Benefits of Employee Training

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Jay Schor, and his sidekick over here, Christian DeVoe, a consultant for Jay. And he goes affectionately by Uncle Jay. And Jay is the founder and CEO of Schor Solutions. Christian is one of his consultants over there. So welcome, Jay and Christian. Thank you very much, and thank you for having me again. Yes. And-

00:28
We’re gonna be talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, the benefits of employee training. That’s one of the things that we do at All Star Dental Academy, and you do this on the medical side. I mean, I read your bio, and if I had to read your bio verbatim, it would be the entire podcast. It’s very impressive. You’ve won multiple years for like top medical consultant, all the places you speak, and…

00:57
you actually speak for weave and some other and dental intel, some others, well not dental intel, but weave and others that are common in our industry. So it’s, it’s nice that we get to share those experiences. So yes, welcome. Actually, for those, it’s been a while since we had you on the podcast, but maybe we can tell us a little bit about about your story of you becoming into medical and also Christian as well. Tell me a little bit about you guys. This is a great story on both sides. So thank you. My name is Jay Schor.

01:27
and I’m the founder and CEO of SureSolutions, and we are an executive coaching, executive practice management consulting company. And we specialize in the operational, administrative, financial health and guidance of aesthetic practices, surgery centers, facial body plastic, and med spas. And how I got into this business is I was a partner in one of the largest dermatology plastic surgery practices here in South Florida.

01:55
until a tragedy happened. That’s a story for another podcast when we’re talking about succession strategy and exit plans. And I had a vision to get into the, as an educator, to get into the consulting business to help medical practitioners start, elevate, and learn how to get out of the business when they no longer want to run a business and they want to sell. So all through these years,

02:23
I got on major faculties. I do teach at Florida Atlantic University in the College of Executive Education in medical business management. I love to teach. And Christian is going to be a partner in Shure Solution starting in January. Christian started as a unpaid intern and then went on to become a marketing assistant and then a business analyst, client success manager. And now he’s spearheading part of my team.

02:52
and will soon become a partner in January of 2025. So I am, Christian and I work very heavy together. We’re on many calls with our clients together and Christian now is gonna be in charge of our HR side, our recruiting and training, and I’m all about the training. Well, that’s a good segue to the topic for sure. The benefits of employee training. So, tell me about it.

03:21
Christian is in Cartagena, Colombia. Oh, yes. And I met Christian at a conference and he helped me as I was in South America and he helped me because I was trying to communicate with somebody and I couldn’t understand what they were saying and he came over and he translated for me and then he says, “‘How do I get to do what you do one day?’ And lo and behold, I said, “‘Well, I’d love to mentor you on a personal,’ and then it ended up being onto a professional side.

03:51
He took the unpaid internship. He left his job and worked with me for a solid year under my tutelage, just training for a solid year before I let him lose it with his own accounts. And the rest is history. He’s become like my adopted family and a partner. That’s an amazing story. It really is. And Jay, you should know better. You’re from South Florida. So you should have a little bit of Spanish there. I can speak a little bit of Spanish. There you go. Just a little bit.

04:20
But this was more elevated. You know, you know the word De Niro. That’s the word we know, right? De Niro. De Niro, yes. So that’s my little south Florida accent. So anyways, it’s great to have you guys. And I think also, Christian, your story definitely highlights the benefits and power of empowering of employee training and those investments that Jay made in you that you took up to be able to become

04:50
a great asset for the business. And I think that sets the stage, obviously, gives us a conclusion, because I know medical practitioners, dental practitioners, I’m gonna start with this, because this is Jay, this is yours, and I mess it up sometimes, but I’m gonna set you up for it. But Uncle Jay has an amazing quote, okay, when it comes to training, because often I’ll get, and you’ll get as well, why should I invest in people if they’re not the right person, if I may let them go one day, which never happens?

