with our listeners so they can get to know you a bit better.

Dr. Michael Neal (0:21.582)
Well, where would you like me to start? I mean, was born at a very early age, David, so.

David J Bland (0:27.106)
So maybe coming out of school, what you studied for and how that transitioned and maybe even influences what you're working on today.

Dr. Michael Neal (0:34.584)
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm an eye doctor, practicing eye doctor. I still see patients a day a week, a little over that. And I came out of optometry school, went to school in Philly. It was a rather interesting area to go to school in, very difficult in terms of the area and such. But I came out of that school, moved to rural Pennsylvania with my wife, and she started a practice that was...

Dr. Michael Neal (1:4.286)
It grew very rapidly and was the learning experience of all learning experiences when it came to hiring. Um, we, we were hiring the wrong way. We were doing things like, you know, this is a podcast of course about testing and such, but it's also process. would imagine in the systems that you have to test and ours were backwards, upside down and inside out.
So that kind of got me to the point where there had to be a better solution.

David J Bland (1:36.634)
So your optometrist or practicing, our first episode, interesting enough, was topology, which is based out of San Francisco, a case study in the book, where they try to measure your face and then basically make glasses that perfectly fit your face based on remote measuring through iOS that they have patented. And there were so many things that they talked about that they had to test because one, people wouldn't trust it.
And then two is very expensive to do. And then three, were kind of circumventing the whole traditional business model of walking over to a wall of frames and having people try them on and everything. I can imagine there are many stories that you also could share of things with your practice that you thought were obviously going to work and then didn't quite play out that way. But then you learned something that resonated with your customers.

Dr. Michael Neal (2:27.618)
Yeah, oh boy, absolutely. All kinds of stuff along those lines. I think that in terms of from a patient experience.
They often just simply like to, to your example, they like to try glasses on. I mean, it's exciting. It's part of a shopping experience and the successful eye practices have made it an experience that's very enjoyable versus the virtual side. There's a market for the virtual side, but folks definitely like to try stuff on. that is how the industry's kind of built around.

David J Bland (3:0.558)
Yeah, so trying to disrupt that I can imagine would be quite challenging because I think that comes with a trust aspect of, yeah, I can virtually try this on, but it's not the same as me putting it on my face. And I noticed sometimes they'll 3D print glasses or something just to say, hey, try this thing, we're gonna ship to you and we're gonna prove to you that this is gonna fit. So there's so many different behavioral things to test there. But so you're learning from that industry and...

Dr. Michael Neal (3:7.267)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Neal (3:18.764)
Right.

Dr. Michael Neal (3:24.910)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

David J Bland (3:27.010)
You mentioned team building and hiring. so maybe dive in and explain and elaborate a little bit more on that of what was working and wasn't working and sort of your perspective on hiring.

Dr. Michael Neal (3:30.136)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Michael Neal (3:40.867)
Well, I'll back up a little bit. So what the heck's an eye doctor have to say as any type of expert position on hiring? Well, you're right. I mean, that's, that's the question listeners will be asking themselves right now. So where this becomes interesting is I hope interesting is that, um, what we thought like, boy, oh boy, our practice is unique. Our air quotes, our, our business is unique. We only, we do it this way. There was so much, um,
internal focus on, um, on what we were doing. And what we didn't really realize is that all kinds of businesses are in the exact same boat. came out of optometry school, um, my wife and I with exactly one class each in, business management, practice management. That's it. So you think that you're going to see a doctor who has all this, this training in how to run a business and the, it's actually worse now. Um, the exact opposite is true.

David J Bland (4:31.306)
Wow.

Dr. Michael Neal (4:40.864)
So boy, you want to talk about testing. That's the, the epitome of trial and error versus on the education side. And so, you know, the, every single thing in healthcare hiring is ideally centered around patient service and trying to bring, get the right people for, for patient service and how to, um, how to help patients and all of those types of things. Um, the problem was out of school, we didn't have a single system.
We didn't have a single anything. was basically put an ad out, hope people apply. The ad, mean, you look back on some of these job ads we did, oh, good Lord, were absolutely, it's amazing anybody applied. And then get people in for an interview, sit down as a doctor and interview them and realize in a real big hurry, you're getting manipulated by the person across the desk. Every single question is yes, yes, yes. And they tell you exactly what you want to hear.
could go on and on. And so ended up making decisions as best as we could that were, I would say arguably slightly above 50-50.
Maybe less actually come to think about it. But random chance. That's about as good as we were with the hiring.

