The Dental CEO Podcast Episode 47: People Problems, Lawsuits, & Liability

You know what's hard? Getting sued by an employee because they claim we did something we didn't do or, or what's hard is dealing with people, dealing with employees that aren't doing what they're supposed to do. They're not showing up and they're not doing a good thing. They're creating drama. They're spreading a cancer in our practice or culture. I mean, managing people is hard. What happens when, you know, someone I'm about to let go of because of poor performance tells me now they're pregnant, need maternity leave, and how do I even deal with that? How do I deal with people testing the boundaries and pushing and breaking rules or shoot breaking laws? Sometimes. How do I even know I'm not breaking the law? I mean, because I, as a business owner, am responsible for following a long list of laws, federal and local, you know, regulations on how to manage people. And those laws constantly change. This is why I think a lot of us are more gray, more wrinkly and have more weight around our bodies than we're supposed to, because in essence, it's so hard to manage people. We just want good people to do good things and we want to treat them well. And for. Why? Why does that have to be so hard? That's what we're diving into today on the Dental CEO Podcast. I've got Paul Edwards, the founder and CEO of Cedar HR Solutions, probably the most experienced person in dental HR in the country. I don't think there's anyone else I could bring on with more experience and wisdom than Paul. And we're going to talk about a massive pain point and what we need to know, what we need to think about when it comes to managing people. Because you know what? It's not acceptable that managing people is, is the hardest thing. People should be the best thing in our practice. People should be the main reason we want to come to work, because we want to work with great people and do great things. That should be our expectation. And unfortunately, most of us aren't there yet. And that's why today's episode is important on the Dental CEO Podcast. If you like what you're hearing on the Dental CEO Podcast, please take a few moments to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. So, Paul, thank you again for connecting with me for this episode. Man, this is the area of dentistry that causes us to get gray hairs, wrinkles on our face, weighted around the belly. It is managing people. It is the legalities of it and the liabilities of it. And just the day to day. I mean, it is a pain point for sure. Before we dive into that, could you, in your own words, kind of tell listeners, you know who you are and what you do? Scott, first of all, let me recognize. Yeah, managing people's. You don't learn in dental school. You're going to spend more time managing people than you are performing treatment on patients. My name's Paul Edwards. I founded Cedar HR Solutions in 2006. Our role in this world, Scott, is to support medical practice. And specifically we have a ton of dentists that we work with in their efforts to comply with all the state laws and regulations to help them understand what leadership means and day to day management means and to just basically provide them software, provide them support, provide them employee handbooks with really well written policies that are for them, for their location. And so we're really just this HR platform, but we also provide a ton of free education as well, Scott. So that's kind of our role in this world. My role is to run that company. I've got 32 great employees, a bunch of HR experts and attorneys working for me, and we support about 3,000 practices right now. We should have had this. Let me, Let me just use bad language. We should have this shit in dental school. So I don't mean anything bad by that, but when we go into business, we have legal requirements. We've got legal liabilities. If we don't meet those requirements, we've got state laws compliance issues. Those things aren't meant to just be pains that we have to deal with as business owners. That is our country's way of making sure that a company is doing the right thing by its employee, and an employee is doing the right thing by its company. And when we're missing these proper policies, we also then deal with the ramifications of mismanaging people, of not having proper leadership. And of course, we're exposed for lawsuit threats and just bunch of drama we don't need. So I said, we should have had this stuff in dental school. We should have been taught this stuff. And I recently learned that you guys have actually decided to invest into educating young dentists. Can you. I apologize for this, throwing this out there, but could you explain to me what you guys are doing for young dentists? Scott, for years now, I guess about 10 years now, myself and a couple of the others here have been kind of guest educators at different universities around the country, primarily in dental schools. And they ask us to come in and spend an hour or two hours or three hours giving a course, kind of a crash course on hr. And what is clear is, is there' only so much you can say or dump on somebody. There's only so much mind dump that you can give a student, you know, in that short amount of time. So we really did recognize a long time ago that what we should do, you know how that is, Scott, you're like, you know, what our company should do is we should create a program for these doctors, young doctors, as they're in school or as they're coming out of school and they want to open a practice or purchase a practice. We should create a program for them that they can just take that would help them out, that they can choose, you know, their own path. Finally created it. We called it the Head Start program. The name implies what it is. It gives you a head start on understanding what the compliance rules look like, how they might apply to you, but more importantly, gives you a larger picture of how you manage and lead people. There are the