Chris Barrow’s Blog

After a restful holiday weekend I rise at 4.00am and drive 3 hours from Manchester to Bristol Airport, my intention to catch a connecting flight from Bristol to Amsterdam and then on to Toronto.

Why? Because that’s a good financial decision, saving me over 300 pounds on the normal ticket price.

I arrive in Bristol to find that the flight to Amsterdam has been canceled and there are no further flights today.

I take my customer service hat off to Caroline on the Servisair desk who, after spending 2 hours struggling with a lone PC terminal that will not work and 80 irate passengers, manages to keep her calm and deal with us all pleasantly – even the rude ignorant pigs who cause a scene with their loudmouth threats.

I am now sat in Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport, having been taxi-ed, courtesy of KLM, to London to catch a direct British Airways flight to Toronto – I should arrive about 90 minutes later than expected – still a very long day.

Watching the behaviour of both passengers and ground staff has been an education this morning.

For now, I have just enjoyed a salmon platter and a glass of champagne – my treat from me to me.

All we have to do now is arrive (with luggage) in Toronto……

Account Statistics
Its interesting to check my account with www.spamarrest.com periodically and see just how many emails I receive and how many of them are spam.

As of this morning, the count since 19th September 2004 is as follows:

Messages Processed 17937
Messages Forwarded 9470
Spam Percentage 47.2%

So I certainly think my fee to Spam Arrest has been worthwhile – and I also reflect on 9470 genuine emails in 8 months – and wonder how we all managed to survive in business before email came along.

I also reflect on the fact that my support team handle the vast majority of “operational” emails in the business – so what I am receiving is genuine enquiries and questions from clients, strategic alliance partners and suppliers – as well as my team, family and friends.

This has been described as the “age of information” and these statistics (shared in a blog – of course) seem to bear that out.

I wonder how we will be communicating in 10 years from now?

Goodness me, it was a very long drive from Swansea to Farnham, Surrey this morning – I had no idea Swansea was so far from the English border!

Today a break from routine and a 5-hour conversation with one of my most successful dental clients and co-creator of “Get your practice finances in gear”, Tim Thackrah of Elmsleigh House Dental Clinic.

What a wonderfully professional conversation – centered on our vision of a franchise concept in dentistry based on the book I recently read (and I haven’t told you the title yet!).

This could facilitate my own transition from practitioner to entrepreneur – but don’t panic because that will take at least three years and I’ll be doing plenty of my “normal coaching” between now and then.

Southampton tonight for Talking Points in Dentistry – another big room full of chairs when I peeked in at 4.00pm. I’ll be there later, the man in black, doing that thing I do for the penultimate time.

I’m starting to forget which room, floor, hotel and city I am in. I left my room this afternoon to pop downstairs, turned towards the lifts and walked quite a way before I realised that I was heading in the wrong direction – towards the lifts of a hotel from last week.

No wonder rock groups trash their rooms – I can see why.

Finally, a quick word of praise for our sponsors for this event, GSK (Glaxo Smith Kline), whose team have been consumately professional throughout – and for our fabulous AV guys – nothing has been too much trouble and they have had the awful job of dismantling stage, sound and light at 10.00pm every night and often driving through the night to the next venue – we “superstars” walk in the next evening and there it all is again – and they have been smiling all the way – priceless.

A 5.00am start and a drive from Bristol to Exeter, where I meet with Barbara Trotter (my UK business manager) and her assistant Stephanie Martin for a management meeting.

Top of the agenda is a review of our practice finances from now until the end of the year – and it’s a worse case scenario that doesn’t look good.

Our business expenses have been creeping higher and our client numbers are static (I said worse case because we have marketing planned) – so profits are down and cash flow very tight.

Tactic 1 – a review of all of our expenses, after which we believe that through repositioning assets, liabilities, income and expenses we can create savings of about 4,000 pounds per month from August – that’s a big saving!

Tactic 2 – a review of our marketing plan, with particular emphasis on Strategic Alliance partnerships – to make sure that overall client numbers do begin to grow again as the year progresses.

Tactic 3 – a review of a our borrowing status to make sure that we have lines of credit should we need them.

That done, we were able to review our 3-year vision and discuss some important evolution in my own thinking – from manager to leader (you have been reading that here) and from practitioner to entrepreneur.

Meeting concluded at 2.00pm and then a long drive to Swansea in South Wales for tonight’s presentation.

My hotel room is pretty basic and reminds me that life as an international speaker and coach is not often glamorous and sometimes downright grey and miserable. There isn’t even a bar in this hotel so I’ll have nowhere to wind down at 10.00pm tonight – poor me.

Another long day but, as usual, the management meetings fire me up – I am blessed with a great team.

Monday and I have just checked in to the Marriott in Bristol for this evening’s Talking Points presentation.

Whoever designed the traffic system in Bristol should be made to drive around it eternally – its a shocker of congested roads. I witnessed a road rage incident on the way in to the hotel – driver X gets out of his car and shouts the “f” word over and over again at the bewildered driver of car Y – then driver X gets back in his car and nearly kills himself and several others, swerving across 3 lanes of traffic to take an exit route.

This is week 3 of the tour and 4 more dates – Bristol, Swansea, Southampton and our grand finale in London on Thursday night.

