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Understanding Expertise

Understanding Expertise - Lily Head Dental Practice Sales

Understanding Expertise

I subscribe to all sorts of newsletters and updates to help me stay informed.  I make a point of regularly unsubscribing from content which under delivers in order to make space in my inbox for the good stuff.

Last week I received an e mail which caught my eye.  It contained quite the offer.  It was the e mail I had always been waiting for.

I was promised the ‘3 secrets of guaranteed business success’.  These apparently constituted the authors ‘best kept secrets.  Content they went on to emphasise I was not going to find anywhere else.  A very compelling offer indeed.

As a business we share our intellectual property all the time.

We do it to help dentists make great decisions based upon quality information.  But I am not sure we give away secrets.

In fact, I don’t think we have any secrets.  There is nothing we know about buying, selling or financing a dental practice that has not been written about or talked about many times before.

I don’t think we possess the ‘secrets to guaranteed success’.  They don’t exist, and if they did I would expect everyone to be banging on my door asking for them.

Finally, I don’t think dentists and dental professionals with any level of experience are looking for our secrets.  What they really want is our perspective.

We provide our perspective on the best opportunities for dentists to exit their business.  We provide perspective on how to achieve the best outcomes, we provide perspective on market trends and a whole host of other matters which are relevant and valuable to our clients.

No one reads our content in the expectation that we are going to reveal some previously secret formula that will enable them to instantly sell their dental practice overnight for a market beating amount.

What I think dentists do want from us is to share fresh insights about a complex subject that has been exhaustively explored by many people over the years.

Dentists want us to share a new perspective that forces them to pause in their routine and think. That challenges them to consider some preconceived ideas they have and how our perspective might change the way they think about exiting their practice or buying a dental practice.

We are in the business to serve our clients and the wider dental business community.

My team does not do that by making dubious claims about selling access to “secrets” that only we possess or by making vague and unsubstantiated claims about being the best or most experienced.

We are serious about helping dentists.  Which is why we put our best “secrets” out there for free.  We Blog them.  Post them on LinkedIn.  Share them on Facebook.  Publish them in magazines.  Speak about them at Exhibitions and on the phone.

This strategy to share information and not to keep secrets is aligned with our objectives of being trusted as experts in the sector of dental practice sales and dental practice purchasing.

All our team work to become experts in what is important to our clients.  While everyone is at a different point in their journey, collectively we posses a significant amount of knowledge and experience which we share.

Being an expert doesn’t correlate to how much you know.  It doesn’t strictly correlate to your experience. You can have experience and not be an expert.

Experts have the ability to anticipate and recognise patterns in the business scenario they find themselves in.  Experts create mental models that correctly anticipate how situations will develop and unfold.

This is exactly how our team have to think when considering the unique characteristics of every dental practice we engage with.

‘Tacit Knowledge’.

Knowledge that you do not get from being taught, or from books.  But knowledge you get from personal experience when working in an organisation which shares information.

In short, experts can see the invisible. The patterns that aren’t readily obvious to others.

They see causes that others can’t. And they foresee implications that others don’t.

But there is no value in any of the insights we share unless the readers trust us.

Researchers have found that ‘Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction and trust’.  We always keep that at the forefront of our minds.

Our ability to effectively communicate our expertise starts and ends with the trust we have built within our industry sector.

This article was written by Abi Greenhough, Managing Director at Lily Head Dental Practice Sales . It was first published in the December 2024 edition of The Dentist Magazine.

If you would like to talk about anything to do with buying, selling or financing a dental practice anywhere in the UK then Contact Us today.

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