best ways to lead and manage people. There are okay, ways to do it. And then there's the wrong way. And what I don't know about you, Scott, but when I don't know something, I look to others and I adopt their model and try to make it my own. And I find that all too often people adopt a model that is not serving them well. And so they get behind an eight ball, meaning that they are learning hard lessons as they go. And you don't really get the HR education that you need until you touch on every single problem over a five, six, seven year period. And during that time, Scott, turnovers more. You're not getting from your team what you need to get from them. They come to someone like you, you're ready to offer coaching. You're a change manager. You're. Someone says, come in like, you know, we gotta change the way we think about this, gotta change what we do. And they can't get their teams on board. And it's because of the way that they started off. It's that foundation that they built. So we built the Head Start program. We've already got students starting to enroll in it after we teach these classes. So I think it's gonna get pretty big. And I think it's for whether or not you're in school or you've even been out for a couple years working as an associate. Now you're thinking about your startup or you're thinking about your purchase of a practice. Yeah, I hate to put you on the spot. Please don't answer this question if it doesn't make sense to answer because obviously things are going to change in the future. And this is just one recording in one moment in time. But what does something like that cost, you know, a young dentist, to get this education on hr? Scott, it's going to be free. We are not going to charge for this. We really want them to have this education. I would be disingenuous, Scott, if I didn't say, hey, and I have a platform for you when you move forward. And if you open a practice, let me be there. Let me be the pro, you know, let us be the ones that service you. But we give this not with a closed hand. It is an open hand. And you do with it what you want. You work with us if you want to or not. And we are developing a program. This is thanks to you, Scott, because you've been working with us for so long. We've already developed a program where we help those startups get started, from the pricing to what we offer. We are already doing that, but we're making it more official now. So, no, there's no cost to get into this program. Yeah, that is an awesome thing to give our profession so needed. I mean, dental schools should make this kind of an aspect of their education, you know, if you've got a program for that. I mean, I'm just saying it. If. Got any dental school deans listening to this, why not introduce HR training as a supplement to the dental school ed experience? I want to simplify this for a bit because some of our listeners have never dealt with HR issues. They've never owned their own company or anything like that. When we own our own company, we take on the legal requirement to follow the law, to have compliant policies. And there's also the leadership benefit of having these policies established so that we have clear expectations and communication with our team and we avoid people kind of crossing these boundaries. Just for example, someone wants to take maternity leave. How does that work? There are legal requirements around that and there's also the need as a leader to decide that ahead of time so that people know what to expect and it doesn't become an HR time bomb. Or what do we do when someone is not doing their job properly? They're. They're either showing up late or they're not doing what is required of them. There's a process for that. What do we do when I want to change what someone does, they joined our practice to do A, I want them to now do B, Or I want them to work a different day. Do I have the ability to require that or not? Or what did we communicate? You could see listeners or hear listeners. If we don't follow the law and we don't organize this in a way for employees to understand, this can result in just a shitstorm of stuff to deal with. And so I don't know if I said that correctly, Paul, but could you kind of talk about what the right HR policies mean to, like, managing people or. Shoot, we could go down the legal aspect. How do these policies protect us? Are there horror stories? How do they. How are we hurt legally if we don't have this in place? Can we talk about that? Yeah, I got a ton of stories. The first thing I want to say is for every. Believe it or not, for almost every little thing you do and big thing that you do. So you named a big thing maternity leave. There's a good example little thing, somebody is kind of starting to show up late in the morning, right? They're not being there on time and it's starting to impact the team and the practice patients. For all of those, there is likely some kind of law, regulation or local ordinance that has to do with employment law that applies. So, Scott, a very quick example. Because you used it maternity leave, if you're small enough, the feds don't have a lot to say about maternity leave. Now they have a lot to say about how you treat pregnant employees or employees who are trying to get pregnant. They have rules there. But once you go above 15 employees, those rules change. And then again, if you were to go above 50, they change again. There's a law that you've all heard of called the family medical leave acting. So anyway, when you have the right support and you put the correct policies in place, and remember, a correct policy is it doesn't violate a law and it complies with the laws that apply to you and your location and for the number of employees you have. So when you have the correct policy in place, you're on a strong foundation and you can pretty much administer that policy and do what you need to do fear free. The problem comes in is when you borrow a handbook or you get given a handbook by a payroll company that says, hey, we're going to