The Campbell Academy Blog (73)

A short Series on the Business of Dentistry: Part 2 - Vision

This little article forms the second part of our short series on The Business of Dentistry, and if you want to know why I decided to write this over this Christmas, part one is here.

I'm not sure when I became obsessed with vision in terms of its relation to either my personal life or my business life, but it is clear that I am pretty obsessed.

I was always dreaming and daydreaming and thinking of the future and ways that I could try to create my own environment. I've done that since I was quite little.

I've envisaged and imagined things moving forward for many years and quickly began to understand that no matter how much I wanted something, I wasn't guaranteed to be able to get it.

In terms of setting a vision for your business becomes one of the most important roles in developing and growing a business because the vision is one of the only things that will keep everyone together on the journey forward, particularly if you are growing quickly.

Vision inspires people.

Hope is indeed massively important and, in fact, one of the most important emotions. Hope for a better future in a vision is something that business owners and principals can give to their teams as long as they go about it the right way.

Things crystallized for me massively around 2010/11 when I watched the video from Simon Sinek, the TED talk; it's here that rocked the internet and set the world on fire about value-based businesses.

Sinek explained the importance of a vision and why we should start with the vision in the first instance before we start with the what of the business.

It was clear to me that this was the right thing to do, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it any other way.

At that stage and very early on in my business career, I worked hard to develop the vision for our little corner of nowhere, the one that still exists to this day.

"We exist to positively influence the lives of as many people as possible through the work that we do and the example we set",

And so we'd moved forward understanding that when we had a vision, it really just set the values of the business, what we believed in and the non-negotiable behaviours that we would have as a group of people.

Vision makes difficult decisions so much easier and clearer as long as you commit to going along with your vision and values.

The values we developed as a team in The Campbell Clinic are here, and there will almost never be any reason to change those.

We know exactly what we have to do to get to where we want to go, and as we reflect on things, month on month and year on year, we continue to move in the direction that we want to travel.

We'll never change the vision; we'll always be here to influence people positively.

We might change the mission, which is the third of these projects: vision, values, and mission. The mission will change probably three yearly unless something comes out of the woodwork which massively rocks our world (COVID, for example) but to be in a position to set your vision and to have the privilege to do that is perhaps one of the most extraordinary things.

I believe that vision setting and building a value-based business comes back to fundamental economics.

It used to be that businesses were part of society.

It used to be that businesses existed to make society better and serve the people within that society. That was Adam Smith's economics.

It was clear what businesses were for; therefore, businesses were a tool we used to improve society.

When Milton Friedman came along and developed shareholder primacy, business changed. The purpose of the business was to make the most money for the people that owned the business.

I fundamentally disagree with that, and I will always fundamentally disagree with that, and therefore, that sets the vision of our business.

You have the opportunity to set the vision of your business.

You also have the opportunity to set the vision and values of your personal life.

Doing that exercise and going through that process (particularly over Christmas) is an extraordinary gift to yourself, an extraordinary bit of self-care that will pay you back year after year.