Transcript

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Hey guys, welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD, the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs. Now, every doctor who's ever opened up their own practice has hit probably that same wall. Suddenly you realize you're not just being a physician, you're a boss, and nobody's really kind of trained you for it. And my guest today has spent over 26 years fixing exactly that. Felix Lin is the founder of Konfidently, creator of the Konfident Fit method for hiring people who actually thrive. And now he's building AI systems for businesses and practices, too. So, I want to welcome to the program, Felix. How are you doing, my friend?

Thank you. Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate being here.

Yeah, we've been working together for the last few years, and it's just really been a pleasure working with you side by side. We're both part of Momentum MD, which is Peter Kim's coaching program, and you've done amazing things with what you're doing, working with corporations, working in terms of hiring, and now I've ventured into AI, and I can't wait to just dig into all of this. But before we begin, who is Felix Lin? And just give us a brief introduction how you got to be where you are today.

28 years just in general industry help, like starting off in recruiting. I've interviewed over 10,000 people. I've run companies since 1998. I was really fortunate to be with somebody who started me off on my own entrepreneurial journey. And so, three companies later, this company is not only doing executive search work, but also focusing on building outstanding teamwork culture, all the things I've learned about leadership over the last 25-plus years. And so, in that time, I've also worked with Tony Robbins. I'm a senior trainer for his organization, and essentially learned all the psychology and all the leadership pieces he has to offer, and it's been an amazing experience working with him. And the opportunity of working with AI started about 3 and 1/2 years ago. Hiring is expensive, right? Not only just like recruiting like high hired somebody like me to help you find somebody that that fee is expensive. If you're even doing it on your own, the cost of time and just like if something goes wrong somebody doesn't work out, the amount of time it takes to train somebody then to unwind what somebody did and train somebody else is just unbelievably painful. And AI became a tool that we can fit into pretty much any gap in our organization. It's amazing to watch these agents go now that that the technology has reached this level, but it's been about 3 and 1/2 years of working starting with ChatGPT, building experts, all kinds of expert prompts, and then getting all kinds of good results for myself. Then when the agents came, now it's just a whole 'nother level. And being able to work with you, Mike, on that has been a lot of fun. Just being able to explore all you like I know you explore you're much better exploring all kinds of different AI than I am. Me, I'm just diving deep and building what we call our Konfidently OS and building at having a business owner or maybe a practice leader just walk in and have every part of their business built out already with agents that can either fill in the gap or support a human that's already in that role.

Yeah, I love that. And I definitely want to get digging into AI, but another reason why I had you on the program is something doctor owners have a struggle with and that's hiring. And that's something that you know a lot about. You know, a doctor opens up a practice and suddenly they have to hire staff with zero training, you know, in it. What have you found like is the most expensive mistakes that first-time owners make?

So, you have to focus on two areas of hiring. You need to focus on both skills and culture, right? And one of the biggest things is that most people have no idea what their culture is. They don't know how to define it, right? They have an inkling of what it should be. And most people just say I just want an office to run smoothly, right? And that's pretty much all they do. The is that most people are never trained on the human psychology side. And that becomes a big piece of being able to hire the right person for you. And when you miss hire somebody, you can feel it right away. If they're motivated in a different way than you have set up like an example would be maybe you love having a very big team driven office where everybody is like, "Oh, hey, if we all hit this goal, then we all get the reward together, right? We all share in the reward." There are people who love that, and there are people who love wanting to be the best. I want to be number one. And so if they're doing better than somebody else on the team, and they're looking at this other person going, "Well, I'm sharing in a reward with that person, but I'm doing like 20% more of the work. Why am I getting the same as them?" They start getting upset, and then they'll leave, right? So, being able to identify the right person to fit in your organization is incredibly important, and learning all of these psychology pieces over the last 25-plus years, and being able to teach it instantly. It's not hard. You just have never been exposed to it.

Yeah, I remember it, and I've shared this story for my podcast listeners before. I had hired a nurse practitioner, and you know, she came in to the office. She sounded like she had all the answers. All my questions, she had all the answers to. Seemed like an impeccable candidate. And she went in, she got to meet the staff a bit, and then she left. And then I asked one of my nurse practitioners, this was the one I was actually leaving, I was actually replacing, what she thought of her. And she goes, "Didn't you see her? I hate her." I go, "Well, why'd you say that?" And they said, "Didn't you notice when she came into the office, she only directly answered you? She basically bypassed Janette, our medical assistant. She didn't give eye contact to her aesthetician. She just focused on you. And if you're going to be working at some place, it's got to be about a team. And just from that first 10-15 minutes, it's like, I already know that it's like, you know, she'll be cordial to you, you're her boss, but how is she going to work with the team?" And that really struck me as something that I'll always remember.

