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The quote at the top of the page associated with this little piece of writing is from the late great Louis Mackenzie.

Louis was a brilliant man who worked with us until very close to his passing, but one of the things he taught me in the time that we worked together was that he said that dentistry used to be a difficult business in which to fail, and now it isn't.

That was a few years ago, and things have not got better. It has not become harder to fail in dentistry again; it's become easier. There are many different reasons for that, which have piled up since the pandemic, but one or two of them are listed below.

Number 1, the cost of money.

Previously, it was easy to get money at almost 0% interest. You could borrow some money, and as long as you just scraped along, you could carry on, pay your debts and build a business slowly; not the case anymore, money is expensive and makes it more expensive.

Number 2, the cost of doing business.

This has just gone up and up and up for about 1000 million reasons. The cost of doing business goes up when we get taxed more (that's happened massively). When we have to pay more for wages (massively). When we have to pay more for supplies, (massively).

And so, everywhere we look, we're being squeezed, and it's costing more, and therefore we're having to try and charge more, but if we can't provide a service that's worth the money that we're charging, then we get less money in, and the costs overtake the money that we make.

And so it might, you might think that I'm scaremongering here or trying to create a crisis, but I was in discussion with my friend and colleague, Chris Barrow, just yesterday, who is very concerned that there are practices that he knows who might not be in business by the end of next year.

When you don't even know what your operating surgery costs per day are, therefore have no idea whatsoever whether your 50% associate is making you money or losing you money, and you're about to get hit by more cost increases, including potentially 2% of National Insurance contributions on sick on stakeholder pensions. Not to mention more corporation tax, not to mention more costs for your materials, or your labs, or your wages, or your rent, or your mortgage, or your heating, or your IT, etc, etc, you could be in trouble.

One of the ways to remedy that is to learn about it and to learn about running a business, and the science and the art of what it takes to run a business.

We've been providing education in this area now for nearly 10 years, and we have a cohort of people who have successfully navigated our course and moved on to do some of the most extraordinary things. I met three of those guys when I was in Portugal recently lecturing, and we were chatting together with Tom Reason, my marketing director from the clinic and what became obvious was that the three guys who'd done our business course years ago, got their heads together and figured out that we'd helped to put a value onto their businesses combined of something like 15 million pounds.

We didn't actually do that; we just showed them how to do that, and then they did it.

I get WhatsApp messages on a weekly basis from Rhoodie Garrana in Johannesburg, who attended a bootcamp course just over 18 months ago, and is now building perhaps the most extraordinary clinic you can imagine in Johannesburg based around the template of what we have here, but not only physically, also procedurally, and so what you'll get now in this blog and in different places, is what we call Bootcamp Voices.

It's the voices of some of the people who have done their business education, some quotes and some encouragement that it is the right thing to do to learn about running a business, and it is worth it, and the return on that investment is massive.

Maybe see you in the springtime, if you want to try and make it better, if you want to learn how to build it better, it'd be a pleasure.