And it’s difficult. It’s really, really hard. And I think I’ve learned that you can’t. As much as I aspired originally to own one of the best practices in the country, let alone the world eventually, but at the same time also be the go to dentist that everybody wants to go to, the person that can do what the other practices around you cannot. The place that everybody refers their tricky cases to because they don’t know what to do. And we’ve got then turns to the southwest. Thankfully we’ve got there we are the place that everybody sends all their tricky cases that they don’t know what to do with. But at the same time, I can’t be that person and also run a business empire at the same time. It’s not possible, physically possible as one person to do that unless you really hone in and get the right amount of people around you. But then it’s a question of what is the best use of your time. And this is where you get to eventually thinking, I’m one person. There is a limit to what I can earn in my hourly rate treating patients. Regardless of how good you think you are, even if you upped your hourly rate to 400 an hour, 500, 600, 700, a thousand, there is still a limit to how much you can earn through your own handiwork, through your own hands, through a given day. Whereas actually you can quadruple that by actually being able to run businesses or multiple businesses on multiple fronts very well and actually being the inspiration behind them.

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.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Ahmad Nunu onto the podcast. Ahmad is one of the most energetic dentists I’ve ever come across. The guy’s always got something going on. Principal of Black Swan Dental Spa, which is kind of taken Somerset in the southwest by storm, one of the leading cosmetic centres and multidisciplinary centres in the Southwest. More recently, principal of Bristol Dental Suite and even more recently, Ahmed started a sort of a mentoring, private kind of mentoring scheme called the Private Dental Mentor. Lovely to have you on the podcast finally, buddy.

It’s been an absolute pleasure. It’s taken, what, three years, however long?

Yeah, because you’re busy, but you are busy. I mean, this podcast, you’ve listened. You said you listened to a few episodes before. We tend to sort of start at the beginning and end at the end, but these days I like to ask a question that’s burning so that I just get that question out so that I don’t have to worry about that question anymore. And it really comes down to when the going gets tough, the tough get going. You really are that cat in my book. You know, you you you really, really work your butt off. What’s the story with that?

Um, I guess from my point of view, it’s always been about wanting to better improve myself, but more so I guess it was the fear of failure that drove me initially. A lot of people won’t know this story unless they were my year at dental school and it’s that I didn’t pass my first time round. I failed two of my exams for various family related background reasons and things which I won’t go into, but I wasn’t ready to take finals. And I remember going up to the Dean’s office a couple of days before finals. Passed all my internals gateways absolutely fine, no problem at all. But and basically said, Look, I haven’t done any work for six weeks, literally nothing. I’ve got so much going on in the background. And the university said to me at the time, you pass all your exams, you haven’t failed a single one. We can’t stop you from taking finals. You have no choice. You have to sit them regardless. So I did. It wasn’t a total surprise that I passed my restorative first time round with barely any revision. Bless them. But I knew my stuff for restorative. I was quite confident with that. But the others, which was paediatrics and orthodontics and the oral surgery oral side of it, I wasn’t at the races for those and I wasn’t ready.

So it was no surprise that I needed the extra six months, which I then shadowed consultant clinics like crazy for for six months. And ironically it’s put me in the position that I’m in today because I wouldn’t have gained I wouldn’t have got any of that extra experience, which gave me the confidence to then do the work that I’m doing right now, which is a lot more orthodontic heavy and a lot more surgery heavy than than I ever envisaged it would be. But guess that’s stuck with me ever since because it made me feel like I was a step behind everybody else right from the very beginning. And I think from that point on, I’ve just carried on going and going and going and going, and I don’t know why. I just haven’t stopped since then. Don’t feel like I’ve got to where I want to get. And I still don’t feel like I’ve got to where I want to get. And I haven’t given the dental industry what I can give it, give it and what I can offer. And that’s I guess that’s the easiest answer to that question.

Was there an element of, oh, I’ll show them sort of thing?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there’s been hardships and challenges all along the way over the last ten. It’s probably been 13 years now, actually across the journey. 15 years, jeez, 15 years. And there’s been a lot of ups and downs across the way. And I think it’s that constant reminder every time there’s a backward step at each point where you go, right, that’s it. It’s having your own internal confidence in yourself, knowing that maybe I haven’t done as well as I could have done in this one, or I’ll strike this off as a learning curve. Let’s move on. Let’s prove to not anybody else really but myself. I think a lot of this is self motivation from inwards where I don’t want to fail and I don’t want to believe that I failed at something.

Yeah. So I felt finals, by the way. So I feel your pain. Yeah. I don’t have any family issues. I just didn’t work. But. But there was an element of, like, shame in it for sure. Yeah. And I hear exactly what you’re saying about people who’d started. Like you feel like you’re behind right away. You feel like you’re behind. Yeah. And I also agree with you on that. Six months was the, for me, the best six months of my career because I really sat down and did the work. And and then I don’t know how it worked in Bristol. You were in Bristol, weren’t you? Yeah, in Cardiff. They used to give you a house job as kind of like a consolation prize for being a failure. And I was never the type to do a house show, let alone oral surgery and all of that. And so you’re right. It can it can sometimes be the best thing for you. And the other thing is people fail at all different levels. You know, I’ve got a friend. His dad didn’t win the Nobel Prize and unfortunately committed suicide because of it. And so, you know what I mean, that probably that never failed in his life. And then at that Nobel Prize level, he he ended up failing. But was the first time I mean, what were you like as a kid? Were you were you particularly studious as a kid or not?

I was, yeah, absolutely. And coming back to that point in a second, But I’m just going to you’ve just you’ve sparked a story. So remember, do you remember what the industry show or whichever one it was? And I was lecturing with you guys for Enlighten. Yeah. And I remember I was walking around the trade show at that particular one and two people from my year who graduated with me, they obviously passed first time round. They saw me walking around and I was like, I was dressed in a suit and I had the lanyard on me that said speaker on it. Yeah, the lecturer one. And and they saw me walking round and they said, What are you doing here and why have you got that lanyard? And I said, Well, I’m obviously working with one of the companies. And I’m and they said, Yeah, but it says that your lecturing. And I said, Yeah. And they said, But how could you be lecturing? You failed two years ago. And it was honestly the most enlightening moment because thinking to myself, you do realise that was a couple of years ago, Like have you not moved on since then? Because I have and I think that was. Yeah. So it’s funny that the stigma stays with you, I guess, for a long period of time afterwards, and I guess it stays for as long as you want it to stay with you. Yeah. And it comes down to mental, mental toughness and mental confidence in your own self. I was devastated during that period.

I’m not gonna lie. The first month I locked myself in my bedroom and I was absolutely devastated. And I mean, it wasn’t even it wasn’t it wasn’t sort of a guilt thing as well. It was sort of like, I can’t believe I failed and I failed before. It wasn’t the first time I’ve ever failed in my life. But that was a big deal. That was your finals. You worked five years to get to this point, etcetera. But then once I got that out of my system, it was then the whole Do you know what? So what? I’ve got another opportunity. I’ve only lost six months of my life. I will you can gain it back. You can you can achieve a hell of a lot more just by moving forward. And it was just the mental, I guess, side of you fixing yourself and trying to turn it around so that you can you can make a good situation out of a bad situation. So. So, yes, I feel you on that one because I know exactly what it felt like and I’ve been through it. Going back to the question you did ask school. I was yes, I was quite studious. I always have been. I guess it’s been drummed into us from my parents from a young age. All my siblings have done very well in their careers, bless them. And and it’s something that’s that’s always stuck with us. Dental school was slightly different, though. It wasn’t the same number.

Are you which number?

Sibling I am the eldest, so I’m the oldest. I’m one of the oldest.

Yeah. Now everything’s becoming clear. I’m joking. I’m joking because I’m the youngest. Go on.

And so. Yes, but that didn’t really matter when you got to Dental school because everybody at Dental school was clever. Everyone’s top of their classes. So you’re sort of then thrown into the mix of a bunch that you’re all quite similar. You’ve all got different personalities, but you’ve all gone through very similar experiences to be where you are. And guess that’s that was the other eye opener for me because suddenly you’ve gone from being top of your class for practically everything to being mean. Yes, I did do very well in certain exams. I did come first in my year for for a few things. But but in the in the main, you’re sort of in the middle of the range of the class. Yeah. And and that for a lot of people that’s a real massive eye opener because you’ve got to just find a way of getting through it rather than actually being devastated Every time you don’t come in the top one or 2 or 3 people.

Where did you grow up?

I actually grew up in Bristol, so I was born in Glasgow originally. I didn’t stay that very long, so I was only there for two years. My dad was finishing off his PhD up there and we moved to a combination of Saudi and Egypt for a very short period of time. Both. Many origin places and ended up in London for about a couple of years before then. Moving on to Bristol and I’ve been pretty much in Bristol ever since. I got to Bristol at the age of about eight, and we’ve been there ever since.

What was your dad’s PhD in?

Civil Engineering. So nothing to do with medical whatsoever. My mum’s an accountant, my dad’s a civil engineer. He’s a university lecturer and has been for many years, bless him. But yes, I am the only dentist in my entire family.

So what made you do dentistry then?

It was a toss up. This is going to be very ironic. At a toss up between medicine and dentistry. I was always quite medical. Like I knew I wanted to go into something medical. The reason I chose dentistry was I was quite artistic and that’s something that’s always appealed to me. And I assumed and thought the hours would be easier in dentistry. You’d be able to go home at 5:00 every single day. You’d be able there’d be no on calls. That was the original thinking behind it. Obviously, it hasn’t quite worked out like that.

Well, dentistry can be that if you want it to be that. But you just. You’re not that soldier.

No, I was for the first year or two, but yeah, it didn’t quite go according to plan. So.

So okay, you you finally qualified from Bristol. Did you have a good time as a as a as a student?

I enjoyed it. Yeah. And it was good fun. I got involved in a lot of activities in various different committees and societies and made quite a lot of friends at university was good. I did enjoy it. It gave me a lot of practical skills that I was able to take on in life later, actually, whether it’s in the university or outside the university. I ran my own radio show at one point. And yeah, there’s a lot of yeah, there’s a lot of things that I took forward, part time jobs and stuff that I did when I was at university at the time as well, gave me an excellent grasp of communication skills, sales techniques, business skills, etcetera, sort of weekend work and things like that. So yeah, no, I did make the most of it as much as I could and it’s really helped me actually when it came to later on, business experience and stuff for sure.

Did you not think I’m going to leave Bristol?

I did. I got a position. In fact, I got accepted into London and Bristol, and out of the two I decided to go for Bristol. I’ve always had my eye on Bristol. I liked the Dental School. It wasn’t so much about being close to home. If ironically, my parents were living in Gloucestershire at the time, so they weren’t actually in the local area. They’d moved to Gloucestershire, Cheltenham region. So I was in Bristol pretty much by myself, but I liked Bristol. I’ve always had a soft spot for it and and the university really appealed to me. So, so yeah, it was a no brainer. When I got the two offers, it was always going to be Bristol for me.

So then let’s talk about your first job, because ironically, now you’re, you’re you’re going to do this private thing. What was your like? Did you go straight to vet?

I did. So, yes, I pretty much went to Wellington, actually, as my first job. I didn’t have as much pressure on me in terms of fear about first patients and stuff as others may have done. I guess it came from having a bit of experience, which was a bit longer. I was left to my own devices when I was doing various things, whether it’s at dental school, etcetera, just because after a while they sort of trust you enough to know that actually you are capable of doing this. You don’t need someone supervising over your shoulder for this extraction or any of this, so didn’t find it particularly stressful. I really enjoyed my PhD actually, and my trainer gave me quite a lot of freedom clinically to be able to do the things that I wanted to do, which allowed me to investigate certain cosmetic procedures and things on a few patients, even if it was sort of included under the NHS, they weren’t quite as strict at that time as they probably were would be nowadays. So that gave me quite a good opportunity to investigate things and and didn’t take the piss. I genuinely did what I could. I finished my quotas, well, looked after the patients, built a very good list. I was the first PhD in that particular practice to on. So it was a completely new experience for them as well. So it was very enjoyable. I really did enjoy it and it gave me the foundation to be able to look at the various things. Later I started looking at the various pathways of what I wanted to do, probably about halfway through my PhD or at the time, as it was called, and I guess this is what will transpire later as to why has been created, because there wasn’t really unless you were going back to hospital dentistry or you had a specialist interest in mind that you wanted to work your way up to.

There wasn’t really anything available that was a clear cut pathway for young dentists to try and emulate or follow once they’d finished their foundation year. It also in your foundation year, it very much depended on what your trainer’s interests were as to the experience that you would get. Yes, you’d get a few things from the study days here and there, but if you were lucky and with the right trainer, you would get a really good, good amount of experience in the things that you might enjoy you. If not, then it will be it will be very heavily reliant on what that practice does and which I guess has its good points and bad points because it is a reality check of what the real world of dentistry really is like in a way. But at the same time, it doesn’t really give you the opportunity to investigate different things and ask the right questions that you’d want to looking back. Now, knowing what I know now compared to what I knew 14 years ago, it’s chalk and cheese. There was there’s so much advice that I would would have wanted to have differently at the time, but probably would have changed my career trajectory.

See, I mean, it’s a funny one because, I mean, were you already were you already at this point now with this super driven guy?

I guess I was more so because of what happened to me at that point. Had that not happened, I probably wouldn’t have been I would have gone with the flow with everybody else. But at that point, I mean, the biggest spark for me was was the actually ironically, I was looking for mentorship and I contacted Neil Gerrard at the time, who was one of the well known cosmetic dentist in Bristol. Brilliant man, Absolutely huge amount of time for and respect for Neil always and still do. And and I shadowed him at his practice. I took a couple of days off from my practice. They were very supportive and I shadowed him at his practice. And one of the things he said to me was he invited me to come to one of the lectures, and this was I was still six months into my I hadn’t really experienced dentistry. I’ve always been told my composite anterior work was great. I remember at dental school, 1 or 2 of the lecturers would come and check my work and ask the question, which is what we always want to hear at dental school, isn’t it? When they come to you and look at your work and they go, Sorry, which fillings have you actually done? I can’t see anything.

And it’s the it’s the magic buzzwords you always want to hear. And I took on that invitation. It was at one of the Bristol Hilton’s in one of the evenings, and I think that was the first time my eyes were truly opened to the world of dentistry, because I sat there in that lecture and it was actually ironically, it was Chris Orr and James Gornik that were both there giving the lecture. I mean, two stalwarts of the dental world and I, for the first time ever, I’d seen work that didn’t even believe was possible and think before my eyes. That was that was my turning point of thinking. If I’m cruising and thinking my work is great, I mean, I have a very long way to go. If this quality of work can be produced, my my knowledge is severely lacking. I have a very long journey to go at this point. And yeah, unfortunately that that experience I guess, probably ruined me for the next 15 years because it gave me a pathway that I never even imagined I wanted to go down.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The first time you noticed that there are a lot of firsts in dentistry that that for me, the first time you see a bad failure of your own work. Is a real moment, you know, that sort of makes you realise, oh, you know, and remember, for me it was, it was staying interproximal staining of porcelain veneers that I’d been doing quite a lot of. And then there was this patient just, you know, she was like red wine, black coffee and hadn’t even been at the practice that long. I think I’d stayed there for three years or something. And three years after I’d put these ten veneers on someone’s top teeth, they were staining. And, you know, I guess I just hadn’t prepped Interproximally enough or whatever it was. Yeah, it’s a moment of clarity. And I remember what you said about the Chris Hall lecture for me was Sanjay Sethi The first time I saw his composites and there were, you know, completely invisible, beautifully polished. I remember thinking, oh, my goodness. Or there was a mike Wise lecture. Have you ever was he before your time? Absolutely.

