By Ross Martin, Accountancy Director at Hive Business.
Quite unusually for an accountancy team we discarded the timesheet. The reason: it harnesses time rather than value, and time isn’t scalable whereas value is. And value isn’t finite, whereas time is. There are some parallels with dentistry: you don’t sell your time per se, you avoid hourly rates where possible and you rely on your associates and your business structure to generate your profit.
If you do conceive of business as a matter of selling your time by the unit then I’d hazard a guess that your life looks a bit wonky, with very few hours left over for restorative things like rest, social life and family. But let’s be honest, how many fellow dentists have you met who don’t feel overworked?
While in our culture it’s certainly possible, and quite normal, to derive a masochistic pride from working too much, the effects are harmful. Poor work life balance is the seed from which personal break down and family break up grow. Working too much means divorce or depression, or both, not business success. So why do it? We do it out of good faith, from a desire to work hard and help ourselves and our families.
But all too often we get it catastrophically wrong: instead of spending more hours in the business, we really need to be spending more hours on it. By that I mean working out how to scale it to adapt to the changing world, and delegating. It’s good for your health to protect your work life balance, and far easier to do that when your business looks after itself.
The alternative is really quite unpleasant. I speak to a lot of people who never seem to have enough time. They are running around and they feel stressed and anxious and unhappy with themselves. They don’t feel able to put time aside to work on their businesses, and there’s never time to tackle things proactively. Their options always close down because they’re forced into a corner and they end up making poor decisions, too late (although they often don’t realise until later still). It’s miserable.
During a divorce it’s awful to see the work life balance scales tip and snuff out a shared future that two good people who have worked hard deserve. Nearly half of divorces stem from money problems, and money problems often lead to other issues including depression and a lack of self-worth which also impact negatively on a relationship.
Once couples stop communicating effectively, relationships quickly break down. Not being able to talk through issues and problems means they’re not settled and can quickly turn into insurmountable problems that neither party is able to talk about in an effective, constructive manner. It’s like the cancer has spread from your business to your marriage: open, responsive thinking is replaced with sclerotic thinking so that options steadily disappear along with your ability to cope.
Dental practices take a lot more work to run than they did 10 years ago. The world evolves around you in real time these days and running a business is like being on a backwards conveyor belt — you cannot stand still. So a business that’s resilient, adaptive and scalable is the only kind that’s going to survive, and a business owner who uses a portion of their finite time to build something like it is best prepared to remain sane and happy. We all want to be happy, don’t we?
Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
