If there was only one dental patient left in the whole of Nottingham and that patient held all of the money to spend on dentistry, then there would be a fight to get that patient.
There isn’t.
Last Sunday, I rode my bike early with Chris.
Chris and I have become great friends over the past few years with sharing experiences both on bikes and about families and about dentistry.
Chris has a practice about 3 or 4 miles away from my practice and it’s fantastic.
It has a much longer history, a much more developed patient base over many, many years and a brilliant reputation.
Chris’s practice has a phenomenal team that he has invested heavily in, but he’s invested more than anything else in himself.
Chris has attended almost every single Campbell Academy course that exists and some of them twice and then taken that knowledge and moulded it into his own practice and built a business which is extraordinary.
Chris is also one of the founder members of our dental buying group which, on the face of it, is quite odd.
Chris’s practice and my practice are, in theory, in direct competition.
We provide almost the exactly the same product mix, for exactly the same demographic of patients, in exactly the same city.
So, why in god’s name should we get on?
Firstly, there’s way more patients than any of us can cope with if we do it right.
Secondly, the joy of collaboration and working together (at least to me and I think to Chris) completely outweighs another 1 or 2 % on your turnover.
On the bike ride, Chris and I talked for a little while about the dental buying group and the peer review project that we have at the Clinic where we’re trying to develop a network of clinicians locally who come and meet and share and talk (and sometimes cry) and just carry the load together.
It’s developed into something that happens 6 times a year and 3 of those times we have somebody speak who has nothing to do with dentistry and just to inspire us and entertain us and to help to make us better.
And so, Chris thought it was a good idea (as a committed member of the peer review group and the buying group) to ask the local DFT guys to promote it to other colleagues in case they might be interested.
They were happy to do that until someone complained, suggesting (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘Campbell is only doing that to promote his Clinic’.
We built a clinic to do exactly this.
At the unveiling of the whole project in 2019 I stood at the riverbank in Nottingham and talked all about collaboration and how the practice was built for collaboration.
Chris was actually one of the speakers that night as were other Nottingham GDP’s who collaborate with us.
Whenever I meet with dentists, I almost always have the worst car, I always, always have the cheapest watch and much of the time have the smallest house (although my house is marvellous).
I decided to spend my money on a practice which is built for collaboration with colleagues and patients and teams.
There are still people around and about who want to sling sh*t at that.
Chris recounted another story where he’d asked the East Midlands DFT group to accept a little post that he had about seeking an associate for his practice and people went ballistic.
If we all work in our own isolated bubble where It’s us against the world and everyone else is the enemy, dentistry will further disintegrate and degenerate into a has been profession for the bitter used car salesmen.
It wasn’t always like this.
Our next peer review group is in September, the presenter is Sara Symington who’s a former Olympic cyclist and a performance director across many sports in the Olympic portfolio. She is currently in charge of Olympic performance for British cycling for the Paris Olympics and she’s just simply brilliant.
You will be unable to attend that talk and not take something back to your practice and perhaps to your personal life that improves you because she is that good.
Nobody who comes to that talk will refer a patient to me because Sara Symington was able to ride a bike and nobody will book on a course because she’s able to tell the story of what it’s like to build and nurture a team (with England netball) who created history within their sport when they beat Australia to win the gold medal in the last commonwealth games.
We’re not doing it for that, we’re doing it because we said that we exist to positively improve the lives of as many people as possible and we’re doing what we said.
Blog Post Number - 3160