Month: June 2020

Prav: Your children are with you and you’ve got three pieces of advice you can leave them with. What would they be?

Andrew Dawood: Oh sugar. Maxine, you should have told me that it was going to be like this.

Prav: Well said.

Announcer: 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.

Payman: Well, one of the best things about my job is I sometimes get to meet a hero of mine. Really, really I mean it. So today we’ve got Andrew Dawood in the show. Andrew, thanks a lot for coming.

Andrew Dawood: Pleasure.

Payman: Thank you. You’ve got probably one of the best implant practises in the world, maybe, but definitely in the UK. One of the leading implant practises in the UK.

Andrew Dawood: Thank you.

Payman: And I’ve been following you for a long time. The first time we ever met, actually.

Andrew Dawood: Gosh. Okay.

Payman: But we’re going to start with your backstory, really. Where were you born, what were you like as a kid, why did you become a dentist, all of that.

Andrew Dawood: Oh God. I don’t think you would’ve wanted to know me as a kid. I was born in London, went to school in London, love London. Used to wander the streets picking up old electronic gadgets and trying to take them apart and put them back together again. Frizzy hair and a bit of an Afro. What can I tell you?

Payman: What kind of kid were you? Were you top of your class?

Andrew Dawood: Oh, no.

Payman: No.

Andrew Dawood: No, no. I measured my success from the bottom. In those days, I was very much more about arts and crafts and electronics. I was a bit obsessed by electronics. I mean, not great at school. I mean, dentistry today, it’s crazy. I’d never have gotten into dentistry today.

Payman: Great.

Andrew Dawood: It’d just never have happened. I never got the greatest great and scraped through.

Payman: You too. He’s an Oxford grad. So when did you decide to become a dentist? Do you remember?

Andrew Dawood: A couple of years ago. I mean, when did I decide? So I was really into electronics and that was a possibility. My brother was a doctor so quite liked that and actually at some point, he’s quite a bit older than me, at some point he went, “Drew, you ought to do dentistry. You’re good with your hands. This [inaudible] and business is really hard work. You’re not good with hard work.” And I did a little bit of work experience with a dentist who strangely I then went on to join.

Andrew Dawood: So I realised that this was what I wanted to do because it was a nice amalgamation of the artsy crafty side, the technical side, the medical side. So it strongly appealed, but I must say that I only really settled into dentistry once I graduated.

Prav: And the dentist that you went and did some work experience for, was that prior to going to dental school I’m assuming?

Andrew Dawood: Yes. Prior to applying, even, to dental school. Incidentally, I didn’t get in anywhere. I got in a week before term started in Clearing. I mean, you know.

Payman: That makes me so happy to hear this. I’m really pleased about this. Who was he, by the way?

Andrew Dawood: He was a wonderful dentist called Laurence Levee who had done some training in the states. He was a high end prosthodontist in central London. So I was really lucky with that and I mean, that and certain other experiences made it clear to me that we wanted to be working at the top.

Payman: Yeah. I remember qualifying from dental school and going to the first VT interviews and just being horrified at what dental practises are like.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah.

Payman: Did you have that feeling as well?

Andrew Dawood: Well, I had a really weird experience. So when I graduated, I went to Venezuela which was a very different country to the one that it is today, right? So went to Venezuela and I worked in the jungle for three months.

Payman: Wow.

Andrew Dawood: In somewhere called Amazonas on the Orinoco River and I sort of moved around in different little locations. It was the sort of Venezuelan equivalent to VT. At a couple of the locations I worked at, I was using rubber dam, I was wearing gloves actually for the first time because at dental school I wasn’t wearing gloves. Gloves, masks, and working in the way that actually I quite wanted to be working. Came back to London and oh my goodness, went to a couple of NHS practises and thought, “No, I can’t work like this” and fortunately I worked in the hospital system for a little while and that was very formative.

Andrew Dawood: So worked at TCH where I am now as well. Worked at [Guy’s] Eastman. So I was sort of sheltered from working in practise for the first couple of years and actually then did a master’s degree with Bernard Smith at Guy’s which was an amazing experience, really.

Payman: Conservative dentistry.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah, conservative dentistry in that time.

Prav: At what point did you get into implant dentistry? At what point in your career did you decide that this is the area that I want to, in air quotes, “specialise” in?

Andrew Dawood: So I graduated in 1984 and probably by 1989 I was working a little bit with implants. I wasn’t doing surgery at that time, but we just started to hear about implants and I’d go along to meetings for [Noble] Farmer at the time because it’s Noble Biocare and I had a load of grumpy older dentists sort of going, “What are you doing here?” And actually that was quite frustrating because there was lots of barriers.

Andrew Dawood: It was very much surgeon led. Even [inaudible] surgeon led. So a prosthodontist, let alone a young whipper snapper of a prosthodontist, didn’t feel very welcome at all which is definitely why Susan and I now would be very welcoming to any young dentist because I just don’t think anyone should experience that sort of, “You haven’t been doing this long enough to be investigating that.”

Prav: Do you remember placing your first implant?

Andrew Dawood: Oh, yeah. I do. I do. Lovely gentleman. Still remember him very well although he’s no longer with us, but kept him in function, smiling and looking good, for 25 years or so that I followed him up. So I remember him very well.

Payman: Did you have a mentor?

Andrew Dawood: I think I had several mentors, really. Of course there was Lawrence Levee who I…

Payman: Worked for.

Andrew Dawood: Started out working for, but I was really lucky because next door to his room was Brian O’Reardon’s room. So Brian was, I think I can call him old-fashioned in the best possible way, oral surgeon who did everything. But he was one of the first people to place implants in the sort of Branemark fashion in the UK. He used to place implants for Michael Wise, for example. So we would always be discussing cases and even better than that, he was pretty much one of the founders of the discipline of dental radiology in the UK.

Andrew Dawood: So along with Professor Seward who was quite an influence to me at dental school, he was very into the radiology, and my brother trained as a radiologist. So this was something that took me very much in the direction of radiology and eventually 3D imaging. So these were early influences. My brother to an extent, Brian certainly.

Payman: Did you meet Branemark himself?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. In fact, Branemark consulted from our practises a couple of times.

Payman: You’re kidding.

Prav: Oh wow.

Andrew Dawood: So yes, we very much met him.

Payman: Then going forward from that, when you set up the practise, was it a classic one room situation and you grew it?

Andrew Dawood: So we started out in Cavendish Square. Susan Tanner, who’s my wife, joined the practise and eventually Lawrence Levee retired. We were in a nice flat working out of a couple of rooms. Very frustrating, very expensive rent, huge service charges, and this feeling that you could never really settle. You felt it was difficult to invest for the future, to develop the facilities you really wanted. So actually we tried to find our own place, to find somewhere where we could really imprint our own…

Prav: Did you have the classic struggles of West End dentistry where you’ve got no patients and years to build up the list and that sort of thing? Or did you have referrals from the beginning or…

Andrew Dawood: We definitely didn’t have referrals from the very beginning. I mean, that was something that was hard work and I think to an extent it still is hard work because we need to really look after our referrals. We always do try really hard to look after our referrals and their patients. It’s not something you can ever relax with, but in those days we weren’t receiving and weren’t really looking for referrals, but we did have a lot of lovely patients and many of those patients are still with us, actually. So our practise is a wonderful mixture of older patients who’ve been with us for years and years and older implant patients who we still monitor outcome for and then newer patients with all their challenges.

Prav: Just so I understand in terms of the transition, so you were in your hospital job then went to work for Lawrence, is that right?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. So in the hospital job and started a part time MSC course over two years. So I worked the other part time in private practise.

Prav: And then was it that practise that you ended up taking over before moving on to your own?

Andrew Dawood: Exactly. Well, took it over and it became our own.

Prav: It became your own.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. Yeah.

Prav: And so you’d purchased the practise from Lawrence? Is that right?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. We did.

Prav: What was that like? So just in terms of you worked for him, negotiation…

Andrew Dawood: It was stressful. It was something that happened organically over a period because we were together for five years and we did more, he did less, and it was organic and…

Prav: Just transitioned.

Andrew Dawood: And the patients stayed, mostly stayed, and indeed I think many patients brought more of their family in and we got quite lucky there, I think.

Prav: And then from there you went on to, I guess you weren’t happy with the facility or the building or whatever it was, to put your own stamp on it and so is that when you decided…

Andrew Dawood: I very much wanted something of an operating theatre type environment.

Prav: Sure.

Andrew Dawood: For one thing, we wanted some space for education. We wanted to develop the multidisciplinary side. I mean, nowadays multidisciplinary practise is very much an every day thing. There are loads of multidisciplinary so called centres of excellence, right? But in those days, there weren’t even… God damn. It’s making me sound like a dinosaur, but there weren’t even dental specialists as such and that’s exactly the environment we wanted to create.

Andrew Dawood: So eventually MRD and specialisation, registered specialisation, appeared and that’s exactly when we moved and started in Wimpole Street which is where we are now.

Prav: And what was that process like? Just trying to find a place, the building, costing up things. Were there scary moments at that time where you felt, “If I make this move…”

Andrew Dawood: Well, there were very scary moments.

Prav: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: Because we didn’t really plan it very well. We sort of just did it and hoped for the best. I wouldn’t recommend that. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. So when we first made this move, we actually lived on the premises. On the two floors above. So I can remember, oh God, I don’t know what CQC would do nowadays, but I can remember treating a patient, in the midst of a full mouth rehabilitation during that move, where the surgery was fine, but there were no lights in the hallway, no lights in the bathroom, and it was winter time and she had to be escorted. Oh God. Maybe I shouldn’t go there. It was a really challenging few months as we made the move and of course, we hugely underestimated the costs.

Prav: Of course.

Andrew Dawood: Took a long time to recover. Would I do it again? Yes, definitely.

Prav: What was the biggest mistake you made during that time, do you think?

Andrew Dawood: So when we made the move, we kept ourselves to a small number of rooms. I mean, more rooms than small, but I think I would’ve tried to create the team we wanted to be earlier on in that move. So things grew slowly. It wasn’t a mistake, I just wish we’d…

Prav: Scaled quicker or…

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. Right.

Prav: Invested in the team earlier on.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. Exactly. Not a mistake, but just looking back I wish we’d had the courage to do that a little sooner, but it happened soon enough and we’ve got a fantastic team so I’m really not complaining and actually generally speaking, the people who joined us stayed with us and…

Prav: Who’s your longest standing team member and how long has that person been…

Andrew Dawood: Probably Shannon Patel.

Payman: Who I went to school with.

Andrew Dawood: You went to school with her?

Payman: Yep.

Andrew Dawood: So if I said 20 years, would that sound about right?

Payman: Yep.

Andrew Dawood: I think she’s been with us about 20 years.

Payman: I qualified 25 years ago so then he was one year above me, but I don’t remember how soon he came to be.

Andrew Dawood: So I’m saying being with us. I don’t really see it that way. I think we’ve been together which is different. [inaudible] the lead periodontist.

Payman: How many specialists work there now? How many humans?

Andrew Dawood: I think there are 15 or 17 dentists. Something like that. Yeah, and there are probably about 50 of us in the building or something like that.

Payman: Whoa. So how many operatries?

Andrew Dawood: 17.

Payman: 17 operatries. Wow.

Prav: What’s the structure like? So in terms of clinicians, support team, reception team, concierge. Just give us an overview of someone who looks after the patient.

Payman: That’s the new buzz…

Prav: Implant coordinator, concierge, the people call it or person who…

Andrew Dawood: Right.

Prav: Looks after the patient journey.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. I mean, we have a fantastic reception team. That’s always a challenge. We have four or five therapists or hygienists. We do have treatment coordinators who sort of liaise with some of our more complicated treatment plans. What else? I mean, we have a couple of people in sterilisation.

Prav: I’m a patient. I want treatment at your practise. I send an email through your website. What’s my journey?

Andrew Dawood: So the email will probably be picked up by one of our treatment coordinators who would try and make something of an assessment of the kind of treatment you actually need. I mean, that can be quite challenging. One loose tooth can translate into a mouth full of periodontal disease and they could be salvageable or un-salvageable. So it could be pain. So pain is likely to end up with the endodontist. Sense of gum problems is likely to end up with the periodontist and so they will go to see the dentist. They’ll go to see the clinician. We don’t have system where a non clinical member of staff, which actually happens in quite a few practises…

Prav: It does.

Andrew Dawood: And is decidedly dodgy, I think.

Prav: Okay. So I take the first step. I liaise with your treatment coordinator or receptionist by email or by phone and then they invite me in to have a assessment with a dentist?

Andrew Dawood: Yes. Absolutely.

Prav: Triage me based on what they feel my needs would be.

Andrew Dawood: Exactly. Exactly.

Prav: And then that’s a full thorough clinical assessment?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. I want to see every patient carefully and meticulously reviewed in a consultation.

Prav: And what would that sort of…

Andrew Dawood: Which can be very frustrating sometimes.

Prav: So I come and have a consultation with yourself. Just talk me through that process. I know it might seem very simple, but…

Payman: How thorough?

Prav: How thorough is that? How long is the appointment? What happens during that appointment?

Andrew Dawood: So I would schedule a 30 minute appointment. I think you can get through a huge amount in 30 minutes and I really do try to assess them in every way. So I suppose I have a restorative background, a prosthodontic background, and so just presumably we’re talking about an implant patient if they’re coming in my direction, but I’ll very much be looking at the general state of their dentician, their periodontal state. I’m fascinated by medical histories.

Andrew Dawood: I get really engaged with the forensics of how did they get to be in the state they’re in. I think that’s hugely important when we’re looking to the future. We want to know what took them to this point whether it’s high blood pressure, they’re on a casein channel blocker, they’re taking [Amlodipine] and actually before we know it, they’ve got a periodontal situation and actually did their doctor know that this drug that they’ve been taking for 5 or 10 years may be one of the factors in causing the problems that have bought them to my door.

Andrew Dawood: So I think that sort of forensic approach is interesting. There are so many drugs now that are going to affect the outcome of treatment. Bisphosphonate. We’re giving a little bit of guidance on anti-resorptive agents. So a lot of our patients are smokers. So I find that actually fascinating. We will very often work with a panoramic radiograph although people always associated us, I think, with CBCT. I mean, we reserve that until we know where and what we’re doing. So that might be something that we will do later on in the process, but it’s seldom the first thing.

Andrew Dawood: So I always laugh when you see adverts. “Free CBCT scan for your new patient.” I mean, that’s an extraordinary thing to do and it’s a huge responsibility as well because that’s a huge volume of data that you need to be thinking about and reporting if you’re going to go that far with a patient. So I try and get a general idea of where we’re going. If it’s a small, distinct issue then I will write and give a comprehensive plan. A quotation, of course. If there’s much more to it, then it may be we’re going to move to a second consultation with more in depth record taking or it might be that we’re going to carry out some initial periodontal therapy to just see what scope there is for improvement before we make a definitive plan.

Prav: And treatment plan sort of a week or so later or at that appointment?

Andrew Dawood: I try very hard to dictate on the day.

Prav: Okay.

Andrew Dawood: It might take longer to edit and send out a letter.

Prav: And then what happens? Do they come back to you to have that presented to them or does that go out in the post?

Andrew Dawood: It will generally go out in the post and one of our treatment coordinators will be there to follow up, but I’m always happy to pick up the phone.

Prav: Okay.

Andrew Dawood: Whether it’s a referring dentist or a patient, I’m always happy to pick up the phone. I mean, I think one of the hot topics at the moment is consent.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: And I think that consent process starts the moment the patient walks through the door.

Prav: Are you writing long essays now with the litigation that’s going on?

Andrew Dawood: So you see, you can write a long essay and the patient will walk through the door and go, “I didn’t read any of that.” So what do you do actually in those circumstances? What do you do? [crosstalk]

Payman: It’s still your fault, right?

Andrew Dawood: They’ve just told you that they haven’t read anything, that they actually haven’t taken notes of anything that you’ve put on paper, so what do you do?

Payman: Yeah, that’s difficult.

Andrew Dawood: So long essays, I don’t think are enough or maybe they’re too much, and what certainly isn’t appropriate is a signature on a form which says basically if the world falls apart, you know that could happen and it’s a lot of responsibility. That sort of thing signed 30 seconds before you start an invasive treatment. In the case of implants, you’re putting in something that hopefully is going to be there for a lifetime or taking out teeth that may have some more scope to last a bit longer and putting in implants which are hopefully going to be there for a lifetime and that’s not a decision you can make on the day of surgery.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, one of the trends that’s out there is you see a lot of itinerant dentists who are going into practises, putting in implants, and they have not met the patients before they do the treatment and that’s just not acceptable in any way, shape, or form and we have a number of patients who come through our door who have been sent to us for various medical legal reasons and for advice and this is something that is a real problem. They say, “We did not understand. We did not consent to this.”

Andrew Dawood: So I think how do you get good consent? By recording the fact that you’ve had good communication throughout the process and yes, the letter of course is important. It is.

Prav: And do you have a unique consent process? Do you ever get the patients to write down the risks themselves? I’ve heard different dentists do it different ways. So some of them say if they ask the patient to write the risk down then at least they’ve understood it. What was your take on that?

Andrew Dawood: Well, we don’t give them a multiple choice type… We don’t do that, but we do go into detail and I think that by and large, the more you discuss the potential issues, the potential problems, actually there is a concern out there that you’re going to drive the patient away by telling them what all the problems are, but in fact I think what the patient sees is someone who’s wise, someone who’s been around the block and understands what can happen, and I think it’s increasing confidence in you, the clinician, rather than decreasing confidence in the process.

Andrew Dawood: So you’re bringing people down to earth and that’s really useful and really important, but it means we’re all on the same side and actually if the patients don’t like that, then maybe you’re better off without them.

