Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Hey, welcome to another episode of Marketing Chairside. We’re here to make sure that we get you the latest and greatest in marketing. And today is more actually about business. You can do all the marketing in the world, but if you’ve got problems on the inside of your business, then all that marketing is going to fizzle. And to solve that problem with today, I’ve got Matthew Norton on the episode. Hi Matthew, how you doing?

Matthew Norton:
Hello, Jonathan. I’m doing great. Thank you.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Thanks for being here. As I said in the intro, I have a problem that comes up periodically. I won’t say frequently, but to different degrees, of course, where we have clients who we bring on board, we turn their marketing around and they see an improvement. They can see by the numbers things are better, but occasionally they still find themselves with holes in their schedule. And it’s because we see in the data, the phone’s not being answered or that the person answering the phone isn’t getting people scheduled, or they’re saying, “People just don’t say yes to treatment,” and all of these things. And back of my mind, I’m thinking, gosh, the marketing’s never going to solve these problems, but you and People + Purpose, that’s what you do, is that you help the doctors understand themselves. You help the team understand themselves and start turning some of these issues around. Isn’t that right?

Matthew Norton:
Yep. That’s right. I tell people all the time that your people are your greatest business asset. And I think they often get overlooked while we’re reaching out to get more patients or to serve those patients. I typically find that doctors are under serving, under appreciating their teams. So yes, it’s very important that if you take people out of the equation where, as in COVID, we realize how important people actually are.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. And so some of the problems that I’m aware of that don’t don’t necessarily come up during our fulfillment of the marketing side of things but we do hear about turnover. They’re like, “Oh, I’m sorry. We’re so slammed. We can’t even get on the phone with you because we lost so-and-so and we’re hiring again. And she was only with us for three weeks and here we are back again. So I’m so sorry. I haven’t gotten back to.” We hear that all the time and just the hiring process where they feel like they’ve screened people, but then they still have this turnover again and again.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And then, of course, the dentists, they feel like I have all these people relying on me and I don’t know how to lead them, I don’t feel like an inspirational leader. And so I don’t know how to really do that. I certainly relate. I spend a lot of my time in leadership books because I want to grow in that area. I want to be an inspiration to really everyone I talk to, but that that can be a struggle. And I’ve heard multiple times from dentists and dental speakers, “I went to dental school and I’m an excellent dentist, but no one told me I’d be running a business.”

Matthew Norton:
I work with a lot of people who are genius smart and incredibly technically skilled, but you’re right, business was under taught, but I think sometimes even more so than that is the leadership element, we’re not taught to be leaders of people. And that comes up over and over because if I’m going to be a business owner, then I’m going to need to be a leader of people, at least to some degree, or I’m going to need to get somebody on my team who can help me be a leader of people. And then I need to be able to recognize the strengths that people have, that they could fit into that role. So you mentioned about hiring. So hiring is the beginning of a dating relationship. Who should I hire? And I try to help people realize that they’re hiring both for success in the role and also for the team. Who is the existing team and who am I as the leader?

Matthew Norton:
So I really feel like it’s important that “Leader, know thyself.” Because we need to see who we are and we also need to see how our own, the lenses that we’re looking through at other people are colored by who we are. So the more we can know us, the easier it is to know other people, and it should be strengths-based. If we follow Gallup’s research from their state of the global workplace, we want to have a strengths-based workplace. And so if anything we can do to help clarify strengths, and as we talked before the show about assessments, that the assessments that I use are assessments from across four different key dimensions to help clarify what are the strengths of this person and how do they fit for the strengths we’ve benchmarked for success in the role?

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yeah, the leadership that can be more effective when you understand the people that you’re working with, I can see that being so critical. You mentioned that 70%… Not you mentioned, but as I was devouring the material that you have, I think I saw one of your videos, 70% of employee engagement is tied to leadership, according to a Gallup study. 70%. [crosstalk 00:06:09] Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Matthew Norton:
I was just going to say, yes the doctors often think they hire me first either because they realize they need to do something more intentional and effective in their hiring world, that the turnover is too high, or the toleration is too high. Some doctors tell me, “I don’t have high turnover,” but they may have high toleration instead, because it wasn’t a good fit, that there needed to be something more intentional there. But where else were you going with that? You started to saying something else.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I guess I just wanted to know what are these doctors feeling and thinking when they come to you initially? Because just all these problems to me seem like someone’s going to be pretty miserable when they get to you.