05:18
And Jay, what do you say about that? Well, the saying goes, and I have to say I stole it from Steve Jobs. Okay. All right. And somebody said to him, what if I invest all this money in training and they leave? And Steve Jobs looks at him with the Steve Job eyes and says, what if you don’t train them and they stay? And when I heard that, I use that for the rest of my life because it’s so true.

05:48
I don’t hire people to tell them what to do. I hire people to have them tell me what to do. Another Steve Jobs, all right, along with Bill Gates. I mean, I, like you, Alex, I love to listen to the people who’ve been there, done that, and have made successes of themselves. Never gonna get to a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs, but I wanna get to the best that we can be. That’s awesome.

06:18
And that’s why it’s so critical. We don’t know what the potential is of our team. And even if that person that would, you know, it’s probably going to stay, okay, let me get the most out of it. The other thing I think about as well, because of inflation, because of prices going up, because of pay going up, we want to make sure that we’re maximizing the benefit of our, of our team. And by training, you get a higher return on investment.

06:48
out of what you have. So somebody is a lot two out of 10 and then you know, that will be what you’re going to get. We can get a four maybe, right? Uh, we can get more. Okay. Not everybody’s going to be a 10. Okay. Uh, some you can get eight to nine, but the point is you raise your entire team up. Okay. Uh, with respect to that and, and, and, and I guess I’m, again, this is just me riffing here, which is so true. I’ll get right to it, Jay, but like often this happens.

07:18
where you have, we’re always trying to get dentists and on your side, practitioners, to run a business like a business, I think like a business person, but they’ll often run it like a mom and pop. Meaning that I’m gonna try to do everything. I’m gonna hire for myself, which you do hiring, and Jay, by the way, for those who are listening, we have had a hiring service at All-Star, well that’s five, six years. Jay has been the inspiration.

07:45
because he did it, he spoke with myself and our hiring director at the time. She was our, our vice president of coaching and he, he does it very successfully medical. But the thing is what we find is people, dentists, uh, doctors, they’re going to do, do it themselves. They’re going to probably not train, they’re going to hire themselves, but it’s this idea of stepping over dollars to get pennies and it’s okay. As business people, I know Jay, you and I, we talk about it. I.

08:15
I said, why is it that I’ll spend a lot of money on something, but then a little thing I won’t? And your answer was, because you can. Okay, which is kind of cute. Why would you and I mow a lawn? Doesn’t make sense, but it’s something that gives us pride. I get it. But I’ll tell you, one thing I admire about you, Jay, you don’t spare money when it comes to the business. You don’t spare expense doing it well. That’s why you’re very successful with business. What is it about dentists?

08:45
and medical doctors. I know you’re best friends with my father who’s a dentist. So what is it about this mentality and how do we overcome that? Because before we even get the benefits of training, how do we get past this mindset that I don’t want to spend the money, whatever that might be? What’s going on here? Help me through this. Well, I’m going to start it and then I’ll start it and then I’m going to let Christian take it over because we go through the same thing as we speak

09:14
is the doctor. Our client is the NP or PA in those states that allow them to own a medical practice. Having been a former practice owner myself, because in the state of Florida, the corporate practice of medicine exists and I was allowed to be a partner, whereas in some states you’re not. The idea was I always said to the doctor who was my other business partner, the owner, I won’t operate if you don’t negotiate.

09:44
Now, the difference was she was legally allowed to do both. I wasn’t. I always said, for you to do these things that I do, you’re losing $1,000 to $2,000 an hour by you not treating the patient. Why don’t you let somebody that is a professional at what they do, do that for you? For example, the training.

10:13
And therefore, let the physician or the practitioner do what they do best, work in the business, not necessarily on the business, and have good professionals in your office that can handle that. A perfect example, Christian, I’m gonna let you share this, that when we deal with our clients and they don’t wanna spend the money, we have a program, do it with you or do it for you.

