Hanging With Richard Branson, Chatting To Larry Page and Balancing Everything with Andrew Moore

Juggling a career and family life is never easy. Especially when you are one of the most sought after practitioners in your field.

But some are skilled enough to manage it – like today’s guest, Andrew Moore.

Andrew tells us all about his approach to the holy grail of achieving a healthy work-life balance and how he came to practice in the plush surrounds of a jealousy-inducing architectural gem.

He also talks about the buzz he gets from teaching and a case that made a dramatic impact on his patient’s life.

Enjoy!

The key things if you want to develop a practice is get good at normal dentistry. Because you will need those skills. You need to see people. You don’t go straight in. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ambition, but I think sometimes you have to learn to deal with people before you start. – Andrew Moore

In this episode:

02:12 – The perfect environment for practice

13: 07 – The power of delegating

15:03 – Hiring process – an oft-overlooked trait

18:43 – Achieving work-life balance

25:21 – Getting into implants

35:13 – A life-changing case

47:05 – Teaching other dentists

About Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore graduated from Royal London Dental Hospital and quickly established a name as one of the UK’s leading cosmetic dentists.

He has postgraduate training in orthodontics and oral surgery and holds a diploma in implant dentistry.

Andrew is the owner of Advance Dental Clinic from where he holds remedial dental training. The clinic was named the best new practice, 2004, and was also given an award for design by the Royal Institute of British Architects. 

Connect with Andrew Moore:

LinkedIn

Advance Dental Clinic

Connect with Prav and Payman:

Website

Prav on Instagram

Payman on Instagram

Transcript

Prav Solanki: Hello listeners, and thank you for tuning in to the Dental Leaders podcast. Today, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Andrew Moore, one of my most favourite people to work with, as a client, and to hang around and be with. This guy has got what I consider to be the most amazing dental practise on the planet. And I don’t just mean from it’s beautiful aesthetics and everything.

Prav Solanki: There’s a buzz, and there’s an energy, and there’s some magic that he’s created in his practise. If he could bottle that up and inject it into someone else’s practise. Wow. So many lessons to learn from this.

Prav Solanki: Pay, what were your takeaways from today’s interview?

Payman: Yeah, well it is my favourite practise in the country as well, just aesthetically, but then the number of implants he’s doing. And then just what a cool dude he is. Just what a cool dude.

Prav Solanki: Super cool man.

Payman: I think there’s loads to learn from this one, and he’s just one of the really low profile super high performer dentists that I know, so I’m sure everyone’s going to enjoy it.

Prav Solanki: Enjoy guys. Enjoy.

Prav Solanki: Andy, you’re very very good friends with probably one of the most successful businessmen in the world.

Dr. Andy Moore: What, you?

Speaker 4: This is Dental Leaders. The podcast where you get to go one on one with emerging leaders in dentistry. Your hosts Payman Langroudi and Prav Solanki.

Prav Solanki: So today we’ve got Andy Moore with us from Advanced Dental clinic. I’ve known you for about 10 years now, isn’t that right?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I think so. We met at a trade show and you came up with a couple of gems that I was like, “Oh, I need to get this guy involved in the practise.” So yeah, it was a good meeting.

Prav Solanki: It was, it was a good meeting. And people always ask me, “What’s the nicest practise you’ve ever walked into? What’s the best environment you’ve ever seen in a dental practise?” And it’s always yours Andy.

Payman: Yeah, I’d say the same.

Prav Solanki: I can only describe it as magic.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, that’s super nice to hear that.

Prav Solanki: When you walk through the door of Advance Dental clinic, the atmosphere, the team, the buzz.

Payman: The building.

Prav Solanki: The building. Everything. You just… you cannot recreate that. And you know that practise was created many years ago now.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah it was 16 years in May, that we opened the first bit of the practise. And then it must be eight years, eight maybe nine years, we opened the second bit. Actually I was looking today with a light coming in, really it was a nice sunny morning and thinking, “Well it still looks good.”

Prav Solanki: I think I must have come there soon after opened.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did.

Prav Solanki: Because I remember you said it. It was just the-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, it was a new build.

Prav Solanki: How did you get planning permission for that?

Dr. Andy Moore: Well, we had a few designs turned down. The architect had done some practises that I’d seen in a magazine. So when I saw that… he hadn’t done a new build, but when I saw his fit-outs I was like, “Oh yeah, I ripped it out of a magazine.” And then a friend of mine, he rips out of an architectural magazine as well and when this plot of land came up, he said to me, “Oh you got that plot of land? You should phone that guy”

Dr. Andy Moore: And we looked at the two things together, well it’s actually the same building, just in two different magazines. So I called up Richard Mitzman, and we went through quite a lot of designs and bits and pieces and eventually we got the sort of the all clear from the council and found out really what they wanted. And eventually we got… because the first few designs weren’t anything like what it is now.

Payman: For anyone who hasn’t seen it, really, you should google it. Advanced Dental, right?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Payman: It’s stunning. And it’s a normal road with normal Victorian houses.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, normal houses, yeah.

Payman: And then there’s this metal and glass spaceship.

Dr. Andy Moore: Well it fit the bill, and what they wanted was a red brick fronted building on the building line. So once they told us that’s what they wanted, and if you look at it from the outside, that’s what we’ve got. But it just goes back a long way. A number of people who come and go, it’s like a TARDIS-

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: -the way it’s sort of… it’s a very long dental practise really. But to have a new build. I mean, I was so lucky to find that plot of land. That was one of the luckiest, ridiculously lucky moments in my life, for no apparent reason. Going into an estate agent, I knew I’d had a year to go on where I was working. I knew the guy was going to say no, it’s time to move on. And he wanted to sort of move me on.

Dr. Andy Moore: So I just walked into the state agent. I must’ve gone past a thousand times in my life and never gone in. I just walked in and I said to the agent, “Oh, I’m just looking for a building. Something like an old house to convert into a dental practise.” And he said, “Oh, I’ve just got off the phone to the doctor who owns that show, with a shack basically, that wasn’t being used, as the doctor’s surgery had been sort of run down for years and years previously, and she wants to sell.” So I said, “Okay, whatever they value, whatever you value at, I’ll offer, I’ll give you 10,000 pound ball and we’ll do the deal by the end of the month.” So it was one of those moments that I just knew I had to grasp, and I just prayed it was going to be a low valuation. I didn’t have a clue what it would be.

Dr. Andy Moore: And within three weeks, we’d done the deal, bought the place. I mean its two doors from where I was working. So I knew I wouldn’t have any problem with the patients being able to go there.

Payman: Did you own the place you were working, or were you-

Dr. Andy Moore: No, I owned my goodwill, so I could move anywhere. So when I sort of bought out of my associate contract, effectively I bought my goodwill. I owned my patients, and the plan was to find another place. But it would have been ideally not so close for political reasons, but that was the way it was. And we basically put up a board. A local guy came in and demolished the building, cleared the site, and then I got the architects involved. And away we went.

Payman: How long did it take, beginning to end, to build?

Dr. Andy Moore: Just over a year. So from buying the land in February 2002, to opening in May 2003. So, and then, we got a bespoke dental practise all in one floor, designed from the ground up.

Payman: Is Mitzman still around?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. He doesn’t do most dental. Yeah. He qualified as a dentist years and years before me.

Payman: I didn’t know that.