No, I did briefly. Briefly. Very much touched on Mike Wise. He was he was towards the end of his his time as I was starting.

I remember I remember the Mike Wise lecture. Yeah. Pretty much about 90% of what he said. I didn’t understand. Yeah. Didn’t didn’t get you didn’t understand what he was saying. Yeah. But the 10% that I understood was this excellence mindset that he had going on. And it just like, you know, the little moments in your career that sort of wake you up, aren’t they? It’s interesting. So what did you do after that job? Did you stay there or did you go somewhere else?

No, I didn’t. They didn’t have they didn’t have what I wanted. They did offer me a vacancy to stay at the practice. This was in Somerset. I was still living in Bristol at the time, just gotten married, and we moved to moved back to Bristol from Wellington. It was Wellington in Somerset, moved back to Bristol and I started a job in Cheltenham, which was a mixed practice. And basically I was I was in that transition phase. I was about to start my restorative MSC in distance learning with I think it was Manchester, it was the Manchester one which had just just started.

Not that smile on that one.

The smile on one. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yes, that was very early days, actually. It literally just started. Was it the king’s one? God, sorry, I can’t even remember now. I think it was the smile on and they were so they’re practical day was smack bang in the middle of my eldest daughter’s due date, so I clearly had to cancel. It wasn’t even worth the risk because the entire year pretty much depended on that that particular sort of ten day period. So I cancelled and I moved it on a year for for the next year. And it was while I was at that practice that two things hit me. One was I went to do some training with Wai-man Chan as he was the first person who ever taught me whitening actually the old Whiten system. That was a real eye opener and experience for me. Plus also after seeing the the Chris Hall lecture, I started to look into alternative courses that I could do in that year just to keep me going. I had the day booked off anyway from the practice, from my from my MSC, so I thought, well, rather than just waste a year, I may as well start looking around. And that’s when I also came across the, the advanced dental seminars. Chris Daukaus and, and subscribed to that and think everything from that point on really never looked back.

You did the whole year.

Course I did. Yes, absolutely. So I didn’t actually go on and do the MSC because I didn’t feel I needed to After that, it was completely pointless. Everything I wanted to get in terms of the information I’d got out of that course and it gave me the foundations and the pathway to be able to go on to the next steps. Also, what it did is it gave me the confidence to start looking at moving away from practice. So the practice I was at were not particularly advanced in terms of their their aims, objectives, etcetera. It was very much a run of the mill practice. And it I’m not going to deny after about year one, it got pretty boring. All my patients were stable. I had a very, very stable, very good quality list and I was reducing my commitments and increasing my private commitments. But there was I couldn’t get any of the products that I wanted at the practice. I couldn’t get any of the the work that I wanted to do properly or advertised or promoted or marketed. So it was it was obvious for me I had to look elsewhere for the private side experience. It’s pointless doing the course if you’re not actually working at a practice where you can implement it for sure. So at that point I did actually get a job. It started off as a one day a week vacancy at Black Swan in Somerset under the previous owner, and at that particular point the one day grew to two days within, I think it was within a month or two because the work was just was there. I mean, it was such a high demand that grew from a Wednesday only to a Wednesday on a Thursday. Then it grew within three months. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And it was pretty obvious for me that there was absolutely no point continuing with my practice. I have to move. And then the opportunity to actually purchase the practice came up. And unfortunately, the.

Which year was that?

2011.

Sorry. Go ahead. What happened to the principal?

So the previous owner of the practice, when I joined it, he’d already had a horse riding accident playing polo. Oh, so he was not able to practice dentistry and was relying on associates and other staff to run it. It was in a huge amount of debt already, just because it had been newly built, or at least some of it had been finished, newly built. And it had it really hadn’t taken off the way it was intended to because the principal dentist was not able to work. So after about six months of being there, he sat down with me and he said, Look, the banks are chasing me. They’re hounding me. This place is going to close in the next three months unless unless I sell. And I said to him, I’ll be honest, I have no intention of buying a practice at this stage in my career. I’ve got a lot of education still to go. I’m not ready to be a principal unless I mean, I’m not stupid. At the end of the day, if there’s an opportunity to be discussed, you would certainly look into it. Unless the business opportunity presented itself, that made it affordable for me, but at the same time made it viable, in which case I would be able to achieve both of my objectives and take this practice forward. I can see the potential in this place, but it needs a lot of work. And we did. We came to an arrangement that actually did work for both parties and had I not had that opportunity, I probably wouldn’t have been able to buy anywhere near that early on in my career. So that was I bought the practice in 2012, so that was the first.

Get it for an absolute bargain.

Yes and no. It wasn’t so much the cost. It was the terms that were very favourable because we managed to do a deal outside of the banks, which made it spread over a period of time, interest free, etcetera, etcetera. And yeah, out of respect, I’m not going to sort of disclose the figures and stuff, but it was, it was very much affordable. I could afford it without needing a whopping great big deposit to, to basically buy the place. I mean, the truth was I was buying a failing business, which needed a lot of work and a lot of time to basically be able to turn it around.

Yeah, but. Okay, so. So tell me this dude, were you already thinking I will be opening my practice and you were already saving up or whatever it is?

No, I mean, if I would have found the ironic thing in all of this is if I would have found a practice to work at, like Black Swan, I wouldn’t be where I am today. If I would have been happy being an associate at a practice like that, I couldn’t find one. There wasn’t any there that I could apply to that I could approach. And I approached a number of factors in Bristol looking for jobs, but none of them really, in my opinion, none of them cut the mustard, really. They were all bog standard practices that were doing okay work.

But my point my question is my question is you’re saying you wouldn’t have necessarily bought the practice at this time if this particular opportunity hadn’t come along. At what point would you have bought a practice? Were you were you thinking, I am going to buy a practice?

Absolutely. Oh, yes. In my head it would have been probably another 3 or 4 years down the line. I needed to do a lot more education and get a bit more experience before then going down and transitioning down the business route. So yes.

So you bought the practice then? Did he did he leave straight away?

He wasn’t able to work anyway, so there was no tie in in that sense at all. And so he did. Yes.

And now you’ve got this sort of, what was it, a debt ladened? Business that didn’t have that many patients. And you turned that into this magnificent success story. How long did it take for the turnaround? I mean, how much pain was involved? Well, take me through some of the steps.

I’ll tell you what, one of one of the quotes that will always stick with me till till I die will be when a man said to me a number of years ago, God rest his soul, that. He was obviously getting quite big at that point. He was quite heavily involved in the and he said to me, It’s amazing how many people keep messaging me, wanting to be the next big person in dentistry because it’s taken Anoop Maini 15 years to become an overnight success, he says. And that’s what it takes. And that’s stuck with me ever since then actually, because he’s absolutely spot on, right? Nobody looks at the last ten years of sweat, tears, blood grafting, late nights, lack of sleep every single night to be able to achieve and get to where you want to get. And without that journey, you don’t you don’t you don’t understand what it takes to get to that position because you need to struggle. You need to struggle, and you need to understand the struggle to be able to really appreciate where you are later and actually feel like you deserve to be where you are. If you’re handed if you’re handed it on a plate, it’s not the same. It doesn’t taste the same. You’ve got to actually go through the hardship to be able to get there. So it took I’d say the first two years were very, very tricky five, five, six day weeks, every single week, taking on cash crises. It’s literally cash flow nightmare in terms of money coming in and money coming out at constant periods of time.

But what it did is it taught me a very valuable lesson in managing those types of scenarios and situations because you don’t get that experience in your personal life as a dentist. When we graduate in our first year or two, we’re on. Let’s be honest, we’re on very good money for what? For our age and our level of experience in life. So regardless of where you’re working, whether it’s in private mix, etcetera, anyone who’s earning over 60 or 70 K in the first two years of graduating from university, you you have a lot of disposable income to play with and not many responsibilities in your life at that point. So any particular cash crisis that happens, it doesn’t take very long for you to bail yourself out of it. You can pretty much bail yourself out within a within a month, two months, three months just by working hard. You can’t do that When you run a business. The figures get higher and you can’t just extend your working hours here and there to be able to get yourself out of it. It’s a very different ball game. You revert to things. You’ve got to have a vision. You’ve got to understand what you’re trying to go, but at the same time you’ve got to try and figure. I mean, I’ve done the the interest free credit cards and you name it. Me too. You name it, it’s been done. And you need to get yourself out of certain situations and crises that happen.

And let’s dig into it. Let’s dig into it. Yeah. So on day one, on day one, what had you bought? How many surgeries, how many dentists, how many staff?

So Black Swan was a four surgery practice at the time. Two of the surgeries were working, the other two were not. One of them was not even finished. Sorry. It was a three surgery practice. The fourth surgery got the player in later. There was a fourth three surgery practice. Two of them were being used. The third one was completely run down with the dental chair that was constantly failing and breaking down. Having been moved from a previous practice, number of staff we had was seven. We had seven members of staff on day one. That was myself, the manager, a couple of nurses and two receptionists, and that was purely what we inherited.

Inherited aesthetically the old Black Swan. And now we’ve got a new super duper black swan. But the old black swan that I saw, I haven’t been there, but the one that I’ve seen in pictures and videos. How much did it look like that or did it not look like that at all?

We changed a few things. It didn’t look like that from the outside. It looked like a tattoo parlour, to be completely honest. It was very I’m not joking. It was very, very black. It was all sort of completely frosted over and looking at it from the outside, you wouldn’t think it was a dental practice. You would automatically think, Right, that’s got to be something dark and murky. It’s got to be it’s got to be a tattoo parlour or something along those lines. And on the.

Inside. On the inside. I remember your original. It kind of was like leather sofas, like someone’s sort of sort of reading room. Or was it like that when you bought it, Did you?

Yeah, the safest was certainly there. We changed a few things around with the tables and sort of chests of drawers and adding a TVs and stuff in there. The reception desk we updated. So there was a couple of tweaks and changes that we made. The biggest change, to be honest, was the branding. We completely revamped the branding and changed the outside of the practice. That’s what needed the most work. It was to open it up and actually remove all the frosting from the front and and everyone just assumed that this was a completely brand new practice that had opened up. It wasn’t. It’s been there for a year and a half before that. It just nobody realised it was a dental practice.

And had it been a squat when he started it?

Yes, it was, yeah. So it was a complete squat. But he was working in the area not a million miles away before he had a good reputation. He was a good dentist. I’ve seen a lot of his work since. Very, very good quality restorative work, bridges, long span bridges especially, that have lasted ten, 15 years, minimum, etcetera, which is the minimum requirement. That’s what it’s what you want. It’s what you ask for.

In many ways. You bought. In many ways, though, you bought the perfect business, right? Because I mean, of course there are many ways you didn’t as well. But, but, but you know the first couple of years of. Of a squat a really bloody painful. And someone else had been through that and you know, the actually the building of a squat, as you know, is bloody painful and someone else had been through that. And so in a way, even though it was early in your career and there were these problems in many ways kind of a nice situation, kind of an in between buying an established practice and starting your own. So I was I was.

Very lucky with that situation and I always stand by that simply because you’re absolutely right. You didn’t go through the start of a business, which is an existence zero patience you’re walking into work with without a single person booked in, or if you’ve had a good, decent campaign beforehand, you’ve obviously got a few coming in. But it’s the constant worry of where are the next group of patients going to come from? And thankfully, because I was working as an associate there already for about a year, it was just under a year that was already an associate there. So I had an established list. I wasn’t that bad.

Yeah. And did you make a speech? You know, like, did you did you say to the team sometimes a lot of associates who buy the practice they’re in find it very difficult going from an associate to a principal. Did you have those moments? Did you?

Did you? Absolutely. So did you.

Set out your vision for it?

I did, yeah. So it was it wasn’t a secret that I was buying the practice. I think everybody knew in the practice it wasn’t mean because the previous owner wasn’t physically there working. He’d given and they all needed to know, to be honest, for their own lives and security and everything else. So that’s helped to alleviate and calm a lot of their fears which was needed at the time. Yes, there was the moment, the day the contracts were signed. Obviously we had a cake release and drinks and sort of it was one of those that sort of set out the the vision, etcetera. I think the hardest part actually, which knowing what I know now and looking back and every single young principal will go through this is like you said, the transition from associates to principal is a very, very tricky one, simply not necessarily on day one. It’s the next couple of weeks afterwards, you’ve gone from being everyone’s friend to everyone’s boss and you won’t appreciate that and they won’t appreciate it either. You carry on treating them like like, like, like they’re your friends. You will have a real hard time trying to get everyone to do what you need them to do and what you want them to do. Because obviously you want to change the environment. You’re inevitably you’re going to make some tweaks and changes. People will struggle if they think you’re their friend and you’re telling them what to do. If you’re not their friend and you just instantly change overnight, it doesn’t work either because you can’t be that cold of a person to shut it off. I mean, you must be a horrible human being to be able to literally isolate yourself and switch yourself off or an absolute genius.

So what’s your advice? Evolution, not revolution, right.

I think it needs to be. I think it’s learning that what you need to do is over the first couple of weeks of going through a transition like that, you need to understand that you need to adapt a much more colder personality with your staff and learn that they’re not your friends. It sounds horrible, but they’re not your friends. And the reason the time this will hit you is when you need to have a sit down with them because someone has done something bad or they are not obeying the rules or something and you need to sit down and have a face to face with them and official proper disciplinary meeting and the look on their face looking at you will give you everything you need to know. They will be so confused as well. How could you talk to me like this? Like you’ve been my friend for all this time. How can you sit there and talk to me like this? You look like you might even sack me like this is. How could you? And that’s a very different one. So if you’ve employed them right from the very beginning as their boss, right from the start, that relationship is there right from the beginning. It’s a very different prospect. So that that is a difficult one. And actually, ironically, the pretty much all of the staff I inherited, apart from three of them at the very beginning, have all left. None of them are left at the practice now. And part of it, I will admit, is probably as a result of that journey and that transition, just not suiting them. They didn’t like the direction that the practice was heading in. So they they felt they needed to leave or they were removed, depending on the scenario.

So, look, I don’t want to put people off because I think I think it’s actually one of the smartest moves possible is to buy the practice you’re the associate in because, you know, that’s the one place where you really know the ins and outs of it. Well, as you say, you can see the potential in the place. Absolutely. Whereas when you go and as you know, when you go and buy another business, you can you can look at the books, you can you can try you can even go spend some days in that place. Yeah, but you don’t really know what you’ve got until you’ve bought it. So I think I think the advice really would be, hey, if you’re an associate in a business that you can see potential in 100% buy that practice. But be warned there will be there will be these moments.

You’ve got to. Right. You’ve got to write off the first year. I think it’s it’s learning that you’ve got to sacrifice the first. With any business that you take on, it might even be longer than that, depending on your journey, what you want to aspire to. It’s very rare for associates to buy a business that’s firing on all cylinders, running at 100% capacity. Why would you mean that’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to be able to do that anyway? And it’s going to take you many, many years to be able to recoup what you’ve paid and actually start making a profit. So nine times out of ten, you’re buying a business that hasn’t reached its potential. It needs a fair bit of work to be able to go up to the next step, which is the sensible thing to do. But you need to be prepared to change your mindset and realise that it will be hard, it will be difficult. You’re the only person that the buck will stop with at any point. You can’t blame anyone else. At any point. Your staff will constantly come to you.

You will be blamed for everything that goes wrong and you need to you need to toughen up and just realise that actually it’s going to be a tough two years. You need to get through it. You’re absolutely right. The best situation to do that in is in a business that you already know simply because you will know a lot of the business’s secrets even if you haven’t gone out of your way to find them out, you will already know them. So when things hit you, when when certain surprises come along, you’ll be in a much better position to understand what’s happened because you’ve got a bit of history with that place and you understand what’s happened before, and the patients will see that as well. You’re not the new stranger that’s come to town. You’ve already been there before. The dentistry isn’t quite as stressful if you’ve already been treating the patients before, you’ve got a stable list and there is everything to be said for a stable list. Bread and butter dentistry will is what makes a business survive at the very early stages for sure.

So look, your practice is known or famous for amazing customer service. Did you have a you know, in those jobs that you had before? Sometimes, you know, you do you do you go, I’m thinking of all the principles I had and you learn a lot from them. But then are certain things you learn not to do as well from from people you know, along the way. But this this notion of like super duper customer service, did you feel like, you know, that that was a there was a deficit or not necessarily in that practice but in dentistry? Because I did.

I think in general, even to this day, I don’t think dentistry as a whole and actually medicine, let’s be honest, in terms of doctors surgeries, etcetera. Customer service is something that we’re all very, very bad at. We’re not good at it. And it’s because we feel like we’re in a health care sector. We’re providing a health care service, and that’s all we need to do. As long as we’re providing the patients with that service, that’s that’s where the buck stops. It’s not a big deal. We will try. We will we will try and do a bit here and there. We will get some speakers in. We will get this particular service and we will attend this seminar. We will go to this. But generally everybody goes back and just settles back into what they’ve been used to doing for many, many years. And I think across the board, especially because of the side of it, it’s got us into that attitude. And that’s something I always realised very, very early on. One of the jobs that did hit me was not a dental job. Actually. I used to work for the old orange retail, which is the orange mobile phone shops. When I was at dental school, it was one of the Saturday jobs I had for a good two years actually. Um, and it wasn’t so much the sales that it taught me. It was how you treat people. The difference with that is you are working for a strong brand. Everyone that it wasn’t phones for you, it wasn’t Carphone Warehouse.

People would come in already having researched you. They knew the products they pretty much wanted. All it relied on was you being extra nice to people to basically get that sale. You didn’t have to start from scratch and drag them in off the street. Yeah, and that just working in an environment like that just showed me, number one, the importance of brand strength, the strength of a brand and how it can sell to people before they’ve even come through the door. But secondly, you could look around at the team and see who the ones that were doing well in terms of sales were and who the ones that were not doing very well in terms of sales were. And you’d be able to see the difference if you worked hard, if you were extra nice to customers, you would see that repetition. They would come in and buy a phone off you. For example, the next week or two weeks later, that same person would come back with a brother, a mother, a father, and they would also buy off you. And then the granddad or the grandfather or whatever would come in a couple of weeks later and suddenly it was word of mouth and it didn’t take very long. I mean, you’d have to be a genius to work out that actually if you treat people really nicely, they want to come back and spend money with you on that.

On a side note, had you always done work as a kid? Had you worked Summers Yes.

Yes. So did a paper around when I was 13, the moment I could, and local area. I worked in newsagents shops when I was 16. The moment I turned 16, just summer jobs, etcetera. I couldn’t help it. I mean, one of the things I did a weekend job throughout my A-levels and GCSEs working at the Science Centre and at Bristol near the train station, and again it was just to show people around and stuff, but it was I don’t know how to live any differently to that. It’s not. I mean, part of it was obviously wanting the spending money, but also it was all picking up experiences throughout my life.

I’m super interested in it. I’m super interested in it because I’ve spoken to a bunch of people on this show, right? And people like Millie, Millie Morrison, Prav Prav himself. He puts all of his success down to working in his dad’s shop, all of his success, you know, like you’d imagine that’s what got him into Oxford University. He literally puts it all down to working in that corner shop. And then I said to him, look, lots of people work in. Cornish But but this question of work, was it something that your parents kind of instilled in you? And are you instilling that in your kids now? Are you telling them to go out and work trying to?

So it wasn’t something that my parents necessarily pushed for, but it was it was more of a say, if you want more spending money, then you’ve got to go out and earn it. And I think that was the.

That’s all it takes, right? That’s all it takes.

It is. Yeah.

So what are you doing that with your kids?

Yes, I’m trying to. They’re not old enough yet, so my eldest is 12. Okay. So she’s they’re getting there, but it’s trying to instil in them that actually you can’t just even if you, even if we’ve got the money, you can’t just get something for nothing. You’ve got to you’ve got to have a reward based system or scheme to be able to to get that. And I’m trying my best to that’s one of the things that we’re going to try because the number of dentists, not necessarily dentists, but generally people who earn well, who are well off that I know personally and their children haven’t done quite as well as they have. They’ve inherited family businesses. As they’ve inherited various things they haven’t taken the drive for. They don’t have that same level of drive to succeed.

I’ll tell you what it is. Look, I was thinking about this year with my sons, now 16. Yeah. And he’s never worked for money, ever. He’s done some charity bits and massive eye opener for him. But a pair of shoes came in in the in the post and he was trying them on. And I said, so you know who paid for those? And he looked at me like, I’m asking him like in talking to him in Chinese, you know, like he was he just sort of raised his hands, you know, And I wasn’t saying you can’t have them here. I was just asking the question because I don’t deal with this shoe payments. I guess his mum takes care of that. But I realised, you know, having talked to Prav and talked to Millie and talk to all these people talking to you right now. Yeah. That, you know, I haven’t set budgeting. And if you want more than this budget, do that and put bad the way the way we’ve brought up my son has always been Hey, study. Yeah. Get your results. Yeah, we’ll take care of everything else. Study. And yet I talk to you and you’re telling me, hey, yeah, study. Sure. But what gave you the most value was the work piece. And think of it myself. That my parents made me go and work for a couple of weeks. And in Oxford Street when I was 17. And it was those two weeks I learned more than I’d learned the whole of school. So it’s funny.

It’s funny. The world, the world is moving in a direction which is very, very unpredictable. And I think this is the thing that they’re trying to get your head around, where people can earn ridiculous amounts of money and be very, very successful and not really have to concentrate on their education level if they’re very good at something or if they get lucky. And there’s that aspect to it as well. And it’s trying to get the kids actually to change that mindset of not wanting the entire goal in life to be YouTubers. And that’s that’s what I want to do and achieve in my life, because unfortunately, I know my generation of kids is certainly growing up with that mindset. So what do you want to achieve in life? Well, I’m going to be a YouTuber and that’s how I’m going to make it in life. Well, okay, well, what if you don’t make it as a YouTuber? What do you then do? Oh, I haven’t thought that far ahead. Well, you need to think like that because, yes, getting an education is great, but that’s not the only thing you need in life. You need practical skills. And. And it’s it’s giving. It’s giving them that side of it think, which is really, really important.

And it gave me that side of it as well. My parents were always very, very heavily involved in the community, lots of charity work, etcetera, and we grew up with that. I grew up doing charity events. I grew up doing sort of charity performances and being on stage, acting, singing to a certain extent, but not quite and and running, running events and sort of growing up in that sort of community leadership environment. And it’s stayed with me. I was an event organiser at school at Uni. We formed our own sort of mini company back in uni organising events and stuff, mainly for charity, but at the same time we were business minded and gained a lot of experience out of that. It’s what made me have the experience to run a lot of the the young dentists conferences and stuff later on, which we’ll probably get to. And and that side of it all helped to sort of build the the bigger picture of, of chasing the next buzz. So you’ve got to do something that you enjoy at the end of the day, you’ve got to do something that really helps you tick and gives you the buzz that you need.

But at the same time, there is an actual goal. You know what you’re working towards, you know what you want to achieve and feeling like you’re actually being able to achieve it was saving up when when I was doing all of those jobs, I was saving up for my first mobile phone. That’s that was my goal and that was my drive all those years ago when I was 16. That’s when mobile phones first came out showing my age. And so for me, that was what was saving my money for at the time. And then it was whether it was computer games or whatever it is that we all wanted to do and play with at the time. But it was the realisation that if I wanted something, I’ll get the basics in terms of what I needed for living and stuff from my parents. But actually they couldn’t afford everything that I would have wanted at the time that there was four of us and one of four. So if you wanted extras, if you wanted extra luxuries, you got to go out and earn them. And you’ve got to you’ve got to buy them yourself.

And it put you in good stead. So, look, I do a thing when I visit a practice where I look at their Google reviews and, you know, there’s different ways of looking at Google reviews, isn’t there? You can look at the number. You can look at the five star ones. You can look at the one star ones and all that, which I noticed. You don’t have any. Yours are all four and five. But you know what I look at, you know, at the top of the Google reviews, it has the words that are mentioned the most. And there’s one word I’m particularly looking for more than any other word. And black swan has the word. It’s the number one mentioned word. Can you think what that word is?

Customer service excellence.

It comes to it. It comes to it. Feel, feel.

Feel.

Feel. And it’s amazing the number of top practices where feel is in that list. I mean, there’s there’s words you’d expect Invisalign hygienist, these sort of things. But the number one word on Black Swan Dental Spa is field mentioned 27 times or something. Yeah. And so how did you get that message around to your team? And then what do you do to make that experience special?

It’s been really hard, actually. That’s a very good question. It’s a question that not a lot of people will ask, and if they do ask, they won’t really appreciate how hard it is to achieve this, because customer service is one of the hardest things to instil in a team that don’t actually do it. Well, yeah, you can’t change people’s habits easily. It’s very difficult to change people’s habits. It’s sometimes easier to change staff than it is to change their habits. It’s true, absolutely. And I’ve learned that over the years. It’s just a case of the team you inherited at the beginning. Can they be changed and moulded the way you want them to? It all comes down to the principal in their vision. If the principal in their vision is if they’re driven, they’re actually sticking to their guns. If they’re consistent, they know what they want and they drive from the top down. Everybody will see and feel that and start to go along the journey with you. If you’re not consistent, if you’re saying things to your staff that you want them to do, but you’re not following these things, you’re not actually consistent, you’re not showing a very good example of that, then that will be perceived in the entire model and and perception of the practice and the business and the rest of the team ethos, etcetera, etcetera.

So one of the things, and I believe this was the real eye opener at the very beginning, what we started to do was we put something together which was we call it an end of year review or end of year review day. So at the end of every single year and the days have changed over the years, but at the end of that first year, we took a whole day off, closed all the the clinics, etcetera, away from the practice, went to one of the local hotels or conference rooms or whatever, and literally sat down for an entire day together planning where the practice was, what we wanted to change, where we wanted to go. We even role played the customer service experience of entering the practice and making the contact with that first patient just so everyone understands what it is that we actually want to achieve. What are the words that are being said to them and the consistency of what should be followed, whether it’s in the surgery, on reception, on the phone call, etcetera, that was useful because what it did was it took everyone out of that clinical environment and actually it made everyone sit down as equals going, Right, this is our business, this is what we want to achieve in the next year.

This is where we want to be this time next year when we sit down, this is where we want to reach and get to. And the way I decided to do it was by not standing there and dictating to them all what what it is that we’re going to do, etcetera. And this is what I want to achieve, etcetera. What I did was I, I had my own ideas and visions, but I wanted it to come out of them as a team, as we think through it, as we plan it together. So there was all these little bits of, of points that were dropped in at certain times to try and take the conversation and lead it where we wanted it to, where I wanted it to end up, but to get it to come from them and some of the ideas they improved on, which is even better because I mean, I’m one person. You put a whole team together and you get an array of different ideas and some of them will be excellent and things that I wouldn’t have considered, but it allowed us as a team to come together, as by the end of that day we had the blueprint for, I think it was 2012 at that time. This is to.

Some of them, some of them will be crap as well.

Well, yes, absolutely. The idea, as you mean. Yeah, Yeah. I didn’t say we wrote. We didn’t write everything down. Obviously shocked.

Yeah. No, but you know, it’s a skill in itself. This, this, this question of making it come out of your team. And then sometimes, you know, you say, Hey, everyone, give me ideas and then a terrible idea comes out and then you’ve got to you got to stop that idea without hurting that person in itself is quite difficult. We have a word enlightened. We use the word enlightened called. Sure. Sure it does. It doesn’t mean yes, It doesn’t mean no. It’s just a Sure.

It.

Keeps you keeps the idea kind of in the middle of nowhere. It’s difficult, though, is my point.

It’s difficult.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So give me an example. When you say we want to be here by this time next year, are they financial goals?

Is a.

Mixture. It was a mixture of all sorts. So it was give me some examples if we’re talking about the actual metrics. So it was a number of new patients coming to the practice in a given month. What was our monthly average for last year? What is our monthly average going to be at this time next year? What are we aiming for? Yeah, part of that. As also the number of Invisalign wasn’t there at the time or we weren’t doing it, but it was looking at number of cases of specific treatments. We want to increase the number of whitening cases that we’re doing. We want to increase the number of patients we’re coming in for Smile makeovers. Implant cases was one of the ones that we spoke about in the first year as well. We want to try and attract. We’ve been referring a lot of implant cases out because we didn’t have in-house ability to do it. We want to start doing a lot more in-house treatments, figures like illness numbers and sickness. We want to and we were very honest about it. I mean, it’s one of the things that we were very honest about from the from day one, everyone’s figures for sickness for the year were plastered all over the screen right in front of everyone. Right. That’s it. That’s what everyone’s been off for this last year. Everyone needs to look at their their figures and you need to figure out a way of reducing that for next year. That’s your own personal goal. Targets. How could you figure out a way of reducing your sickness levels for next year? I’m not talking about long term sickness. I’m talking like day here, day there, day here, day there. And there were some some 1 or 2 members of staff that were chronic abusers of that system. And it would it would be really obvious. So it’s.

Dude.

But dude, how do you how do you I mean, I want this to be valuable. Yeah. I want this to be valuable for people and for me as well. By the way, how do you how do you enthuse a nurse on the question of we want to increase our implant numbers? Do you do you sort of spell it out that if we do more implants, then there will be more career opportunities for you? The nurse, Is that the way you say it?

Kind of.

It’s because what’s in.

It for her? Like? Yeah.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. And it was partly because of the opportunities it would bring. One of the things that we thought at the very start, which is a big problem in dentistry, it’s the like you’ve mentioned, the career pathway of a dental nurse doesn’t really exist in dentistry. Yeah. As practices have taken that on and they’ve created their own pathway. But as a general rule, it doesn’t really exist when you qualify as a dental nurse, the only way you could earn more money is if you’re in the right practice and they just give you a wage rise every single year or every couple of years or whenever they feel like it. But actually there is no incentive to incentivise and do more skills. So what we did very early on is actually create a pay structure for our nurses. So which is based on achievement and based on qualifications, we will pay for the qualifications. These are the qualifications I want you to do. This is the order that they’ll be done in. As you achieve more, your wage will go up and you will earn more. When you’ve achieved everything on that list, you will then be on a normal sort of percentage rise based on every year’s appraisal, etcetera, moving forward. And we’ve got the opportunity and the ability to be able to add to that skill set. For example, we’ve got Intraoral scanner that was then added onto the, onto the pay scale in terms of if you do the training for it, you will be able to then earn more in that sense. So it’s things like radiography, training, photography, training, so our nurses and the majority, it’s quite nice doing Invisalign open days and it’s actually the nurses that are taking the photos, not purely the dentists, the nurses that are doing the scanning for the patients, not the dentists, the nurses that are doing the X-rays for the patients, not the dentists.

