The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (43)

The Test

Today marks the end of the Dental Entrepreneurial Bootcamp, our week-long, intensive, full-on business course for dentists and their teams.

It's been the first time we've run this, and we hoped and expected a lot, but it has been the most extraordinary experience for us as a group here.

It's exhausting, and Alex, Hayley, Tom, Chris and I (and Millie, Nancy, Brooke, Ibby, Jess and all the guys that have helped on this) are exhausted from running around and the intensive nature of this.

But I've just sat through the second of the presentation deliveries of the three-year plans that have been constructed, and I am close to speechless.

Mike, one of our South African delegates from Johannesburg on the course, has just put forward a plan for his practice and his team for the next three years, which has inspired us to better things, let alone his own team, and that is the point.

We finished content delivery around the middle of yesterday and gave the guys the opportunity to go and write their plan and timeline it over the next three years, finish their SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, competitor analysis, visions, values, and mission statements, and take everything into account to decide where they were going next, where they would be in three years, and what the map was for that.

They didn't have to do anything after that. They could have gone out last night and got wrecked, gone for a nice meal, had a lie-in this morning and appreciated the fact that they were in another place, and then gone home after their 'work holiday', but most of the group stayed up until after one, trying to complete the work, trying to get stuff done.

"You never get fit by joining a gym; you only get fit by going to the gym".

Too often, I go to places or see things where delegates turn up (not just in dentistry, but in any discipline), and they think that by paying and turning up, somehow skills or knowledge will be transferred to their brain because they bought it, but they never earned it.

We get better by doing the work, by thinking, by being open, by sharing and by working and practising and doing and doing.

What we tried to give people on this course was all the tools and the environment in order to achieve that and (arrogantly, perhaps) it appears that it's absolutely worked the way we hoped.

It's one of those weeks, one of those times in my career where I'm going to look back and think I'm so grateful I was able to do that.

When all is said and done and I am finished and I cannot do anything anymore, I will look back on this week and be pleased that I was able to be part of it.