give it to you in words so you can customize it. Which is kind of like sending me back into an operatory with all the tools and a dental assistant and telling me I have everything I need in order to take care of my problem. So when you have all of these things in place, then you can manage confidently because the worst thing that can happen is that you have somebody on your team who is not going to get on board, who is pushing back, who has become a warm body, who appears to have quit in place, and you are having trouble getting through to them. And then you want to let them go, you want to terminate them. And you use what we call a gotcha, which is you haven't worked with anyone and you have a policy in place that says we will not tolerate gossip or negative comments about other employees. And you use that gotcha because that employee is doing that, they are toxic and you fire them for that, not knowing that you had a policy and practice in place that applies to all employers. That is a federal law that is going to get you in so much trouble if that employee ends up in front of an attorney with that policy. You cannot tell employees that they can't say negative things about the practice. You cannot tell employees that they cannot gossip. That's a gift to the federal agency that enforces it and frankly to the attorney that it comes in front of. They're like, oh, my God, I can't believe you gave me that gift. So that's an example, Scott, of how people can make up things. Where, by the way, that happens all the time. There is a way to approach it. It's called professional communication. And you got to do a little tap dance around it. But you can get very clear with a person that they got to stop doing what they're doing. It's destructive. And if they keep doing that, it's going to be the end of them working with your team. And I'll put this out there. The worst thing you can do is let a bad apple or somebody who's not happy working for you continue to work for you, because they will infect the other team members. You owe it to your team members to be able to take decisive action and keep the team intact and keep the team on task and not focused on some negative thing that someone else has brought to your practice. Let's talk about an example here. If, let's say I've got got an employee who's an older employee, maybe 60 years old or so, and they don't seem to do what I ask them to do. They're kind of stuck in their old ways. I ask them to change something and they're really not doing it. I want them to work on Fridays because we've opened up Fridays and they're just saying no, I refuse to do that. They're a hard person to deal with. They upset other employees. It's just not working out. I want to get rid of them. I want to replace them with someone that has. Yep. That has that fixed. Right. What's the right way to go about something like that? Well, you communicate your new policy. Okay, so you literally just created a new policy which says, we're going to open on Fridays. So you've changed whatever hours of operation and you can do that and you don't have to communicate it in writing, but the best thing that you could do is communicate it in writing to the entire team. After having a meeting with them, you just, there's a memo out. We're opening on Fridays. This is how we're going to fill the schedule. Whatever approach you take to doing that. When this employee says, I can't work on Fridays because you document that with them. You have a meeting with them, you document it and you make your decision as to whether or not you're going to let them not participate in this Friday. Which I want to put this out here, Scott, you framed this person as I'm already having problems with them. But if you weren't having problems with them and they come to you and this is part of leadership and say, this is why I can't do this, I don't have care for my husband, husband who has early onset dementia on Fridays, then you take a different approach maybe to that person because they've been a great team person in helping you out. In some states, if someone were to come to you and say that, you would need to take that into account even if they weren't a good employee, because some states added some protections for that kind of care for employees being able to take the time off to do it. Now, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, Scott. The way to either get them to do it or not do it is to set, I'll call it the rule, the change in policy and make it fair to everybody. Everybody's got to change. And if she can't do it, then you can make a decision around that. But I don't want to gotcha on that. What I would like to have seen in the preceding weeks and months is that all of the little things that you described, not getting on board, not doing it, saying I will, but not doing it. If you had been documenting that, at least in notes, and been having some coaching conversations with them, now we have everything we need in order to fight the case that I think you implied, which is this person may claim age discrimination in this termination. And so the way to fight that claim is to be able to show in the record that you had a body of things or one or two things that warrant letting this employee go and separating from them. You have paperwork. So if you have that, that two things happen. If she were to go to the EEOC and they were to even hear this and send a letter and want to investigate, you would give them all those records that support your reason for termination, including a back and forth where she's saying, I just don't want to work on Fridays. I never have, I never will. That would be a very powerful thing to show the eeoc. It would help them help you. In other words, they'd be like, nope, we're not seeing anything else here. This does not look like age discrimination. So just wanted to share that part of it. You would have this documentation in place. I've got a few things to say about this. Now, not only would it help with the agency that's going to