Prav: Sure, and in terms of being one of the leading implant clinics in the UK, in terms of pricing and level of investment, where do you sit? I’m assuming at the top end of the market.

Andrew Dawood: We are an absolute bargain. No, I’m actually being…

Payman: Love that.

Andrew Dawood: Completely serious.

Payman: Love that.

Andrew Dawood: We’re being completely serious. Okay, look. You’re talking about us as an implant clinic and actually we’re not an implant clinic. We’re a specialist practise. We’re a practise with many specialists in it, actually. We’re not all specialists, but we’re a practise where if it is appropriate that a patient has a root filling, they’ll have a root filling. If it’s appropriate that they’ll have a difficult reconstruction on teeth, then that’s what they’re going to have.

Andrew Dawood: Yes, I do implants, almost exclusively implants, but what is an implant clinic? I mean, maybe that shouldn’t really be there. I didn’t think a specialist implant, you know we talk about should there be a specialism in implant dentistry, I don’t really think there should be because it’s actually about restoring denticians and we need that overall perspective.

Andrew Dawood: So we are a bargain. Coming back to your point, we’re a bargain because we’re hyper efficient. I think we’re extremely efficient at what we do. We’ve been doing it a very long time. We use well known, highly regarded implant systems and we do that from the ground up. So our implant system is something that’s highly regarded and well known, but the components that we put on top of it are also of that system. So I think something that people don’t really get is that what you put on top of the implants is as important as the implants and a lot of patients will say, “They used that implant. It’s a really good implant”, but then you see that what’s been put on it just doesn’t fit at all and they’ve used…

Payman: Cheap stuff.

Andrew Dawood: Cheap stuff on top and that’s a great way to cause perisplanchnitis, for example. So the implant fails because of the restorative work that’s done. So when we work with referrers, we work very closely with them to make sure that what goes on the implant is the right thing. Now if you’re going to do it right, it is going to cost a bit more. I think I’m actually going to name something that’s happening at the moment because you’re laughing, I think you know what I’m going to tell you.

Andrew Dawood: So there’s a dental company called Finest Dental which has just recently, I understand, gone bankrupt or something like that and there are patients out there who have just been left in the most appalling state and some of them have found their way to our practise and it’s just mind boggling. I mean, they have had implants provided from a well known manufacturer, but in the patients I’ve seen, the implants look like they’ve been shot in. Far more of them than there should be. Far more implants.

Andrew Dawood: So they’ve paid very little, I believe they’ve paid very little, but for twice as many implants as they needed. Then what’s been put on top just [inaudible] belief. No thought to occlusion, no thought to the opposing arch, no thought to the periodontal state, the restorative state, and I mean, it’s worrying. It’s upsetting. It gives us all a bad name.

Prav: How do you deal with a patient like that? So someone who’s gone and had that treatment done somewhere else at probably a fraction of the investment that you do have[crosstalk 00:28:27]

Andrew Dawood: You see, remember, sorry. I said we’re a bargain. I mean, actually paying half as much for nine implants still costs more than four implants done properly.

Prav: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: Buy once, buy right.

Payman: Yeah, absolutely.

Prav: The general point, you must be seeing a lot of failure cases coming to you. How do you deal with that without trashing the previous guy and all of the…

Andrew Dawood: We never do that.

Prav: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: Sympathetically and empathetically and it can be very challenging. We also see patients who’ve gone abroad to have dentistry done.

Prav: Do you get a lot of that?

Andrew Dawood: We see quite a few of them and that’s upsetting because the patient comes back, not back, they come to us and they’re already upset. They’re already angry and there’s a tendency for them to sort of tar the dental profession all with the same…

Prav: Same brush.

Payman: Do you get a lot of people travelling here to come and see you?

Andrew Dawood: Oh, we do get quite a number. I can say that they travel from…

Payman: The Middle East and all that.

Andrew Dawood: Some from the Middle East, but also from Europe and even further places like Scotland.

Payman: So you’ve pioneered a bunch of things in practise. The imaging. You were the first CBCT, were you?

Andrew Dawood: We were. Yeah. We had the first CBCT unit in the UK.

Payman: You’ve [inaudible] and print bit and pieces, implants, titanium, things that we didn’t think were possible. This sort of being the pioneer, it comes with an element of kind of risk, going into the unknown, and you were saying when you moved from one practise to the other you jumped in. Didn’t really know what you were doing, but you just did it. That seems like a threat that you must be comfortable with. I’m not saying comfortable with risk, but comfortable with not knowing the future and trying to be the first.

Andrew Dawood: I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it or just stupid. We’ve been earlier doctors in so many things.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: And some of the things that we’ve been earlier doctors in have been really successful and some of the things that we’ve…

Payman: I was going to say, there must have been lots of false starts along the way.

Andrew Dawood: Oh God, yeah. Yeah.

Payman: I read somewhere you were printing in the 90s and you must have invested in things, thousands [crosstalk]

Andrew Dawood: Our first patient treated with 3D printing was in 1999.

Payman: That’s unbelievable.

Andrew Dawood: In fact.

Payman: So did you have lots of mis-starts and…

Andrew Dawood: There’s this thing, what is it called? The technology adaption life cycle, but there’s the chasm where people head out full of enthusiasm and suddenly you just fall into this chasm of, “Oh God, I wish I hadn’t been the first one to do that” and that’s happened so many times. I mean, in terms of 3D printing for example, we invested early on in costly industrial 3D printers. We’d have been much better off taking a small part of what we invested in the machines themselves and investing that into the 3D printing businesses, the companies that produce these machines.

Prav: Sure.

Andrew Dawood: It’s very competitive. There are very small margins. The people who really make the money out of it are the people who produce the machines because they produce materials that are tied to those machines.

Payman: The ongoing…

Andrew Dawood: And so it’s a bit like buying a really expensive ink jet printer and having to buy cartridges all the time. Very frustrating, but you can’t look at one item on its own. You have to look at the bigger picture. So we’ve invested very much in technology and 3D technologies. Some of that’s been good, some of it hasn’t been so good, but it’s taken us into territory that’s been interesting, engaging, fulfilling. It’s led us to treat some amazing people, amazing patients, work with some amazing surgeons, dentists.

Payman: What is it about you that you were the young guy when all these older guys were putting in the implants and you seemed like you were comfortable with that, then you were the first CBCT, then the first this, the first. Why are you that person?

Andrew Dawood: I think it goes back to when I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted to be an electronic engineer or a potter actually or a dentist works pretty well. So it’s that sort of fascination with technology, I suppose, and also a bit of tendency to think laterally which I hope my kids have a bit of as well. I think they could be as annoying as I was at school. I’ve got a daughter who is in dental school.

Payman: Oh really?

Prav: Ah.

Andrew Dawood: Actually so trying to look at technologies outside of dentistry, seeing how we can use them in dentistry or vice versa actually because dentistry, in many ways, is what drove the 3D printing market because with this new technology there are lots of things that people talked about doing, but in dentistry we were actually doing them.

Payman: Yeah. And so you have a 3D printing business that supplies outside of dentistry to architects and…

Andrew Dawood: Yes. So the business, I mean I’m not involved day to day in that side of it, but we work with architects, product designers, some quite well known individuals. People like Ron Arad. Some well known sculptors. We produce everything from architectural models to sculptures to patterns for sculptures to jewellery which is really the same as dentistry in so many ways.

Andrew Dawood: So anything that can be modelled on screen in a virtual environment and sent for printing or milling for that matter because we even make some large scale sculptures which are milled out of blocks of marble or polystyrene. Things like that.

Payman: I went to that exhibition. Have you heard of Moving to Mars? Did you hear about that one? What will it take to move to Mars and they took a bunch of these little plastic pipes along with them and then printed the houses and printed the tables and chairs.

Andrew Dawood: If you’re going to do that…

Payman: That’s going to be you.

Andrew Dawood: No, I’d get bored in a small space for a long time. If you’re going to move to Mars, you’re going to print it using Mars dirt. That would be the way to go. You’ve got lots of sunshine and make cement and use Mars dirt and print without it because a lot of people are printing houses in concrete and printing in concrete is a thing.

Payman: Fascinating.

Prav: How do you split your time between the different businesses? Do you have certain days focusing on one business and another or do you have a team who’s leading the printing business and then report back to you?

Andrew Dawood: We have an excellent team of people and we work together. There’s synergies. Where there are synergies, we exploit the synergies, but our imaging businesses which is Cavendish Imaging is lead by Veronique Jackson who’s a medical physicist who’s totally brilliant and very self-sufficient, actually. So essentially I work as shall we say the clinical director and we meet regularly and chat about the way things are going and the imaging world is constantly changing, constantly evolving, and I’ve got a chat [inaudible] Matt Vinyl who runs Additive which is the 3D printing business.

Prav: Just give us an idea of the scale of these operations. So 50 people in the practise. How many people in the imaging?

Andrew Dawood: Probably about 15, 17?

Prav: Printing side?

Andrew Dawood: About 12, 15.

Prav: How do you lead all of that?

Payman: What kind of a leader are you?

Prav: What’s the secret to your leadership? Give us your top five tips for being an excellent leader.

Andrew Dawood: Well, I don’t feel like an excellent leader, I have to tell you. I wish I had more time for everybody if I could

Prav: You a workaholic?

Andrew Dawood: I don’t think of myself that way because I mean, part of it is I don’t think of what I do as being work particularly and probably I just really enjoy what I do. I really enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy the patients who I work with and the dentists and…

Payman: You’ve got incredibly high standards yourself. Then do you want that from your team as well and that you are quite a hard boss to work for or…

Andrew Dawood: I think if people want what I want which is the best for the patients, the best for the client, then things tend to run themselves pretty well and I think there’s a very strong work ethic in the environment we’re in. I mean, the people who don’t have a strong work ethic definitely stick out like a sore thumb and I think we’re quite democratic. I think the people around me kind of are as unhappy as I might be if someone’s not performing.

Prav: How involved are you in the recruitment of these team members? Are you just recruiting at the higher level and then having your sort of…

Andrew Dawood: So I have a wonderful practise manager who looks after most of the recruitment in the practise and then so higher level, yes. I’m more involved and of course, the people who run the other businesses are more involved. Susan absolutely is hugely involved in that side of things as well.

Prav: You ever had to fire someone?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah.

Payman: Who does that? Is that you or Susan?

Andrew Dawood: Oh, I think when we really chicken, somebody else entirely will do it. I mean, that’s the pits, isn’t it?

Prav: Yeah.

Payman: It’s never easy.

Andrew Dawood: No, it’s never easy. It’s never easy.

Prav: Never easy.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, that’s not something that I enjoy or want to do.

Payman: So the toothpaste.

Andrew Dawood: So that’s really Susan’s baby. You’d have to get her along to talk about that.

Payman: I love that toothpaste. I really do. I love the four flavours of it.

Andrew Dawood: Well coming from you, that’s a compliment.

Payman: I love the four flavours of it and it’s a wonderful idea and the execution of it. I don’t know if you saw, Curaprox tried doing something like that. Was it Curaprox?

Prav: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Payman: The gin and tonic. The execution on the branding was all right, not as good as yours, but the taste is still disgusting and it’s a challenge. I’ve played with taste in toothpaste quite a lot. Really, really brilliant execution.

Andrew Dawood: So Susan’s really managed that and I think we were a little early with the toothpaste and it’s something we want to revisit, but it’s very much something that I will leave you to discuss with Susan.

Payman: I like that.

Prav: Tell us about your family.

Andrew Dawood: Okay. Well, there’s obviously for this morning, the star is the budding dentist.

Prav: Sure.

Andrew Dawood: Third year.

Payman: Did you encourage her to become a dentist?

Andrew Dawood: I didn’t encourage anything to do anything particularly. So my oldest son who’s currently doing a PhD in bone biology. I mean, that sounds like we’ve had a certain influence, doesn’t it?

Payman: Yeah.

Prav: It does.

Andrew Dawood: But when he said he wants to do medicine, I wasn’t mad keen on… I sort of said, “Well look, if you are going to do medicine, why don’t you do dentistry?” I got involved a little late on that one because I really think that it’d have been totally brilliant and then Hugo, our central child who’s actually a software engineer, I mean he was always going to do that. It was clear. I mean, he was always at his computer.

Prav: Programming geek?

Andrew Dawood: He’s a programmer but he’s just the most astute sort of business-minded and people centred person. So very into technology. Clever, clever guy. So he was never going to do dentistry and our daughter sort of piped up and said, “Well, I think I should do this.” It was fantastic. So thrilled.

Prav: Is that your youngest?

Andrew Dawood: She’s our youngest, yeah. So thrilled that she’s doing it and also for me, for Susan, I think it’s focused our attention more on the profession. I don’t think there’s a lot we can do, but thinking about her moving forwards into this profession we just want to make sure that it’s the right one for her. So it’s going to.

Prav: And when did the children come along amongst all this moving the practise and setting up businesses and…

Andrew Dawood: Well, we literally had our middle child in a drawer above the practise. So yeah, that was kind of take a little time off to have a baby and move straight into a building site, yeah.

Prav: Wow.

Andrew Dawood: Which isn’t that what happens to everyone to an extent?

Payman: Sure. Do you still live in Central London? Or…

Andrew Dawood: We do. Yeah.

Payman: Yeah. [crosstalk]

Andrew Dawood: Thankfully no longer above the practise.

Payman: Did you ever have ambitions for opening more than the key centre? I mean, did you ever think of doing lots of them?

Andrew Dawood: I don’t think lots, but I can see a reasonable argument for being a little more distributed than we are.

Payman: So you think that might happen?

Andrew Dawood: Ooh. Watch this face.

Payman: Well because we have these younger kids on the show sometimes and super ambitious and people are ambitious when they’re young, but I’m thinking of Robby. He wants to put one in every city in the world. He meant it. He really, really, really meant it.

Andrew Dawood: I think the challenge is…

Payman: The excellence in that one centre as the key thing.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah, I mean the challenge is as soon as you do that, you need people who are like minded, who want the same for their patients, and to find people who are going to work for you somewhere else, it’s tough. It’s challenging and so you see a lot of multi-centre practises and you see them open, then you see them close. Are the corporates that we see out there a bit of a dumbing down of dentistry where what we can offer is a bit more limited? I don’t know. The dental industry is becoming a bit more of an industry.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: I’m not sure that that’s really the way I want to go. We’re proudly independent. I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? When I graduated, an independent practise was one that wasn’t happy to call themselves a private practise because they didn’t want to frighten away the patients.

Payman: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Dawood: But they were also trying to move off away from the NHS, but now an independent practise to me is us.

Prav: Sure.

Andrew Dawood: We’re not a corporate, no desire to be a corporate, and yet we can be out there and offer our patients exactly what they need. There are no commercial pressures towards uniformity.

Prav: Standards and all of that.

Payman: I mean, you must have put in thousands of implants by now. Have you got a number?

Andrew Dawood: I actually laugh when people give numbers. I mean, if you’re still counting then there’s [crosstalk]

Payman: But my point is, my question really, is with surgery you can never be blase about it. You have to still always be on it, but there must be an element of it where it’s second nature to you and that sort of tension between it being an easy thing but it’s a surgery at the end of the day and I guess the things that you’re doing, the risks are higher.

Andrew Dawood: Well, some of them, but I love surgery whether it’s a single tooth or… The drive for me is always to keep it as minimally invasive as possible, the interventions as small as possible. In this day and age of sort of Instagram dentistry, I do laugh sometimes. I open Instagram and I see these incredibly complex scenarios that there’s the before, but there’s never an after. Bone everywhere, bone materials, screws, and membranes and incredibly complicated things and you think, “Well, was that really necessary?” And we’ve tried all sorts of things in the past, but at the end of the day keeping it simple is the way forwards. Keeping teeth. That’s keeping it simple. That’s the way forwards.

Payman: I notice in your ad it says something about, “You may have been told you need a bone graft, but actually we can do many things without them.” Is that what you’re alluding to?

Andrew Dawood: We might have said something like this in the past or even currently.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, very much a bit of clever thinking, clever 3D thinking, can very often allow you to skip those sort of extra treatment which actually quite significantly affect predictability and definitely affect the timing of procedures. So if you could avoid grafting, that’s one less procedure. Very often a quicker, more predictable result.

Payman: Do you ever get bored of it?

Andrew Dawood: Do I ever get bored of it. God.

Payman: Because what if I gave you a billion dollars? Would you still put implants in? I mean, you answered the question.

Prav: He’s thinking about it. He’s answered the question.

Andrew Dawood: There are maybe some of the simpler things that I do I would do less of, but then on the other hand I do enjoy the simpler things that I do. I probably would. I mean, I love the max fax stuff, I do, but I couldn’t be at the top of my game with that if I wasn’t doing some of the other stuff around it. It’s very hard to say… Everything you do feeds into what you do to make you the person that you are. So if I wasn’t doing the simple things, then I probably couldn’t do the more complex things and yet, doing the more complex things that I do helps to make the simple things simpler. So it would be very hard to take your…

Payman: I hear you, but I think what I’m saying is you know when you ask someone, “If you weren’t an implantologist, what would you be?” You would be a technologist of some sort.

Andrew Dawood: No, I’d probably be a potter actually.

Payman: Potter. There you go.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, when my parents said, “What do you want to do” and I said, “Potter.”

Prav: Slapped.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. It didn’t go down well. It really didn’t, but that generally was…

Payman: What do your parents do?

