I'm working on the presentation days that I'm providing for the Extreme Business 100 group, which is part of the Chris Barrow portfolio that we took over in April this year.
Prior to that transaction being undertaken, I'd already been invited by Chris to speak on the course for 3 days, and I'm looking at providing something around a consultation masterclass, but with an analogy related to the wider business of dentistry, and this is how we present it and do it and stuff.
I was thinking deeply about this, particularly on my bike into work today, and on the dog walk before that and how we can frame this to people to get the most out of it, but one insight that struck me greatly about this.
If you attend those days, I promise I'll give you a format that will show you how to make your practice better, at least in part, but probably quite considerably, but I cannot do the work for you; you have to do it for yourself.
We've reached a position over the past 10 years where we are extraordinarily secure with a fantastic balance sheet and assets that would allow us to push our business forward in any direction that we wanted.
While I understand that we are so privileged to be here, I also understand that the reason that we are here is that we did the work.
In 2010 and 2011, Chris used to come to me for one day every month to go through both my businesses and to set targets for the following month and the following 3 months.
We did the work.
We integrated the systems, we created a culture of development, we promoted people and encouraged them, we trained them, and we paid them properly. We made our facilities the best we possibly could and invested in technology, and we did this under the guidance of Chris and what he was seeing in other places from other people.
It's simple for everyone, 'you never ever get fit by joining a gym’.
‘You only ever get fit by going to the gym’.
Everything that you get from people who want to teach dental business practice management, consultations, ridge preservation, finance, marketing or anything else is a format for you to use and you to do.
Choose to do or do not, but don't complain if you went on a course and never did the hard craft of implementing the things you learned in the course into your practice, and then never made things better.
As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
You have to change, and in order to change, you have to stretch, and stretching is painful and hard and tiring and time-consuming and strenuous.
Do the work. We really, really need people who are here to do the work.