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Tonight, for the first time, I'm putting a joint blog out both on the Colin Campbell blog and on the business blog.

I guess this is so people from either side of the subscription who get this can see that there are two worlds to this blog: the first is the amateur philosophy from a reluctant Dental Businessman, which goes out every single day (4600 or so), and the next is the Sunday dental business one.

Just in case you may be interested in one or the other, or both.

Callum and I travelled to the northeast of Scotland last week for 5 days (including 2 days of travel). We were 50 miles above Inverness in a town called Dornoch.

Dornoch is my spiritual home, where I would travel with my parents and my brother as a child and stay for two weeks in a touring caravan on the campsite beside the sandy beach and over the fence to the golf club.

Some of the happiest times I can remember as a child were in Dornoch: the freedom, the adventure, the memories- spectacular.

For reasons of personal heartache, but also joy, my family have ended up back in Dornoch; my Mum and Dad and my brother and sister-in-law- Callum and I went off to visit.

There's a million things to tell you about that place, but this is also a business blog, and the point is, when I took my parents out for a coffee on the day before we came home.

What you must understand about Dornoch (it's where Guy Ritchie and Madonna got married) is that it is now a little enclave of wealth in the midst of the Highlands of Scotland, which has many aspects of deprivation and social problems.

It's a pilgrimage for American golfers because it's the third oldest golf course in the world, and the town is full of recycled American money.

That means there are coffee shops and restaurants and trinket shops, and what used to be the old toy shop when I was a lad has now been converted into something called Cocoa Mountain.

This is a multi-chain endeavour in the Highlands (I think), which is a chocolatier, coffee shop, cake shop, etc.

It seemed perfect and close enough to my brother's house to take my old mother and father for a coffee and a cake, which is one of the things that they love.

And so this becomes a metaphor for how not to do something like this when you work in a service industry (which I do).

First of all, on entry, the steps were broken and difficult to climb. There was a ramp which was offset to the side, which was an afterthought for people to get up, and so the type of people who come for coffee in the middle of the day are often older people or mums and dads with pushchairs, not the easiest place to get in, but never mind, that's common.

On entering the shop, it was chaos; the tables were covered in cutlery and crockery that hadn't been changed. It was dusty and dirty; the floor was dirty, and there was a queue at the counter - it was carnage.

We had pretty much committed to this; my mum and dad are not particularly mobile, and so we managed to find a table and clear away the plates and cutlery that were there from before and prop on the end. I was able to go to the counter to order.

The first thing that's really important to me if I go for a coffee and sit in is that they don't serve it to me in a takeaway cup.

That is super lazy and s**t for the environment if you're actually interested in stuff like that, so I made a deliberate point of asking the guy on the counter if I could have proper cups because we were sitting in (I know what my mum and dad like). He acknowledged this with a smile on his face, and off we went.

It was later in the day, so they were restricted on what we could buy in terms of cakes, and the chocolate counter was absolutely decimated. I'm glad they were busy, but the guy who was making the coffee was completely stained down the front, haggard-looking and totally uninterested.

We ordered the coffees, and I ordered the chocolates and two cakes that were left and spent nearly 40 pounds in a coffee shop.

If I'm spending £40 in a coffee shop, it has to be that thing that I talked about earlier in the week: “You'll pay a lot, but you'll get more than you paid for”. Let me assure you, we paid a lot and got less than we paid for.

As Callum starts to make his journey into our business and starts to look at these things and go on to study business, he's fascinated by all these things, and we were able to have a conversation about what's good and not good. What was disappointing and what was uplifting.

There was nothing uplifting whatsoever.

The shelves were dusty, the tables were dirty, the floor was dirty; maybe they were short-staffed that day, maybe it had been busier than they expected, but there was no provision whatsoever made for anything like this.

What was happening was that there was an outshoot of a part of a business which was centred somewhere else; it was an afterthought, with no leadership, no management, no skin in the game.

It was understaffed (to maximise profit), and there were no protocols in place, no ‘considered architect’, no rules that said: “sit-in guys always get their coffee in a cup”.

They were picking the artisan chocolates that we had ordered out of standard packets, because they hadn't had time to unload them, as they were too busy. It totally busts the myth of what they were trying to achieve: being a high-end chocolatier in a coffee shop.

It doesn't matter; I got the chance to speak to my mum and dad. Callum and I got the chance to talk about business and what it looks like to make a promise to a customer and break it, but it is a metaphor, as all of these things are.

What promise are you trying to make to the people that you look after, and how often are you breaking it?

A wonderful question. In fact, a day's worth of discussion, isn't it?

In a group brainstorming session, imagine how good that would make your business after one day's work.