Andrew Dawood: It really was a conversation.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: What my parents do. Well, my dad was an author, a translator, and a publisher. Advertising, marketing. Not at all anything that I ever got into, but we were probably the first dental practise in the world to have a 3D printer, but he was the first person doing what he did to have a typesetter, but a computerised typesetter. So I used to operate that as a 14 year old. I’m remembering this now. So this thing was the size of a room and in my summer holidays as a 14 year old I would be operating this thing that essentially moved a matrix of tiny negatives around to set print for lithographic reproduction onto photographic paper. So I’d be in the dark room changing this thing. So he spent as much as a house on this computerised printer.

Payman: I think the beginnings of it, right?

Andrew Dawood: I seem to remember that it had 64 kilobytes of memory which is as much as your washing machine now. It’d probably be less than your washing machine.

Prav: Less. Less.

Andrew Dawood: Maybe your cappuccino machine. So no, there was that and like him, he never knew how to work it and there are a lot of machines that we have that I have no idea how to run either and my mother is, was a simultaneous translator and…

Payman: Which language were they translating into?

Andrew Dawood: Arabic, actually.

Payman: Oh really?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah, yeah.

Payman: What’s your background?

Andrew Dawood: My parents came to the UK in the 40s.

Payman: From…

Andrew Dawood: From [inaudible] in Lebanon.

Payman: Oh, okay.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. What else did you ask me? Sorry.

Payman: Well, I was getting down this route of if you weren’t a dentist, what would you be?

Andrew Dawood: A potter.

Payman: But where I’m going with it is that you’ve achieved pretty much everything in dentistry. I mean, you could…

Andrew Dawood: Oh, I don’t know.

Payman: Well, you know what I mean, but you could stop being a dentist and being something else if you wanted to. So where I’m going with it is do you feel like retiring? Do you think you’ll retire early? Are you one of these types that says you’ll never retire, you want to work forever type of people?

Andrew Dawood: Well, my dad was still working when he was 85.

Payman: Is that right?

Andrew Dawood: So I couldn’t really consider that. I’m not sure how good of a dentist I’ll be at 85, but maybe I’ll have stopped putting in implants by then, but I enjoy what I do.

Prav: Was it your dad’s own business?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah.

Prav: That you were working in, yeah.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah.

Payman: Amazing.

Andrew Dawood: Only on summer holidays, mind.

Prav: So what’s the next big move for you? I remember before, we were just chatting outside and you were talking about MRIs and where that’s going.

Andrew Dawood: Well, I mean that’s a feature of what we do. So we got involved with CBCT back in 2005 which is volumetric imaging. People compare it with CT, but there isn’t really a comparison because CT is sliced acquisition whereas in CBCT we’re requiring a volume at the same time. Same time. That’s very important. It’s the same time and MRI is moving in that direction as well. So instead of requiring MRI data a slice at a time, you’re acquiring it volumetricly. A whole chunk of data. What that means is that if you give contrast agents, for example, you can actually start to see vascular systems in one chunk.

Payman: Whoa.

Andrew Dawood: So we have some incredible imaging. This is rather sort of new really working with guys at UCLH. Incredible imaging of tumours, vasuclatures, nerves. We’re running through [inaudible] glands for example and so we’re getting into some very interesting surgical planning 3D printing of that kind. So we’re looking at how MRI can be fused with CBCT or just used on its own. Lots of projects in mind there, but really that’s just a little…

Prav: Side project.

Andrew Dawood: Side project. Something that is a hot topic for me because I’ve thought about MRI a lot, but brilliant radiologist called Simon Morley showed me some of his work which was so inspirational. I want to try and help with that. Promote that.

Prav: What’s the next big thing for you?

Andrew Dawood: The next big thing is probably catching up on sort of a trail of growth and expansion that we’ve had over the last few years and actually just making what we’ve achieved so far solid and stable.

Payman: Consolidate it.

Andrew Dawood: Consolidating and I mean, rather than looking forwards and doing more, I just want to make sure that what we’ve done so far is better.

Prav: Sure. Sure.

Payman: Andrew, we’ve been asking all of our guests about clinical mistakes that they’ve made in the help that it’s not the normal medical situation where everyone hides their mistake or blames the thing. It would just feel so good if you said you’d made some clinical mistakes that were…

Andrew Dawood: Well, I mean we learn from our mistakes, right?

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, we learn every day. I mean, there’s mistakes that we make where we can beat ourselves up and then there are mistakes that we make that everyone makes and I mean, what’s all so challenging in dentistry in general and in the implant world in particular is that what we do has a patient at the other end of it and we have the challenges of our regulators. We have the challenges of a population who are evermore increasingly litigious and so it’s a difficult environment, but nonetheless we learn from our mistakes and we improve ourselves by reflecting back on what we’ve done and that goes for everyone from the receptionist all the way through to all the team who are terribly important to us.

Andrew Dawood: I mean, one of my big pleasures is seeing development within our team who are so important to us. So yeah, we want an open culture to reflect and share problems amongst clinicians. We’re really lucky to be able to sit together or stand up together in a corridor, whatever, and discuss the problems that we have.

Payman: So what are the clinical mistakes that you’ve learned so much from?

Andrew Dawood: Oh gosh. Where do you go with that? I think the kind of implant dentistry I practise today is very different to the kind of implant dentistry I practised 15 years ago, for example.

Payman: In what way?

Andrew Dawood: I think we had higher powered rose tinted spectacles back then and maybe, maybe we were a little more likely to look at the implant as a huge panacea to any problem that came along and possibly back then we might have put in more implants than we do now. The converse of that is that maybe more teeth came out than that need to now. I think we were always operating in an entirely ethical…

Payman: Yeah, of course.

Andrew Dawood: Way. I feel confident and secure in that knowledge, but I think ideas have changed generally.

Prav: Did you ever have one of those moments in practise where you thought, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I’ve just done that. I’m going to need to tell the patient that I’ve screwed up” or whatever. Made a mistake and put it right. Any situations like that before?

Andrew Dawood: Well, probably one of the most upsetting occurrences for me, so you’re pushing me to give me my particular disaster.

Payman: You don’t have to.

Prav: You don’t have to.

Payman: No, no, no.

Andrew Dawood: So I would say one of the most frustrating and upsetting things that happened to me was a pure sort of pressure consent administrative issue where…

Payman: Perfect storm.

Andrew Dawood: You had a perfect storm of a very, very busy, challenging day with actually emergency, I don’t mean serious emergencies, but people who were seriously impinging on your day and compromising…

Payman: Your work flow.

Andrew Dawood: Your work flow and I had seen a patient, had a really detailed consultation, had written a really detailed letter, had gone through scans, had talked to the patient. I knew exactly what I was doing. He should have had the letter that said exactly what he was going to have done and we got on so well that because he was uncomfortable, he came in within about three days of that consultation and actually I was also working with a new member of staff who… our work flow wasn’t what it should have been on that day at that moment for that particular patient who had a huge cyst on a first molar and absolutely failing second and third molars.

Andrew Dawood: I’d written my letter that these three teeth were going to come out and I said to him, “Okay, here we are. We’re going to take out these teeth”, numbed him up, and took out the teeth and he said, “Hang on, there are three teeth. You’ve taken out three teeth.” “Yes. That was in my letter.” “Well, I didn’t get your letter.”

Payman: So you learnt from that.

Andrew Dawood: So this new patient who I didn’t know very well turned out to be a thoroughly difficult individual.

Prav: Piece of work.

Andrew Dawood: And anyway, a couple of implants and a sinus lift later, managed to pacify him, but these things sort of…

Prav: You’re not going to have a 30 year career without things going wrong.

Andrew Dawood: No, an event like that, it absolutely changed the way we work.

Payman: Yeah.

Prav: Of course.

Andrew Dawood: Because I mean, it’s silly, it’s subtle, but it’s not subtle. Did you get my letter?

Prav: Reshaped you, yeah.

Andrew Dawood: It reshapes you. So I mean that’s probably the worst clinical error and clinically it wasn’t an error.

Prav: It was an administrative error.

Andrew Dawood: We did exactly what needed to be done, but what needed to be done didn’t coincide with what he thought we were doing. So if you want my worst error, that’s probably it.

Payman: What were your darkest times in professional life? I mean, did you have any issues like, I don’t know, building issues or people leaving you at the wrong time or loss of confidence? You don’t look like someone to lose confidence.

Prav: Work life balance.

Payman: Work life balance sort of.

Andrew Dawood: Well, I mean I think we’ve been pretty lucky.

Payman: Where I’m going with this, you don’t achieve excellence like that without some sacrifice.

Prav: Most have ended up in the hole at some point.

Payman: Because you’ve achieved so much, you know what I mean?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah.

Payman: He runs a business, I run a business. To make something, you want to be best in the world at something, you do end up sacrificing along the way. I mean, my particular problem is I sit in a room on my phone with my kids, but I’m on the phone, yeah? And so I go away for conferences all the time. It affects them. It does affect them.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. I suppose that’s true, but I think we live close enough to work. Susan has worked throughout her life and seldom took a lot of…

Prav: Is she a specialist too?

Andrew Dawood: She was a specialist prosthodontist and she seldom took time off. One was going to the hospital to have the baby come out, but I think our kids have benefited from that. I think they’ve seen how we work and [crosstalk]

Payman: Work ethic.

Andrew Dawood: Great work ethic and you can keep yourself very busy doing nothing and I think we keep ourselves busy doing quite a lot and I’m not complaining.

Payman: What do you like outside of work? What are your hobbies?

Andrew Dawood: Pottery.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: In case you haven’t gathered.

Payman: Yeah.

Andrew Dawood: Pottery, I love.

Payman: You cycled here, right?

Andrew Dawood: I wish I could say that was a hobby. I mean, it’s transportation. I did go to London, to Brighton last year which was good fun. Pushed along by one of my sons. I loved it.

Prav: Are you a gym person? Health and fitness?

Andrew Dawood: Well, I hate to disappoint you, but when I get on the running machine it’s with my dictation machine in my head.

Prav: Two birds with one stone.

Andrew Dawood: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. So I do that. Yeah. I go to the gym and work out. Try and keep reasonably fit and healthy, but I like my food.

Prav: Don’t we all?

Andrew Dawood: Yeah. Like my food a lot.

Payman: So if you were going to leave the legacy, what would you say? I mean, if you were going to leave some advice for your kids or for your… Listen, do your bit.

Andrew Dawood: This is seriously deep. I wasn’t ready for this at all.

Payman: You should have listened to an episode before you…

Prav: Let me paraphrase.

Payman: Yeah. He likes to close on this.

Prav: It’s your last day on the planet.

Andrew Dawood: Oh.

Prav: And your children are with you and you’ve got three pieces of advice you can leave them with. What would they be?

Andrew Dawood: Oh sugar. Maxine, you should have told me that it was going to be like this.

Payman: [inaudible]

Andrew Dawood: Well, I’d say do your best for everyone and always do your very best and be kind and good God. Look out for each other.

Prav: As in the siblings, look out for each other.

Andrew Dawood: Each other.

Prav: Stick together. Always support each other.

Andrew Dawood: Absolutely.

Payman: That’s good enough for me. Be kind.

Andrew Dawood: You said that better than me. You’ve obviously done that before.

Prav: No.

Payman: He just likes to make our guests uncomfortable.

Prav: Not at all. Not at all, but certainly for me irrespective of what my kids end up doing, the big dream I have for my kids is that they’re always together, they’re always best friends, and…

Andrew Dawood: Absolutely.

Prav: If shit hits the fan, they’re there for each other.

Andrew Dawood: Absolutely. So that’s very much… each other and your fellow man, really. God, that’s getting deep.

Payman: Excellent.

Andrew Dawood: A long way from implants [crosstalk]

Payman: I enjoyed that, Andrew. Thank you so much…

Prav: Thank you so much.

Payman: For coming on the show.

Prav: So thanks a lot.

Payman: Thank you for that. [inaudible] I think.

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

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

Prav: And don’t forget our six star rating.

Intro Voice: 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.

Payman: Well, it gives me great pleasure to have Richard Howarth on the bulletin today. Richard, I’ve known for a long, long time, but he recently sold your practise, Richard. How does that feel?

Richard Howarth: I suspect I would be a little bit less chill than I am now if I was still the owner.

Payman: And then after selling the practise… I know you’re a sailor, aren’t you? Instead of jumping on a boat and going to the Caribbean, jumping straight into designing a bit of PPE, a visor, which we’ll get onto. But Richard, really what I wanted to find out from you really to start with, there was just a story of [inaudible 00:01:01]. How did you start it? How did you get it to where it was?

Richard Howarth: Well, it started off being unhappy as an associate. I worked for a lovely principal and didn’t like the way she ran the practise, basically. I think about eight different nurses a week. I cared very deeply for the care that I was giving my patients, but was making no money out of it. And I was almost packed up dentistry.

Payman: Was it NHS?

Richard Howarth: It was NHS in those days. There wasn’t anything else. And almost packed up dentistry. My second choice of career would have been to be a pilot. So I was this close to changing and going somewhere else. And I met a guy called David Price. He’s unfortunately no longer with us now. He was in his seventies when I met him, and he introduced me to a group of dentists called the Dental Health Practitioners Group. And he did a seminar called Ten Steps to Startup.

Richard Howarth: And the seminar was talking about the ergonomics of the dental practise, how to design it so it was efficient. He was talking about how it related to a theatre. So you would go in and buy tickets and then cut them away. Or if you went in and you were going to the performance, you might go through to a bar or a lounge area, or even a restaurant pre seeing that show. You then go into the show, but you’d never see what was going on behind the scenes. And you could see within the room, loads of people were just switching off. What’s this got to do with me opening up in a practise? But his pattern was designed to put off as many as people as possible. He wanted just two or three people in that room who wanted to work alongside him.

Richard Howarth: I remember coming home when I was a very poorly paid associate. I worked very hard, but I didn’t gross very much. I was too careful in what I was doing. And I remember coming home and saying to my wife, “I want to give this guy what was a huge stack of money per month to help us set up in practise.” He gave me the confidence to [inaudible] notice. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t have anything organised. From that, I quickly learned that you make your own look.

Richard Howarth: So I was on the phone. I found a guy who had to retire through ill health. He’d had a lung taken out because of cancer and his practise was disappearing. There was no good will because he wasn’t working. So I offered to reopen it for him, give him a year of me working there, learning how to run a dental practise and gave him the opportunity to sell it at the end of the year, because I knew I wanted to set up a practise and staff it.

Richard Howarth: So he gave me permission to do that. I didn’t pay him very much for doing that. Even that was a rocky road. The nurse who was supposed to be helping me get things ready, turned a car over and ended up being badly injured. So I remember on day one, I’d hired a friend who had never been in dentistry at all. Jackie, she was just going to be trainee dental nurse. I just noticed on the desk, which said, “Receptionist and dental nurse required.” And we went from there. So I did that for a year while I got planning permission on three premises in Stafford, one of those being next door to a car park, and on that car park was going a medical practise and they phoned me up and said, “Would you like to rent some rooms above it?”

Richard Howarth: So I bit off their hand and set up what was Smile Style One. It was an NHS practise. We mixed, as we were allowed to do in those days, giving people choices and treatment.

Prav: Single handed?

Richard Howarth: Single handed. Just me. I get my leg pulled by a lot of my friends because my first dental chair cost me 500 pounds. It was purchased from the back of the Auburn [inaudible] Psychiatric Hospital, which was closed down. I remember turning up with a transit van and my wife and the caretaker lifting in a dental chair into the back of this transit van, along with a load of other [inaudible] that was stored in this [inaudible 00:05:24]. And if anybody knows how heavy a dental chair is, I’ve got no idea how the three of us actually lifted it and then lifted it out at the other end. But yeah, it costs me 500 quid for dental chair, a dental light, a wet developer, a little bit of cabinetry. And that was about it. Really.

Prav: Rich, what stage of your career were you in at this point? So you said obviously you’d worked as an associate for a period of time. How many years did you have under your belt before you took this leap?

Richard Howarth: Okay. I did a year and a half in hospital. I did two years in general practise. So I was 26. 25, 26.

Prav: Wow.

Payman: And then did you add dentist in the NHS system?

Richard Howarth: To the team? No. Initially, it was just me. So we just grew it. What happened was, we very quickly… Four years, I realised that my work was going to be down the private route. I was struggling very much with this concept of… The NHS didn’t seem to be adding up. You did the maths and you thought, “Well, we’re really struggling to make this profitable.” So really, we were providing private treatment for Mrs. Jones, which was subsidising Mr. Smith having his NHS filling.

Richard Howarth: I felt very uncomfortable ethically with that. And I decided that I had had to make the NHS just work on its own, or I had to step away from it. And at that stage I chose to step away and I decided that having premises above NHS doctors wasn’t going to work, apart from the fact my image of working with doctors to work with their patients with heart disease and diabetes and everything else, just wasn’t working. They weren’t interested in preventative medicine. They were interested in rent.

Richard Howarth: So I bought a very small building in the Centre Stafford which we then converted into what was the two surgery stroke, one booth practise. And so at that stage, I could run two chairs, but very quickly we moved to a dentist/hygienists model. And that was the model that I really worked with for years and years. So basically, the model that we came up with was, rather than me doing checkups, which I just felt was of no value whatsoever, what we would do is move the checkups to the hygienist’s room. So I was then an invited guest on hygiene point. And what that did was it raised the value of hygiene work. Working in a healthy mouth just makes dentistry so easy.

Richard Howarth: If you’ve got no blood, no bleeding, and then somebody who cares for their mouth, you can really do some fantastic work. Whereas in the other way around you, the patients come to you as a dentist, they see you as a dentist and they go, “Okay, you need to go and see the hygienist to get rid of this gum disease.” It lowers that priority in the patients.

