Learning When To Let Go with James Goolnik

What failure he had in marriage he made up in having a successful practice; not one to be so much happy about.

But the amount of courage and determination to remain undeterred in achieving something in one’s professional life is quite a feat, considering the amount of emotional stress involved in here. 

The guest for this episode personifies this scenario.

James is a member of the British Dentistry of Occlusal Studies, British Dental Association and is a Dental Phobia certified dentist.

He has twice been listed in Private Dentistry’s poll of the top 20 Elite Dentists in the UK in 2011 and 2012. James has been voted the most influential person in Dentistry in the UK in 2011 & 2012 by trade magazine Dentistry.

He is thrilled to be a judge for both the Dental Industry Awards and the Dentistry Awards.

James lectures internationally and has delivered over 80 seminars on tooth whitening techniques, minimal invasive dentistry, and dental marketing.

His book Brush is the number one bestseller on Amazon, and all the profits go to Dentaid. The first project was in Malawi, where James installed a two surgery dental practice and lead a dental team to deliver a skills transfer workshop.

His current project is tackling sugar as a reward for children.

Parents, professionals, and anyone who is in the same boat as having a family, a successful career and business at the same time can resonate well with James.

Get to learn more about his struggles in life, the practice he has and how he is managing it.

Discover how he builds lasting relationships with his clients as well as his staff.

Find out the marketing strategies used in his business.

His life’s lessons will give you the right perspective of running your own business and growth as well.

Enjoy!

The number one thing you have got to get in a relationship with your patient. Make sure there’s a connection. Make sure there is trust and when things go wrong. Dentistry is not ideal. We are human. Everyone makes mistakes, something happens. But if you have a relationship with the patient, they know, like, and trust you, you can handle it. – James Goolnik

In this episode:

13:12 – How his grit gets him into dental school

19:17 – How James nail down his post-graduation game plan  

21:33 – History of his dentistry career timeline from being a dental associate to becoming the president of BACD 

25:51 – Debunking the myth that dentists are bad business owners

38:48 – The best way to successfully nurture your client relationships

40:30 – Hear James talk about the multi-practice model and why it is not for him

42:50 – Three effective dental patient marketing methods James use

45:36 – How his success as a dentist affected his family life

54:16 – Two simple ways he does to reduce stress at work and family

57:47 – What is the biggest mistake he did on his career 

01:02:46 – Two ways to lead by example and inspire your team

01:09:54 – The recruitment process and thought about firing someone

01:11:59 – The Rewards Project; shifting the rewards culture

01:19:02 – Love, be loved and never stop learning

Connect with James Goolnik:

bowlanedental.com

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Pinterest

Prav and Payman:

Website

Prav on Instagram

Payman on Instagram

Transcript

Payman: Hi guys, welcome to the Dental Leaders Podcast. Today’s guest is James Goolnik, one of the highest profile dentists out there. I think today was quite fun, quite interesting, going through his very beginnings, all the way to the campaign that he started about sugar and children’s teeth.

Prav Solanki: The Rewards Project.

Payman: The Rewards Project, exactly right. I go back a long, long way with James. I was actually in school with him.

Prav Solanki: James, ever since I got into this industry, he’s always been somebody who I looked up to. Was in awe of, really, in terms of looking at what he’s achieved, the team around him, the team of specialists that he works with. I remember once giving a lecture at the BACD and James calmed me down just before I stepped on stage. I wasn’t speaking in front of a large number of people but he gave me a few words of advice. Super, super nice guy.

Prav Solanki: What did I take away from today’s interview? The support from his family, the lesson from parents and family support, how a strong cultural background and strong family unit can set you up for life. That combined with hard work, effort, created what his success is today. You’re really going to enjoy today’s interview.

James Goolnik: Too much paperwork.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: Too much bureaucracy. Yeah.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: I like to be fast-paced and change things. If I do something one way and it’s not working, okay, I want to change it. I don’t want to go through six committees and wait a year to change something. I just want to get on and do it.

Payman: But fast forward, you were president at the BACD?

James Goolnik: Yes.

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

Prav Solanki: So today we have James Goolnik with us, the founder of Bow Lane Dental and many other startups, some businesses, which I’m sure we’re going to hear about. James, thanks so much for joining us today and taking your time out of your busy day to come and spend time with me and Pay. I’d just like to start by getting a bit of background. What’s your backstory James? Just growing up and how you got where you were, if you could give us a run through of that really.

James Goolnik: Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks very much for inviting me. It’s an honour to be here with you two. I remember you a bit from school. Not a lot. Payman and I went to the same school. I won’t tell you all the stories about that. That’ll be the uncut version of the podcast.

Payman: It’s a very good school now.

James Goolnik: Yes.

Payman: But back then it wasn’t so good.

James Goolnik: No, not so good. It was actually just boys when we went.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: I was like won’t go wrong. As soon as I left all the girls came in. I missed it.

Payman: Did you put your kids in a mixed school?

James Goolnik: They’re mixed with all actually, so I’ve got one in single sex. Actually, two in single sex and one in a mixed school.

Payman: Oh really? I insisted on mixed school.

James Goolnik: Did you? Okay. Don’t want to get them as problematic as what’s happened with you. So yeah, my backstory is I actually always wanted to be a dentist from the age of like 12. I was like okay, what do I want to do? I was thinking about different careers. I’m Jewish, so my family’s like, “You’ve got to be an accountant. A nice, Jewish accountant.” Or a doctor, that’s it. An accountant or a doctor. I thought I didn’t fancy accountancy but I thought I’d keep my mother happy and go spend a day with an accountant, spend a day with a doctor, and spend a day with a dentist. The dentist was having so much more fun, had a much nicer car, and it was just like okay, I want to be a dentist. Actually, Mr. Bay , if you’re listening, from Highgate Group Practise, you’re the guy that inspired me to be in dentistry.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

Payman: Was he your dentist?

James Goolnik: He was my dentist. He had a really nice manner to him. I enjoyed going there. I wasn’t scared or anything. Had some fillings. I know that’s a bit of a shock, dentist having fillings, but I think to be a good dentist you’ve had to have a filling, have an extraction, have a bit of everything. I haven’t had an implant yet or a root canal, but there’s always time. I think it was just I spent a really good time with him and just really enjoyed it, and thought, “Okay, I’m good with my hands. I like people. I like business as well.”

James Goolnik: My father was in publishing, so he published children’s books and games, and he’s always been about, “Work for yourself, don’t work for anyone else. You can be in control of your own boss, your own destiny. You can decide what you want to do.” So I thought, “Okay, I definitely want to have my own business. I want to specialise in something,” and dentistry was the right career that you can actually spend some time and actually become qualified… It’s for five years, but I loved it. So it was like okay, “Work with my hands, that’s what I want to do.”

Prav Solanki: And was that from the age of 12, that influence that you wanted to be your own man, work for yourself, have your own business?

James Goolnik: Yes, right from the beginning because my father was as well. I just saw that he could control… If he wants to finish work at 2:00 in the afternoon and come home, and he can. It was like okay, that’s really cool. I don’t want to do too much paperwork. I want to work for myself and have a bit of control. And I like making things. I was always making Airfix models and lots of different things. I actually filmed my first feature film with a guy that some of you might have heard of called Christopher Nolan. He did the Batman films and the rest of it, and we actually…

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: He was at school as well, in Highgate, you might have known him.

Payman: I didn’t but Tom Hooper was in my class.

James Goolnik: Oh, okay.

Payman: Who did a bunch a films.

James Goolnik: Okay, so I mean it’s… Highgate, it was quite a lot of interesting people. There were a lot of people who did nothing afterwards. So yeah, we filmed a film, it’s actually like a space film. I quite liked pyrotechnics at the time and he was good with Airfix. We made these Airfix models and put these little rockets on the end of them, and then we strung up in the basement some string from one side to the other. We put the Airfix model at the top, lit the pyrotechnics, ran back to the camera and went, “Let go.” It flew across. Okay, great. Now he’s made millions and millions.

Payman: And you’re a dentist.

James Goolnik: Yeah, he didn’t even put me in the credits. But anyway, thanks Chris. Yeah, that was fun.

Payman: What was it like being the kid of someone who wrote books for kids and had games for kids?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I was always the guinea pig.

Payman: Yeah, were you?

James Goolnik: Me and my brother were the guinea pigs. We got lots of free stuff. It was like, “Try this out. Is it any good? Will it sell? How much will it sell for?” We tried lots of different things so it was quite nice to try new things before they came out. My dad went to trade fairs and things like that, and sometimes we got to go along and stand on the stands. God, that was awful. Standing on a stand, I’ve been on dental stands since then, it’s like okay, comfortable shoes you need because it’s hard work.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Payman: Yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: So yeah, it was really good fun.

Prav Solanki: You got integrated into business from a very young age in your father’s business I guess?

James Goolnik: Yeah, yeah.

Prav Solanki: What were you like as a student? Were you a swot or were you gifted?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I wasn’t particularly clever. I wasn’t particularly clever so I realised that actually to get anywhere I just have to work harder than everyone else because otherwise I just wasn’t going to get there. I was always doing work. I started out, I think my first job was at 13. I was delivering milk for the milkman. I wasn’t that business savvy because he used to pay me in yoghourts. It took me about a year to realise that actually I could get cash for this job rather than just yoghurts. My fridge was always full of yoghurts, which was quite handy.

James Goolnik: That was really good fun. I enjoyed that. I worked in the cinema. I did lots of different things, but-

Payman: Did your parents force you to work?

James Goolnik: No.

Payman: Was it one of those, or were you one of those kids that wanted money in your pocket?

James Goolnik: I wanted money to do my stuff. I wanted to buy the latest computers, I wanted to buy things.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: It’s like okay, they gave me a certain amount of pocket money but I wanted to upgrade it. And also, I was always interested in cars and I thought, “Okay, I want to get a nice car.” In that stage, they were all the Golf GTI’s and the XR2’s, and all that sort of hot hatches-

Payman: Peugeot 205’s-

James Goolnik: GTI and all that stuff. It was like, “I want to get a nice car, the best way to do that is…”

James Goolnik: So it was… Okay, I did that job. I went delivering newspapers, and then cinema. Cinema was quite good, working in the cinema. Anyone from London that worked in Muswell Hill Odeon in North London. That was good fun. Unlimited popcorn and Coca Cola, hence the reason why I’ve got six fillings now. It was like okay, this is not so good, but that was good fun. I was worked on the holidays and on Saturdays as well, so I started saving up.

