New facts have emerged since the June 2016 referendum and some people want another Brexit vote. This may be unrealistic given the law and Parliamentary precedent, but it’s easy enough to understand.
What’s harder to understand is the stance that dental practice owners often take to facts, which is to avoid looking at them after a decision about their business has been made.
Which is strange, because they don’t have the same constraints on their decision making processes. So why do they behave as if they do? Unlike in politics, it pays to be fluid in business. Make more u-turns than Theresa May and there’s no reputational cost, yet there may be serious benefits.
If you are trying to grow your practice from £500k turnover to £1m you need a gear change and a shift in strategy. From £1m you need another shift to get to £1.5m. You won’t make it by doing the same things a little better. Gear changes mean identifying new facts and taking new actions that serve your new strategy.
But how do you reinvent your strategy? Many dentists feel uncomfortable about this and avoid it altogether, and worse, they muddle up objectives, strategy and tactics. The American organizational theorist Richard Rumelt describes the three hallmarks of bad strategy:
- Failure to face the problem. If the challenge isn’t defined properly it’s impossible to assess the quality of a strategy.
- Mistaking goals for strategies.
- Fluff. Getting sidetracked and not actioning anything.
Failure to face the problem is common among practice owners. Often the challenge is masked. Why? You’re providing high end treatments and you have a nice lifestyle as a principal. But you can’t see what you could be doing. You might be subsidising the rent, but you haven’t defined the challenge because there’s no pain point.
But if we show you the pain point, perhaps that you are only being paid the equivalent of a 20% associate deal, you might feel differently. Suddenly the status quo feels unacceptable and the challenge is better defined.
Mistaking goals for strategies is also typical among dentists. People are great at reeling off to do lists but not so great at settling on one or two pivotal objectives, like getting to the £1m sweet spot. Only when you know your main objective can you identify the obstacles and build your strategy and tactics tightly around them.
And the fluff. Everyone knows the feeling of sitting in interminable meetings and losing the will to live. Meetings need focus, and they need minutes with actions, and actions with deadlines and accountability. Actions count more than buzzwords and corporate talk.
Rumelt describes the kernel of good strategy:
- Diagnosis. Identify the challenge, the main pain point, and thereby remove the sense of overwhelming, competing challenges.
- Guiding policy. Your overall approach to overcoming the obstacles.
- Coherent actions. All actions support the guiding policy.
This work isn’t an exact science, which might explain the aversion among dentists to it. It’s what our diagnostic day and management consultancy services have been designed to help you with.
It’s about assessing change and evolving, which is time consuming and can feel uncomfortable if you’re used to delivering solutions in clinical dentistry. But it’s the only way to grow — you won’t be able to grow by doing the same thing.
To find out more about our diagnostic day please call us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
