Have you heard that there's two types of associates that you can hire? There's the passive associate and there's the active associate. The passive associate is more that person that's coming in to be part of the clinical staff.

They're going to work with the staff and they don't really have any type of leadership. Certainly not a management role. Generally, you've got a strong office manager or another doctor who is in charge of them.

They want to be able to use the clinical skills they've got. They want to improve and work with both the patients and the staff on improvements.

It's not that the active associate wouldn't want to do that as well.

An active associate is somebody who's more focused on a leadership role. They want to be a little bit more in charge. They're probably going to be a little bit more about money, and then somewhere down the road, that they're probably going want to own a practice.

But with the active, there's a huge advantage in the fact of you're going to get a lot of high production out of them. Again, the biggest problem is that they're probably going to want to leave soon.

My suggestion is how do you get the best three years out of them?

Can get three years out of them? Can you help them, teach them leadership skills, business acumen, and get them prepared for when they want to practice one day?

What we see is once they're making the money they want to, and they've got a team they like, and they're consistently getting the types of patients that they want, and life feels comfortable... It's hard for them to leave to go do their own thing.

You might get a high producer that does end up staying. With the passive associate, the challenge is they're probably not going to be as high a producer. It's not that they can't be. It's that they're really focused more on the technical parts of their job and being a good employee.