Dr. Andy Moore: And then he sort of retired from dentistry when I started dentistry effectively. So he was quite a few years ahead of me. And then he trained as an architect, a sculptor. He did all sorts of stuff. And then he obviously saw there was a niche to design. This was before the days of all CQC and HCMO 105 and all this stuff that dentists weren’t doing, but he was… because he trained in the states, he was so up on all the…

Payman: Sterilisation and things.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, yeah, and working. The first thing he said to me was, “Oh, you should work in two rooms.” And I was like, “I can’t work in a yard. I can’t work. I can’t do that.” He’s like, “No, no, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it. It will make you so much more productive.”

Dr. Andy Moore: And so I took all that stuff on board. We had sterilising areas outside of the surgeries before that became the norm and the requirements like it is now. And I worked with two nurses in two rooms, and I just loved it. It was just fantastic. In doing implants as well. All that setting up time and clearing up time, that was just going on while I was doing other things. So it was a real… I’ve got a lot to thank him for, not just for the design of the building, but for the way he opened my eyes and changed the way I worked.

Payman: What did you spend? You mind talking about that?

Dr. Andy Moore: I got a Polish builder, that Richard, before Polish builders were sort of norm. I think the plot cost me 90,000, and it’s a decent sized goal.

Payman: Good old days.

Payman: Wow.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I mean the plot wasn’t a lot of money. Then the build, I think it was 260,000 to build it. And you look back on that and think, “Oh my God, I got a real bargain.” But it seemed like a lot at the time, because it was a risk for me as a one person. I was just me. To build a four surgery practise and quite a statement sort of big practise and taking on a lot of people.

Payman: Have you been to his other practises? He did Robbereti’s one.

Prav Solanki: Yeah, I haven’t, no.

Payman: Beautiful. He did the Gentle Dental in Croydon.

Dr. Andy Moore: Kamlesh, yeah.

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: Well these are all guys… I mean I-

Payman: But yours was my favourite of all.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, well I’ve got a lot to thank Richard for. But I think he’s got quite a lot to thank me for because everyone who came around to my practise, especially when I was doing teaching at the Royal College, they’re like, “Oh I want a practise like.” And about eight, maybe five, guys built practises off the back of coming to my practise with Richard. And so he did really well and he’s brilliant, and fantastic to spread that, the design worked so well. And when we got the other plot of land at the back and extended, then obviously he was the first person I went to do the extension there.

Prav Solanki: At what point did you decide I want my own business? Because you mentioned you had this moment where accidentally you stumbled into a estate agent, but before that, was it in your mind? That I want to be my own boss.

Dr. Andy Moore: Well I knew I’d have to do at some point. I mean when I was working as an associate, the agreement with my boss at the time was we would both go private and set up a private dental clinic in Chelsea. Because it was just coming to that point where NHS was getting harder and harder to where… and I had a good following of private patients, doing quite lot of implant work.

Dr. Andy Moore: So I knew at that point I was going to need to do my own sort of business stuff. And I’ve got friends who had been successful in business, and yeah, it was a natural progression. I think that when you… the dentistry, not gets easier, but it becomes less of a challenge to think about doing stuff that you need something else as a challenge. And building a business is a really good challenge for people. So yeah, it was a natural progression, I think so.

Prav Solanki: What was the biggest challenge, or the biggest shock, that came to you after opening a business? Was it managing teams-

Dr. Andy Moore: It wast the staff. Yeah. Managing the people. The patients were amazing. Managing the people. And when you were so used to working maybe with just your nurse and one other person and receptionist and stuff, it was much harder to take on a group of people and getting them to jell. And what we found was, because we were working differently to normal dental practises, there was a sterilising area, rather than all the girls doing their own thing. We found it was quite hard to take on experienced dental nurses, because they were so used to doing their own thing and not working as a team.

Dr. Andy Moore: So eventually we got that rolling, and then we eventually sort of took on and trained our own nurses. Some of the best people were people who we trained ourselves, rather than nurses who were already qualified. So that was really good in the end. But it was, the first couple of years were quite hard. We went through quite a few staff, which is always difficult to sort of say, “Oh, it’s not working.” That’s the hardest. That’s what I find one of the hardest things. Is-

Prav Solanki: Managing people.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. Or letting people go that you know just aren’t right for the practise. But we’re so lucky now, because we’ve got such a stable group of girls and the dentists and everything. It’s been really good, the last few years.

Prav Solanki: It’s such a happy place, the times that I’ve been in. Everyone’s smiling, everyone’s happy. You can feel that buzz.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. It’s got that. A lot of people say that.

Prav Solanki: How have you created that? Because it must be your leadership, right? There’s got to be something in there that you can give some advice to some of our listeners. I’ve never walked in a practise where the energy and the level of happiness is such a high.

Dr. Andy Moore: I think it comes from the building of it, little bit as well. I can’t just take the credit for it really. Because it’s a really nice place to work.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: I mean it’s a nice place. It’s a nice environment to be in.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And that is good. I think the girls get… I try and give the girls as much responsibility as I can. Because I think that they, the right people are empowered by that. And that took me a while. That was another thing. When I first started, it took me a while to be able to let go of stuff. I wanted to do everything, and then I realise I had to sort of give responsibility to other people. So they’ve all got their own roles within the team, plus other roles as well.

Dr. Andy Moore: So I don’t know what it is. We just got a good group of people that we’ve sort of got together, and it does take a while to find that sort of team. It’s like putting together a load of footballers. That on paper, they’re all fantastic, but they don’t actually jell that well together. So I think that that took a little while. But now we’ve seemed to have got that, and it does seem to work with the formula we’ve somehow stumbled on I think there, so.

Payman: Do you still get involved in the recruitment?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I do actually.

Payman: Yeah?

Dr. Andy Moore: I do. Yeah. I tend to let the practise managers and all of the senior nurses weed out, and then I’ll get involved in maybe in the last five or six. Because at one point, I took a step away from that, and that was a mistake.

Prav Solanki: Right.

Dr. Andy Moore: And I took a… because I thought, “Oh, this is another thing I can delegate to other people.” And then I sort of didn’t get the people I wanted really. And it didn’t work.

Prav Solanki: If you could package up what is it that you are looking for-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I know, I could.

Prav Solanki: Could you describe the qualities in a person that you look for when you’re trying to find staff?

Dr. Andy Moore: It’s that personality, that spark that they have. Because I always say that you can teach someone dentistry, but you can’t teach them how to be a smiley, funny, bubbly person. Someone who can talk to other people. That comes really from within and it’s… we’ve had some people who have been really shy, and they’ve really come out of their shell. And perhaps I didn’t think they would. But I think for most of them, they’d have already got that before they come to the practise.

Dr. Andy Moore: And we try and find that, rather than going, “Oh, you’ve got really good CV. You’ve worked at this place, you’ve that place, you’ve got this qualification, that qualification.” I go by personality, the feel, and the vibe I get of people. Rather than looking at their CV.

Payman: Is that true with dentists as well or just…

Dr. Andy Moore: Dentists? Well, you have to have a bit more than that with the dentist. So yeah, I definitely go a little bit more. Luckily we don’t have to, we get… when the dentists come, they tend to stay. So we don’t have to recruit that often. So we may be looking for someone who’s got a good personalities, but we’ve got a skill set that will fit into the practise. Because what realise a long time ago was I couldn’t do everything. I used to try, and I used to do ortho, implants, all surgery, I was trying to do everything, and I realised I just couldn’t do that. So now, even though no one is, apart from the periodontist, is a sort of specialist per se, we have guys who work in the team who are really good at one specific aspect.

