After starting his working life as a teacher and a tour manager in the music business, Mark accidentally entered the charity sector as a short-term hire for a friend and has stayed there ever since. He and his wife Jo lived in Tanzania for 10 years, began raising a family and both served for the
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All of us in business have three basic resources with which to create our vision, our systems and our profits: TIME MONEY PEOPLE Our success ultimately depends on how best we use them. Recently I’ve been reflecting on my own past (and that of others) and realising that many of us make a basic mistake
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It’s a simple enough formula: MANAGEMENT = SYSTEMS = LOGIC LEADERSHIP = PEOPLE = EMOTION If you are old enough to remember Star Trek, the Vulcan second in command Mr. Spock was the ultimate manager; never flustered by emotion, he would easily recommend the sacrifice of a small community aboard a ship or a planet
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You know exactly who I’m talking about. The (so called) team member who is always stirring things up, gossiping, setting people up against each other, manipulating conversations and quietly sabotaging the progress you are striving for. Smiling terrorists who “play the game” when you are around and chip away at the foundations when you are
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Let’s go back 20 years – the millennium is approaching and imagine I’m predicting at a conference that, by 2019, there would be a new breed of Principals and Managers – multi-site owners, growing from their original location to create micro-corporates across 2-10 locations, doing so by buying satellite practices from retiring dentists who are
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Does your business vision extend to training your team to do their jobs properly? I recently ran a workshop during which over 20 practices were asked how often they trained and/or refreshed the training for their front desk team – rehearsing answers to FAQs and their onboarding protocol for visitors. On average, the answer indicated
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I’ve observed that, in a coaching meeting, there is very often a moment when a light bulb flashes in the client’s head and they suddenly get clarity on an issue that they’ve been struggling with for some time. Recent examples have been clients realising: what to do in order to hit a seemingly impossible sales
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It took a significant accumulation of social drinking in the months (yes, months) up to Christmas and New Year to convince me that Dry January was a good idea. It took a health-conscious wife to persuade me to recommence Paleo nutrition on 14th January, after over a year of lapsing back into far too much
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Today my final workshop of the week in Dublin for a group of 7 independent orthodontic practices. That’s 3 workshops and 1 team training day in 4 consecutive days – plenty of steps on my Garmin, a somewhat deeper voice than I had on Monday and a lot of people met and engaged with. During
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One of my FAQs from clients goes something like this: The performance/behaviour of Person A is causing a problem – how should I deal with this?” In this context, Person A can be a team member, a patient, a supplier, the Boss(!) – in fact, anybody who is making your life more difficult because of
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