Yeah, just backing up on what you said about what mistakes people make. People think the people that interviews the best are the ones that they should hire. When somebody interviews really well, it just means that they interview really well. And sometimes that may not be a good thing, right? They're practicing an interview. And if they're practicing an interview, that means they practice a lot. But that's all. That may not be the right person, right? So, sometimes it's the person that did not interview well. And the whole thing is creating an interview process that helps bring the best out of the person in front of Instead of expecting people to be perfect in an interview coming in. Nobody is, right? And for those of us who are business owners for a long time, we haven't had to interview anybody. We've done the interviewing, but it's like a different feeling when you're actually going into interview for something else that you really want, right? And so, we have a system We have a specific way called the Konfident Fit. And it's just a really easy interview to help understand where people are at their best. There can be no line for it. It's just giving people different categories and having them choose. And then when you look over the overall total scheme of what the person wants, can you give that to them, right? And so, it's actually a really simple interview and it's actually fun to do. And people actually learn about themselves. More importantly, you get to know whether this person can thrive in what your environment is like.

Yeah, and that's a really cool. Maybe you could give a taste about like, you know, we all know the standard interview questions. It's almost passe, what are your strengths or weaknesses. And it's all kind of cringey after a while. But is there like a question that you feel a practice owner could use, maybe one or two questions that might give you a true read on that candidate?

So, for your specific person, Mike, in that example, I would have gone over There's a gentleman named Daniel Goleman. He wrote the book on emotional intelligence. And just a brilliant author, brilliant mind, does a lot of research on human psychology. So, about 20-something years ago, he actually looked and asked the question, "What are the leadership styles that everybody follows?" And what he found is that there are only six. And this is the incredible part. So, when we talk to people about what are the six leadership styles, so first is like, "Okay, what do you want in a boss?" Right? And the question is like if I'm going to tell you all six of these, and people gravitate toward two things. I don't know if we have time, Mike. I can go over them really quickly if you want me to.

Yeah, real quick.

Okay. So, we use his older framework. The first one is commander. Right? So, you'll recognize all of these styles. The commander is someone who like most people have run into a bad commander. A commander is someone who's a bully, someone who's all that's their way or the highway, someone who won't listen, someone who overly micromanages, right? Those are all examples of a bad and most people have run into somebody like that. They yell at people, they get really angry, right? What a good commander is also something you've experienced. I should say great commander. A great commander makes decisions quickly. A great commander is someone who always clarifies what the team should be moving toward. Right? They're always moving toward the outcome. A great commander can get people unstuck, right? And so, what we want to be is a great commander without the bad commander. You don't have to have both in the same person. Except most people are typically getting the bad commander as it is and so, that gets perpetuated down the line. You learn from the person you, "Well, that's the way I should do it for everybody else." Right? It's not stepping back and going, "Oh, how should I do this?" And so, that's one So, some people really want great direction. And so, we want to be a great commander for them. And so, another example would be the visionary. Visionaries love generating ideas. Visionaries love getting people excited about their ideas. And visionaries just come up with idea after idea after idea and it gets very exciting to work around them. Now, that's what a great one does. What a bad one does is just dump too many ideas on you at once. And then that's a challenge for me cuz that's what I used to do to my team. I would come back from a seminar and my mouth would start opening and you see the terror in their eyes, right? And so that the whole thing was like I would just start dumping on them and I had no idea what they already had on their plate. I also had no ideas a bad visionary. I had no idea what resources it would take. I just go if it's in my brain and I can see it should be in front of me right now. Right? So I don't know how much time, how much money, how many people it's going to take. Do I even think we have the right talent on board? I don't care. I'm just dumping ideas. And then I don't give them priorities. In my mind I might have a priority list, but I've never communicated it with them. I'm just dumping ideas. And so if you don't allow your team to understand like those are just two of those things. If you haven't asked them what they wanted then that's a big disservice. Right? So to help people be their best they operate and it changes over the person and their career. But you want to find out what they love. And my job as a leader is to make sure that I'm giving them what they love for them to be their best, right? If I can't do that, if somebody wants a democratic leader they want to be heard. Kind of like my son, right? He needs to be heard, right? So I have to stop whatever I'm doing and I put my democratic hat on and I have to listen to him. As soon as he's listened to it's lights out for him. He loves it, right? He just goes like 100% afterwards. So it's just recognizing that all right, just like I can recognize it cuz I know, but just to ask him, "Hey, what do you love?" And they'll tell you. And so that's part of like being a better leader overall is asking that in the interview process and making sure I can do that.