James Goolnik: And also, being Jewish, when you get 13 you become a man, you do a bar mitzvah and lots of people give you gifts for that. I put all the money aside, saved up, and first car was not that sexy unfortunately. It was a Metro, a mini Metro, if anyone knows a mini Metro.

Prav Solanki: What colour?

James Goolnik: It was white, okay?

Payman: Oh.

James Goolnik: But the best bit about it, it had a big sunroof so you had this sunroof that could slide right the way back. It was an after market thing, and that felt like a convertible to me. It was like okay, wow, this is cool. But yeah, and then on from that I got a Fiesta XR2.

Prav Solanki: Green car.

Payman: Was that in school? 17, you had a Metro.

James Goolnik: Yeah. And then I had… Yeah, the XR2.

Payman: Did you drive to lunch?

James Goolnik: Yes.

Payman: That was the ultimate crime in school, I remember.

James Goolnik: Drive to… Well, the thing about driving to lunch was, which is quite bad, we all drive to lunch. It was only like a 15 minute walk-

Payman: What do you mean only? It was a long walk.

James Goolnik: It was a long walk.

Payman: To get to lunch was a 15 minute walk and all the rebels drove to lunch. It was a big no-no.

James Goolnik: The hardest thing was one of my friends, Guy, he had a VW Beetle and he drove to lunch, and there’s also another one of his friends, John. I was in the back of the Beetle and they were racing down one of the roads in Highgate, Winnington Road. They were racing down it and one of them didn’t judge the speed quite well, and they smashed into each other.

Payman: Oh.

Prav Solanki: Oh dear.

James Goolnik: So we had two smashed cars on the way and we were like working out, “We’ve got 15 minutes to get to lunch, how are we going to do this? Somebody’s got to stay with the cars and we’re going to leg it back to lunch.” So we left Guy with the cars to sort it out with the police. Okay, not so good. In school uniform. Don’t know how he got out of that one, but hey.

Payman: But those you knew working as a kid, Prav was talking about it before… He’s worked in your dad’s shop?

Prav Solanki: Worked in my dad’s shop.

Payman: He puts all his success down to what he learned talking to the public at that age. My parents forced me into a job at 16 or so.

Prav Solanki: What were you doing?

James Goolnik: 16?

Payman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before that, I didn’t. It was Oxford Street.

James Goolnik: Were you the one with the placard?

Payman: No, no, no.

James Goolnik: Golf sale this way.

Prav Solanki: Subway, McDonald’s.

Payman: I persuaded some clothes shop guy that that’s the career I wanted for the rest of my life and I worked a summer. I ended up spending more every day than I was earning just because I felt so horrible working that I used to go and eat… I would get steak and stuff.

James Goolnik: So nothing’s changed then?

Payman: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But what I’m saying, I actually hated my parents for making me work at that time, but how valuable that little bit of work was? Now, listening to you saying, “At 13,” and then all the different jobs, just seeing how people run businesses, talking to the public is huge.

Prav Solanki: Huge.

Payman: It’s huge.

James Goolnik: Brings you out, and also having your own money is like okay, I’ve made this money. I can spend it on exactly what I want.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: If I want a XR2, I’m going to buy an XR2 rather than having to-

Prav Solanki: So all that wealth that you’d accumulated at that young age, was your first big purchase the mini Metro?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Yeah?

James Goolnik: It’s freedom.

Payman: Where did you study dentistry?

James Goolnik: My story was a little bit different because I didn’t get the grades that I wanted to get into dental school. I passed my A levels but I didn’t get enough right grades so I had to retake two of the A levels. I retook them and that actually gave me a lot more drive. Okay, I’ve studied hard but not enough to go where I want to go. I got a place in one dental school but it wasn’t where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in London. I’m a Londoner. So I went back and restudied them and got into King’s.

Payman: Was it an extra year?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I did actually discover… And also, I’m slightly unusually because I actually went to UCH so I was the first… The last intake at University College Hospital when it was great. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go there,” and then after the first six months they said, “Actually, you guys are the last intake. We’re not doing dentistry anymore so enjoy it.”

James Goolnik: So yeah, this is great it was like a party, then a lot of the lecturers started leaving. I thought, “That’s not so good.” And then they said, “Actually, you are the last and we’re not going to take you all the way through so you’re going to do one year with us, and then you’re going to have to go somewhere else.” So we then had to split up and choose wherever we wanted to go to, so I went from UCL, I went on to King’s.

Payman: So that was the time when they thought caries was on the down, we don’t need to train anymore dentists?

James Goolnik: They were cutting back on dentists. Okay, how can we save money? We don’t need dentists.

Payman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: They got that wrong.

Prav Solanki: What was it like to… You said you worked hard, you were a swot or however you want to put it, and then you got your A level results-

James Goolnik: I didn’t get it.

Prav Solanki: … and they were not what you expected.

James Goolnik: It was a little bit of a kick in the teeth, as it were, but it was like okay, you know what? I knew I wasn’t as clever as the other people in my class, but I was driven and I wanted to do it, and I thought, “Okay, well I passed but I didn’t get what I wanted and I still want to do dentistry, so I’m just going to go back and do it.” So I just put my nose down and did it and got the grades and got into King’s.

Payman: A lot of people say that year of retake was the best year of their lives. They find themselves and that sort of thing. What was that year like?

James Goolnik: Half of it was quite hard because all my friends had got the grade and got into where they wanted to be, so that was hard. I had new group of friends, but I had an amazing girlfriend at the time so that was brilliant.

Payman: Okay.

James Goolnik: That helped me change my focus a little bit. And it was also a stepping stone in between… I was at school and I was at the same school for all those years and everyone knew me, and suddenly I’m going somewhere new and there’s people-

Payman: Where did you go?

James Goolnik: I went to a place called Mander Portman Woodward. It’s in Kensington.

Payman: Uh-huh (affirmative). MPW?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: That was great because there were loads of different people, and there were people that were like on something the whole time and the reason they didn’t pass was because they were just out their heads the whole time. There were other people that just didn’t do any work and people like me who didn’t quite get to what they wanted to and they were studying. They treated us like adults. It wasn’t like they knew us from being 12 onwards and they knew all the things we’d done wrong. It was like, “Okay, you guys are 17, you know what you’re doing. You want to get these grades, let’s just do it.” It was actually brilliant.

Payman: How about at dental school?

James Goolnik: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Payman: How did you find… I’m we’ll get onto the social side, but the academic side of that, did you find it hard?

James Goolnik: I found it quite hard.

Payman: I did.

James Goolnik: I mean the manual stuff and doing it, I was good with my hands and I was always passing things and everything. I didn’t have to redo things like that, but the actual studying was hard work and it was like, “Okay, why am I learning about mitochondria? Am I ever going to need to know about this? Why am I learning this?” It was tricky to put that into real life.

Payman: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: That was the hard thing, and there were these people that were teaching us who had never been in practise. I’m thinking, “You’ll teach me all about communication skills but you are communicating people who are not paying anything. It’s a whole different ballgame when they can choose where to go.” So I found that was very different. But King’s was great. There were some really good people that I’m still friends with, quite a lot of them, since then.

Payman: Do we know anyone who was in your year?

James Goolnik: Yeah, Tif. I think Tif.

Payman: Oh, were you in the same year as Tiff and Anoop?

James Goolnik: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tif and Anoop, all of us.

Payman: Okay.

James Goolnik: We were quite-

Payman: Mamaly.

James Goolnik: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mamaly and… It was quite a lot of us that have done quite a lot of things in dentistry since then.

Payman: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: It’s drove us on. But no, I really enjoyed it. We set up different things and I, you’ll find this out later on, but I don’t drink. My first girlfriend was killed in a drink driving accident. I’ve never been a big drinker anyway and my parents aren’t big drinkers, but that just put me off completely. I’ve got this rule that if I’m driving I won’t drink a thing, and then through university actually it was easier just to not drink. Then I became… “Okay, what am I going to do? I want to be involved at the party but I don’t want to be the odd one out,” so I became a DJ. I DJ’d through all of university and that was great fun.

Payman: What kind of music?

James Goolnik: It was all 80s stuff. Some people might not call it music but I loved it. Wham, rap, it was great. Club Tropicana, everything. It was great fun.

Payman: Was your girlfriend, you were with her when this happened?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: So how old were you?

James Goolnik: That was when I was 18, so that was actually just-

Payman: Wow.

James Goolnik: … yeah, before I got into university.

Prav Solanki: You were in the car?

James Goolnik: No, I wasn’t in the car. It was a weekend and she was away with her friends. I’d just gotten into dental school, and then this happened before she started.

Payman: Wow.

James Goolnik: That was my first proper girlfriend so it was like okay, this is tough.

Payman: How did you handle that?

James Goolnik: I’d not really had loss in my life up to then so that was hard, and also I was really close with her. It was like, okay… My parents didn’t know what to say. It was like okay, how are they going to tell me? Yeah, it was tough.

Prav Solanki: They broke the news to you?

James Goolnik: Yeah, they broke the news to me. It was like okay, this is tough for 18, doing that, but…

Prav Solanki: And it was a drunk driver accident?

James Goolnik: Yeah. She was sober and all the rest of them, then somebody… Because she was coming out of petrol station and somebody came straight in and hit straight into her. He was way over the limit and killed her. Unfortunately it was just her in the car, her friends in the back were all fine. But that was tough.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: And that’s put me, I mean I was never a big drinker anyway, but as soon as that happened it was like okay, well drinking and driving shouldn’t be in the same thing.

Prav Solanki: I totally agree with you.

James Goolnik: I don’t care what people say, “Oh I can handle it,” whatever.

Prav Solanki: Just have one.

James Goolnik: Have one and then if something happens, you’re always going to think for your life, “If I hadn’t had that one, would that not have happened?” My rule is nothing, and then it was… Actually, in a way, it made me get into DJing that was great fun. Then it got me into meeting other people. You just force yourself to do it because otherwise if you’re sitting in the party and you’re the only one not drinking, everyone thinks they’re hilarious when they’ve had a bit to drink and when you’re sober it’s like, “You’re not that funny actually.”

Payman: So were you DJing at the university parties?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I was DJing at all those student unions stuff, getting paid for it, great fun-

Payman: I bet you were quite a popular guy at that point.

