Let’s say you’re an ambitious dentist who owns two or three locations but wants more.
In order to reach those growth goals, you need to ask yourself a question: Do I want to be a dentist or a CEO?
Because you’re fast approaching the point where you can’t be both.
When you first start adding locations, you can get away with running things like you did when you had only one practice. But as soon as you start talking about any kind of real scale (more than a tiny handful of offices), that old way of doing things is going to blow up in your face.
In addition to having people working in your practices — hygienists, associates, etc — you’re going to start needing to hire people to work on your business. This includes project managers, marketers, HR; the kind of folks who can take a small business and turn it into a company.
In other words, you need a professional management team. And you’re going to have to either lead them yourself or stick with a clinical role and bring on someone else to be CEO.
There’s no wrong answer to the dentist or CEO question but it’s imperative that you get clear on which role you want to occupy.
Otherwise, you’re going to be the primary blocker in your own business’s growth.
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