Matthew Norton:
Yeah. Usually a lot of stress. Most of the doctors, when I begin to talk with them, they’re working very hard. They have very little spare time. In fact, sometimes the objection is I’m not sure I’m going to have time even to a lot to this. And this seems like soft skills stuff, compared to the hard skills, so to speak, that might be calling for their attention. But soft skills are really people skills. And if we’re back to people being your most important business asset, then mastering some of those people skills is a really powerful way to unleash greater wealth in the practice. Almost everybody is looking for optimizing profitability and optimizing the use of their time to generate profitability. So, the more we can equip a team to serve alongside of us, then that’s going to go a long ways in being able to accomplish that. One of the assessments is Emotional Agility and the research is powerful on what the financial benefits are to that practice, elevating the Emotional Agility of the leader and the team, even a small amount, it changes productivity. It changes profitability.

Matthew Norton:
And the rest of the assessments are really telling us where are people going to be engaged. You mentioned that the engagement changes, so why do people leave a practice or why are people uninspired and being tolerated? Because they’re not engaged. They’re not passionate about that. Gallup says that about 30% of workers worldwide are actually engaged in the work they’re doing. And as you mentioned, yes, it is the owner, leader, manager, whoever’s in that role that has the greatest responsibility to turn that around. But if we can get to know the people a bit more, where is their inspiration? So one of the assessments on inspiration sources says of these seven primary different inspiration sources, what really matters to these people? If I want them to embrace a change or a new initiative, or I want them to step up their performance in a certain way, then I need to learn to speak to their inspiration sources, why that even matters in the first place that they’re there.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yeah. Well, I know you have a lot of experience with this and you work with all sorts of businesses, but you said about 85% of your clientele are dental offices. I’ve had a dental consultant tell me to my face about one of my clients, “so-and-so is a great dentist, but they’re a hot mess and you’re never going to see a turnaround in their practice.” And that’s from a dental consultant. I’m thinking, holy cow, that person needs some other insight. And I see that as a benefit of you, you’ve been in business 35 years, 13 years of that doing coaching and training. And so I see you as a definite asset for these dentists. And I know that your process is to ideally first have a conversation with the dentist. What does that look like?

Matthew Norton:
Basically, I want to find out where their current challenges are. Where are they going, first of all? I to use the Wizard of Oz metaphor to say, “Okay, where is the Emerald City for you?” Do you know where you’re going? And do you know why that even matters to you? Because sometimes people have something that they’ve stated as to where they’re going, but it really isn’t compelling enough for them, they just pick that up somewhere along the line because they thought that’s what they should be valuing. And so I help people get clearer on that. So I need to know what they’re thinking first and foremost, what they’re feeling, where are the stresses, what’s the current people status that they have? Do they have office managers, other leaders other than themselves?

Matthew Norton:
What is their team like? How do they feel about their team? What can I learn about the level of engagement and productivity? How inspired is everyone and what are their plans for next? Are they planning on growing? Are they planning on making changes? Do they have people issues? Do they have system process issues, what’s next for a breakthrough for them? So if I can begin to glean that, and then we can look at doing some initial assessments, even just for the doctor as a starting place. So I can begin to know more about who they are and then speak to the integration of what they’ve told me in our conversation, as well as what they’ve told me about themselves subconsciously through the assessments.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
So that initial, I think you call it a discovery call. What’s the time and financial investment required for the dentist to do that?

Matthew Norton:
We do a 20 minute discovery call initially at no cost. So if doctors are open to explore this and in 20 minutes I can get a pretty strong indication as to what the needs are and then we could talk about what was possible from there.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Gotcha. And then I know the second step is assessments and you’ve mentioned the different types of assessments that you have. I personally filled out the Emotional Agility quick assessment and that was really an interesting… It made me think I’m hovering over a very accurate, very inaccurate, I’m trying not to click the middle just because it’s in the middle. There is some hard questions in that, but can you tell us a little bit about the assessments that you offer and what those address within the practice?

Matthew Norton:
Yeah, they’re strengths-based. So again, back to Gallup again. Not that Gallup is the Bible, but Gallup has done massive amounts of research looking at this. And so they find that if you want engagement, you want productivity in the workplace, then you want to have a strengths-based workplace and to have a strengths-based workplace you have to have a means of understanding their strengths beyond I’ve had experience doing this, I’ve done this before. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a strength. So for three of those core four assessments, the inspiration sources, the action approach, which is more of a behavioral, how do you do things relative to tasks and people. Or the cognitive styles, how do you most naturally think. Those are not scores like I want to get my score higher. Those are where the assessment taker is comparing and contrasting, I’m more this than that, more this than that, because there’s no right answer.

Matthew Norton:
We just want to know how does each person most naturally think, where are they thriving? Where is their thriving area? And that’s where we want them working. That’s why we want to hire them. We don’t focus on improving the weaknesses. We focus on optimizing and deploying the strengths. And if everybody’s doing that and we reshuffle as much as we can for when a role might require a certain thing and the person in that role isn’t a perfect fit for that element, who else maybe could do that? It might be a great fit overall, but not that piece. We can usually be more personalized in our approach if there somebody else there who might thrive with that more. So we’re looking at that. It’s strengths-based. That also not only helps guide hiring initially for role in team, but also for personalized development.