Richard Howarth: The dentist is important and the hygiene is less important. Whereas if you make hygiene is the most important, and then the dentist plays a completely different role. And my analogy here is like a garage. So, when you take your car in, most of the time you’re taking it in for a service. And that’s what the hygiene therapy room’s about. It’s about servicing your dental health is making sure that you’re enjoying the best dental health you choose to have. Obviously you can’t make people do, because ultimately it is down to what they do, but that’s your role.

Richard Howarth: Whereas the dentist then becomes the repair shop, in terms of you’ve crashed your car, let’s make it better again, sort of thing.

Prav: Or give it a re-spray.

Richard Howarth: A re-spray, exactly. Exactly. It’s funny, I use that other analogy is the fact that if you want the spoiler on the back of it, we can do that too.

Prav: Nice. Nice. Give it a wrap.

Richard Howarth: Yeah, exactly. So basically that’s what I worked on. And then the plan was to be there for about 10 years. And it was the deciding factor. Do I continue as a single handed practitioner, or do I go bigger? And it became clear that as a single handed practitioner, the expenses of running a practise were increasing, we’ve got CQC come in, everything was just getting more and more so… And then your margins as a single handed practitioner were being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

Richard Howarth: And it seemed sensible that we have to try and share that. And it took me five years to find premises. Right at the beginning of the recession, we found a super premises which literally needed gutting. We took them back to the bare brick and rebuilt the whole thing.

Richard Howarth: But the advantage of that was I can set it up exactly as I dreamed. So move three was my dream practise, the way we delivered the patient, it was this theatre analogy. We had a patient delivery corridor, we had our behind the scenes, which the patients never saw where we processed instruments and stored our stock. We even had Jack and Jill cupboards in the back of the surgery so that clean instruments are placed in one stack in patient sequence. And then when we finished them, they go into a dirty covenant and then they get taken out. So there’s no walking around the practise with dirty instruments that they literally are served in that manner.

Payman: How many staff did you end up with when you sold it? How many people were you in the end?

Richard Howarth: I would say in the end, we were four dentists, three therapists, and about 16 or 17 [inaudible] staffs, between reception. We always ran with more nurses than the average practise because we had… I know people call them TCOs. I hate the word TCO. As we’re always smile makers, and that came from the Olympics in 2012. Went down there and it was Games Makers. I think if you remember showing you around, I thought, “Oh, we need Smile Makers.” So, all the girls who helped the patients with regards to treatment plans and teaching them all the hygiene skills and all this sort of stuff, they’re my Smile Makers.

Prav: Richard, it seems that you were even back then very, very forward thinking even compared to today but what it seems to me, I don’t know what yet, what your patient journey looked like. And the hygiene stroke dentist, almost like co-diagnosis model that you were using almost sounds like the stuff that they were doing in the States way before we did it here in the UK. So what really interests me is what was your patient journey? If you could just walk us through as a new patient walking through into your practise, and then meeting one of your smile makers as it was, or then being communicated with throughout their treatment. And just talk me through. What would I expect in a consultation with you, Richard?

Richard Howarth: Well, initially very much so… I suppose at the front end, it looks a bit similar. We offer the opportunity for a client to speak with a nurse beforehand. No fee, they can just come in and quite where possible they may introduce them to a dentist at that moment in time, but not always. But a lot of that is about delivering our culture. We know our culture doesn’t suit every patient, it’s not right for everybody.

Richard Howarth: Some people don’t want the service that we, they act [inaudible 00:13:37]. So, we talk about our culture, a lot about what we’re expecting from them, what we’re going to give them. And we offer them the opportunity to do that, to have a full assessment. A full assessment is with a dentist. It’s not with the therapy team at that stage. It is with a dentist. So the dentist will do a full case assessment. And our aim really then is to deliver the patient to the point where they are accepting of what we call one of our wellness programmes. Roughly speaking the wellness programme is determined by their gum health. Obviously, if their pretty healthy, then they don’t need much, and if they’ve got huge pockets, then they need a lot.

Richard Howarth: And that wellness programme is really their get go. If they move their way through that, then we can progress and provide them increasing levels of service. Obviously, pain always takes precedence. So, if they’re in pain or they’ve got an immediate crisis problem, that will be sorted before we do that perio programme. But, getting through the perio programme is almost your qualification to being a member of Smile Style. And it also introduces them very much to this hygiene therapy model, where they are working very hard with the hygienists. In my case, they’re all therapists now, and with a qualified dental nurse delivering all health education. And, they like that.

Richard Howarth: The nurses don’t hurt them. They see them as that pals. I always say, I don’t like big spiders. If you put me in a room with big spiders and gave me a very important message, I don’t think I would take it on board. So, if you stick somebody in my room or even with a hygiene therapist, to some degree, we are somebody to be fearful of for whatever reason, culturally, and everything else.

Richard Howarth: But we want to get that message to that person as efficiently as possible. What we’re about. We’re changing beliefs and behaviour. If you’re taking beliefs, behaviour, working a very deep level with those patients, and therefore you want to put them in the best environment that you’re going to have the effect. So you’re going to have an effect. Once they’ve got through the perio programme, we’re doing routine dentistry. Once that perio has got to a level, and it doesn’t always have to be perfect, but it does have to be to a point where we can start to do restorative dentistry. We’ll restore them. We’ll-

Payman: Richard?

Richard Howarth: … get the function right.

Payman: Richard, you touched on culture there. I’ve been to well over a thousand dental practises in my time, and the culture from… Culture is a funny word because it means so many different things. But the way that your staff seemed like they were happy to help. Everyone seemed so happy in the practise. Do you think part of that is the fact that they’re more involved with the patient care, that they feel more fulfilled? Because life of a DCP sometimes it’s just carrying out instructions and you can bottle what you had in that practise.

Richard Howarth: Yeah. Each system creates its pluses and its minuses. One of the pluses that they do get is the fact that they do have their own patient list. They’re working one to one with patients that that does give them that extra involvement and reward. Just like as a dentist, when is it most rewarding? It’s when you’ve done that great restoration, or you’ve restored that mouth, or you whitened it and straightened it and everything else. And the patient is just over the moon. And, they want to give you a hug and a kiss in pre-COVID. And their writing letters to you and thanks very much and everything else, but it’s very much when you see the letters we get back. a lot of it is team. I’d really like to thank Richard and his team.

Richard Howarth: And I think that’s the point. And some of the girls get stuff specifically for them. They do get little gifts or something. They get that relationship, which is lovely. So I think there is that. It does create problems though. It’s not without its problems because, I get nurses who we’ve had over the years and they’re just not used to talking to a patient. Their told that that’s not their responsibility. You do not talk to a patient. It’s the dentist’s responsibility. I talk to the patient, you sit there and you do what I say.

Richard Howarth: And, I’ve had a lot of nurses just go, “Oh my, I just can’t cope with it. That’s… Deal with that.” Those are usually the ones that you don’t expect. Absolutely thrive in it. And to be honest, I have to say, we decided that the best ones are usually the ones grown in house. So we just hire and train and hire and train. And that seems to be a forever process within the practise. And a lot of the girls have come through. The disadvantage, is a big disadvantage is you raise their aspirations, massively raise their aspirations.

Payman: Why is that a disadvantage?

Richard Howarth: The disadvantage is they can tend to want to leave and go and do great things. So, I suppose over the years, I’ve accepted the fact that it’s much better to work with people who are going somewhere than to work with people who are just stuck. And, I’m proud of the fact that as well as building Smile Style, I’ve got probably in double figures now, people who are dental hygienists and therapists around the country, or have gone on into general nursing or practise managers elsewhere. So-

Payman: Yeah, now I get it.

Richard Howarth: It’s building people. It’s building people all the way through, and you just have to accept that.

Payman: That’s one of the nicest things about business there, Richard, I think. Watching people develop. I know we’re a bit pushed for time, I want you to fast forward to selling the practise. How did that feel? What was the process? Did you have lots of buyers in line? I mean, I’m sure they did. Lots of people wanted to buy that practise. It’s a beautiful place.

Richard Howarth: Yeah. I’ve got to thank the team behind me. [inaudible] were my agents and particularly Abby, she was fantastic. Yeah. I suppose in your head, you’ve got to get to the point where you’re ready to sell. And I arrived at that point. In the background, we’d been working on the practise to make sure that systems were right and everything was ready, and I think that was great. I had time. I was building up to it probably for three or four years, not with a specific date in mind, but just accepting the fact that when you sell that you don’t walk away, generally. And, I had in my head, “Well, I probably want to be done, or at least be able to make the decision to go if I want, in my late 50’s.

Prav: What was it that triggered that? It seems like it was a very structured approach that I want to be out of this game, in this period of time, I’m going to prep for three years, probably do your pre-due diligence, et cetera, et cetera. And did you have a magic number in mind that you were aiming for, or anything like that? What was the motivator behind you saying right?

Payman: He’s got a boat, Prav. He’s got a boat.

Richard Howarth: I suppose what you’ve got to understand was I’d already realised that the most important thing was to make a business that wasn’t just me. I was only working for two days a week and I had been only working for two days a week for a considerable amount of time. Years. And so we traded possibly making slightly more in terms of money for time. That’s the trade off, isn’t it? You can work five days a week and you can have a lot of money, but you don’t have any time. And I chose to do the other thing, so I had time.

Richard Howarth: But what I was finding was that time was just constantly being eaten up by managing the practise. I was very hands on. So whether it was recruitment, whether it was marketing, whether it was dealing with patient problems or whatever it was, the time just quickly evaporated as a principal and owner of the practise.

Richard Howarth: It got to the point where I thought, “You know, I’m not enjoying that as much as they used to do.” And equally the other thing, and I suppose this is relevant, I think that the business needs to continue to grow. I think any business needs constant nutrients coming into it. And there was getting to a point where there’s the limiting return on your investment. If I’d gone out and bought… And we have done, we bought Omnicam and various other things, but there comes to a point where you think, “If I spend a 100,000, 150,000 pounds on this, when do I get that back? Who’s benefiting from this?” And it was even more stark with me only doing two days a week. So really I was investing in all of this, for the associates.

Richard Howarth: And I suppose it got to the point where you’re, “Do you know what? It needs to keep growing. I need a partner. I need somebody to come in to help me keep this business growing, but I haven’t got the energy, and I don’t want to keep committing my finances to this indefinitely.” I suppose that came into the equation as well.

Payman: Richard, anyone else after putting that much effort in and then selling it and by having the sailing interest that you have, would then take a break?

Richard Howarth: Yeah.

Payman: But you didn’t, you started a PPE company. Tell us about Provizage. How did that come about?

Richard Howarth: That came about because it became very clear really early on that we were going to have to wear visors. I could see no way around it. And you see I wear glasses, since my forties I’ve had to wear glasses to see anything and I’m dead without loupes. And I just thought, “How the hell am I going to wear loupes?” And I’d obviously seen some things which clipped to the sides of loupes. And I thought, “My nose kills at the end of the day wearing such heavy things. The last thing I want is something stuck out even further and leaning on the nose, and I’ve got enough stuff on my head. And then the other thing, it reminded me very much of when I was younger. And I did a few years in hospital.

Richard Howarth: One of the clinics I was involved in was treating HIV and AIDS patients. And obviously in the time when we really didn’t quite fully understand all of that, and my consultant at the time insisted that we were as protected as we are going to be for COVID. So, full gowns and foot coverings, head coverings, masks.

Payman: Double gloves?

Richard Howarth: Not even single gloves, double gloves and a visor. And I just remember how hard those clinics were. I thought, “Geez, if this is what you know is that this is what I’m going to go back to, how am I going to function?” And I don’t know, it was just bumbling around in my head. And, came across my visor that I had in the garage for [inaudible 00:25:34], an old gaudy thing.

Richard Howarth: And so I got that out and spinning it around and thought, “Well, what happens if I hang it around my neck?” And fiddled around, and it seemed to work. I then built it out cardboard and made my son and my wife wander around in it and take pictures and things. Yeah, yeah, I get the, get the sizes right and the proportions right, and everything else. And then got somebody on CAD/CAM to design it for me, so I could then print one. And basically, it was for me really. and so I got that and I thought, “Geez, this actually works really, really well. This is absolutely fantastic.” I ended up walking around for days with it around my neck, thinking this just really works, showed it to a few people and they said, “We need [inaudible] .”

Payman: It just looks so much more comfortable around your neck. Doesn’t it? And you don’t get that weird sort of chimney effect. Yeah. Put it on, put it on.

Richard Howarth: This is it, here.

Payman: It’s a bit spaceman-ey and I like that about it. Look at that, Prav. It’s such an elegant solution.

Richard Howarth: [inaudible] with you. It’s just great. The other I liked was the fact that the patients it’s less intimidating. I’ve fought for years to try and make dentistry more-

Payman: Accessible.

Richard Howarth: Welcoming.

Prav: You’ve just taken a standard solution and flipped it on its head, haven’t you, Richard?

Richard Howarth: That’s right.

Prav: Amazing.

Richard Howarth: You’re a problem solver. And I just wanted to solve a problem that was there. And nobody seemed to be thinking about it. My wife said, “It won’t mess your hair up.” I see Prav, you’re like me.

Prav: I don’t have that. Mate, we’ve got the same problem there. No issues.

Richard Howarth: So, I can see it from the girl’s perspective. If they’ve got even more stuff on their head and that’s not what people want. And so it just lets the heat come out. Somebody was saying, “Won’t it fog up?” Well, I’ve walked around for days with it on and it doesn’t fog up at all and it just doesn’t get as hot because the heat can rise.

Payman: It’s reusable, Richard. Right?

Richard Howarth: Pardon?

Payman: Reusable, obviously.

Richard Howarth: Reusable, so it’s not disposable. The key bit for me is vision. You’ve got to be able to see what you’re doing. It’s paramount. That’s why I wear loupes with a light. If I can see it, I can do it. So we’ve actually gone a material, which is optically superior. It’s much thicker, it’s much more robust. It’s actually used in the nuclear industry for visors there. Because they’re always got higher protection and visibility. It doesn’t refract or, or split up your light. I would have staggered, you don’t know when you first start doing this, but literally it didn’t look like I was wearing anything when I was working. I didn’t notice there was any difference looking at it.

Payman: What do they cost Richard? And what’s the website? How do you get them?

Richard Howarth: Okay. So that they’re $49.99. Obviously, no [inaudible] until the end of July.

Payman: Oh yeah.

Richard Howarth: If you go to Provizage.com and that’s with a zed.

Payman: Provizage with a zed.

Richard Howarth: Provizage with a zed.

Payman: And can order online-

Richard Howarth: Order online and we do individual ones. We do small practise packs and big practise packs with various offers on at the moment if you get your orders in.

Payman: Well-

Richard Howarth: Just to let everybody know, we will be shipping at the beginning of July. We were expecting dentistry to be allowed back at the beginning of July, and obviously it’s been to go from prototyping to manufacture in such a short space of time, and testing has being pretty tight.

Payman: I want to welcome you to the world of dental supply, Richard.

Richard Howarth: Yeah. Yeah.

Payman: I’m sure you’re going to make a massive success of it. Just like you made a massive success as at Smile Style.

Richard Howarth: Oh, I hope so. Even it helps people out, it was never done to make… That wasn’t the primary objective. It’d be great if it does, but if I help anybody out, just like if I help a patient out, that’s why I’m a dentist. If I help my colleagues out and make what will be hard work over the next few months, a little bit less hard work, than I’ve succeeded or be another little tick in what Richard’s done in his lifetime.

Payman: Congratulations, buddy. Really, really lovely to see you.

Prav: Well done, Richard. And for me, having worked with lots of dentists, I can just say this interview has been an education. And I think it’s come from your terminology more than anything else. So talking about the garage, the re-spray analogy, the mechanic, nutrients in your business, all of these things. Sometimes you just don’t think about business like that. And it’s really refreshing to hear a completely different take on it. And then to top it all off, you turn a visor upside down and you create something amazing like that. So, hat’s off to you. It’s really, really good.

Richard Howarth: Thanks very much. That’s one thing that I’ve always found is, if you can talk in pictures so people understand what you’re talking about, you’re halfway there.

Prav: Yeah. Brilliant.

Payman: Thank you so much, Richard.

Prav: Thank you. Thanks for your time.

Richard Howarth: Guys, see you soon.

Prav: Cheers.

Payman: Bye-Bye.

Richard Howarth: Cheers, bye.

Outro Voice: 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.

Payman: Do you have people, sort of groupies, you know, people who are nervous to be in the same room as you? It must’ve happened. I remember it happening to me …

Jason Smithson: I hope not.

Payman: Back in the day.

Prav: I was your groupie once, Payman.

Jason Smithson: Once. He came to his senses.

Payman: And I handled him in the way that groupies are handled.

Intro Voice: 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.

Payman: It gives me great pleasure to welcome Jason Smithson onto the podcast. Hi Jason.

Jason Smithson: Hi, how you doing?

Payman: Good. Good. I’ve known you for more than 10 years now, I think.

Jason Smithson: When we were in short trousers.

Payman: Yeah. Yeah, I think both of us were, both of us were.

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Payman: But I think-

Jason Smithson: And had hair.

Payman: Yeah, both of us. And Prav. I think with a personality like you, a lot of people feel like they know the kind of person you are, but I think we’re all aware of the limitations of social media and so I think what we want to get out of this conversation is sort of a more in depth, long form sort of discussion of the person behind the personality.

Jason Smithson: Looks and all.

Payman: Yeah. So just give us the quick rundown. How did you grow up, your parents, school, that sort of thing.