10:43
So Christian, why don’t you explain that and share the benefit of having external third party or even employees do it and not the practitioner or the business owner? Absolutely, Jay. I’ll answer. I mean, I’ll talk about that in a second, but I wanted to mention also something you always say, which is a hundred dollars. It’s not a lot of money, but a hundred dollars is a lot of money, right? So you should never be afraid of investing in your business, especially when it comes to HR.

11:13
Now to talk a little bit about what you were saying, Jay, yes, we do give our clients a couple of options. We tell them, hey, we can do it for you. It’s gonna be a different engagement and we can do everything from the beginning to the end. We’re gonna go to the different sites, like Indeed, LinkedIn, Do The Pose, the job description, and then we’re gonna call these people, we’re gonna interview them, and then after we have vet them, we might send you our interviews.

11:39
a recording so that you can see our top candidates and then you can pick and choose the one that you want to proceed with. Then we send them to you, you have an interview with them and then send them back to us to all the paperwork and get them onboarded. And moving forward, we also help them be trained into different capacities that they will do in the business. Something that I also wanted to mention is that when you don’t invest in your people, just because, and I’ve seen this a lot.

12:08
people that are in LinkedIn will probably see a lot of these posts as well. It’s a lot more expensive to hire someone new than to simply, you know, promote and raise the people that you already have. So training is going to help you save a lot of money. And it’s also give your staff, it’s going to give your stuff motivated to stay and more satisfied with their jobs. So Alex brought something up Christian and I’d like you to comment on this. He says,

12:36
And I love the face he gave, I don’t want to spend the money. All right. So we have a term in our business that when somebody says, because it costs a lot of money, what do we say when somebody says it costs to train? What is our favorite line? It doesn’t cost anything. It’s an investment, Jay. No, it’s an investment. Because an investment is something that you get a return out of.

13:06
cost is something that you spend that yields you no return. It’s very, very temporary. It costs me money to run my office, to have the electric and the phones. Yes, I get a service out of it, but when it’s over, it’s over, whereas the expense and the investment that you place in your team will yield you dividends for years to come. I never quite understand. When it comes time,

13:34
to give somebody, whether it’s a merit increase, we can talk about this later, I don’t believe in annual review raises. I only believe in performance raises. You don’t get a raise because you’ve been there another year. You get to keep your job because you’ve been there another year. I give interim performance reviews based upon your training so that it doesn’t necessarily have to correlate to financial remuneration.

14:01
No one ever didn’t know what they were going to get on the report card or transcript when they were in school, right? You knew. So, when it comes time for a performance review when you’re doing training with somebody, the idea of a performance review is strictly to review their performance and share with them what opportunities lie ahead so that when it comes time to do their final, their real performance review, if it’s tied to financial remuneration.

14:29
You’ve given them the opportunity to improve. You know, I don’t believe in knocking somebody, banging somebody by the things they’ve done wrong because it could be our fault by not giving them internal training, not allowing them to do external training. I speak at a dozen conferences a year where I teach. Meaning I just brought my entire team down to Miami Beach for a weekend.

14:58
at the Global Aesthetics Conference, stayed at the Lowe’s, and they had to be eight hours a day in the training rooms to learn different methodologies from different people, giving different trainers the opportunity to share different ways to do it. My way is not the only way. I think it’s a great way. Maybe it’s not the best way. I never stole an idea I didn’t like. I didn’t like, yeah.

15:24
Well, you know, actually let me build on that. And that’s another J is in my love. I never stole an idea. I didn’t like, I know that’s Steve jobs, great artists, steal, right? So one of the corollaries to that, that I heard from Tony Robbins, my mentor, when I worked for him for several years, is model the best. It’s a nicer way of saying steal ideas, right? But model the best. What are the best doing in business? And I’m not looking at dentistry.

15:52
and I’m not looking at medicine unless Jay’s doing it. But typically, a standard practitioner is not gonna be the example. And it’s amazing how successful that dentists and physicians can be without any training. Imagine what they can with. But I’m gonna look at the best in the business, the Fortune 500. I’m gonna look at how they do customer service. Look at Chick-fil-A, which is a fast food company, okay? And the service that they do.