David J Bland (5:59.788)
Wow. You know, I didn't know that about the lack of business education. I mean, I know I'm not asking you to recite what the curriculum was, but I imagine even what you were exposed to was probably pretty traditional high level stuff like business plans and such. that that am I on the right track there?

Dr. Michael Neal (6:22.540)
No, not even that detailed. No, it was, less than that. Um, and that's one of the reasons why most docs coming out of school now don't go into private practice. You have a colossal amount of student loan debt and it can be some, some medical professions, three, $400,000. You're just not going to take a risk where you open up a place and your own, and you're without any type of a revenue slash income for a, be a long period of time, if ever.

David J Bland (6:24.559)
Okay.

Dr. Michael Neal (6:51.084)
So folks just don't generally take that type of risk nowadays.

David J Bland (6:55.352)
Wow, I wasn't aware that either. really not even a business modeling or business plan type education, just a really, really high level of here's what a business is and kind of good luck, it sounds like.

Dr. Michael Neal (7:8.740)
Yeah. And I think, uh, nowadays it's even less training because more of it is put onto the, um, the clinical side than it used to be. Yeah. So it's pretty dismal from a healthcare profession standpoint of getting into private practice, figuring this out on your own. Now, if you came from some type of business background and then went to doctor school, uh, you know, healthcare, doctor school of whatever type it is, that's another story, but it.
You know, talking about testing, everything has to be tested because you have no idea. You're just throwing spaghetti at a wall.

David J Bland (7:42.550)
Okay, so good to get to know that I'm being educated here already on this interview. So you're trying to hire people, you're realizing, look, it's almost just a random chance if we get somebody that's a good fit or not. And so at what point did you start to take a step back and say there has to be a better way to this? Can we try something else?

Dr. Michael Neal (7:47.459)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Neal (8:1.474)
Well, too bad we're not on video because you'd see, I pulled all my hair out. That was basically the period of time where, I mean, it was bad. All joking aside, it was awful, horrendous, catastrophic. We were churning through people like we were trying to make butter. And it was because we were hiring using resumes, we put the most empathetic person in front of the candidates, my wife, and we were
trying to unintentionally help people. So be doctors. We're trying to be doctors. Help people up. Oh, they need a chance. need, oh, you know, they all they need is one break and
Very rarely that was true and that happened, but the vast majority of the time, the people that needed the break didn't have their act together. And we were never going to be people that were going to get their act together. hiring, using the approach of trying to help people, it's a noble cause that just does not bode well for a business. You do not get performers that way. High performers, not at all.

David J Bland (9:8.290)
Interesting.

Dr. Michael Neal (9:8.526)
So yeah, back to your question, when did we flip over? I was in executive coaching at the time, back in 2016, and saw these teams that were extremely high functioning and very similar to a healthcare team in terms of helping people, being there to serve the, in their particular case, customers versus patients, and did a pretty deep dive with that organization to figure out how they were hiring, what their processes were.
And I thought, well, we can just bring those right back to the practice and start doing that type of thing.

David J Bland (9:42.754)
Okay, so it seems like through executive coaching, you're able to see how things are modeled. And I think the challenge I see with some of the companies I coach is that we'll see something like this maybe from another company, and we'll think, oh, we can do that here. And the mistake I see sometimes is, well, we just copy the practices of the little tactics that they're doing. And we often don't take time to understand the why of what they're doing.

Dr. Michael Neal (9:48.696)
Yes.

David J Bland (10:10.842)
and the principles behind it and the culture they have. And then when we bring all these practices over, it fails because shockingly enough, we didn't understand the why and we didn't understand how would it apply to us. So I'm not saying that you fell into that trap, but explain your thought process of doing that because that is a real trap I see that a lot of the companies like Coach fall into.