And it’s all of those skills that’s taken years to get to that position. I mean, it’s it’s it’s something that’s required many years to get them to that position. But that’s what I mean. And also the implant side of it as well. We get more cases through the door. We will it’s an additional skill that you guys will be trained to do because then it warrants us actually getting some proper decent training will send you on a proper implant training course to be able to do. And also being honest about the finances. At the end of the day, everybody wants to earn more money, but unless you unless the practice is doing better, unless the finances are getting better through the door, unless we’re becoming more popular, it’s wanting to drive the business forward and actually caring about that place. And you’re absolutely right, the majority of people don’t. And but it’s finding the right ones that do. This isn’t just the job to them. And that’s really difficult to find those members of staff that genuinely care about the business. And they’re few and far between. And it takes years and years and years to slowly pick them off one by one and add them to the team to get that perfect team.

I mean, do.

You publish your numbers?

Yes and no. I used to think I’m very honest about the numbers. Now that the practice is in a very different state, I probably don’t as much now, but we used to. Yes. So we would publish all of the figures in terms of income. We would publish mean, let’s be honest, the first two years there wasn’t any profit, so that wasn’t particularly difficult to publish. Um, and, but the numbers in terms of new patient numbers, etcetera. Yeah, very honest about it.

Turnover numbers.

Turnover numbers in terms of how much money we’ve made, how much money we’ve brought in, how much money has gone out, it depended on the numbers mean some. There were some periods of time where the numbers were frightening and didn’t really want to share them with my team, just simply because the money going out in a particular month was way more than the money going in. So the last thing you want to do is freak out your staff and go, Am I going to get my wages next month? One thing I’ve done since day one is I’ve made sure that we’ve never missed a payday for the last 12 years, 12 years, 12 years of owning Black Swan. I’ve never missed a payday. Regardless of what’s going on in the background, the staff’s wages will always be protected. And I think that’s one thing that they do all appreciate because they really realise that actually they will always come first. Their wages and their structure will always come first, regardless of what else is going on in the business. And that’s, that’s something that’s quite nice for them to always have that safety blanket. Knowing that, because unfortunately I’ve worked at businesses, in fact, I’ve worked at another practice where that was not the case and I knew how it felt from a personal experience level payday would arrive, whether it’s because they haven’t got the finances or sometimes it’s just they give you the impression they just don’t care. Payday comes and you’re as a dentist, you’re supposed to get paid on the 10th of the month. It gets to the 17th of the month, and you then have to approach your principal and go, Am I getting paid this month? Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah. Give us a couple of days. We’ll get it sorted and you’re sort of like and I’m in a one off maybe, but when it happens a few.

Times, people.

Play a cash flow game, right?

That’s a cash flow. Can’t do that with.

Cash in.

The business.

Yeah, but you can’t do that with your staff. It doesn’t work.

No, I agree.

I agree. I agree. Although people do it with suppliers all the time. But but I mean, I know exactly exactly where you’re coming from. I’m glad you now have. Now it’s a much bigger business right now. What are the numbers now?

In terms of what?

Employees.

Dentists.

So we’ve got, um, oh, I would say in total, the team is probably about 35 now.

Across the two.

Sites.

No, across the Black Swan.

Oh, really? How many Across the two?

Across the two. It’s probably coming up Two. If I would count, it’s definitely 50. It’ll be more than 50 between the two. Yeah.

So you strike me as a bit of a control freak. I might be wrong about that. I might be wrong about that. But you strike me as that. Yeah, right. So. So, for instance, I’ve got partners. Yeah. You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who wants partners. You want to kind of just do it all yourself, and the buck stops here, and so.

Do you have.

Tried having a partner and it didn’t.

Work. Oh, did you. Did you. Did you did you have a.

Partner in this business.

For for Bristol. Oh, for.

Bristol. Oh, really? Really, Really. So what, you bought the guy out?

Yeah.

Yeah. So. So I was going to ask, what about lieutenants? Like there must be running with 50 people. There must be five key people or four. Three key people who report to you. You can’t have 50 reporting to you.

Absolutely. You have to. So the structure now, in terms of the two businesses, obviously, I’ve got managers at both sites, but the Bristol practice is a smaller prospect. So it’s a bit easier to sort of manage in that sense. But with Black Swan, it’s had to go to a heads of teams system where you’ve got the main overall manager who reports to me. Our regular meetings. I’ve also got heads of teams for the various different teams. Mean when you’ve got sort of a team of 10 to 15 nurses, you can’t ever get grab them all in the same place to be able to have a discussion or a meeting with them. So you’ve got a sort of a head nurse, head receptionist, head clinician, media team head, which are all part of sort of the structure for, for regular sort of monthly meetings, etcetera. But they’re all they’ve all got their own responsibilities and their own ways of doing it. I’ve also had to I’ve got a main lead for now as well, who’s also my personal PR, which had to do. I couldn’t survive any longer without without having a PR.

So I’ve got a question then. The kind of person who’s a control freak. I don’t want to say it in a derogatory sense because it’s also your superpower as well, right? You know, you want everything exactly the way you want it, Right. But the kind of person who has that that trait has trouble trusting people. Yeah.

Absolutely.

And then that lack of trust also ends up with sort of slows down scaling in a way because you want to sort of prescribe everything everyone does in a way. And so how do you square that circle? Are you are you more comfortable in that now? Have you gone through pain?

Think you have.

You have to. You haven’t got a choice. I think when you’re facing a reality where you can’t do it, you I mean, we’ve all been I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s gone through this, but when you go through an evening where you sit down at the end of the day and it’s happened to me so many times over the last 12 years, you sit down and you’ve got a long list. As long as your arm of all the things that need to be done, the people that need to be responded to and everything that needs to be done yesterday, not even today. So, yeah, and all of them are looking for a response immediately. And and you just you can’t do it. You sit there and you sort of break it down and go, I can’t do this anymore. There’s a limit. I’m a human being. I’m one person. I mean, let’s not deny it. You mental breakdowns are a part of this this role and this job. It will happen on a regular basis as you as you rise through until eventually you come to the realisation that actually you physically can’t do it all. If you want to own more than one business, you have to learn to let go of various different things. You can’t also be a clinician and a businessman at the same time. It’s really difficult, especially when you get some of the bigger cases. And Covid was the big eye opener for me for this, and we’ll probably get to that if we’re going to touch on it later because that changed a lot of things in the way that I did things, and it really opened up my eyes to a lot of different ways of doing it. But I couldn’t carry on the way I was before. I had to change and I didn’t have a choice. I would have I would have gone absolutely, completely bonkers crazy if I didn’t.

Well, I want.

To I want to get to some of those moments, actually. But, you know, I think the way to look at it is let’s say you’re doing one thing for the sake of the argument. Let’s call it the you’re taking care of the Instagram for Black Swan. And at one point it becomes obvious, look, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve got too much other stuff going on now. You’re going to bring someone else to do the Instagram for Black Swan. Yeah, A lot of people, by the way, make this massive error of going to the person who’s on Instagram the most and saying, Hey, you can do it. And you know, the biggest mistake that most dentists make is that one, right? But okay, you’re bringing this other person who’s kind of good at Instagram or whatever. Yeah. What you’ve got to accept is that that person won’t do it as well as you do it. To start with. Definitely.

There’s a lot of companies that won’t do it as well as you do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoever you bring in and.

You’re paying them to.

Do it.

Yeah. Whoever you bring in won’t do it to your standard. And you’ve got to figure out and this is the most important. There’s loads of stuff Enlightened does that I’m not happy with here. But, but, but you’ve got to come to this point that let’s call that person, that job, whatever, whichever job it is, let’s say they’re doing it 70%. It’s a lot better for six times 70% than one times 100%.

Exactly.

That, isn’t it? Exactly. That’s the thing. And you’ve got you’ve got to accept there’s going to be a small drop. Hopefully it’s going to go up again and it’s going to go to a higher place than where it was before. But you’ve got to accept that drop. And for someone like you, it’s going to be painful. I can see it.

It has been painful.

But like you said, you’re absolutely spot on because at the end of the day, think it’s coming to terms with what can you not compromise on? What aspects do I need to have my finger on the trigger for at all times? And then what can I compromise on? Where can mistakes occasionally be made where it’s not really going to detriment the business, it’s not going to damage us per se, and that it’s realising that and realising where your weak points can exist and then working the rest around.

So then let’s get.

Let’s get to it then, because I think that’s you’ve, you’ve hit, you’ve hit the nail on the head. The things that you decide you cannot slip on defines your business. And they’re different for different businesses, you know, because, you know, we’re all different. Right. Your business stands out in the Southwest as a bit of a, you know, happening cosmetic practice. But the business next door to yours, let alone the practice across the road from yours or whatever, you will have different priorities on what can’t can’t go, what can’t you get wrong? So what would you give me? A few highlights. The things that definitely can’t go wrong at Black Swan from your perspective.

Customer service. You. There cannot be a single person that walks out of this place that feels like they did not get number one value for money, but number two, an exceptional service that they’ve never received elsewhere. That is the number one key priority for this business. We can make mistakes with dentistry. Dentistry, You can’t be perfect. No one’s perfect. You’ll make mistakes occasionally. It’s how you deal with those things and how you make people mean you’ve hit the nail on the head. How you make people feel ultimately is what drives the entire ethos and the brand of the business. I don’t want a single person walking out after an experience with us to say, Oh no, I don’t know. I don’t trust them or I don’t like how they they treated me or I didn’t like how they made me feel or they didn’t get back to me when I made an inquiry. Those are the things that are just a complete no no. If anything like that happens, that is that for me is a huge, huge red flag. You’ve messed up. You’ve absolutely messed up. If something like that affects your business because that will hit your brand, as you say on the on our Google reviews, I can’t remember whether we have got any one star Google reviews or not.

No.

They’re all it’s only fives and fours.

But that’s taken 12 years of solid, hard work to make sure that we don’t get many. I mean, the difference is in Bristol, we have got some we’ve got we’ve got a couple in the early stages. And and that’s.

You can’t you can’t.

You can’t. Sometimes someone will come in and say, can I have you say, no, that’s a one star review. There you go. Straight away. Yeah. So, so, so, so I’m not going to judge people for having one.

No, no, absolutely not.

Absolutely not. But another question. But another question. I noticed Laura Horton is on one of on your on your list of mentors. Has she helped you with all of this in Black Swan?

She we attended a bit of her training. I’ve been in touch with Laura for years, so I know her quite well. And one of the things that she did was she helped us with our treatment coordinator training. Right at the very beginning. A couple of us all attended her courses at the very start, and that was a bit of an eye opener in terms of for me, for the the communication side, the the way to treat patients in terms of customer service as well. It wasn’t so much the reception side that was a different discussion. But the in terms of the clinical side, in terms of getting them in at the start, talking to them, then doing the clinical bit that we need to do and then presenting to them afterwards. And it was that side of it that that did help actually open up my staff’s eyes to a number of things that could be done.

So then, okay, let’s talk tactics since we’re talking customer service for now and I’m sorry, I’m only focusing on this, but it’s your superpower, so it’s important we go into it, right. In terms of tactics for customer service. You’re telling me, okay, you picked up a couple of things from Laura Horton for the sake of the argument. Yeah. Do you go and put your staff through many courses, all the ones we’ve heard of, Do you take your team out to amazing places so that they can see what amazing customer service is? Do you make it all up yourself and, you know, figure out when you go to a lovely hotel in Istanbul or whatever, try and understand why did that make me feel special and how can I translate that? And I know it’s all of those, but, but, but, but which.

Was literally about to say tactics.

All of the above. And there’s been a couple of things. Obviously, we’ve done various different team courses and getaways over the years as well. One of the biggest one which will stick with with them for a long time was Spear. I sent not my dentist, my support staff to spear in Arizona at one point. This was many years ago when they were doing the team training. I don’t know if they still do it actually, but that was a real eye opener for a few of them because they got to see the American side of customer service, which is a completely different league to what we have in the UK. Customer service in America, as I’m sure you know, because you’ve been there millions of times, is just embedded in the culture. It’s their way of getting more money out of you. And it’s accepted that if you get a good customer service experience, you need to pay for it. And that doesn’t exist really in the UK. It does when you go to five star hotels and things to a certain extent, but in general, day to day life you will not necessarily get that if you’re going to normal shops, If you’re going to restaurants, it’s not the same. It’s very, very different. So it’s that was part of it. It was it was very interesting for my manager and a couple of my higher members of staff at the time to go across and see what they were teaching and what they were advocating, and that helped to instil it, even though none of it would have been amazingly new, we would have seen it on various different courses. They’ve been to conferences for the team, training stuff and things before, but it was going there to experience life in a different country as well. For the five days or six days or however long they went and to see how. Our customer service can actually be in a different environment. I think that was quite a powerful trip. That was about seven years ago, quite early on in the in the practice infancy.

What about just specific specifics for your patient journey? You know, you talked about follow up. It’s one of the biggest issues in dental practices. In fact, it’s one of the biggest issues in businesses in general. Right. I took it upon myself to book the hotel for one of these mini smile makeovers that we did somewhere. I said, I want to do it. And I just wanted to know what it’s like, right. To do the to do the booking and get it all right. You know, because I’d done it years ago. Then it’s been someone else taking care of it. I want to know where where it’s at right now. And honestly, man, the hotel that responds first has got this massive head start. Massive head start. There’s, by the way, the hotel who never responds here, who might be an amazing hotel. Yeah. And yet they didn’t have a system in place for follow up. Yeah. So it’s so interesting. So so. So do you have a CRM system that kind of prompts people to follow up? How often do you train your people on it? Because one thing I’ve noticed is it’s not a one time thing. You got to keep on training for customer service.

It’s very difficult.

It’s very difficult because you’re absolutely You mean you’ve hit the nail on the head there with with software, you can have the best softwares in the world, but unless you’ve got the right staff in there to actually implement and follow it and actually do what’s needed and be honest with it as well and is is the biggest problem. So yes, we do have a CRM software. We’ve changed over the years many times actually. At the moment we’re using a combination of my smiles, one as well as robo reception. So we’re using robo reception and I’m just trying to member the other one. Dan Graham So it’s Dan Graham and and robo reception. We’re using a different what’s robo reception.

One of those bots that asks you questions.

Yeah but they’ve now they’ve now got their own CRM one similar to enquiry bot actually enquiry bot we’ve used as well and we’ve really liked it. That’s another good one that, that came through in Covid, but it’s making sure that the two things, number one, limiting the people that have access to it so that you’ve got the right people looking at it and reducing the numbers significantly because it reduces errors. The more people you have doing things, the more errors you’re going to have, the less follow up you’re going to have for people. The mistakes get made and unfortunately, you can’t track the mistakes. The whole point of the software is to be able to track. But if mistakes are made and you can’t track the mistakes, you have no idea what you’re dealing with and what’s going on. So that’s why the only people who have access to it are my managers and my treatment coordinators. They’re the only ones that have my reception. Do not. We went through all of that many years ago. We discovered it doesn’t work. So.

