Latest Blog Post

Right, I have thought about this one for a long while and I will try and get it down in an abbreviated form here, for anyone who may be interested.

Personal efficiency is all well and good and, to a point, something we should strive to achieve.

The difficulty is personal efficiency trap is that it is finite and we reach a point where we’re no longer able to flog that horse, despite the fact that we keep trying ton achieve growth, through making ourselves more and more efficient and trying to squeeze more and more tasks in to less and less time.

You can use any number for online, cloud base or electronic gadgets to speed up your processing, but you cannot speed up the processing, inside your head.

This leads to a deep seated and over riding emotional tiredness as you try and juggle decision making every single day from your “efficient life”.

Lawyers understood this years ago.

In effect, for the world of freelances, the efficiency trap becomes a source of brutal disappointment.

Remember that almost all dentists working in the United Kingdom are freelances!

Freelances can only increase their wages by doing more work or charging more for their work.
They can generally only charge more for their work when they’re held in higher regard and their skills are seen to be scares.

That is a training and reputation issue.

Doing more work is the obvious option and the trap that most freelances fall in to.

For most dentists in the United Kingdom, the average amount of billable hours in the week is about 30-35. Once you’ve reached that level then you fall in to the efficiency trap of trying to make more money in that amount of time, which inevitably leads to our adduction in the service that you provide or a stretching of your working hours beyond 40-45 to 50 hours a week (what you do is take the administrative development out of your billable hours and put it somewhere else, but this is a false economy, because the value of your billable hours therefore drops.

So, the option is to charge more money for your billable hours and that is where the growth is for the freelancer.

In truth, in dentistry that is probably a finite option too.

The other option is to add more people in at the different billable levels.
Like associate partners in law or equity partners in law, this means you create more business at different levels of cost for clients that want different things.

Dentistry has always been particularly resistant to this and the associate model in dentistry has led to an obstruction in this possible model developing.

In a world though, where growth is required to continue investment in your team, your premises and your services, enhancing the servicing model of increased quality and reputation and adding people in at different levels of chargeability is the only alternative that I can see to the efficiency trap.