Jason Smithson: I was probably quite unusual for a dentist. I was brought up in quite a modest background, not poor background, but quite a modest background in a mining village in a place called South Yorkshire in, well, the 1970s and 1980s, a place called Doncaster, not very exotic, mainly known for the railway station which you pass through or the motorway interchange as you rapidly pass through trying to get away from it. But, yeah, it was at that time a mining village. My parents were both married obviously, and I have a younger sister, Emma. My parents were just regular, fairly working class people. My dad worked in a factory doing a relatively basic job and my mom, my mom’s quite personable and my mom was the meet and greet girl at Sainsbury’s. So she kind of stood on the front door and said hello to people and helped old people with their shopping and stuff like that.

Jason Smithson: My generation, I come from quite a big family, in terms of cousins. I have at last count, 20 odd cousins and everybody in my family, immediate family, aunts, uncles, cousins, all live within perhaps a five mile radius. So quite a close family, quite close knit background.

Jason Smithson: My parents actually both left school at 15. Neither of them has O Levels, and obviously no A Levels or university education. But I was quite fortunate to be really strongly mentored by my parents at a really early age in so much that my mother had me when she was 21, but she kind of, I almost felt like the chosen one with my mother. She spent literally so much time with me. When I was preschool, she spent literally every hour of the day with me and I was fortunate in being able to go to school at five being able to read and write, which put me at a significant advantage. She also spent a lot of time drawing and a lot of time making things. So I’m really, really grateful to my parents for that.

Jason Smithson: My dad used to work, frankly, ridiculously hard in quite a hard job, but I always remember him coming home and, when I was younger, always having time to play things like Lego with me. As I got older, I got interested in Airfix or actually Tamiya was the brand of model tanks. And he always used to spend time doing that with me. And we used to make like diorama’s of little tank battles and stuff like that. And then when I was older still, I was, I had a massive interest in cycling, road cycling, believe it or not, given my build now, I was quite a serious road cyclist, but yeah, my dad used to spend literally hours taking me to A roads and motorways where we used to tram up and down and do 10 mile time trials for that. So my parents really invested a lot of time in my childhood, and I’m really grateful for that.

Jason Smithson: In terms of schools, my parents, and not … My grandparents are quite religious, but my parents are not especially religious, but they fought quite hard to get me into the local kind of Church of England school. So from the ages of 5 to 11, I was educated, it’s a state school, but it had a very strong church background. So I was educated at a Church of England school, which was in a really a housing estate just outside a pit village. And then when I was 11, I went to the local comprehensive school, which was right in the centre of the pit village, and oddly in the middle of the miner’s strike, which you may remember in the early ’80s. So that was quite a strange environment to be in, in the ’80s. A lot of my friends were children of miners, so that had a significant impact on my life. And then-

Payman: Were you a staunch anti-Thatcherite?

Jason Smithson: Do you know what? I’m not and I really should be. I’m not that political, if I’m very honest. It has to be said, I mean, Margaret Thatcher and what she stood for really, really destroyed that community. Not only the miners, the policies and what happened there actually destroyed … I had friends who had businesses, friends’ fathers who had businesses, you know, my uncle’s business was he used to sell books, he had a book shop, and his business was destroyed as a result of the miner strike, which sounds really odd, but in fact, the miners’ wives used to go and buy books from him. Well, if you’ve been on strike for two years and you haven’t got enough money to feed your children, the last thing you’re going to do is go and buy a book. So his business folded as a result of that. I had lots of friends’ fathers who were in other businesses, went under because of that. So, you know, it was, it was a real negative for that area. And even now what was a very vibrant area with people working up to me being about 11 or 12 and quite a strong community, is still destroyed some, what, 35 years, 40 years later.

Payman: Never fully recovered.

Jason Smithson: It’s just absolutely destroyed. And there’s no way that it’s ever coming back. So I think they have to accept the blame for that, but it doesn’t make me an anti-Thatcherite, oddly enough.

Payman: She turned out to be right on some of the things, didn’t she?

Jason Smithson: On some other things, yeah. Yeah. So I take a fairly balanced view on that, but yeah, then I went to sixth form in the same school, which was … The pass rate for GCSE was quite low, as you can imagine. And the sixth form wasn’t huge, it was about 20 people.

Payman: Were you a swotty kid, Jason?

Jason Smithson: Was I swotty?

Payman: Were you top of the class?

Jason Smithson: Well, funnily enough, my mum and my wife were talking about this in the February half term just gone. And I actually didn’t want to be a dentist when I started off, I had absolutely no interest in being a dentist, and I want to be a vet. I was kind of inspired by the, again, a Yorkshire thing, but by the James Harriet thing, and my plan was to be a horse vet or a large animal vet. And I was a swotty kid, up to being about 15/16. I was mega swotty. And in the lower sixth, I was pretty swotty. And at that time you had to get four As at A Level to get in to do veterinary science, and my predicted grades, I did five A Levels at that time, plus general studies. So my predicted grades were six As.

Payman: Whoa. Wow.

Jason Smithson: So I applied for veterinary college and got offers, one of which I accepted for Nottingham. And then in upper sixth, I discovered girls. And I was quite a late developer. So lots of guys were hanging around with girls at 15/16, and it took me until I was 17 kicking on to 18, and then I kind of tried to make up for it a bit and I spent all the time we had, you were probably much the same. You finished school at, I think, I don’t recall, I think it was something like March and then we had until June to revise for our A Levels, something like that, and you took the time off and you were supposed to go home. I actually came down to Cornwall and camped on the beach. Yeah. Came and sat on the beach surfing, chasing girls, and I shouldn’t say this but smoking pot.

Payman: So were you living in Cornwall at the time or were you living in Yorkshire?

Jason Smithson: No, I was living in Yorkshire. I …

Payman: Oh.

Jason Smithson: Part took the train down and part hitchhiked down and part walked down and a bunch of friends, about four of us came down here, and we just arsed around really. And then I came back to Yorkshire, very cocky, extremely cocky, sat my A Levels and promptly failed and ended up with … What did I get? I don’t recall. I think I got an A in general studies, I remember that, and then I got an A, I think I got an A, a B, and a … A, a B and two Cs or something like that in the end-

Payman: And then what?

Jason Smithson: Which was nowhere close to getting accepted.

Payman: Then went to dentistry with those grades? Or did you retake?

Jason Smithson: No. So I went home, I went home to my father, with the … My dad’s very relaxed. My parents are slightly hippie-ish, but I went … Now, I can remember going home to my dad with a paper and in a state of shock, you know, how dare they give me these low grades? And my dad said, “Well, what are you going to do?” And I said, “Well, I thought, I thought I might spend a bit of time travelling and then I’ll go back and retake them.” And he said, “I don’t think so. I think you better go and have a look in …” You might remember at the time they had clearing in The Times newspaper.

Payman: Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Smithson: Here for all the no hopers, of which I was one. And you had to kind of scan through The Times and find a reasonable course to go on. And they were all kind of biomedical sciences and stuff like that. And then at the bottom was the Royal London Hospital, and it was the London Hospital at that time, dentistry. And I thought, “Oh, I could probably, I could probably do …” I was clueless. I had absolutely no idea. I thought I’ll do that. So I applied to the London and got in. The London had quite a smart admissions policy at that time because what they did was they made offers for half of their places. So they got the kind of smart, smart kids. And then the other half of their places were in clearing, which sounds bad but what they did is they mopped up all the smart kids who were … Who screwed up their A Levels for whatever reason.

Jason Smithson: So actually, well, I’m still in contact with quite a few of them now. The people who’ve actually done quite well were the misfits who failed their A Levels because you’re just too young at the time, really 18 is …

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: I actually think, if I’m honest, I actually think that dentistry should be a postgraduate degree, because I just think you’re just too young at 18 to have the level of responsibility required. And I absolutely definitely did not have the level of responsibility required at 18. And I …

Payman: Did the party go on into first year and second year, did you knuckle down and …

Jason Smithson: Yeah, it did. It went on in my first year. Yeah. Some of my friends might tell you my first year I was known for having gone to the toga and tequila party for literally half an hour and spending the rest of the evening taped face down on a gurney in A&E throwing up. And, yeah, it was bad. I have pass-fail vivas for first BDS, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, absolutely clueless, didn’t know anything, just about got through it, well, did get through on pass-fail vivas. And I had pass-fail vivas for about half of the topics in the second BDS. So I was just really not interested. And then when I got to be about 20/21 and we actually went on clinic, I just grew up a bit. And then I went back into being a swot a bit. So, yeah. So it’s a bit of an odd journey, really.

Prav: Jason, just going back to your upbringing, a lot of what you’ve said there resonates with myself. So my dad worked in a factory.

Jason Smithson: Yep.

Prav: He then spent a good part of his life driving taxis, and then …

Jason Smithson: Yep.

Prav: Typically owned a corner shop, as you do.

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Prav: And I think the overriding theme for me, and I don’t know if it was the same for you, was for me to do better, and the reason why they were grafting so hard, and as you said, your dad worked incredibly long hours, was all driven towards basically a better future for us.

Jason Smithson: For the kids. Yeah.

Prav: And the overriding message for me when I was growing up was I’m doing what I do today so you don’t have to. Were there any themes or anything like that when you were growing up in terms of your future or …

Jason Smithson: I don’t think it’s that strong, but then, and actually even now, my parents are in their 70s now, their primary motivation is for me and my sister still.

Prav: Wow.

Jason Smithson: Even though, I mean, my sister’s done very, very well. My sister was in finance and recruitment. She’s done very well, indeed, frankly, better than I have, financially anyway. And even though my sister and I are both, let’s say very independent, my parents still are motivated by what is best for us. They never really used a stick or anything, they never, not physically, but …

Prav: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: A mental stick with us, but they were always motivated to do the best. To be fair, they knew from quite an early age I was reasonably bright. I mean, I was, I mean, as I said right at the beginning, I went to school being able to read and write. So I was then put in a school, a good school, but with kids who couldn’t read and write, and that made me a little bit disruptive as a five and six year old, because everybody’s learning to read and write and you’re bored. And so I had a … I had kind of extra lessons at that time, which worked, with like a trainee teacher, I suppose. My parents were very supportive of that. So I got a lot of good breaks as a result of my parents. Let’s say that.

Prav: And what was it like growing up with 20 plus cousins? Were you in and out of each other’s houses? And …

Jason Smithson: Yeah, we were. My mom has, well, five brothers and sisters and my dad has one brother and they all have quite large families. And my cousin, and my cousins, male cousins, there’s a group of us, about five or six of us all about the same age. And I’m the youngest of them, but we kind of used to hang out together. So it started out from being probably about 10.11, we’d get on they were BMX bikes at that time, you know, ooh, I can’t remember the name of that gold rally BMX.

Prav: Raleigh Burner, was it a Raleigh Burner or a gold …

Jason Smithson: Actually, I think it was a bit cooler than that.

Prav: Was it cooler than that?

Jason Smithson: It might have been a Super Burner or something like that. But anyway, I used to get on that and ride to my cousins. My cousin lived on the same road, two of them, and I used to ride over there. It was about a mile, mile and a half over some fields. And then we used to play together as 11, 12 year old kids, BMXs, bows and arrows, air rifles at that time. Not that I’d want my children doing that kind of thing now. But there we go. And then, as we got older-

Payman: Jason, was moving to Cornwall with your kids, was that, did you want to give that sort of experience to your kids that you had yourself?

Jason Smithson: The move to Cornwall was accidental. My wife is actually Cornish, but we weren’t married at that …

Payman: Oh, is she?

Jason Smithson: We weren’t married at that time. We lived in London and it was … Moving to Cornwall was almost an accident because what happened is I did oral surgery for quite a while in hospital, practise at Barts and the Royal London and some outlying, excuse me, outlying hospitals at Bedford and places like that. And I was going to do oral surgery and then I decided not to do oral surgery. And then I realised I timed it really badly because I was the first year that had to do VT. You might remember this, Payman.

Prav: Me too.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, so I-

Prav: Yeah, me too. Yes.

Jason Smithson: So I actually resigned my oral surgery post with a view to going into practise. And somebody had said to me, “Well, where’s your VT number?” FD number nowadays.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: And I said, “Well, I haven’t got one.” And they said, “Oh, well, actually you’ve got to go and do VT.” And then, being a little bit of an arrogant, mid twenties, I thought, “Well, you know, I’m quite bright and I’ve done three years of oral surgery, everybody will want me.” And actually, everybody didn’t want me. So I was applying to do VT quite late in the day, June, July, when everybody else had found their post. So there weren’t that many posts left, certainly around London and of the posts close to London I applied to, nobody was … It was kind of, “I’ll give you a call.” They didn’t want … I was ringing them up saying, you know, to a general practitioner, saying, “Listen, I’ve got three years oral surgery experience. I could come into your practise and do loads of oral surgery.” You can imagine how attractive that is for somebody who’s running a fairly stable practise. You know, having the, having some wildcard in there who’s going to be taking loads of people’s teeth out and people in the waiting room with swollen faces and such, it’s not very attractive.

Jason Smithson: So I had real trouble getting a VT job and it worked out that the only real VT jobs around were in Cornwall, South Wales and up in Northern Scotland. So I’d been to Cornwall on family holidays and my wife was … My wife is kind of Cornish, she’s born in Cornwall and spent the formative years of her life in Cornwall, but mainly she’s lived in, around London, but I felt I had a kind of link to Cornwall so I came down there. That was why. There was no design to it at all.

Payman: It wasn’t about the good life?

Jason Smithson: Absolutely not. It was the fact that I couldn’t get a job anywhere else because I’d left it too late.

Payman: But it became about that, I guess, right? I mean, you decided to stay.

Jason Smithson: Sorry?

Payman: It became about that because you’ve decided to stay there.

Jason Smithson: Absolutely. I mean, it worked out very well because there’s quite a strong private practise ethos in Cornwall. In fact, I think I’m right in saying, although Gloucester may disagree, that the Cornwall Independent Practitioners Group was one of the first in the country, if not the first.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: So there’s that. And also because it’s quite spread out and there aren’t that many dentists, there’s not that much competition in comparison to say London or Manchester or Leeds, and also there’s, well, there is now but there wasn’t at that point, a dental school. So most of the switched on practitioners, you wouldn’t refer, for example, endo or implants or difficult oral surgery to the local dental hospital because there wasn’t one.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: So there were a lot of fairly, well, very competent older guys around here who were actually really, really good in terms of mentoring and, and in terms of getting you out of trouble with things like wisdom tooth extractions, difficult molar endos, stuff like that. So I actually gained a ridiculous amount of experience just from being down here, just because of the remoteness of it.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: The …

Payman: That independent group …

Jason Smithson: Yes.

Payman: I think the first time we met, you were heading that up.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, by default.

Payman: Yeah.

Payman: … that up.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, by default.

Payman: It’s a bit strange, because even with this BAPD thing that you’ve done, I always think of you as sort of a rebel loner kind of cat, like not the type who likes to sit on-

Jason Smithson: I’m not a big committee guy, I have to be honest.

Payman: But you were, you were ahead of that organisation. And you were head of this organisation. So there must be sometimes.

Jason Smithson: [crosstalk] head of the BAPD, it’s a committee, but …

Payman: Oh fair enough.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, I was chairman of the Cornwall Independent Practitioners Group for about five or six years. And yeah, I [crosstalk 00:00:38].

Payman: You used to bring six speakers from all over the world. Like Newton [Fall] and all of those used to go to Cornwall.

Jason Smithson: It was a really really good concept because, as you remember at that time, it was a time of like [Whack] and things like that. There was a lot of big stuff going on in London. Really good stuff. But the trouble is, London for us is five or six hours away. So everybody would have to close their practise, come down to London, do the one day course, and then come back. So you lose between two and three days. So what we decided, well not we, prior to me, they decided to kind of club together, pay a membership fee monthly, and get these people down. And I managed myself to get, I think we met at the Newton Fall course didn’t we? But people like Newton Fall, we got to John [Canker 00:01:23], quite a few pretty serious guys. Buchanan, the endo guy. Yeah. Quite a lot of them are not that well known now because that time’s gone.

Payman: When did you start getting into minimally invasive dentistry? And sort of the kind of work that you’re known for now? It was around the time that we met, I remember.

Jason Smithson: It was, but actually to be quite honest, I spent quite a lot of the early parts of my career doing maximally invasive dentistry. So I was very much of the … I went to the [Rosential] course fairly early on and I saw that. And I was pretty inspired by that because I liked the aesthetic. So I was doing, I think Tiff probably touched on this as well. I was doing in my … How old would I be? Mid-thirties, maybe quite a lot of [inaudible] veneers. A lot.

Payman: Yeah me too.

Jason Smithson: Like two or three cases a week of 10 years, that was pretty normal. If we didn’t have a veneer case on, I was pretty disappointed. And actually it gets slated now for it, because it suggests people are financially motivated. My impetus to do that work wasn’t really the money of it, although we did quite well financially. It was actually, I actually felt at that time I was transforming people’s lives. As it turns out-

Payman: That’s what it was to be at the cutting edge of cosmetic dentistry at the time.

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Payman: That’s what it was.

Jason Smithson: You had people with misaligned teeth, dark teeth, and you were kind of chopping them down, hacking them up, and putting veneers on. And two weeks later they look great. Three years later they didn’t look great, that’s a whole different story. But I think probably when I started to get to my late thirties, I started to think, when they started to fall off quite a lot, and people ended up needing more endos. And I was just looking at it. And I’d been on the [Panini] course. And I just thought, “You know what? Rather than just doing a single central with composite, I wonder if we can do composite veneers?” Which was one of the … I mean, when we first met that’s what I’d just started doing. Hadn’t I? Do you remember?

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: Years ago. And I had some cases that I showed you, I remember, which I was really impressed with. And looking back they were not very special, but they seemed good to me at the time.

Payman: Your photography was always very strong. Did you do a early photography course in Cornwall or something?