James Goolnik: At that stage it was great. It was a great way to meet people, and also I wasn’t that confident with girls at that stage and it was like okay, I’m in the DJ booth, they have to take to me if they want music. I’ll put rubbish music on until they talk to me. It was like okay, they’ll start being really friendly if… Okay, okay. So that was quite good fun. And the DJ booth has lots of dark corners, so that was also good as well.

Prav Solanki: Is it true that the DJs always pick up the hot chicks?

James Goolnik: Yeah, well my success rate definitely increased once I did DJing.

Prav Solanki: Increased the conversion rate, yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: That was it, yeah.

Payman: So then in dental school, were you very driven in so much as like… Were you already planning, on your way out, what you were going to be doing? Were you focusing-

James Goolnik: Yeah, I was already planning to have my own practise and I wanted to do something very different, so I was looking at what other people were doing out there. Okay, that’s not that great. People don’t want to go to the dentist, why do they not want to go to the dentist? How can we make it more approachable, more friendly, more of a fun environment? So I was looking at what other people were doing in other industries and saying, “Okay, that’s what I want to do.”

James Goolnik: But also realising that, at dental school, five years is not enough to, one, get your communication skills up. They teach nothing about business. I learned it from my father and just winging and seeing what works, what doesn’t work. But also the skills we have clinically aren’t really enough. They may be enough to get you through for a few years, but they’re not enough to meet the demands of the patients. People want more and more things. Okay, I need to do some more training as well, but I also needed to have a life.

Payman: So you got a job?

James Goolnik: Yeah, so I got a job. I worked part-time, actually, in a dental practise doing nursing while I was going through university.

Payman: Oh really?

James Goolnik: And then when I finished I quite enjoyed the hospital life. There was something about the hospital that was quite good fun, and I was very good at taking teeth out. So I thought okay, what can I do? So I decided to do a bit of Maxfacts, so I spent a year doing Maxfacts.

Payman: House jobs?

James Goolnik: Yeah, house jobs, and that was good fun.

Payman: On call as well?

James Goolnik: On call as well, and that’s when I-

Payman: And casualty and all that?

James Goolnik: Yeah, that’s when I met my first wife, in casualty, who was a doctor.

Payman: Oh, okay.

James Goolnik: It was really good fun and we’re quite lucky because Maxfacts, there wasn’t a lot to do, so we were the ones that could do the facial swelling. People got drunk, again, that was another thing that put me off alcohol, it’s like all these people… Why did you drink so much? Now look at your face, it’s like crazy. The only good thing about them drinking so much is that I didn’t need to use any anaesthetic because they had anaesthetised their whole body, and you can just suture them back up again.

James Goolnik: So that was good fun and I got to take out loads of tricky teeth. And based in Camberwell we had these massive people with huge roots, and it’s like okay, I can get this tooth out. I don’t need to be strong, I just need to change my technique.

Payman: Did you know while you were doing that that you weren’t going to pursue that?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: So it was like a get a bit of experience thing?

James Goolnik: Too much paperwork, too much bureaucracy. Yeah. I like to be fast-paced and change things. If I do something one way and it’s not working, okay, I want to change it. I don’t want to go through six committees and wait a year to change something. I just want to get on and do it.

Payman: But fast forward, you were president at the BACD?

James Goolnik: Yes.

Payman: But we’ll come to that.

James Goolnik: I was also president of the Dental Society as well.

Payman: Oh, of King’s?

James Goolnik: Yeah, King’s. I started off doing more… When I did the DJing, then we did more fundraising, and then we said, “Actually, you know what? King’s as a dental school is not as inclusive as all the other ones,” so I reached out to Guy’s Hospital and all the other dental schools, and we had this dental sock where we all came together and we did this charity fundraising.

Payman: Oh nice.

James Goolnik: I did the DJing for that as well.

Payman: Nice.

James Goolnik: It was actually quite good fun. And then we got the reps, which they can’t do any more, but they came down and gave us loads of freebies. MPS and stuff, they all want to get us signing up so giving us as much as possible is like okay, this is cool. We were excited by these little planners and stuff weird things. It was fun.

Payman: Then you got an associate job somewhere?

James Goolnik: Yeah. So then I got an associate job, and that was… I worked in different places. I was Googling award-winning practises and there was one in Thamesmead that had an award-winning dental practise. They had done everything and they’d done loads of PR and all the rest of it.

Payman: I don’t think Google existed at that point.

James Goolnik: Maybe not.

Prav Solanki: AltaVista or Yahoo.

James Goolnik: Might have been, yeah. I don’t know. I feel like Google’s been here forever.

Payman: It feels like that, it does feel like-

Prav Solanki: Netscape, Netscape.

Payman: It does.

James Goolnik: I think I just picked up the phone and go, “What’s the best-”

Payman: So it was a nice practise?

James Goolnik: Yeah, it was in Thamesmead and it was mainly an HS practise but it did some private stuff, but he was really good. Principal’s name was Vijay. He was really good at marketing, really good at marketing, and really good communication skills. I learned lots about that and it was like [crosstalk 00:23:17]-

Payman: That was your first associate job?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: Did you have VT or-

Payman: Your first principal really shapes you I find. Well mine did. So this guy was marketing and was doing-

James Goolnik: Yeah, he was doing a lot more marketing and he was doing a lot more about communications throughout their newsletter, paper, newsletter-

Payman: Which back then was a huge deal.

James Goolnik: It was.

Payman: No one was doing that.

James Goolnik: He was doing a lot more stuff and he was working the community, and he was showcasing what they were doing with the local businesses.

Payman: Shout out, what’s his surname? Vijay…

James Goolnik: I think it’s Vithani. Vijay Vithani. I really enjoyed that. And then also, through that I then did some part-time associate positions on weekends. I was lucky enough to get a place in Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge. Alan Gold and Roman Franks.

Payman: I know that practise.

James Goolnik: Yeah, so that was really… It was amazing. I was like the youngest person there. They were all going, “Are you qualified? Can you do this?”

Payman: So suddenly you were exposed to that very high-end…

James Goolnik: High-end, but I was basically doing the rubbish shift that no one else wanted to do. So like the Thursday afternoon late shift and the Saturday mornings.

Prav Solanki: Back then, how did you go about getting your jobs? You said you opened a book or Googled or whatever, you rang the place and said, “Give us a job,” or-

James Goolnik: Well no, I wrote letters. It was a big thing, about writing, so I looked at all the best practises around and I wrote letters to them saying, “Okay, this is me, this is what I can offer you and I’d love to work with you.” I sent out about 50 of them and-

Payman: It’s different, isn’t it? I never did that. I went and opened up the BDJ and looked for what jobs there were. That outlook of-

James Goolnik: I went for places that didn’t have jobs because they were where I wanted to go to.

Payman: Yeah, very interesting.

Prav Solanki: You had an idea of 50 practises you’d like to work in.

James Goolnik: And I sent the letters out and I got about 10 replies, but two of them were standout. I thought, “You know what? I want to go to these.” So I went there, met them, and yeah, I loved the practise. I was slightly different at that stage President of the Dental Society. I was more confident about what I could do and I was starting to learn about marketing and they quite liked that. Also, I was more moldable. They were, “Okay, I think I can teach this guy something. He’s not jaded yet.”

Prav Solanki: And all along during this whole period of time, you were going to open your own practise?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: That was very, very clear in your mind?

James Goolnik: It always was.

Payman: You were saving up?

James Goolnik: It was getting the skills because it was like okay, I need to know what I need to know because dental school taught me nothing about that. I can do teeth but can I do teeth profitable, and can I run a business and run a team and motivate people? It was more about, “I need to learn some skills,” so apprenticeships, as they were.

Prav Solanki: Stepping stones.

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: It’s really interesting because a lot of people who know they want to go into business don’t know that they need the skills to influence and manage a team, or learn about marketing. Some people just find themselves and say, “Right, I want to start a practise, I want to go into business,” and then discover that. But it was very clear in your mind that you needed these skills?

James Goolnik: I needed the skills to have it and also I wanted to learn from the best, so who are the best out there that are doing these sort of things? Obviously I’m a Londoner so I know like in Knightsbridge, that is a high-end place. They’re going to have money, they’re going to know what they want. They’re not going to take any rubbish so let’s learn from these guys. Alan and Roman have been doing it for quite a few years.

James Goolnik: It’s also old school. When I started it was like people weren’t wearing gloves. It was like okay, it’s new now, we’ve got to wash our hands and wear gloves. Okay, what’s this rubber dam stuff? What do you do with this?

Payman: There wasn’t rubber dam…

James Goolnik: No.

Prav Solanki: Is that right, no gloves?

James Goolnik: They started off no gloves and they started… People were doing it in dental school, we were wearing gloves, but it was still, out in practise, it was just okay, wash their hands.

Payman: When I was a kid my dentist didn’t wear gloves.

Prav Solanki: Fingers in your mouth?

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: It was thought to be like tactile sensation or something.

James Goolnik: I’ve got a story about that actually. This was only six years ago. We have an endodontist in our practise and they were moving. They were deciding if they were going travelling. Okay, we need to find somebody else, so I started interviewing people. We hired this guy, CV looked amazing. He had been doing it for like 10 years. Special was endodontist, all the rest of it. After the first day I always get feedback from the nurses, and so, “Were they nice to you? How was he?”

James Goolnik: They said, “Yeah, he was really nice, but there’s a real problem. He wasn’t wearing gloves.” I said, “What?” This is six years ago we’re talking about, okay? He wasn’t wearing gloves. I said, “What’s going on here? Are you sure? Did you miss it?” No, he wasn’t wearing gloves. What, nothing? “No, he puts the gloves on when he starts and when the patient’s lying back he takes them off. I said, “That’s a bit odd,” so I thought well you’re not doing a second day like that.

James Goolnik: I sat down with him and said, “I’ve heard something, that you’re not wearing gloves in treatment.” He said, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” I said, “Why did you not do that?” He said, “I’m an endodontist, I get much better feel with my fingers without gloves.” I said, “Yeah but what about cross infection and CQC and all that?” He goes, “Oh I put the gloves on in the beginning so the patient sees that I’m wearing gloves and then I put a rubber dam on and then it’s all sterile so I don’t have to do anything.”

James Goolnik: I said, “Okay, fine, you won’t be coming back here. Bye bye.” And that was the end of it. I could not believe it. It’s like wow, okay.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: So there are people out there who don’t wear gloves.