Dr. Michael Neal (10:33.240)
Well, um, again, because we don't have video, can't see the David as a crystal ball in front of them right here. Uh, that's exactly what happened in the practice. The, mean, what we were trying to do essentially is create the beautiful music that an orchestra plays by pulling over five, six, seven different, um, instruments that were played by somebody and thought we'd make music like beautiful music. Well, boy, that was, uh, that didn't work.
So the good news is that what we're able to do very, very rapidly is iterate. So I knew that we had something. We were missing the why, we were missing the proper instruments, if you were. what we looked at this problem from a 50,000 foot view and myself and a couple of people I was working on with it at the time, the assessment approach, that's what we're doing.
We use psychometric assessments to figure out what a person's naturally good at. We were using the wrong ones. We were using ones that were advertised to make the entire decision essentially for you. Um, that's too good to be true. It simply doesn't, in my experience, it doesn't work. Um, there are a couple that come close, but for very specific use cases, it wasn't enough. And so we had to create some and that led to
creating more and then getting our entire process set up where it was very, very specific to hiring administrative team members, clerical team members, up to basically middle management for healthcare practices. That's how we started. And the whole thing, you know, want to talk about testing. We didn't stop. That's all we did.
over and over and over again until we got something that started to produce results that were better than the 50-50.

David J Bland (12:28.558)
Yeah, I mentioned that that copying practices, it just seems like human nature. It's something we do. you're not necessarily unique in that sense of of seeing that play out that way. With psychometrics, can maybe you expand on what that means to our listeners? Because I don't think they're all familiar with psychometrics at all.

Dr. Michael Neal (12:33.550)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Michael Neal (12:48.812)
I don't, I came into this hiring business, if you will, not looking to start a company, but being completely categorically ignorant of the right way or the wrong ways to do it. So I had to learn very quickly. And one of the, the general concepts that was thrown out by kind of the HR industry and, ways to figure out who the right person is, is a
a field of psychology called psychometrics. I don't know what the official definition is. What it is to me is you can ask people to take an assessment and out pops this report about what they're naturally good at their strengths and their talents. Now, whether or not you believe in this is, is immaterial for the purpose of the conversation. We, when we started it, it,
worked a little better than what we thought. We had to iterate, go through versions of this, um, rearrange the, mean, this again, back to the symphony, everything had to be rearranged. had to practice. We had to do, um, bring different people in different, uh, psychometric tests. Um, what we wanted to do was buy one and it just would magically work because we would have a magic wand and it would just like, Hey, if you pay X outcomes, this fantastic employee. Um,
As it turns out, we built that system, incredibly reliable and predictable, but it didn't exist for our use model. building it took a while. One of the things we found out the hard way, the very, very hard way was that we had built a system based on using email to reach out to these candidates. And it was a disaster.

David J Bland (14:45.338)
So explain why didn't email work, you know, as I have some hunches, but maybe, you know, what specifically didn't work for the hiring?

Dr. Michael Neal (14:51.372)
Yeah. So I would imagine a lot of folks listening to this are in front of a computer most of the day in professional type roles, things like that, where you essentially live on email. You might like it. It might be the bane of your existence, but it's inescapable. What we found out, well, the story simply is I walked into my office in the morning, my assistant, we shared the same office at the time and she spent six hours.
talking to candidates, trying to explain to them what spam was and what their junk mail was. I said, how's this even possible? Who doesn't know what spam or junk mail is? I'm not joking. This was six hours. She came in at something like nine. She blew through till about a little after three. I didn't eat lunch. And I was sitting there the whole time watching my blood pressure raise to the point of like the Wiley Coyote cartoons.
And I realized we were DOA. We were absolutely dead on arrival as a company because what we were told as part of our initial research is that, oh yeah, I checked my email. Check it all the time. Okay. Well, it was an assumption that they were correct. We didn't verify that. An average candidate applying at the, like the entry level positions. Yeah, they checked their email. They're going to do it once a week if you're lucky. They say they'll do it every day, but it's almost never. And the problem became
When they were applying for jobs, they'd forgotten what they applied for by the time our email to them got to them and asked them to complete an assessment. We were completely upside down and backwards in that process. It was fatally flawed.

David J Bland (16:32.602)
Yeah, we call it the say-do gap sometimes where people say how they'll behave or what they do and then there's a gap between, you can think of a spousal theory, a theory in action or theory in use of what they actually do. And we have this perception of ourselves. It's very interesting scientific stuff there.

