Month: July 2019

Transcript

Prav:
The first time I heard your name was Payman, I thought the reason why they call you Payman is that you’ve got loads of cash and you pay for everything, right?

Payman:
What does that mean?

Speaker 3:
This is Dental Leaders, the podcast where you get to go one on one with emerging leaders in dentistry. Your hosts, Payman Langroudi and Prav Solanki.

Prav:
Here we finally are, guys, the Dental Leaders Podcast. This has been a work in progress probably for the last two years to 18 months. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. I guess the reason this came about is me and Pay have been involved in discussions with each other privately about content creation, the value of it, and understanding the why behind everybody’s whatever they do. We independently came together, didn’t we, Pay, and talked about podcasting?

Payman:
I think both of us listened to a lot of podcasts, but before we go any further, I should introduce Dr. Prav Solanki as your host. I’m Payman Langroudi. We were both going to talk to … One thing I realised was when I go out for dinner with a dentist, the conversation I have isn’t around fillings and even whitening. The conversation I have is about them, their lives and the details, the nuances, and that’s what I’m interested in when I talk to someone about the person behind the persona, if you like.

Prav:
That’s so true.

Payman:
We’ve got quite a lot of interesting guests lined up for this show. You probably have heard of most of them when you look at the name. What you’ll find is or what we found was there are people that we’ve known for years who we still didn’t know so much about their lives until we had the long form conversation. For me, I feel like with social media, the way it is, you end up knowing just a tiny fragment of someone’s persona, the thing they’re putting out to the world. Whereas, in this long form conversation, you really get to know the person better in a much more nuanced way and a much more interesting way. Hopefully people can draw lessons, what to do and what not to do from all of that.

Prav:
That’s so true. Payman, just touching on what you’ve just said there, the likes of people like Mark Hughes, Adam Thorne, Anoop Maini who I’ve known for over a decade, had numerous meetings, conversations with, but sitting down focused for an hour and having those deeper levels of conversation about their values, their families, their friends, their struggles in business, life, whatever it is. You really get to understand the person behind this public persona or the story. You often say that when you have a friend, in air quotes, “on Facebook” or on social media, they’re not really friends, but you interact with them. Perhaps you develop in your head what that person will be like in real life when you met them.

Prav:
I think what we wanted to certainly bring in the Dental Leaders Podcast is bring that persona to reality so that if you were to meet the person who came on this podcast, you would have a true sense of what that inner person is like, what their values are, and just to pull out a true level of authenticity. There are so many podcasts out there at the moment. There are several dental podcasts, and how to do a filling, what’s your technique on composite veneers, blah, blah, blah? I’m sure it’s all very interesting, but actually the human element behind it and the authenticity behind it I think is something that we feel people would be more interested in.

Payman:
Yeah, I agree with that. I’m a dentist but not practising anymore. You’re a doctor but not practising anymore. I think we both bring something to the party with respect to that. We both had a career going from clinical to now we’re both in a service role. I’m in the manufacturing role. You’re in the actual client service business. Meeting loads and loads of dentists and seeing the things that are common to them and the things that are actually unique to each one. I feel like there’s so many interesting conversations out there, and I’m really looking forward to discovering more of them.

Payman:
For anyone who is listening, the idea that we can have these conversations really will be helped by you guys to give us suggestions of other interesting people. Obviously, we’ve opened our Rolodex to find the key people that we know who we think people will find interesting. For me, some of the best stories I know of are from dentists who aren’t even famous dentists. Being a famous dentist isn’t the same as being a successful dentist. That’s interesting. We were talking about this before that even some of the most successful dentists that I know haven’t got a public persona.

Prav:
That’s so true.

Payman:
The stories that they tell are even more valuable, I guess. I’m really looking forward to this whole series and hopefully the audience will enjoy it too.

Prav:
Absolutely. I think what Payman has said there in terms of there are some dentists out there that most people won’t have heard of. There are a lot of dentists that I interact with day to day. Our definition of success is totally different. My definition of success may be different to yours, Payman, and a lot of people’s definition of success may revolve around wealth creation. One of the things that I’ve learned through speaking to a lot of these guests that we’ve interviewed is that a lot of people have had very fulfilling, stressful and successful lives, be it in the work-life balance space or be it within their own careers or jumping between job to job, leaving dentistry or going down different pathways. If I think about my work-life balance, this is probably one of the best work days I have in a month because-

Payman:
Although you’ve changed a lot, Prav. When I met you, how long ago was that?

Prav:
Over a decade ago now.

Payman:
A good 14, 15 years ago. You didn’t use to take any holidays at all.

Prav:
No.

Payman:
You obviously weren’t married, didn’t have kids.

Prav:
No.

Payman:
You were super focused. You still are. That whole work-life balance thing, the idea that you leave work at 5:30, that would have been totally something that you wouldn’t have done back then.

Prav:
No. If you would have had that conversation with me a decade ago and said Prav, I’ve got crystal ball here and in 10 years’ time, you’re going to be leaving work at 5:30, running at home to see your kids. Your wife is going to have a meal on the … You’re going to have a different life. You’re never going to work on the weekends again. I would have just laughed at you because at that time, my life just revolved around graft 14, 15, 16 hours a day, falling asleep with my laptop on my chest, waking up with my laptop still on my chest, doing a bit of word, jumping in the shower, go into the office and having those super long days of just grinding it out. I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through that.

Prav:
A lot of the stories resonate with that transition in time where I can relate to the areas in life that people are during their entrepreneurial journey and somewhere at the beginning. I can see a form of me there, and some are way ahead of me. I’m just looking at them from a very aspirational point of view thinking, how do I get there? What are the steps to get there? They leave behind many clues in the interviews that we’ve conducted that we all can learn from, I think.

Payman:
What’s been your darkest moment work-wise?

Prav:
Jesus. I think it revolves around work and health. Let me describe a situation where I was working so hard and I was living by myself at home. Every evening, I’d leave the office via Domino’s. My companion on the way home in the passenger seat was at Domino’s. Did I stop, pack up to eat the Domino’s? No way. I didn’t have time to do that. I remember having the slices in my hand whilst driving home, dropping half of it on my lap, but I would hoover at Domino’s between the journey of picking it up and going home. That was my every night routine. Breakfast was Subway on the way in.

Payman:
It doesn’t sound like you at all.

Prav:
Whatever else comes in. I was on this hamster wheel, and I was putting a lot of weight on. I remember I got to a certain point in time where I was massively overweight, and I’ve been to Central London for a meeting, and I was on the train on the way home, and I had a temperature. I was feeling dizzy. I’m really hazy and lightheaded. I rang my dad up and I said, “Dad, come and pick me up. I’m not going to make it off the platform.” All I remember is my dad stood at the other end of the platform. I’m walking across Manchester Piccadilly and I fainted.

Payman:
You actually fainted.

Prav:
I actually fainted. The next thing I knew that had happened, I was in hospital. The doctor, the medic at the time said to me, “Prav, you were so boiling hot, we could have fried an egg on your chest.” Funny enough, I had an infection in my parotid gland. Believe it or not, I went to see my brother beforehand and said, “I’ve got a little bit of a lump here. What do you think it is?” He goes, “Stop being such a wimp,” in a less polite word and sent me away. Weeks later, that developed into an infection. You know what? I just kept neglecting the signs, the symptoms, everything, the pain. I didn’t go back to see my brother. I didn’t go to see my GP. Why? Because work was everything. Work was my life.

Prav:
Anyway, IV antibiotics, out of hospital a couple of days later. Two days later, my abdomen had swollen, and I was back in hospital for another five days. They thought I had a volvulus in my gut and I got some obstruction. What happened is because of the antibiotics, I had a paralytic alias. Basically my gut had gone into paralysis. Stuff was going in but wasn’t going out.

Payman:
During the Domino’s days.

Prav:
During in the Domino’s days, mate. Fast forward, when I finally got out of hospital, that was one really that low moment where I thought, what the hell am I doing it all for? I am on this hamster wheel. I’m doing everything to keep my clients happy. Some of my clients, I will never make happy no matter what I do.

Payman:
How successful were you at the time? Were you firefighting or were you doing quite well?

Prav:
Financially, I was doing well, right?

Payman:
Really?

Prav:
Very, very immature in both my business direction, recruitment, leadership, all of that stuff. I was successful as a function of working hard and time and hours put in. I was just putting in too many hours and wasn’t working efficiently. I hadn’t had any professional coaching by that point or anything like that. My lowest moment was then when I realised that Prav, you’ve put all of this hard work and energy and you’ve neglected your health over the years. I had previously been fit, healthy and strong, and I hit rock bottom. It was at that point I realised I’m doing all this for who, for what? I cried myself to sleep. I really, really thought. When you sit down and actually reflect and think, what am I doing this for? You can get really unhappy about it and get really teary. It was at that point in my career that I decided to let certain customers go.

Payman:
See, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That every low point has its upside. Are you telling us that you then realised that not every customer is your customer?

Prav:
I think I realised at that point that there were certain customers that no matter what I did, I could never keep happy. Maybe there was somebody out there who could do that. Every time my phone rang and it had that person’s name on it, my heart rate would go up. Those that shouted the loudest got more service.

Payman:
A lot of dentists can relate to this. Everyone has a patient like that.

Prav:
You find that actually the reason why you’re working those 16, 17, 18 hours a day, whatever it was, was because of the demands put on you by unreasonable clients who expected more than you could possibly deliver. One of the hardest things for me to do in business was having those frank conversations with people and saying, “I think there’s somebody out there who can do a better job for you. We’re not the right people for you. At the end of this month, I’m just inviting you to find yourself an ideal agency. Here are the names of a couple of people who could help you out.”

Payman:
Prav, take us back to that time when you gave up medicine. I know it’s very fashionable these days. People want to leave dentistry because of all the stress. At the time when you were a doctor, recently become a doctor, and within how long was it before you took time out?

Prav:
I think for me, I decided that I wanted to go into full-time clinical research.

Payman:
Full-time.

Prav:
Yeah.

Payman:
Really? Okay.

Prav:
I did my PhD at Oxford.

Payman:
At Oxford.

Prav:
I spent three years doing that.

Payman:
Were you top of your class in medicine?

Prav:
Yeah, in the top five.

Payman:
Oxford.

Prav:
Yeah.

Payman:
Bloody hell. Go on.

Prav:
I was coming towards the end of my PhD. My supervisor’s job, a professor at the time had published a couple of papers. I presented at various conferences, and I really, really enjoyed the research side of things.

Payman:
22 – 23, right?

Prav:
Yeah. That was the career path that was paved out for me. I was offered a junior research fellowship at Oxford University, and that was where I was going to go, but in the last year I’m a PhD, my brother had qualified in … Actually, he qualified a couple of years before, but he set up a practise called Kiss Dental. I was kicking around in the last year of my PhD. I had won a scholarship. I pretty much finished my PhD a year early and was hanging around for the funding more than anything else. In that last year, I had some time to help my brother out with his practise, customer journey, marketing and stuff like that. That’s not through any knowledge.

Payman:
What did you know about that?

Prav:
This was my attitude. If I could learn the anatomy and the ins and outs of the entire human body where every nerve, blood vessel flows, the Krebs cycle, biochemistry, pharmacology, all of that stuff inside out. I’m sure I could figure out this marketing game.

Payman:
What did you do, read?

Prav:
Read blogs, websites, experiment. The biggest piece of confidence that my brother gave me was when he said to me, and back in those days, it was really easy to get your hands on money. He got I think 110% loan to start his business up, and then he got an additional 50 grand loan for the marketing. He goes, “There you go, kid. Do your best.” I said, “What am I supposed to do with it?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Just splash all over Manchester.” We did radio. We did news like no one else has done before.

Payman:
He gave you a budget of whatever it was.

Prav:
50 grand.

Payman:
50 grand.

Prav:
50 grand.

Payman:
That’s so amazing. The thing is no one, especially back then, was spending 50 grand on marketing.

Prav:
Not even close, mate.

Payman:
I guess you guys had no idea about that. You just said let’s do it.

Prav:
My brother, if you know him or you know of him-

Payman:
I do.

Prav:
There are two words that will come into your mind when you think of my brother, risk taker.

Payman:
Really?

Prav:
Yeah, without a doubt. He’s got a massive set of balls. He takes risks, but he has so much self-belief and ambition. He knows he’s going to do it. In many areas of his life and aspects of his life, he’s done that, and it’s always served him well. Ploughing 50,000 pounds into marketing at a very early stage and trusting your brother who doesn’t have a marketing background to do that, it’s a massive risk. You know what?

Payman:
What happened? Some patients started coming in?

Prav:
Patients started flooding in. I remember the early days-

Payman:
What did you do with the 50 grand, radio?

Prav:
Radio, local newspaper, Google PPC, which was like 20 P a click compared to [crosstalk] really, really early. We’re talking 2005 here, right? 20 P a click, 30 P a click as opposed to the three and four pounds today. We saturated. We made loads of mistakes. If I look at the mistakes we made back then, holy … They were the biggest cardinal mistakes of marketing that you would have made today. You know what? We just grabbed land. What our goal was if anybody in Manchester thought dentistry, I want them to think Kiss Dental.

