The problem with being out of your comfort zone is that it is uncomfortable.
A while ago I received a comment to the blog post from a Dentist who is extolling the virtues of running a smaller business with 1 dentist in it which had super profit and none of the hassle of running a big business.
I exchanged emails with this practitioner as he came to me first through the blog. It was an interesting discussion and very thought provoking in a time where we were just about to scale up.
So, as I write this blog, I have been on both sides of this but perhaps in the bigger, bigger business for only a short while.
I had the small business, one where I was the guy which was just supported by a lovely team and was simple and easy.
I treated the well healed people of South Nottingham and disregarded everybody else.
The people that got into my club did well and I could be as selfish as I want, buying whatever I wanted and taking time wherever I needed.
At times like this in the bigger project, I look back on that and I didn’t want it and it didn’t satisfy me.
Personally, I wanted contribution, perhaps on a slightly bigger scale than the one that I was achieving in that model.
I had come from a background that was not privileged, I have come from one where my parents worked their fingers to the bone just to give us a chance, to make it a bit better.
I feel a responsibility to have to do that because of what people did for me.
I guess it’s not supposed to be easy, certainly not to me, that’s why I choose this way.
Writing this blog might seem dark and hard at times because, well, it’s dark and hard at times.
It doesn’t mean I can’t sit back as I write things like this and be happy and satisfied and proud with some of the thing that me, but more importantly my team and the people that I have been able to nurture and inspire have achieved.
As a little post scrip of this blog, somewhere around 15 years ago a young 15-year-old schoolgirl came to see me for work experience at the NHS practice I worked at in Ilkeston.
I have a photograph of her in one my old lectures, scrubbed up and assisting implant surgery in that practice.
She wanted to be a Dentist but in the end didn’t make it into dental school but was so committed to work within the profession that she trained as a therapist and ultimately came to work with me one day a week at the old site.
Moving to the new practice, she’s here three days a week and she is Emma my therapist and hygienist, one of my team of therapists and hygienists at the new Campbell Clinic.
A couple of weeks ago at our open day for family, she turned up with her new husband and her brother, dad and mum to look around the place where she will work and build a future.
She bought me a present.
It was some writing, that was framed for the wall of my office and it said this “Dentistry has been good to me, so I want to be good to Dentistry…” Colin Campbell.
I don’t ever remember saying that, but I must have done, and I still believe it, which is why I choose this route.
Blog Post Number - 2302
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