And I think another thing that as owners we often have trouble is having them move, let's say you're a nurse, and moving them into a leadership role. And then you teach them nothing about leading. You just How how fix something like that, right? And Mike, I know you're a big proponent of this because I know you focus a lot on leadership and coaching leaders. And you're absolutely right. It's a whole different skill set. And as like a business owner or a business leader, it's a a skill set that you got you have to build. This is actually the most important skill set to build when building your business. And just understanding like basics of human psychology and just like, you know, getting someone who can teach your teams, if you're not the one doing it, you have to have somebody that's going to teach your team. And as soon as you have somebody that is that servant leader, then everything is going to change in your organization.

Yeah, but often times, like I said, they don't have the skills themselves.

Yeah. Yeah, and the biggest part is to recognize that we don't, for sure.

So, let's talk about this AI thing. I guess it's been in the news a lot, right? This AI It's permeated everything, right? So, a lot of fear, a lot of trepidation. But you've embraced it. And what are you seeing out there? You you have your company but now you've been working with other companies into launching these AI operating systems. What pushed a like a leadership and hiring guy into AI?

Well, I think it's like my own desperate need. That was the first part, right? So, over my 28 years, 29 years now of doing the work, I have never been a good marketing person, right? So, Mike, when I talk to you and you do all this marketing work, I'm like just in awe of what you've learned and done, right? So, but I've always done word of mouth and like referrals and direct sales. And nothing wrong with that, yeah. Nothing wrong. It's a lot of effort, man. Right. A lot of work, though. And even then, there's like if you don't have a structured referral program or even two or even three, then you're leaving all kinds of money on the table, right? I mean, when they see a guy like you that can do all this different like in running this podcast for that matter, right? It's like, you know, you have all these different channels of how to get the word out. Like how to create community. And so the first thing I wanted to do was I had a three plus year old website that was just like this really old not great it was just really bad. I was just It had a little bit of information. It had some videos and things like that. But nobody's going to get excited about looking at that website. And so when I realized I had an agent actually build a website I was like, "Okay, this is interesting." And so the first day I had the agent I had it learning about me. And all the different areas of business that we do whether it's executive search, whether it's culture building, whether it's team training, coaching, right? And then so I had it learn everything about what we did. It created a website that in less than 10 minutes that was out of this world. I mean it was pulling studies about things that we were talking about in culture that I had never found before. And of course I had to go see if they were real and they were real. So you know, ChatGPT can hallucinate some of these things but I always double check. So I went to go check it out and I was like, "Wow, this is a Gallup poll that talked about this." And then he actually just pulled this information in even though I never even asked. And so it built this whole thing out and we were using Claude API at the time and it cost less than $200 to build a website that might have cost us five 10 maybe 15 to 20 grand, right? Depending on the people. So it was like, "This is out of this world." It's just shocking like and I know you've had some of the same experience working with AI. It's just it was just a no-brainer to use it more.

So tell us about AI agents for an AI curious but maybe overwhelmed practice owner. Maybe talk about agents or at least talk about what would be like kind of their workflow that they should start be looking into that you would recommend they automate.

So when I do conversations with people I record everything. Right? And what I do is it's all recorded into this product called Fathom. And so Fathom saves this data in the video and well as a transcript. And so I have an agent that goes onto the Fathom site every day pulls down all the video, all the transcripts. Then that agent will read the video, summarize the video, read the transcript. It'll then save it or put it into a long summary spreadsheet that has all of our videos and has like little summary like has like information about it so that all of my other agents can look at it. And then that agent tells the appropriate agent in different business areas that they have a video they should look at. Right? If it's a follow-up video like I just did something like this morning where it's kind of like a sales kind of like demo or a discovery call, then Gretchen, who's my person who's like my agent I should say agent that pulls this information down, alerts my other agent Chad who's in sales that here's a lead that you need to keep on top of Felix. Right? You need to update the information into the CRM. You need to remind Felix that hey, you need to follow up on anything that was like in the transcript to do. But then if there's an interesting use case, then she actually brings it to my marketing agent who's Jane. And so Jane then will take that information. He's got already a month's worth of posts for LinkedIn that's ready to go. But he looks at the content and he goes, "Oh, okay. Well, we can talk about this. This is a really interesting use case that should be like maybe in the middle of next week." Right? And so he'll insert it in there and then when the time comes, he'll upload it, he'll create the post and it actually goes to my VA and she looks it over, she asks us to create the image and then the agent loads it onto LinkedIn and also to Facebook. And so if you're doing stuff on TikTok, if you're doing stuff on Instagram, everything like that, you can set it up to upload the information so I don't touch anything. In fact, all I do is talk to people, which is exactly what I want to do. And it just gets recorded and then they take it from there. And so as soon as you have the standard operating procedure set up and it's something that you really like and you test it out and you make sure it's trustworthy, then you can set it off and it just runs and you don't have to do anything with it after. It's just automatically posting everyday. Dope.

