 Yes, you made it! In this month's article in Envision Magazine, we discussed how important it is to set up a foundation for your new hires. The most ideal foundation will get them on track for success and get them selling in your optical as soon as possible. Now there are two points that I wanted to make in this behind the article episode. The first one is that every position in your office is a selling position. And the second is how we kind of get stuck in this sink or swim situation. The first one, the discussion of how every position in the optical sells. Let me get something straight. If you work in an optical, you are in a selling position. And if that freaks you out, get over it. It's part of the job. And every position in your office is a sales position. Let me illustrate for you. You have a patient going on the journey of coming in and going back to the back and seeing the doctor and getting checked out. All of these positions are an opportunity to either make or break a patient's sale. And like we discussed before, your patient's amazing prescription that you found is only as good as getting glasses to wear the prescription with. If the patient never buys glasses from you or anybody else, they're never going to be able to experience that really amazing prescription. So why not have them buy it from you? I don't care if you are hiring a receptionist, a pretester, a tech, a scribe, a billing specialist, a manager, an optician, or a doctor for that matter. They need to know their role in the sales process for the journey of that patient. You need to set each position up with the framework to begin properly addressing recommendations and objections, all things that we hear on a daily basis when selling eyewear. The second thing that I want to dive into is the sink or swim approach that nearly every optical does. And this approach isn't done maliciously by the office. It's done for the sake of survival. Let me illustrate for you. Let's say that you've got five team members that you're supposed to have on staff in your office and you're looking to hire. So you've been without a team member. These guys have been running the office short staffed. So you finally get somebody in there. Yay! You have a new hire. But this new hire can't be out on the sales floor. So what do you need to do? You need to train the new hire. So you're going to take your best person off the sales floor to train the new hire. So now not only are you short staffed, but you're putting all this extra load on these people in the office. Now what ends up happening? Honestly, eventually something's got to give because you're still seeing your full amount of patients and you're still having people come in and out of the office. And these three people are trying to manage things that should be a five-person job. So what ends up happening is usually one of two things. Number one, these people are going to get super stressed out, start freaking out and you're going to start having cracks in your foundation of your team. Or number two, this person, the best team member who's usually training people, is going to get called back to help every single patient that comes in, every question that pops up. So what ends up happening? This guy ends up getting thrown off the boat. And this is where the sink or swim thing comes in because you're already short staffed with these people, let alone this person who are having to figure it out and they're getting thrown off the boat. And that's where the sink or swim comes in. Now I recognize this repeated process that was happening in hundreds of obstacles and I thought there must be a better way. There's got to be a way to be able to get these new hires functioning in their office so that they can be contributing to the day-to-day, yet still be able to be on the training process and not necessarily kicked off the boat right away. So what we did was we created a model that is laid out in the new hire checklist that you have available for download. When following the order of the new hire checklist, it allows for the newbie to be a contributing member to the rest of the team. But in the same token allows for less stress in the office, therefore, you know, them to have kind of more of a supportive training process. We also recognize in this training process that we were setting up that these things that were being taught weren't necessarily unique to each office. They were the exact same across the board for every optical. So what if we created a resource that offices could use to get the newbie the foundational knowledge necessary without having to deal in and use up so much of the already short staff, staff time. So we created this new hire training structure and an online resource so the team could access it whenever they needed it. Now I get there is a lot in our field that has to be learned in hands-on training and it's something that an online course just simply can't replace. But if you have the framework to get this newbie functioning and selling in your office as soon as possible to become a contributing member of your understaff team, it sure can alleviate a lot of the stress in the onboarding process and keep the rest of your team from burning out on you.