Meet RESTOR Medical Spa’s Flora and Dominique Waples-Trefil

Can you tell us a little bit about RESTOR Medical Spa?

[FLORA] We are a medical aesthetics practice in Colorado. Our job is to make aging optional. We do everything from where a traditional spa ends to where a plastic surgeon starts. It’s facials, and it’s lasers, it’s Botox, and it’s filler, and we make clients look fabulous.

When you got started out, I imagine the two of you were wearing all the hats. What was it like to start hiring and delegating?

[F] I’ll be honest, the first person we hired, was somebody who’s been in the industry for a very long time. We just said, “We don’t know what we’re doing here, you go in the back and do what you are trained to do, and I’m going to try and figure out what the hell the rest of this is.”

[DOMINIQUE] As you might imagine, that was kind of a disaster.

[F] It was nearly two years into the business before I was really capable of training someone, and it would take me six months to do so. Seriously, in the treatment room, day-to-day, working continuously with them for about six months before they were ready to go. And we have a staff turnover every two to three years. So if you spend six months training someone, and then they’re gone in two years, that’s a big investment of time and effort.

[D] Even when we knew it was time for somebody to go, it was really hard to think about the heavy lifting of bringing somebody new on.

In your industry, how important is proper training? Are there regulations or certifications when you’re dealing with medicine and health and people and their bodies?

[F] We are dealing with procedures which, not to be too blunt, can hurt people, some permanently if they’re not done correctly. The qualifications a person comes in with have nothing to do with making them safe to do these procedures on people. That’s the gap that we have to address head-on in training our personnel.

In this industry, there are a lot of people doing it very, very badly, even dangerously. But there are some people doing it really well. And frankly, one of the biggest differences between those two groups is-

[D] Training and oversight.

So with proper training being that important, beyond those one-on-one six-month sessions, did you have any other systems in place? Processes you attempted to streamline as you grew?

[D] Yeah. Paper. We had Word documents with multiple choice tests.

[F] There were so many problems with that. For starters, there’s no automation, or really any accountability.

[D] And the phone keeps ringing, with people wanting to book, so it just falls off.

Where did all your policies or procedures live before Trainual, if someone needed to look it up?

[F] When I saw Trainual, and I saw that we could do videos and build courses around them, I was like, “Oh my god, thank god.”

Now what I can do is just give my whole lecture series, record it, upload it and then it’s infinitely reproducible. I can train 10 people in 10 different places at once. They just watch the videos and then take a test on it to make sure that they paid attention and that’s it.

Once I built the structure, it took zero additional time for me to make sure that everyone had the baseline knowledge. Then all I have to do one-on-one with them is watch them do the procedures.

[D] But to be clear, it’s not just training that got more efficient. It impacted our hiring process too. It’s a screening tool for us.

[F] True. When we are hiring, we send a group of potentials a module from Trainual and we see if they are good enough. They get a certain amount of time, and we see if they can watch it, absorb it, and pass the test. By doing this, we ensure our new hires are capable of learning quickly, which cuts down on training time too.

Of course, businesses need ongoing documenting, as roles evolve or processes change. Do you have a strategy for that?

[F] Actually, you know what I do? I have a little notebook that I carry with me all the time. The very last page of it, I keep a running list of things that I need to put in the Trainual.

I’ll be doing something and I’ll realize I had just shown admin staff how to do something new and I’m like, “I need to make a little three-minute video of this because when the next person starts, I am not going to redo all of this training and I don’t want it to get lost.” So that’s what I do and then it goes up on Trainual.

What is your favorite part of using Trainual?

[D] Trainual is basically a gatekeeper between my employees and my time.

They have to prove themselves first and that makes my investment in them so much more efficient and effective and worthwhile.

[F] I love the testing component. You can see how many times somebody tried, how their score improved, and that shows how much they care and the effort they are willing to put in.

For more from Flora, Dominique, and RESTOR Medical Spa, visit: restormedicalspa.com