Payman: Do you remember when you decided, “All right, I’m going to go look for a premises,” you started from squat, right?

James Goolnik: Yeah, started from squat.

Payman: That’s a big thing to do. Did you know that’s what you wanted to do? You wanted to set it up?

James Goolnik: I started looking at practises for sale, so I signed to all the selling agents, Frank Taylor and all that stuff, to see what there was out there and the people were selling… It was rubbish. I went to see the practises and they were rundown and they were like, “I want 200,000 for this.” For what? There’s nothing there. I thought I’m not paying for rubbish. I’m going to start myself. I also wanted to do it very differently, so I thought okay, I want to do something different. I’m going to start looking around for premises.

Payman: And the city was… I mean there was maybe… There were dentists but it was single handed…

James Goolnik: Yeah, it was really small.

Payman: That kind of-

James Goolnik: There was no marketing, no PR. There was no multi-specialists.

Payman: What made you think the city, apart from the obvious?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I mean I just love the buzz. The buzz of the city, there’s something special. Basically I then went on to do a master’s degree at the Eastman and the Eastman’s in Gray’s Inn Road, so I was going through the city a lot of the time.

Payman: Right, right, right.

James Goolnik: Some of my friends were working in the city as bankers and lawyers-

Payman: You got the bug?

James Goolnik: There was such a great buzz. When you get on the train and they’re all suited and booted, they look so good. There was money everywhere. I was like okay, this is the plan. I looked around and there was no one doing what I wanted to do in the city. I got this huge map out and I pinned… I got out the Yellow Pages, saw every practise in Central London, and I was pinning them around. I thought there was just not enough in the square mile. There’s not enough, and then the one’s that are there were doing an average job. I thought you know what? This is a no brainer. I’m going to go in here and do it.

James Goolnik: So actually, then two of the practises that stood out, I wrote a letter to them to say, “Look, I’m interested in buying your practise if you’re thinking about retiring in the next few years, we have a conversation.” Never came back to me so I thought you know what? I need to find something, so I then went to some estate agents, commercial estate agents, said, “Okay, I want to set up a dental practise. What do I need to do? I want you to find some premises for me.”

James Goolnik: So I had two guys on retainers looking for a dental practise potential. They were looking for it, and while they were looking there was an advert in the BDJ. I don’t normally read adverts, but there was a guy that was actually an American dentist, wanted to set up a practise in the city. A guy called Greg Bullock, he’s in New York, and he was doing something quite different. He was doing… All his staff was Japanese. So all the dentists were American but all the staff was Japanese, and he was targeting the Japanese market in New York and he wanted to do something in the UK.

James Goolnik: He wanted somebody to help him set it up, so while I was actually doing my MSC and working part-time, I started working for him and I helped set up the practise. It was great because he used to come every couple of months. Get loads of Skype calls and phone calls and emails and stuff, but then he would just come every couple of months so I had free range to set it up for him.

Payman: So this isn’t Bow Lane?

James Goolnik: This is before Bow Lane. It’s called Nihon Shika Group.

Payman: Wow.

James Goolnik: That was before Bow Lane.

Payman: I’ve got some experience, Japanese don’t trust non-Japanese medical… Yeah, that’s for sure.

James Goolnik: They’re great patients because they don’t need any anaesthetic. They just go into a zone and they just let you get on with it.

Payman: And they fully trust what you’re going to do.

James Goolnik: They fully trust with you, it’s fully paid by insurance so all you have to do is fill it out, but you have to speak Japanese. If you don’t speak any Japanese you’ve got no chance.

Payman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: So I had Japanese nurse, Japanese receptionist. I learned some Japanese, like, “Which tooth hurts?” Everything was silver plated. It was all precious, semi-precious metals. Inlays, onlay, things like that. It was just… Okay, I’m going to do it, and they were really respectful, easy to treat. I love Japanese food. It was just great.

Payman: What a cool dude this guy was though.

James Goolnik: He helped me.

Payman: Like back then.

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: Was thinking of going from New York to London treating Japanese patients. That’s thinking outside the box.

James Goolnik: He had five practises in the states.

Payman: Did he?

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: He wanted to do one in the UK, so that was great because he was basically my mentor. He was the one who was teaching me about okay, I need to pay associates this amount money, this is how you need to do it. He helped me think about contracts and how to get the right team members, how to motivate them, how to get the best deal for your materials, and things like that. Because before, I just… Okay, I like this rep, I’ll buy all from Henry Shine, but actually there’s other ways of doing it. He helped me with the business skills side of that.

James Goolnik: At that stage, after a year of doing that, I finished my MSC and thought okay, I haven’t found a premises yet. And then suddenly, I got a phone call saying, “We found somewhere for you.”

Payman: And that’s Bow Lane?

James Goolnik: That was Bow Lane. I was just lucky. I wanted something with a self-contained entrance. It had its own entrance. It was above a shopfront so I wasn’t having to pay the fees for a shopfront. It was two and a half thousand square foot. It was the perfect location right in the city near Banks Station.

James Goolnik: The tricky bit was there was another dentist going for it. So there was two of us bidding for this premises and the way I got it, it was because I was doing it all through my agents. He didn’t know who the other bidder was. He knew there was another bidder, didn’t know who it was at all, and I just thought how badly do I want it? It was on… I don’t remember what it was, it was like 80,000 pounds a year. I thought how bad do I want it? I’m just going to over bit for it. So I put in a bid, I think it was 92,555 pounds. I just went straight in way above it.

Payman: Which year was that?

James Goolnik: And I killed it.

Payman: Which year?

James Goolnik: This was 2000. Yeah, 2000.

Payman: A lot of money in 2000. A lot of money for rent in 2000.

James Goolnik: Yeah. But it was a…

Payman: It’s a beautiful spot, it’s a beautiful spot. It is.

James Goolnik: I killed it because I beat the guy. And I don’t know who it is in the end, but it was great and it’s been a brilliant location. Been there 17 years now.

Payman: Did you then do it up a bit at a time?

James Goolnik: Yeah, so basically we planned it. I used Gary Butters from GGPC and they planned it as a six surgery practise, but I didn’t have the funds for a six surgery practise. I didn’t have any patients, so I thought okay, how am I going to do this? I was working part-time in the Japanese clinic. I was also working in another place now also in Knightsbridge as well, and another place in Bayswater for a guy called Ronald Dunn. I was doing that and also going in every day, check in on the builders, check in on all this stuff, so it was all… Juggling everything. We set it up as two surgeries to start with. We planned it for six but we set it up for two. We had myself and a hygienist, Christine, who’s still with me 17 years later.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: That was brilliant, so it was like okay, I was trying to juggle everything. Pay the bills, make sure I was getting money as a dentist, and then trying to tell the patients in a nice way that I’m going to have my own practise but without any of the principals finding out.

Payman: Did you pull them over?

James Goolnik: I pulled quite a few over. I had an argument with one of my bosses because I actually wrote… I said to them, “I would like to write a letter to the patients saying where I’m going,” and they said, “No, you’re not allowed to do that.”

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: I said, “Well they’re my patients.” They said, “No they’re not, they’re our patients.” At that stage we had no contracts. It was the old days where it was like spit on your hand, shake your hand, that’s it, how you work together. There was no contract. I wrote to about 10 patients and the rest of them we just… They could find us eventually from friends of friends. Google was around then.

Payman: I don’t think it was. What was it like on day one? Did you start doing one day a week? How did you do it?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I did one day a week and I just slowly… I would come in at the end of the day. I had a full-time receptionist and she actually started for a month before we even opened, so she was taking phone calls and bookings and stuff like that.

Payman: How about the business plan, working capital, spending on the build, all of these, did you make errors?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I made errors. It’s normal. I did a business plan but I got the money from HSPC and it was, to be honest, it was… As soon as they saw dentist, they will just give you money.

Payman: Think back then it was a bit more-

Prav Solanki: Easier, right?

James Goolnik: It was quite easy.

Payman: It was easier back then.

James Goolnik: As a dentist you got money, my parents could underscore the loan-

Payman: Guarantee it.

James Goolnik: … to guarantee it, so if there was any issues my dad guaranteed it. So it’s like okay, but I thought I’ve never seen a bankrupt dentist. People have always got teeth. I know what I’m doing. There’s definitely demand here and if the worse comes to worst, I’ll have a two surgery practises and I’ll sublet the rest of the building.

Payman: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: So I thought let’s just go it. But at that time, I’d worked at the Eastman for so long and I’d made my own crowns, done my own lab work, I thought well there’s no labs in the city. I want to have a lab, so we decided to have the top floor as a lab space and we sublet it to Tony Laurie.

Payman: Who was Mike Wise’s technician?

James Goolnik: Yes. I met him through Mike Wise because I was doing Mike Wise’s course.

Payman: For anyone in the audience who doesn’t know, Mike Wise –

James Goolnik: He’s one of my gurus.

Payman: Do you know Tony Laurie as well?

Prav Solanki: No.

Payman: Tony Laurie was just the top, top, top, top, technician. Does he still practise?

James Goolnik: Yeah, he still practises. He works at the end of our street.

Payman: Oh really? Good guy, I like him.

James Goolnik: Yeah, he was the number one technician in all of UK, working for the number one dentist in all of UK.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: Mike Wise is like one of my first gurus. He’s like evidence-based everything.

Payman: Were you on his course as well?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I did three years of his course. Met some great people in his course. Made me think about okay… He was Eastman trained so it was okay, this is the way we do it. This is evidence-based, this is what happens, but in private practise people don’t want silver fillings. They may be the best for them, or a gold filling might be the best, but there are other things that they won’t tolerate them. How do you communicate that to a patient? Say, “Okay, if we do it this way, this is what the expectancy is going to be of the tooth and the filling. This is your maintenance. Or we do it your way and this is what you’re going to do.”

James Goolnik: It’s all about informed consent but back in those days there was no written treatment plans, or they were long ones. There was no signing everything away like the young dentists do now. Everything is like signed in triplicate. I keep telling them, it’s like okay, I don’t care how much you’ve got signed. If you haven’t got a relationship with your patient and there’s no great report, I don’t care how great your compliance is, they’re still going to see… So the number one thing I always try and teach the younger dentists is the number one thing you’ve got to get is get a relationship with your patient. Make sure there’s a connection, make sure there’s a trust.