Jason Smithson: Absolutely not. I mean, as we were talking about earlier, I’m technologically quite inept, and I would count photography as a technology really. So I have a reasonable idea of how to use a camera, but my method of getting a good shot is really just take a lot of pictures. And I pick the best one. Very rarely first time out the camera.

Prav: So Jason, going from the point where you’ve been on all these various courses, you’ve been doing a lot of invasive cosmetic dentistry and then shifted over towards this thinking, “Oh, rather than doing one, maybe we can do a load.”

Jason Smithson: Yep.

Prav: How did you transition from that point to being known as one of the world’s, if not the world’s best, at the technique that you teach today? What was that transition? And in terms of just going from someone who practises dentistry, who then teaches it on a global stage?

Jason Smithson: So I think Payman’s heard this before, but I’ll tell you. I work in a practise, or worked with a guy called Jeremy Harris, who was a very strong early mentor for me. But his thing is really fixed pros and implants. Very good at amalgam carving as well. Indeed, I still work with him, and he still works at the practise a day a week. Now he’s nearly retired, but there we go. But he’s not interested by his own admission. He could do good composites, but it’s not really a massive interest. So I wanted to get some feedback on it. So I started to post my cases, which were mainly at that point posterior composites, which were quite unusual at the time. Maybe what, Payman, would it be 12, 13 years ago? In so much as I used to use a lot of tint in the fissures and stuff like that.

Jason Smithson: So they were quite, what might be called now, hyper realistic. So I posted them on a website, which is still around, called Dentaltown. Really just for feedback, it wasn’t with any ambition to do anything other than to communicate with other dentists who were into composite resin. And it got mixed feedback, it’s a fairly American dominated website. And some people were saying, “Oh, why are you putting all that ugly [inaudible] into your teeth? Into your restorations?” And some people were saying, “Wow, that’s really cool.” As it turned out, again, they were so-so. But they were perhaps quite revolutionary for the time. I wasn’t the first to do it, but one of.

Jason Smithson: And after a while a guy called Lincoln Harris, who is still a good friend of mine. In fact, I had dinner with him in Sydney about three months ago. Good guy, runs a group called Ripe on Facebook. He called me and he said, “Do you teach?” And I said, “No. And I don’t have many interested teaching,” because at that time, and to some degree now, I’m quite shy in some environments. And at that point I would be quite nervous to give a presentation in a practise meeting. Like if I was asked to give a short presentation in a practise meeting I’d be up all night with diarrhoea at that point. So it was a definite no-no for me. So I listened to him, and he said, “Well, we have this business model. It’s called Aesthetics in the Alpine. I live in Australia. My wife is Canadian. We fly to Canada to Whistler once a year. And we have a dental meeting that’s mainly geared up to skiing. And we have three speakers, one kind of world known expert.”

Jason Smithson: The year I did it, it was actually a guy called Gary DeWood who I’m really good friends with now who’s fairly prominent in the Spear Institute, really decent guy. There is a guy who’s kind of regionally/nationally known, was a Canadian implantologist [inaudible 00:31:10]. I don’t recall his name. And we have a guy or girl who’s never lectured before. And all you’ve got to do is to come over. We’ll pay for your flight, economy class flight. We’ll pay for your hotel for a week. We’ll pay for a ski pass. And all you’ve got to do is give a one hour lecture. And my response to that was, “Thank you very much. No thanks. I’m not interested.” Because I had several barriers. The first barrier is I didn’t really like public speaking at all. I was quite shy. My the second barrier was I have absolutely no IT skills and that hasn’t changed much.

Jason Smithson: So I had a Dell computer with two keys missing. And I had absolutely no PowerPoint. So I said, “Thanks very much,” put the phone down. And he said, “Well, get back to me if you change your mind.” And so my wife, who was into skiing, she said to me, “Who was that?” And I said, “Well, it’s this guy from Australia,” and I just explained the situation to her. And then, “Anyway, I’m going to go make myself a cup of tea now. Thanks.” And she said, “What? You ring him straight back. This guy has just offered you a free holiday.” We didn’t have kids at the … Well, actually we did have one child at the time. “He’s just offered a free holiday for you to speak for 60 minutes and you’re saying no?” And I said, “Yeah, I don’t want to do it.” My wife brow beat me over the evening into doing it. We’re all married, so you know how that works. Once she made that decision that was that.

Jason Smithson: So I rang Linc the next morning. And I said, “Look, I’ve had a chat with my wife and I’ve had to change of heart, and I’m going to do it.” He said, “Okay, fine.” So we agreed to do it. Luckily I had about nine months of notice. So my next challenge was I have no technical ability and no computer. So luckily Stewart, who has been my best friends since I was 11, teaches computer science as a teacher. And I called him and I said, “What do I do?” And he said, “Don’t worry. Just send me a disc.” We were on discs at that time. “Just send me a disc with everything you need to go on a PowerPoint, and I’ll make it for you. I’ll make you a really simple five four PowerPoint. And you can advance it with one button. Don’t press any other buttons and you’ll be fine. Just talk about the slides.”

Jason Smithson: I didn’t even know how to put anything on a disc. I couldn’t even copy paste at that time, that’s how bad I was. So you’re going to laugh at this. What I did was my wife put all my pictures on a disc. All right? And she labelled them figure one, figure two, figure three. And I got a 100 page flip top reporters pad. And on page one I wrote, “Slide one.” And then I drew where I wanted the picture to be. I wrote the reference underneath it. And I wrote the title of the slide. And I put the floppy disc and the reporters pad … Younger dentists are going to be absolutely laughing at this. And I put that in a bubble wrap bag and sent that to Stewart who lives in London. And he called me a day later and said, “What is this?” And he made me a PowerPoint, which I still have. I look at it, it kind of grounds me when I look at it, with my pictures on. And the titles.

Jason Smithson: And that actually, that lecture has changed quite a lot. But the backbone of that lecture is still the backbone of my posterior composite lecture. And that was my first lecture. That’s how I did it. And I went and I had no clue what I was doing. I had at that point, no public speaking training. And I kind of bumbled my way through it. And it kind of worked.

Payman: Someone else asked you to speak again from that? [Inaudible 00:12:06]?

Jason Smithson: What, to use the same PowerPoint?

Payman: Well, did it go down well?

Jason Smithson: Well, interestingly enough, or not, another friend of mine who’s become a really good friend, a guy called Phil [inaudible 00:12:21], is a dentist in Connecticut. And he was quite prominent on Dentaltown at that time. And he said, “Listen, I hear you’re lecturing for Linc.” And I said, “Well, yeah.” And he said, “So, I don’t like skiing.” He does now. But at that point, “I don’t like skiing. What I like to do is to drink and gamble,” which he still does. “And I live in Connecticut and we have this casino near us called the Mohegan Sun.” I don’t know if you’ve ever been there Payman.

Payman: No.

Jason Smithson: I’m not really into casinos, but it’s quite a nice casino. It’s owned by an American Indian family. And it’s all done in kind of tiffany glass. It’s really quite nicely done actually, quite tasteful. Anyway. “What I want you to do is to come to the Mohegan Sun and give me this lecture. And also do a hands on.” And I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve now got to make this lecture a bit longer. And I’ve now got to do a hands on.” So the next guy in my practise, the following day, happened to be a guy called Rich Newman, who is still actually the rep for GC. And I said to him, “Do you know anybody in America who could give me some stuff to do that’s hands on?” And he said, “Actually no. But I’ll give you the number of Chris, Chris Brown, who’s my boss. And I’ll see if he can help you out.” They were very kind. And they ended up fixing me up with GC, and we ended up doing the hands on with GC in America.

Jason Smithson: And actually Phil, who was the organiser, is a very smart, slick case, a really good people person. And he’s a really good business guy. So he managed to fill, and this will surprise you nowadays, he’d fill 40 places in an hour.

Payman: Wow.

Jason Smithson: On Dentaltown. That’s my-

Payman: Dentaltown was on fire back then.

Jason Smithson: It was on fire, yeah. So he-

Payman: There was a thread called the Chase and Smithson thread, Prav.

Prav: Yeah.

Payman: It was called the Jason Smithson appreciation thread or something like that.

Jason Smithson: Something like that.

Payman: And it was the biggest thread on Dentaltown for like two years running continuously.

Prav: Wow.

Jason Smithson: Something like that. Yeah. So then we did that. We kind of split the profit after we’d taken money off for what we drank away, and was financially quite good. So I thought, “Oh, this is okay.” So yeah, then a little, not too long after that I met you.

Payman: Yeah, that’s right.

Jason Smithson: That was when it was … I had that first, if you remember, you had a rep I think.

Payman: For about two months.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, Hawkeye, I forgot what … It doesn’t narrow it down much in this room. And he came down to Cornwall, and I was like, “I’m a really good lecturer. I lecture in America and everything.” And just completely blanked it. And, “Would you be interested in sponsoring me in the UK?” Basically I didn’t have a sponsor in the UK. And he was like-

Payman: We’d just started with Cosmodent that year. And we brought Buddy over to lecture at Whack.

Jason Smithson: I remember.

Payman: And I said, “You come over.” And you were like one of these young kids. But you weren’t one of those young kids. You were a bit older.

Jason Smithson: I wasn’t that old. I was-

Payman: I reckon you were like 32.

Jason Smithson: Yes, something like that.

Payman: People much younger these days.

Jason Smithson: They do. Yeah. So I-

Payman: Which we’ll get onto I’m sure.

Jason Smithson: The first time I helped out on Buddy’s course, I can remember doing that. And then the second year, I think it was Corky did a class, didn’t he?

Payman: That’s right.

Jason Smithson: And I got an hour in a back room in a broom cupboard somewhere. But my Mike O’Malley, and people who are listening probably don’t know, he’s one of the owners of Cosmodent, came and listened to it. And Mike will say this now, I think he quite liked it, because certainly in the US at that time, and to some degree in the UK, all the lectures were really hugely inspirational, and, “This is what you can do at the highest level.” And this was more of a worker day. This is how you could knock it out in your practise kind of lecture, which was completely alien to that kind of thing. And Mike really picked up on that.

Payman: He’s a smart guy, Mike.

Jason Smithson: He’s a very smart guy and a very good friend of mine. And then that kind of picked up with the Cosmodent stuff in the US. Yeah, so that was that.

Payman: Jason, who must get a lot of people-

Jason Smithson: And we went for dinner with him didn’t we?

Payman: Yeah yeah.

Jason Smithson: At the River Cafe, didn’t we? I remember it.

Payman: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Payman: I mean the number of people you’ve trained over the years, it must have gone into the many thousands by now.

Jason Smithson: I think it’s about 15,000 if you do the maths.

Payman: Yeah. So do you have now people contacting you all the time trying to get help for this, that, or the other thing?

Jason Smithson: Yes. Yeah. In fact I-

Payman: It must take a lot of your time.

Jason Smithson: It takes an enormous amount of time, but again, about five years ago, I read Ronald Reagan’s autobiography. It’s quite interesting. And when he was president of the US, not that I’m anywhere near that, but he always took the time to personally reply to everybody who wrote him a letter. And I thought, “Do you know what? That’s a really amazing thing to do.” So people have always said to me, because I get about roughly between six and 10 emails/Facebook messages/Instagram messages a day saying, “I’ve got this case. How do I handle this?” And people have said to me, “Why don’t you just get your PA to handle it or just fob them off or something like that?” And I think, “Do you know what?” I think that’s kind of a cop out. And I think that’s kind of poor behaviour as a human being.

Jason Smithson: So I always, if anybody sends me a message after any of my courses, or if anybody hasn’t been on any of my courses and still sends me a message, I always try and take the time to at least answer them or point them in the direction of a paper that might answer their question. Or if I can’t answer the question, I’ll say, “Well, I can’t answer that, but here’s somebody who might be able to.” Because I just think we owe that to people. I just think it’s really rude just to say-

Payman: No for sure. For sure.

Jason Smithson: And I mentor a few people, probably about, young dentists, let’s say, what? Probably about six on a regular basis. We speak once a week. And probably another six where I speak to them once a month.

Payman: Jason, you kind of made your reputation on social media. Dentaltown at the end of the day was the early social media-

Jason Smithson: It was social media. And a bit of Facebook.

Payman: Facebook transformed, globally became someone super important. Because of the photography I think. I mean, at the end of the day, and the dentistry, but what I’m saying is that dentistry works because of photos, and it resonates on these platforms because of photos. Did you not want to then move into the Instagram?

Jason Smithson: I’m not sure Instagram is that good at … See, we have this kind of, “Oh, he’s an Instagram dentist. He’s a Facebook dentist.” And actually I use both platforms. I’m not convinced that Instagram is a very good teaching platform, because of the kind of environment it is. Instagram, rightly or wrongly, is quite a positive platform. So it doesn’t encourage critical discussion, let’s say that, so-

Payman: Or long form discussion. It’s also short.

Jason Smithson: Sorry?

Payman: It’s very short. Isn’t it? Very short.

Jason Smithson: Yeah. My kids, certainly my 14 year old has … Well, she’s very into horses and she has I think, at last count, 10,000 followers on Instagram.

Payman: Well done.

Jason Smithson: Yeah. Maybe more. And she would consider herself to be an influencer on Instagram, I think, or that’s her aim. And I think Instagram has some uses. I think it’s useful for your profile, to get out there. And it has a use to promote either yourself or a product. For example, if you were looking to launch a … you’re Enlightened, so a new Enlighten product I think would work really well on Instagram because of the way the platform is. I think in terms of a discussion with constructive criticism, I’m not talking about slating somebody’s case, but with constructive criticism, I don’t think it really works. I think, to be quite honest, I think Facebook or Dentaltown, Dentaltown’s kind of gone now, but they were much better places for discussion about cases than Instagram.

Jason Smithson: I’m also not that convinced about the link between influence of people and the number of followers they have, and things like that. It doesn’t kind of resonate with me. My daughter’s obsessed with how many followers she’s got. And I’m kind of like, well really, the important thing rather than worrying about the number of followers is whether the message you’re putting across is right. That’s something I’d be more concerned about to be quite honest. And I think-

Payman: But when you see these young kids who’ve got massive Instagram profiles.

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Payman: what’s your feeling on it? I mean, let me tell you what I think first, because-

Jason Smithson: Go on.

Payman: These platforms skew younger and younger. Yeah?

Jason Smithson: Yeah.

Payman: So now the Tik-Tok, as an exercise, I’ve got a social media manager. As an exercise I said, “Look, go and find Tik-Tok influencer”. Because thinking, “I’ll get them cheap now. I’ll get onto that.” And they’re all 12. They’re all under like 15, the big ones.

Jason Smithson: Yeah my son’s on Tik-

Prav: They’re all 12. They’re all under 15, the big ones.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, my son is on TikTok. With their fixed models.

Prav: So the platforms skew younger and younger. And so what happens is the people who know how to handle the platforms are younger and younger. And so we end up with younger dentists having more influence and younger dentists have got less experience. So they’re always going to clinically make, they’re not going to be clinically of the same sort of standard because they haven’t got the experience, but they know how to handle the platforms. It’s a funny situation.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, I’m not even sure that there’s a correlation between how many followers you’ve got on your level of influence. For example, I did a course about 18 months ago abroad myself, the old man and a younger dentist who has a very strong Instagram profile has, I don’t know, 40, 50,000 Instagram followers.

Prav: Who was that?

Jason Smithson: Well, we won’t go there because it’s not very fair on him. But when we did this, the course was attended by 30 people, 32 people actually. And I have 2500 Instagram followers of which 50% are about my wine, because my Instagram rather stupidly is half wine and half dentistry. I should have done two separate ones. I’m so technologically stupid, I couldn’t manage that. So essentially I have about 1000 dental, Instagram followers, and it turned out that even though we advertise the class on Instagram, all 32 came via me. So I have to question how much actual influence Instagram has.

Prav: Well, I mean, because you were known before Instagram, so.

Jason Smithson: Yeah. Yeah.

Prav: That’s maybe to be expected, but what do you think about my point about we all see it, we see errors on Instagram. We see people getting very successful on Instagram. What’s your take on it?

Jason Smithson: Define success.

Prav: Loads of patients want to see them.

Jason Smithson: Do you think so?

Payman: Well, yeah, we see it. You do see it.

Jason Smithson: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. If I’m very honest.

Payman: Do you think patients should be making their choice of clinicians through pictures on Instagram?

Prav: It’s a bit sad.

Jason Smithson: Direct answer is no, but how else can they make a choice? You know, it’s very difficult. I mean, if you go and try and a builder, for example. We’re having renovations done on our house, how do you know who’s a good builder? So I don’t know about you, I tend to look on the website and if they’ve got quite a nice website, it looks pretty professional on website. I think that they might be a pretty good builder, but it has absolutely, makes no sense whatsoever, does it really, if you think about it? Probably the patients think very much the same. If you go on Instagram or you go onto the person’s website or you go on a Facebook site and it’s well put together and well managed, then they’re probably a good dentist.

Jason Smithson: And that may or may not be the case. Indeed, to be honest, Jeremy, who I mentioned before, who’s a very, very competent, he’s one of the very few dentists who I know who’s competent broadly. He’s good at endo. He’s good at implants. He’s good at restorative, which is quite a lot better than me, because I’m only good at restorative. And he hasn’t got any Facebook or Instagram profile whatsoever, but he’s spent 40 years doing really solid high end dentistry. And frankly, one of the best dentists I know who I would have treat me, you’ve never heard of.

Payman: Thanks, Jason. If you needed or wanted or desired composite veneers who would you go to?

Jason Smithson: Well, I don’t need composite veneers.

Payman: Let’s say. Let’s say.