So, that's awesome. You know, those are things that I don't think a lot of doctors want to get involved in. And having something where you're just repurposing what's already out there. Right. And again, spreading the word of what your practice does, how you can help other people, and what kind of treatments, what you can provide, that really is a game-changer. Like if you're educating your staff on a new procedure or a new service or some new product that you guys are rolling out, all you do is record it. You just record the conversation. It's not like you have to create anything new. The agent will then just take the recording of it and you can have it take the recording and actually transcribe it and then you can build a number of LinkedIn posts to get it out there. Or even things that you want to send to your whole patient base, right? Here's the marketing email that we need to let everybody know that we're doing something new and it could really help your quality of life, right? And so, that's the whole thing is that doesn't require a brand new hire. And the creative part is that the API costs or the token cost can be extremely low. And that's the amazing part. Yeah, yeah, it's been incredible. Now, you can lose a lot of money in different tokens, but if you don't know what you're doing, using the right models can be very cost-effective for it.

And I think I'm not sure if you want to let the cat out of the bag yet, but we've been working together and you're putting up, you know, agents for practices, including my own practice. I don't want to give thing too much weight to it, but talk about how an agent can help with busy practice owners like

Right. So, we want to focus mainly on the non-PHI, so we don't get anybody in trouble with HIPAA, right? So, actually our agents are actually coded to not touch patient information. And so, Mike and I are working on how to go around and do other things. There are ways to use the agents to help with that and we can. The areas though that you first want to work on are like just marketing, right? Getting more patients. How do we increase the amount of overall patients? How do we decrease the amount of no-shows, right? Cuz that's also another big piece of like, okay, the agent can take a look at what you're doing to connect with your patients and just like different kinds of reminders to get them in. And it can actually pull from the best practices of what's in the world, right? And what's most good and then implement it into your company and it can actually train your front office staff to do it, right? How to create the patient journey on your website. How to create a whole funnel system like, "Oh, hey, we got like SEO, right? We got here because I was searching about, oh, hey, I've got some really bad eczema and I was looking out the inner dermatologist that was like the best in the area and your SEO is maybe you don't say the SEO, but because your was amazing, they ended up on your page, right? And then your patient journey asking them questions like creating the funnel so that they are like getting more like, you know, they're answering more and more of their questions without any of your people getting involved yet. And by the time they're done with that journey, they are like, "I'm going to schedule an appointment. I'm coming." And as soon as they schedule that appointment, then afterwards it's like this whole line of pay, okay, so now that you schedule appointment, here's how to get ready. We're going to help educate you. We're just going to stay in touch with you, but it's all in the system. It has nothing to do with your people.

Yeah, it's really interesting too and maybe just as an aside to in terms of your medical practice, I'm looking at some of my numbers now and I'm getting new patients because I'm being referred by ChatGPT cuz they're actually going to my site. So, if your site is not being, I guess, AI-friendly or that you are missing a lot of opportunity. Uh there are people are searching. They're not getting into Google now. Now they're going into ChatGPT and asking, "Hey, who can I go to for my, you know, X treatment or help me with my eczema?" Yeah, so The agents can help you get the content up that you need in order to be seen as that expert, right? So, they can walk you through the whole thing. Yeah, and optimize your sites, you know, for that. So. Yes.

So, we put together something and we might edit this out later depending on the demand, but if there are practice owners who are interested in learning more about how we develop agents or maybe even interested in having an agent into their practice, you have an opportunity for them.

