Tamara Milanovic spoke with Justin Leigh about how the Dental Practice Accelerator process is coming along for winners Jay and Kin, and what he has learned as a mentor and coach.
Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about your role with the Dental Practice Accelerator?
My name’s Justin Leigh, I am the founder of Focus 4 Growth, a sales and leadership development and training company specialising in the dental market. I was really privileged to be invited to be part of the mentor team for the Dental Practice Accelerator, alongside Sandeep Kumar and Sameer Patel. Sandeep and Sameer both have clinical backgrounds and are steeped in dentistry.
Early on in my career, I was a dental technician, but I’m a business coach. Sandeep and Sameer really share best practice, distilling what they found works in practice and leading teams and businesses.
While I bring an element of that, my specialty is getting really clear on the actions, making sure that everybody’s enrolled, helping to think about communication and getting the whole practice team aligned with the growth journey.
Then, helping with accountability to make sure that the actions get completed.
Very often, the operations and implementation can be the things that trip people up. They’ve got all the right intentions and some great ideas, and then they don’t execute. So for me, it’s about helping people be accountable to execute and bring their teams along on the journey.
And how has the process been going for these past few months? How has your experience been?
It’s been a great experience! Once we’d selected Campbell Dental Practice, we started with our full day together with the practice team.
There have been a number of changes that the team has wanted to make, and in particular, the owners of the practice Jay and Kin have really got clarity over where they’re now taking the practice, what that long-term vision looks like.
I’ve really enjoyed helping them come to those decisions, make the changes happen and stay on track with their plan for the future. I’ve been having regular calls with Jay, Kin and their practice manager Louise, to give them the support and accountability to continue to inspire the changes in their own teams. And I’ve really enjoyed it.
I do a lot of this work with groups of dentists and customers. I don’t often get to work with the business team and really take them through a full implementation like this, so for me, it’s quite rewarding to see the progress they’ve made so far and be part of the journey, even though I’m at a distance from it because I’m focused on coaching for accountability.
The regular coaching call is about helping them stay focused on what they’ve committed to. In particular, recapping on the progress they’re making and the results they’re seeing. It’s a really enjoyable part of the journey.
Can you tell us more about these changes? What are some of the steps that they’ve taken or the growth that you’ve seen with Campbell Dental Practice?
The big thing is setting a clear goal for what they want to achieve as a practice team. One of the key challenges for lots of practices, and was a challenge for them, was an over-reliance on an NHS contract and finding that they didn’t have the capacity to make changes.
When you have a high UDA target, the work rate is also really high, the surgeries are packed with appointments for NHS patients – where do we start the journey? How do we move from that level of constraint on their time to starting to build a private practice? It’s been a really interesting journey.
It starts with the intention, setting the goal to say, ‘this is what we want to achieve’. They’ve gone through that process. Then it’s about communicating those goals to your practice team and giving them confidence that it could be achieved, enrolling them on the mission that you’re on.
Significant improvements
Then thinking about how you communicate that with patients. How do you start to zone your diary to create the capacity for the private treatment? How do you then think about the patient experience? What investments might we have to make as a practice to make sure that that patient experience delivers on patients’ expectations of a private practice?
So a lot of it is mindset in the early stages, setting goals, communicating with the teams, starting to think about the patient experience, but also patient expectations and how you meet and deliver on those. Then making some strategic investments in the practice. If you’re a dentist that wants to aspire to build a higher performing, more prestigious practice, what are you prepared to commit to?
That’s been a useful process, and we’re probably at the five, six-month point now. When I speak to Jay and Kin, they say, ‘we’re not sure it’s progressed as much as we thought it might’. But when you look back at the changes they’ve made and the results of those changes, they’ve made significant improvements.
Often we set goals that are pretty big, and for most people, those goals take three to five years to achieve. So when you think of six months in the context of a five-year goal, it’s important to keep the context and the perspective on where you’ve got to so far to stay motivated.
I’m sure Jay and Kin have a lot of great plans and intentions. What advice or actions have you given them that they’ve implemented?
Quite a few! The goals, getting really clear on what those goals are. Also, understanding what is the current capacity in the practice, Where have they got gaps? Where are there opportunities for them to start to look at the growth opportunities within the practice?
There’s an exercise I take a lot of clients through which is really valuable, and it’s something that’s often missed, which is to take a step back from the day-to-day and think bigger about the practice, and in particular to look at what they want as a goal long term. Start to create a vision for the practice and the team and patients. What do we want? What do we aspire to be as a practice in the future for our patients and our local community?
The second area is about impact and the mission. What’s the impact they want to make, what’s the reason the practice exists? What is it that inspires every member of the team to show up at their best every day? That’s been useful to help them start to guide their thoughts and articulate them more easily to themselves, each other and patients.
