Why you shouldn’t let the loss of income put you off team training.

Every great clinician invests in training for his or her personal development and progressive practices will do the same for the development of their team.  It does, however, create a financial dent, not only in the investment for training but also the loss of income from closing the practice but you know the old saying 'you need to 'speculate to accumulate'!

Where do you begin?

So you want to invest in specific training for your team and to know who to choose to work with or where to start you need to be clear on your overall business objective – what it is you want to achieve?

Once you are clear on this you can go on to identify some of the specific areas you would like to see your business grow and develop.  This might be for example an increased income, or to refine and polish the service you provide, or perhaps you would like to install systems and increase profitability. There are many different needs a business may have and all areas should work towards increasing turnover and profitability.  It has to make financial sense.

Say for example a training day is £1500 for your entire team and your daily target that day is £4000 then you are looking at a deficit of £5,500.  You need to evaluate if your return on investment is worth it to you or how can you alter hours to generate the £4,000 lost from closing the practice.

Looking at the bigger picture and establishing what the training will provide for your patients, your team and your business will allow you to clarify both the short- and long-term benefits.  Analyse your overheads and begin to understand if investing in one area could reduce the overheads in another or does investing in one area improve another area.

Also, consider your operations, if there are shortcomings that will reduce your ability to reach your vision and business objective sometimes it’s a case of you can’t ‘not’ do it. 

Once you know what you want and need regarding training and have selected a company to work with you and your team, you now need to do the sums.

1. Consider all the areas your business has to improve on
2. Calculate loss of income in closing the practice
3. Look at where you can open clinic time before the training to make up for lost income
4. Involve your team heavily in outlining what you want to get out of the training
5. Provide your team with an evaluation form for the training so you can discuss it together afterwards. Richer learning will take place afterwards once you have collaborated your notes, thoughts and ideas that can grow after training
6. Set some goals from the training so you can continuously action ideas and keep the momentum going
7. Learning and development are never complete so keep exploring exactly what your business needs and when is a good time. A good consultant or trainer will be able to help you see the bigger picture and guide you into what would work best for your growth at a particular time.

How have you overcome the financial deficit of training?

What positive results have you had from training in your practice?