Business and your business never ever stands still.
We have a very short view of history, and so we can be cruising along in our own little furrow for a little while where things are good, not realising that very soon up ahead we'll hit a massive roadblock, and that'll be the end of us. Therefore, all of the cycles (and in particular product life cycles) in all of business are real and current and imminent.
And so, re-examining what you do in your business and what your business is for is super important.
No longer could you graduate as a 23-year-old, open a practice with family money and still be doing the same things at 60 when you decide to sell and cash out and have a nice retirement.
The days to allow you to do that on that treadmill are utterly and entirely gone. That's because the external environment impacts on your internal environment all the time. So the advent of new technologies and the change in social attitudes will ultimately drive the market into a different situation where the routine stuff that you've previously been doing is not of any value anymore or of much less value and then you have to decide what to do next.
In recent times, the ‘what to do next’ thing of choice has been ‘composite bonding’. I write that phrase in inverted commas because composite has always been bonded in one form or another, and so the bonding of composite is not new; what is new is calling anterior aesthetic composite build-ups ‘composite bonding’.
This has been driven by a change in social attitudes by a particular demographic and generation wishing to look like someone ‘aff the telly’.
In general terms, this type of treatment is not particularly good for patients, and that is for two reasons:
1) They don't actually need it.
And so people with great skill in the application of anterior composite materials can do extraordinary things for patients in small amounts but in my experience, that's not the vast majority of people doing it or why they're doing it, it's mostly because they think they can make more money (new product into the product life cycle).
And so that takes me to my latest email.
I was offered the opportunity to provide hair transplants at my practice and to generate an extraordinary amount of hair transplant leads, to now generate a new business, using a different product to improve my product life cycle.
One of my best friends has had great success with this type of treatment, but for me, it's just not a fit for us, and so the decision of what to do next and how to do it and what to do well is one of the key things that pushes you forward as an organisation into the longer term.
Making sure that you're aware of the market, the changes in the market, and the change in the attitudes (most particularly for the people that you seek to serve the most), and then providing that service and solution for them in the best possible way.
That's how to decide what to do next, not jumping on a bandwagon of what everyone else is doing, just because it looks like they're making short-term cash.