Increasing confidence
Thirdly, we’ve looked at values – standards, principles, the guiding statements that as a team and a practice they want to adhere to. That starts to elevate their position, performance and what they stand for as a practice in their local area. Those three strategic pillars that underpin a business have been useful for them.
And while they’ve gone through it, they’ve had their own thoughts. They’ve engaged their entire team on that, and now they’re finalising what those three components look like as they go into 2023.
It’s an often missed strategic exercise. For a smaller practice team to get that level of clarity can be useful because it starts to guide decision making, increase confidence and give everyone higher levels of engagement and motivation.
You’ve given them very valuable advice, but from a mentor’s perspective, what are some things you’ve learned during this process?
I’ve really liked going deep with a client into their own business plan, their goals and aspirations, and recognising that these things don’t happen overnight.
There is a processing time that you have to go through during a growth period. And often, we set goals, we want to achieve things and we’re ambitious about that, but sometimes you have to allow a gestation period for the changes you make.
It’s important to ensure everybody in the team is on board with the goals and changes, and I’ve learned the number one thing when anybody’s trying to make a significant change in a practice is communication. I don’t think it’s possible to overcommunicate, but it is possible to under-communicate.
If you set off on a course and then you don’t follow up or you’re not taking the time to reinforce what it is you’re trying to achieve, people can easily either forget or slip back into previous habits and behaviours.
That continual focus on ‘Where are we going? What’s the goal? Why is it important?’ and communicating progress so that people stay on board is important, and while I know that, when you go through projects like this, it’s a great reminder.
What would you say is the biggest change that you’ve seen with the practice and with Jay and Kin specifically?
For me, the big thing is clarity over where they want to go. Prior to us joining them and starting this project, they knew they wanted to change. They didn’t quite know what they wanted to change towards, so we’ve helped them get really clear on the goals.
That clarity over what they want to achieve and why has become useful motivation for them, so they’re clear on where they’re headed. They’re now motivated to do it and have confidence because of that clarity in the plan. They’ve got support from Sameer, Sandeep and myself, and I think that’s given them confidence as well.
The biggest change is that clarity on the goal, why they want to get there, and now they’ve got confidence to actually make tangible steps in the right direction to achieve those goals over time.
What does the future look like for Campbell Dental Practice? What are some ideas that you’re working on currently with them?
They’ve got a move towards private treatment, a fully private practice at some point in the future. For now, really thinking about how they take those initial steps to consolidate it.
I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, but they’ve made a first significant step towards consolidating that move to private by committing a single surgery to it full time.
That’s been great progress because for a lot of heavily NHS practices, to make that migration to private is such an important bold step, but it’s also one that can be filled with reservation. It’s quite nerve wracking, and they’ve overcome that and made this commitment. They’re already starting to see the progress, they’ve got more private patients booking in to see Kin and other members of the associate team there.
That’s giving the whole team confidence, and that will continue to accelerate in the future. Like anything, once you start to build that momentum, that’s really going to flow in 2023, so where I can see them going to is actually every goal they set, they will achieve. What does the future hold for them? It depends how big they dare to dream.
What is the most rewarding part of this process for you?
I think it’s seeing the transformation in their clarity and confidence. I work with their management team, with Jay, Kin and Louise, and in the first meeting, everything that we discussed was a question. ‘Is this possible? Could we really do this?’ Seeing that transformation from them questioning ‘can we do this?’ to having a tangible plan, prioritising the actions and making progress every time we meet.
At each of our sessions with Jay, Kin and Louise, they’ll update me and it’s not until they work through their progress that they realise just how much they’re achieving. They’re already making significant steps and progress, but like many of us, they’ve started to take that for granted.
And that is so rewarding for me, because they’ve gone from a level of uncertainty to having such a solid, tangible plan and then making significant progress every month.
I don’t even know that they’re fully aware just how much their confidence is increasing and how much they’re inspiring their practice team and their patients. And that’s really rewarding to see.
As a coach, I see that change at each session. For them, it’s gradual because it’s an evolution of who they are, but the most rewarding thing for me is seeing that change in confidence and clarity as they move forward. It’s been a brilliant experience.
What are you most excited about for the future of Dental Practice Accelerator?
his is practice number one, so it’s our first foray into it. I think seeing what Jay, Kin, Louise and their team have achieved so far is inspiring for us because we’ve provided the catalyst to help that happen, and we’re excited about what’s next.
We’ve made a really positive impact so far, even though we’re just six months in. Once this is proven, we’re considering how do we help more practice principals, partners, management teams etc to go through that same journey, gain that same clarity, confidence and key actions so they can transform their practices, too?
We’re excited about what comes next, we’re not entirely sure what that is, but we’re excited to find out.
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