Achieving Greatness: Award-winning practices take the business coach

James and Sonya Hamill are a husband and wife team and directors of Blueapple Dental and Implant Team, a multi-award winning dental practice in Belcoo in County Fermanagh. James is also clinical director at the practice while Sonya is Blueapple’s practice manager. The practice offers a wide range of dentistry services but has a special focus on implant dentistry.

“Our location is really important,” says Sonya. “We’re in a very remote part of Northern Ireland, in a small village on the border with the Republic of Ireland. We have a broad catchment area and patients are widely spread out, so it’s essential to run a full service.”

Freshly crowned Private Dentistry Irish Practice of the Year 2013, Sonya takes a look back at how Blueapple Dental has developed and, working with a business coach, become the practice it is today.

Sonya and James first opened the business in June 2005 and appointed a business coach three years later following their first award win. “It was the early days of the Dentistry awards,” recalls Sonya, “and James had just won the first Best Young Dentist award for the UK.”

The practice had grown rapidly, moving from one surgery to two within six months of opening. “We’d started with lots of enthusiasm and ideas and we knew that we wanted to offer our patients a fresh approach,” says Sonya. “But we didn’t have the background knowledge, skills and training in how to run and develop a business properly. We just knew that up to that point everything was going great, but we needed another person to push us further and help us go through the ceiling that we had reached.”

At that time, business coaching was practically unheard of. “It’s so familiar to everybody now, but back then coaching was new to us and certainly new in Northern Ireland,” says Sonya. “James is very quick to identify something new or to think outside the box, so when a colleague mentioned that they had taken on a business coach and how he was changing their practice, we decided to give it a try.”

The business coach began by spending a day at the practice and giving detailed feedback on what he’d seen. Since then, coaching has been a resource that they can call upon whenever they need support and advice. “I’ve learned it is crucial to have that outsider perspective,” says Sonya. “He is constantly giving us reasons to stop and think about what we’re doing. Being a husband and wife team, it is probably even more critical to have someone that can cut through where emotions might cause our vision to become impaired.”

Part of the practice vision is to enter industry awards, as Sonya explains, “An award is a pat on the back for ourselves and our team because we really are doing something special. We may be in a tiny village in a corner of South West Northern Ireland, but that doesn’t stop us from maintaining standards that you’d find among the best and brightest anywhere else in the country.”

Gaining this recognition is not only good for the practice team but also for the business itself. “One of the main reasons for entering an award is for the team; they work so hard and we are continually resetting the bar for them to go further,” Sonya says. “Awards are also useful from a marketing perspective, and it’s good to keep challenging yourself and measuring your business to ensure you’re at a high level.”

Business coaching was a significant factor in the practice’s success in being named Irish Practice of the Year. “I looked at the business differently from the day that our coach came into it,” says Sonya. “He is an influence on our decision-making all the time, even when we’re not in direct contact with him. It’s very easy to become insular - especially in a practice like ours, which is relatively remote - and it’s important that you don’t lose sight of your place within UK and Irish dentistry.”

She continues, “With that level of business expertise to call on, you are constantly pushing yourself and keeping head of the game; and it’s that influence that has driven us to where we are now. It’s nice that people in the industry feel that our approach merits an award.”

Acknowledging the competitive nature of dentistry today, why does Sonya feel that their practice won the award? “I think it’s because of our emphasis on the patients,” she says. “That’s always been our mantra: making it as good as possible for the patients. We offer a welcoming, warm, non-clinical environment, where we know who they are and what they need, and I think that has marked us out. We are willing to go that extra mile for them - something that business coaching has taught us.”

Principals who would like their practices to achieve award-winning status might like to try business-coaching services such as 7connections, led by Chris Barrow, who has seventeen years of experience as a consultant to the dental profession. Together with Tim Caudrelier and Karl Taylor-Knight, 7connections has the experience and knowledge to help improve every aspect of your business from strategic planning, finances, branding and marketing, to the patient experience, operations and compliance.

For more information about 7connections

please contact Phillippa Goodwin on 07508 184 044

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