Streamlining Practice Systems & Operations
Sarah Hoang started off as the office manager of Cornerstone Christian Counseling in Denver, CO in 2018, eventually becoming their Director of Operations, and now leading as their Managing Director.
Sarah knows what it’s like to regularly hire new team members, scale HR and administration, and lead 70+ clinicians and staff towards reaching operational goals.
As she put it to start, “When you work at a small business, doing administrative work generally means you wear a lot of hats at once.”
In the earliest days of their counseling center, Sarah and one of the co-founders “owned most of [the operational] roles, but as [they] grew in size, [they] would always get to the point where [they’d] find [themselves] stretched on capacity and time.”
Their team had to become super “familiar with with those tension points, knowing when the hat got too tight, the work had expanded beyond one person, and it was time for those [responsibilities] to become a separately hired role.”
At those points, Sarah shares that “it's a good idea to investigate what your options are for delegating job duties that could be departmentalized.”
Their ability to effectively change and form departments when necessary has been rooted in Communication and Humility.
As she puts it, “our successes and failures revealed to us the 3 most powerful things you can do to support your team through any big change:
Make a Change Management Plan
Over-Communicate at every step
And keep your Values at the forefront (which takes some guts if it means changing the plan or admitting it's no longer the best idea!)
One big part of changing and scaling revolves around the adoption of core systems and technology.
At Cornerstone, here are a few ways they have maintained high-quality systems:
Running yearly audits to evaluate every internal tool and system
Having a process for internal feedback & enhancement request
Establishing a think-tank of director-level employees that provide insight into any system problems
Performing semiannual research on all new tools to see if there's anything better that’s missing or that could integrate into current systems