Dr. Michael Neal (16:49.378)
Yeah, exactly. And so what we ended up having to do was pivot to the other extreme, which is texting. Texting doesn't require an app. It's baked into every single phone. Good luck finding a person who isn't a texting expert nowadays, especially at the entry level position side of things. when I say it doesn't require an app, there's no gatekeepers at all. Like you don't have to pay the Apple tax or the, or anything like.
you have to get them to download an app. doesn't work that way. It just works. up and works. It's expensive relative to email, but we took several months pause to build that entire system and test the heck out of it so that it was scalable and pretty much bulletproof. But that was one of the key learnings that we faced as part of our testing process is it just email just doesn't work for entry level position.

David J Bland (17:43.704)
Yeah, I find sometimes when I'm giving advice to people or they've gotten conflicting advice, it's been things like I work with an insurance company and they're trying to target farmers. And the advice was, let's just run Google ads. your farmers are not, they're on the farm. They're not online all day on Google. You know, this is not going to work. Or we were trying to do something for Lyft and Uber drivers at my last agency.

Dr. Michael Neal (18:0.046)
than on Google.

David J Bland (18:10.302)
And we thought email would work or an app and they just wanted text. know, they didn't want they wanted their onboarding to be just texting and that was completely new. We thought well no way that that could be true and that's.
was overwhelmingly what they needed. And so I do think we have to be careful at times where obviously you get a lot of conflicting advice too. I mean, you're very successful, but over the years you sort of have to sort through that conflicting advice and say, okay, how do I internalize this? And what do I put into action for me? And that's not always clear. I mean, you kind of have to test your way through it, but I think these tried and true, oh, just run Google ads or oh, just email. It varies so much depending on where your customers are online and offline and how they behave, not just how they say they behave.

Dr. Michael Neal (18:53.858)
Yeah, I mean, we had to meet our, our candidates where they're at, which is on their cell phone, sometimes two or three in the morning. I mean, the responses would come in 24 hours a day, of course, busier during the day, but they would still come in in the middle of the night. Um, and that was a really kind of an eye opening experience. Um, if, if, well, initially with email, we didn't meet them where they're at. We didn't know that they weren't there. We had to find that out the hard way.
And as soon as we figured it out, boy, texting works like a champ. And so with the way that our process is set up now with these assessments and such is for our clients, we write the job description for them. We publish it out to 22 different job boards. Why 22? Well, as part of our testing, one isn't enough. There are some 800 pound gorillas in the hiring industry as far as those job boards. They're not enough. You need to blanket it.
your job ad all over the place. And so we, we do that for our clients. And then the whole concept is we need as many people to be poured into the top of this funnel, this hiring funnel as possible, because we asked them to, um, to go through our assessments and they're quick. They're 10, 15 minutes, depending on the person. David, what do you think the percentages of people that apply for a job we send this text to?
What's the percentage of people that click on it?

David J Bland (20:26.031)
I'm trying to think of your funnel here. So just to click.

Dr. Michael Neal (20:28.586)
Keep in mind, by the way, one of the testing learnings that we did was we sent them this text about a minute later. Didn't work. Our system is set up so that when you click the button on the job board, your cell phone buzzes within five seconds. That is fast enough. 10 was not. So what percentage do you think apply? Or click the button. Click the link, I should say.

David J Bland (20:51.962)
So that with that quick turnaround, I'm still thinking there's a huge drop off. I'm thinking like maybe 30 percent click. All right, it's a little better than I thought.

Dr. Michael Neal (21:1.912)
half. About half. Yeah, yeah. And now they click on it. They start the process and we lose about a quarter of those after the first the first bit. So initially our clients were saying, well, you lose half of them. That's bad, right? I said, no, no. These are people who I mean, they're sitting on the couch.
They don't want to put down their Xbox controller and interrupt the video game to do something that you're asking them to do. How the heck do you think that works out in a business environment? mean, are these the people you want to bring to the table and say, hey, you know, I'm going to invest in you when you won't even lift a finger to, um, to do anything in this job that I, that you just applied for, by the way, right? It's really, um, when, when they exit our process, um,
you know as passionate as I am about it, extremely polite, very nice, etc. But that's the reality, is that we lose that many just by asking them to take an action of any type.

David J Bland (22:11.586)
I can relate to that. think in the past, I have a lot of startup founders come to me for one-on-one advice. And I normally don't do a lot of one-on-one startup advising unless it's a really good fit. It's usually in batches at VCs or accelerators or at universities. And I would ask them, was like, okay, can you fill out this assessment before we meet because I need to know a little bit about your business, what you think your assumptions are. And then that'll make a much more effective advising session when I can respond to something.

