All the time, I have flashbacks to what it was like when we were opening the practice six years ago, and we were basically bankrupt, and we were going out of business, and everything was going to hell.
I have reminders everywhere around me when I'm at work, and I don't want them to fade or go away (only the paranoid survive). We decided at that stage, just for a short while, that we would be right on the rivet.
No reserves, no backup, just a short period of time where we would jump across a gap to get to the other side.
Before that, we were in an extraordinarily financially secure position, and we find ourselves in that position again.
The trick about the long-term is to mend the roof while the sun is shining, and if the sun continues to shine for longer than you expected, then make the roof stronger, and the walls and the foundations, and the stores, and sharpen your tools and get ready, because without any shadow of a doubt, the s**t storm will be here in a minute.
Dentistry in the United Kingdom is probably about to take another turn for the worse. The first thing that's going to happen is that the rules around worker status and associate contracts are really going to start to sting some people.
We have experience with this from various angles when we amended our roof a while ago. I'm staggered to see people asking questions about this now, whose roofs seem to have huge holes in them.
The second will be the panic around the CMA investigation (Competition and Markets Authority). The CMA reported on vets last week, and they're about to go into dentistry pricing in a big way. If you haven't got this sorted out, then you'll need to get it sorted out, and it won't be particularly bad, but for some people, it will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Just another CQC/GDC/ indemnity/ HTM 0105. Just a bit that people can't deal with because the roof isn't mended.
If you find yourself in a decent position at the moment, then fix the roof.
If you find yourself not in a decent position, then tie everything down and get ready because it's probably going to get bumpy again.
Even aside from that, in dentistry, the price of global fertiliser has just risen by 60% in the last two weeks (a result of what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz).
Forget the price of oil; people will not be able to grow their spring crops or their winter crops, depending upon where they are, and we import so much of our food from so many other places that the price of food is about to go up and stay up.
What happens in energy shocks, too (as has happened many times before), is that the effects of the short-term shock last for a much longer time.
The price of borrowing is going up, probably at least four points; the access to credit is going down; the cost of everything is going up again; and we live in a country where things are already past the point of manageable for many people.
As I said above, if you didn't mend your roof when the sun was shining because you thought it wasn't shining, then now is the time to think. How do I secure myself going forward on what could be a difficult period? And no one's really going to know how long the difficult period is going to last.
Blog Post Number - 4483
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