The dip is a famous concept in business (in life), it's kind of represented by a graph.
So, a standard two-axis graph, where there's a point on the vertical axis where the graph starts, for example, let's say halfway up, and then the graph proceeds along and then plummets downwards and downwards and downwards almost to the bottom and then slowly rises out on the other side. Obviously, that bit in the middle is the dip.
If you look at start-up businesses, they talk about a 3-year dip on average, that's before it makes any sort of money, but that can be variable from industry. If you look at implementing a new product or a new skill, or a fitness regime, it's always the same. If you want to train to run a marathon and you haven't run before, you're gonna have 2 or 4 weeks, depending on your age, where you feel like s**t as you start training, that's the dip.
The problem is that most people don't get through the dip. The next thing, though, is in business, when we decide to start a business, for example, and get the greatest of dips, it's easy to jack out of the business halfway through the dip because we think it's not gonna work, and then we only lose half the money, but then we've lost half the money.
If your business is bigger, what you'll find is that you're creating dips all over the place. I want to develop my hygiene service so that it's a lot better, but it'll take a bit of investment. I need a new CBCT or an iOS scanner. I've decided to invest in a practise manager or an operations director, etc, etc, etc.
If these steps come together, it starts to get frightening, and so one of the jobs of the leader is to try and stage the dips, not to eradicate them and not to eliminate them altogether (they’re necessary for investment in a better place). The ideal is to keep them separated as much as possible, because to bring them all together all at once is probably a recipe for trouble, but to imagine that there are no dips, or that you're past the dips, that is naive and extreme.