As I sit here early on Friday morning, trying to produce enough blogs for Millie to get them published and up to date, I'm looking at a piece of Lego on my desk, which is a half-constructed Millennium Falcon that I received for Christmas from our boss and our leader, Hayley Brown, our managing director.
It's about half built, this Millennium Falcon, but still doesn't quite look like a full Millennium Falcon, and that's the point, that's the metaphor.
Towards the end of January this year, the senior leadership team (think board) of The Campbell Clinic Group met at a place called Oddhouse Hall. It was a beautiful sunny January day, and our non-executive director was with us at the same time.
Hayley and I had planned a full day of strategy and strategic thinking and planning to take us to the place we needed to be in January 2026, but to harness the strategy that we'd designed over the past few years, for the different phases of work in various areas of the business.
We created six projects in different areas, which, conveniently at that stage, could be shared with the SLT team. These included expansions of our orthodontic project, expansion of our general dental project, work on GDP engagement in implant dentistry, and various other initiatives.
We were able to visualise these and then construct details related to these projects. A couple of weeks later, we took them to the entire team on our team day to show what we wanted to do, pull teams together, and get the projects done.
It's a hugely exciting and energising thing, but of course, then it's time to do the work.
As with all of these things, no battle plan ever stands contact with the enemy; it always needs to be adapted, changed, and altered based on the circumstances that we find, and over the past 6 months, there has been some amount of adaptation, but the essence of these projects has stayed the same.
Our financial year starts on the 1st of February, and so all our strategic planning centres around that (hence the reason our meeting was in January). We now have a format and structure for this year on year, and every year we get better at it because we're more practised, the administration is better, the thinking is better, the discussion is better, and the execution is better.
As we look now, and are very close to what tech business is called H1 (half-year results), it's 13 days until the end of our half-year. Our business is up 12% (or more) in that time, which for us is an extraordinary achievement, particularly in the current dental market.
Our current growth metric will double from here in 7 years, and everything looks like we'll probably double quicker than that.
Making a plan is critical, adapting the plan is essential, and visualising where you are within the plan (much like the Millennium Falcon) is crucial.
The Millennium Falcon is being built, piece by piece, every 2 weeks, to demonstrate to the staff how far we are in the project. It's a metaphor, a visual metaphor.
Every Tuesday meeting that I have at 9 o'clock every fortnight, I present the Millennium Falcon as a small part of that meeting and say, “Look how far we've come”.
I meet with the team every Tuesday morning between 9:10 and 9:30. We meet with the team 4 times a year on full team days, updating, celebrating, and commiserating. I meet with the senior leadership team every 3 weeks. One small meeting, one medium-sized meeting, and one full board meeting are held quarterly, with numerous other meetings to complete the projects.
This is the structure of business, this is the work of business, this is how you build a business.