Who is going to run the practice when you aren't in the room?
It’s Friday afternoon and you’ve had a good day.
You’ve stepped away from the practice, looked properly at the numbers and talked about what you want the business to become. There are ideas in your notebook, a few uncomfortable truths you can no longer ignore and a clear list of things that need to change.
Then Monday arrives.
An associate wants to discuss their diary. The practice manager needs a decision about recruitment. Someone has followed up a treatment plan, but nobody is quite sure what happens next. A patient complaint lands in your inbox. By 11 o’clock, the time you set aside to work on the business has disappeared.
You still believe in the plan. You just haven’t had a chance to explain it to the people who will need to deliver it.
I’ve watched this happen in dental practices for years. In fact, I’ve spent a fair amount of time helping owners retrieve excellent workshop notes from the bottom of a drawer.
The problem usually isn’t a lack of ambition or ideas. It’s that too much of the business still runs through one person. The owner attends the meeting, hears the advice, makes the plan and then returns to a team that wasn’t part of the conversation.
Sooner or later, every decision comes back to the owner again.
That is one of the reasons we have redesigned the Extreme Business workshop experience for 2027.
One practice, two rooms
At each of our 2027 workshops, there will be two rooms running simultaneously.
I’ll be in the business room, working with owners, principals, practice managers and senior leadership team members. We’ll focus on the decisions and disciplines needed to build a stronger independent dental business.
In the other room, a guest speaker will work with the clinicians and team members who shape what patients actually experience each day.
The idea is straightforward: bring the people responsible for the direction of the practice and the people who can help put that direction into action.
You might bring your practice manager to work alongside you on the business. You might bring a treatment coordinator who can improve the journey from consultation to treatment. You might send a therapist, associate or clinical lead to develop an approach that the rest of the team can adopt.
Who attends will depend on your practice and the subject that quarter. The point is to make the choice deliberately, then give those people the time and support to use what they learn.
Introducing the SLT Academy
A strong practice needs more than an owner with a good strategy. It needs leaders who understand that strategy and can make sound decisions when the owner is elsewhere.
That is the thinking behind our new SLT Academy for senior leadership teams.
Many owners tell me they want to delegate more. Often, the people around them want to take on more responsibility too. But “be more strategic” is a difficult instruction to act on if nobody has agreed what the priorities are, who owns them, which numbers matter or how progress will be reviewed.
The SLT Academy will give that work a structure.
Using The Campbell Academy Business Clock©, we’ll connect strategy to the operating rhythm of the practice. That means looking at the business as a whole, then turning the plan into clear responsibilities, regular conversations and practical action.
For an SLT, the test is whether its members can answer questions such as:
Where are we trying to take the practice?
What are our priorities this quarter?
Which decisions can we make without waiting for the owner?
How will we know whether our changes are working?
What do we need to discuss each week to stay on track?
If those answers exist only in the owner’s head, the team cannot be expected to act on them.
My aim is to help leadership teams become more capable and more confident, while giving owners the space to do the work that only they can do.
The business journey across 2027
Our four quarterly business workshops follow a deliberate sequence.
Q1: Build the machine
We begin with the foundations: why the business exists, where it is going, how the money works and how it is managed. Before you push for more growth, you need to understand the machine you’re asking to grow.
Q2: Build the demand engine
Next, we look at marketing, conversion and patient experience. How do the right patients find you? What happens when they enquire? Where do opportunities stall? How do you build confidence throughout the journey, from first contact to treatment acceptance?
Q3: Build the delivery engine
Demand creates its own problems if the practice cannot deliver consistently. This quarter focuses on the services you offer, the way work moves through the practice, the people involved and the leadership needed to support them.
Q4: Build the business that works without you
Finally, we examine performance, scale, freedom and exit. Whether you plan to sell one day or simply want a holiday without checking your phone every hour, the business needs to operate well when you are not personally pushing every project forward.
Each quarter builds on the last. The work will be most valuable when owners and SLTs take it back to the practice, make decisions and return ready to review what happened.
Four guest speakers, four different opportunities for your team
I’m also delighted to announce the speakers who will lead our team training room in 2027.
Q1: Manish Chitnis — Trust to Treatment
A patient can receive an excellent diagnosis and still leave unsure about their options or what to do next.
Manish’s day will examine the whole journey from comprehensive diagnosis to treatment acceptance. He’ll look at clinical planning, photography, scanning and the conversations that help patients understand what has been found, what can be done and why it matters to them.
This will be especially useful for clinicians, treatment coordinators and clinical leaders who want a more joined-up approach to complex treatment.
Q2: Cat Edney — The Therapy-Led Transformation Day
Many practices can see the potential of therapy-led care. Making it work well across a busy practice is another matter.
Cat will look at shared care from the patient’s point of view and from the perspective of the people delivering it. How do associates and therapists work together? When should a patient be referred? What does reception need to understand? How do you build a diary and a set of protocols that support the model?
This is a practical day for therapists, associates, managers and principals who want to make better use of the skills already in their team.
Q3: Colin Campbell — Strategy for Everyone in the Dental Practice
If your strategy is discussed only by the owner and the practice manager, most of the team will encounter it as a series of unexplained changes.
Colin will show how strategic planning can be understood and implemented across the practice. He’ll take the subject out of the boardroom and into the meetings, decisions and responsibilities that make a plan real.
This day is for the whole team. Everyone should understand where the practice is going and how their work contributes to it.
Q4: Elaine Halley — The Digital Patient Journey
Digital dentistry offers extraordinary opportunities, but buying equipment is only the beginning.
Elaine will explore how photography, scanning, digital radiography, diagnostics and emerging AI can help the whole team collect better information, communicate more clearly and support better decisions for patients. She’ll also look at workflow and return on investment: who should use each tool, when should they use it and what difference does it make?
It’s a subject for clinicians, hygienists, therapists, nurses, TCOs and anyone involved in the patient journey.
I’m excited about this line-up because every one of these days has the potential to change something useful back at the practice.
Plan who attends with our new workshop planner
There is one important detail about the two-room format: the sessions run at the same time. One person cannot attend Chris and the guest speaker on the same day.
So we’ve made planning easier.
On our new 2027 workshops page, you’ll find an interactive workshop planner. Choose your usual location, select the role you’re planning for and explore each quarter. It shows you the business and team training sessions side by side, along with the date and a guide to who might get the most from each room.
We’ll be visiting Belfast, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh. If one person would benefit from both sessions in a particular quarter, the planner also shows the dates at the other locations. They could attend one room locally and the other in a different city.
You can also explore the guest agendas on the page before deciding who to bring.
I’d suggest opening the planner with your practice manager or SLT, rather than making all the choices yourself. Ask them who is ready to take on more, where the practice needs greater consistency and which person is most likely to bring an idea back and put it to work.
That discussion is valuable in its own right.
What happens when you get home?
There is nothing wrong with leaving a workshop feeling energised. I hope you do.
But energy fades quickly when you return to a full diary. Before the day ends, I want you and the people you brought with you to agree on a few practical things.
What did we learn? What will we change? Who will lead it? When will we review the result?
It could be a clearer handover between clinician and TCO. A new shared-care pathway. A weekly SLT meeting with a better agenda. A more consistent use of photography in consultations. Or a decision that the owner no longer needs to make.
Small changes, carried through consistently, can alter the way a practice works. A notebook full of good intentions cannot.
That is what we want the 2027 workshops to help you do: build a business with stronger leadership, a more capable team and less dependence on one exhausted person at the centre.
Then ask yourself one question: who else needs to be in the room for your plans to happen?
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