Before we get started, I am going to give yet another shout-out to the paperwork packet that I have put together, or rather paperwork packets. That’s my sponsor, so to speak. This series of episodes put together several paperwork packets for you to check out that will help you start or grow your testing practice. All of the paperwork is testing-specific. If that’s interesting to you, you can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/paperwork and check out. There’s a clinical packet, an administrative packet, and a psychometrist training packet. So check those out if you’re interested. I think they’re great. I’m a little biased, but I really think they’re great.
All right. Onto the episode.
[00:01:10] All right y’all, here we are back in episode #4 of the What I Wish I Knew series. If you have not checked out the prior, What I Wish I Knew episodes, this is a 5-part series. Today we’re on number 4. Previous three, I talked about a few things that, well, I wish I had known when I started out in practice.In the first one, I talked about being careful with insurance; second, I talked about putting billing systems in place; and last time, I talked about delegating, which y’all know I’m a big fan of. But today we are talking all about how to get all that knowledge in your brain, out of your brain. I think this is getting at the need for [00:02:00] big-picture systems or rather the big-picture need for systems, period.
I talked about billing systems two episodes ago, but this is really about how to get all of that knowledge that lives in your own mind down onto paper or into some form where other people can use it.
One thing that I figured out from the very beginning when I started to delegate a little bit and or hire folks in my practice to help with testing is that I had a lot of information and a lot of processes and a lot of procedures, ways of doing things that lived solely in my mind. When it came right down to it, I made the mistake of assuming that these other people knew what I was thinking and would somehow do things the way that I did them because [00:03:00] that’s how I did them and had done them for a long time.
Looking back in hindsight, it makes perfect sense that of course, no one would do things exactly as I do them. But that’s my growth edge and something that I continue to work on with my employees and managing the practices. I tend to take more of a hands-off approach to managing in the sense that I trust that people know what they’re doing and I don’t micromanage for fear of being too pedantic or something.
But what I found is that people like to have direction just generally. Second of all, I think if you have any hopes of scaling your practice or hiring or delegating some of these tasks, you have to document all of this knowledge that lives in your mind.
So what am I talking about here?
Well, I’ve made a list of several things that I [00:04:00] wish I had documented from the very beginning. Hopefully, you will find this list helpful too. I think of my friend Jaime Jay, who was on the podcast several episodes ago when we were talking about virtual assistants. He phrased it like this, you want to do your tasks as if it’s the last time you will ever do them.
What that means is, when you do a task, it seems so time intensive when you are doing this in the beginning, but what you want to do is, as you are doing a task, whatever that task is, you want to also concurrently document everything that you are doing over the course of that task. The idea is that then someone else could pick up that document and be able to follow along more or less with what you are doing and how to do those tasks. So believe me, I wish I had done this [00:05:00] way sooner than I did.
One of the first things that I ended up documenting was our phone script. I talked last time about delegating to a VA and I hear a lot of how people have a lot of trouble letting someone else answer the phone. I shared that concern. I was convinced I was the only one who could sell our testing services and talk about it in a way that made sense to clients.
But what I soon found out is when I put together a really good phone script that included some FAQ questions for things clients might ask, I tried to document answers for that, what I found is that not just one, not just my first admin assistant, but the next one after that was able to do a really good job answering the phones and explaining our services. I was very pleasantly surprised how quickly both of those [00:06:00] individuals were able to pick up the script and run with it.
We can get into how to train a VA. There’s tons there of how to train and a receptionist. But one thing that I did do that helped a lot was have friends and family call in and do practice phone calls as if they were going to schedule a client, and that helped a lot. I also answered the phone live for my new hires, and my new receptionist to observe how I answered questions. I kept the phone on speaker and let them take notes and listen to how I answered various questions. Anyway, that’s another episode, but one thing that you can document as a process is your phone scripts. It’s a great place to start.
Other things include your testing interview documents. So what format do you follow for intake interviews or diagnostic interviews? Also, document how you pick a testing battery. So not just the tests you [00:07:00] use, but how you decide what tests to use.
One other thing that you can document is your testing process. Call back to the paperwork packets in the beginning. One of the things that I put together was a master checklist for a testing day. I went through and detailed everything that I did on a testing day, in what order, when to start timers, when to check the computer, when to load this onto the iPads, and so on and so forth. So documenting your testing process and the actual steps you go through when you’re testing.
Another thing you can document is how you solve specific problems around the office. So this might be, how do you fix the printer? What do you do if the iPads don’t work? What do you do if Q-interactive won’t sync? How do you change your password? Where do you put the new password? What do [00:08:00] you do if a client is upset about their bill? Any number of these random questions that fall outside your typical FAQ, try to document those as much as you can because the likelihood is that they will happen again at some point.
Another big thing is making a template for your reports. That’s pretty self-explanatory. Creating a recommendations bank so that other clinicians in your practice can use them if they’d like. Billing and scheduling systems. So how do you schedule people? Do you have any special guidelines for scheduling? Any restrictions on your schedule? There are tons of questions that come with that. How do you handle overdue bills? What do you do if a client requests a discount? All of these things are decisions that you have to make, and at least in my case, these are things that lived in my mind for a long time that I had to then explain to people.
What I [00:09:00] found is that it has helped me think through my meta processes instead of flying by the seat of my pants and making decisions in the moment.
Okay, so what else can you delegate, or sorry, what else can you create a system for?
I talked about anomalies and one-off questions. You can also keep a system for test ordering. That was important. I started to create a database of all of the purchase numbers or SKUs for each of the testing materials that we purchase and put that into a database so that my admin could order testing materials.
And then one last thing that you can have a system for is, and this is huge actually, is a way to keep all of your passwords. I use LastPass. I like LastPass because it’s a password-keeping system. It’s basically like when [00:10:00] you create a password for a website, it saves it automatically and stores it securely so that you can create a unique password for all the websites you’re logging into which is great for cyber security.
What I also like is that it will generate a secure password for you. But then the best part and the most relevant part for this episode is that it will let you share those passwords securely with someone else whom you choose. So you can share your passwords without that person seeing the password. They can go to their LastPass account, there’s a button that says launch and you can just launch the login to whatever websites you are trying to get into.
So, lots of ways to document your processes, but that’s the theme for the episode today. Even though it will take some more time in the beginning, it [00:11:00] will save you so much time down the road.
As you are going through your day, as you are doing the things that are so familiar to you, if you can start to write down or make videos for any of these processes that you go through on a daily basis, it can be super helpful.
Thank you as always for listening to the podcast. I’ve tried something new these past few episodes with doing these little mini-series. Let me know if this stuff is helpful. If it’s not helpful, please know that I am trying to line up more interviews. I’ve got a lot in the works and I think they’re going to be good. So know that that’s on the horizon, but doing two mini-series here over the last few weeks.
As I said at the beginning, if you need any testing-specific paperwork for your practice, I worked hard over the last few months to put together some [00:12:00] paperwork packets for you. There’s a clinical packet, an administrative packet, and a psychometrist training manual, and I think they could be helpful. So you can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/paperwork. And if you use the code podcast, you will get 20% off your entire order. So hope those are helpful. I will be talking next time in the last, what I wish I learned episode about the cost of testing materials. This was a wake-up call for me.
I hope to have you tune in then. Take care in the meantime. Bye.