This one has been coming for a while.
The dental education market is absolutely stacked full of people wanting to train you to provide implants for the patients.
In many (most) cases these courses are supported by the dental implant companies themselves because the benefits for all are clear (if they work).
The reasons that most dentists would take on implant dentistry generally fall into the following categories:
No business works with without making money and making money in a business is a relatively straightforward equation which goes along the lines of…
Money in – money out = money left.
So, a dentist doing an implant course can rationalise the cost of the course because they’ll make money off the treatments later which will pay for the course – makes sense right?
But what if you learn to run your business better, what would that look like?
Surely that would benefit your patients because your business would be slicker, better, their experience would be better, and the quality would be higher?
Surely it would make you better at your job, because your business would be better, you could invest more, you could be less stressed, and you could be happier that your vision was coming into reality.
Surely you would make more money.
The investment of an implant course is supposed to be a lifetime value investment (i.e., it pays for itself year on year on year after you’ve learned what to do).
The same is entirely true for learning how to run your practice better but although dentists generally realise that they were not born to be businesspeople and nor were they taught much about it at dental school, they seem extraordinarily reluctant to try to learn about it after they’ve graduated.
There is one huge unspoken benefit too though?
I have lived through the generation of principles who have ‘sold-out’ and sold their practices to ‘dental service organisations’ (dental corporates).
Sometimes that’s because they pay the biggest price but mostly it’s because the practices were of such a size that no one could afford to buy them and there was no partnership model that would work.
The alternative to selling to a DSO was to just give up and leave with nothing back for all those years spent, apart from the wages you earnt.
What if there was another way?
What if it was possible not to sail your team down the river into a gigantic organisation that they never asked to work for, what if it was possible to turn the business into an asset that continued to work and improve whilst you worked less on patients and more on the business and then less on everything ultimately until it continued on.
Whilst I realise that this might seem pie in the sky, it certainly isn’t in other industries and it definitely isn’t in other countries.
In property development, most serious property developers almost never, ever sell the asset.
They build the asset, they collect the rent, the asset increases in value and the rent increases in value. That’s how people gain their wealth.
We would you sell the asset if you can draw from the asset what you need to live (as well as you want) yet continue to have the asset which continues to increase in value.
Once you’ve sold your practice you just get a lump of money, which becomes the asset, which you then put away somewhere and live off the return.
Isn’t that the same as living off the asset of a business?
More and more people who are coming to the end of the road in their business are getting more and more uncomfortable about the fact that they’ve built something brilliant and now they’re going to send their team down a toxic river in a leaky canoe.
The kicker here is though that the very best of these businesses are the ones that started out with that intention in the first place.
If you build a business now, right in the middle of this environment, when you get to the other end (whenever that is) you’re much more likely to have the thing you wanted then than the thing that you just happened to have because you never planned ahead.
The sixth edition of The Campbell Academy Business course starts this summer.
It’s designed for you and your business partner/practice manager/life partner or whoever you choose to bring (we recommend the principle and your practice manager).
It’s designed to show the principle how to give the business to the team and designed to show the team how to make the business work for the principle.
If this seems like it might be for you, click here.
Blog Post Number - 3042