16:18
When you come through the drive-thru, they don’t hand it. They open the doors to hand to you. I went to this place called McAlister’s, it’s a deli. It’s a fast food kinda, and they’re always so pleasant. And this is interesting. There’s two places I go, and Jay, you’ll know where they are because there’s one, there’s a bagel place that’s like a mom and pop type thing, and there’s a chain called McAlister’s. Anyways, the mom and pop, what are they doing? You can’t get certain things.

16:48
Now they’re charging you upsell on the credit card fee. They give you a hard time. Do you not want business? Like they’re giving reasons to leave. This place, they give you a free tea, this. They come around and they ask to take your tray and you don’t pay tip because it’s buy at the counter. So it’s amazing. You would think that the mom and pop would be giving better service, but no, this chain, they’re training.

17:17
And it’s interesting because I watch they have to all be trained. Everyone and they’re watching for customers to make an engagement. They must have been taught that and it’s phenomenal. So it doesn’t mean that you have to be the rich Carlton. That’s the only one that can do that. Even a fast food place is investing in training because they’re not stupid. They’re shareholders. Uh, Chick-fil-A is a huge company. They’re, they’re looking, they know it works. They know what makes money. They’re not stupid. Okay. So,

17:47
We model the best customer service works. And you know what, there’s a side effect. You might feel good about yourself, dentists and physicians. You might feel, you know what, I’m making the world a better place. I’m being kind to people and that feels good too. And guess what? Your pocketbook is gonna get greener when you do it. So, but like uncle Jay said, you have to make that investment and the business people do it. And I’ll tell you Jay, and you’ll agree, all my top dentists and all your top doctors

18:16
They don’t blink to make investments in their team. Now, every dentist and every medical practitioner, they won’t blink to invest in themselves. They love it. Let me go to CE. I have this joke in my dental community with us. We don’t do DDS around me, dull dental stuff. We do business, okay? But they love to do DDS all day long and MD all day long. They’ll invest in that. But that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be…

18:42
making more money doesn’t mean you’ll be happier. It’s good if the cost of doing business, you have to be a great clinician if you’re gonna play this game. But the true success are the ones that are invested in their team. You know, we’re from, Alex and I are from the Miami area. And I use this line, many times people hire because they have an immediate need. In my former practice, I used to get.

19:09
criticized or chastised by colleagues that I was always over staffed. And that was done intentionally. I called it insurance because I would rather be over staffed than struggle. When I have people calling in sick, I have people on vacation, I have people on maternity leave. Now we had 29 staff and most of them were women and there was always somebody pregnant. The beauty of that, that’s a beautiful thing.

19:37
However, it could be disruptive if you don’t have enough of a backup. So there’s an expression that I used when you’re hiring that if you don’t train your team, when you hire just a warm body, you’re always going to be taking the heat. And I say that because of our Miami heat, our basketball team. But you’ve got to invest just like when I hired Christian.

20:07
He didn’t touch a client for almost a year. He was on every call with me. I introduced him as my intern. I introduced him as a future client success manager. I introduced him as someone in training. You know when you go to a restaurant or somebody and there’s the server and there’s somebody that’s like a shadow to the server, you know that they’re in training and that’s okay. We all have to make mistakes.

20:35
We all have to learn the right way to do it. But I never put somebody at the front desk, I never put them in an exam room unless they shadowed somebody to get good training. And then we had available remote training and I always sent the people to professional training classes and I have online training classes. And I gave them, and it was testing too.

21:02
I want to ensure their understanding because sometimes people are afraid to let you know or share with you that they didn’t get it. And in the dental and the medical community, A, it could be very detrimental to the patient or it could be detrimental to the practice with oops, I forgot. Let me give you a perfect example. We have a client that’s an oral maxillofacial surgeon. She’s complaining about a team. Now why?