Prav: Quite a diplomat today, Jason.

Jason Smithson: I don’t know. There’s the guy who you probably haven’t heard much of recently called Leandro in Brazil, who’s very talented. I used to do some work with an Australian company called DentalEd, A guy called Emanuel Recupero, and I fancied myself as being their top composite guy. And you know, I was in my mid thirties at the time and Emmanuel showed me, he said, “I’ve got some pictures of this guy in his third year at dental school just sent me up some composites”. And I said, “Oh, okay, let’s have a look”. And he showed me them and they were Leandro’s. And I thought, Oh dear, this guy is really, really good. He hadn’t even qualified then. He’s going to be quiet now. I think he’s a concentrating on work and his life and his family, but he’s again, he was quite well known. What would you say, Payman, five years ago?

Payman: Yeah. With the whole bio emulation stuff, right?

Jason Smithson: Yeah. A very, very talented guy. There are a few other guys.

Prav: Jason, what’s your amount of travel that you do every year?

Jason Smithson: I would say, well, last year I did a hundred lecture days, so yeah. Just translate that.

Payman: So every other weekend or even more than that?

Jason Smithson: Well I did, for example, in March, just before lockdown, I did three days in New Zealand and then another four in Australia back to back. And then just, when was it? In November? What did I do? I did four days at Spear. And then I flew over to North Carolina and did a day at UNC. That was quite cool. One with the students. I don’t know if you remember that there were like 110 students.

Payman: Yeah, I saw that one.

Jason Smithson: That was really cool. And then I flew up to Philadelphia and did three days there.

Prav: Where is it? Raleigh?

Jason Smithson: It’s Raleigh, Durham. Yeah, really nice dental school. UNC, nice bunch of students really well kitted out lab. And it worked with one demonstrator, it worked pretty well. But what I’m saying is I did what, nine days in two weeks there. So, it’s not every weekend, but it’s pretty much every other.

Payman: What’s the impact on your family life?

Prav: That’s exactly what I was going to ask.

Payman: Jason.

Jason Smithson: Yeah. So most people would be thinking, God, how does he stay married? Kate and I have been together since, we haven’t been married since ’95, but we’ve been together since 1995. So I suppose that says something. The deal is, I have a good friend who is an estate agent. And he said to me, we had a dinner about six months ago, and he said, well, with all this travel you probably never see your kids and I said to Tim, well, your working day is you get up at 6:00 AM. Your kids aren’t out of bed, you have your breakfast and go to work. And then you come back at eight, your kids are in bed and you don’t see your kids. So you don’t see your kids apart, and you work Saturdays, you don’t see your kids apart from on Sunday.

Jason Smithson: My deal is I work pretty hard in bursts. So I don’t really work at all in July and August when my kids are off. So I work two to three days in practise a week. I cut that down to a couple of days in practise, July and August. So I essentially got most of summer holidays off with them. And I also don’t work particularly hard in December. So I’m off most of the Christmas holidays off with them. And then we usually take a holiday in February, half term and the October half term. So in fact, what it is, is, daddy’s away a lot, but when he’s at home he’s in the room. So, I personally think it’s better to be like that because my kids do a lot of after school activities anyway, to which parents often can’t go. So, it’s better for me to have time with them when they’re off school.

Prav: And are you good at being in the room, so to speak? Because I struggle with that.

Jason Smithson: Do you?

Prav: I’ll wax and wane. So sometimes when I’ve got a lot on at home, I bring my work home and I could be sat there watching TV, but I’m not watching that programme. I’m not really in the room. I’m thinking about something else. Do you find it…

Jason Smithson: No, I’m not like that at all.

Prav: And I have to make an effort to switch things off, so to speak. And I’ve tried really hard over the last couple of years. You can just compartmentalise, and when you’re doing that one thing, whether it’s playing with your kids or doing the activity with them, you’re 100% engrossed in that?

Jason Smithson: I wouldn’t say I’m 100% perfect, but I mean, I’m up pretty early. I’m up about 5:30. My wife’s very rarely up before 7-7:15. So I’m up at 5:30. I don’t set an alarm. I just wake up and then I do all the kind of dog work or the emails or replying to Facebook messages about how do you handle this case and stuff like that between about 5:30 and about 7:15. So I’ve got all that out of the way before my family is in the zone, really, cause I’ve got, well, Henry’s not a teenager, he’s 12, but my 14 year old daughter and 12 year old son are definitely not up at that time. So, and then I go to work and when I’m at work, I do all my treatment planning, all my letters at work and things like that in my lunchtime. So I don’t tend to take lunch. I take lunch, but I’m working in it.

Jason Smithson: And then when I come home, it’s family time, but I work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in the practise. And then if I’m not lecturing, which is every other week I’ll work like a normal nine to five day working on lectures or reading papers or writing articles, whatever. Nine to five on Thursday and the Friday.

Jason Smithson: And then I’d like to pick my kids up from school or take them to school on those days. And it’s family time in the evenings, and certainly at the weekends. Although it’s changing a little bit because my daughter is a really good horse woman and my wife’s obsessed with horses as well. So it’s kind of almost, it’s not splitting the family, that will be a negative, but they tend to go off and do their horsey things.

Prav: You’ve got some horses, Jason, I saw.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, we have four. Not to be recommended. This is on par with having a boat, I think, in terms of hosing money away. But yeah, it’s a hobby of my daughters and I tend to do things with my son. Like, not that I’m very good at it, but skateboarding and we’re currently building a Spitfire ethics model, is what we’re doing there.

Prav: Jason, people don’t appreciate the level of sacrifice that it takes to be one of the greats. You must have over the years, you must’ve missed, I don’t know-

Payman: Birthdays.

Prav: Important events?

Jason Smithson: Nope. I tell you what I did miss. And I always say this to people I mentor. I’ve come to the conclusion there four [inaudible] in dentistry. And this is only for dentistry. This is probably one of my most profound thoughts. If you want to be successful in dentistry, you have two main things and that’s yourself, your own mental and spiritual and health well being and your own interests and hobbies, which is on equal par with that of your family. Staying married, which is important, one of the most important things and giving your kids a significant part of your life and good mentorship, bringing up your kids properly as it used to be called. All right? So those are two main things. And then you have the little add-ons, which may be a lecture career in dentistry, maybe a practise, right?

Prav: But not both.

Jason Smithson: But not both. Well, you can choose. There are four, you can have three. So choose three out of four. Now I’m not saying which is right and which is wrong. It’s not for me to decide. Some people have chosen to have a really strong practise, a really strong lecture career. And unfortunately for me, with my life view, they’re either no longer married to their wives or they haven’t spent a lot of time on themselves, or you go out for dinner with them and they could only talk about dentistry, and that in a way, is sad as well to me. But it doesn’t make it wrong.

Jason Smithson: I chose to have lecture career and spend time with my kids and family and to spend a little bit of time on myself, because I do have my own hobbies, and not have a practise. So that’s basically the bit I missed out on, but I think people who try to do all four might be disappointed because I’ve never yet met one person who has had all four, truthfully. They might tell you they’ve had all four and on the lecture circuit on the stage, you might see even a video or a big presentation about that person having all four. But it’s not true. It’s not authentic.

Jason Smithson: I’ve not met anybody yet who’s had all four and it certainly isn’t me. If I’m very honest, I probably only have two. And I do neglect myself a bit. I spend a lot time with my family and a lot of time on my lecture career and in a way I’ve neglected myself. You were probably a little bit inspirational with your weight loss and fitness thing recently. Well, I’ve been following that. And actually that’s kind of inspired me a little bit and I think you know what?

Payman: Well thank you.

Jason Smithson: I think, you know what? I’m getting to nearly 50 now I maybe should think about doing some pull-ups because I don’t think I can do one. But yeah. So maybe I only got two out of the four, so maybe I need to focus on the third.

Prav: What is Jason time? You get that time to yourself and let’s say you’ve got half a day to yourself, do whatever you want, what would you do?

Jason Smithson: So I have quite weird hobbies. I’ve had Jason time between one o’clock today and this interview, which was at four o’clock and my nerdy hobby is something called Nowaki. Now I don’t know if you’ve known anything-

Prav: Tell us more.

Jason Smithson: Have you heard of bonsai Japanese that you’ve probably seen bonsai plants. Well think of that on a macro level. If you make a tree into a bonsai it takes years. It takes about 10 years for most trees. But, my wife thinks I’m insane. I’m currently in the process… We have about one acre, we have some paddocks because we have horses, but we have about one acre of formal gardens, which was really quite badly overgrown. So I’ve cleared that. And I’m now in the process of either planting things that I can convert it to Nowaki or converting trees that were already there into Nowaki and quite fancy pruning.

Jason Smithson: So it kind of appeals to my nerdy kind of precision and I love Japanese aesthetic. I’ve never been to Japan and I’m dying to take the children to Japan when they’re a little bit older, when they can really appreciate it. But I like a lot of things about Japanese culture, particularly Nowaki and it involves quite big ropes and ladders and stuff like that. So it’s quite physical, and also some quite fancy Japanese handsaws, which you chop things with and varying pruning bits and bobs. But that’s one of my interests.

Payman: You know Jason, every time I land at Heathrow, I think about you. Every time.

Jason Smithson: Where?

Prav: Because I land at Heathrow, I jumped in my cab, I’m going to be home in half an hour and think-

Jason Smithson: I’m home in five.

Prav: And I think he’s got another five hours.

Jason Smithson: Another five hours.

Prav: Every other weekend, both ways. Right? What do you do on that train?

Jason Smithson: You have to wait. It depends, if I’ve just come back from Australia I don’t do very much. I usually try, and this sounds really OCD, but I am a bit, I usually try to do something constructive. Like you just come back from a lecture. Okay. One thing I always do is if I’m asked questions at the end of the lecture, which seem stupid, I always analyse why did that person ask that in inverted commerce stupid question? And the answer is always not that the person was stupid, more than I explained it very, very poorly or the visual aids I had were poor. So indeed the reason why they asked that stupid question is because I made a mess presenting it. So what I do is on my flight back, I think, okay, some person asked a question, which seems real obvious to me. Quite clearly, I didn’t explain it well. So how can I modify that?

Jason Smithson: So I use the, while it’s clear in my head, I think, okay, what bit of it was the visual aid? Was the picture poor or was the general explanation poor or was it just put together, was the message just wrong? And usually it is, so I modify that and often I can take a couple or three hours and obviously I have lunch or dinner on the train as well. And that by the time you’ve sought all that out you’re home pretty much. So you can use that time in a constructive way.

Payman: So that lecture gets better every time?

Jason Smithson: Well, I get a fewer questions at the end. Let’s say

Prav: It’s certainly evolved. Your lecture’s not the same lecture it’s been, it continuously evolves.

Jason Smithson: Yeah. I mean the skeleton of, certainly the posterior lecture, and to some degree the anterior lecture is the same. And you might get new cases you might have done the week before and you think, oh, that’s a really cool one, I want to put that in the lecture. But yeah, it evolves in terms of the message is the same, but the way the message is put across differs. Also, you might want to, it might be the following week, I’ve got a lecture, for example, you might explain something quite differently in, I don’t know, the Philippines than you would in the US in terms of analogies and you want to choose an analogy which resonates with that person. Because if you choose an analogy that doesn’t resonate with that person at all, it doesn’t make any sense. So you might need to make a little modification and you probably just hide the slides and leave it in the lecture for when you’re talking to a group that is similar.

Prav: So Jason, I want to go into two areas now, you have two areas. Running hands on courses myself I know that sometimes if you forget some little tiny thing, it can ruin the course. So what’s your worst story from? I mean, on all the courses you’ve taught, there must have been a couple of stories where things just went wrong. Your lowest movement?

Jason Smithson: On lectures? Oh yeah, yeah. We’ve had a few, I did a course once, an anterior composite course, very early on in my career and there was a big miscommunication about models for the composite course. And I was provided with a very nicely cast, upper and lower stone model to do composites on. That didn’t end very well.

Jason Smithson: Another one, Ryan won’t mind me saying this, we laugh about it now. A guy called Ryan Maguire, who was at that time, the Kulzer rep in Ireland. In fact, I think he is again the Kulzer rep in Ireland. Ryan and I had a real good laugh when we went over to Ireland, pints of Guinness and stuff like that. But he emailed me the day before the course and said, “I have got the most amazing camera to project what you’re doing onto the screen. And it’s being supplied by a television company.” And I thought, wow, he’s really gone. And he had made a huge amount of effort in getting this camera and it was in no way his fault, but when the camera turned up, I don’t know if you remember from years ago, watching Grand Stand or Man of the Day with this huge camera. So, this guy turned up and said, “This is a cutting edge camera”. And he plonked down this camera that you might use to film, I don’t know, a David Attenborough-

Jason Smithson: … down this camera that you might use to film, I don’t know, a David Attenborough series, macro, but it wouldn’t even focus on my hands on the table, nevermind the … and this was like two hours before the course.

Payman: So what did you do?

Jason Smithson: Well, poor Ryan had … We said thank you very much to this guy. I mean, it’s a really good camera for filming, I don’t know, lions and tigers or something like that. Ryan had to run out at … Well it was eight o’clock in the morning and try and find a Currys or something that was open-

Payman: You’re joking.

Jason Smithson: … and just buy a video camera, which we sellotape onto a mounting-

Payman: Wow.

Jason Smithson: We didn’t have a tripod, that was a bit … But it worked out all right in the end and everybody enjoyed it and it was good. The other one was a complete disaster is the one I never made because … and I never do this anymore. For any dentists who are just starting out on a lecture career, never booked back to back lectures. In other words, never finish a lecture in one town at five o’clock at night, and then plan to get on a plane that evening or the following morning and do a lecture in the morning in another town because it always goes wrong.

Jason Smithson: I did a lecture in Hungary and then I planned to fly at five o’clock in the morning to The Hague in the Netherlands and get to The Hague in the Netherlands, I don’t recall. I think it was about half past seven, eight o’clock in the morning and then do a lecture at 10 o’clock in The Hague. It was early in the morning and I fell asleep on the plane and they said, “We’re landing.” Unfortunately, due to what fog, I landed like 150 miles away from where I should have been. So the poor people on … they were Dutch, Michael, who was the organiser at a place called Seed, very good organiser in Holland. They were very cool, being Dutch. So they ended up waiting around until I got there at lunchtime and then we did the course and finished it late in the evening and went out for a dinner. So everybody was happy in the end, but it was quite stressful.

Payman: We forgot the mandrels.

Jason Smithson: Sorry?

Payman: We forgot some mandrels. We forgot the mandrels once.

Jason Smithson: Did we?

Payman: No, we did on one of our courses.

Jason Smithson: Oh, one of your courses? Yeah.

Payman: So there was no way to polish the composite-

Jason Smithson: On a polishing course, slight problem.

Payman: That one’s never going to happen again, but how about clinically? We’ve been asking everyone, in that black box thinking, so that everyone can learn from an error. What’s your biggest clinical error?

Jason Smithson: So when I was a student, my … Well there are a few, but when I was a student, my exam case, I forget her name now, but she was an older Greek lady and she had absolutely loads of gold crown and bridge work in her mouth. I had to take off a five unit bridge, not under exam conditions, but it was part of my exam case, and then re-prep it underneath and redo the bridge. I managed to throw it down her throat, a five unit bridge.

Payman: Oh, bloody hell.

Jason Smithson: And she swallowed it. So I dropped it.

Payman: Big thing.

Jason Smithson: I was stupid enough not to … Yeah, huge. So I looked at it and I thought, “There’s no way I need to tie any floss around that, it’s huge.” So I took it off in one piece because she wanted to keep it obviously, because it’s quite valuable and then it slipped out of my fingers and I dropped it on the back of her throat and I said, “Don’t swallow, don’t swallow.” And she went … and just swallowed the whole thing, so that was pretty bad. I got into quite a bit of trouble for that as an undergraduate. Then when I was a houseman at the London, it was quite stressful because as a houseman, I don’t know if you’ve ever done an oral surgery house job, but you had to supervise two or three students and it was a kid’s extraction clinic. So it was GA and they didn’t put a tube down, they just put a mask on the kid and they gassed them and then they whipped the mask off, the anaesthetist whipped the mask off and you’re expect it to extract the tooth in about 10 seconds and then they put the mask back on before the patient died of anoxia. It was in the early, mid ’90s.

Jason Smithson: We were supposed to be taking out a lower E, you can see where I’m going to go here, and the anaesthetist took the mask off and the student grabbed the lower E and wiggled it about a bit and did get anywhere, which is reasonable because they were fourth year student and then put a mask on and then they took the mask on and they did it again. The anaesthetist was getting quite hassled because obviously it’s not healthy for the patient. So he was really hassling me to get on with it and I picked up a forceps and I said, “Let me show you how it’s done,” with some irritation and a bit of arrogance, let’s say. I grabbed the lower six and pulled the six out. I got into serious trouble for that. So yeah, I’ve done quite a few pretty bad things.

Prav: Just a quick one. Jason, going back to being renowned speaker, you said earlier that you were nervous standing up in a practise meeting.

Jason Smithson: Hugely, yeah,

Prav: So tell me about the very first lecture you gave and how you felt and then what was that transition? Did you public speaking training or how did you transition?

Jason Smithson: I did, if I’m very honest, yeah.

Prav: Did it help?

Jason Smithson: It did. The first one, I think you kind of … I don’t know, you don’t even remember it just blanks out because you’re so focused on, you don’t know your … I mean, now I know my slides. I could talk you through my lectures now without having the slides in front of me and finished on time because it’s just what I do and I’ve been doing it so long. Whereas when you first start, it’s almost trial by PowerPoint because you’re looking at a slide and reading off it, which is never very successful and that’s what I did the first time out and it was just reading the words on the slide, which is not really speaking at all.

