Relationships Matter
Relationships Matter
During a post-recession recovery in a rapidly contracting profession with offshore pressure, Microdental steps on the digital gas and grows. This is not something that only we at Microdental can do. Sure, we do have excellent management and technical folks who get the day-to-day jobs done that provide restorative solutions, but that is not our key to success. It is the relationships - something at which every laboratory should excel.
Just as dentists come to trust you for laboratory fabricated restorations, smaller laboratories are coming to trust partnering with larger laboratories or selecting manufacturer suppliers for outsourced digital solutions. Small laboratories have to do this. They simply cannot take the hit on their profit and loss or balance sheets that owning or leasing underutilized capital equipment creates. The productive features of the digital revolution carry a hefty price tag that makes partnering with an outsource supplier financially mandatory.
A subdivision of our profession has been created to do just that. However, now we are seeing an interesting shift in outsourcing. Laboratories and lab groups are being asked by other laboratories to provide digital support to smaller laboratories and to help form buying groups. Some have made a significant push to develop that business model quite successfully.
Why in the world would labs outsource to larger national brand competitors? Relationships! You trust your relationship with doctors and other laboratories. You know your clients intimately and they trust you to help them succeed every day. It is the same with your vendor supply chain. When relationships matter and trust is in play, teams of people can come together and work towards mutual success. What a great definition of Covey's win-win theory.
It has been fun to see this evolve in our profession. It is one more reason why I feel so fortunate to live, work and play in the dental laboratory profession. I cannot imagine many joint ventures working as seamlessly or as well in other industries. We have thousands of fewer laboratories today than we did 10 years ago and the next few years will be even more interesting. Stay strong and work together. No one is as strong as all of us.
