Deciding to improve or elevate your understanding of how to run a business is a significant lifestyle choice.
It's never possible to abdicate the responsibility for running a business to someone else.
With this in mind, a metaphor to think about is a New Year's resolution. When you decide that, after all these years, it's time to ‘get fit’.
And so, what happens in the first week of January is you join the gym, and you decide you're going to go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week and maybe eat a little bit better, maybe drink a little bit less, maybe get a little bit more sleep.
You can do that till towards the end of February, but you can't stop (well, you can stop, but you will return back to where you were, or worse).
I remember once, a friend of a friend gave up drinking for a whole year, but after the bells tolled on New Year's Eve at the end of this year, he ordered 12 beers in a bucket from the waiting staff at the function we were at and drank them all in quick succession. Not really the lifestyle change you might have been hoping for.
Deciding to take responsibility and control of your business is a major choice in undertaking, but the first step is to test whether it's for you.
We developed a Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Programme with the ITI several years ago, which we call it DDEP.
It's a six-week investigation into a lifestyle change to run your business in a better way, and there are various ways to approach it.
Number one.
You could use it as a fact finder, drop in, see what you know, what you don't know, see where some of your significant gaps are, and drop out.
Number Two.
You could use it as a way to meet people and explore what other people understand about business, and benchmark yourself against other people who run dental businesses.
Number Three
You could immerse yourself in the content and the coaches and develop a business plan for the next 3 years and exit with that plan.
Regardless of which way you approach this course and how you decide to take what you want from it, it never stops at the end of 6 weeks.
I think this is the most important insight into this or any other course.
It starts your learning; it doesn't finish it. It starts the change in your lifestyle.
What you're trying to achieve with something like this is a change in mindset, where you understand the advantage and the value in working ON, not IN, your business.
The Digital Dental Entrepreneurial programme gives you permission to be a business person. We know that you're good at dentistry; we know you've got that. Can you be good at the business too?
This might be the perfect place to start
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