be investigating this, it would likely be very strong at keeping away attorneys to potentially take on her case to bring this to a court, to a legal threat. Right. Because, because they, but they don't have a case. Right. So without, without the documentation, oh now we, now there may be a case. Or I can make up a story. If I don't have any documentation account, I get to make up the narrative the employ. This is why you give people a reason for letting them go. Because when you don't give them a reason that's supported by something, then they get to make up the reason for you. I'd say a lot of these legal threats go away when we follow policy correctly and when we set these things up to not just communicate well with our people but to protect ourselves and to show a record of what's actually happening. And an analogy I like to use is if I'm going to do, if I'm going to do my taxes. Right, Right. And I've got several companies, I've got all kinds of tax, you know, I've got all kinds of things to consider. I got write offs and adjustments and depreciation. I'm going to make sure that I've got a CPA firm advising me on how to do file my taxes every year and make purchases that I need to make. And I'm going to have a strategy so that I'm making the right decision. I'm also protected. And if I ever shoot, if I ever had some sort of investigation or audit, I would for sure have experts on my team helping me manage that process. Yet what is more serious than that, I think is the HR side of things. The threat of lawsuits and costs or just the cost of losing people or the cost of keeping them when I shouldn't keep them is a serious pain point financially and emotionally for leaders in dentistry. Yet we didn't get education on it. We don't have anyone on our team. And a problem with that. Paul, I, one of my good friends is an HR executive. I'm not sure exactly how much money she makes, but I, I think she makes like around five or six hundred thousand doll year. Yeah, I, as a dentist I can't afford, you know, a dentist can't afford to pay someone big money to be an HR executive for them. And without wanting to make, I don't want to make this like some kind of commercial for cedar, but I can't help but talk about this for just a second. You guys solve this problem in a very innovative way in dentistry where if I'm a dentist and you guys have helped me build all my proper policies so I'm Compliant with local law and federal law. And I could also have your HR experts on retainer so that any time I have an HR issue I've got to deal with or manage, I can, with unlimited amounts of help and support minutes, I can talk to your HR executives and basically they will hold my hand and walk me through the entire process every time to make sure I'm compliant. Did I say that correctly? You did. They're going to hold the hand and they're going to give you alternatives. Maybe they'll talk you off the ledge. They'll give you maybe some other. Imagine this. We have 3,000 members. We've had over 2,000 for more than a decade and a half. Imagine all the problems that we've helped to solve and the creative ways we've had to look at it in the different situations. Imagine you have the benefit of that when you have a problem come up. So it's not just about always the legal stuff. It's like, I don't want to lose this employee, but I'm really frustrated here. What do I do? That's another benefit. So I saw this, Scott, because I had a small business with no HR support, and fortunately, I never got sued over an employee issue. But I had 62 employees at one time and felt like I was just taking shots in the dark as to what I could do to manage people. And knowing what I know now, oh, thank goodness. No attorney ever got me in their crosshairs back in that decade, in the 90s. Yeah. I had a coaching client recently that had to settle for $45,000 with an employee that made a claim that something bad happened. And it never happened. Happened. It never happened. This employee was actually stealing from the practice. The practice had to pay the employee $45,000 to settle this, to make it go away because that was cheaper than fighting the case. And being right is so frustrating. It's so unethical, too. You know what a worst problem is, though? I don't know if you're seeing this now, but, you know, there's a lot of reliance on just pulling up chat GPT and asking advice. I have tested this with lots of different things. Chat GPT ain't right. The advice coming out of that is really, really bad. There's stuff made up. I mean, there's just plain stuff made up. I'm sure that we've got some entrepreneurial dentists that are trying to chat GPT their way through compliance and legal issues in HR situations. What are you seeing on your end when it comes to that? Well, you know, we kind of knew it was going to come in. It's becoming quite prevalent almost weekly we're getting something. One of our members who by the way, don't need to go to ChatGPT for an answer, they can come to us, we're having members and or new members come through the door. That's a different story. They haven't had our support and they're showing us things that they have created on ChatGPT. So when I say things, let me define that. They're showing us a policy they think they need. So they've gone to ChatGPT and they've asked it to create the policy and they're sending it to us and saying, we want to add this to our employee handbook book. Would you guys take a look at it? Or they're sending us a memo that has been written or a corrective action that has been written by artificial intelligence and they've sent it over to us. And what we find is, is that about 99% and there is a 1%, that's the danger. But about 99% of these things have some inherent issue built straight into it. And when I say some inherent issue, I mean it's small but significant. You would never know it if you weren't us and weren't familiar with the law. And that's the danger, Scott, is that the thing comes back and it's confident it will confidently give you an