2008 was a big year (at least for me).
I had a huge health scare within my family which framed my thoughts about what was important and where I’d like to be and then on one dank early March evening my bosses (Husband and Wife) came to my house under some pretend pretext to actually tell me that they’d sold the practices I worked in to IDH and that they were taking over in 3 weeks.
And so, I left of short order leaving everything I’d built in those practices for 11 years behind and walked into the worst recession and financial crash that the country had ever seen (or at least so I thought because I had no experience of these things really).
A year into that recession I became a partner at a new practice just as things were really hitting the buffers and assumed that I would be dead and buried within a year or two from then.
Fast forward 12 years and I open a massive and expensive dental tin hut in the middle of a field in Nottingham 5 weeks before they lock us down in the worst pandemic the world has seen for a long time.
We open back up and have an unprecedented clamour for healthcare and in particular independent healthcare before now reaching levels of inflation that haven’t been seen since the 1970’s and the prospect of a recession worse than the one in 2008.
And so, it’s fair to assume now that we’re all going to die (which obviously is true) but perhaps just not yet.
Straight after lockdown the price of used cars was rising 23% a year and house prices in some areas were much the same.
The rise in new car prices has now dropped to 8% (that’s still an 8% rise a year) but it’s much less than 23%.
Supply chains are levelling off, stuff is available, house price clamour is reducing, inflation is over 10% and we’re heading towards a national strike.
And so, it’s time to think for all of us who have interests in business what phase are we in.
Are we in a growth phase?
Are we in a stabilisation phase?
Or are we in a survival phase?
The good news for us is that we have been in all of those phases in the past 24 months and so, we have familiarity with those.
We clamoured through the most extraordinary survival phase from January 2020 for (well I guess the whole of 2020).
It felt like we could stabilise the ship at the start of 2021 and then all of a sudden, we were in the most extraordinary growth phase.
The best thing to remember in these circumstances is that no phase lasts forever and it’s likely that you will end up at least in stabilisation or growth on a cycle for the rest of your working life.
You might be fortunate enough in a business to avoid the survival phase, but I reckon that the survival phase is the most important one to teach you the best way to work through the other phases.
I’m not entirely certain where we will sit over the next 6-9 months, perhaps growth, perhaps stabilisation but both of those are great and neither any less difficult than the other.
Having been in a survival phase in 2020, I have made sure that we are very unlikely ever to be in a survival phase any time soon.
I teach on The Campbell Academy business course with other colleagues from the practice and external speakers to try to help dentists understand modern business principles to allow their practices to grow and flourish and succeed.
If you’re interested in finding out about it, please click here.
Blog Post Number - 3189
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