Either the business grows or I grow

Author

Kevin Ng
May 30, 2024

Kevin’s Journey Weekly Breakdown

Either the business grows or I grow

Hi friends! Have you ever felt stuck but didn’t know the steps to get yourself out? This was me last year. I knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to get myself out. I even started to feel sad about it.

Last year, after an explosive first three years of growth in my practice, I hit a major growth pain point. The skills that got me here were not going to get me where I wanted to go. My practice’s top-line revenue was growing, but my operational expenses were growing faster, and cracks were starting to show in our patient experience. We were starting to have patient complaints, employee complaints, and all sorts of unhappiness.

I turned to talking to trusted mentors and to reading books. I got so many inspirational ideas on how to overcome the hurdles in my business until I tried implementing them. I got stuck. I couldn’t execute. It turns out that the biggest constraints on my business weren’t my business systems, my (non-existent) HR systems, or any of that. It was me. I did not have the mindset, the tools, or the direction necessary. 

How do I have difficult conversations with staff when I am afraid of even approaching them? How do I operationalize consistent feedback cadences with my team when I keep missing deadlines myself? I did not have the bandwidth or the skills necessary to execute on all the tasks I needed to accomplish.

Without those skills, my office’s performance and reputation would continue to drop until we were cash flow negative, which we got pretty close to several times during the year. I had what’s called a skills gap. 

ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY WITH SYSTEMS

My first task was to implement a system where I could take notes and keep track of every new skill or idea that I’ve learned, because ultimately, if you don’t apply, or even remember, what you’ve learned, then you haven’t really learned at all.

For this, I turned to Tiago Forte’s Second Brain system and his PARA style of folder management. He has plenty of free content on YouTube, and by watching some of his teachings, I was able to improve my note-taking skills, which you can think of as a gift to your future self.

I have developed a constant habit of journaling and writing notes down almost daily, and definitely weekly. Tiago’s work references David Allen’s book Getting Things Done quite often, so that is where I headed next.

At the heart of it, David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) system is a way of capturing and organizing tasks in order of actionability and to help us all push our tasks forward. 

SIDE NOTE

Alex Hormozi describes learning as: If you have a different response when presented with the same feedback, you have learned. An easy example is if you touch a hot stove and it burns your hand. You have learned that the next time a hot stove is presented to you, you don’t choose to touch it. Intelligence is how quickly you can change your responses to repeated feedback. So, a highly intelligent person is one who will change their responses immediately upon receiving negative feedback.

From David Allen’s GTD methodology, I picked up three things: the capture habit, the weekly review, and the 2-minute rule

  • The capture habit is based on the observation that your brain is used for thinking and not for storing information. Consequently, we should be getting important thoughts and ideas out of our heads as efficiently as possible. Setting up a system for capturing notes in any situation is a crucial component of this step.

  • The weekly review is an important complement to the capture system, as you set up a weekly review cadence with yourself to go through all of the different notes you’ve captured in the past week, break down your week, and plan for the week ahead.

  • The 2-minute rule is probably one of the most powerful productivity hacks there is. It states that if a task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, go ahead and complete it right away. The thinking goes that it takes more than 2 minutes to put a task on your to-do list, so you actually save time by completing it right away.

Learning these new systems allowed me to broaden my bandwidth to remember what I’ve learned and also to accomplish more tasks in less time. After all, learning is based on the ability to attain feedback on the new behavior in a quick manner, and the quicker you can iterate on different ideas and the quicker you receive feedback from your attempts, the quicker you will learn.

Let me know if you want me to go more in depth on how I set up my productivity systems in a dental context.

If this resonates with you, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with others who might find it valuable. Additionally, I would love to hear your thoughts and insights on this topic, so please feel free to respond to this email. Your feedback is truly appreciated!

Kevin