21:32
Because when it came time to do the service, the staff only billed for five teeth, and she was doing six. That’s only one tooth. One tooth cost $6,000 between the time that it was all said and done. And why? Because the person wasn’t properly trained to have a checklist. The checklist goes from booking the surgery, booking the time in the surgery room,

22:01
Having the anesthesia provider if the dentist doesn’t do it themselves. Having the bright staff in the room making sure you got paid. If you’re putting the person to sleep, did you have medical clearance if you needed medical clearance? Did you have all the instruments that you needed? Sounds silly to all the people working in dental and medical offices. You understand that. But a mistake can cost thousands of dollars that you can’t make up and get back.

22:29
Well, I was going to say, I’m going to ask you a question that’s pretty obvious and is, and either of you can respond. But for dental practice or medical practice, typically, not with All-Star Dental Academy or J-Shore Solutions or whatever, how do people train their office? Let’s just even start with the front office. What typically happens when you hire somebody? There’s a difference in how we hire. If we- When I say hire, nothing to do with you.

22:59
I’m saying the non-interaction, what happens for the prototypical office? You hire somebody to answer the phone. When do they start answering the phone? What day?

23:13
In the in reality in re in reality the day they start that’s right. My I know I’m not going with you I’ll be very clear Very clear. This is not a day. They start all-star or jay solution or solution whatever short solution program I’m saying that the the vast majority Okay, mil hundreds of thousands about millions. They will hire someone and this can be any business any business They hire somebody answer the phone There’s no shadowing

23:42
There’s no systems, shadowing and systems. That’s cool. You could even add another S, triple S. Anyways, so you have shadowing, no shadowing, no systems, you go right there. The Ritz-Carlton we love to talk about, in their policies and procedures, they will not allow somebody to touch the phone without 90 days of phone training. So you’re shadowing, you’re going around, you’re learning before you start to do that because if you start to do some of this math, look at the oral facial, maxillofacial doctor.

24:11
or even a standard dental practice, you’re losing every time you do not convert a phone call or it leads to a broken appointment for a number of reasons. You’re talking thousands of dollars, actually, I think it’s somewhere between six to $10,000 a year for the first year value of a patient. Lifetime values is 10 years. $10,000 times 10 years is 100 grand, meaning that one patient, you would have benefited $50,000 to $100,000 of lifetime value, you’ll never see them again.

24:40
from poor customer service. Not the low referrals that you lost from that patient. And I include that, that’s part of it, yeah. It could be more. You can start getting a multiplication effect. So the point is, what I would demonstrate, my mathematics here, you have the cascade solution, I have the business growth formula. Part of the situation is, when you start doing the math here, one messed up month of poor execution could literally cost you millions in lifetime revenue that you’re not gonna get back.

25:09
because of that. So you say, I don’t have the money or the time to invest in training. I would gladly pay thousands for millions. I don’t know about you. Yeah, Christian, you know, when we engage in that, even in the recruitment process, all right, and then the onboarding and the training, let’s talk about that, the conversion

25:38
How do we get the person that’s either answering the phone or somebody that he can even be a medical slash dental assistant? Everybody’s a salesperson. Everybody. No, that person’s a dental assistant. They’re a medical assistant. They’re not in sales. Yes, they are. Everybody that touches a patient is a salesperson. Let’s talk about our onboarding and the training of even like a conversion cascade.

26:06
And if you can, Christian, share what the purpose of that is. Absolutely. I’ll share that for sure. I also want to just make a quick story. I want to tell a quick story that was related to what Alex was saying. Back before I met you, Jay, I used to work at different call centers. And the first call center that I worked for, they only gave me three, four days of training and it was sales. And then they threw me to the phone and I had no understanding, no complete understanding what the business

26:33
was all about and how we did the things that we did. So I failed miserably. That’s a great intro. And honestly, that was a horrible experience for me. When they fired me, I was happy, because honestly it was like, this was a terrible experience for me. Well imagine the bad experience for you. Imagine the bad experience from all those customers. All the customers. And not necessarily from you, but from other people having to be the recipient of someone not trained. You call a company, it’s usually gonna be these utility companies, like AT&T and Comcast, and you can just tell they’re not trained.