Dr. Andy Moore: So Vecelia is amazing at Invisalign, brilliant with people. And so if someone phones up and is interested in Invisalign, just straighten him with Vecelia. And that’s a way of keeping her busy. So we don’t… there’s a thing, sometimes principals want to have everything. They want to have all the patients and things. But for me, I just tend to focus just on the implant stuff, and the general dentistry gets moved around the other-

Payman: So do you not do any?

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh, I think you always end up doing a little bit. When you do implants, it’s such a general thing as well. Because you might be doing an implant on one tooth, and the patient needs a crown on the other, so.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And I’m really still interested in digital dentistry with CEREC and stuff like that. So I still like to do all that sort of thing, but I do less and less these days. But I think you’ve always got to do that. There’s so many skill sets you need in implant dentistry, even if it’s just being really slick at making temporary crowns and bridges chairside, and stuff like that. You need those skills really.

Prav Solanki: What sort of volume of implant dentistry you doing Andy? Just so you could give us a real fight there in numbers?

Dr. Andy Moore: Well the practise did about 700, 750 implants last year.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

Dr. Andy Moore: So yeah, that’s been the norm for us for the last five years or so now. So yeah, it’s good. And I’ve taken on another guy, Phil who works for me, who’s taking on more of the implant stuff as well. So it used to just be me, but now Phil does more cases. So that’s really good. So it means I could take a bit of time off, so without the cases. I had seven weeks off in the summer with a broken arm, and there was hardly any cases that had to get put back because anyone who wanted to wait for me could wait for me. Anyone who didn’t, then Phil could pick up those cases. I think that worked really well.

Prav Solanki: I’ve always admired you Andy, because you’ve got the perfect, what I would consider to be the perfect work life balance. So you work damn hard, and you do a high volume of dentistry in the time that you do it at a very high standard. But you also, I have conversations with you about marketing or whatever it might be, or just stuff going on in the practise, and then you’ll be off on your next holiday or spending time with your family.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: So it’s really sort of, you’ve inspired me in some respects of me taking time out of my own life and spending it with my family, or taking extended breaks. So how do you get that balance right? Of owning your own business that’s got a massive overhead beside it, supporting a team, but also making sure that you’ve got an amazing work life balance?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I mean that’s another real… I think it helps when you do an implant work, which is sort of profitable once you get good at it. I think it’s hard at the start with implant work, and obviously with… I’ve been doing implants for over 20 years now, so I’ve gone through a lot of learning curves with that. And just having good people who can, that when you’re away, that stuff gets done. It must be hard for dentists maybe who work on their own, because they know when they’re away, they’re always thinking about the practise.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And I still, even when I’m on holiday, I still see emails that I need to answer and I don’t think you can ever get away with it in this day and age. But I do try to… what I’ve been doing in the last five years is trying to chip away at my book. So I’d just take an afternoon here, and an afternoon there, and trying to gradually wind down as the other guys get busier. And that’s hard sometimes, to do that, because you got to have faith in everybody else. But it works really well for me that, and I try and take seven or eight weeks holiday a year if I can.

Dr. Andy Moore: And you come back refreshed, and you’re ready to go again. And I think, I find if I work for more than two months without a break, I get a little bit like, “I need a holiday.” I get too tired. So I think that works quite well for me, get that balance somewhere along the line. But it’s, again, it’s quite hard to put your finger on it. I think you have to toy with a bit. Do a little bit here, if you… the key I reckon is to, for me, to earn the same amount of money and work less is more important than me to work really hard and not-

Prav Solanki: Make more.

Dr. Andy Moore: And make more money and not have time to enjoy it. And I think I like doing other things other than dentistry. I enjoy dentistry.

Prav Solanki: So you, if… you’d said you’d take an afternoon off here or there or whatever, considered a treat or whatever. What is Andy time? So if you have an afternoon free to yourself, or a day free, selfish Andy time, what would you be doing with that time?

Dr. Andy Moore: Generally riding my bike, which is a bit sad, but yeah, I like training. I’ve done a couple of Ironman and lots of half Ironman events and stuff, so. And I like being outdoors. I like that challenge of pushing myself sort of physically to do things that I perhaps wouldn’t have thought I could do maybe 10 years ago. So I enjoy doing that. Just spending time at home. The kids, again, growing up now, so they don’t need me so much. Like they used to.

Payman: How old are they?

Dr. Andy Moore: Alfie’s 20. He’s at Uni. And my daughter, Lily, she’s going to be going to university this year so, it’s going to be me, the wife and the dog, so. I think she’s more nervous about it than I am. But yeah, so it’s good to have outside interests. I mean it’s good. I mean I… yesterday was a good one for me because I had a sort of nice day. Morning great, finished my patient before lunch a little bit earlier. So I had an hour and a half, sun was shining. And I was like okay, and I jumped on my bike, did a quick 50k ride, came back. Quick shower, and then did the afternoon. That was a perfect day for me. So bit of work, bit of training, and then spend the evening with family and stuff. So yeah, that’s the way I like doing things.

Prav Solanki: Has fitness always been something that featured heavily in your life? Or is it something that’s been…

Dr. Andy Moore: I’ve definitely got worse or worse. Well I’ve got fitter, but I’ve got more obsessed with it in the last sort of five, 10 years I think. I’ve always… I played football when I was younger and run some marathons and stuff. But yeah, in the last… I think as the kids got older and they, you get to that moment where you come home from work and they… and you come home and they’re doing their homework, and they’re doing stuff, and they don’t sort of feel like they don’t need you so much anymore. That’s quite a hole that can leave you with there. So I think for me, when the kids got to that point, I started doing a bit more training and sort of just spending a bit more time doing that. So yeah, I still really enjoy it.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Payman: Did your kids think about wanting to be a dentist or not?

Dr. Andy Moore: I thought about them wanting to be dentists. I was trying to… I’ve always been trying to… I think my son would be an amazing dentist. Because he’s really good with his hands, and he’s good sort of… he’s just a sociable people person. And I’ve been saying to him for years, “Just, it would be really good if you just…” And he just not had the thing for it. He’d not had the thing for it there. So it’s a real shame.

Dr. Andy Moore: I think it was that realisation. He was in primary school, and he said to me, “Well, if things don’t work out, I could always become a dentist like you.” And I thought, oh maybe that’s not his aspiration. So he’s more interested in engineering and design. He’s very, he’s quite artistic. So design, but I haven’t given up hope on him yet. I’m still chipping, even though he’s at university doing something else. I’m still mentioning it there every now and then.

Dr. Andy Moore: And my daughter, she’s going to do neuroscience. I was like, “Well you’re doing neuroscience, you might as well do dentistry, what’s the matter with you?” But I think they just want to do their own thing, and I can absolutely appreciate that. That they want to carve their own niche in life, rather than-

Payman: How did you get involved in implants so early?