Yeah, two things. One is just to be able to have a conversation, right? To understand what are the real use cases that could really help your practice grow. And be able to create even more teamwork in the practice. Oh, by the way, one thing we didn't talk about, if your people on your team are using the agents, the agents then can actually report all of their work to you without having to give them overhead on doing it. You can build a dashboard and understand where every little project and everything is rolling in the whole organization cuz now the agents are reporting it. You don't need to wait for a person to report it. They're usually not that great at it, right? And so, the agents though, if they're using the agents, the agents will report everything right to you. And so, that's another thing to create better project flow through, making sure that everything's working. And so, for us though, we want to understand your use cases right away. What is like the thing that you can get off your plate right now that you're stuck and it could make a massive change in your revenue of your organization or patient care or the things that are important to you. That would be the first thing. The second thing though, and what we really love is our 7-day demo, our free guided demo. Especially for those people who don't know how to utilize the agents, I'll actually sit and walk you through how to do it, right? And it's so easy. And we will set you up with a number of agents. We can show you how to set create even more agents for different projects that you're working on. And then we'll show you how you can use them right away to start working on some of the biggest challenges that you're having and within a week you've got solutions already. It's out of this world.

All right, that's a very generous offer. Where can they go to find out? Do we have a link or we do we need to create a link?

Oh, yeah. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah, probably. It's a www.konfidently.com. And that's the over of everything that we do with a K at the end k o n f i d e n t l y hopefully there's like a graphic or something that shows up and it'll show you kind of the overview of what we're doing and I would love to be able to just have a conversation with anyone again, there's no strings attached after 7 days you keep whatever you built. If you don't want the agents that's totally fine, but everything that you build during those first 7 days is yours to keep. So Mike and I are huge proponents. You have to get on this. Cuz if you don't the people that are using it are going to just zoom past people that aren't using and you'll see why as soon as you start utilizing them. They're so easy to use.

Yeah, and a lot of times they're not doctors too. So that's influencers and things like that or so it's important as physicians we need to learn these skills or else like you said we could get replaced. So you could just go to konfidently.com ask about the 7-day trial and Felix you'll set them up.

Well, one other thing Mike yeah and if you have somebody on your team that if you already have a team and you have somebody in your team that loves using AI bring them on the call. We're going to include them on the 7-day cuz we know that how busy you are in terms of just working with patients and running the organization. If you have somebody on your team that already leans this way, we can get them up to speed and they can be your champion in your organization to help it go. So it doesn't have to be all on you.

All right, I think you're going to get busy. We're here Mike and you didn't even share but we've had a few physicians go through this already and well you can talk about some of your own success stories already but some of the people you're working with I mean I've been seeing you mention it on your socials.

All right, yeah, so we kind of keep most of the like so things that we have built right? So we have built things for on the market like what we call it Konfidently OS. If you like the way that we created all these agents, we actually can give them to you as part of our service, right? So, if you're using our system, it's part of the system that we're happy to give you how they're all formed, the experts that they're modeled after, and all of the the SOPs and workflows we're already doing. And so, we've implemented it like I have a chiropractor who is just like used the agent to research all the other chiropractors in the city. And in the surrounding number of cities. And so, the next part of it is that now the agent built a whole system to reach out to them to see if they're willing to sell. Cuz he's willing to start buying them, right? So, to help him grow his business, this he wanted the agent to do it. And so, the agent created the whole strategy, the plan, you know, like how to reach out to them first and then continually reaching out to them over the long period of time and automatically doing it so that he doesn't have to do it. Right? So, he's given them an email address within his practice that he can actually send stuff out. And so, there are a lot like we're used to use this, right? And so, he just got that started and so, I'm excited to see and curious to see like what kind of responses he's going to start to get.

All right, that's awesome. Felix, again, tremendous stuff. Always pleasure to talk with you. Any last-minute thoughts before we end the call today?

Yeah, I mean, if you know Mike, I've known Mike now for the last I think what, 3 years now? And the values that you deliver, Mike, is always out of this world. I just want to keep up with, right? So, anything that we can do for you guys, you know, Mike and I, we put ourselves behind it, right? So, we want to make sure that no matter what, that by the time like, you know, you got things up and running that you are super excited and they work. And they're bringing you real value. And I know Mike is all about that stuff. I'm here for that as well.

All right, that's so awesome. So, go to konfidently.com, ask about the trial, and Felix and his team will be sure to reach out to you. Again, guys, thank you so much. Thank you, Felix, for being on the show. And as always, guys, you're going to have your ups and your downs as a physician entrepreneur. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.