In early June, Andre and I had the pleasure of attending the London Xerocon event held at the ExCeL. It was a two-day event that enabled us to meet many different people across the accountancy field, as well as some extremely inspiring speakers.

One of which was Sam Conniff, an Uncertainty Expert. Sam is an expert in uncertainty and uses his knowledge and expertise to help people to navigate change and turn any fear that comes from uncertainty into opportunity.

With the fast paced changes we see across the world and in the work-place, his message seemed to harmonise with what we share with our clients at Hive, more specifically within the dental industry. We often talk about how we strive to stay ahead of the curve and lead the accountancy revolution in order to provide the best for our clients. We also talk alot about how dental practice owners need to embrace change in order to survive. With this ever-changing climate, it does force change and those who are unable to adapt what they offer and how they run their business, it’s likely that they’ll rapidly see their profit margin decrease and the need to exit quickly be an urgent requirement.

My key takeaways from his talk were:

• We naturally prefer to endure pain over uncertainty (E.g. suffering from a bad service, rather than taking a leap of faith with an alternative provider, no matter how better they seem)
• Having a low uncertainty tolerance means that we get filled with more doubt
• Having a higher uncertainty tolerance means that you are more likely to plan further in future
• Uncertainty causes us to look for patterns and refer back to what we already know, which in turn prevents change

To find out more about his theory and how he can help you to navigate uncertainty, you can access his website here.

His talk got me thinking about the dentists we speak to and an area that we see time and time again being neglected is the finance function of a business. In one of Hayley’s previous blogs, Don’t forget to invest in your profitability, she explains how dental practices and businesses should be investing in the following key areas:

• Employees
• Tracking good-quality data
• Annual compliance
• Management accounts
• Sound tax advice

We often speak with dentists who have been with their accountant for years, but they haven’t provided any proactive advice or optimised their tax efficiencies, just simply ticked the box for compliance. It still amazes me how despite reaching out to us because they haven’t been happy with the service they’ve been receiving for years, alongside us identifying £thousands in tax savings, they shy away from making the switch.

With the right investments being at the forefront of your businesses success it’s time to take a step back to identify how your fear of uncertainty might be impacting this. Sam talks about how navigating uncertainty can drive growth and opportunity for high performing teams and leaders and so I wanted to put this into context with how Hive can help you.

We know your work is extremely challenging and so we are here to be the experts behind your finance function, so you can be rest assured that you are getting the most out of your hard work.

Hive is made up by three main entities: accountancy, business consultancy and marketing. We are designed to support you through every step of your dental career, from being newly qualified, to ensuring you sell your dental practice in the most tax efficient way, and everything in between.

We only ever suggest services that we truly believe you need and have absolute faith in the services we provide. To this effect, we launched our money-back guarantee back in September for our accountancy services, in the hope that this helps potential clients to feel assured by our promises and decrease the degree of uncertainty involved in making the switch.

If you’d like to organise a complimentary consultation to discuss your requirements and how we can help you, please get in touch.