Matthew Norton:
So a lot of times people will use assessment, an assessment of some sort, usually not thorough enough, usually not multi-dimensional, but some tool to make a quick hiring decision. But then it’s either that, or it’s a one-off team building exercise around assessments. What I’m interested in doing with people is helping them build a framework and a language into their culture to where everybody on the team knows the strengths of each other, can begin to speak to each other in those strengths and have reasonable expectations. Most relationships, whether personal or business, fail or fall short because of unreasonable expectations, because I thought you were going to be this or do that and the truth is they were never going to be that and we just didn’t…

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yeah. You’re not going to change them.

Matthew Norton:
No. And you don’t even want to, you want the best version of them. Just to say one more thing real quick, the only one that we actually care about improving is the one you took, you took the short version of it, but it’s a very nice report in the full version, looking at five different elements of Emotional Agility. That one, if people will answer honestly, with a bit of reflection, then that is one of the greatest areas for growth potential for the doctor and for everybody else on the team. And that when I provide training to help people improve their Emotional Agility, that will help people work better with people who are not like them.

Matthew Norton:
People with low Emotional Agility do pretty well with people who are very much like them. They don’t thrive. They don’t engage optimally, more stress and drama gets created when they’re trying to engage with people who are very different from them. So we need different. We need a team of complimentary different people, but just like in marriage, people often marry somebody who’s quite different than them. It was part of the attraction, but over time I don’t know what to do with these things and now you’re irritating me more than you are being a compliment to me. So we need skills that [crosstalk 00:17:13] on how to do that.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. And so with these assessments, the doctor and team get to know themselves better, you get to know them, where do you go from there?

Matthew Norton:
So then depending upon what the state of the practice is, where are we in our journey down that yellow brick road from where we started to what we see is the biggest desired outcome, where are we? Where are some blockages? What are the people that are involved? What’s unoptimized? Where are the unoptimized assets and resources here, or where are the stress challenges? So then we can begin. The doctors have the opportunity to work with me on a personal coaching basis. I will coach the doctor themselves. I will coach whole teams. I will coach just the leaders and we trade this around with some clients to where there’s some of each, so that we’re moving everybody down the road to next with whatever comes up. So once we’ve isolated, know where they’re going, who they are, where the challenges are, then I can use the assessments as a guide for personalizing a journey, as opposed to some one size fits all coaching approach which doesn’t work any more than a one-size dental approach works for every patient.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. And so the starting point to all that, the best approach anyway, is to schedule a call with you. Which I saw on your website. You just let people drop into your schedule, that’s bold. But if they’re not ready to do that, then the other thing that you offer is a hiring blueprint to help them assess where the problems might be in their hiring. Can you tell us more about that?

Matthew Norton:
Yeah, it’s called a foolproof hiring blueprint and it really looks at seven different key elements that may be causing them to lose a lot of money. The research shows anywhere from low end of $114,000 of cost for a bad hire, all the way up to 240,000, depending upon the role. And so when we get to bigger practices where they’ve got people in more leadership managerial roles, or a bit more of a C-suite role, then it becomes incredibly expensive when you make the wrong choice. So I try to help people in that, give them insights for free so that they can be better equipped, better informed, but it also sets the tone for how they can look through the lens of the hiring to see what’s the rest of the journey maybe going to be like, and how do I make the best of that. So I see it being beneficial throughout the whole course of a relationship with anybody in the practice.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Yeah. I’ve downloaded that and read through it, and I read that $114,000, but when you say it out loud, I’m like, “I can’t afford to make these kinds of mistakes.”

Matthew Norton:
Doctors will tell me I don’t have time to be more intentional about my hiring. And they’ll also tell me, here’s another quick point, they’ll tell me that I need to just hire the next person that’s breathing because there aren’t enough people to choose from. Valid point, especially in our current times, which means of whoever is available we might want to not compete transactionally. If we can lead with the culture and what the mission is and what we’re trying to accomplish here, then we can attract better candidates in the first place. But also if we can engage them and have them be fulfilled such that they never want to leave, which if you have these assessments and have some insight as to how to apply them, the people will never want to leave. And if they never want to leave, you save an incredible amount of money.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Wow. I’m looking at this, 40% fewer technical errors, 28% less employee theft, 17% higher productivity. I mean the scales tip radically here when you’ve got the right people on the team, that’s just…

Matthew Norton:
As we talked about earlier, 59% lower turnover, but it’s lower turnover without having to just keep people and tolerate them and keep your turnover low. We want highly engaged people, not just people who are staying because they’re too afraid to leave. That’s not what we’re looking for.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And so if they are moving forward with these things and seeing results with you, what are some of the transformations that you see in dental practices? What’s the outcome for the people who are really diligent with this and like you said, are honest with themselves and are really willing to invest the time in this most valuable resource in their practice?

