WORK-LIFE-BALANCE: A DENTAL TECHNICIANS STORY WITH JINESH PATEL, MANAGING DIRECTOR, S4S LONDON LIMITED Leave a comment
For many years, our industry has suffered the wrath of an unhealthy balance of work and lifestyle. Watching it first-hand I would like to share this story for you as readers and hope that we as an industry can look after ourselves and reignite the fire which once encouraged many of us to join this thriving industry.
The story starts with my Father a talented artist out of Uganda, Africa – Hiten Patel. His ambitious mindset brought him to a career which he had no knowledge of, but was close to what his heart desired most, Art. He used his exceptional skills in Art and manual dexterity to pursue himself in learning the trade of an orthodontic technician. His career excelled and became one of the most talented technicians I have ever seen with no background in this area of work. He quickly found himself not knowing how to manage the customers who required the work of his hands. So, the only way he knew how was to work long mind bearing hours and for 25+ years he did just that.
We have all felt this before and I am sure many of us have had adverse effects in ways that are unimaginable. From health and wealth, family and friends, relationships and marriages all affected by our inability to switch off. So how do we go about resolving this? How do we move our mindset away from this day to day routine that tears us down?
Embrace change
One of the hardest things we did was to break routine and embrace change. For years we ran our business in a ‘routine like way’ which disabled us from being able to enable growth. This means that we became content with our workflows and made growth slow. From those days to now we have seen many changes in our business. here are a few things that helped us excel:
- Introduction of digital printing
- Digital management of invoices
- Encouraged hiring of staff (we are not superhuman and we cannot do everything!)
- Went and actually learnt new techniques to bring to our armoury.
- And finally, the launch of a new partnership to form S4S London Limited.
Acknowledge your strengths as an individual
Our successes depended on the ability that we acknowledged we cannot do this single handed. We used our strengths to get as far as we could and then started hiring for the areas which required skills that we did not possess. We implemented a manager, process workers and a marketing assistant which abled us to focus on our own individual strengths. Hiten focussed on his technical ability to manufacture jobs in a swift but affective manor, sangita (also known as mum) was our administrative powerhouse and myself who built relationships with all our clients provided them a personal experience never to be forgotten. This trio of skills came together and propelled our customer base rapidly and gained the personal touch that or customers know and love us for.
Finally, Free up time to enjoy other beauties of life
Now this is a huge part of breaking the routine. As technicians we do not know how to free up time. We will happily pick up those tools and continue working to get ahead, sometimes working crazy long hours and into the weekend.
This was our biggest challenge and time to time we get caught back into it. We set out our strategy to make sure we do a normal 9-5 and then leave work at work and spend the rest of the time focussing on ourselves. The realisation of freedom to the mind was the biggest change in our business which made us make clear cut decisions to succeed. We managed to find a work life balance which got the work done effectively and yet spend those precious moments with our loved ones.
We have made some incredible changes in recent times to our mindset which has developed our business and broken our ‘tech’ trend of over working ourselves, being miserable and suffering from our work life imbalances.
I would like to finish on the quote ‘Be the change you want to see’ and try and implement this in the three points written in this article; Embrace change, acknowledge your strengths and free up time to enjoy other beauties in life.
