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Pretty much everybody who enter into business, pretty much everybody who runs their own place at one time or another becomes obsessed with growth and scale.

For most people the one time or another becomes all the time and the purpose of the organisation becomes about getting bigger and richer and wider and broader and ultimately, ‘taking over the world’

The problem with scale is particularly evident amongst businesses that directly serve the public.

The problem with scale is quality and the maintenance of quality.

In an engineering business where you are making precision pieces of metal this is perhaps not quite so difficult.

Buy the machine which allows you to make as many pieces of metal as you want within the tolerances that you want and then just turn the machine up as demand dictates.

Then it’s all about the design of the product and how no one else can get it and how it solves a problem and how it makes life better.

For me though, for us, in our place, it’s very different.

Ours is entirely dependent upon the human factor and to maintain quality while scaling but relying on the human factor is, I feel, almost impossible.

For that reason, when companies in healthcare decide to scale, they have to set the bar of acceptability at a low level, otherwise too many people fall below the bar and that kills the organisation.

If you decide to have 50 dental practice then that’s all well and good but you can’t possibly hope to maintain the level of quality when you have one brilliant practice.

Everyone will tell you that to have one practice is harder and harder due to ‘economies of scale’ and the cost of compliance and marketing and HR and materials and equipment and all that stuff and of course, they are correct.

Price per unit of a dental chair is extraordinarily less if you buy 300 (Bupa) than if you buy one.

But the answer is quite simple…

… you win with quality and service.

The company with 300 dental practices has to set the service bar low. The company with one dental practice gets to set the service bar as high as they want.

The same applies to quality. If you stop paying attention to everybody else within your industry and start paying attention to the people you wish to serve then they will understand that to come to your place and to receive the service you give and the quality you promise costs more than going to the place where they buy 300 dental chairs at a time.

Blog Post Number: 1792