So have you set up like minimum service levels? So patient sends an inquiry through the website. What happens next?

So enquiry through the website will lead to the treatment coordinator picking up that inquiry or the manager depending on who’s in first. The inquiry will then be followed up with a contact initially, depending on what the inquiry was. They have got the option to basically say whether they want a phone call or a WhatsApp. So that’s our two main contact points. It’s either WhatsApp or a phone call. We don’t really deal with email in terms of inquiries unless it’s an email enquiry that’s come to us. But even then they would normally state how they’d want to be contacted. So we try and have an actual direct conversation with the person to figure out what they’re looking for. It’s got to be within the first couple of hours of getting the enquiry. Yeah. So within two hours really we’ve got to try and contact them within reason. I mean if it’s a weekend and we’re not open, it’s going to be Monday morning of course. And then the next they then get put into depending on what that achieves, if we do make contact with them and it’s led to something, they then go through the normal process in terms of getting the informative emails, in terms of getting the the build up to appointment day, etcetera.

Go on, go on. What’s that. What’s that. What’s that.

So that will be obviously the obvious medical history forms, it will be the, the directions, the video of where the, the practice is and how to get to us. It will be the the details of let’s say it’s Invisalign. They’ve inquired about the details of Invisalign at Black Swan. What do we provide, what do they can they expect if it’s a video consult that they’ve booked in for, then they will obviously will give them a bit of a brief about what the video consult will entail. Once they’ve had the video consult, they’ll then get a bit more information about what was discussed in their video consult should be a bit more relevant to them before their actual booked in appointments. So we try and sort of follow up with it and try and give them as much information as we can.

It’s beautiful.

It’s beautiful, right. Because the guy has not yet stepped in, has he? No. And he’s already had directions, videos, specific videos to his inquiry. Like that’s important, right? He’s already in your ecosystem. Right.

Let’s put it this way. And this isn’t us bragging, but it is. And that we any patient that ends up in the chair in a surgery having come through that system is going ahead for treatment. The only thing that will stop them going ahead for treatment. As if we say you cannot have it done. Perrier, for example, or something else. You will. You need to have something else done first, or the treatment plan needs to change, etcetera. Our conversion rates are extremely high and for all.

Of them is.

Part of the process, giving them an estimation of of possible range of costs as well.

They need to you need to be time wasters.

You need to be transparent about it right from the offset. Then why hide it? Because if you start hiding these things and patients come in later and then they all they want to know from that initial inquiry. Let’s face it. Why do patients inquire with practice? Why do they phone around with practice? They want to know how much you charge. What is the cost of your Invisalign? Yes, you can give them all the other perks. You can give them all the extra things and that you do and you should do, because actually that’s what sets you off from all the competition and sets you apart. But ultimately they want to know how much it costs. And if they if you turn around and say, Oh, Invisalign treatment is, I don’t know, 2495 3195 3695 3995. Whatever it is. And the patient turns around and says, Oh no, my budget is 1500. And and you’ve seen the photos, you’ve seen the case. You cannot meet their expectations. There is no point continuing with that particular enquiry in terms of getting the patient in the chair, getting them to spend money on the consultation, etcetera. If they can’t actually afford the treatment, you can say to them when you’re ready and able, then obviously we’re here.

But this is a realistic expectation of what what it’s going to entail. If you want to discuss alternative options, if it’s Invisalign that you want. Fair enough. If you want to discuss alternative options, we’d be delighted to come and see you. These are what the alternative options can be. And it’s just. Yes, you direct or divert a couple of patients away from you that probably aren’t the right specific patient for your business. There’s no shame in saying it at the end of the day. Lots of enquiries, especially with the NHS crisis at the moment. We’re getting a lot of enquiries for all sorts of various different things and if they can’t afford the basics of what we can offer, how are they going to afford the root canal treatment or the extraction that they may need later on and the crown costs that they’re going to need? You can’t. This is how you get a complaint. You get a complaint by attracting the wrong patient to your business right from the very outset, because then they will find something they’re not particularly happy about or they feel like they’ve been misled. And as a result of that, that’s what will cause a grievance later on down the line.

And let’s not forget, right now, we’re discussing positioning. Yeah, let’s not let’s not forget the higher end patient needs to know your positioning is higher end.

Yeah.

Absolutely. That that’s that’s key too, right? You know, if I if I’m going to let’s say I come to Bristol, I want to get myself a steak and I say, hey, Ahmed, where’s a good steak? And you say this place. And I look in the menu. If the steak is under £19 or something, I won’t even like I It’s too cheap for me, isn’t it? Like, that’s not going to be a good steak as far as I’m concerned. Yeah. I’m willing to spend £90 on a steak. Yeah. How will I know that the place is that place if the menu and the pricing isn’t there?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And it’s attracting the right type of patient for your business. You’ve got to price it up accordingly. Absolutely. The most insulting thing for me to hear is when a patient comes in and goes, Geez, you guys are the cheapest in the area. And I’m just thinking to myself, well, mean, I’m not taking that as a compliment. That’s a disaster because we’re not supposed to be.

Yeah. Are you trying to be the most expensive?

We’re not. No. Think we’re trying to be the best value for money. Guess mean. We will end up where we end up, but at the same time mean It’s difficult with Invisalign because it depends on your on your discount level and things as well. It doesn’t. It’s about profit margin rather than the actual cost of the treatment. So it depends on how.

Much Invisalign.

Do you see Invisalign as a as a profit centre or do you see it more as a way of attracting patients?

Bit of both. It depends how you price it. I think we’re second highest or definitely one of the highest Invisalign providers in the area that we’re in. So we do get a lot of patients coming in. We’re not the cheapest and we’re not intending to be. But at the same time, we’ve got a waiting list of patients, think we’ve got a 3 or 4 month waiting list at the moment in terms of cases coming in. And part of that is not just because of Invisalign, it’s word of mouth purely, it’s going through the Black Swan experience, which we hear time and time again. Patients want to come in through the place. They want to experience how we’ve made their friends feel and family feel. And it’s the end result. It’s the treatment planning service that makes it makes you stand out from everybody else because Invisalign is a tool. Anyone can do Invisalign. It’s how you straighten the teeth and what position you get them into which. If you understand orthodontics, you can do better than the others around you and also limitations. You don’t want to have any problems at the end of it. Then you throw in the whitening experience. Then you throw in the the bonding and the sort of the enamel oplasty, the tweaking around the smile to give them that smile that they actually wanted at the very start. Straighten the teeth will not always give them the smile they really want and it’s about and know exactly and it’s about understanding what they really, really want. And then you throw in there that the videographer is going to come in and film some of this we’re going to interview before and after. We’re going to get really good quality before and after photos. And suddenly you’ve got an experience that that patient will remember for the rest of their life.

Tell me this, but do you do ads to get patients for Invisalign?

We do, but that’s not the majority of our.

The majority is word of mouth.

It is word of mouth. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So the inquiries that we get in. Yes, I’d say if I’m being completely honest, I’d say about 20% of our cases probably come from social media ads and paid ads, paid.

Paid ads, paid ads. Then in the in.

The in the creative for the paid ads, how do you distinguish yourself like, for instance, Prav Prav got an ad he’s he’s done for someone that the headline says cheap Invisalign you’re in the wrong place. Yeah, because the guy saying he’s not cheap Invisalign, he’s he’s quite the opposite. How do you distinguish yourself in an ad? Do you do you somehow manage to get the brand over in the ad.

Agency.

Deal with that. What do you do?

Bit of both.

But you need to be working with the right agency that can do that and actually can reflect your brand firstly. But secondly, it’s about trying to stick out from what everyone else is trying to do. Let’s face it, every single practice in the country is currently advertising £1,000 off Invisalign free whitening free retainers.

And because it kind of.

Works right, it kind of works on that generic vanilla vanilla.

Level.

It does to a certain extent. But in the market now saturated, isn’t everyone looking at these ads and going, Well, this place is doing £1,000 off, this place is doing £1,000 off. Patients aren’t stupid. After a while they’re going to realise no one’s really giving £1,000 off. They’re just saying in the ad and what they’ve all done is they’ve bumped their prices up to a certain extent. And let’s face it, that’s pretty much what 99% of practices are doing. So it doesn’t actually have any value to it and it doesn’t mean anything.

Well, I think, well, well, one thing we can’t say they’ve all done that, number one. But also the way that ad works is not necessarily for someone who’s looking at lots of ads. Yeah, the way that ad works is someone comes across the ad. Yeah, it hasn’t hasn’t come across lots of ads. Comes across the ad, you know, I don’t know. I might want laser eye surgery. By the way, I’m never going to go for a cheaper version. Right, Because I’m not. But but but somewhere someone might say, hey, £500 off laser eye surgery. Not necessarily that I’ve looked at others necessarily. I would. Right. But but you know what I mean, That that’s why that ad works. But but what you’re saying. Yeah, the brand part of it is a whole different thing. So how do you how.

Do you differentiate?

So when we did our adverts, most recent campaigns, for example, we used a lot of our own photos. We used a lot of our own videos of actual real life patients in the ads. We’ve used clever sort of marketing videos and designed in a specific way with the Black Swan brand all over it. We’ve we’ve gone for feel people we we wanted to do was inspire. We wanted patients to look at the ads or look at and go I want to I want to be that person in that photo. That’s that’s the experience. I want to get mean All the other stuff about discounts and this and bonuses and everything else, it’s great. I mean, they’re taking all the boxes. They’re saying what everybody else is saying. But actually I want I want that feel. And also showing off the the experience that we can give, the look of the premises and everything else. It’s it’s what makes it quite easy to distinguish yourself from everybody else around you. Otherwise you literally are trying to do exactly what everyone else is trying to do stock images, stock ads and everything else. At the end of the day, people want to see that these are real life, genuine cases that you’ve done using the same image of an Invisalign patient holding a tray and smiling and looking absolutely beautiful and all this and all that. It’s what everyone does. Patients can distinguish between a stock image and a real genuine image, especially when they see people actually holding things that are brand related to them.

Yeah.

You’ve definitely got a knack for marketing, buddy. You’ve definitely got a knack for marketing. Well, how do you balance the question of clinical excellence and business excellence? You said you kind of alluded to it before. You said you can’t be both brilliant clinician and brilliant businessman. What did what did you mean by that?

It’s very difficult because running a business requires your utmost attention 24 over seven. If you want it as a small scale business, it’s perfectly doable. If you want to upscale, you want to open yourself up to multiple avenues. You can’t also be the main go to clinical guy. And this has been the absolute bullet for me since Covid, because the number of big cases that we’ve been getting in, it’s been about 1 or 2 a week. And when I say big cases, I’m talking sort of ten, 15, 20 grand cases that walk in. They’ve they’ve been neglected for years. They want to get all this treatment done. You discuss it briefly at the very start just to get a rough idea of whether they’re interested or not. And then they say, yeah, absolutely, fine. When can we start? And suddenly you’ve got yourself into a sort of a 20 grand plus case, whether it’s sort of a rare case, whether it’s a alignment and on all sorts of other restorative work. And it’s difficult because you can’t then sit there at the end of that day and plan all these cases and try and get them all in the diary, etcetera, whilst also treating the rest of your patients whilst also trying to run your business, keep everybody happy, keep all the staff happy, manage all the finances, pay all the bills that need to be paid and keep the place afloat. Look, sit back and look at the figures for the month, how well you’re doing, Analyse the data, talk with the accountants, the bookkeeper. I mean, it’s never ending. It’s never, never ending. And it’s difficult. It’s really, really hard. And I think I’ve learnt that you can’t, as much as I aspired originally to want to be, to own one of the best practices in the country, let alone the world eventually, but at the same time also be the go to dentist that everybody wants that wants to go to the person that can do what the other practices around you cannot.

The place that everybody refers their tricky cases to because they don’t know what to do. And we’ve got then turns to the southwest. Thankfully we’ve got there we are the place that everybody sends all their tricky cases that they don’t know what to do with. But at the same time, I can’t be that person and also run a business empire at the same time. It’s not possible, physically possible as one person to do that unless you really hone in and get the right amount of people around you. But then it’s a question of what is the best use of your time. And this is where you get to eventually thinking, I’m one person. There is a limit to what I can earn in my hourly rate treating patients. Regardless of how good you think you are, even if you upped your hourly rate to 400 an hour, 500, 600, 700, a thousand, there is still a limit to how much you can earn through your own handiwork, through your own hands and through a given day. Whereas actually you can quadruple that by actually being able to run businesses or multiple businesses on multiple fronts very well and actually being the inspiration behind them. And it’s getting that balance right. I don’t I haven’t got it right yet.

So. So what is the actual situation? You said you’re kind of the beginning and end.

Yeah.

So you said that off off mic. But to explain that.

So at the moment we I’m going through a transition. I’m trying to reduce my clinical work to a certain extent to concentrate on doing the things that I believe I can do and that I should be doing, reduce the work that I don’t need to be the one doing by inspiring and and training and mentoring the other dentists around me to be able to take on the work to the same standard, to the same level so the patients don’t feel like they’re being neglected or being significantly shortchanged and to maintain that standard in the practice. And I think that’s that’s the transition we’re currently going through over the next year or two to achieve to that level. But then allow me to then be able to have more time to be able to spend on the businesses themselves rather than me physically being in the surgery all the time.

So what is your week like? So how many days.

Are you actually at the.

Moment? It’s Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday is clinical at Black Swan with patients longer days, Thursdays alternates are the my longer appointment days. So they’re the ones where we’ve got the videographer in where we do the filming etcetera for for some of the longer appointments, the reveals, etcetera. And then at the moment the Fridays and the Saturday alternates, I work at the Bristol practice clinically and again, something I’m trying to cut down over the next year or so and try and reduce my clinical attachment to the Bristol practice because it’s very difficult to to run a business, and especially if I’m not there as often and manage it sort of from the sidelines and also be the clinician in that practice at the same time.

So. But are you thinking of more practices?

Um, I didn’t envisage owning more than one practice. A couple of years ago, so I will never rule anything out if an opportunity presents itself like it did last time, I may consider it, but it gets to the point you need to have that infrastructure in place before you start expanding or doing more, because otherwise you end up going crazy. You can’t take on more responsibility if you haven’t even got the infrastructure in place to manage the ones you’ve got at the moment when they don’t rely on you. So it’s the obvious question is can you take a month of holiday off all your businesses and can they run themselves for a month while you’re not there? If the answer to that question is yes, then you’re okay. You can take on another business. If the answer to that is no, then you’re not ready.

So. So take us through the opportunity that presented itself with the centre of Centre for Dentistry Practice that you bought, which explain to others. The Centre for Dentistry was a corporate that was had was operating practices inside Sainsbury’s stores and around Covid time. They got into financial difficulties. I was dealing with them as well, unfortunate because I liked the management there. They had good vision, they wanted to do the right thing. Tell me about it.

What happened?

So that particular practice used to be around the corner from where I lived, so it was very, very close to where I was. I got a job there doing their orthodontics. I saw an advert up about, I think it was about a year and a half before Covid actually offer alternate Saturday work. And at the time I thought, you know what I mean? It was a bit of a punt, but I thought, I can see what they’re trying to do with this corporate and it’s a private corporate which is unique. There’s not many of them around. And it’s a it’s a unique idea. I want to get a job there and I want to see what it’s all about. So I did. Is that.