Dr. Andy Moore: Well I-

Payman: Were you always a surgical type? Like were you-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I used to do a lot of surgery when I first qualified. I used to work at Basildon hospital and do… there was a days when you… there was a department run by one consultant and SHO and about eight clinical assistants. And someone got me into doing that when I first qualified. So, and I still like doing, we used to run our own lists. It was really good. It was a great way of getting surgical, sort of experience. And then after, probably, I think it was about seven or eight years of doing NHS, did a lot of amalgams in a really busy busy NHS practise, I just thought, “I just don’t know if I could do this for the rest of my life.”

Dr. Andy Moore: And I started then looking around for other things and someone said to me, “Oh, you should look at implants. It could be the next big thing.” So I met Ashok Sethi, and I did Ashok’s course. I’ve got a lot I’ve to thank Ashok for, because he opened my eyes to what other things dentistry could be. I remember going to his practise in Harley Street, it’s a big townhouse in Harley Street, and thinking, this is amazing. This is what I want. This is what I want to do.

Prav Solanki: What sort of stage of your career were you at that point?

Dr. Andy Moore: I was in that transition where I’d been… where dentistry, it was getting to be the bit same old, same old.

Prav Solanki: How many years qualified were you by then?

Dr. Andy Moore: So I must’ve been eight, maybe nine years qualified. And I was just… I was still enjoying it. I was still enjoying dentistry, but I was just at that point of like, “Oh my God, I’m… I could be doing this for another 30 years. I need to do something else.” Not something else, because I know I’ve got limitations. But something, maybe just a different challenge. So that was good for me, to go and see what else was going out there. And then aside, going on courses through Ashok, you know, did his year course. I thought to myself, well I’ll do the odd implant here and there. And again, quite a leap of faith as an associate in a predominantly NHS practise to turn around and go, “Oh, I’m going to buy all the implant stuff.” The physio dispenser, the kit, all the… and all this. When you-

Payman: Are you placing all 750 implants? Or is there a second implantologist there?

Dr. Andy Moore: Up until recently I was, yeah. But Phil is now doing a lot of, yeah, he’s doing a lot of stuff. So yeah, I mean it’s good. I mean we’ve got so many patients who just… because I think being in the same street, I’ve worked in the same street for 30 years, so I’ve got a lot of patients out there and I walk through town. “Oh yeah, I did that. I did that one. Yeah I did that.”

Dr. Andy Moore: So I think it’s just a volume of people. I don’t remember the name, but I remember what I did on them. And they sort of… you get people coming in straight out of the blue. I saw someone, yesterday I think it was, who I hadn’t seen him for 15 years.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

Dr. Andy Moore: And just came in and said, “Oh I broke my tooth. You did an implant for me 15 years ago, and I just want that one out.” And so I get people just coming back. So it gets easier, I think, as you’ve done more. There’s not much selling involved for me anymore with implants, because a lot of people are sold on it. Not like the old days, it was a real leap of faith for people.

Payman: You were just saying your original… we were talking before about your early veneer cases that you’ve-

Dr. Andy Moore: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Payman: Are you seeing Peri-implantitis as a big problem?

Dr. Andy Moore: Absolutely. I don’t see it as a big problem. I see it as a problem, yeah. And it’s a really hard thing. Because what we know now is different to what we knew then. But you get some real random stuff with implants. You could place an implant, it’s really stable, and then year down the line you’ve got failure, and you just can’t put your finger on that. And you’ve got patients who’ve… I’ve got patients who’ve had implants that I placed 20 years ago, and you look at it, you see they come in, you take an X-ray and the bone level is where it was 20 years ago. So I think dentistry, you do learn that there’s always going to be failure in dentistry, and it’s minimising the risk for the patient, and minimising the risk for you.

Dr. Andy Moore: Because that’s always a difficult conversation that. Because you don’t get enough failure to make it one of those things that you think, oh just not worth it. Because there’s so many other people out there who’ve got fantastic results.

Payman: What’s the state of play with Peri-implantitis? I mean, what’s the treatment? Is it just like Perio?

Dr. Andy Moore: It’s like Perio, yeah. I mean the thing is that you’ve got to weigh up often if it’s an anterior implant, if it’s got a deep pocket around there, you have to think about making it easy for that patient to clean. So it might be that you’ve got to sacrifice some of the aesthetics for it. So if that’s the case, and that becomes a problem, then it is often removing the implant is the only option and then starting again with something else.

Dr. Andy Moore: But a lot of patients, they understand things have a life span. Although I think it’s one of the only things that people ever say to me, “Will it last a lifetime?” That’s a tough one. When people are thinking something is going to last a lifetime. Well, you’ve got to gauge people’s expectations. And that’s the hardest thing, the expectations of people I find. These days, we do a lot of teeth in a day, and I still, I personally think it’s a really amazing treatment to offer someone, and you’re just gauging the expectations of someone who’s coming in. And they’ve got all loose teeth, they all need to come out. Then you see them in the morning. Place the implants, all this teeth out, so all the upper teeth out, implants in. Six hours later you’re fitting a custom made acrylic bridge.

Dr. Andy Moore: Something that’s made in a day. But it looks nice, it’s stable. And the patients, “Oh, it feels a bit thick at the back.” And then you just think, “Oh my God, that’s one of the hardest things to do in dentistry.” Even though you’ve shown them the models, and shown what the timber is going to be like, and said to them, “Look, it will be a bit thick because it’s plastic. It needs to be strong. You can’t have it breaking.” So those are the challenges, I think, that face a lot of implant dentists, a dentist full stop really, there. That is gauging those expectations are so high these days.

Prav Solanki: A lot of dentists tell me that sometimes patients forget where they came from.

Dr. Andy Moore: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s why you need a photo sometimes, and say, “Well this is where you were, and this is where you are now.” And it’s getting them through that transition stage. I mean we custom made pretty much all our temporary full arch bridges, lab made stuff, and it’s really really hard to do in a day. It’s really hard to get the bite right, get everything looking good. But we know it’s a temporary, and sometimes just getting over that to the patient, that they know this is something that we have to get through until we do the permanent one.

Dr. Andy Moore: Saying that, I saw a lady this morning who we did a full arch for, before Christmas. It was November. And I said, “Oh, is there anything you want to change about the temporary?” “No, just do, it looks fantastic.” And it looked brilliant. So most of them are like that, but you don’t know, when that patient comes through the door, whether they’re going to be a patient with really high expectations, or realistic expectations. And some of the patients you think have got realistic expectations turn out to have really high expectations. They don’t have a sign, they don’t come in with a sign. So it’s difficult, it’s difficult.

Payman: I think it is difficult dentistry, isn’t it? Does it get easier, because you’ve done so many?

Dr. Andy Moore: I think the surgical aspect, just straightforward surgery, gets a bit easier. You got to be a little bit, you still don’t want to be blasé about it. You still want to make sure that you’re on the ball. But yeah, definitely-

Payman: The soft tissue side of it for anterior seems like a headache.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, that can be. Again, it’s case selection, and picking out ones that you’re going to do quickly, ones you’re going to do slowly. So you got an immediate. Sometimes it seems like the more difficult treatment, but you’re maintaining the soft tissue. And there’re other times you’ve got to do things slower and make sure things heal and just take your time with things.

Payman: Are you involved in the zygomatic?

Dr. Andy Moore: No. I thought about zygomatic implants. I went to Paulo Malo’s clinic in Portugal a few years ago and saw him do some zygomatics. And-

Payman: No.