answer. It will even tell you I'm giving you the right answer right now, when in fact it does not have the context. It's not one of our HR experts who stops and says, hey, wait a minute, minute. And they don't typically say this, but it's how it goes. Scott, wait a minute, I have 10 more questions for you. I need to know X, Y and Z. I need to know this other thing. Now that you've told me X, Y and Z, I have two more questions I need to talk to you about. Okay, now that I have all that information, here's what I recommend that you do. Here's what you could do, here's what you might do, here's what you probably should do. ChatGPT, unless you could put all of that in there and understand what it's giving back to you and confirm it is not helping. And here's the reason why, Scott. It is a non sequestered system, meaning that when you ask it a question or you ask it to write something for you, it goes to the Internet and it finds articles and postings. It'll go to Reddit, it'll go to all sorts of places, it makes a decision on what it thinks should be right based off of some algorithm of authority and then it will return an answer you and again, it will be quite confident. So it will find legislation that never got passed. It will find the latest version of the law that got passed, but not the right version with all the regulations that got written around the law. So it will return confidently information that probably a lawyer wrote and said, hey, this isn't all set in stone yet. Here's where we think it's going. You will get that as clear advice. So it's a non sequestered system and it can be incredibly dangerous. And we've seen it return some things and get sent over to us where we're like, pick up the phone and get this person now. Do not let them, do not let them distribute that, do not let them talk to that employee and use this paperwork. Yeah, it reminds me at least where AI is right now. It reminds me of one of my kids. I got five kids, I got one kid that is super good communicator, very charismatic, very confident, but half the time he's full of. But man, when he says what he says based on wherever he got it from, it sounds like he knows what he's doing and saying he's gonna go far in life. Scott. Yeah, he is. But you know, chat GPT's got to preserve itself. It doesn't come up and say, well, I'm not sure if all the sources I used are actually correct, but here's, you know, it's just right. So I'm curious, have you seen any specific, like horror stories when it comes to the latest iteration of this, of how people are using ChatGPT? Well, I'll give you a real example. We had a practice, a rather large practice that had a problem with an employee. This is typical, Scott. So we could take this down so many different directions, but this is a typical scenario. Let me give you the top level. You've had an employee who's not doing well. We talked about them earlier. They've been giving you some issues and now you're ready to do something about it. It or you're thinking about doing something about it, but you've been putting it off and all of a sudden they come to you with an issue that stops you in your tracks. So I'm going to get. It could be any number of issues, but I'm going to use. All of a sudden they've walked in and said, I'M pregnant. What you have is an employee who's now coming in and saying, I'm pregnant, and saying, I may need some accommodations. And you're like, wow, I now have to accommodate this person who, if I could have just gotten to it, I would have finally talked to them and let them go. You are frozen in your tracks. So in this instance, we saw a practice write a corrective action to this employee. And what they did was violate four laws during that, basically demoting her, sequestering her, giving her a different. Changing her duties immediately after her, informing them of this. Because what they wanted to do is say, well, if I have to put up with you for the next six, eight weeks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put you in the basement and turn the lights out, out, and we're not going to see you anymore. You're no longer going to be the disruptive force. They should have been talking to her all along, saying, hey, you're distracting people. They could have been having this conversations with her, but because they didn't, they now have this issue. So what they decided to do was tell Chat GPT the problem and have it write up a pip, which is a very bad idea. Scott, I just want to say this. In small business, we don't have plans for improvement. What we have is you need to correct this behavior and get better today by Friday. We don't have a month. We don't have two months. We don't have six months. We cannot sit here with you while you work through this, while we try to figure out a way to get rid of you. We are talking to you now. We're looking for improvement from you. And so it wrote a pip, and it basically, if they had given that to her and I said this earlier, that she could have taken it to an attorney and he'd have been like, oh, my God, thank you for this gift. I will take you on. This will be contingency fee, and I'm going to fire a $250,000 shot across their bow, and let's see where we can get them to settle. And so that's the horror story. And that's just one of many. Here's the thing, man, Scott, it was written so well. If I wasn't an HR expert, I would have fallen for it. It was amazing how well written that thing was. Was, that's my kid. He just sounds so good, saying such bullshit. We're obviously all using AI and we're going to continue using AI. I think you should so where in. In the HR world, where does AI become a tool? Or how do we know it's wrong? Or are there boundaries? Like, how do we think about using AI as a tool when we are trying to manage the HR side of a dental practice? I just think as an owner, you're not going to use it for that. You're going to kind of stay away from that. You're going to let us use it for the way that we see fit and for us, Scott, I don't mind telling