Last night’s Extreme Business weekly client webinar was a perfect reminder of why community matters. When you gather ambitious, thoughtful practice owners around the same virtual table, something important happens. People stop feeling as though they are wrestling with their challenges alone. They begin to see that the answers are often already in the room, shared by people who are trying, testing, refining and learning in real time. This week’s session focused on one of the m

It was 19:15 by the time the last of three trains pulled in to Morlaix, and that meant that Sheila Scott and I would be facing a late ride of 27km to reach our hotel. Under normal circumstances, maybe 2 hours on bikes loaded with panniers, arriving too late to find any restaurants open in the Brittany port (they mostly close at 21:00). But these were not normal circumstances. Earlier, we had started the 9th day of our Basque to Brittany 2026 tour in Longeville-sur-Mer, with t

Aristotle may not have had an intra-oral scanner, a TCO or a treatment presentation room, but he did understand something that matters just as much in modern dentistry as it did in ancient Greece. People make decisions when three things are present: trust, emotion and logic. That is the Aristotle framework. Ethos. Pathos. Logos. In plain English, that means: do I trust you, do I feel understood, and does this make sense? Too many treatment plan conversations lean far too heav

Over the last few months, Laura Horton has taken her workshop tour with Extreme Business to Belfast, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh. The feedback from delegates has been outstanding. That is no surprise. Laura has a rare ability to take subjects that can feel uncomfortable, awkward or overly complex and turn them into practical, usable leadership tools for real dental businesses. What she has covered on this tour has been both broad and deep. Her

Every now and then, an idea arrives from outside dentistry and lands with surprising force. That was exactly my experience when I first encountered Gareth Southgate’s Dear England. What struck me was not football. It was leadership. It was the power of a public statement of standards, values, identity, responsibility and belief. It said, in effect: this is who we are, this is what we stand for, and this is how we intend to represent ourselves. And I found myself wondering wha

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Gary, a dental technician at the Scottish Centre for Excellence in Dentistry. Gary asked a very good question. In fact, it’s a question that many clinicians, technicians and practice owners should be asking themselves more often. "How do I promote myself to the people I most want to work with?" In Gary’s case, the target audience is dentists across the central belt of Scotland. But let me tell you something important at the out

During our weekly client webinar last night, there was a vigorous conversation about observations made by Laura Horton, during her current Extreme Business workshop tour, on the need to stop tolerating Owners, Managers and team members who send WhatsApp and other instant messages out of hours. That includes ealy and late during the week, and also weekends. It reactivates the debate about "synchronous" versus "asynchronous" communication, the former demands instant response, t

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to Durham LDC on a subject that sits at the very heart of every successful independent dental business, building a championship support team. Not a team that simply keeps the doors open. Not a team that waits to be told what to do. Not a team that survives only because the principal is forever rescuing, reminding and refereeing. A championship support team is something very different. It is a group of people who can enthusiastically r

Last night we took the dog for his final walk around the block at around 21:30, and as we turned the corner of our cul-de-sac, I spotted a young man crossing the road around 100 metres in front of us. Close enough to be spotted but too far away to make out individual features. Clearly late teens, early twenties, carrying a small rucksack, looking around as he walked in what appeared to be a very shifty way. We both walked and watched as he crossed the road and disappeared aro

In the last 24 hours, we have been reminded just how much money is now flooding into artificial intelligence. Anthropic has been reported at a $965bn post-money valuation after a $65bn funding round, putting it ahead of OpenAI, whose last reported valuation was $852bn in March. In other words, these two businesses alone are now brushing up against a combined value of $1.8tn. That is not just a technology story. It is a patronage story. Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: