Alex Nottingham emphasizes training as a crucial step to achieving an All-Star practice. Elevate your team and excel in dentistry!
Resources:
- All-Star Live Dental Training Events
- Dental Coaching
- All-Star Online Training
- Dental Practice Growth Webinar
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
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. Here’s your host, Alex Nottingham. Let’s talk about how to train like an All-Star. This is the third step in the five steps to an All-Star practice. We talked about vision, your team, and now we’re talking about training, how to train like an All-Star. Just to recap, vision. In our first episode, we spoke about your vision.
00:29
So your vision outlines your aspirations, your goals, and the way you express yourself and your purpose to the world. And with your vision, you wanna make sure that you run every decision you make through your vision. Write it down and tell the world. And then when it came to training in our second episode, we talked about the four elements of a great team member. They’re committed to patient service, they take initiative, they love learning, and they love feedback.
00:57
the team must match your values or they bring down the entire team. And lastly, we talked about the five steps to all-star hiring. Just a quick summary of that process. When it comes to training your team and training your team, like an all-star, the first element is onboarding. So this is where when you bring in a new employee in the first 90 days, you want to have a maximum impact. And with respect to onboarding, the different types of onboarding or different
01:26
modalities. So it’s going to be the position if you have an assistant or hygienist, and then it’s just in general customer service onboarding. But you want to have it systematically available to you whenever you bring on a new employee. It’s very interesting in the research, employee retention improves by 82% if you have a clear onboarding process, because typically when you bring somebody on, it’s just start working, figure it out. But the more
01:56
systematized you are, where you bring in a new employee, they know exactly what to do for that position, it’s a higher likelihood they will succeed, feel good about the business, and you’ll retain them. Now, employee expectations, 60% feel or expect that they will learn the skills they need on the job. So it’s important that you have these already lined up for them when they come to work for you. So that’s onboarding in a nutshell.
02:25
The next element is comprehensive training. So now that you got your team up to speed within 90 days, we are looking to maintain our competitive advantage, and that’s comprehensive training, where we’re training little by little on customer service skills or clinical skills over the lifetime of that employee. One of the questions that I often get is, well, what if I have the wrong team? Then I shouldn’t train, right?
02:54
I should wait till I have the right team. I love this quote and really think this through. What happens if we train people and they leave? That’s the concern. Why train them and they leave? What happens if we don’t train them and they stay? And I’m going to read this again because it’s so important. What happens if we train people and they leave? What happens if we don’t train and they stay?
03:23
And the point of this is we got to be always training regardless. But if we’re always training, we have a constant baseline. And if that team member may leave us again, we don’t know when, at least they are trained and we’re getting the most out of them while we have them. So once you finish onboarding, then you’re on cruise control. If we’re not consistently training, especially on customer service skills,
03:50
then we’re gonna backtrack. We’re gonna go back to the way we normally do things, which isn’t always ideal. So the key is 20 minutes a week of training and sticking with it. No skipping, no excuses. And I liken this to the story of the tortoise versus the hare. There was a race between that fast hare, that rabbit, and the slow tortoise. At the end of the race,
04:18
the tortoise wins because it stayed the course, whereas the hare kept going back and forth and all over the place, they got distracted. When I was working for Tony Robbins, we had this concept that we saw and trained called the training effect. And what we would see is when we trained, there would be a skill improvement, but what would happen is it would drop. It would drop very quickly. So we had to keep training so we maintain some permanent skill.
04:46
but there’s gonna be this atrophy to go down. But as we continuously train, we can push up the skill and some permanent change will occur. So we have to realize that entropy is working against us. So we gotta keep injecting energy to improve our training results. Onboarding and ongoing comprehensive training is the pinnacle of all practice success.
05:15
If you can maintain that, onboard your team for quick success, and then consistently train around 20 minutes a week. And I wouldn’t do much more than that. You can do 20, 30 minutes, but then you can talk about it. But we’re busy. We got to get keep working. But the problem is we’re going to forget many of the things that we learn if we try to cram it all in. I remember when I was in college, I was a study skill specialist and I taught people how to study. And.
05:44
Everyone thought I was so smart because I got straight A’s and I never would study, but that’s not true. I did study. I never crammed. I did little by little, and so I knew that allowed me maximum retention. If you’d like to learn more about our online training program, feel free to visit our website at allstardentalacademy.com or you can reach out to us. In addition, if you haven’t had a chance yet, check out our webinar, Dental Practice Excellence.
06:10
We teach you a lot of free tips on phone skills and scheduling and implementation. And you can visit that webinar at allstardentalacademy.com slash free dash training. Remember to follow, subscribe, like, comment and share. And until next time, go out there and be an All Star.