everyone out there, we started exploring it as soon as we could get our hands on it because we saw the value in it. And it took a while. When I say it took a while, it took a while to get to this point, which we were able to arrive at about six months ago, which is we were able to sequester the AI. So now when we use artificial intelligence, we're using it as a tool, just like radiologists are using it as a tool to find things on radiographs now that they couldn't see before. It's a sequestered system and it's in inside the system and it's looking at the more than 100,000 times we've responded to an HR question and given an answer. It's looking at all of our compliance documents, it's looking at all of our knowledge base. I could go on and on. It is not allowed to go out to the Internet and find an answer unless we want it to go out there and find that answer. And then that gets vetted back here first by a junior and then by a senior, by someone who has a law degree or 25 years of HR experience. So that' we have to do with it. If you don't have those things, then you really need to be careful. And I see Facebook groups for AI for dentists. And a big thing of it is them giving away these prompts that they think are going to get them the right results for an HR thing. And I'm like, man, I don't think you understand that your prompt of 14 words would have to be about 175 words to get the right answer back. Back. And then how would you know? How would you know that you got the right answer back? Yeah, I see it like, if we want a good result, the AI should only be exposed to good information and should be led by a, an expert, a good person prompting. Well, so we need the expert, we need an expert prompt and we need to have access to expert information. But what's happening right now is we don't have experts who. We got shitty people in experience level having shitty prompts. Have AI look at shit for information. And we're getting back really well written. Yeah, pooping poop back. That looks really great. It's a great looking poop. So when I kind of step out of this for a bit and look at the problem we have, it starts with education. We don't know what we don't know as business owners and it's impossible for us to master it because there's so many laws and the laws keep changing. We're not masters of that, just like we're not masters of accounting laws. Right. We're not masters of HR laws. And what we need is we basically need an ongoing access to an expert to guide us situation by situation. That is going to balance out the need to be compliant client, balance out the need to be a good leader and to be caretaker of the company. When we screw up one of those things, the law or leadership or what's good for the company, it's not going to work out well. That leader can use tools like AI because they've got the expertise to understand how to use it to save them time. But we can't replace the expert with AI. And that is one of many, many dangers we're running into right now when people think that AI becomes the knowledge expert. Did I say that in a way that you agree with or was there anything I said that you don't agree with? No, I agree with everything you said. I would add that every time we write an article now we do this thing called the Roundup where we pick three questions from the world at large. HR questions. That could be one from our members out of our Facebook group, about 10,000 people in HR basecamp. We pick a question and we answer it. And we say, from the legal point of view, here's what you need to know and from the human point of view of view. So getting back to what you just said, there is the human side to managing people and artificial intelligence. Here's a way artificial intelligence might be able to help you. Let me give a good example. The way you communicate with people needs to alter a little bit based on that person that you're talking to. So some people want direct feedback. Some people aren't as good with direct feedback. You've got to give it to them in a slightly different way. You still need to be direct and deliver the message. You could go to artificial intelligence and say, I need to talk to this employee. Every time I talk to her, she kind of Starts to tear up and cry. She gets so upset that she can't hear what I'm saying. And I know she's capable, she's getting in her own way. So when she's calm and when she can hear me, she's a great employee. Anytime I have to talk to her, she gets super upset. How can I frame the following things to her? Because I need to talk to her and what could I possibly do to keep from getting her upset? And you might get a very, very good answer back from artificial intelligence on something like that. Remember, it could come back and tell you, well, what you should do is sequester her in a basement somewhere and turn the lights out on her again. Even though you might get a great answer, you've got to be careful when it comes back with something like that and recognize it. I'm going to try to summarize my thoughts on HR when it comes to the owner of the dental practice. I think step one is we need a baseline level of HR knowledge so that we understand what our business requirements and needs are. When it comes to that, we need a layer of just education. Then we have this need of an employee handbook that in black and white spells out the rules of the business. And those rules have to be compliant as the laws continue to change. And the rules also have to serve the business wise, well, and of course be in alignment with what we want for our employees. The process of building those rules is almost like a wonderful consulting coaching process because it, it causes us to think through these, these issues and what is the right time off policy? What is the right needle stick policy? What do we do when someone has a patient that mistreats them? What should the rule be when it comes to maternity leave? We need to, as business owners go through, through that very healthy consulting kind of process of