Payman:
This time, you were also doing your PhD?

Prav:
Yeah, but it was a three-year PhD. I’ve completed it in two. At the same time, I was teaching undergraduate med to medics, so I was lecturing in pharmacology at Oxford University and teaching a few classes and then doing a few pharmacology practicals as well. In terms of the PhD side of things, I had finished my experiments. I’d written up and had a lot of free time on my hands. A lot of this stuff I was doing remotely. I didn’t have to travel back to Manchester and anything like that for it. Ultimately, I was working in the family business, and it’s what I’ve always known. When my dad had the car shop, we worked in the family business. When my dad drove the taxis, we cleaned the taxis.

Prav:
When my brother had a practise, I was working in the family business and everything that I could do to help my brother be successful. Either way, he would have been successful in his own right. He has such a high level of ambition. If you’ve ever met him, you’ll realise that, but that’s what I wanted to do, anything that I could do to help my brother. He became a success. Every patient that walked through that door and met Kailesh fed off his personality, and he performed dentistry for them.

Payman:
Kailesh has got this amazing way of handling people. Many times, you’ve told me over the years that you’ve been delivering patients for loads of dentists, but Kailesh handles them in a really special way.

Prav:
He’s just got this way of lighting up a room. If you’re at a party, at an event, at a course, there is something quite special about him. I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother. He lights up a room. When a patient walks into a consultation, I’m sure he does the same thing. He created the success out of his practise. He was on politics and cars at the time. Some of his colleagues at the time said, who’s doing your marketing? I’ll speak to our kid. He’ll give you a bit of beer money, give them their beer money and he’ll start out, I didn’t have a clue about business. You know what I was charging for a full service back then? 50 quid a month.

Payman:
I asked Kailesh. I saw a video of the Kiss logo flying around doing fun things. It was really good. I came to Kailesh and I said, “Who did that for you? That’s beautiful.” I think it was one of the first times I had ever met him at some conference. He said there’s this company called The Fresh. He didn’t say it was you, his brother. I remember that.

Prav:
I think that was a big era back in the day because we did deliberately separate-

Payman:
Separate.

Prav:
… that because what I didn’t want to do is associate those two things. That was one of the early mistakes I think we made.

Payman:
How about leaving medicine? You had to decide. Was it much more exciting doing the marketing side or were you seduced by that?

Prav:
I did my PhD and passed it, obviously, and I was offered a junior research fellowship, staying on at the same same lab and everything, but I built up a passion because as I was saying earlier, Kailesh was on politics and cars. His friends had said, who’s doing your marketing? I built up a client base of say eight to 10 clients. I can’t remember exactly how many at the time.

Payman:
You had a business.

Prav:
I had a business. I was sending invoices out using Microsoft Word and actually didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t registered a company, was pumping money into my personal account until I found an accountant. I was just making all the mistakes you do early on in business, but I loved it. It was in my blood from the early days of cleaning taxis, mopping my dad’s shop, serving customers, selling cigarettes, alcohol, groceries. That was in my blood. It’s what I was born to do. I had a deep conversation with my prof at the time, Professor Tom Cunnane. I remember saying to him, “I really love this marketing thing I’m doing.” I was talking to him about that whole thing. He was a friend, a mentor.

Payman:
Did he not think it was a waste that you were leaving the highest level of research and-

Prav:
Very special guy, Tom. He always used to say to me, “Whatever you do, do it with love. Do it with passionate and enjoy everything you do.” He was a fun loving guy. I remember we used to have our tutorials, first year of medicine. Everyone else would have their tutorials in a classical wooden panelled tutorial office. We had ours in the pub. He was a very, very different guy. Taught us how to learn, taught us about enjoying life and passion. When I sat down and had that real conversation with him, he just said, “Listen, Prav. You got to do what you love. You’ve got to do what you enjoy. Just go and do your thing. There will always be a job here open for you. I hope to never see you again.”

Prav:
I think that was my first springboard into the business world and then everything else just, I made a shit load of mistakes and I learned my mistakes and learn … and I’m still making mistakes. When you evolve through this journey, and this is where I find myself today, if I could turn back the clock, would I have done anything differently? Absolutely not. Would have I gone to med school? 100%, because the skills that I learned in talking to a geriatric patient or talking to a paediatric patient or talking to somebody who is just incapacitated and having to take a history from them, give you all the communication skills that you need to communicate in business today. I remember the first time I met you. I was in complete awe of you.