Dr. Michael Neal (22:17.528)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bland (22:40.868)
versus we spend the whole first advising session me, know, trying to up to speed on what you're doing. And I was in awe about how many people did not want to fill that out. And it wasn't a huge, long, arduous thing, much like yours is. And I think it was kind of a shock to me because I was trying to figure out, look, these people have my Calendly, they're booking and they're not even showing up, but they reached out to me for help and they don't show up. it was just, there's something about the behavior of that. I don't know if it's...
about asking for help or what it is or just following things through. But I have to say, I've always been a bit shocked that the people who wanted my help and reach out to me wouldn't either fill out an assessment or even show up for the session. I was always amazed by that.

Dr. Michael Neal (23:27.586)
Yeah, there's an example I can think of a fellow named Dan Kennedy. He's a big deal in direct response marketing. Um, he helped us, uh, working on our pricing model because he's very used to working with doctors and such. And I remember, um, very expensive consultant, but he scheduled his time with, uh, I think it was about 40 minutes. and you talk about whatever you want for 40 minutes.
But the only way he would schedule the call, or his assistant would schedule the call, is if you sent him all of the information, and I mean all, beforehand. So he could review it, think it through, and then come to you with actual conclusions and well-placed thought. And even he was griping about how so many folks wouldn't even do that. You're paying through the nose, and you're not going to get off your butt. So back to our process with that.
That was one of our testing learnings up front. And then this gets better. So the people that do apply and who do start our process, we retain about 90, little over 90%, I believe, through the assessment process. So once they start it, they tend to finish it at a quite high rate. And we determined later on that those are the folks who are very interested in themselves. They want to know what
because we tell them upfront they're gonna get a copy of this information. So we provide a bit of a carrot, there's no stick in this. So just a carrot to get them through this process and they get a copy of it. And then the people that our software is automated and the people that can do the job based upon their natural strengths and talents are matched of course, the way we know they can do the job, they're matched to what we're looking for. So job.
A requires you to be an exact round peg in a round hole. Well, we figured that out. We know that their strengths and talents are an extremely high match for what the job requires them to be good at. And our software will literally give a thumbs up. That's after all this years of testing, that's what it ended up getting to the point was the software gives a thumbs up. And then we also found out that wasn't enough. Because of course we're dealing with people.

Dr. Michael Neal (25:52.463)
So what we added past that was a video interview. It's a one-way video interview. And they're sent this video interview. The 10 questions are the same for everybody. We get these responses back, and only our team reviews these video interviews. So there's a reason why. I'll tell you about in a sec. But we're not looking for necessarily what their answers are.
That's the 20%, if you will. The 80 % is how they answer the question. We're looking for intangibles at that point. when you look at these, like we have folks who look at these all day long. When you look at these day after day after day, it's very, very easy to pick the people that will work out well for our clients. It doesn't matter what they look like. Keep in mind through the automation process, we don't even know if they're male or female. We don't know if they're green, pink, purple, doesn't matter. If they have horns on their head, none of that matters.
When you do this enough, all you're looking for are performers, high performing people, and they stand out like Vegas neon. It's that easy.

David J Bland (27:1.924)
That's very, very interesting. through testing, you're able to find this really great fit and this great match through the process. And what I like about this is this was a real need that you experienced personally. This wasn't born out of reading a market research report or going to a focus group or something. This is something that you personally struggled with. And you thought, well, there have to be other people also struggling with this if we are.

Dr. Michael Neal (27:9.294)
That's the whole point. Mm-hmm, yeah.

David J Bland (27:30.936)
You tried your own solutions and you iterated through that, you know, and it made some missteps along the way, which we all do. But you got to finally, you iterate it and test it as something that works. And I'm sure there's more iteration to be done even, you know, even after our episode today. But we kind of use this model we talk about where it's like, do you have the problem? Are you aware of it? Are you actively seeking a solution? And then even beyond that, have you built your own solution? And I don't know if you've ever calculated in the back of your head how much money and time you spent building that.
But I imagine it's a significant amount because the problem was that urgent and pressing for you.

