Business coaching from a cycle ride – Part 2

The other week I cycled from Oxford to Putney bridge for a fun weekend away with a friend of mine. This two day trip revealed some incredible metaphors about how to run a successful practice that I wanted to share with you.

Last week I shared with you the importance of distilling what is important, essential, valuable and the purpose of any project or goal that you start.

Today I want to share with you some of my insights about starting from a position of being ill equipped and poorly informed.

I am a fair weather cyclist, I am fit, strong and active, although I don’t do much regular cycling so embarking on a 100 mile cycle trip without doing any research or having knowledge of the terrain or doing any training, was, I admit a curious decision and once I had committed to the trip I was going to complete it. I did however, have a puncture repair kit and a set of alan keys although I did not have a pump, and thankfully I didn’t need one.

As I reflected on my lack of preparation, I recognised this was not dissimilar to the decision I made when I bought my practice or the one many dentists make when they buy their practice. Most dentists like you, buy or set up a squat because they want offer the patients a great service doing great dentistry they way they have been trained to do it. When they are planning the practice they spend a lot of time and attention thinking about equipment, materials, chairs, cabinets, microscopes and other equipment.

When I meet with other people who are planning on setting up a business they explain how they spend a lot of time learning and developing the necessary skills that they will need to run a successful business, such as

· the industry they are going into

· projected sales

· The vision for the business

· Planning the budgets for the next 12 -36 months

· Considering the staffing requirements

· Identifying key skills, and attributes

· Building a sustainable marketing plan

· Planning the systems and protocols for all aspects of the business

· Identifying skills gap for themselves and staff

· Planning training

· Developing the leadership and management structure.

· Etc, etc

There are 4 stages to learning and developing a skill – take for instance learning to cut a crown prep

Unconscious incompetence - That is you are not aware of your own knowledge gap. There was a time that you were unaware that you could not cut a crown prep.

Conscious incompetence – that is you are aware of how much you don’t know about a subject. A moment came when you realised you could not cut a crown prep.

Conscious competence – You can do something and it requires a lot of mental exertion to do it. You started to learn how to cut crown preps and had to consciously think about each stage, incisal clearance, the depth of the prep, the shape of the margin, placement of the retraction. All of this was hard work when you first started learning and had to consciously think about each stage,

Unconscious competence – you can do something without thinking about it, just like how you now probably prep a crown, it comes naturally and your fingers know what to do automatically.

As I was considered what little preparation I had put into preparing for my cycle trip, I also considered, how little I had considered and prepared for running a business when I bought my practice. I thought about the clinical dentistry yes, but failed to consider business skill I would also need and the problems that had caused. I then reflected on all my friends colleagues and latterly clients, who had inadvertently fallen into the same trap, thinking that knowing how to do clinical dentistry was sufficient to run a successful practice.

Fortunately 1 have spent the last 15 years studying business particularly with reference to dental practice. If you recognise where you are on the path from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, you can be reassured that as your dental business coach, I can help you run a great dental practice.

If you have gained insights into how you run you business better from unrelated situations please let me know, by commenting on my post now.