I’ll be glad when its over – truly sick of hotel rooms now and living out of my travel bag.

But the visibility in UK dentistry is fantastic, as measured by a gradual increase in ezine readership numbers.

Tomorrow morning I have an early start to drive south first, an hour to Exeter, where I will meet with Barbara and Steph for a half-day management meeting. I’m really looking forward to seeing them both and discussing our business strategy and tactics for the next three months.

Alarm call at 4.30am, cab at 5.15am, flight from Glasgow to Gatwick at 6.15am.

Then a full-day practice visit with a 6-partner expense sharing dental practice to discuss their marketing strategy, re-branding, staff training and communication skills between the partners.

This is one of the best managed practices I coach and yet they still have much to do in the areas of marketing and – my current pet subject – leadership.

This is a special issue in this model of business as there is no single, dynamic leader and many decisions have to be by consensus. Our research shows that this is the most profitable model in dentistry and yet possibly the most difficult to run.

A serious, challenging day that leaves me exhausted and yet satisfied with the contribution I have made.

I have a 21.20pm flight back to Glasgow and as I type this in Gatwick I read that the flight has been delayed to 22.20pm – that will put me back in my hotel room after midnight.

I must love this or something.

On our bridge call with coaches last night, I was asked to describe how I have managed to climb out of my recent period of “funk” and re-establish my enthusiasm for life.

I shared a number of actions, including:

Writing authentically in my ezines – this brings 80% appreciation and support from readers plus 20% complaint, unsubscription and offers of help from well-intentioned, obsessive-compulsive helpers.

Having “good conversations” with family, friends and colleagues about the situation and my feelings about the situation. About what has to happen for my needs to be met.

Getting out into the fresh air.

And revisiting one of my favourite books of all time – “Lifelaunch – a passionate guide to the rest of your life” from www.hudsoninstitute.com.

In the book, authors Hudson and Maclean describe 4 distinct phases in a never-ending circular path of personal evolution:

Phase 1

— “Go For It,” is the positive part of a life chapter, when you seek to live your dream and reach a sustainable plateau of success and well-being. You are on Purpose, and life, for the most part, is working.

Phase 2

— “The Doldrums,” is a down time, a protracted sense of decline, when you’re not happy with your life chapter, but you don’t think you can do much about it. The Doldrums are meant to serve as a wake-up call, an invitation to restructure or reinvent your life so that it works for you once more.

Phase 3

— “Cocooning,” is a detachment from the chapter that was’t working, a beginning of a major life transition. In Cocooning, you take an emotional “time out” to heal, reflect, and discover new directions for your life, eventually leading to renewal and revitalization. Cocooning nurtures and nourishes the soul, giving birth to a new script and a beginning of a new “story” for the next chapter of your life.

Phase 4

— “Getting Ready,” is a time for experimenting, training, and networking, resulting in a launching of your next chapter. You test the possible paths ahead that will allow you to live your purpose and values. At that point, you write the script for the next chapter of your life and plunge into it. You have arrived in Phase I again.

And this liberates me/us from feeling guilty about being in the doldrums periodically – it is just a natural cycle.

I’m somewhere between “cocooning” and “getting ready” at the moment – and that’s OK.

And this isn’t the book I mentioned in my last blog – that is still to come.

Your business can only begin to grow when you get out of management and get into leadership.

Your business needs effective management systems – for finance, marketing, sales, operations and teamwork.

You are the worst choice possible of people to manage those systems.

Your job is to spend 80% of your time on your Unique Ability® (Dan Sullivan www.strategiccoach.com) and 20% of your time leading your managers and your team.

Dentists are control freaks – wanting to understand, create, monitor and manage ALL of their business systems. They need to get out of the way and let their teams function.

Coaches are tinkers and cheapskates – unable to let go of “doing everything” or unwilling to invest in people to support them. The excuse is “lack of clients/cash flow” – the reason for the excuse is too much management and not enough leadership.

I have just read a brilliant new book – its going to make a big difference – I’ll tell you more later…..

I’m sure the Irish ancestry is at work.

Sat in the Belfast Hilton with a pint of ice cold Guinness, answering emails before tonight’s presentation.

I feel so much at home here – I love the Irish attitude to life.

My cab driver from the airport was a laugh and my receptionist at the Hilton could not have been more helpful and courteous.

The people here have suffered so much adversity over the years – as a result of which they have none of the b/s and barriers that one experiences in the “metropolis” cities on both sides of the Atlantic.

As expected, an audience of over 500 last night on the campus of Nottingham University – a new location for Talking Points and well supported by an enthusiastic crowd.

I was delighted to meet with Chris Potts, former clinical director at Boots Dentalcare – and still working for Boots as they dismantle their healthcare services.

We reminisced about the 18 months I spent helping them to create and “roll-out” a consistent patient journey experience across their 40+ in-store practices.

It was a great business with great people – both in the practices and at their Nottingham Head Office – a business which, in my humble opinion, should have been supported and allowed to grow and prosper.

My wish is that the exercise in corporate high-street dentistry will be repeated in the future by a similarly forward-thinking team.

I would love to take a leadership and coaching position in such an organisation.