James Goolnik: Things go wrong. Dentistry is not ideal. We’re human. Everyone makes mistakes. Something happens, but if you’ve got a relationship with that patient and they know, like, and trust you, you can handle it and say, “You know what? I tried this, it didn’t work. I’m really sorry, this is what we’re going to do now. There’s this option, this option, this option, what would you like to do?” Give them that, rather than saying, “I did everything right. It’s not my fault. I’m not giving your money back,” which is what a lot of them do. “You signed the paper, you said you liked it, I don’t care now.”

Payman: I think it’s the other way around. You should immediately give the money back. But interesting question James, we just had another one of these, a young gun, Robbie that you just met, Robbie Hughes. Kind of what he was saying was that he wants to be different, he wants to be patient-focused. That’s all well and good now where every single coffee shop is customer-focused. Back then you really were one of the very, very first to be customer-focused. Let’s call it that.

James Goolnik: We really wanted to be different and also think about okay, what do they want? They want pain-free dentistry, they want to have a nice time in there in a nice environment. It’s got to smell nice.

Payman: You were definitely one of the first to do that, but then, talking to this guy, superb brain that he’s got on him as well, he’s talking about scaling, putting one in each town in the world, and all of that.

James Goolnik: That doesn’t turn me on.

Payman: Yeah. You’ve got that one jewel.

James Goolnik: I love it.

Payman: Didn’t ever think about doing a second?

James Goolnik: Yeah I did, I actually… I was a day away from signing a lease in Canary Wharf.

Payman: Oh really?

James Goolnik: I went to premises, got an architect in, did all the plans, did everything. This was about 10 years ago now. Got everything ready to go and I thought would I want to work in Canary Wharf? And the answer was no. Do I then want to commute from one place to the other? And all my friends who’d had more than one business were much more stressed. I thought do I want that? No. I want a work/life balance. I love what I do. I love treating patients, and I hopefully will always treat patients.

James Goolnik: But I didn’t want the extra stress and I didn’t need the money. I thought you know what? I’m going to keep at one, and it was quite hard because then I saw people, like Anoop and all these other people, my peers, who were getting two practises, three practises. I’m going to be a corporate, I’m going to do this. There’s a big ego thing about okay, why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing this? It’s like no, I don’t want to do that. That’s not where I want to be. Okay, I’m fine with that. That’s okay.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: You don’t have to have all that thing. For me it’s okay, what’s my lifestyle? I can go anywhere I want to go and have a holiday. Whatever I want to do, I can take… Work one day a week or six days a week if I want to, but I’m loving life at the moment so why would I want-

Payman: But then there’s also the appetite for risk question, right? As a young gun, there is no risk.

James Goolnik: There is no risk. You can do everything. I had the guarantee of my parents. I didn’t have kids at that stage. You can just chuck everything out. When you then have commitments and kids at school, and all the rest of it, it’s like okay, it’s a bit harder now. I’ve got… If this doesn’t work, what happens to this? You get more cautious on it.

James Goolnik: But then I love the excitement of doing something new, a new challenge, especially if somebody says to you in private, “You can’t do this.” Yes you can. It’s not been done like that before. Okay, that’s it. I want to do it.

Prav Solanki: I’m going to do it.

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: Somebody tells you no, if somebody tells me no, it’s like you know what?

Payman: That’s the challenge.

James Goolnik: You said no, I’m doing that. I don’t really care what you think.

Prav Solanki: Brilliant.

James Goolnik: I’m doing it.

Prav Solanki: Brilliant. So going back to opening a new practise, no patients, hygienist and… What was your first marketing campaign that drove patients through the practise?

James Goolnik: Okay.

Payman: You’ve done a few.

James Goolnik: Done lots of different marketing campaigns, some of which didn’t work. Actually, a good majority didn’t work but I’ve tried. The best one that’s worked is actually going round to every single local business in the area and just saying hi. I went to every single business in the area. I went to the hairdressers, I went to the beauticians, I went the investment bankers, and said, “Just to let you know, I’m James. I’m a local dentist around the corner. I’d love to take care of you. You get 10% off any treatment if you come to see us. Come and say hi.”

James Goolnik: I got to know the community as close as I could do. At that stage there were less big chains. There was still big chains, like Starbucks and stuff, but there were less big ones so I went in everywhere. They got to know us. We also put… The best investment I ever had in marketing, it sounds a bit crazy, is an A-board. Just plain A-board in the street. We’ve got a really narrow street in Bow Lane. It’s a pedestrianised street and at lunchtime it’s heaving, so we just put an A-board out with… And it was usually stuff to try and stop people, going, “Have you had your mouth checked for mouth cancer?” It’s like whoa, that’s enough to stop them.

Prav Solanki: Yeah, yeah.

James Goolnik: The other thing that worked really well is apples. We used to give out apples with stickers with Bow Lane on. So it was… Our team was just there at lunchtime. We gave out 250/300 apples, all for free, and it was just awareness. Okay, why am I getting an apple? So they stop and they look at the sticker. Oh, it’s a dentist. In my head, there’s a dentist, it’s purple, it’s called Bow Lane, and we’re in Bow Lane. Then six months later they break a tooth, they go, “Oh, isn’t there a dentist somewhere?” And then they remember it all. So it’s just getting to know about the local area.

Prav Solanki: Do you remember patients walking through your practise and saying, “You were the guy that gave me the apple,” or…

James Goolnik: Yes. Yeah, it was brilliant and it was also, at that stage, every patient, I knew all their names because I only had six. I know all about them, but it’s been brilliant. That was one great thing about being somewhere for so long, is that I get to see them when they were new city… Really vibrant, excited, happy about their life. Get to see them, and then I see their partners, and then I see their kids. Then sometimes I see the girlfriends and then I see their second partners.

James Goolnik: There’s one patient that I’ve actually seen all four of his wives now, so slowly… He obviously gets divorced with each one and then the new one comes along, so I get to see them all and make sure they’re healthy.

Payman: Talking of divorce…

James Goolnik: Okay.

Payman: Okay. Go on.

Prav Solanki: You met your wife whilst you were in your hospital job, that’s right?

James Goolnik: Yes, hospital job, yeah.

Prav Solanki: Just talk to us about the struggles of running your own business, work/life balance, and the toll that that can have on your relationship.

James Goolnik: It’s tricky because obviously when you’re setting up a new business you put 110% effort and energy in it. You live, breathe, and sleep it. There was that. Obviously my wife was a doctor as well so she was working quite hard.

Payman: Hospital doctor?

James Goolnik: Yeah. Hospital doctor, NHS. She’s working quite hard but not earning much money, so it’s all those sort of stresses going on. And then also, when you start up a business, financially it’s hard. You have to cut back on different things, which makes it tricky. Just trying to get priorities right, and over the years, as the business has got more and more successful, it’s tricky.

James Goolnik: You go to the business and it’s going really well and it’s really successful, and there’s loads going on, and then you go home and it’s not as engaging, there’s a dichotomy between those two lives. I found that the more successful I got in business, the more strain on the personal relationship was.

Prav Solanki: And at what stage did the kids come?

James Goolnik: The kids came very soon after… I think it was six months after we opened the business. I have twins, Harry and Kate, so that was like okay, we go from zero skills of parenting to suddenly parents of twins so that was a bit-

Prav Solanki: Stress, sleepless nights.

James Goolnik: Yeah. That was extra stress, but it was great fun. The business was going well. Just trying to balance all of that, but as the business got more and more successful it got harder. And then I thought you know what? The person I was when I met her, I’m not the same person anymore. She’s not the same person anymore. 10 years later you think, okay, it’s not working. I thought okay, well I’ve put this much effort into the business, business is running really nicely now, I need to put this same amount of effort into the relationship. We started relationship counselling for a year. Looked at all different things and just thought you know what? This is just not working.

Prav Solanki: Like you mentioned relationship counselling. I think it takes a certain type of person or couple to actually, first of all, except that they need outside help, and then the other thing is actually going to a stranger and talking about the ins and outs of your relationship. What was that like?

James Goolnik: I mean I’m quite an open person. When I meet anyone for the first time there’s… Trust is like at 98%, so I’m quite open then, but as soon as they do something that doesn’t show that they’re at the same level, I drop right down to like -5%. But I’m quite trusting. I knew there was a problem, I knew I wasn’t happy. My wife wasn’t as unhappy as me but I knew this wasn’t working. I thought okay, I need to do something about it. My personality type is I’m a bit of a fixer, so if something is not right I’m going to put 100% effort… I’m going to research the hell out of it. Who is the best counsellor? Who’s this, that?

Prav Solanki: Sure.

James Goolnik: I’ll chuck everything at it, but then if it doesn’t work within a set period of a time I go okay, I’ve done that, no, move on.

Payman: How old were the kids?

James Goolnik: The kids were five. About five.

Payman: Okay. And they’re 16 now?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Payman: Wow.

James Goolnik: Four, five. It was tricky because do I stay in an unhappy marriage just for the kids and go through until they go through school? What’s the best hurdle? Is it better to go when they get through secondary school at 11? Do I wait until they leave school? I know lots of people in unhappy marriages who say, “I’m just going to stay with it for the kids,” and I just thought no. Life’s too short. I want to model them a happy life and I wasn’t having a happy life at that stage.

Prav Solanki: Can you remember the day you decided it’s over?

James Goolnik: Yeah. It was-

Prav Solanki: And did you decide it was over? Was it a mutual… Just talk me through that process.

James Goolnik: It was me who called the day and said I’d had enough. I think by that stage and the amount of counselling we had, she understood that it wasn’t going anywhere. We were talking at that stage and the counselling helped us talk. The communication was better, but we weren’t happy. I just thought… She wanted to try longer and longer and longer, but I thought I’d given enough. A year was enough. I’m not happy, the kids, at that age, can perceive when we’re not together. We were in separate bedrooms. It was just not right, so I just thought I’m calling it, that’s it. I’m out.

James Goolnik: And we then had to live together. Going through the divorce bit we had to live together for a few months before we could find accommodation, all that stuff. That was tricky. People say no matter how well you get on, soon as divorce lawyers get involved it’s like, “You’ve got to go for this, you’ve got to go for that. Record all conversations, copy the emails, do all this.” It got quite tricky at that stage. I’d just had enough and said, “I want to get out of this,” so I moved out. I hadn’t met anyone else. There was nothing else there. It was just like the possibility of having a happier life was worth moving out for.