Why you did the.

Job there?

Purely unfortunately, yes.

I can see that because it seems like a strange move. Yeah.

So I did that and I didn’t necessarily hide it, but at the same time, I enjoyed my dentistry, I enjoyed my orthodontics, I enjoy doing sort of high end dentistry. So I could be in a position where I can pick the cases and the way that I want to do. So I got a job there. They were very they’ve made no secret of that at the time. They were very surprised that that I would apply for a vacancy like this. And I said, look, I just I just want to experience I want to work in the in the corporate. I want to see what it’s like on the inside. And and it’s around the corner from my house. And what’s the harm of earning a bit more money? So I did it for about I did it for about a year initially and it was very obvious right from the very beginning to me that there was a huge amount of potential available in this place and it was not being tapped into lack of experience of the dentists that were working there, lack of experience with the staff that are working there. And it was an overall just lack of management of being able to run the place. It wasn’t anything to do with the quality of the patients because when I spoke to or treatment planned, any of the the work that the patients needed and quoted them the right prices that I would feel comfortable with, etcetera, not a single patient batted an eyelid.

And remember the management approaching me quite early on actually after about two months and basically saying to me the other dentists in the practice are complaining your prices are too high. And I said, Well, I can see where they’re coming from because their prices are probably a third of what I’m charging. But at the same time, I’ve brought in all my own materials. I brought in all the things that I want to do. So I am justified in charging the prices that I’m doing because the quality of the work that I’m doing is still to a very high standard. Has a single patient complained about any of the prices? And they said no. And I said, well, why are we why are we having this conversation? I’m literally tripling your income from a from a dentist. And the patients are all super happy about it. If anything, it’s starting to generate a lot more patients coming through the door and a lot more inquiries. So that was a bit of an eye opener for them as a business model because it didn’t work with their business model.

Their business model relied on every single one of the practices. It was 25 branches all over the country being the same price, whether they were in Scunthorpe, Doncaster, Fulham in Central London or Bristol. And to me, I mean, I’m not running a corporate, but to me that didn’t make any sense because the rental prices in Doncaster would be extremely different to the practice in Fulham. Of course, surely the running costs will be different, the staffing costs will be different. You can’t price things up in the same way. It just wouldn’t work. But I like the ethos of the model. But if you’re going to do that, you need to charge a lot more to try and attract the right type of patients in there. The patients that were coming into the Bristol branch lived locally around the area and it’s a fairly affluent area. So they’ve got the finances, the funds to be able to spend on decent dentistry. So that was the the the first sort of initial red flags for me. And as Covid approached, they did approach me at that time and basically they were very honest. They said to me about three months before Covid, they they said, look, we’re going to be closing. We’re only keeping open ten branches around the country that are the ones that are actually doing quite well.

We’re going to close all the other branches. Bristol is one of the branches that we’re looking to close. Do you want to? Office. And it was at that point that I sort of said, I’m not really in a position to. This wasn’t my intention of coming here. I mean, I wasn’t here to buy the business. I was here to get an insight into what running a future private corporate might be like. So at that point, I said, I don’t think I can actually afford it. I’m really sorry. I don’t have the finances and the funds. And just out of interest, how much would you be looking to sell it for? And I think it was at that point that it changed everything for me because there was I mean, the figure they quoted me was just was was ridiculous. I mean, it was it was a steal. It was an absolute bargain. And I think at that point, that’s when I thought, hang on a minute, this mean I can’t really say no to this. I need to find a way to structure this to actually make it work without relying on me being the main dentist in the practice. But you can quite easily turn this business around.

I’m seeing a pattern here where you’re coming into distressed businesses. If one day we have a problem in and I’ll be giving you a call back, so go on. Yeah. And did you turn it around? What happened?

Yeah. I mean.

Well, you were lucky because it was the Covid bump that happened after that, right?

It was to a certain extent. There were still patients in the practice. So it wasn’t it wasn’t a total loss. But yes, it was. I got another one of my friends who to come in as a business partner, younger associates at the time, great dentists, very good quality dentists. The one.

You didn’t get on with.

In the end.

The one that we are still very good friends. We have.

Not fallen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he, he came to the decision that two years in business ownership was not for him. He didn’t like the stresses. He didn’t like the it was becoming pretty obvious that it was a lot quicker for me to take the decisions and make the moves and hires and everything else than it was to constantly have meetings to. And that would intrude in both of our lives and think it was. That was one of the turning points really. When we sat down together, we were very honest and we drew up an exit strategy for him that worked for both of us. But yes, we have turned it around. So when I inherited when I bought when we took over that practice, that practice was no dentists had all left nurses. We had one part time nurse, one part time receptionist and the practice manager and that was it. That was literally the staffing at that practice. Every single member of staff had been at that practice for just under two years. The manager had been there for a slightly bit longer than that. So it was a case of literally bringing in the team immediately. Hygienist 1 or 2 nurses. Receptionist Another dentist, potentially. And yeah, all before Covid sort of really took took shape. So this, all these conversations were taking place. So the practice itself had shut its doors just before it basically march when when Covid lockdowns all started.

Wow what time and.

We the deal for buying I mean, the negotiations were going on throughout throughout Covid. We bought the practice and signed the forms on the 5th of June. And obviously we were allowed to go back to work on the 8th of June. So it didn’t give us a huge amount of time, so we couldn’t actually open till the 10th of June. Realistically, with the and everything else that we had to try and sort out to begin with. But but yeah, it was it was a very strange scenario to sort of bring in staff very, very quickly to try and settle everyone, buy all the materials that needed to be bought immediately and and really just try and get it working. And I mean, we started off obviously with all the furlough and everything else. It had to be on a on a reduced scale to begin with. Take the hit for the first month or two. But but yeah, I mean, it’s grown now. We’ve got five dentists at that practice. We’ve got two hygienists. We’re working. It’s a two surgery practice. It’s working two surgeries pretty much nearly six days a week now, including Saturdays with late nights, etcetera as well. We’ve got a very rising team and that’s that was three years that it took to get that position.

With the massive enlightened advert on the outside.

A massive on the ad? Absolutely.

Thank you so much, buddy. Very nice to see that. What’s the positioning of these two practices? I mean, it’s not position the same as your black swan, surely?

No. So this I would classify this one as a more middle of the range, good quality, family oriented private practice, which actually I mean, again, eye opener for me, there’s a lot of money in it. It’s a very profitable way to run a business. You don’t have to do the high end implants, the cosmetics and everything else to actually be able to turn a decent profit and make some good money out of normal bread and butter dentistry practice. So yeah, it’s a different prospect, but still very profitable in its own right. I mean, we’re not we’re not a million miles off a sort of a 1 million practice at the Bristol practice in three years and starting pretty much from zero. So it’s.

Associate.

Associate lead has got its own challenges, right? I mean are you did you put in some of your existing team from Somerset there or is it too far?

Not at all. No.

No, it’s too far. It’s an hour and a half drive between the two. It’s not it’s not practical. It’s not viable. So, yes, associate led is very difficult. And it’s still I mean no team is. Perfect. We will continue to improve, but it’s trying to bring in dentists from different backgrounds and different settings and trying to get them to work in an environment where the patients are going to be a bit more challenging simply because the type of patients we attract at that particular practice are patients that are disgruntled with the NHS, that are trying to look for alternatives. So as a result of that, unless you give them a really good customer service experience, they’re not going to really. And the clinical care needs to be obviously a higher standard. They’re not really going to see the difference of what they used to pay at the NHS and what they’re paying at the private practice. You can’t give them the same experience, otherwise they will be unhappy. You can’t charge them the same. You can’t charge £50 for an examination or £45 for an examination, even though they don’t know what the charges are now. But back in my day, it was, what, £19 or £25 or whatever it was, And then expect the patients to still be okay with it because they are clearly judging you. They’re coming to you because they’ve come from an background. They’re not getting continuity of care. They’re not getting the same clinicians, they’re not getting a great service experience. When they phone up the practice, they don’t answer the phone first time round. They they won’t get you in as soon as you as you need to come in.

All of these things are what’s driven that patient to contact you to come in. And unless you tick the boxes for what they’re really looking for, get them in fairly quickly When they’ve got a problem, get them in, not keep them waiting for a couple of more than a couple of weeks in terms of coming in for their first appointment. Treat them really well and give them a lot more information than they’ve ever received before at their clinical examination. Have some good follow ups, be able to discuss sort of plan things with them. Unless you’re giving them all of that experience, there’s no value in it for them. And that’s difficult to give to dentists that have not been used to that environment either, because you can’t just pluck a dentist out of a sort of, let’s use an example, an NHS practice, stick them in a private practice and go, yep, carry on doing exactly what you were doing before because the patient will not see the value in that. You need to change the way you’re doing things. Otherwise you will get complaints, you will get disgruntled patients and that’s that’s the learning curve and you won’t have that team ready, especially in an environment like that where you’ve got to source the team quickly to get them in. I mean, they might be clinically excellent. And I’m not using Bristol as an example specifically for this. I’m being more general. The dentist may be exceptionally skilled clinically, but if he hasn’t got the customer service aspect that comes with it too, the patient won’t realise that and they won’t. They won’t really appreciate the quality of the care they’re receiving.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Look, man, I feel like I’m selling you short because there’s so many things you do. You’re an accomplished clinician. You’re doing the BDA thing, and yet we’ve totally focussed on customer service and patient experience and so forth. So we should talk about the other stuff a little bit. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about the whole event side of things that you did. I mean, you were pretty much one of the key people in organising that event in the Southwest, right? What was it called?

Yeah, the Young Dancers conference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. And that’s I mean, I’ve been chair of the dentist committee for Young Dental Group in the Southwest for the past eight years now. I think I launched it and founded it. And, and the main reason for that was purely I tried to join I was considered a young dentist at the time still. And I tried to join the National Young Dentist Committee for the BDA and was sort of rebuffed at the time and said, Oh, well, we haven’t got any spaces. You can’t really get involved in that side of it. The next allocation won’t be for another couple of years. And I thought, actually I can’t really just hang around for a couple of years waiting for a committee position to come available. So we so I decided I went to the Western counties branch of the BDA, which is the Southwest branch, and basically said, Look, I want to start a young dentist group in the Southwest. I want to give that sort of link between dentists graduating and then becoming a bit more experienced and finding the right places and settling in this area. It doesn’t exist at the moment and I got the support I needed. We set it off. We launched the first event and it’s been it’s been a success ever since up until Covid happened. In fact, the last conference was literally a couple of weeks before Covid, which was in the middle of Feb, actually, and it grew from strength to strength. I think we had 140 people turn up at that particular one, 150. We even hit Jason Smithson was the main speaker. Obviously a couple of years before that we had Dépeches as the main speaker at the Exeter one. So we’ve had we’ve attracted some really good names. And one of the main things or main reasons I wanted to set that up was because to inspire the younger dentists and the younger generations to give them access to things that I didn’t have access to when I qualified.

Because there’s a lot in dentistry that needs to be discussed, whether it’s the business side, the clinical side. But unless you look into it and realise what it is that you don’t know, you’re not necessarily going to go looking for it. So that entire scenario was created, the entire campaigns were created for that that first year generation of foundation dentists as they graduate and for those students and final year to attend something like this and really inspire them to something great in terms of dentistry. And my main inspiration actually was during my PhD year, one of the things that inspired. Nearby events was going to the conference in Liverpool that particular year because that was when the conference used to be organised by the BDA properly. And what I loved about that is there were so many seminars, lectures, literally everything you could imagine under the sun was available and you could go to it, you could choose where you wanted to go. There was multiple things all being organised as well as the massive trade show, which was a huge, huge inspiration for someone very early on to go to. And that’s that’s one of the things that stuck with me and I wanted to bring some of that to the Southwest, which is why obviously we brought in trade exhibitions and things afterwards. And actually that’s what led me afterwards to start going down the route of as well. And that’s what’s more recently created Private Dental mentor. It’s off the back of the young dentist conferences.

Yeah. Tell me about private dental mental.

So one of the I’m glad you asked one of the one of the things that I would have liked and looking back at my career now is a structured learning programme to give me what I needed in my first year there. There’s so many courses and so many people that I’ve been I’ve been on and been with over the last ten years, 12 years, 15 years of my career that have really inspired certain aspects of my clinical dentistry and non-clinical, but they weren’t done in the right order. For example, mean just as a throwaway Janos Mako’s posterior occlusion course that did a posterior sorry morphology course that did think it was about 6 or 7 years ago. And I remember walking out of that after three days of sort of solid plasticine induced sort of carving in dingy basement of a London hotel, three very late nights carving the four, five, 6 or 7 uppers lowers again and again and again and again.

That’s a marathon course, isn’t it?

It is.

And I remember walking out of it at the end and just thought, why didn’t I do something like this in my first year of graduating? I’m doing this seven years too late. I mean, if this was instilled in me right from the very beginning, the quality of my composite work and direct work would have completely shot through the roof quite early on because actually this answers a lot of the questions that you get to so many different composite courses and and rightly say you learn a lot of the basics that you need, but you never really go into the depth of morphology. There’s no time. You don’t have the time to do that. And that’s not something that’s specific for a lot of these courses. You cover the basics of it to a certain extent, but you’re not going to cover it in that sort of intensity. And there isn’t really anything in the UK that exists that does it to that sort of intensity the way those courses were. So that was quite an eye opener for me, as well as many other courses that that I’ve done over the years. And that’s what inspired was, is really what is the once you’ve done your your foundation year, what next? If you want to stay in practice, if you want a transition to private practice, what can you do next that will actually help you with that transition? And at the moment, it doesn’t exist.

Yeah. So explain it. What is it?

So it is a one year mentored program with structured face to face sessions once a month. That will and every single month is a theme topic. So over the 12 months you have 12 theme topics that you would concentrate on for that one month. Thursday is your study day or is the day And at the start of the Thursday of every single month, that is when the speaker for that month will come in. They will give their their lecture, their learning experience, etcetera, and the rest of that month will continue to concentrate on everything you’re learning. So, for example, one of the earliest things wanted to start, which is month one in September, is a detailed look at dental examinations, detailed dental examinations, as well as pain management and pain free dentistry, because that is the key to any private practitioner trying to break out of my practice. It’s a three key things that you kind of need. You need to be able to analyse the patient well, you need to be able to treat that patient well and give them a pain free experience and pain management. It’s the one thing that should set us apart in private dentistry. You’ve got more time when a patient comes in in pain, you’ve got more time to be able to spend with that patient to try and figure it out. So the whole month in September will be spent on those three things. Work will be set on Thursday mornings, every single week, where they will they will be the delegates will be asked to complete that work. And then the Thursday afternoons of every single one of the Thursdays, then we will have some clinical case discussions on Zoom as a group to discuss scenarios based on that month’s theme and topic. And people are then they are allowed to bring in their own cases to discuss as well. And the idea behind.

It is it’s.

One day a month, right? Not one day a week. One day. No, no.

It’s the one day a week in terms of the structured mentor sessions. But the the face to face actual speaker session is one is once a month. Okay. So moving on a couple of months, for example, when we’re talking about the the Yanos one, which you’ll be doing his entire three days course as part of this, that’s at the start of December, the rest of December sessions will concentrate on you being given your models and you’re basically being asked to tasked with carving and doing the work and taking photographs with them as you go through it for the rest of that month.