27:02
They’re new. Or credit card company. It’s the first day, right? It sounds like they’re the first day. Really. You know, you think that little of me. And now it’s AI. And AI is not where it needs to be. First of all, it’s also creepy. But you have to deal with the AI. Oh, I did not understand your prompt. Please try again. No, representative. You want to speak with the representative. Yes, we can only blow a bra. Zero, zero, zero. And it still says, please call back later. And it’s like, oh, you know. Come on.

27:31
So, no, really good point there, guys. So- But the training, Christian, talk about- Yeah, I was gonna go there now. So yeah, so that was a big contrast compared to what we do at Azure Solutions, for example, and it is continual training and we start, you know, taking these people and they might not know a whole lot about fun skills. They definitely don’t know a whole lot about a Ritz-Carlton experience and we have to teach them, hey, you gotta use-

27:58
pleasantries, you’re going to make the people on the other end of the phone feel that you’re happy that they’re calling you and that they are not an interruption to your day, right? So you better answer with a smile and you better say thank you and please, and I’ll be happy to assist you. And may I please gather some data and then answer their questions and try to get them the answers to what they need and ask questions to understand what the bottom line is for them. Like what’s the real root cause of why they’re calling. And then once you know that…

28:28
You can use that to your advantage to sell because then you’re going to talk in a way that you’re going to be talking to their pain points. Absolutely. Yeah. What I want to demonstrate here, which is really, really phenomenal for those that are listening, whether you’re listening, you’re a medical practitioner listening, we have some of those on our podcast, but I’m sure Jay will share on his social media and you’re listening here to Jay and how wonderful Jay is. Many of you are working with him. If not, you better. And then our dentists, of course. What I want…

28:55
everybody to watch here is so also the Academy is one of the top training companies in dentistry hands down and I’m not putting this on how great I am if we have a great team great people and that’s important that could be a whole nother discussion about leadership and people and as you can see you you have great people that would build the company they take care of the business my co former office manager

29:19
She said, you know, you take care of your, your, your employees and your team. They’ll take care of the business. So it’s not about me or Jay. It’s about a great team. But what I, and then you have a shore solutions, probably one of the top, if not the top medical consulting coaching companies in the medical field, but I want everybody to see here that you, you have cross the information’s the same. It’s just a different audience.

29:48
And then you go to other consulting firms that earn financial and others. It’s the same thing. So what is nice about that when you listen is you go, oh, you don’t say I’m a periodontist or I’m a plastic surgeon. This doesn’t apply to me. It applies, what we teach with Jay and Christian and myself teach, they’re all the same stuff. But what’s behind it is, yes, some intelligence, good people.

30:16
good mentors and guides to help you. But we are basing this off what’s best in business. Jay being a professor at Florida Atlantic University, this is what the best of the best are doing. This happens to be the field. So I think this is a great case study for everyone listening to see it’s the same. And so you get that recognition to say, well, I’m gonna model or as Uncle Jay says, steal it, you’re welcome to, do what the best are doing.

30:45
and you’ll get what the best are getting. If you do what everybody else is doing, you get what everybody else is getting and you don’t want that. You want what the best are doing. So I’m gonna stop this podcast here because we can spend hours. You guys are just amazing. And definitely check out the last episode I did with Jay. I think we were doing more on HR and hiring. This was amazing, the benefits of employee training. Christian, thank you so much. Jay, thank you so much as well for being on the program.

31:15
And remember to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, get the episodes as they are released, share with your friends. And Uncle Jason’s I have to smile. He’s loyal. I’m not going to smile. I’ll try. Anyways, until next time, go out there and be an all star.