Dr. Andy Moore: It’s sort of put me off. for me. Rather than make me want to go out and buy a kit, I was like, “Oh my God, there is a limit on what you should be doing in dental practise.” And for me, I think I’m a great believer in doing stuff a lot. You should do, but if you don’t do things from one month to the next or one six months to the next, you should be sending them somewhere else. So I think you get good at doing things quickly and a lot of. So if you’re doing one zygomatic case a year, you shouldn’t be doing it. You should be sending those to a guy who’s doing them every week, preferably. So I just, yeah, I backed away from that once I’d seen them in action, but yeah, maybe it’s a good treatment for some people.

Prav Solanki: Can you remember a patient who you’ve had the biggest impact on, life wise, in the way you’ve changed their life through dentistry?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I think the Teeth in a Day sort of stuff is the one that really, that’s the one that really gets people. When they’ve been suffering. You’ve normally had that thing where they’ve just had teeth, just one added on one, another other one added on, another one added on. I mean, we do this technique called [cinco 00:35:33], predominantly do it in the lower jaw. Where a patient will come in with often a full denture that I’ve had made recently. They’ve had their final lower three out, or something like that, and they’ve had a full denture made. And they just cannot wear it. They’ve had that nearly a full denture. We just had two teeth holding it in-

Prav Solanki: It’s a big difference.

Dr. Andy Moore: And then they’ve had those last two teeth out. The dentist, in good faith, has made him a nice lower denture. And that is a technique I really like. And it’s quite difficult, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. Because you got to put the implants in all parallel. It’s a Teeth in a Day, but using the existing denture to create a semi fixed. Patients can take it in and out, but it’s actually quite hard to get in and out. It’s a good, it’s almost fixed.

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And that’s one of the ones where you really, when they come in, and I think, “You know what? I’ll see you next week.” And I can really make a difference, that person’s life. Because they come in with a wobbly denture, and in a hour… a straightforward case, I can do it in an hour, an hour and a quarter, and they walk out, and they’ve got effectively fixed teeth.

Prav Solanki: But what changes for them Andy? So, patients have come back and said, “You’ve changed my life-

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh that thing is, “Can I bite an apple?” I have to reign them in a little bit, especially if I’m doing a median load. And I’m like, “Yeah you can, but not for six weeks.” But yeah, just being able to eat. I think people, we just all go out for dinner much more than we used to. And food is much more of a bigger deal. And I think you get people who say, “I go out and I’m having to take my teeth out halfway through a meal, or I’m avoiding going into social situations,” and stuff like that. And then when you get people like that coming in here, I definitely can do something with them.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: I could definitely do something to really improve their quality of life. So yeah, I think for that, and just that thing of people saying smiling without putting their hand up, without covering their mouth as they smile. And those sort of cases.

Payman: You know what it is? We don’t get taught enough about the emotional side of losing all of your teeth.

Dr. Andy Moore: No.

Payman: And emotionally when… I mean we’re all getting on a little bit now, right? But emotionally when something goes, whatever the thing is, my wife had started taking medicine and the doctor said, rest of your life, and it was like one of those moments in your life-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. That’s a long time.

Payman: -and it was just taking a pill. And we looked high and low to find a doctor who would say, “Oh, she doesn’t have to take it for the rest of her life.” But when you lose all of your teeth, all of them. And like he says, the lower dentures that just doesn’t stay, emotionally, it’s a really bad place to be in.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Payman: And then to be taken out of that, I can see that it’s going to be huge, isn’t it? It’s going to be huge.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. Again, sometimes it is expectations. I think when we first started doing a lot of Teeth in a Day stuff, we were generally on people who had full dentures. So that was a lot easier to take them from a full denture to a fixed bridge, a transitional bridge. But it was such an amazing feeling. Now we got a lot of patients who have never had that experience of a denture. And they’re the ones that are hard to manage their expectations on. But at the end of the treatment, the cases have generally all gone really well. It’s just getting them through that initial period can be a little bit tricky, I think.

Payman: I bet the word of mouth is huge on it as well.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I mean we get a lot of people who just come to us, and they say, “Oh, you saw my friend. Oh you did my husband.” That is a big thing, because people really want to talk about that life changing sort of stuff. Because it’s just fantastic for business really.

Payman: Excuse my ignorance about this, you probably even know more about this than I do Prav, but is all on four, all on six, could you do that with any implant system? or is that specifically-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I think you’ve got to have a system that is going to give you really good primary stability. So it has to have a certain sort of thread or just the technique for putting it in. But I think most of the big systems now, they’ve got all the components to do that. Because it’s such a big treatment for people. It’s such a popular treatment modality that the implant systems, they’ve all got their own little way of doing it.

Payman: Do you use more than one implant system, or do you stick to one?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I use predominantly Ankylos, from Dentsply and I use Anthogyr as well, which is a French system, which is really good. And we pick and choose according to. It’s just nice to have another system that you look on. You think, “Actually, it might be better to use something different.” But predominantly, I still use Ankylos the most there. So I’ve been using it now for, it’s probably 16 years or since it came to the UK.

Payman: So you don’t have different qualities of implant?

Dr. Andy Moore: No, I don’t do that.

Payman: That’s a thing, isn’t it? Some people do that?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I don’t know about that. I’m not sure that’s really my thing. Premium implants, and stuff like that. Yeah, I don’t know how that works.

Prav Solanki: I think, I’ve spoke to you at length on this Andy, and we all know that Ankylos is at the top end of the market in terms of costs, right?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: And I said, “Well have you thought about using the cheaper implant?” You always talk about, you just need one failure to ruin a year, right?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I think you want to be putting something in that you wouldn’t mind having in your own mouth. And also, I don’t believe in complicating things. When you’re doing a plan for someone, and you go, “Okay, it’s going to be x number of thousand pounds to do this implant, but if you do this implant, it’s going to be a bit cheaper, and that implant’s going to be a bit cheaper.” And I really think that’s confusing for patients.

Dr. Andy Moore: It’s a bit like when we do a full arch, I won’t say all… like an all on four sort of treatment. We sort of charge it really as a procedure rather than per implant. So if I do four implants, it’s the same as doing six. Because the patient might be sedated and you, “Oh, actually I could put a couple of extra implants in here.” And you don’t want to have to sort of get over that sort of consent issue.

Dr. Andy Moore: So it’s actually better to do it as a procedure. Because in a way, four is less implants, but it’s much harder and more critically harder to do if you put four in. Because they’re often, it’s a much harder case.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: So I tend to do it as a procedure, and I think it’s better that way for patients, that transparency with patients. I learned that a long time ago, most of the complaints you will have is that patient didn’t expect the fees. So it’s not that they’re not happy to pay, but it’s that they thought it was going to be one figure, and it turned out to be another.

Dr. Andy Moore: So when we do a plan, we stick with that plan. Even though if I think, “Oh, I’m going to have to do some extra stuff, but I hadn’t mentioned it.” The patient, we swallow that cost, and you just do it because by the time you’ve spoken about it and talked about the whole thing, you could have just got on and done it anyway there. So that’s just the way-

Payman: My uncle is an implantologist in Iran, and he says that it’s very common in Iran. They say Swiss implant, South Korean implant or Iranian implant. He’s just like, “That’s absolutely standard thing.”

Dr. Andy Moore: Really?