Payman:
Me?

Prav:
Yeah. You’re the owner of Enlighten. You had the name. The first time I heard your name was Payman, I thought the reason why they call you Payman is that you’ve got loads of cash and you pay for everything.

Payman:
What does that mean?

Prav:
Look, in the early days, I was incredibly naïve.

Payman:
Aren’t we all?

Prav:
You look up to certain people and think, what magical powers do they have? I’m sure listeners out there get this as well, but you’d walk up to a certain person who you were in awe of, and you would feel nervous in their presence.

Payman:
Sure. That’s happened to me many times.

Prav:
I think it’s only later in life when … Certainly for me, the things that have balanced me out in life are kids, getting married.

Payman:
Yeah. It’s a big change in your life, big, big, big change. Definitely. Definitely much more at peace is the way I put it, since you got married. Not that you were broken before, but somehow you’re really completed now that you have kids, it seems like.

Prav:
I think it just … Certainly for me and maybe not for everyone, but for me, it’s unleashed or released an area of happiness. Not that I wasn’t happy, but it’s unleashed an area of happiness that I never thought was attainable or possible. It’s almost impossible to describe the feeling that my children give me in terms of happiness and joy and the completeness of me.

Payman:
You were definitely that dad that as soon as the child was put in your arms felt madly, deeply in love with.

Prav:
Totally.

Payman:
Remember we talked about I didn’t feel that. I hope my kids aren’t listening. Not that I don’t love them, I love them very much, but I didn’t feel that immediate moment of holding the child and immediately.

Prav:
The moment Mahaniya came out, it was a flood of tears. It was this-

Payman:
Which I’ve heard before from others, but that wasn’t my feeling. It’s different for everyone, isn’t it? It’s different for everyone.

Prav:
What about you, Pay, leaving dentistry?

Payman:
Yeah, it was interesting. Dentists ask me this all the time actually. The biggest resistance I had was from my parents actually, saying what a waste. The nice thing … I used to think about that myself, thinking, well, all this study and all this practise. Often I think … I certainly wasn’t the dentist who hated dentistry. I used to like it a lot. I like the patients a lot. I like the interactions a lot, but there came a point where I think it was you actually who sealed it in my head. I said I’m going to give up now and maybe come back to it at a later point. You said, “Well, why would you? Why would you come back? Why wouldn’t you just give up?” I think I hadn’t let go fully emotionally from the profession as such.

Payman:
From the perspective of survival, you really worry as a dentist. You really worry because it’s who you are. I wasn’t a dentist long. I was a dentist for about five years, but definitely I identified as a dentist. I still do by the way. If someone asks me, what do you do? I’m a dentist. The thing that really sealed it for me was the notion that if someone else started a company and it all failed, it really would be a gigantic disaster for them.

Prav:
Sure.

Payman:
Whereas as a dentist, if that happens to you, it’s a gigantic disaster of course, but you’re still a dentist. You can still go out, make some money, feed the family.

Prav:
Amazing fallback option, right?

Payman:
Yeah. Have all the status that comes from being a dentist, albeit by that time you would have wasted a few years and might have to be an associate or something, which I was anyway. I was never a principal of a practise. It’s very interesting because up to that point, I was thinking, no, you wouldn’t leave a profession like dentistry to do something like a business. At that point, it flipped and said, actually, the fact that you’ve got a profession like dentistry behind you is a good reason to go into business and take that risk, which we all know it is. It sounds to me like your business was cash flow positive straight away. We definitely weren’t. We had four years of terrible pain.

Prav:
Going back to when you left, you said one of the hardest things was having that conversation with your folks. Had they invested a lot of time, money and energy into a child becoming a dentist?

Payman:
Immigrant story. Our immigrant story was a bit different in that we had to run away from Iran. It wasn’t that go to a better life immigration. We ran away to a worse life. I’m telling you the way it was. We were very comfortable, very happy over there, and overnight had to get up and come over into a small flat, which is very different to what we were used to out there. An immigrant’s story of doctors and dentists. My brother is a doctor. I became a dentist. When you say invest, every parent invests so heavily, whether it’s financially or not. My brother was always top of the class. I wasn’t. I think they were pretty happy when I qualified as a dentist.

Payman:
When I said I want to stop, my dad is an accountant, and he said, “So what do you want to do?” I said, “We want to do this a teeth whitening thing.” He said, “Let me look at the business plan.” He had a look. There was this page on the business plan that said about legality. Bleaching has been illegal. From when we started in 2001 until 2012, it was illegal.