Dude, how.

Long have you been how long have you been cooking this up? Because I know Janos. I was with him in Vilnius a couple of weeks ago. He’s booked, like, two years ahead.

Yeah. No.

Have you been cooking this up for a couple of years? Longer than that?

No. This started we. We started this last year, so that’s when I started doing the planning for it. It was about a year ago that we started doing the planning and I’ve booked him for the next couple of years for exactly that reason. So yes, he is very booked up. Absolutely. He’s very difficult to pin down. And a lot of these speakers are mean Cavenders obviously quite busy as well. And and a lot of the other household names, Ian, Dan, Nadeem Yunus, they’re all very busy people that you can’t get into their diaries that easily. You’ve got to do it in advance. I have always had this. I mean, I’ve trialled the idea of this in my own practice with my associate a few years ago. I got him to do all of these courses. The difference was I was sending him to do these courses all over the world and all over the UK. The difference is now we’ve brought all these courses here in house to actually do them and run them at a reasonable price, which will be a lot cheaper than if you were actually doing these courses all separately yourself.

But is it Bristol based? It will be.

In Somerset, so it’ll be at the Black Swan Training Training Institute.

Aurora. The New Black Swan has training facilities.

Absolutely.

What a beautiful practice, by the way. I take my hat off to you. So what? Isn’t that a bit difficult to get to? Or is it you’re super focusing on people in that area?

It is. I mean, we’ve only got spaces for for sort of 20 delegates per year. So we’re not we’re keeping it very, very small and intimate simply because to get that hands on experience and that level, especially if you’re doing an entire year course, it’s a lot. It’s full on. If you start having a too big a group, you’re not going to get the benefits out of mentoring people quite, quite close knit. So it’s not about the numbers per se. It’s about getting the right people that are willing to either be close to the area or willing to travel. You’ll be surprised. I mean, we’ve had dentists enquiring some sort of London had practices. I’ve had one practice in Leeds that’s actually inquired already about joining the program. So people are prepared to travel for the right courses.

But this isn’t this isn’t particularly scalable, is it? I mean, you can’t have several cohorts because Janos is, you know.

Not yet. Not yet, but it could be. Yeah. Yeah.

So is there some sort of selfishness in this that you’re trying to find associates for your own businesses? Is that what.

No. If anything.

Undercurrent. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s the case.

No.

It isn’t. I mean, it’s funny you say that, but no, it’s not, actually, because I don’t have any space for associates currently either. Practice. It’s purely down to two factors that drove this. Number one is the way the is going think dentistry is going in a very unique way over the next couple of years where we are all being pushed into the private sector. We as we as a profession have a huge opportunity here to showcase what private dentistry can really do for the profession and and actually give them a real good experience to make them realise this is what private dentistry gives you. And if we do that well and we play our role well, we will change the background of dentistry in the UK forever because yes, they will eventually source more dentists. Yes, we will get more coming through the doors in the next couple of years. I’m sure of it. But actually if patients realise the experience they’ve just received, they’ve paid a bit extra, they’ve had to leave the NHS for a while and they realise that actually the experience they’ve just received, the practices in their area that they’ve just gone and experienced treatment with are so far advanced in terms of the care that they’ve gotten. They don’t want to go back and that’s I’m not knocking the NHS if it provided a service that actually could cater realistically for everyone the way we need it to with proper holistic dentistry, comprehensive dentistry by all means I would be a massive advocate, but unfortunately in its current form it cannot do that. And that’s that’s for me is one of the big driving factors. It’s training the next the new cohort of dentists coming through to get them that experience.

So they are very confident in their dentistry. But it’s not just confidence. Confidence is great, but you need to have substance. You need to actually be good at what you do when you sell something to patients, when you’re doing something as basic as direct composites, actually being proud of your work and doing it to a level where you really take pride in that work and you know you’re doing a good job for that patient, not just doing it for a photo, but doing it for functional clinical reasons. And that that’s the type of delegates I want to inspire moving forward. The other side of this as well is you’re funny you say that because it’s kind of it’s not for me to try and sort of pinch associates and create them. It was more realising the associates that I was attracting at my practice didn’t have the skills and experience, and when it was the one associate pre-COVID, it was easy. I could dedicate my time and attention to one person. When you’ve got 2 or 3 each practice, you can’t do that anymore. It doesn’t. It’s they require too much time and too much effort and sort of training to be able to do the things that you want them to do and for them to learn quicker on the job as they go through. Because ultimately it’s discussions of cases and things that actually give them that experience to be able to not make all the same mistakes that I would have done and not take as long to learn and pick things up, which ultimately will benefit their own careers but also benefit my businesses as well.

But how does your wife.

Put up with you? I’m actually very surprised. I’m still married. To be completely honest. Four kids here and the amount of stuff you’re doing. You must be coming home late once they’ve gone to bed. Leaving before they’ve woken up, that sort of stuff. That must be going on, right? It is, Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. So the Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are pretty much a write off. I will. I will get home late. They are my late nights, my Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are a bit more chilled. They are like that. I like that. So do you have that arrangement with her that, you know, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, you’re going to do whatever you want. And yeah, I like that. I like, you know, I think Sandeep has some sort of arrangement like that for Sandeep from my smile as well. It’s actually a good arrangement, but it’s been such an eye opener, you know, you know someone for years and then. And then you see that it’s even more drive than you thought. Oh, my goodness, man, our time’s coming to an end. I want to kind of quickly go through an error, clinical error.

Any particular one.

There’s loads of examples I can give you. Any particular type?

Tasty one. Tasty one.

Well, I don’t want the. I dropped something down someone’s throat type. Okay. I want one. I want one. You can learn from kind of patient management error kind of something. One of those.

Oh, okay. I’ll keep it as simple as I can. So actually, one of the ones that we will probably be discussing on because it’s so basic, yet all of us will experience this at the start of our careers patients. And this this for me was a massive eye opener. It’s changed the way I do dentistry since patient comes in cavity in their tooth. Very big, whole food getting packed in there. They have no pain from that cavity yet they’ve not experienced a single ounce of pain. As a dentist, it’s very easy for us. And then this is exactly what did. This was in my second year of your first year at Black Swan, but second year of being a dentist. And it was it’s very easy to go, That’s fine, no problem at all. We will fix it. No problem at all. Let’s log you back. Let’s let’s get the filling done, etcetera, etcetera. Let’s seal it all up and and finish the job and off you go. Patient comes and then leave it at that patient, then comes back in a week later. Absolute raging toothache. I had no pain whatsoever. Until you touched me. Until you did this filling. I was absolutely fine. Now I can’t sleep. This is all your fault. You have caused this. You need to rectify this. Okay, no problem. The discussion then is around root canal treatment extractions. I’m not paying a penny.

This is not my problem. I didn’t cause this. I’m not paying for root canal treatment. I’m not paying for the removal of the teeth. I want to save this tooth. But you. But you have to pay for this. It’s a really difficult scenario. And I will admit, at that particular time, I took the hit and I sorted the patient out and and I let that go. But I learnt from it because actually what it taught me is that consent is very different and very difficult for different patients. It doesn’t matter what you get them to sign, it doesn’t matter what you say to them at the beginning, you need to figure out that they actually understand what you’re saying and also can can afford the consequences of what you’re going to do for them if they can barely. And this comes down to doing favours for people as well. It’s horrible that the world has moved on to this because if you’re doing somebody a favour, which is a great gesture, it’s very, very nice. But if that favour turns into something unplanned as a result of you doing that favour and they cannot actually cope with the consequences of that favour, you’ve actually done them an injustice because you’ve put them in a difficult position that they can’t actually deal with, and then you’ve taken ownership of that problem and you have to find a solution to it.

And this is a very simple example, but actually a really important one because had actually discussed in detail, in detail, I’ve mentioned it in passing, but have I sat the patient and said, you have an extremely deep hole in this tooth. This is going to be root canal treatment If this this tooth is not it’s going to end up like this. This will cost you X, Y, and Z. If we proceed with this, you need to be fully aware that this is going 99% likely to happen. So you need to be prepared for the consequences. Either that or the extraction. Do you still want me to go ahead and fix this problem or what do you want to do? And then the onus is on the patient to take that decision without me really taking ownership of that situation. And I think that’s one thing I’ve learnt heavily over the years, is to realise that actually it’s not to take the patient’s problems home with you. These are not your issues and problems. You need to give them, need to learn how to direct those issues to the person, give them options and get them to choose the most appropriate option, not always the most expensive, and it’s not always the cheapest. The one they believe will be the most suitable one for them because then they’re responsible for the consequences of the situation that happened afterwards.

Although I kind of I feel like it’s a young dentist error to give all the options and not give a recommendation.

I’m not saying don’t give a recommendation if they ask you for a recommendation. Absolutely. By all means. We are trained to save teeth. I want to fill this tooth and I want to do the restoration.

I’ve come across it yourself. You’ve come across it yourself with a lawyer or something. A lawyer says, here’s option A, B or C, and you go to the lawyer, Which one would you do? And you go, Well, that’s not my position. That’s not my decision, it’s your decision. Or then you get a really great lawyer who will say, Here’s option A, B, or C, I would go for B, Yeah, you know, like that. It makes such a big difference, right? And you’re not necessarily going to go for B? Yeah, you just want to know what’s his his position on it. I hear what you’re saying. That’s something.

But yeah.

It’s nuance. It’s nuance. I hear you. I hear what you’re saying.

We get asked this question all the time anyway, don’t we? So in surgery, it’s something that we get asked consistently. What option would you take? And it’s being able to answer that question in the right way and be honest with the patients. And I think that’s one of the things. Again, it’s a big team built a big practice builder is honesty and pricing your treatments up so that regardless of what option the patient takes, you don’t have an option that makes you much more money than the other options because then it’s not fair. You may end up pushing down a particular route where it’s not necessary. Whereas if you’re making a decent profit on every single option, regardless of what that patient is doing, you can give an honest opinion. Attention may actually be your best option in this case. Go for the denture.

By the way, in that example, the fact that you picked up the bill for that, what was it? Private Endo? It speaks to the fact that you do not want one star review man.

You’ve got to.

Speak to that.

Fact.

You’ve got to chalk it up to a learning experience.

Well, you you did. Yeah. Not everyone would have made that decision, dude.

No.

Loads of people wouldn’t have made that. Loads of people would have told them where to go or or whatever. Yeah, but. But you weighed up your options and and took the blame, which is beautiful. Yeah. Like in your own head. Took the blame and then made sure that patient was delighted. Yeah. Made sure that, you know, that you handled that situation. That’s what I mean by the how one defines one’s business. Yeah. It comes down to those final base principles because loads of people would have handled that differently.

But then when would that have gone? But when would that have gone?

It would have resulted in a very disgruntled patient who would have gone and badmouthed your business, probably. I mean, I’m not I don’t think about it in terms of Google reviews. So you’ve got to sometimes weigh up the options and go right. Well, actually, in in this scenario, this is the better of the options to be able to deal with this and need to learn from it and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

I get it, man. I get it. The thing is that. You know that what I’m saying. What defines you? Somewhat. Someone will say that was not my fault. Do what you want with that. Yeah. And know that it’s not going to get very far. Yeah. Some people sometimes, By the way, dude, the dentist will be convinced that the patient is lying about it and having a go. Yeah, and that’s where the real strength of character comes out. Yeah, That when, you know, when you think in this case, you kind of took the blame and thought this patient just wasn’t the communication was incorrect. This patient was kind of mal informed. Yeah, yeah. Whereas sometimes you’ve got a patient in front of you who you’re convinced is having a go then handling that situation. And I bet you dude, I bet you you still would have taken the hit. Yeah. Because that’s, that’s, that’s what you’re saying.

It’s realising.

Think it’s reading the situation and trying to take the and one thing I’ve learned over the years is to take the money aspect out of the equation and treat it from an emotional point of view and give and share that patient that you genuinely care when they come in. And they have. I mean, thankfully it doesn’t happen often, but just money disgruntlement happens the majority of the time. That’s what they’re really complaining or arguing about. And it’s taking that aspect out of the equation and sitting down with them and just going, What do you actually want to resolve this scenario? Forget the money. What do you actually want to solve this scenario? And if they say, well, actually, I’d like I’d like my tooth to stop hurting, that’s fine. We can so we can sort that that’s not a problem. Whereas if they say, well, I want my money back for X, Y and Z, No, no, no, it’s not a question. We’re not talking about money. What outcome do you actually want? And that’s where it comes down to it, because then they realise that you genuinely care. It’s not a case of you arguing about the finances. That’s where issues really crop up. When dentists don’t want to pay for this and don’t want to pay and get it, I can see their point of view and I agree with them. But it’s it’s also realising that actually you need to show this patient you genuinely care about them, their feelings, their pain, etcetera. And that’s when it sort of reverses the situation because they realise that actually you’re not a total arsehole, you haven’t just stolen their money, you actually do want to help them.

Yeah, absolutely, man. What about a business mistake?

Our business mistake. Business mistake or mean? We haven’t got very long. So I’m not going to run into a very long list here. Well, actually, one of the things that opened my eyes up was actually post-COVID. I’ll use this as an example, and I’m not going to mention any names because it would be unfair to. But we took on we wanted to enhance our social media profile. So we started looking at various and it gave me the opportunity to do my research on this. During Covid, we started looking at various different companies that manage Dental social media profiles, and one of the things I learned very quickly and lost a lot of money on is that just because companies say they do something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they do do it or they know how to do it. They may have done it for one particular company, but it doesn’t mean they can do it and replicate it for other companies. And that was a painful lesson because I think I got through about three different companies in about six months learning from each experience to realise that actually I am literally throwing my money away here and not really getting what I want to get as an outcome. And that then inspired me to then try and bring that in-house, which is what led to our media team being created at the time and actually bringing in the social media coordinators, the, the, the videographers, etcetera, and building our own sort of mini in-house studio to be able to to cater for all of that, but wouldn’t have considered doing that because to me that was too much hard work at the start for me to then bring people in, train them and implement all of that. It wasn’t until I had gone through the other experience and the other side of it that I realised after losing it was a fair bit of money to be honest, that actually it wasn’t really possible to do what I wanted by using what’s out there already. I need to actually create this myself.

Yeah. I’m not totally convinced by that mistake. I get it. I get it as a mistake. But, you know, if you couldn’t find the right supplier, great. No, man. A mistake. An error.

Oh.

I think your clinical one was good.

It was a good one.

But your business one was a bit poor.

Business mistake.

Yeah. Business, man. What kind of business, Sarah? Can you think of?

Plenty, I’m sure. But if I was to think of one straight off the cuff, I’d say recruitment, actually, because this is something that’s probably the thorn in the side of many, many businesses. And I’ve learnt over the years that it’s very difficult to get it right. You need to have a robust system to be able to figure it out. Otherwise you end up going through multiple members of staff and it’s not fair on the staff who’ve been brought in if they’re not necessarily suitable for the job. And I’m not talking just in terms of non-clinical staff, I’m talking clinical as well. So it’s learning to try and attract the right number, the right members of staff to the team. So for example, we went through a period of at the Bristol practice of recruiting about, I would say the team that we have there now are not the team that we had there two years ago because in that first year and a bit, we probably turned around the staff a number of times in terms of we were getting a new nurse practically every 6 to 12 weeks and a new receptionist probably every couple of months as well.