Prav Solanki: If you could go back and relive that life before you started your practise and change something, do you think it would have been different?

James Goolnik: No. I just don’t think we were compatible.

Prav Solanki: You were the right people for each other.

James Goolnik: That was it, and when I started I was obviously a hospital dentist, hospital doctor, both worked in NHS. I wanted to do my own business but I’m from a family of people setting up their own business. She wasn’t. She was an only child and they hadn’t set up business before or anything. They worked for other big corporates. I think we had a different background. I was from London, she was from Norwich. There was too much of a difference. I think that was… Now, understanding that, getting older and being 50, you think actually, people’s upbringing is quite important. It doesn’t matter about your ages so much, it’s more about your upbringing. Are your family values? Have you been brought up in a similar way? Because that made a bigger difference.

Prav Solanki: I come from a… My parents are divorced. Wasn’t pleasant. As kids, nor… between them. It created a wedge. It did. Do you think it had an impact on your kids? What was your and your wife’s relationship, or ex wife’s relationship like during that transition period up to now?

James Goolnik: The relationship during the divorce battle was hard. We were communicating but not in a nice way. In the back of my head it was always what’s best for the kids, what’s best for the kids? Okay, let’s do this. My parent’s even said, “What’s best for the kids? I’m going to be there, I’m going to do this.” Every decision I did was what’s best for the kids? It was the first priority, and then what’s good for me? But I wanted to make sure I could cushion them as well as possible.

James Goolnik: My kids then had problems at different ages. My daughter found it really tricky as we were going through the initial divorce but she’s fine now, whereas my son was fine all the way through that and then a few years later he then found it harder. I’ve always put them first, 100% in front of anything, but our relationship then got better and better and better. We were quite friendly. As I said I’m big into cars, so I helped her buy her last car. I’m helping her buy her new car at the moment.

Payman: So super friendly now?

Prav Solanki: Oh wow.

James Goolnik: So we’re friendly but it’s… And obviously I pick the kids up every week so we do drop offs, but there are certain spark moments that happen. Every sort of six to nine months, something triggers it and it’s like, “You can do this.” I don’t know, she’s got to sign up a new house insurance or something and she’s getting really stressed by it all. “It’s all right for you, you’ve got a team of 24. If you want to get a new house insurance quote, you just send them an email and they’ll do it all for you.” They don’t do my house insurance. That’s not how it works.

Payman: Imagine.

James Goolnik: So that was the difference, and there’s always been a difference there. She said, “It’s all right for you, you’re earning all this money because you’ve got an easier life than me.” I’m earning this money because I’ve put a lot of personal education into me and I’m doing my own business. You’re working for the NHS. If you want to earn more money, you need to work smarter. You need to set up your own practise. You need to do something else.

Payman: Obviously your situation is your situation.

James Goolnik: Yes.

Payman: Dentistry’s a stressful job.

James Goolnik: It can be a stressful job.

Payman: Yeah. Dentistry can be a stressful job, particularly nowadays. I’m not going to say more, but nowadays with all the legal crap everyone’s got to take care of as well, there must have been a couple of like dark days where it was stress at home, stress at work. What’s your advice to someone going through that?

James Goolnik: Luckily I didn’t have many days where all the stress was coming in at once. You have days when it’s stressful at home and then you have your respite at home. I think one thing that helped is that I always had some place to go, so if home was really tricky I had my workplace and that was just a sort of a cocoon.

Payman: That’s interesting, isn’t it? You said work was actually… It’s the opposite?

James Goolnik: Yeah, I think if I didn’t have the business I think I would have found it really hard, and I’ve had other times where home is… Business has been really stressful, but then having a calm home, I just had somewhere that I could retreat to. But for me, I’m big into exercise so I found that… I used to run to work and actually that gave me some head space. I didn’t have any music on, I just went for it.

Payman: From where to where?

James Goolnik: I used to run from Putney into the city. So 8 miles-

Payman: Bloody hell. Every day?

James Goolnik: Not every day. Three days a week.

Payman: Wow.

James Goolnik: That was great because, one, I had my exercise over in the morning. I just felt a real buzz with the endorphins. I could think better, and I’ve always been better thinking when I’m moving. I’m not so good at like… I can’t sit at a desk and think, I need to be usually out in fresh air. That was great. For me, I had that crutch. It was the exercise that could help me go through whatever I was thinking. And also, if you have something on your mind from work, by the time you get home you’ve sorted the puzzle out already in your head. You’ve gone through it all, so that worked well for me.

James Goolnik: And also, I don’t like being like everyone else. I don’t like being a commuter. I don’t want to be one of 5000 people on the train. I want to be slightly different. I’m going to do it differently.

Payman: I get it.

Prav Solanki: Did you ever have any moments in your business where you felt like throwing the towel in?

James Goolnik: In the business?

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

James Goolnik: No, no, no. I’ve had some tricky, really tricky bits. I’ve had a member of staff stealing money from us. I’ve had colleagues writing weird things on emails and Facebook and stuff. I’ve had lots of different haters, but never thought… No. I love what I do. I still love what I do. I mean everyone has bad things. You might get CQC inspector come in the next day, “Oh, that’s what’s going to happen here.” There’s always bits and bobs that happen because that’s just life, but for me, hey, you know what? For me, I’ve got this thing. Okay, compare it to my day to what happened yesterday. Am I progressing in my life? Is today better? Have I learned something from it? Rather than compare myself to some other person who’s doing something else at that time.

James Goolnik: That’s the thing I hate about social media. You see the highlights of somebody’s journey that they’ve edited and filtered and whatever, and then actually it’s not real life. You compare yourself to them, it’s like why would you bother? You don’t know what’s happening to them.

Payman: Funny enough we were just speaking to Robbie earlier, and he was talking about filters and how a lot of dentists put their filtered cases up on Facebook and Instagram, but it’s not reality, right? Because if you put all your stuff out there, you get a mean average of what it is and it’s not as sexy as they make it out, right?

James Goolnik: Right. Anyone can make a composite that disappears. It might be a freak one-off, it just happens. Then you just doctorate and put it up. I’m not into that.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: That’s not my style.

Payman: Have you ever made a serious clinical mistake on a patient? Assuming you have, how did you deal with it?

James Goolnik: Yeah, the biggest mistake I’ve done is I’ve taken out the wrong tooth. It was a patient, it was only about eight years ago, took a look at the radiograph, the rest of it, and for some reason I just wasn’t concentrating enough and I took out the wrong tooth.

Prav Solanki: Was it the left and right, wrong way round on the radiograph?

James Goolnik: No, they were next to each other.

Prav Solanki: Right.

James Goolnik: They were next to each other and I looked at it, and I made the wrong decision. Took the tooth out and realised it straightaway. Okay, what am I going to do for this? I took out the right tooth which was next to it, so they lost two teeth instead of one tooth, and just said, “Look, I’m really sorry, I’ve taken out the wrong tooth. This is what’s happened. We checked the X-ray and the rest of it. This tooth wasn’t the best tooth. Now I’ve taken this one out as well. We can replace it with an implant and we’re going to do this free of charge. Now you’re going to get your tooth back.”

Prav Solanki: Going back to what you said earlier, the relationship with a patient-

James Goolnik: This guy I had been treating for five years. Never had any problems at all. We got on really well. I soon as I realised I just stopped and sat him up and said, “Look, this is what’s happened.” You can’t undo it, once you’ve done it. Once you’ve taken a tooth out and can’t push it back in and hope for the best. Luckily it was next to the other one and it was heavily filled. It wasn’t a great tooth anyway. It was right at the back. I said, “Look, I’m really sorry.” I didn’t charge him for the extractions.

James Goolnik: On the house.

Payman: But there was no recourse?

James Goolnik: No recourse, no.

Payman: He didn’t come for you?

Prav Solanki: At any point did you think there was going to be a recourse?

James Goolnik: When I first did it, when I took the tooth out, then I was like yes, okay, I’ve made a serious error. What am I going to do? I started sweating everywhere. Okay, what am I going to do? But then I just thought you know what? I’m going to be honest. If something happens in life just be honest and say… Stop, rather than trying to cover it up, it’s like-

Prav Solanki: Dig yourself a bigger hole, yeah.

James Goolnik: It’s life. Things happen. You just have to move on for it. I haven’t done it since.

Prav Solanki: Always double check now right?

James Goolnik: Yeah. 25 years of dentistry, 17 in the same practise, and one mistake. The other mistakes that happen probably every six to nine months is saying yes to a patient and then realising that actually, I can’t deal with them. What they want is not what I can achieve.

Prav Solanki: Got you.

James Goolnik: And that happens quite regularly and you just have to say, “You know what?” Half way through you think, “You know what Mrs. Jones? You want to achieve this, I can only achieve it this way but you don’t want me to do it that way. I think the best thing to do is I can give you your money back and you can find somebody that can do it that way because that’s not what I can do.”

Prav Solanki: Got you.

James Goolnik: I think that’s the best way, just to stop and think. Sometimes you can do the dentistry but dealing with a patient is the tricky part.

Prav Solanki: It’s hard, isn’t it? Not just dentistry, any kind of business. When you’re dealing with people you can’t keep everyone happy, right?

James Goolnik: Yeah. It’s impossible. The problem is the higher pedestal we are, being president at the British Academy of Dentistry or whatever, they look up at you and they go, “Okay, this guy has done it a thousand items before. He teaches dentists, he must know what he can do. He can fix me. I’ve been to 10 other dentists and they can’t fix me, but you’re the one.”

James Goolnik: When they come in the room and they tell you that, your ego sort of thinks, “Wow, maybe I am the one. Yes, I can do anything.” Because we’re a healthcare providers and we want to naturally help people. The first instinct for me is like Prav, I can help you. Yes, I can help you. But then when you start to look at it in more detail you think actually, what you want and what I can achieve are not the same things. I’m much better at picking it up now before I’ve started treatment, but we often make mistakes and think actually, I shouldn’t have started treating you. But when we started treating them I want to get them to a stable place.

James Goolnik: That’s one tricky bit about a principal, is when my associates get into trouble, I step in and go, “You know what? We need to get this patient in a comfortable place and happy, whatever it takes. Remake whatever needs to be done. There’s no charge.” And I just take over and fix it. We’ve not, touch wood, in 17 years we haven’t had a single case against us because we just take ownership and say, “Okay, I want to fix this. What do we need to do to fix it?”

