A metaphor that I love for explaining situations where people are prepared to sacrifice their values, or their future, or even their friends and family, to get the thing they want now is that of the snake eating itself. And so, imagine we have a snake with the most beautiful and magnificent head, massive poisonous fangs, bright yellow eyes, ready to pounce.
Imagine the snake is hungry and it decides to start to eat its own tail because it cannot find food, and then continues to eat its tail, and continues to eat its tail, not thinking about the consequence of what is happening, or where the next meal is coming from.
Of course, the snake's head is entirely useless without the rest of the snake, and there comes a point where the snake has eaten so much of itself that it dies.
In my world (and I really need to use my world by way of metaphor), this is the 50% associate model, this is the model whereby a dentist works in a practice and gets 50% of everything they make, like barbers used to do. They pay 50% of the laboratory costs to make the lab built, to make the lab work, crowns, dentures, etc, and maybe 50% of the components for implant treatment, and otherwise get to keep everything else. Essentially, that means that unless they make enough money, the practice makes an awful lot less money than the person who's doing the dentistry.
In dentistry, that became a thing; it became a meme. A cultural acceptance that everybody said was the way it was, it was certainly the way it was when I started as an associate back in 1997.
There were people at that stage on even more than 50% (and there still are some now), but that model is a snake eating itself.
The associate wants more and more, and therefore eats more and more of the snake. There is nothing left for marketing, development or looking after human resources and the team, or investment in technology or facility, or anything. But it doesn't matter because that's not the associate's problem - it's not the problem of the head, it just needs to be fed.
Also in dentistry, this is what happened with Invisalign and the Clear Aligner revolution. Everybody chased after a Ponzi scheme, which was undermined by credit. Where they thought they could never stop making money, even though they were never looking at the long-term, never actually looking at what it cost, never actually looking at the trust they were burning in so many parts of the process.
And so the snake continued to eat itself until aligner technologies collapsed (as they are collapsing now) and their pricing exploded, and their trust was lost, and all the people who thought that it was OK to charge £2,999 to patients for upper and lower clear aligner technology, suddenly realised they weren't making any money.
In a little while in a blog, I'll compare this to the housing crisis in 2008, which fractured the economy.
We continue to do these things.
To create Ponzi schemes, the only person that wins when everything collapses is the person at the very top of the scheme.
If you're still a 50% associate, your head is about to eat the rest of the snake.
If you're still doing clear aligner therapy for £2,999 based on credit using Align Technologies, you're about to eat the rest of your steak.
If you don't see it coming, that's on you.
It's probably though because your eyes are absolutely full of the rest of your body that you're eating.
Blog Post Number - 4459
Leave a comment