Dr. Michael Neal (28:3.330)
Yes.
Yes. Now the good news is that we put the problem to bed. If we never make a change in our software system, it's still solving the problem for our clients at about a 97 % certainty level. So when you find these people, not only are they a great fit, but they tend to stay at a much, much higher level. It's easy. They're showing up for work each day, being asked to be themselves, not somebody else, not pretending, none of those things.
and they get to make a contribution, they get to help people. And this isn't just for healthcare, but these are folks who generally roll into work. They don't realize why what they're doing is special. The boss and the team love them because they're performing at an extremely high level and they go home. It's not a dramatic type approach to hiring.

David J Bland (28:57.806)
Yeah, I'm always thinking back to Dan Pink's autonomy and mastery and purpose almost, you you need some combination thereof, you know, to really find joy and reward in your work and be your authentic self. That's amazing. you've kind of like shared this journey up until now. What's next? What are some big assumptions you're looking at, you know, through the rest of the year? You know, what do you, even if not, if it's this product or something else around it, you know, what are some things that you could share with us?

Dr. Michael Neal (29:3.352)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Michael Neal (29:28.034)
Well, what we started out as was a service for our practice, which expanded to friends practices. Of course, this was never designed to be a business. It was never out of the box. Like, like you said, we go to a, do some market research and boom, pops a business. Um, it became a business because the product works like the service we offer works so well. And the next step after I care was expanding into other, um, health professions.
What we realize is this works really, really well for any private practice. It works just as well in dentistry as it does in eye care, in chiropractic, et cetera. So I think we're in somewhere around 12 different healthcare professions at this point, which just demonstrates that a private practice in North America is the same across the board with a couple percent exception to that. Past this,
We've, we've hired, I think our strangest job role we ever hired for was a locksmith. To give you an example, like that's where who saw that one coming, but it just, it really illustrates the point that when you are hiring people for these natural strengths and talents, that's where the, the magic is made. It's a, it's an approach that just makes magic. You, don't believe the results you can get with a business until you have people.
You know, the old adage, the right people on the bus, but they have to be in the right seats on the bus and they got to have the right seat mate. And then they got to have the right person who's driving the bus. then, you know, instead on the owner's side, instead of focusing on all that all day long for the rest of your life, what you get to focus on is, uh, writing out the map, telling the bus driver, where do you drive the bus? And then team just goes. And of course you put guard rails on so they don't go flying off the road.

David J Bland (31:22.682)
Yeah, that's important.

Dr. Michael Neal (31:23.074)
But yeah, it's a complete mindset change as to how you can accomplish solving problems. Because it's not you solving the problems anymore, it's the team.

David J Bland (31:35.434)
The book I wrote, Testing Business Ideas, is part of the Strategize series. So there's five books in the series. The last one is High Impact Tools for Teams, which Stefano wrote. And I was in one of his workshops once and I was like, wow, so much of this is communication. And then in the back of my head, I thought, I wonder, and maybe you have some insight into this because I do not. I wonder how many, what's the percentage of people out there in the workforce now who have never experienced working on a high performing team? Or have never experienced sort of the magic that you're describing where
you have team members that fit and excel in their roles and they can be their authentic self and really just master their craft and really contribute value. I think that percentage has to be low because because just the work workplace satisfaction surveys we see and the results. It's really sort of a tragedy that people don't get to experience what you're what you're communicating about.

Dr. Michael Neal (32:27.990)
It wouldn't surprise me. And of course this def this depends on your definition, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was high single digits. I would not be shocked in any way if somebody said like an actual A plus. Um, like I talk about A players, B players, C players, D players. Um, it's not the person per se. Uh, it's their fit to the role. So like being part of a team,
where it's chock full of A players and you know the lowest performing person would be like B plus. How many folks have been on a team like that?
I don't know. I don't think it's very high at all. And here's the thing from my experience. Uh, I had this, this happened yesterday. So I was seeing patients yesterday and one of the patients asked me about scheduling an appointment directly. And I just stopped right there. I said, you know, with my hands, I did the timeout signal. I'm not allowed to schedule appointments. I just mess it up. You've got an expert sitting in front of you. Shana will help you. Yeah. And the patient just laughed like I was, uh,
They expect me to know how to schedule an appointment. Are you kidding me? You want to see the whole gears grind to a stop? Let the doc schedule an appointment. No. Yeah, that happened yesterday. That's how recent that was. So when you get these really high performing teams, you got to let them do their job, right? Like I have a friend who, I can't describe him too closely here.
but he is a capital B billionaire, extraordinarily successful in a very narrow field in the world. And he describes his job as a CEO doing very little. He gets on the phone each day. He talks to the key team members. He asks them what they need and he gets it for them.

