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About Heather Nottingham
Heather is the VP of Training & Phone Skills Instructor at All-Star Dental Academy. She is a former retail sales trainer and manager for Bloomingdale’s, Kate Spade, and Theory, and a top new patient coordinator for a multi-million-dollar high-end dental practice where she personally increased revenue by over a million dollars in less than 18 months. She has over 24 years worth of customer service, training, and phone experience, and designed the All-Star Dental Academy Phone Success Course as well as the GREAT Call® Process.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hi, everybody. Heather Nottingham here, VP of Training and co-founder of All-Star Dental Academy. And today I wanted to talk a little bit about hiring and trying to do it yourself. So do it yourself. I was just joking with my husband, Alex, our CEO.
00:28
and he can be frugal. He, a lot of times when there’s something around the house that needs to be fixed, he’ll say, oh, I don’t wanna spend the money, I’ll just do it myself. And so he’ll do it, and then something else ends up breaking or whatever, and just like when people try and do it themselves with dentistry and different things, it doesn’t usually work out really well. And so with…
00:54
This with hiring, a lot of times, because we do have a hiring service at All-Stars, very popular. We service the entire United States and we can help you find pretty much any type of team member, admin, clinical, hygiene. And a lot of times I’ll talk to people and they love the concept of the hiring service, but there are sometimes people that don’t move forward. And when I reach out to them and say, what’s going on? They’re like, well.
01:22
I just want to try and like do it myself first or have one of my team members do it or my office manager. And usually that’s the same thing that they’ve been trying to do for probably the past like six months or a year. So one of the reasons the whole hiring service started is one of our local dentists here in our local area needed help finding some team members. And he said to me, he called me up personally and said,
01:50
you know, I’m having a really tough time finding a hygienist. And this was like five or six years ago, way before COVID happened. And it was still tough during then to find people. And he said to me, I can’t find a hygienist. And I tried on my own. I found somebody. And then a few weeks later, that person didn’t work out. And then they relocated somewhere else in the country. And then I found somebody else. And that person didn’t work out because it was a terrible match.
02:18
uh, culture fit for the practice, meaning the person did not get along with the other team members. And he said to me, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t like doing this. I like being in the chair with the patient doing dentistry. That’s what I’m good at doing. That’s where I make my money. And I didn’t go to dental school to hire people. That’s not what I was trained for. And so
02:45
And he said that my team also doesn’t have the time to be doing these things as well. It’s not in there, then it takes time away from them being able to help the patient. And so for us, this is what we do, this is what we specialize in. And so I say to many of you that, yes, you can try and do it on your own, but why would you try and do something on your own that you don’t like, that you’re not good at, and that your team probably isn’t good at and doesn’t like either?
03:15
Right? So like, yes, you would pay us to do the hiring service, but we know what we’re doing. We’re very fast to respond. The, you know, the one biggest number one complaint that I’ll tell you that we hear from potential candidates every single time we talk to them for different positions is I’m interviewing with a whole bunch of practices. And I love the fact that your hiring service gets back to
03:44
candidates very quickly and you’re very organized. Most dental offices, from what I hear, they take forever to get back to people. It’s either the doctor that’s trying to respond to potential candidates like after hours or on weekends or when they’re not doing dentistry. So that’s not good, that’s not fast enough. Or you have a team member that’s kind of like, ugh.
04:08
You know, I have all this other stuff I have to do. I’m managing the office or I’m running, answering the phones. And now there’s this potential candidate. Well, I’ll get to them later. And then what happens is the good people that are potentially interviewing at multiple practices are gone because, you know, you waited too long to get back to them. And so for us, we are super quick to respond and we like doing it. We know what we’re doing.
04:37
And so, you know, I always say to dentists, let us take that off of your hands, off of your plate, so that we can do it and you can get back to doing what you love, which is dentistry. So something to keep in mind is you have to consider when you’re doing hiring, do you like doing it? Do you wanna do it? Is it worth your time? Is it worth your team’s time? Are you gonna do it well? And if not, then it’s better to
05:06
to outsource it to somebody else. Doesn’t have to be us, but outsource it to somebody. So something to consider. Until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.
05:20
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com.