Payman: And he was saying, “Yeah, I’m getting some luck with Iranian implants.” But we do have it in dentistry, don’t we? We have it whitening, basic and advanced, right? That that’s-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, no I suppose so. Yeah. I mean, and I’ve seen, I don’t know if that’s the sort of practise we want. I don’t like to be demarcate between-

Payman: Yeah, I get it.

Dr. Andy Moore: -premium, because it should all be premium. And if patients have a cheaper implant, they’ll still want it to work. I don’t know. I’d… for me, I’m not sure about that. But a friend of mine, he saw someone years and years ago in a practise in Harley street that were doing the Hungarian implants sort stuff.

Prav Solanki: Right.

Dr. Andy Moore: And so they were doing the consultations there, and then you had the option to have a Swiss implant in the UK, or the Swiss implant in Hungary, and the cheaper implant in the UK, or the cheaper… and this treatment plan for a single tooth implant. It was about 10 pages.

Dr. Andy Moore: He sent it to me, I went, “Oh listen, just come over and see me. And actually it didn’t work out. When you looked at having it done in the UK and having the proper implant, it was the same prices as what we charge. So it wasn’t like they were trying to be sort of super cheap or anything. It was just really confusing.

Payman: I’ve seen some horror stories that people, tourism, dental tourism.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. The dental tourism ones. I think less so now. Now the pound is so crap against the euro. It just doesn’t really work so cost effective. But back, say 10 years ago, when you were getting a lot of euros for your money to go over there and have stuff done. But yeah, I mean, I saw cases of just the sort of treatment that would take me sort of six months to do, they were done in three or four days. That someone would go over there and just have full mouth crowns. They were the worst ones. I think the implant ones, they’re more of a problem when stuff goes wrong.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: But just thinking, my God, they’ve done 24 crowns in a day, and you’re looking at these crowns, and they’ve all got problems around them, and ledges, and it’s just… Yeah, I had a lot of those maybe 10 years or so ago. And we get the odd case here and there, people just, “I’ve had these implants done, and I don’t want to go back.” I used to sort of try and help those people out, but that then became my implant, unfortunately. It became my problem.

Dr. Andy Moore: And you spend two or three hours trying to Google the clinic to try and get some information on what they were and what screws and what type. And I just-

Prav Solanki: Stressful.

Dr. Andy Moore: I had a couple of cases like that where it just became my problem.

Payman: How do you remove an implant? How does that work?

Dr. Andy Moore: It depends whether it’s-

Payman: Integrated or not?

Dr. Andy Moore: If it’s integrated you have to generally to refine around it and then-

Payman: What does that mean?

Dr. Andy Moore: Well just to drill with a hollow drill, yeah. Around the implant to loosen the bone and then we’ve got like a torque wrench that you can just unscrew it. But if it’s failing then it’s sometimes just like taking a wobbly tooth out. So yeah. So it’s taking out the ones that are well integrated-

Payman: And you do grafts and sinus lifts and all that sort of?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we do that as well. Yeah, we do more… we used to do a lot of block grafting, where we’d take bone from the lower jaw and things. But now we do more bone regeneration techniques, which seem to work really well now with new techniques and stuff.

Prav Solanki: And you’ve taught other dentists, and mentored other dentists, through implant dentistry, right?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, we run a course at the practise. We do like a two day advanced surgical course, usually four or five times a year. And we have dentists… and I’d do live surgery. We normally have a Thursday and a Friday where we do two cases on a Thursday and two cases on a Friday. It’s good. It’s really good for Dave, it’s quite stressful for me. Having 10 guys all watching as you’re lifting the sinus membrane, and they’re thinking, “I hope he tears this. Then I’ll see him repair it.” I always know what they are thinking. Yeah, and it’s quite hard doing… because they don’t want to see me place a single lowers six inch. It might take 20 minutes. They want to see complicated stuff. So you’ve got to get complicated cases in, and they’re the ones more like to have sort of complications, yeah.

Payman: Do you enjoy the teaching?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I do actually. I sometimes, I was thinking to myself, oh, the lead up to it, I say, “Oh, I’ve got courses week.” But just doing the normal day, and then we generally get a really good group of guys in, and they’re dead keen to learn, and it’s a nice social thing, and it’s good for me. Find out what other people are doing, and I enjoy finding out what everyone else is… because it’s a very open thing.

Dr. Andy Moore: It’s not me just standing there and saying, “This is the way we do stuff.” I like, it’s more of an interactive sort of seminars and I get them to try and do a lot of the work, and just to talk about stuff and that works really well and it’s really rewarding, teaching. It is rewarding.

Payman: You learn a lot by teaching.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, you definitely do. You definitely do. And you just meet some good people. I quite like having people over. We’ve got guys who’ve… I’ve been running the course since I’m opened the practise, so 17 years. And guys who keep coming back and saying, “Oh, I just want you to show me those cases and stuff.” And it’s really good. I really enjoy that and you get to see, get to meet a few nice guys.

Prav Solanki: Do the courses generate referring dentists as well for you?

Dr. Andy Moore: They used to. But we’ve sort of exhausted pretty much all the close to home dentists now.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: So most of those, if they were going to come on the course, they would’ve been already. But yeah, we used to generate that. I mean it’s quite a lot of the guys who came on the course originally are doing the same sort of stuff as me now.

Payman: Oh, cool.

Dr. Andy Moore: So that’s really good to hear. But now we get people from all over. I got a guy from Australia, so I was pretty impressed. I don’t know if he was over here for something else. I don’t think he came over especially. But yeah, a lot of guys from Ireland, guys from Europe. So yeah, it’s good.

Payman: What percentage of the work is by referral, and what percentage are your own?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I reckon probably the implant stuff is 35% referral, and the other 60% is through google, word of mouth. Those, with Prav looking after my website, we still do well on getting lots of hits on the website. And so I think you need that balance. I’ve always thought you… because you find that your referrals, they retire. Some of them retires, bit selfish, but they retire, and stop sending new patients. And then you’ll have guys who go, “You know what, I reckon I could do that.” And then they start placing their own implants, so they dry up.

Dr. Andy Moore: So you need that balance really. You need the balance between getting the patients from the local dentists sending stuff to you, as well as your own patients coming to you sort of through word of mouth. Like I said. Yeah, so.

Dr. Andy Moore: But a lot of the guys, the best referrals tend to be the ones who do the restorative. So they’ll send the patient to me for the surgery, and I’ll get it all teed up for them and then they go back and take an impression and do the final crown. So it’s a good way of doing it.

Prav Solanki: Andy, you’re very very good friends with probably one of the most successful businessmen in the world.

Dr. Andy Moore: What, you?

Prav Solanki: Richard-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah Richard, we met years and years ago. Just one of those chance meetings on holiday.

Payman: Richard Branson?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. So that was one of those, another one of those sliding door moments in your life there. And we’ve stayed friends for 20 years or so.

Payman: Where was you? What happened? How did you meet-

Dr. Andy Moore: We were in Mallorca, and he had a hotel there, and we were staying there. It was me and my wife before we had kids. And we were having lunch, and he came up to me and said, “Oh, you look like the sort of guy who might want to make up a four for tennis.” And I was like, “Oh yeah.” And back in those days, a holiday for me, it was a proper holiday. I didn’t use to take any sports care with me or anything. I’d sit by the pool and read and those. They were the good old days. So I cobbled together some sports gear and borrowed a racket and I could hit a tennis ball, not very well, but. And so I made up a four tennis, and then we sort of hit it off, and that evening we had sort of bit dinner together, and he’s into his chess. And I used to play chess when I was a schoolboy.

