The Campbell Academy Blog (241)

The homeopathic effect of training and progress

The homeopathic effect of training and progress

It will be the same across every, single industry, but let’s focus on my industry, because that is all I know about.

Have you noticed the change?

Everybody in dentistry is upskilled in some area or even (apparently) all areas.

Firstly, the upskill in the really valuable aspects of dentistry, so now every single practice is an implant practice.

This really was not the case 15 years ago, or even really 10, but while I was on my honeymoon in New York, in 1999 I went through the yellow pages out of interest and it just seemed that every single practice was an implant practice.

So it is that we have that now in the United Kingdom.

Everybody then, did ortho, and at least short term ortho and Invisalign.

Aesthetic dentistry and crowns and veneers are a given and now facial aesthetics’ and, on the story, goes.

The next area of mass specialist anticipation in dentistry, might be perio or particularly peri-implant disease.

If you hadn’t noticed, the change in the NHS contracts since 2006 has driven dentistry into the private marketplace, whether it liked it or not.

Prior to that and certainly in the mid 1990’s a huge proportion of dentists were happy to make their good living off of NHS dentistry and leave complexity and difficulty to specialists and people with advanced training.

As the man who ran out of NHS dentistry, so everybody decided to upskill and now everybody considers themselves to be appropriately upskilled.

It means that everybody does 10 or 15 Invisalign’s and 10 or 15 implants a year and for the average general dental practitioner to be able to crack through the barrier is really difficult, because they’re trying to be good at Invisalign and root treatments and perio and ortho and anything else that goes with dentistry.

So, what do you do?

How do you square this circle, how do you continue to make a living, when competition is fierce?

First thing to appreciate is that the gravy train is over.

It’s going to be really hard to make that living that you made by doing the same old thing.

Second thing to remember is your world is a very small place and you only have to be good in your world.

If you keep looking out at what everybody else is doing, you’ll lose the focus and attention on the people that you was supposed to be serving.

Seth Gordon calls it a “the minimum viable audience”.

It’s very clever, it means that we can all exist, side by side, serving our own minimum viable audience.

Something to think about.

The toxic nature of trying to be as famous as the Kardashians or as rich as Richard Branson, distracts us from the work that we’re supposed to be doing.