First chance I have had to visit the blog this week – I woke at 4.30am this morning and, after trying to close the imaginary air-lock door of my thoughts, I gave up, got up and have been tidying my UK apartment as we have a potential purchaser round to view later today and I will be out.
The last 2 days I have been in meetings with Barbara and our potential strategic alliance partners for The Dental Business School 2006.
On Monday we flew up to Glasgow to meet with Dr John Barry and the team at Isoplan. As well as offering management systems software into UK dentistry, they are also rapidly developing a dental payment scheme. The company is led by John as entrepreneur but has the great advantage of a superb senior management team – we met with his MD and Technical Director, shared our vision for the DBS and listened carefully to their vision for Isoplan. There is much common ground.
After our trip to Scotland we drove from Bristol to a small village called Font Gifford in the wilds of Wiltshire (homes owned by Madonna and Sting nearby) and stayed at a delightful English country pub on Monday night, before meeting with Andrew Warren and team at DPAS on Tuesday. Another provider of dental payments schemes (the first after Denplan) we again shared our visions and looked for common ground (plenty of it). Andrew also kindly introduced us to all of his team and took us on a tour of their quite magnificent new premises nearby.
This is developing into a wonderful week – listening to real influencer’s in the profession talk about how they see things develop is helping me enormously in evolving my own plans – and in the short term will help with our lead generation and lead conversion for 2006.
It has been a salutary reminder that I need to “get out more often” in the wider world of business – to become less reclusive when it comes to other providers of professional services to my niche.