In one of his best-known poems, Robert Frost famously described making the difficult choice between two roads diverging in a wood. One was grassy and pleasant – the more popular choice – while the other was covered with leaves. He, of course, “took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
I’ll freely admit that when young, I took this poem at face value. I liked its spirit of treading the less conventional path, and getting a different outcome. It turns out I was wrong – the whole point is that both roads were roughly the same. It’s an ode to the great “what ifs” of life, and the fact that we can never know how the other road works out.
But all the same, sometimes taking the road less travelled can actually make all the difference. If you’re a business owner, you’ll know this better than most. Faced with the choice between diverging career paths, or the owner v. associate conundrum, you chose to forge ahead under your own steam. In recent years, this hasn’t been an easy star to follow. I know many practice owners who are feeling an ambient level of grief that their business isn’t how they’d imagined it would be.
I’m going to argue that this topsy-turviness is fine. In fact, it’s what you signed up for.
By choosing the non-predictable, non-linear career path, you chose the chaos that comes with it. At times, this is difficult, but it also makes you more competent and more resilient. You’re growing, every single day. For a business owner, it literally is all about the journey, not the destination.
If you’ve seen The Matrix, you’ll be familiar with the “blue pill, red pill” choice. Take the blue pill to stay in ignorant bliss, or take the red pill to see the world as it is. As a practice owner, you choose to take the red pill. Your perspective changes in many different ways, such as waking up to see that tax actually isn’t a wonderful thing that does us all a world of good – it’s a flawed system that favours some over others. But, owning a business also means taking what I’d call the black pill, or (if you want to make it sound more ominous) the doom pill. This means swallowing all the difficult truths you might be facing, before carrying on anyway.
Because, the trickiest truth of all is that your vision for the future will constantly be disrupted. The road you’ve chosen to travel will be rife with potholes and sudden, unexpected turns. I’m in no doubt that there is greater change still to come. Until now, employees have been (at least mostly) buffered and protected from the past six years, while business owners bore the brunt and made the big, scary decisions. It’s unlikely that this grace period will continue forever, and far more likely that shockwaves will spread. Already, we’re seeing a dip in entry-level white-collar jobs coming up. If you’re an associate, however, the principles remain the same: engage with your practice, work with your skills, build your communication, and think seriously about your tax.
There’s still a degree of predictability in dentistry, and you can still retire at the end with a good payout, but the journey you plotted out might not be what you imagined. If you can accept where you are by passing through the various stages of grief that come with this – denial, anger, bargaining, and depression – you can even feel excited about what’s to come.
Every business should make money, but it can never be purely commercial. Success doesn’t come from charging more and spending less – it comes from doing a hundred things very well. You may have a mortgage to pay and a family to support, and profit certainly helps you to accomplish these. But there’s a deeper reason you chose to own a dental business. It’s always been about doing something better, and loving (to some extent) the chaos that comes with that.
Admittedly, dentistry used to be “safe”. The chaos was far less pronounced, and practice owners could breeze along, making a good profit from a basic level of emotional investment. This is no longer the case, but it doesn’t have to be a negative thing – it’s a challenge. Fundamentally, don’t we all want the stakes to be real?
The rise of AI may spark more changes in how people work, and even what future jobs and “products” look like. Yet I believe it’ll always be possible to make dentistry pay well. As more tasks become automated or handed off to the virtual sphere, we’re likely to see a higher premium on human interaction. In this, there’s a chance to think about how you create an experience around face-to-face dentistry that people value (and tell their friends about).
By choosing entrepreneurship, you’ve already steered yourself onto the road less travelled: you’ve given a tacit nod to the path of chaos. When this chaos arrives, it means you’ve won: you’ve got what you wanted. In this landscape of constant flux, there’s more potential than ever. So, yes, take time to grieve and accept that things are different – and then seize the opportunities with both hands.
It’s also helpful to know you’re not alone. If you’d like a partner on your journey, or simply to speak with someone else on the path, you can email me directly at dan.fine@hivebusiness.co.uk to arrange a meeting.