And it was purely down to how we were recruiting at the time. We were getting the a lot of candidates applying, we were getting them in, we were interviewing them and we were being blown away by themselves, by them at interview in terms of their saying all the right things, they’re taking all the right boxes. But what we weren’t getting into the nitty gritty of is getting practical applications of why they’d be good for the job, actually putting them in a scenario which actually shows us what their work ethic is really like, judging whether they’d be suitable mentally for this job or not. And I think that’s that’s what stung us a few times because we had a couple of a couple of candidates all in a row that just weren’t they weren’t cut out for the vacancy. And it wasn’t because they weren’t very good. It was the circumstances at the time of Covid required a certain individual who was hardworking, mentally resilient to walk into the job and be able to actually handle the stress and the pressures. It was the most stressful time to work in a dental practice.

You mean with the masks and the fallow time and.

The.

Just and just the timings? It’s also that as well as all the timings and everything else that were going on, it was crazy. Things were going out of hand on a daily basis and you needed a strong team to be able to adjust to the.

By the way, at that time it was a massive shortage of, of.

It was.

I mean the shortage of people now. But at that time, yeah, it was so it.

Wasn’t.

Surprising. It was hard to find good people at that time.

Exactly. That. You’ve literally just said what I was about to say. It was even harder to try and find the right people, let alone find any staff at all. And that was the real trick and a challenge for us at the time because we ended up on many occasions having to bring somebody in and then lose them within two months, bring somebody else in and then lose them within 2 or 3 months. And it would be for various different reasons. And it wasn’t always their fault. They just weren’t suitable enough for the job. And it took us a while to to get through the chaos of Covid things to settle down a bit. Yes, we had to rely on locums for a bit as a lot of practices did, and then after that, slowly try and find and those those small, suitable staff started coming out of the woodworks, we started to spend a bit more time interviewing them to try and attract the right ones at that point, and it made it a lot easier. But it changed the way I interviewed at both sites actually, because it made me realise that actually the normal traditional way of interviewing just doesn’t work in those types of scenarios.

What are you actually specifically looking for in this job? It’s not just the case. So we’re getting a nurse in. Let’s get a bit more specific than that. What what do we actually what skills do we need from this specific nurse based on where they’re going to work, what surgery they’re going to be in and who they’re going to work with, what specific skills do they need to have? That was something I didn’t used to do to that much detail. We’d look for generic skills that were suited to a generic person doing that job, but it wasn’t specific. And I think that taught me a really valuable lesson. Obviously, every single time you recruit and bring someone in, it costs you a certain amount of money. You lose that chunk of money. The moment that process kick starts and starts again and it’s all costing the business more. The locum agencies you need to bring in will cost you an arm and a leg and all of that. I mean, I’m fairly sure we lost about 10 or £15,000 over the year and a half on that alone in terms of recruitment, if not more than that, to be completely honest.

But it was a valuable lesson because we needed to go through that to realise that actually when you recruit, you’ve got to actually understand the exact profile of this person. You want to get in and it doesn’t matter if somebody impresses you in an interview, if they don’t suit that character, don’t employ them because you will regret it and you will have problems later on down the line. Even if they’re a great talker, even if they they sell themselves extremely well, but they don’t have the characteristics you actually need for that receptionist to work with the other receptionist on on the desk or that that marketer or that nurse, she’s going to be working with a specific person. That’s the person we’re recruiting for and that person won’t get on with that particular personality. So it might be a great nurse, but it won’t fit into the team. And that was a real valuable eye opener for me because actually it really did. Change the way we recruited afterwards. And we’ve got it right a lot more times since then. So it’s been a it was a big eye opener, but it certainly was a big change that was needed as the business.

Of being more.

Specific and digging deeper in the specific areas that you’re looking for. Yeah, but listen, you’ve clearly got a talent in marketing. I can see that as a as a fellow enthusiast of the of the dark art. But you also it’s clear you’ve got a really good understanding of the numbers and the business like that sort of CFO kind of role. Generally, those two people aren’t the same person, not to mention, you know, clinical director, not to mention, you know, CEO, which is a different skill to, to CFO. Yeah. Often in often in tension. Right. That where there’s a there’s a in our business right I want to spend money so I’m just always trying to pull me back you know, and, and the tension helps, the tension works. You know, I want a dream and he wants to run things, you know, and looking forward and, and looking at what’s going on today or he’s amazing with computers and I hate computers, you know? And so how do you manage all of these tasks And forget, forget, forget, forget that question. What’s what are you bad at?

I’m bad at both of those things that you’ve literally just mentioned. So let’s relate the spending. There are various different types. Oh, I mean, you’ve asked about big mistakes I’ve made. It’s buying. The classic one is buying things that I really shouldn’t have bought at that particular time because I genuinely can’t afford it. But I believe or something. Well, the thankfully we needed with the new build but the Treos for example, we bought an Itero scanner. Then within six months we bought a trio scanner and we needed to pay for these things. But I convinced myself that we needed them and we did. And we were using them all the time now. But at that particular time, it probably could have waited another six months until the finances eased slightly from the first purchase. But it didn’t. And it’s because I like the scanner. I can see the limitations of the first one, but I desperately want the second one because I just want it. It needs to be in practice. And it’s that said that that type of relationship. Thankfully both practices I am trying to still instil that relationship between myself and my managers because they are opposite personalities to me. I am not the most organised person in the world. I will happily.

No I’m not as Mr. Organised.

No. I like everyone to do the organising for me.

Me too. Me too.

But I’m not always the most organised with things, hence why I had to bring a PR in because it’s getting too chaotic to live in my head now. So the and that’s that works really well. My manager at Black Swan, Zoe, is one of the most super organised people I’ve ever met. She’s meticulous with lots and lots of different things and that works. But at the same time my one of my greatest skills is being able to look forward at things I’ve got. Obviously I’d want the vision, I always want to drive forward, etcetera, but look forward at certain situations and analyse the situation without and take the emotion out of it and be able to see what it is. And for example, if when we’re going through a financial difficulty phase, for example, and we’ve got various different things that need to that need to happen. And the prime example of that is right now we’ve just literally spent 1.2mm on a brand new build for, for the new build. I’ll be completely honest about how much it costs.

What did you build the building from the ground up?

It was an existing it was an old co-op building that was given to us. And you can imagine the size of a co-op that was given to us as a shell unit, which is what I’d asked for. So we can literally build everything.

From the ground.

The way.

You want it, the.

Way we want it. And that’s what allowed us to make it look like the way it did. But it was always going to cost an arm and a leg. Everything in this place in terms of the technology, the detail, the the heating, the air con, I mean, even the surgeries have ten air change filters and our plumbed into all of them automatically. Just so if anything like Covid ever happened again, it’s already in there. But yeah, it wasn’t going to be cheap to do and did the numbers and did everything with the accountants at the very beginning, but my vision wasn’t going to detract me from doing it, even though I knew the next two years were going to be bloody hard work to try and do that. But it was worth it because I’ve wanted to make a practice look like this for years and years and years. And even though the accountants may say, well, actually another year of saving will make it a bit easier and maybe another two years of saving would probably make it a bit easier. But no, the opportunity is here. It’s now the building isn’t going to be available forever. It’s become available for a lot cheaper because of Covid. It’s now it’s now at a point where it’s the rent is more achievable for us. This isn’t an opportunity that may come around. Again, the location is fantastic. It’s on the edge of the Waitrose car park in prime central location in the middle of the town.

How close is it.

To your previous practice?

It’s round the corner. It’s about a two minute walk.

Oh, lovely, lovely.

So it’s literally around the corner.

If anything, What’s happened.

To the previous one?

Unfortunately, it’s still derelict as it stands. I imagine they’re going to change it into flats so the top two floors will change into flats or apartments.

Are you renting.

That? Yeah, as well. Yeah. Okay. So. So you know what I think? I think that sort of blank canvas approach that you’re taking in co-op I, I saw the best example of that is I don’t know if you’ve seen Robbie Hughes. Have you been there?

I haven’t been.

There, but I’ve seen it.

Yeah.

It’s the best example I’ve seen of that, where it’s a blank canvas, man, And then you can put the walls wherever the hell you want to put the walls. And I think that’s going to be the future, you know. And he says it in a funny way. He says, We’re trying to do 21st century dentistry in 19th century houses. Right. And it’s very true. You know, when you see his place, his surgery has got these I mean, it’s bigger than one of my flats that is like gigantic surgery. But really, see, the future is that I really do. And the pictures I’ve seen of your place. Beautiful, man. Beautiful.

Well, you’re going to see them all over because we are. We’ve got a number of very, very big campaigns going on over the next year and stuff. We’re entering quite a few of the awards later on this year as well. So we’ve been quiet for a while, but we’re coming back with a bang. So yeah.

Awards.

You won an award once, didn’t you.

All those years ago when I was a young dentist.

Yeah. Is that what it was?

What was it? South west, young dentist, that one.

Something like that. Yeah.

So I’ve got a real love hate relationship with the awards. All right, man, let’s finish it off and let’s finish it off with the usual questions. Fancy dinner party. Three guests. Dead or alive? Who do you have?

Oh.

I would have I would mix it up so I would want to have, um. Robert Downey Junior.

Oh, yeah.

Massive Marvel fan. So I can’t help myself. I’d want to see what he’s really like and whether he really is like Iron Man in real life. Is he.

Really? I don’t think he is.

But he’s an actor.

Well, I don’t know. I want to find that out for myself.

Well, do you want Iron Man? You can have Iron Man.

Dude, No, no, no.

No, no. Want to see.

If.

Tony Stark actually exists in Robert Downey.

Junior as a person?

Because he pulls it off so seamlessly and so effortlessly.

I should.

I shouldn’t just say dead or alive. I should say fact or fiction as well. Like it could be a character. You could use some guy’s going to have like, Superman. Go ahead. Who’s next?

Um, next, it would be Martin Luther King.

Oh.

Yeah, I’d like to. It would be. It would be amazing to actually get get the stories from the horse’s mouth. I’d like to really hear what what he really went through and what it was really like at the time of all of that and what drove him more so than anything else to and inspired him to do what what he did at the time.

Have you heard have you heard that there’s a there’s a guy who connects Gandhi to him?

No.

There’s there’s someone. A book. Or is it basically, you know, that sort of non-violent resistance? He he got it from Gandhi via one person who knew them both or something. You know, I’m butchering the story, but it’s something like that. Go ahead. Sorry.

As in they were they knew each.

Other or.

The Gandhi and Martin Luther didn’t know each other. But there was this connector. There was this one person who knew them both. Something like that. I’ll have to look it up. I butchered it. Go ahead. Who’s the third?

Third person would be tricky. Um, just because ideally I’d want it to be a sports person. But at the same time, I would probably want to have a conversation with Dr. APA just because Mike.

And Mike are.

Your fantasy dinner party. Okay, go.

Ahead. It would be at.

Sports betting, so we’ll come back to that. Said he’s getting an honourable mention because he’s not going to make the dinner party, but he’s getting an honourable mention. Oh, I see.

I see. I see. I see.

Well, tell me, is he. Is he your Dental hero? Is that.

Is that think at the moment in terms of veneers and working assets, he’s very inspirational. There’s no doubt about it. The way he’s set himself up out there. The brand strength for me is the biggie. What I really, really love is the consistency and the brand strength. They’ve chosen a niche. They’ve chosen a particular product to go with, and they’ve literally bombarded the the brand with that particular product. They don’t do anything else. They don’t advertise anything else. They talk about obviously full mouth restorative dentistry, etcetera. But it’s it’s concentrated to a specific skill set and I like that. I don’t think I can do it myself. I think I’d be limiting myself if I concentrated, concentrated on one specific skill set. But I really do admire that because it is a major achievement. What I find a major achievement is being able to pull that off in multiple sites as well across the world. I mean that. How do you do that?

How do three sites, Right? Three sites?

Yeah. Well, they open a fourth now as well. Oh, where’s.

That?

Miami. Miami. Yeah. And so again, how do you be the main lead clinician that everybody wants to see but also keep the patients happy? Seeing other associates that work at your practices as well? That is the ultimate question that I’d love to know the answer to.

I mean, I think what’s beautiful about Mike is he took Larry’s practice that was already the most successful practice in America and didn’t just sit back on that so that it is beautiful what he’s done in that sense. So who’s the sportsperson.

The final person would be either I’m going to go for Ronaldo. The other one I would have said would have been probably Rafa Nadal just because he’s always been my favourite tennis player. Just the resilience and the grit that thrive off that. I really like people that just have the determination, their own internal determination to be the best and literally spend their entire life like dedicating their craft to that and getting as good as they can. But it will be Ronaldo I think it will be Cristiano Portuguese.

Ronaldo Yeah.

Yeah. Cristiano I mean, he’s been at the top of the game for, for many, many, many, many years. And he’s, he’s not, I wouldn’t classify him as gifted as Messi, naturally, but I would say that he’s made himself in that position with his sheer determination to literally be the best at what he does for years and years and years. And that that takes some doing. I mean, that is a real, real mental strength to be at the top of your game for for that many years. For forever. And that’s something that I would really find very fascinating in terms of getting an insight into that person’s mindset. And you can see, hear it in interviews and things, but until you actually sit next to someone and ask them the truth, tell me the truth, don’t tell me what you tell them. Cameras I want to know.

Yeah, that’s that’s the point of the dinner party, isn’t it? Final question. It’s the deathbed. Surrounded by your loved ones. Three pieces of advice you’d give to them and to the world.

Uh, the first thing I would say is that hopefully I’ve given them enough opportunities to use those opportunities to grow their own lives and use the opportunities that I’ve given you to grow your own lives. Do not copy what I’ve done. Do not do what I’ve done. Learn from it. Do not make the same mistakes that I’ve done. It would be. And obviously that’s aimed purely at my kids, more so than anything else. Secondly, it would be to understand that money is not everything. It does not bring you happiness. It helps slightly paper over the cracks in some situations, but ultimately it’s about learning what it is that gets you out of bed and makes you and gives you that drive to succeed. Find something in your life that makes you happy, that gives you that drive, whether it’s bringing up your own children, whether it’s a particular profession, a craft, something that you can get quite good at that will give you happiness whenever you need it and whenever you want to do it and become good and accomplished at it. And thirdly is just be a good person. Just be a good person in terms of your own personality. Be a wish, kindness on and everyone around you and the rest of life will follow because you will never please everyone. You will always have haters. But if you can have touched people’s lives positively more than you have negatively overall, and you’ve genuinely done your best in life to make other people feel happy, then you can’t. You won’t have any regrets.

That’s nice, man. Two hours and 27 minutes.

Don’t spend any less. I’ll be honest.

We’ll see if it comes out as one episode or two. We’ll see what Prav decides on that. Brilliant, man. Thank you so much for doing that. Really, really enjoyed that. Really enjoyed that.

Thank you so much for your time.

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.

Thanks for listening, guys. If you got this far, you must have listened to the whole thing. And just a huge thank you both from me and pay for actually sticking through and listening to what we’ve had to say and what our guest has had to say, because I’m assuming you got some value out of it.

If you did get some value out of it, think about subscribing and if you would share this with a friend who you think might get some value out of it, too. Thank you so, so, so much for listening. Thanks.

And don’t forget our six star rating.