making decisions about what these rules should be that's in our employee handbook. Then from there we're live with the rules. And the rules are they form boundaries to make sure that as much as possible we don't have employees go off road somewhere and start doing something wrong. They understand the rules and so it keeps them in the lane. You know, as much as possible when people get out of the lane lane when they are now mistreating the business or the customer versus the patient or each other against the rules. We now have the requirement to be a good leader that is compliant with the law. Because we don't know all the laws and because we're not the best leader we're ever going to be, we need a guide for that, someone to hold our hand and say you need to do A, B, C and D in that order. And depending on how those things go, these are going to be the potential results. And this is going to keep you protected. Mr. Chatgpt is not that person to do that for us. We need an expert to do that for us. Because this is serious money. These are serious like ramifications to our business, to our life, to our employees lives. That's what we need. And man, if we have what I just said, we will sleep way better at night, we will have less threats. We will know to in our soul we're doing the right thing. Even if it's a hard thing, even if it's hard to deal with something. In the moment, we are doing the. Right thing with the strength of knowing that, with also the being ethically correct, being legally correct, we're doing the right thing. And that is what I think is missing in most dental practices. I want to add something to what you described. You described that process and you describe it very well. It's a healthy thing, it's a good thing to sit down and go through all your policies and figure out all the things that you just listed. Scott, here's part of the difference going to promote us a little bit here or our process. The difference between us and everyone else is that we provide training on that. So we get you 80% there on your handbook. The process you described as a guy or a gal doctor sitting at their house with a handbook that they've borrowed, pulling down policies off the Internet and they're going through it and they're figuring all these things out without any of the benefit of any kind of expertise or perspective. The difference for us is that we spend a couple hours with you and sometimes a little longer if that's what you need. Training you on that employee handbook and showing you where you don't have any say. Remember all those laws say one thing and then also saying to you this is where you do have choice. Do you want to give 6, 8 weeks, 10 weeks of maternity leave? Do you want to pay for it? You don't have to. Would you like to pay for it? Here's some options how you might address that. We train down that document so that you actually get the education you need when you leave, that you have an understanding. And Scott, I'll tell you this, we tell everybody, hey, here's one price for the handbook and it's higher if you do our support system, our ongoing support system. We lower that for you quite a bit. And people. There are a number of people, 20% who don't know us yet. They're not ready to get married. They just want to date us. And they're like, let me do the handbook, I'll just pay more, more. They come to that. They come to that meeting, that two hour meeting, kicking and screaming, by the way, Scott, because no one wants a two hour meeting to do anything these days. And about 90% of that 20% say, oh yeah, I'm in. After learning what I just learned and hearing your expertise as a company, I want that ongoing support. And that is what is missing is the setting the rules and putting your, and setting your business up through your policies and leadership. That where you also get that information. I want to say one other thing. You said you had someone that you were working with that had to settle for $45,000. The thing was, is they had to do the math on the cost to fight and win. And that's the game that's being played. People don't end up in court. They're all demand letters. Everybody, your side, your attorney, their attorney is like, this is going to cost and time, effort, hell, it's going to cost. That and your own loss of power. Power. While you're dealing with this, you're not dealing with patients and making your business better. So I just want to say that had they been working with us and brought that problem to us, there would have likely never been a lawsuit. There wouldn't have even been a demand letter because of the documentation that was in place. We certainly can get someone who's been embezzling out without getting you in any trouble. There's a way to do that. And for $45,000, you would have had 18 years of HR support from us. Pain. I'm just saying. I'm just saying do the math. That's how that works out. I'm gonna say something interesting. I've never said this before. You know, most people in dentistry say managing people is the hardest thing, is the worst part of owning a dental practice. Can be. Yeah. And. And, well, that's what most people say. But what if, what if that's ridiculous? What if that's just the symptom of a lack of. Lack of rules and policies and accountability to those. What if managing people would be the most beneficial thing of owning a practice, the thing we enjoy the most, the thing that brings us most of our fulfillment? And the difference between the two has to have as part of the problem that we have not been educated and we have not built in, in accountability to following the right thing to do. And so what we end up having is we have people that are just constantly pushing here and pushing there and wanting this and testing that. And we have this almost shoot from the hip mentality that, oh, my God, I'm just. I just gotta. I just gotta put out fires with people and. And we feel sometimes trapped or held hostage to this person and we're worried about this liability or this concern and. And