Ann: Half Year Report and Accounts, page-15

@travelightor,

I'm not too fussed about a bit of portfolio management in the form of recycling capital out of underperforming practices. And hey, these aren't a bunch lowly trench diggers or common laborers we are dealing with here (with all respect to the world's trench diggers); they are highly trained, intelligent specialists who, presumably would have their own independent opinion on things, and those opinions might differ from those of their bosses/partner in the form of ONT.

And sometimes those differences in opinion might be irreconcilable.

I understand that. (In fact, in some ways, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more.)

Nor am I too worried about the tenure and commitment of Dr Holmes, nor the extent of alignment of his interests with mine.

The guy is younger than I am, and is clearly not in the gig for the lifestyle (he hasn't had an increase on his $90k pa salary for as far back as I have checked, which I recall being about a decade back.)

So I am quite satisfied that he is definitively on the hook of how the business performs (maybe excessively so, which would also not be a good thing, but that's a separate matter).


No, the thing that has me perplexed/concerned is this dramatic whip-sawing is the cost of people in the business, as shown in my earlier post. Because I would have thought that this category of costs is largely non-compressable.

So while @we9smia 's post about the IT programme being successful might go some way to explaining this favourable variance in employee expenses, I can't believe it could possibly account for even close to all of it. Especially since that upgrade was only completed late in the financial year

Of course, the sale of the dental practice might also have impacted the Revenue and Cost lines, but not to the extent that it has occurred.

So, while most ONT results that I have analysed over time have easily passed the reasonableness tests and have hang together quite nicely in my mind, this one has me scratching my head a bit.