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: Whether it’s giving money back, whether it’s sending them to a specialist, whatever we need to do, we’re just going to take ownership and get them in a happy place. At that stage, we may say goodbye to them and they can go somewhere else, or often times, they don’t want to go and they’re like, “I like you now James. I want you to fix everything for me.” Okay.

Payman: Your team, I’ve noticed over the years interacting with them, it feels like you’re talking to sort of a higher level of employee in a way. You must really invest in them heavily. I guess you pick them well in the first place.

James Goolnik: Thank you.

Payman: What kind of leader are you?

James Goolnik: I try and lead by example. I work very hard. I’m very passionate about my patients. I’ll always go the extra mile to try and help them and get them out of something. I don’t care about the money. I’m not interested in the money. Whatever it takes to get them sorted. I want them to grow and move on, and I understand that, say, a hygienist comes with me now, she may want to go off and do something else in five years time. I’m not going to hold her back. I want to try and invest in them. If they want to be an orthodontic therapist and they need the money for the cost, we’ll just lend it to them. Whatever it takes to keep them. I want them happy while they’re at Bow Lane.

James Goolnik: When they’re at Bow Lane, even if it’s only six months or a year, I want them happy. We get people that have… I’ve got three team members that have been with me over 15 years now, and then about six of them have been over 10 years.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: They come back. We’ve got a nurse now who was with me for six years, went off travelling, got married, and now is coming back tomorrow to work back with us again.

Prav Solanki: Amazing.

James Goolnik: That is lovely, having them back. It’s part of our little family.

Payman: What are the secrets of that? Lead by example.

James Goolnik: Lead by example, be nice to them. Listen to them because often you think they want what you want. It’s different, so you might think actually what they want is a pay raise. What they want is this. Actually, it’s not sometimes. Sometimes, and one of my team said to me about two months ago, he said, “You need to say thank you more.” Okay, you know what? I do.

Prav Solanki: It’s amazing how much just a little pat on the back goes a long way.

James Goolnik: For the next two weeks, I was sending her messages on Instant Messaging about, “Thank you for that, that was really good.” The first day, she says, “You’re taking the Mickey now aren’t you?” But after a week I overheard her talking, “James really changed. He’s thanking me a lot more than normal.” Okay. It’s just a system. I’m putting a system in place that I’m going to remind myself to thank them more. If you just say thanks to somebody, it doesn’t mean anything.

Prav Solanki: No.

James Goolnik: Thanks Payman for doing X, Y, Z, and this is how it meant to me. That’s when it makes a difference. You’ve got to make it personal and make them realise that actually there’s an emotion attached to that. You’re not just saying thanks to everyone, because people just say thanks and it’s like have a nice day. It means nothing.

Payman: I think it’s worked though. Okay, so say thank you.

James Goolnik: Pay them well.

Payman: Pay them well.

James Goolnik: Pay them well is really important to do that, and also give them little wins

Payman: Are you proud of that? You’re paying your staff higher than the average?

James Goolnik: Yeah, yeah. We’ve slowly, every year, we just go up and up and up. It costs a lot more to get somebody new in and then to train them up to that level and to integrate with the team than it is to give somebody a pay rise. Okay, I don’t want this person to leave. At some point they’re going to leave. We had a receptionist and we ended up… We were paying her 30,000 pounds a year and she still wanted more, and one of her friends had gotten into a job that was paying more than that. She came to me and said, “I don’t want to leave but this is what I want to stay.” We did the sums and thought okay, you’re good, but as a business I can’t afford to pay you more than 30,000 pounds a year. If you can tell me how I can afford that, then I’ll do it. And she couldn’t, so that was the end of it. She left.

James Goolnik: Sometimes you have to let people go. I mean if she came up with some constructive ideas and said, “Okay, I can do this in the business or this in the business, or this, and this is how you can afford to pay me,” that’s a different matter. But she couldn’t and I thought we were paying well. I thought you know what? Otherwise I’m going to get everyone coming up and saying, “I want more, more, more.”

Payman: Have you got a performance related pay element?

James Goolnik: Yes. All our managers, we have a business manager and we have a treatment coordinator, and both of them are on KPI’s, key performance indicators, so they get 10% of their salary is also a bonus as well, so they get a certain amount of salary and they get 10% they can get as a bonus. But I found that the one thing that’s really helped recently, and we’re doing it the last two years now, is little surprises.

James Goolnik: For example, cinema tickets. I bought two cinema tickets. I messaged all the team saying, “Where is your local cinema?” And it was like Odeon or whatever. I got them two cinema tickets for them to go to any film they want, any time, and I gave it to everyone. A lot of practises may only give it to the nurses. I gave it to the dentist. Like Zaki was going like “This is really cool”, Zaki afford cinema tickets. Just the fact of getting something free from your boss is cool.

Payman: It’s nice, it’s a nice little-

James Goolnik: It’s different. I didn’t repeat that because I might do something different and you get like Boots vouchers. The other thing that’s worked really nicely is that we do free lunches twice a month. It’s always on a different day.

Prav Solanki: Twice a month?

James Goolnik: What we do is the day before we send the menus around and people choose what they want. They’re always healthy foods, and then we just provide lunch for them so they don’t have to… It’s everyone, the whole team gets lunch.

Prav Solanki: Delivered to the practise?

James Goolnik: Delivered to the practise. Always something healthy and we all eat together. That’s just really nice, to have their lunches.

Payman: Have you interacted with James’s staff?

Prav Solanki: I don’t think… No, I don’t think so.

Payman: There’s a real ownership, the way they talk about the place. You really feel like they’re stakeholders in the modern speak. You feel it, you feel it. It is like that, it is like that. But this combination of… For me, you can’t really be patient-centric, customer-centric, unless your team is happy. It’s one of those, you can’t expect them not to be happy one minute and then happy the next. It doesn’t work. Too many people expect that, yeah? Oh be super nice to our customers but I’m going to treat you like…

James Goolnik: We do surveys twice a year we send out anonymously to them to find out how can we do better? What are we doing? I mean some people would want more money, but there’s always little things that we can easily do. Like somebody said, “Why don’t we just get fresh flowers?” We had fresh flowers at the beginning of the day and then five years ago we were cutting costs. Do we need flowers or not? They go, “No, we should have flowers.” We got flowers in and it just lifts everybody. They love the smell of it.

Payman: It’s something you would never think of yourself.

James Goolnik: Yeah. The problem is when you’re in your business all day, and I’m in there three days a week, but when you’re in the business you do not see these things. You’re don’t see the little things, but actually they go, “Just having the flowers makes me cheery when I see that.”

Prav Solanki: I’m assuming you’ve had to fire somebody before?

James Goolnik: Yes. Lots of people.

Prav Solanki: Lots of people?

James Goolnik: Yes.

Prav Solanki: Ever get any easier?

James Goolnik: No. Sorry.

Prav Solanki: What’s the most difficult conversation you’ve had with somebody you had to fire?

Payman: Before we go any further, you’ve fired lots of people have you?

James Goolnik: I have fired lots of people.

Payman: So what’s the technique? Hire lots and fire lots?

James Goolnik: I think the big thing, and you hear about this all the time, is fire fast.

Payman: Yeah, hire slow.

James Goolnik: Hire slow and fire fast. Basically if you think in your gut they’re not the right person for you, then I always ask another team member just in case there’s some clash of personality, “What do you think of… Do you think they’ll fit in the team?” And some people take longer to warm up into a team, especially if we’ve got quite a big team that have been there a long time. They take a while to bed in. It’s a little bit intimidating initially. But yeah, usually the initial gut feeling is okay, they’re not quite right for us. It took us two months to get this person, I don’t want to then have to work harder and do double the work so let’s just see if they get better.

Payman: Yeah.

James Goolnik: You just have to say it how it is unfortunately. And we always, if somebody goes, the best thing that we’ve found is they go straight away. No mucking around, you get your stuff and you’re out. We pay for the whole month and we give them a lovely reference. It’s just go. You try and keep somebody on there when they’re not happy or when they’ve been fired, it just doesn’t work.

James Goolnik: And the same thing with… The hardest thing is to hire and fire a dentist. That is the hardest thing because they’re your colleagues, they’re your peers. You’re going to see them at conferences and the rest of it. It’s just not working, and that is, most of the time, it’s actually… The two times I’ve fired dentists, it’s always because of clinical skills.

Payman: So we had the endodontist.

James Goolnik: Yes, so the endodontist. Yeah, that didn’t last long. It ended in a day.

Payman: That wasn’t so hard.

James Goolnik: But then yeah, associates, it’s really hard. It’s clinical skills and sometimes… You can’t be there the whole time. You get feedback from your nurses, but when patients come back because things are breaking and coming off all the time, or you’re looking at X-rays and you’re thinking this is before, they’ve done this restoration, but why have they done this restoration? This tooth didn’t need to be touched.

James Goolnik: That is harder. It’s like okay, I think they’re over treating. Sitting them down to say, “Look, I don’t think the value that you put on your dental care and what we put on…” And then is it me? Am I just super conservative or not? I then talk to the other team members, like Ilan and Zaki have been with me for years, and say, “What would you do with this case?” And then they wouldn’t go in as well, it’s like okay, this person shouldn’t be working for us. That’s the hardest.

Prav Solanki: James, there’s a 101 other questions I’ve got for you but I’m conscious we’re running out of time.

James Goolnik: Okay, cool.

Prav Solanki: I’d like to focus on your new project.

James Goolnik: Okay.

Prav Solanki: Charity?

James Goolnik: Yeah.

Prav Solanki: Tell us all about it.

James Goolnik: It’s called the Rewards Project.

Payman: Okay.

James Goolnik: Basically I’m a parent of three kids and it really annoys me when I go and they have a haircut and they’re given a lollipop. There’s a three year old having a haircut, it’s so exciting for her, the first haircut, all the rest of it. Give her a certificate, give her a sticker, give her something that lasts for your business. Giving them a lollipop doesn’t help anyone.

Payman: No.

James Goolnik: That really frustrates-

Prav Solanki: Maybe helps your business.

James Goolnik: Well I’ve got enough… There’s enough dental care, cosmetic stuff, aesthetic work, we don’t need it from caries. And then every day, seeing the damage that is done by sugar to teeth really frustrates me. Children, most of the time, have no control over what they eat. They’re parents have complete control over what they eat and give them.