Prav Solanki: So you played chess together?

Dr. Andy Moore: So I played chess with him, and he’s good. He’s pretty good at chess. And I think he had too much to drink, but I kept beating him at chess, and he wouldn’t let me go to bed until he’d beaten me. So we stayed up until wee early hours, and we still play chess together. It’s still very competitive. That’s one of our things we do. So yeah, it a good meeting that one.

Payman: You’ve been to the island?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, we go there most years. So yeah, we go there and we’ve got a core friends that all go together. So yeah, it’s great. And the kids, my kids have grown up going over there. They’ve been going there for-

Prav Solanki: I remember receiving a text from Mandy one day and he said, “I’m sat here next to…” Was it Larry Page?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I do know Larry.

Prav Solanki: Google.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: He’s like, “I’m sat here next to Larry Page. You got any questions for him?”

Dr. Andy Moore: I thought you might be able to get me up on the rankings. I don’t think he’s quite… He’s not quite as focused on my website as he should be.

Prav Solanki: I don’t think that’s his priority.

Dr. Andy Moore: I’m not sure it is. He’s got an island next to Richard’s. So he’s a big kite surfer, so we often go out kite surfing.

Payman: He kite surfs?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, yeah. So we’ll often do a trip over with Larry, and he’s a proper Californian sort of techno guy. He really is.

Payman: These super duper dudes, do they, I know they’re just like us and all that, but are they busy to the extent that they suddenly have to leave?

Dr. Andy Moore: No, they don’t seem to be. Richards always… I mean, they’re just so smart, I just… it’s hard to quantify. But I have sat down and had lunch with Larry Page and stuff. After kite surfing, we’ve sat done, and you sort of start quizzing him about what the next thing is.

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And you just go, “I haven’t even thought of that.” Just the stuff they’ve got going on is incredible. And they just think differently, I think, these guys. They’ve just got, and as they get more successful, yeah, they don’t do that. Just rushing off and doing stuff. They’ve got other people who do all that stuff.

Prav Solanki: That’s good to know.

Dr. Andy Moore: He’ll go out kite surfing, he loves kite surfing. He’s just just absolutely all over it. And he’ll go out kite surfing like four hours and stuff. He loves it. But yeah, they’re very, so switched on. Yeah, yeah. It’s-

Prav Solanki: Do you ever talk shop? Or is it all about the fun, enjoying that time together?

Dr. Andy Moore: I mean Richard, we talk about business. And I’ve got a lot of tips, business wise, from him. Not direct tips, just seeing the way he treats people. He’s such a good person with people. He’s so genuine and he treats his staff with so much respect. I’ve learned a lot from that, the way he is with people. And he’s always on the button. It doesn’t matter what business it is, he can cut through whether dentistry or-

Payman: Spaceships.

Dr. Andy Moore: -spaceships or trains or anything. For him, he goes straight to the core of things very quickly. So he’s quite a good person just to ask about stuff. But yeah, we don’t talk about my business too much. Seems to be insignificant when you’re going into space.

Payman: Are you not his dentist?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. I do do some stuff for him. He’s so busy. He’s all over the place.

Payman: You can’t get the channels for him.

Dr. Andy Moore: He drives me mad sometime, because he’ll go and have some treatment done somewhere else. “Oh, I just got work. I had to saw this dentist in Miami.” And I’m like, “Why didn’t you just come and see me?” He said, “Well, it’s quite a long way.” He lives in the Caribbean most of the time now, so it’s a long time. It’s a long way for him to come all the way over to me for a crown. So, but no, we don’t keep it separate, but it is sort of one of those things where if he wants me, I’ll help him out.

Prav Solanki: So Andy, it’s your last day on the planet, and there’s three bits of advice you can leave behind for the world. What are they?

Dr. Andy Moore: Don’t work too hard. I think that’s a good one. Just… don’t know. I think you’ve got to really grasp opportunities, and it is quite hard because sometimes you’re going to be held back by your doubts and stuff, but go with your instincts. I mean I’m a big one for that. Just seeing something and thinking, “Yeah, I’m going to go for it.”

Prav Solanki: Go for that.

Dr. Andy Moore: Because you don’t want to regret stuff. You don’t want to regret not doing things. It’s not often you regret doing things. There’s probably a few things.

Payman: Yeah. It depends on what things you’ve done really.

Dr. Andy Moore: But most of the time you regret when you don’t do something. And we’re talking smaller stuff. But yeah, I would definitely say-

Prav Solanki: Take every opportunity.

Dr. Andy Moore: -take every opportunity and just don’t be a person who’s thinking, oh I wish I had done that. Because things sort of have a reason that they turn out, don’t they? It just seems to work that way sometimes.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Payman: And you’re one of the top implant surgeons in the country that undoubtedly, and-

Dr. Andy Moore: That’s what you’re saying.

Payman: You are, you are.

Prav Solanki: Without a doubt.

Dr. Andy Moore: I’ll take that from you.

Prav Solanki: Without a doubt.

Payman: And yet… I was going to say, yet so humble with it. And we were discussing before, a little bit under the radar. Not that many people have heard of you that, of course many have in your area, I’m sure. But considering your profile, considering what you’ve achieved, is that on purpose?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, it probably is because I think… I used to teach at the Royal college a lot and I just, I really enjoyed the teaching element of it. It was just the underlying sort of politic of it always sort of, I always thought that it’s not really my thing, and I like doing my own thing. I like doing my own thing too much to get involved with committees and things. And you need people to do stuff like that, and you’ve got to take your hat off to the people who are doing it. Because if they weren’t doing it, that things wouldn’t work out quite as well for everybody else. But I’m definitely… yeah, I like to just keep my head down and stuff and just, I’m happy with my own lot in a way. I don’t need to-

Payman: I mean how’d you become Andy Moore? I mean the-

Dr. Andy Moore: You’ll have to ask mum and dad that. I don’t know about that one.

Payman: If you had to pin down sort of a key thing?

Dr. Andy Moore: Is it for a dentist?

Payman: Yeah. Let’s say there’s some young kid listing now who’s two years out, and he wants to be like you, what are the key strengths, the key things?

Dr. Andy Moore: The key things I would say, if you want to develop a practise, is get just good at normal dentistry.

Payman: But why? I mean if you could do [crosstalk]

Dr. Andy Moore: Because I think you need those skills. You need to see people. No, well that implants came to me much later.

Prav Solanki: 10 years, yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: You don’t go straight in, and I think… I often see guys who are newly qualified and they want to… and it’s brilliant. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ambition, but I think sometimes you’ve got to learn to deal with people before you start-

Payman: Let’s say I’m Mr. Charisma. Let’s say I’m two years out, and I’m really good with people, and I want to do implants. It goes down to that sort of work on your strengths or work on your weaknesses-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, well I think what you want to do is you want to build a rapport with the sort of people that, I’m talking patients, who you’re going to be treating for a long time. So you’ve got to be in it, it’s the long game. You can’t chop and change practises. “Oh that practise is good, I’ll go there. Or these are doing more implants, I’ll go there.”

