When I was young, I used to watch The A-Team on a Saturday night. Hannibal, who was the leader of that motley crew, used to always say at the end of the episode ‘I love it when a plan comes together. The thing is, though, the plan can't come together if you don't have a plan.
This is the time of year to construct your plan.
People who own their own business don't get a Christmas holiday; they get downtime during Christmas when the work is closed to work on their business, at least in part. People who decide to take the luxury of 2 weeks off at Christmas and pay no attention to their business pay the penalty when they come back to work in January, February, March, April, etc.
Part of running a business, of having a business, of building a business is working on the business and building your plan.
At this time of year, a lot of the work of the Campbell Clinic Group team is building the plan for next year. In fact, the majority of my focus is on next year's plan at the moment. We have a meeting which falls into the behaviours of excellent leadership that we subscribe to on the 23rd of January 2026.
The meeting is all-day off-site with the senior leadership team and the non-executive director, but it's not somewhere where we get together and look at pie in the sky nonsense of things we might like, It's something that's prepared in detail, with papers, agendas, insights, all of the possible decisions that we have to make are tabled before we go. We view the market, what it looks like, external and internal, what the challenges will be, where the business is now, and what we'd like to achieve in as focused a manner as we can.
In spite of the difficulties of this year, we've grown enormously since last year, but we prepared ourselves last year for 2026/27. That was a conscious effort to invest in infrastructure, both in team and facility, that would allow us to catapult forward next year. If all our calculations fall into place, if our plans realise themselves, we could be double the size of the business we are by the end of 2026, and we are not a small business at the moment.
That is 3 years' worth of strategic planning, year by year, planning, quarter by quarter executing, touching base, touching base, adjusting, moving along.
I live in a world where ‘only the paranoid survive’. It’s obviously never going to be successful; this will never work, but it's worked so far, so why won't it work then?
All of the resources we have here on this site, all of the information for strategy planning, your best analysis, your SWOT analysis, your swimming pool model. Now's the time to do it over Christmas, it's free.
You just have to download it and do it. And then, this time next year, you'll be glad you did it.
The last thing to do, though, is to write a letter to yourself. Where would I like to be on the 31st of December 2026? I'm told that's what successful people do, and then you can read it then and see how much better you did than you expected.
Colin Campbell, Chris Barrow, and an intrepid group of dentists will be cycling across the plains of Tanzania from Kilimanjaro in early February 2026. If you would like to support the charity, Bridge to Aid, and this extraordinary challenge, please click here.
Thank you for your generosity.