Prav Solanki: Very true.

James Goolnik: It’s like you do well… My son did well on a math test. He gets a bar of dairy milk. You’re in a school, why are you giving chocolate for that? You don’t need to. There’s much better ways of doing it. What I’m trying to get people to do is think beyond sugar. Think about what rewards you can do for good performance and good behaviour that don’t involve food or sugary snacks. That’s the next project.

Prav Solanki: Just give me a vision of how that project’s going to be executed and what it looks like. So stickers and certificates and hairdressers, or…

James Goolnik: What I need to do first is actually see what is out there at the moment, what people are rewarding people for and look at the good practise. There’s plenty of schools and nurseries that are doing good things for people when they’re doing well. We’re looking at… We’ve got a team of nutritionists, doctors, dentists, psychologists, all together.

Prav Solanki: Wow.

James Goolnik: It’s launching in May. What we’re looking at is how we can… What’s going on at the moment. We’ve got a rewards review that we’re sending out to 20,000 schools in the UK. It’s looking at what they do for sports days, what they do for festivals, how often they have their cake bake sales. So looking at what they do at the moment. There’s a survey going out to all the schools.

James Goolnik: Then we’ve also got two quizzes. We’ve got sugar quizzes, like how addicted to sugar are you? When, Payman, do you reach for that Yorkie bar in the bottom drawer? Is there a certain reason to do it? We’re looking at all of that out there. It’s a fun and educational resource, and then we’re sharing good practise out there. One of the things that’s out there is, I don’t know if you know, but you can actually retrain your pallet to not like sweet things anymore.

Payman: How?

James Goolnik: There’s research out there. It takes six days. What you need to do is cut down added sugar for six days and after the sixth day, when you have something sweet, it tastes so sweet to you, that’s the point when you think actually that’s not good.

Payman: Is that it, just cut it out?

Prav Solanki: I’ve not had sugar for 90 days. I had a strawberry the other day, holy crap it was so sweet. So ridiculously sweet.

Payman: I get it but like my kids, my daughter is completely addicted and I wonder if six days would do it to her. I think you’ve got to want to. It’s like stopping any addiction, right?

James Goolnik: As a parent the first thing is actually look during the prep work beforehand, so it’s like going through the house and seeing what rubbish you’ve got there with added sugar and looking at 100 grammes, trying to get everything under 5 grammes, but a 100 grammes first of all. Replace the sugary cereals and sometimes, okay, I’ve got these Cheerios and they’re too high. They’re 32 grammes of sugar. Let’s go for the lower sugar Cheerios first to get them down slowly, and if that’s too much, maybe do 50/50. Half the normal sugar ones, half the…

James Goolnik: The slow changes, people don’t notice if you reformulate slowly. And then looking at go-to snacks. Okay, what snacks can I make? What lunchbox stuff can I have for my kids that is actually not crammed full of rubbish? You’ll find they’ll behave better, they’ll concentrate better, they’ll have less dental problems.

Payman: I know.

James Goolnik: It’s a win/win for everybody, and the schools are really up for it. I think it’s easier at schools because we have them in a protected environment and they want to learn. It’s a win/win for everybody, and then the kids are going to come home and say, “Dad, why are you having that chocolate bar? You don’t need that chocolate bar,” and changing it.

Payman: Yeah, yeah. A friend of mine runs one of the big water companies and he said they’ve got this big issue with wipes being blocking up… And he said the most successful way of changing this habit is by teaching the kids. It works better than any other marketing…

James Goolnik: We’ve got a massive problem in the UK with the amount of extractions going up to the five to the eight year olds. It’s just up and up and up. The number one reason kids are going to the hospital for GA is having a tooth out. That’s criminal in this age.

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

Payman: Would you… You’re doing this… I know we’re supposed to be in the profession of prevention, but very left field compared to city cosmetic dentists. Would you say it’s something you’d like to be remembered for?

James Goolnik: I just like making a difference. It’s like okay, I want to do things that people say you can’t do. What is a big goal? What do I fight every single day? I fight with sugar in the mouth, with what’s going on, and the damage that’s been done. But with my kids, it’s like okay, you’ve given them a lollipop, now they want a lollipop for everything. I’m fighting this battle. I want to replace this. Sugar is great. You can have sugar at birthdays, it’s fine, celebrations. Have sugar when you know you’re having sugar, not when it’s hidden in a sandwich bar. They’re putting it in their sandwich because it’s cheap, it makes the shelf life go longer, and they’ll sell more sandwiches.

James Goolnik: It’s not because it’s good for us. There’s no nutritional value at all in sugar. They’re just chucking it in and they basically mass poisoning us. I think we can make a difference and I think with all the thousands of dentists out there, we see our patients regularly. We talk about nutrition, we have great communication skills with them. Let’s start talking about it. Let’s do stickers. My kids love stickers. They love sticker charts, they love star charts. There’s so many different ways that you can reward children without using food and without using sugar.

Payman: Is there a website?

Prav Solanki: Where can we learn about this?

James Goolnik: It’s called TheRewardsProject.Org. There’s loads of free resources on there. There’s some quizzes that you can have for kids, quizzes for adults. You’ve got your rewards review you can send out to your schools. We want to go into every single school and get them more and more engaged in what you can do. We’re going to be sharing good practise and teaching people about healthier habits. We’ve got nutritionists to say, “We’re doing this,” and we’re doing our 14 day sugar detox.

James Goolnik: You’re way ahead of us. You’re on the 90 day, but 14 days is all it takes.

Prav Solanki: I’d be happy to share any experiences I’ve had.

Payman: Did you say the TheRewardsProject.Com?

James Goolnik: .Org.

Payman: .Org. TheRewardsProject.Org.

Prav Solanki: James, one last question.

James Goolnik: Yes?

Prav Solanki: Your last day on the planet and you can leave the world giving three pieces of advice.

James Goolnik: Okay.

Prav Solanki: What would those be?

James Goolnik: Love, be loved, and never stop learning.

Prav Solanki: Beautiful. Thank you.

Payman: It’s like someone had already asked that question.

James Goolnik: It’s in my book, it’s in my book.

Payman: Brilliant. All right, well thanks a lot for coming over. It’s been a pleasure. I feel like we still didn’t get to the bottom of why is it that you want to prove everyone wrong when they say, “That can’t be done.” Until next time.

Prav Solanki: Mate, we’ve just… That’s podcast number two. Mate, we’ve just scratched the surface. We haven’t talked about his current relationship, work/life balance.

Payman: BACD.

Prav Solanki: BACD. Shit tonne of-

James Goolnik: The book and sleep. And meditation.

Payman: We’ll bring you back.

James Goolnik: The morning ritual, we’ve got to come back for the next-

Payman: We’ll bring you back, we’ll bring you back.

James Goolnik: Would love to.

Prav Solanki: For sure, for sure.

Payman: Thank you so much.

Prav Solanki: Cheers buddy.

James Goolnik: Pleasure.

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

Prav Solanki: Thank you for tuning in guys to the Dental Leaders podcast. Just got a little request to make. If you’ve got a suggestion of somebody else who we should be interviewing or somebody who’s got a really strong story, powerful story to share with us, please send us a message and help us connect with that individual so we can bring their stories to the surface.

Payman: Thank you so much for taking the time guys, and if you got some value out of it, think about sharing it with your friends and subscribing to the channel. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

In this episode:

02:12 – The perfect environment for practice

13: 07 – The power of delegating

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

18:43 – Achieving work-life balance

25:21 – Getting into implants

35:13 – A life-changing case

47:05 – Teaching other dentists

About Andrew Moore

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

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

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

Connect with Andrew Moore:

LinkedIn

Advance Dental Clinic

Connect with Prav and Payman:

Website

Prav on Instagram

Payman on Instagram

Transcript

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Super cool man.

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

Prav Solanki: Enjoy guys. Enjoy.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: What, you?

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

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

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

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

Payman: Yeah, I’d say the same.

Prav Solanki: I can only describe it as magic.

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

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

Payman: The building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Payman: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payman: Is Mitzman still around?

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

Payman: I didn’t know that.

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

Payman: Sterilisation and things.

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

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

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

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

Payman: Good old days.

Payman: Wow.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah, I haven’t, no.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Kamlesh, yeah.

Payman: Yeah.

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

Payman: But yours was my favourite of all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Managing people.

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

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

Payman: Do you still get involved in the recruitment?

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah, I do actually.

Payman: Yeah?

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

Prav Solanki: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payman: So do you not do any?

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Wow.

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Make more.

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

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

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

Payman: How old are they?

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Well I-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payman: Are you involved in the zygomatic?

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

Payman: No.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: It’s a big difference.

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

Payman: Yeah.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: No.

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: No, I don’t do that.

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Really?

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

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

Payman: Yeah, I get it.

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

Prav Solanki: Right.

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Stressful.

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

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

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

Payman: Integrated or not?

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

Payman: What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Payman: Do you enjoy the teaching?

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

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

Payman: You learn a lot by teaching.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

Payman: Oh, cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: What, you?

Prav Solanki: Richard-

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

Payman: Richard Branson?

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: So you played chess together?

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

Payman: You’ve been to the island?

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Google.

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Payman: He kite surfs?

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

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

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

Payman: Yeah.

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

Prav Solanki: That’s good to know.

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

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

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

Payman: Spaceships.

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

Payman: Are you not his dentist?

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

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Go for that.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Take every opportunity.

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

Payman: You are, you are.

Prav Solanki: Without a doubt.

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

Prav Solanki: Without a doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Is it for a dentist?

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

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: 10 years, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Payman: That’s true.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: It’s magical.

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

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

Payman: Do you ever feel like slowing down?

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

Payman: Have you?

Dr. Andy Moore: In terms of work?

Payman: Yeah.

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

Payman: Long days?

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

Payman: Yeah.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Have you got an exit strategy Andy?

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

Prav Solanki: Tie you in.

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

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

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

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

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

Payman: Oh yeah?

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

Payman: You dropped out.

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

Prav Solanki: Yeah.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh, good thank you.

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

Prav Solanki: Thanks for sharing Andy.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah cheers.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Oh right.

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

Dr. Andy Moore: Yeah.

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

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

Prav Solanki: Thank you. Cheers Andy.

Payman: Thanks a lot. We appreciate it.

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

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

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

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