Dr. Andy Moore: You’ve got to build your base-

Payman: That’s true.

Dr. Andy Moore: -and you’ve got to have that. I mean for me, I think being in the same area. I mean, sometimes I just think, because I didn’t come to Chelmsford on purpose. I came there as a six month stop gap before I went to something else. That’s a bit scary, because I never left the street. Which is… I don’t know what it says about me. Either I’m really lazy or… But I really enjoyed that.

Dr. Andy Moore: I enjoyed treating those people, and enjoyed the work. Yes. I still enjoy the actual bits of dentistry now, the actual mechanics of it. But I enjoyed treating those people and developing Rapport with those people. And I think if you then move on somewhere else, then you’ve got to build a whole new sort of good wIll up. I think staying things in somewhere for the long game, and getting good at the general bits of dentistry so that you can focus on the other bits.

Dr. Andy Moore: So you don’t want to be worrying about doing, if you’re newly qualified, don’t want be thinking about, “I’ll go to do an implant tomorrow, I’m really going to be…” It’s got to be something that comes as a natural thing, so you can then focus on all the other stuff. Because you’ll be looking after the patient, making sure the patient’s happy with the plan, making sure they’re comfortable when they come into the practise. That you’ve got all those. That, like you say, when you come to the practise, you get that feeling that-

Prav Solanki: It’s magical.

Dr. Andy Moore: -it’s a nice place to have a treatment done. And that’s what you want all the patients to feel.

Dr. Andy Moore: So if you can get good at doing the dentistry side of things. Either with… I don’t think you should do too many courses. I think you should keep your education up and focus on one area you’re really interested in. But don’t go overload on, because you need to do the miles. It’s a bit like my daughter’s passed her driving test recently. I said, “When you pass your test, you’ll do way more miles, and you become a better driver.” And she says, “Well you can’t be better than just when you pass your test.” You will because you get so many more situations that come along. So you need to be able to go through all these situations to… there won’t be many times that you get surprised by the things patients do or come in with. So you don’t want to be in that situation where you’re having to think about things too much.

Payman: Do you ever feel like slowing down?

Dr. Andy Moore: I have slowed down. In the last-

Payman: Have you?

Dr. Andy Moore: In terms of work?

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, yeah. I have slowed down, and I’ve got a long term plan, which is to slow down and let the other guys take over more and more work. So yeah, I do less hours now than I did three years ago. But when I’m working, I’m working. I actually want to have a really busy day, I want to-

Payman: Long days?

Dr. Andy Moore: Not long days, no. A busy day. I don’t work long hours. Because I don’t think that’s… it interrupts my training besides. No, but also, I think it… there’s one thing about getting old, even though I try and fight against it. You just get more tired.

Payman: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And I won’t work after five. I don’t work Saturdays and stuff like that. So I generally will finish a bit early on a Monday. Work full Tuesday, have either Wednesday off, or just work in the morning. I’ll work all day Thursday and then I’ll finish early on a Friday, one o’clock on a Friday. So I work, but when I’m working I really am working, I want the day to fly by and to do lots of fun, interesting things and to have a productive day.

Dr. Andy Moore: But yeah, I have slowed down, and I reckon I’ll gradually try and pinch another morning off. And so to go down to maybe three and a half days a week soon, and just do it that way, really. Rather than just suddenly go, “Oh, I’m going to pack up now.” Don’t think that’s going to work.

Prav Solanki: Have you got an exit strategy Andy?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, really just that. I don’t see, at the moment, that selling the practise to one of the big corporates, and they say, “Go work for me for 5 years.”

Prav Solanki: Tie you in.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, that would kill me I think. Because I love being my own boss. I like making my own decisions and just going, “You know what, I’m going to buy a new sewing machine because I think that’ll be a really good thing to have in the practise.” Or, “Let’s just do something different.” And I’d be really worried about someone else coming over and taking all those things off me. So I don’t see myself doing that at the moment. But maybe more towards just winding down until, because I like doing dentistry, I’d just like to do… if I could do maybe three days a fortnight or something like that, just to do the bigger cases and have the rest of the team running the practise.

Prav Solanki: What would you do on the other days?

Dr. Andy Moore: I don’t know. I can’t ride my bike anymore. I do now. I don’t know. I think it just… With that broken arm I had in the summer, the first week was murder for me because I was like, “Oh man, what am I doing at home?” And then actually, it was a nice summer.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: I sort of got into it, and scarily I sort of quite enjoyed it, not going to work. And the first few weeks I was popping in and seeing what they were doing. In the end I was like, “I’m not going to even bother popping in. I’m just getting in the way.”

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: So I actually quite liked it. Yeah I know, I quite liked it. Taking the dog for a walk. And your day goes by really quick when you got the World Cup and the Tour de France to get through. And getting up late or reading the paper and stuff. So, I don’t think I’d have any problem with retirement, but I think my bank manager might, and my wife. Yeah, and my wife. More importantly, my wife might. So yeah, I think I’ve got to keep it going for a bit longer.

Payman: What do you think you would’ve been if you weren’t a dentist?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, well I started doing physics at university.

Payman: Oh yeah?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah. And I realised that I just wasn’t smart enough for any of that. It was just so complicated for me. I thought I was quite good at maths and things and I was like, “Oh my God, this is… I can’t. I can’t. I don’t think I can do this.” So I only did a term.

Payman: You dropped out.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I did a term, and I just realised it wasn’t for me. And my sister just qualified as a dentist. So I went and spent a couple of days, and thought, oh yeah, this looks all right. I think this, I’ll give it a go. It’s hard to make decisions when you’re 18, what you want to do for the rest of your life, isn’t it?

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Dr. Andy Moore: And so yeah, maybe I would have been some sort of physics type person. I don’t know. It could have been on the start of, it was just as computers are getting going and all that. I could’ve been involved with that, but I don’t know. I like people, I couldn’t see myself being in an office or anything like that. I think… I liked seeing different people.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Payman: Well it’s been really lovely speaking to you.

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh, good thank you.

Payman: It really has. I want to just thank you a lot for-

Prav Solanki: Thanks for sharing Andy.

Payman: Yeah sharing, and coming all the way here to do it.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah cheers.

Payman: I think there’s still a whole lot. Well normally we start these things by saying, “Where were you born?”

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh right.

Payman: We get the whole backstory, but because I so much wanted to know about Advanced-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

Payman: So it’d be great to have you back another time, go backwards then-

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, no, well I was born in Grimsby, if that helps. So I don’t think you need to do anymore research on that one. So yeah. But thanks guys.

Prav Solanki: Thank you. Cheers Andy.

Payman: Thanks a lot. We appreciate it.

Dr. Andy Moore: Thanks a lot, appreciate it.

Speaker 4: This is Dental Leaders. The podcast where you get to go one on one with emerging leaders in dentistry. Your hosts Payman Langroudi and Prav Solanki.

Prav Solanki: Hey guys, and thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Dental Leaders podcast, a vision that myself and Payman had over two years ago now. And if you have got some value out of today, just hit the subscribe button in iTunes or Google play or whatever you’re listening to. Let us know in your comments what you actually got out of the episode. Because we love sitting back and reading those reviews. It really does make our day.

Payman: It’s a real pleasure to do this. It’s fun to do, but I’m really humbled that you’re actually listening all the way through to the end. And join us again, if you got some value out of…

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