Teaching the MDRT culture

When Dana Mitchell, CFP, CLU, started to grow her practice, she quickly ran into a problem. Like most advisors who are busy meeting with clients and managing a business — not to mention raising a young family — the 10-year MDRT member from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, simply didn’t have the time needed to train her new employees beyond the basics of the job.

“I’ve got a couple of emerging advisors, and I’m really busy,” Mitchell said. “I can train on systems, but training the MDRT culture is really hard to do. And with new advisors, how do you bring them into that?”

The answer, for Mitchell, was simple: the MDRT Academy.

You may have heard of the Academy, an association within the MDRT Family of Brands that’s designed to help advisors reach MDRT production levels and join MDRT. If you’re safely ensconced in the MDRT world, however, the relevance of the Academy to you might not seem immediately obvious.

But for Mitchell and other MDRT members tasked with training and developing new talent, the Academy can be an invaluable tool.

“It was really useful for me, just because instead of me coming back from the MDRT meetings and talking about all this great content, I sent my advisor to the Academy website to see best practices from MDRT members,” Mitchell said. “Then we would have a 15-minute conversation versus the few hours that she wanted to have.”

Guide to growth

Like MDRT, the MDRT Academy is an individual membership association. Its extensive content library, available in five languages, is accessed via a website and mobile app. Once members have taken the self-assessment, they receive a Weekly Growth Plan targeted at their growth areas. They can read articles, watch videos, listen to podcast episodes and do deeper dives into specific topics via modular Performance Guides. They also can attend bimonthly webcasts, presented by MDRT members and other industry professionals, and ask questions during live Q&A sessions. In addition, the Connect section is a place to post questions and hear back from MDRT member experts. When Academy members reach certain production milestones (which can be tracked in the app), they also become eligible to attend MDRT meetings.

Mitchell says this member benefit was perhaps the most impactful for her junior advisor. After attending the 2024 MDRT EDGE meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, hearing directly from MDRT members and getting a taste of MDRT culture, “she got hungry to qualify.”

So hungry, in fact, that the advisor, Terasa Rausch, became a first-time MDRT member in 2025.

And Rausch’s is not the only MDRT Academy success story. When Ryan J. Pinney, LACP, enrolled five of his employees in the Academy in 2022, he saw almost immediate results.

“Lo and behold, they got better at their jobs,” Pinney said in a presentation at the 2024 Top of the Table Annual Meeting. In fact, one of those advisors, Joshua Herrington, who was totally green in the profession after serving in the U.S. Air Force, not only qualified to apply for MDRT in 2025, but already has nearly reached Top of the Table-level production, Pinney said.

Pinney, a 16-year MDRT member from Roseville, California, USA, evocatively compares the experience of putting advisors in the Academy to bumper bowling, where barriers prevent bowling balls from rolling into the gutter.

“You put them into the Academy, and they can bounce around in there,” Pinney said. “They might be a little left or a little right of where you want them, but you get the chance to nudge them into the middle where you want.”

He personally did such nudging at weekly meetings where Academy members reported back on what they were learning and asked follow-up questions. This, he says, led to noticeable improvement in how those advisors were performing. Plus, it allowed him to see who was putting in the work to improve and who was skating along.

Getting better

Shawn Bellefeuille, CFP, CLU, a 12-year MDRT member from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, “grew up” as a rookie advisor in an agency system with trainers and meetings and a clear development track. He says the Academy has filled that type of role in his own business, helping his advisors target areas of improvement in a very intentional way.

“The self-assessment is going to give them a good idea of what they really want to learn, where their weaknesses are, where their strengths are,” Bellefeuille said at the Top of the Table Annual Meeting. “That’s where the magic happens with the MDRT Academy, because it’s going to push out content that is relevant.”

He also says the Academy has acted as a valuable accountability tool for his team.

“Our new advisors need some accountability built in around them, but I am the world’s worst person at keeping people accountable,” he said.

Since the MDRT Academy is available on a mobile app and website — and since most advisors are never far from their smartphones — they can enter their production on a regular basis and then more easily transfer it to the company’s internal tracking system. There are also more than 100 other goals members can track to create a strong foundation for the future.

One of the advisors in the firm has been an Academy member for three years, and Bellefeuille has noticed the clear difference it’s made, particularly in the development of her daily habits.

Mitchell sees lots of potential for other MDRT members to use the Academy in growing junior advisors.

“There’s got to be tons of MDRT members like me who can use it to help train the next generation of advisors,” she said. “We’ve got an aging industry; we need to bring in new talent. But it’s daunting, because how are you going to spend the time training when you’re still so busy?”

“I think MDRT members should look at their teams and say, ‘How can I leverage this content to grow my people?’ Just put your junior people in it and you’ll see the benefits.”

And those benefits aren’t just for the junior advisor who increases their production or the senior advisor whose time is freed up to focus on other things; they’re for all MDRT members, present and future.

“The faster I can bring a new person into the fold of MDRT, that’s only going to be good for me and for them and for everybody else too,” Pinney said.

MDRT Academy membership requirements

Membership in the MDRT Academy is open to any advisor who does not currently qualify for MDRT. All MDRT members can access the MDRT Academy using their MDRT credentials.

Membership begins November 1 and expires December 31 of the following year. Advisors can join at any time throughout the year. Dues are $275. First-year members joining after March 31 will pay prorated dues based on when they join. 

The MDRT Academy is available in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, Traditional Chinese and Vietnamese.

Elizabeth Lyzenga is a senior content specialist for MDRT.