man, we react out of emotion and we inadvertently break the law. They all talk to about it, right? And there's more drama and it just bubbles up and bubbles up. And then at the end of this whole thing, you know what we say as Dennis I think I just want to focus on the business side and cut back clinically because I'm so burnout. Yeah. When we ask, well, what's the biggest problem managing people? Oh, so. So we're not burnout from the clinical side that we want to come back. We're actually. We're burnout from managing people side. That's because we're managing them without rules, without accountability, without clear communication, without the confidence to do it Right. Right. All of these rules are to protect the employee and the practice. All of these rules are to do the right thing. And it's amazing how when everyone is held accountable to the law and we do the right thing, how few people issues there actually are. And when we work in an environment with so few people issues, we end up respecting each other differently. We end up giving each other support, we get validation, we get fulfillment, and we achieve differently. And we as an owner can be a bigger size if we wanted, but we're all blinded by the lack of accountability and the lack of rules. And that is what's so frustrating, which is why I started this episode saying this shit needs to be in school. Because we've got to learn this early on as dentists, even if we never own a practice, we work with people and we are a leader in that organization. We need to understand. Understand how this is supposed to happen. As we wrap this up, Paul, I want to pass the ball over to you for kind of a last set of thoughts or comments, anything that we haven't touched on or we need more kind of detail on. But I. I do want to say what you guys at Cedar are doing is. Is really an innovative approach to solving a complicated problem for dentistry. And no wonder you've been doing it for so long. No wonder you've been so successful as you are. No wonder your Facebook Group HR Basecamp has so many people in it, and it's such engaging engagement. But, you know, Cedar HR Solutions, and you are really helping us, and I want to. I really appreciate you guys for doing that. Do you have any last comments or thoughts before we wrap this up? Down that last line of thought. Believe it or not, being a leader is a privilege. And you can feel like it's a privilege as long as you keep growing and as long as you're doing right by the people that you're leading. And where that takes you to oftentimes is that you develop a core team around you that feels the same way. They lead in their own right and they're working for you, and they start spitting out bad people. When someone hires someone who's not a good fit, they don't last long because they come into an organization that has structure, that has policies, that knows where they're going. It will not tolerate someone who doesn't pull their weight, will not tolerate someone who wants to take the team off in some other direction. That has nothing to do with patience and running the business. And so I think that is a place where you're trying to get to. Is it hard? Is it difficult to maintain? Does it become more difficult when you grow and start adding more team members? Yes, all of those things are true. But, Scott, there's no alternative. If you open a practice and you have people, this is the other journey that you've decided to take. And we love that. I am passionate about it. I created this company to support businesses of the size that we see as small businesses. We're not here, although we have a few larger clients that have more than 100 employees. We're here for that person who has two employees, six employees, 20, 30, 50. We're here to provide that level of expertise that you described earlier with your friend who probably makes a half a million dollars a year. What if you had access to that when you needed, would be fantastic. And that's what we are. We're there to help you with that. You're a small business. You don't need an HR person sitting there all day long paying them $120,000 a year to work for you. You need somebody when you need somebody, and that's the model that we built. Yeah. Awesome. Very well said. Well, Paul, I. I really appreciate not just what you do, but obviously for coming on our podcast and talking about this. Listeners, have we talked about anything that you feel. Do you feel like it's hard, you know, managing people? Do you feel like there's a cultural cancer that's just slowly spreading of entitlement, of pushing the boundaries of not performing, of kind of getting away with things. Because if that's the case, you're probably losing breakfast people, because great people don't want to be in that environment. They don't. If this is the case, you're probably losing life expectancy emotionally from having to deal with this stuff. And it does not have to be this way. Don't label dentistry, don't label ownership, as now I have to deal with this stuff. This stuff happens when we're not properly structured and set up and we don't have accountability. And that is what we need. And it starts with information. It starts with an HR handbook that has been thoughtfully built and of course, is compliant and ongoing. It requires us to have the help of experts to hold our hand and lead us through these things that will pop up. And the end result is a culture of accountability with people that want to be there, that want to do well, and that will not accept some new bad apple coming in. They'll pluck that thing right out of the batch and say, no, thank you. And that is the vision I have for all of us, and that is what we hope we achieve here. I hope this episode was helpful. Paul thank you again, listeners. I hope you've subscribed so you get this little drip of our content every week, and I hope that helps your life and your career. And this was our Dental CEO podcast episode on hr. My name is Scott Leune. Thank you everyone for joining and listening to us.