Alex Nottingham, JD, MBA emphasizes training’s 82% retention boost. Consistent, comprehensive learning leads to lasting practice success.
Resources:
- Dental Practice Growth Webinar
- All-Star Live Dental Training Events
- Dental Coaching
- All-Star Online Training
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. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. Let’s talk about how to train like the Fortune 500. Now, remember, Heather worked for one of these Fortune 500 companies in the Federated, which owned Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and so on, and they have systems for everything. And when she initially worked for my father’s office.
00:30
She was shocked. There was no training. And to illustrate the importance of this, the Ritz-Carlton will not allow employees to touch the phone without 90 days of phone training. And if you went to the webinar, alls slash webinar, and you saw where I talk about phone skills and how much it costs you, you’ll see why it’s wise and why the Ritz-Carlton is training before anybody touches the phone. So important.
00:57
What we see in the statistics is onboarding. If you’re onboarding your team, new employees, you’re gonna see employee retention improve by 82%. And employees expect to be trained. 60% of them feel that they will learn the skills they need on the job. So that’s onboarding. Then we have comprehensive training. This is how you get your competitive advantage. This is where you’re training ongoing, little by little.
01:25
So what should you look for in training your team on customer service and practice management skills? First, you want structured coursework and testing. An easy way to do this is e-learning online. The second is you want study guides and action plans that show you how to do it, how to implement what you are learning. You want to evaluate phone calls to see the feedback on what are you training and is it translating to what’s actually happening with patients.
01:53
and you want some sort of accountability. The key to success that we teach here at All-Star is 20 minutes a week of coursework every week. No skipping, no excuses. Don’t do more than that, but don’t do less than that. It’s the consistency that’s key. And we all heard the story about the tortoise and the hare. And we know the tortoise won the race between the hare. Even though the hare is much faster, the hare got distracted and the…
02:20
the tortoise was slow and steady and won the race. I was a study skill specialist in college, and I ended up graduating summa cum laude 4.0 GPA. And many people said, oh, it’s because you’re smart. Well, I like to think that’s part of it, but really it was I knew how to study. And the trick was little by little, I never crammed. And so I was always ready to go. It was little by little, same thing with the tortoise and the hare, and the same thing is true with your dental practice, train little by little.
02:49
And there’s many opportunities to train. You have huddles, you have weekly meetings, you have monthly events you could do individually at the office or at home. And there’s feedback mechanisms that you can use. Quizzes and exams, certifications, phone call evaluations, coaching. Now I wanna point something out to you to be very careful of. And these are the mystery calls. And some of you may experience this or not where a stranger calls your office or worse, you’re paying somebody to do that.
03:19
and they’re calling your office and they are using some sort of gotcha script to get your team to mess up and they give you a failing score. I don’t like these because they’re not real and they’re often used to promote sales training or make your team feel bad. Instead, record your phone calls, evaluate real phone calls, and use a service-based philosophy, not a sales-based philosophy. Now, when you start training…
03:47
It takes four units of energy to start a project, according to Brian Tracy’s research. But it only takes one unit of energy to keep it going. So the problem is we often start and stop training. And so there’s not this consistency, and it takes more work and more time or more money to get it going. But the point is once you start onboarding and you get it going, keep it going. That’s where the comprehensive training, little by little, helps.
04:14
When I worked for Tony Robbins, we saw this training effect happen, where when you train people, skill will improve, but it will sharply decline. Some skill will remain. So you have to keep training to see that skill continue in order for continuous growth. And so the premise of this entire discussion is onboarding and ongoing comprehensive training is your key to long lasting practice success.
04:42
And I would say probably the number one lesson I learned from Tony Robbins was this idea of modeling. What are the best doing? So what are the best in dentistry doing? Well, the best dentists, they’re committed to patient service. They have a business that works for them. They hire the best team members. They invest in training for their team and themselves, and they’re open-minded and humble. The best team members, committed to patient service, take initiative, love learning, and love feedback.
05:11
So now how do we implement all these things that we’re learning? Well, I’ll tell you. Go to alls backslash webinar. And in that webinar, I tell you how to implement phone training, how to reduce turnover, how to be more efficient and effective in your practice. So check it out, alls slash webinar. And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.
05:40
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacadmy.com