Prav:
What do you mean illegal?

Payman:
Bleaching was illegal. Concentrations above 0.1%.

Prav:
Even by a dentist?

Payman:
Even by a dentist, it was illegal. My dad looked at this page and he went, “So you’re leaving dentistry to do something illegal.” He said, “I think it’s an error. It’s not actually what you mean, is it?” I said, “No, that’s what I’m doing.” Accountants are risk averse. He said, “Look, I can’t back this.” I think he recognised as an accountant, what you do is you end up watching a bunch of entrepreneurs do well or not as the case may be. He said, “Look, I’m not going to stand in your way, but I do disagree with it.” My mom is similar. She thought it was a big waste.

Prav:
You almost proved him right.

Payman:
Well, yeah, because we had a tough time. It’s tough. It’s tough, tough, tough at the beginning. We had a company called Bright Smile. It was a super well-funded enterprise, and we were going head to head against them. With our flawed business model, we were just … The first four years were painful, properly painful. The funny thing is that’s probably when I met you, and you were in awe of this guy who owns Enlighten. We went badly, man. We were in serious trouble in several moments, three or four times in that first four years where we were about to shut the whole thing down and somehow got through it.

Prav:
What fished you out? How did you get out at the other end?

Payman:
In those moments, we managed. There was a moment where literally the bank called us, “Forget it. We’re shutting you down.” It was the day before Dental Showcase, when that came in. I remember at Dental Showcase literally fighting for our lives. We had a record day at Dental Showcase. It’s the agony and ecstasy of business that we all go through, dentists go through with their practises too.

Prav:
For sure.

Payman:
That happened a few times. For me, the thing that I learnt the most about that is the line between success and failure really is very, very thin. If my son came to me today and said, “I want to start a business,” I’d worry for him a little bit.

Prav:
Would you?

Payman:
A little bit. Times are different. Times are different. When me and you started out, the internet didn’t exist.

Prav:
Well, it did, but … Yeah.

Payman:
Not really with me. When we started out-

Prav:
Yeah, just about.

Payman:
So much that’s available to people now wasn’t available. I’m not necessarily saying it’s easier now. Nothing is easy, is it?

Prav:
It’s not. The way I look at it, a lot of people talk about now is the great time to start at business because it couldn’t be easier. The environment is still the same. The competition is still the same. Everyone is in the same boat. My daughter talks to me now about GCSEs and the fact that, oh, they changed the curriculum. We’re going to be the first year who’s going to be doing chemistry on this new point system, blah, blah, blah. So is every other student. The principles of chemistry do not change. The fundamentals of chemistry do not change. If you are the top student in your class, you’ll come out with the top marks. You look at the change in environment in business. We’ve all got the same environment. This competition, I don’t think it is any easier.

Payman:
I think it’s a super interesting time because 20 years ago, it was impossible to break into some businesses because of the way distribution worked and the way marketing worked. Today it’s almost all the huge brands are challengable and you can see it day after day. Uber comes along and does what it does to the whole taxi industry. You can see how any brand is in trouble if the right competitor comes in.

Prav:
Right. A disruptor comes along, yeah.

Payman:
Right. A disruptor comes in. 20 years ago, it’s very hard to disrupt. You had to get your product on the right shelves. You have to have the right relationships in order to do that. Marketing was TV or.

Prav:
News, national press.

Payman:
Marketing was so expensive that that’s where some brands got a proper stranglehold, which I don’t think is the case today. Today, you need talent for sure. There’s no doubt about that. You still need hard work. You’re right. The basics are the same.

Prav:
The basics will always be the same, for sure.

Payman:
This was supposed to be a 10-minute intro, but we got a bit further into it.

Prav:
Yeah, we digressed, but here’s the thing. I hope that you listeners out there have learned a little bit more about me and Pay.

Payman:
Yeah. I think that’s what we want the podcast to be. We want it to be free form, and we want it to last as long as it lasts. We’re not going to stick to climbing zoey.

Prav:
No, not at all. Not at all. Let the conversation flow. Let it go in whatever direction it goes and hopefully we get beneath the skin and beneath the depth of a lot of people in dentistry and you guys learn a little bit more about everyone.

Payman:
Brilliant. Join us. Listen to the first episode. You’re waving.

Prav:
Bye.

Payman:
Bye.

Speaker 3:
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.