When I was designing The Campbell Clinic Building, I read a lot about work environments and what they should look like and be like, and I focused and settled on someone called Cal Newport and a book called Deep Work.
Newport talked a lot about how to get stuff done, good stuff, and how to have systems and environments and behaviours that allowed you to be more productive and more effective, not so you could work longer or more hours, but just so you had time to do all the things you'd really like to do in your life, amongst many other things, and so another of the things that we set up was a Cal Newport thing in the clinic, which was environments that encourage you to have serendipitous conversations.
Those are the creative conversations that you have when you pass someone in the corridor, or there's a space where you go to meet someone or talk to them. These are water-cooler conversations, as they used to be called in America, or coffee machine conversations.
My life is absolutely full of those types of conversations, and they are extraordinary. One of the ones I had today was with Tom (Reason). Tom is our Campbell Clinic marketing and education director, and his job is more and more centred around the marketing part of that job.
Just to be clear, I have worked with an awful lot of people in marketing in dentistry and outside of dentistry, but I've never worked with anyone better than this.
Tom had recorded the day before a lecture for The Campbell Academy Clubhouse, around ‘compounding marketing’; the essence of this is that you need to have a plan, and then you need to stick to your plan, and then it works.
It sounds entirely ridiculous, but it is the essence of success, and it is one of the behavioural traits that many, many leaders in dentistry (and outside of dentistry) don't seem to have.
It's what makes banks successful and organisations that are huge, that have been around for a long time.
In terms of compounding marketing, you have to understand marketing (Tom does), understand whom you're trying to talk to and attract to your business (Tom does), and then go about setting a plan to attract them, and then let it wait.
As I've said many times over the past little while, you have to let the ‘egg poach’.
We built a marketing engine in 2019, or at least we built a plan for a marketing engine to attract people directly to the practice because we anticipated the decline and the death of referral dentist practices (which has certainly come to pass where we are).
It's taken 7 years for that to mature, and there is much more maturation to come, but the results are astonishing.
We believed in it, we trusted ourselves, and we built it, and we kept doing it, and where we are now is unrecognisable from where we were then (our turnover is almost 4 times greater in one building).
Understanding that if you're here for the short-term, then you need to use really rough and ready tactics that help the short-term, but if you're here for the long term, that is super special, because you've got the chance to build something that compounds, and compounding is exponential, and exponential is a big number.
Blog Post Number - 4605
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