Owning It

The day we all dread as new practice owners happened to me 3 months in, that day where we have to face ourselves and our failings.

I remember the day vividly. I was in Whistler, British Columbia on vacation. I was relatively new to the sport, having picked it up when I was still in dental school. The sky was a deep shade of blue and the cold crisp air on my face had been refreshing, hovering a few degrees below freezing. A perfect ski day.

For some reason I just wasn’t feeling it that day. My legs weren’t cooperating, and every bump or mogul felt three times its size. As I looked around, I could see that I was all alone on that part of the mountain, having chosen a less populated path. It was probably the moguls. After yet another tumble, this one over a mogul whose soft snow had been scraped away revealing hard pack underneath, I sat down on the snow and started to cry.

I was in month 3 of practice ownership. In that time, I saw the schedule, that had, until that point, been completely full, start to empty out. A cancellation one day became two cancellations the next. And though I was still technically meeting my production goals, I wasn’t sure how long that would last.

I was failing.

Every departure from the schedule felt like a dagger to my chest. I knew a lot of the patients, because I had worked briefly for the small niche practice a year prior doing hygiene for the selling doctor. (that journey to ownership will be covered by a later blog post). And many of those patients knew me, and if they themselves hadn’t seen me yet, their spouse, family member, coworker, friend, had seen me. And still some of them left. It felt personal

What have I done?!

The tears fell and continued to fall. Now, these weren’t dainty tears that could easily be wiped away. These were whole body spasms of grief. My usual survival tactic of putting one proverbial foot in front of the other was no longer sufficient to the task.

The feelings of overwhelm weighed me down like a leaden anvil that one sees in the old cartoons. The pressure felt excruciating. Did I do the right thing by buying this practice, this burden, this noose around my neck? The previous owner of the practice was an expert in dental materials; his hand skills were among the best I’d ever seen (he used to help grade the dental boards for crying out loud!). I was but two years out of school-how could I possibly measure up to that?!

What had I done?! And what could I do now?

I sat with that question for what seemed like hours.

I could NOT go back to working for other people. My reasons for wanting to be on my own were still there, still important to me. Hadn’t I made the leap because I wanted to be in control of my destiny? I was 28, young for a dental practice owner. I had many years ahead of me in my practice career. I just had to do the work.

Nothing we do in life is easy, and up until that point, I had taken advantage of systems in place in other practices to let me get ahead. And up until that moment, I had relied on the systems that the previous doctor had put in place to get ahead. Those were clearly not working, and for my practice to survive I would need to put in some hard work. It would now be on me to make my success happen. Success isn’t just handed out. It is earned.

And how could I possibly be the same as a veteran dentist, who had 40 plus years of experience over me?

I didn’t have to be, nor did I want to be. I would do things my own way, on my own terms. I would own it. I brought something to the table. I just needed to figure out what that was.

I consider that moment the low point. It required me to be honest with myself. I had to dig deep and really face what it meant to be in the position of ownership. And that failure is always a possibility, even when we had been told countless times in school that “dental practices are the third least likely business to fail!”

I look back on that day with gratitude. It solidified a resolve in me to keep going in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. Doing the hard things, when we have to stretch ourselves, is what makes us grow. It is in facing the reality head on that we can move forward. In the end, I had done the right thing. My practice thrived and grew in a short amount of time.

I had feared failure did what I could to prevent it, and yet it came anyway. And I would fail. Over and over.  It would be hard, and I would learn from those failures. I would make mistakes. But those mistakes would be my own. I would repair those mistakes, whether that was with my team or with patients because those mistakes were my own. I would own it. There’s nothing more liberating than that.