Matthew Norton:
Well, we’re going to have a leader, an owner who actually is being more profitable, is less stressed because there’s less drama going on all the time. I can focus on my technical skills and over time, as I become a better leader, I can develop people around me who can take on more of those supporting skill delivery roles that make my life easier, make me to where I can focus on what I need to be doing and not everything else. But sometimes in that growth journey, the doctor does need to step up for a while at another level with intent on these things so that they can get liberated with that. But they’re going to be much more likely to hit their production goals, they’re going to be much more likely to get to where they could be in a place of the value of the practice for selling.

Matthew Norton:
You don’t want to look past the people like they’re just pawns on a chess board. As you’re trying to increase the valuation of your practice, the people are going to help you increase that valuation and the systems and processes, including how to work and develop their strengths is going to be a key part of that. But you’re going to have a team that’s going to be happy. A team that is excited to be on this journey with you, to where they’re not talking behind people’s backs. I help people with their understanding, communication and collaboration skills. So much of it is a communication and conflict resolution problem across different people who don’t understand each other and don’t know how to approach each other for a resolution. So I will help anybody in the practice overcome that.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And now let’s say I’m one of those people that just can’t push myself or chooses not to push myself to solve some of these issues, I’ve heard you use the word tolerate a lot, and you I’m thinking of one of my dentists who’s just tolerated this same person in their practice for years and years. Can we tolerate our way to success? What are some of the issues that we’re going to see if the doctor watching this doesn’t make a change?

Matthew Norton:
There are some people who are maybe a bit more intuitively good at some of these things and can achieve even a reasonable level of success without engaging any of this. That’s not the majority, but there are some. But I think that there’s erosional effects that are continually going on. It will erode the health and wellbeing of the doctor as their bandwidth for handling all this begins to narrow down over the years, some begin to develop health issues and start overeating and personal relationships, the relationship with their spouse and kids, if they have those, becomes more difficult and compromised.

Matthew Norton:
I mean, the things that are often that they would say are most important, which is part of my dare to dream process that I’ve put them through, is I have them get clear on what are the things that really matter absolutely the most. And then they’ll have a dawning awareness that I’m sacrificing those things on the alter of just working hard to try to get somewhere, but they haven’t even clarified fully where they’re working hard to get. So it’s really doctors chasing their tails around and some of them very early on are trying to figure out how to retire and get out of the whole thing anyway. They’re not loving the journey and that’s not a good way to live.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
I mean, I’ve heard of some, “I want to go speak and talk about how to have a successful practice,” and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, but I know your practice and you got a lot of issues.

Matthew Norton:
Yeah, it looks easier sometimes just to get out and go do something else.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Right. Wow.

Matthew Norton:
Maybe that is a better fit to go do something else. And there are times where we clarify that people need some more significant changes, depending on where they are in their career. It’s never too late to be more fulfilled and to be happier. And if people are deferring happiness until some later date of accomplishment, it’s unlikely to ever occur.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Well, I know that, or at least I don’t think you have a degree in counseling, but it sounds like that’s what you end up doing. Sometimes that’s what we need, is a another person to talk to who doesn’t have any other tie to us that’s going to be objective. So I appreciate you being that for people. I certainly hope that my clients reach out to you and anyone else watching this. I just believe so much in what you’re saying, that the people are your most valuable asset in your dental practice and my business. And so thank you for helping us invest in that. Thank you for your time today. I may be in touch. But where do people go to reach out to you?

Matthew Norton:
So they can go to peoplepluspurpose.com and there’s a contact place on there. They can go to peoplepluspurpose.com/hiringblueprint and get the free blueprint. They can go on the homepage there and set up a free 20 minute call. So, there’s different options there, but would love to engage. I also have a Facebook group called The Exceptional Leaders-Thriving Teams Network. So if they’re interested in coming there, there’s a lot of other people in the dental world, including other dental coaches, et cetera, that are a part of that group. And we’d love to have you there as well.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
Fantastic. Well, peoplepluspurpose.com. I’ve got it in front of me, so I’m not going to go there again, but I’m going to continue to devour everything that you put out. Matthew, thanks again for your time.

Matthew Norton:
Thank you Jonathan, I appreciate the opportunity.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:
And thanks to you, the viewer, for spending time with us. Please like, subscribe, click the little heart symbol thingy, do whatever you can to get the word out. Our mission is to help more people stop wasting time and money on marketing that doesn’t work and to better know what they’re doing to make their business grow. So thank you for your support in that. And we’ll see you next time.