Dr. Michael Neal (34:32.910)
I was like, what else do you do? He's like, not much else. That's the job. I was like, what do you mean? He has a team that is, they're such high performers, he doesn't have to deal with much of anything else.

David J Bland (34:49.272)
Yeah, I was just thinking back in my career and there may be one or two instances where I could say, oh, I had this pretty magical experience with a team. And what's interesting to me is that that was over 10 years ago. 15 probably at this point, maybe going to 20. I don't know. It's all blur in my career. But when I talk to people who were a part of that team later, you know, I still reconnect with them. It's amazing to hear them talk about that experience and how they've not been able to find it again. And they're almost seeking that

Dr. Michael Neal (35:12.622)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bland (35:19.220)
experience again and again and just failing to find it in other endeavors.

Dr. Michael Neal (35:23.978)
Um, I watched a podcast with, uh, Jocko Willnick, Will Link and Simon Sinek, I believe it was, and they, had a very interesting discussion from, um, Jocko, and I'm probably, uh, mispronouncing some names here, but he talked about his time in the Navy SEALs and yeah, and, uh, it just revolved, not, not what they

David J Bland (35:44.506)
Oh yeah, Jock is excelling, I've seen some of his stuff.

Dr. Michael Neal (35:51.321)
did for a living, not the outcomes. Cause of course he can't talk about that, but he just had no interest in it was all teams, the team. And what I've heard from these folks over and over again, they would give anything to be back on the team. Like when they have to leave the team, it's almost like they're excommunicated, not necessarily, well, sometimes intentionally, but not necessarily. It's just, they miss it so much. It's their entire, um, get some, get some up in the morning before they're supposed to get up. They go to bed after they're supposed to go to bed.
They, uh, they just, their entire life revolves around this. It's so well, it's completely cohesive at that level. How many folks have experienced something like that? And maybe we're not, we don't have to compare teams to Navy SEAL teams or other, you know what I mean? Okay. A little bit of a, maybe that, that ceiling's a wee bit too high. Um, but you bring it back down to regular business reality.

David J Bland (36:29.710)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Michael Neal (36:46.904)
how many folks go home and say, I can't wait to help my team out tomorrow. Or the A players will be like, they're not even gonna say that because they're constantly helping their team.

David J Bland (36:54.732)
Yeah, it's cool.

David J Bland (37:0.856)
Yeah, it's just it's just fascinating and your world of just unpacking You know the psychometrics and building something over time to help solve for this very specific issue It's really impressive. So we can talk about this all day, but I know there's people listening and they're struggling with hiring and they're struggling with finding a process for them So if they've loved what they've heard today and they want to reach out to you What's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Dr. Michael Neal (37:28.546)
Yeah, by all means. Thank you. Um, it's simply, simply to go to build my team.com www.buildmyteam.com. Um, you schedule a consultation with one of our team members and to start spilling the beans, you know, talk about, I mean, honestly, there's, there's no, there's no reason to, to, um, hold back on that conversation. Um, we've heard it all and our job is to help.
I mean, our team exists to serve others and to the way that we serve others is to help them find amazing team members for their own team. And that's what our reward is. You know, we pay it forward in life by getting these teams, uh, the amazing team members they need to be come even higher functioning or sometimes it's higher functioning at all. And that's what really motivates us. It's really, really cool. In fact, quick story, everybody uses Slack nowadays.
We have a Slack channel called Bang the Gong. Whenever we find a team member for one of our clients, we post it in the Bang the Gong Slack channel because it's something we celebrate.

David J Bland (38:39.066)
That's amazing. I love that. if so, if you're listening and you need help or you want to reach out, we will also include this on the detail page as a link as well. I want to thank you so much for hanging out with me and being just really open and transparent about how you've your way through this and where you are today and what you're excited about. Just thanks so much for joining us today,

Dr. Michael Neal (39:0.055)
Thank you so much, David.