Article

Insights
Mar 06, 2024 // 12 min read
Dental Business Management Part 1: Creating a Vision - The ‘Why’ of your Business
Colin Campbell
Katherine Hare
DOI: 10.3290/iti.fi.45727
dental practice management small business social values
Series overview

In October 2023 the ITI launched its Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy. This innovative and interactive online modular course is designed for dental practitioners to enhance and improve their knowledge of business concepts, to improve their practice, their team and their patient experiences. It is hoped that this course will be able to inspire a new generation of dentists to improve their working environment for both themselves and their teams, and therefore improve their satisfaction, their well-being and their enthusiasm for the industry.

This course is set around six modules over a four-week period and the modules include vision setting, dental practice finance, marketing, human resources and leadership, and sales and strategy, together with discussions regarding social legacy and corporate social responsibility.

To accompany the launch of this course, a series of short papers have been devised around the subjects of the modules in the course to assist practitioners in their understanding and learning and to augment the course material. It was felt that this course was necessary, and indeed that these publications were necessary, because it is clear that healthcare practitioners throughout the world are struggling with overwhelm, burnout and difficulty in organizational management. There is a raft of research and evidence related to this including physician burnout in the United States, which in some cases is reported to run at approaching 50% (Shanafelt et al. 2012). In a recent study in the United Kingdom 43% of practitioners said that they were very engaged with dentistry (BDJ 2019). But the sad part of this is that it means more than 50% of practitioners are not highly engaged in dentistry. Certainly, one of the things that lead to burnout and stress and disillusionment is the inability to create and nurture organizational structures and strategies to reduce the overwhelm of administration and non-clinical tasks. Developing an excellent structure in dental business not only improves the lives of the practitioner and potentially their appreciation and satisfaction in their work, but also improves the lives of the team, the supplier-partner relationship and, most importantly, the patient outcomes.

This series of articles, in conjunction with the Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy, is designed to augment clinical education and development for practitioners around the world, ultimately feeding into the aspiration of the ITI to improve patients' lives worldwide.

Introduction

Setting a vision for your business may seem like an aspirational or even unnecessary goal. This is particularly true in the busy working world of a small business, where turnover is absolutely vital, and time spent working on philosophy might seem a waste of resource.

Nothing, though, could be further from the truth.

Setting the vision of your business is fundamental to its success moving forward, even if your business only has you in it. The benefits of setting a vision, and then values, and then a mission will provide the guiding lights that allow you to move your business towards the place where you would like it to be. It is of course impossible to start on a complicated journey without a map, otherwise you will arrive at a destination which is entirely unplanned and may be in entirely the wrong place. It is also evident that as we build our businesses and organizations, we will come to ethical crossroads, where decisions are extremely difficult and complicated. Our vision and our values and our mission will allow us to navigate those decisions in a much easier, more effective way. So, for this reason, vision setting is essential (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Building a business. Photography credit: Stuart Reekie Photography, UK

If you are entering into a new venture, then vision setting is an obvious starting point as you decide how to design your business from the very beginning. Your vision then might seem easy or obvious. However, it may seem much more difficult if you're already in a business setting, wondering what direction you're going in, and whether the business decisions you made some years ago are right for you now.

In either situation, it is absolutely essential to take time out and go back to the principles of vision setting, in order to give you a clear guide moving forwards. There are countless examples of companies that have a clear vision, which has helped them move forwards. There are also many examples of companies that do not. Indeed, according to the Harvard Business Review, over 85% of executive leadership teams do not follow a strategic approach, spending less than one hour per month discussing strategy (Olson 2022). This seems foolish at any level of business.