I am not the one to launch into talks of crisis in order to facilitate our courses or our advantage or to push people in our direction, but it is my job as I look after my own dental practice to survey the market and see what's happening.
Also, I have not become the person who says, "Everybody has to be on AI, or we're all going to die", but just in case you wanted another little explanation of what's going on around the surface of this blog, here is an article I generated on perplexity.ai (my chosen search engine) about the future trends in UK dentistry.
Surveying the market and talking to many different people in dentistry, both in the supply parts of the economy and also in the delivery (dentistry itself), paints an enormously mixed picture at the present time.
We have many dentists, particularly mixed practice dentists, coming through the Academy, and it's interesting to speak to them about what things look like and where they are, what's selling, what's not selling, what's winning and what's not winning.
For that reason, it's probably useful to reference this blog against the one that comes tomorrow, which is called 'The Super Associate' and we'll try and backlink to that later in case you come to this afterwards, but the super associate is one of the big issues in UK dentistry at the present time together with the workforce issues and the collapse of the NHS.
On the one hand, dentistry looks grim for the general public in the United Kingdom. Access to NHS dentistry is at perhaps its lowest ever, investment in NHS dentistry again, at its lowest ever, relatively speaking, and only likely to get worse as the UK finances degenerate and worsen, and we spend much more money on defence moving forward and try to find areas to get that money from.
Beyond that, it's still really difficult finding dental nurses, training dental nurses, if a little bit easier, accessing dental associates as the government tries to open up access to overseas dental associates following the disasters of Brexit and the shutdown of our colleagues coming from abroad.
The Perplexity article about the general outlook for the UK dental industry paints a very positive picture of independent dentistry, but of course, in order to harness the opportunities, you have to be organised in order to grasp everything that is in front of you, you have to be prepared to lift your head and grasp what's in front of you and that is when we enter into the assumption of a crisis and reacting to a crisis which is either there or isn't there, but being on crisis mode almost all the time.
It was Andy Grove, the founder and chairman of Intel, who coined the phrase 'only the paranoid survive' but unless you're in a position where you think that you could lose everything in a minute, then it's essential to get to that point, because if you are not looking at the threats and looking at the opportunities the world is liable to creep up behind you and suffocate the thing that you have.
Talking to several people in the dental industry, particularly about guys who have hung their hat on the clear aligner model and the finance model, I see that there are lots of businesses that are going to be in potential trouble this year.
People who cannot get enough low-return, high-volume patients through the door to sign up for finance and have cosmetic treatment will find themselves in more and more difficulty as they run out of customers.
Anyone else who has hung their hat on NHS contracts and growth in NHS contracts will find it more and more difficult to access and service those contracts as there are fewer and fewer staff and less and less money, relatively speaking, going into these contracts.
The only way you can win in the NHS model now is by stealing more and more contracts from other people, and of course, if you do that, it's the other people who are having their contracts stolen who are going to die (because someone's going to die).
If you've mastered the model of very low-price, high-volume dentistry, I'm sure you could still do pretty well, but now the price is so low, and the volume has to be so high that there are only a very few people who are able to do this.
Also, in that world, it's almost impossible to keep your staff because it's demoralising and cuts against the values of why anyone has ever gone into dentistry.
And so, what do we do about this?
More than ever now, we have to work on our businesses (not just in our business) doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is complete insanity, as we know, but turning up and working a little bit harder and a little bit harder to try and overcome the reduction in NHS funding or the loss of staff members, or the reduced number of patients because our marketing or our service or our environment just isn't good enough, just will not work anymore.
For years now, we've tried to share everything we learned from going through the process of building our practice and organisation. We grew 10% last year, and we're predicted to grow between 10% and 20% this year and are already on target to do that (our financial year starts at the start of February)
We distilled everything into two courses, bottled it, and put it on a shelf, ready to take.
You won't learn everything related to dental business in one course or one sitting, but it's a really, really good place to start.
The Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program, our seven-week online business course, which can be done around your work starts on Monday. It's a coached business course that has everything from finance to marketing to sales to HR, and you'll be able to come out the other side (if you do the work) with a 3-year business plan ready to rock.
If you prefer to do it faster than that, our Bootcamp course is here; it's 5 days, at the end of the month, Monday to Friday, a much more intense version of the digital course with much more content and much more value.
Out the other side, and ready to go again, to apply your paranoia to the threats and opportunities that exist, not just to keep you in business, but to thrive and get to a better place.
Blog Post Number - 4108