Payman: It’s all too common, actually Jase, you know? Still today, you do see that.

Jason Smithson: I know, but I mean, I think my tip would be, to anybody to starting out, young or older, or somebody who’s … Is to keep the slides very simple. You should limit it to one or two pictures, a title and maybe a reference or a slogan. I think as soon as you start putting loads of tables on stuff, it’s a problem. I think the less experienced you are probably the more slides you need, which is really difficult, because the fewer slides you’re able to build, if you’re less experienced, because you just don’t have the material. So it’s kind of chicken and egg and you get more experienced. I mean, I need probably now 30 slides an hour, roughly. That would be my rate, average is about 45 to 60, but then you can slow your speaking style down. You can talk about the case more, you can talk about the research more, but you have to be doing it a while to do that.

Payman: I think you do, something with you Jason, you do do that. You slow down, from what I remember. You slow down on the difficult concepts.

Jason Smithson: On the difficult stuff. Well, there’s also a way of getting somebody’s attention as well.

Payman: But it’s really important because it’s something I say to younger lecturers sometimes, that just because it’s a word that you take for granted, don’t think the audience takes that word for … You are very good at that. You’re very good slowing down at the right point when it’s getting complicated.

Jason Smithson: Well, there’s also a cadence thing. For example, some speakers just speak really slowly all the time, and some speakers speak like a machine gun all the time and I actually … My thoughts are you keep people’s attention by change. Now that change can be in the cadence of your speaking, so you can speak at a set rate and then you might speed it up and then you might slow it down et cetera, et cetera and it just keeps people awake. The other thing you can use, is I try to keep the background of the slides fairly uniform. It’s usually black, but you might every 10th slide have a white one. Not Technicolour, just you’re doing black, black, black, black, suddenly a white. Wake up, because you were just nodding off. Just maybe thinking about going on Facebook or looking at your iPhone or whatever, and that just re-grabbed your attention.

Jason Smithson: Or you might change your position in the room. Or if you’re on a podium, you might get off the podium every five or 10 minutes. I’m not saying prowl around because that annoys me as well, but you might move from the lectern down into the audience or you might move … It’s just these small things that actually look very casual and like you never thought about them, but actually are designed into your lecture to keep people awake.

Jason Smithson: I learnt quite a lot, I don’t know if this is done anymore, but I did Dale Carnegie, funnily enough. Do you remember How To Win Friends And Influence People?

Prav: Yeah.

Payman: Amazing book.

Jason Smithson: I didn’t do that. They run, what was it called? Powerful PowerPoints or something. I don’t think it was called that but was called something like that. I went in Bristol about, gosh, 10, 12 years ago and there was six of us. None of them were dentists, they were all … I was like the monkey there, the tea boy. They were all quite serious people in high … High level corporate people and I think one barrister maybe. They took you through … Just like the things I’ve just told you, how to engage people during a presentation, how dress, your posture, how to speak, how to put the PowerPoint together, it was PowerPoint then. All these little things and it was quite expensive. I remember, eye-wateringly so. And it was about three or four days, but it was actually very, very good.

Payman: I think as a delegate, there’s a way to be a good delegate too and you see it. When you see enough delegates going through, you see some who really get a lot out of it and others who don’t. By the way, I’m totally cool with someone turning up for the fun of it. Why not? Because you want to take some time off the practise and you want to come and have fun. It’s cool, it’s super cool with me. I’ve got not problem.

Jason Smithson: I don’t know, I think to take time off and come and see my lecture just for the fun of it, I think’s a bit sad.

Payman: But it’s real, it’s a real thing.

Jason Smithson: Why don’t you go and enjoy yourself or spend time with your family and friends, you know?

Payman: It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing. It’s almost like I need that excuse or whatever it is.

Jason Smithson: To get away?

Payman: But what I’m saying is-

Jason Smithson: Yeah but maybe you should reflect on your own life. You shouldn’t need to go to a dental lecture-

Payman: Yeah, I get it.

Jason Smithson: … to take some time for yourself-

Payman: I get it.

Jason Smithson: I don’t think-

Payman: I get it.

Jason Smithson: … but then, that’s me.

Payman: But what I’m saying is the idea that the event, the lecture, the course is the beginning of the journey and not the end. I think a lot of delegates come in thinking, “This is it. I do this course,” and they’re done and that’s not the case and what you see afterwards-

Jason Smithson: No, no absolutely not, which is why I spend time supporting people afterwards.

Payman: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Jason Smithson: Because getting back to what I was saying about converting things on the train, they’re often people who don’t get it, who don’t feel confident to ask the question and that’s quite reasonable. Everybody has a different personality type and that person may email you a day or two, or even a week later and say, “Do you know what? I didn’t actually get that in the lecture.” Then you do have a responsibility to explain that, I think, anyway.

Payman: Well, I think lockdown’s shown us that there’s a massive appetite for education, the webinars … I’ve been pleasantly surprised that that’s what dentists have been doing, watching webinars during knocked down, and your success that you’ve had-

Jason Smithson: And drinking wine.

Payman: And wine. The success you’ve had with yours, how many were you getting? 500, 600 paying people coming to your online one?

Jason Smithson: Yeah, yeah.

Payman: Marvellous man, really marvellous.

Jason Smithson: International, which was nice. It’s nice to keep in touch as well. You both probably know the book Tribes by Seth Godin.

Payman: Yeah.

Jason Smithson: And it’s almost a tribe and it’s actually, you know, I tell you what I do enjoy, actually … The lecture I enjoy, I don’t mind that. But when you see people signing in at the side at the beginning, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I remember you, we met in Taiwan, you were in Scotland,” and it’s nice to see these people again online and then we do a 30 minute at the end and chat with them at the end. It’s not social because it’s Zoom, but it’s almost social in lockdown.

Payman: Do you have people … sort of groupies? People who are nervous to be in the same room as you. It must’ve happened.

Jason Smithson: I hope not.

Payman: I remember it happening to me back in the day.

Prav: I was your groupie once, Payman.

Jason Smithson: Was. Come to his senses.

Payman: And I handled him in the way that groupies are handled in.

Jason Smithson: I have people that come to the course more than once, the same course. Actually, and this is not a sales pitch, I would encourage that because I’ve done some people’s courses twice myself, because I think sometimes, particularly if it’s a bit out of your comfort zone, you might spend the first course thinking, “I’m just getting my head around it.” I did with a couple of courses, and then you may embrace it and then go back to your practise and start doing it. Then some aspects of it you may run into trouble with, then you think, “Okay, well, how do I deal with these problems?” Well, if you go on the course again, then often you A, get the ability to ask questions about those issues. Or it may be that that’s covered in the course anyway, and you just didn’t pick it up because we all only take in … what are the numbers? Something like 36% or something like that of what you’re taught?

Jason Smithson: So it just gives you a second bite of the cherry and actually, people always say, “Oh God, he’s on the second time on the course. He’s obviously a no-hoper,” or she. Actually, it may be that that person is not a no-hoper, it’s actually that that person is really, really engaged and has taken in 40%, 50% and has worked on that and they actually want to grab that last 10% from coming again and they’re the people that really, to be honest, get the most out of it.

Payman: Yeah, repetition’s massive, massive. It really is.

Jason Smithson: I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness going on a course twice, I mean, I’ve done a couple, I’ve done Didier’s course twice.

Payman: We encourage it, we tell them to come again to watch, to watch.

Prav: I find when you’re learning or reading a book, it’s always contextual to what’s going on in your life. So, the How To Win Friends And Influence People book, for example, I’ve probably read that three or four times and each time I’ve read it-

Jason Smithson: Got something different.

Prav: … it always resonates with what is happening in my life and the relationships around me and the same with the course. It might be a patient that walked in your practise last week or a conversation that you had with a patient and then something that Jason says, it resonates. You pick up on that and you missed it last time.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, or maybe I modified it.

Prav: Yeah, yeah on the three hour train trip or whatever it was.

Jason Smithson: Five.

Prav: Five hours.

Payman: Jason, what’s your advice to an ambitious young dentist who wants to really go places now in restorative dentistry? What should they do? Come on your course, of course.

Jason Smithson: You know what my advice is, in very few words?

Payman: Go ahead.

Jason Smithson: I haven’t really thought about this, but be authentic. Be authentic. My second bit of advice is be authentic. Because, you know what? If you jump on stage and start recommending techniques that you don’t do, if you jump on stage and start recommending products you don’t use, it’s obvious. Just be yourself, nobody will criticise you for being yourself. Everybody’s got something to offer, offer what you do and what you feel is right in your head and you’ll always have an audience for that. That’s what I think.

Payman: Absolutely.

Prav: I’ve got another piece of advice to ask you for Jason, and this is-

Jason Smithson: I’ll try.

Prav: This comes down to really, imagine it’s your last day on the planet. Earlier today you mentioned that one of your values in life is giving your children good mentorship. So what would be the three of advice that you would leave them with for life?

Jason Smithson: I think again, it’s to thine own self be true. Be authentic. Put your family first. I don’t know if I’ve got a third one.

Prav: That’s all right, yeah.

Payman: All right, we’ll have to live with that.

Prav: Drink good wine Jason, drink good wine.

Jason Smithson: You caught me on the hop.

Payman: Drink good wine.

Jason Smithson: Yeah, but not mine. Because my wine, but I don’t know if it’s my son or my daughter, have been hogging into my spirits, I don’t know. But it’s slowly going down.

Payman: Good on them, good on them.

Jason Smithson: But there we go.

Payman: Well, thank you so much. I know how busy you are, Jason and I know what [crosstalk] thank you so much for doing this.

Jason Smithson: Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity.

Prav: It’s been great, it’s been brilliant.

Payman: Thanks a lot.

Jason Smithson: Thank you very much, thanks.

Payman: Bye.

Outro Voice: 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.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Well, do you know what? I’m going to tell Payman. What conversation would we have about five years ago when I called you up?

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. To remind everyone, you tell them.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. So I called Payman up and I saw… He doesn’t remember. I saw Payman, I saw-

Dr Prav Solanki: That was brilliant.

Intro Voice: 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.

Dr Prav Solanki: Rhona, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the Dental Leaders Podcast. I’m sure we’ve got tonnes of stuff to talk about from social media to mental health, to haters, to all sorts of stuff that’s been going on. What I want to get out from today, truly is for people out there to understand who the real Rhona Eskander is, the real person behind the social media, the real person, and just bring out-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: She’s a really nice person, just saying.

Dr Prav Solanki: So Rhona, tell us about your backstory, how you grew up, your childhood, your parents, upbringing, siblings, all that sort of stuff. Give us a run down of your childhood-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Okay. Well do you know what’s so funny? Because I love talking about this only because people have these massive preconceptions of how I’m a little princess that was given everything on a plate and I just love to prove them wrong. That’s kind of my favourite thing. But I pretty much… My dad came to the UK at 21. 10 pounds in his pocket and just a suitcase. Worked a Spaghetti House to put himself through medical school. So you had that very kind of typical immigrant ethical background where he was a massive graft and hard worker.

Dr Prav Solanki: Came from where Rhona?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Egypt, typical Egyptian. He is, “Rhona, you have to be a doctor, a dentist, an engineer.” That kind of typical Middle Eastern dad. He brought me in my sister up with very strong kind of work values. So education was always at the forefront of our upbringing. My mom’s Lebanese and-

Dr Payman Langr…: Did they meet in London?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, they actually met in Saudi and my mum is six foot two and my dad’s five foot 10 so it’s quite funny.

Dr Payman Langr…: Good on him.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, good on him. He saw her actually in the hospital in Saudi and was like, “Wow, that woman, like don’t care if she’s married, single, straight, gay. She’s going to be my wife.”

Dr Payman Langr…: As a patient?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, no. I mean, she was just walking through a hospital. Basically he saw her and he basically said to his friends… Organised a dinner party. They sat next to each other. Six months later they were engaged. Six months later they were married and they’ve been together for 35 years and they’re still really in love, which is pretty great. But anyways, when we grew up in the UK it was actually a bit of a struggle because when my dad was in Saudi and me and my sister were born and we moved back to the UK when I was five and he actually found it really difficult to be in the NHS.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It was a time where there was a lot of racism, a lot of struggle. We didn’t have much money growing up at all actually. I remember my dad rationing in Asda to buy apples and so forth. My mum was so desperate to get us into private school because she believed that she wanted us to have the best education. So she started working in retail and she actually had a degree in nutrition, but at the time, back then, no one was into the whole healthy eating thing. It just wasn’t something that was in Vogue. So when she was working in retail, as you know, the wages aren’t great, but every single penny went to education. I ended up getting a scholarship to my secondary school, but I wasn’t the smartest kid alive. Oh actually it was for drama. Surprise, surprise. Acting was always my thing when I was a kid.

Dr Payman Langr…: What was the name of the school?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Queens college. Do you know it?

Dr Payman Langr…: No.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, actually a lot of celebrities, well now strong women I’d like to say went to that school. So did you guys know Jameela Jamil?

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: She was in my school-

Dr Payman Langr…: Was it formative, you think, that school, for you?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: What do you mean?

Dr Payman Langr…: Well, you’re saying celebrities send their kids there because-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No they weren’t. The thing it was art and drama base, which is what the scholarship was for, was kind of for drama. It was never kind of science or mathematically inclined. But again, my dad was like, “Find a real job. You act in your spare time.” But I think really it’s a school that nourished young females to be really strong and empowered. So Jameela was at my school and we all know the kind of women that she represents me industry. Sarah Jossel as well, who is beauty editor of The Sunday Times and is always in on ITV This Morning. She’s the main person as well as like very prominent figure in the kind of beauty industry. We also have another huge influencer, Lily Pebbles. So very strong females came out of that school, that did lots of different things with their lives, which I found really interesting.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Because I think it was a school that allowed you to be very free and allowed you to kind of develop a very strong character. We didn’t even have a uniform, things like that that allowed you to develop your character. But I had to work really hard. I was never good at science. I was never good at maths, but I knew I wanted to be a dentist from the age of 11 because-

Dr Payman Langr…: How did that start?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: My aunt was a dentist in America and I went and did work experience for her and I just loved the way it was all set up, I loved the way-

Dr Payman Langr…: Your mom’s sister or your dad’s?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, my dad’s sister. I just loved the way it sets up. I was like, “Do you know what? I really want to do this.” My dad obviously tried to get me into gynaecology. We cover all parts of the body in the fam. But I thought, I actually just didn’t really like the… I didn’t like medicine. I didn’t like the hospital environment. I found people only come to you when they’re sick. Whereas in dentistry I just saw this relationship of seeing someone every six months, which I just loved that.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: At school I just worked really hard. I was that person that had to revise five to six months before an exam. You know how some people can do it like a week before, I was never one of those people. I always had to kind of graft hard to get good grades and I barely got into dental school. When I applied I had interviews. But I mean, it was probably my fault because I’d rock up to these interviews with this massive hair, big earrings. Do you know what I mean? They probably thought I was like more of a fashion person.

Dr Payman Langr…: Don’t worry. We just had Andrew Dogwood. He said he struggled to get into dental school.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Really? Yeah. But I think the thing is, is that it depends really on how you-

Dr Payman Langr…: Which school did you go to, in the end?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I went to Leeds and yeah, I mean it was great. It was fun. But I was a very insecure, un-confident person when I went to Leeds.

Dr Payman Langr…: How did it feel for you arriving in Leeds from London. Because when they arrived in Cardiff from London, I felt a bit a duck out of water. It was-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh my God.

Dr Payman Langr…: Did you have the same feeling?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I mean, it was hilarious because I obviously went to the most public school halls in Leeds. It was like literally getting into Harry Potter and everyone there was these quintessentially British people. There I rock up as you said, Middle Eastern walk straight, Habibi vibe with my Aga Boots, Ralph Lauren back in the day.

Dr Payman Langr…: Stood out.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, literally. There were people that like, “Oh my God, you’re so foreign.” I was like, “Okay, hilarious.” I had a really great time and I just think I was very unsure of who I was. It was an amazing experience. I’m very sociable, so I love getting on with people. But I didn’t really know what I liked. I wasn’t confident enough to do things out of the norm, et cetera. Dental school for me wasn’t great at all in terms of, I was always friends with the people that did English, journalism, history, art, all of that. Dentists-

Dr Payman Langr…: Then they all left off the three years, suddenly you were left with no one, yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly. I just kept going young for the young ones. I was like, prey on them. I was literally like 21 hanging out with 18 year olds.

Dr Prav Solanki: Freshers week again.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly. I did freshers week agan and again and again. But the thing is the dentists for me, they didn’t really like me if I’m completely honest with you. As you said, they found it a bit weird. They were like, “Oh, you’re so posh. You are made in Chelsea.” I was like, “Okay.” I found it really daunting because I just felt like they didn’t like me. I never got involved in all the kind of Dent Soc, Med Soc things. But to be perfectly honest with you, for me it was one of the best things because my network was so much wider as you guys know, and so much more vast. The connections that I developed went beyond dentistry and that really helped me on my career later on.

Dr Prav Solanki: Did you miss London when you came to Leeds? So I went in the opposite direction. I was from Manchester to Oxford. I was dating someone in London and I spent a lot of time in London and it was… I only-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yes, the accent.

Dr Prav Solanki: Comes and goes.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Prav Solanki: I only realised that I’ve missed Manchester, probably about eight and nine years later.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Prav Solanki: I once went back home and I’d done sort of nine, 10 years. I went back home, stayed with my brother one day and I thought, “This is home. I’m staying.” I left all my stuff in the house we were renting my stereo, everything. Never picked it up and just stayed in Manchester.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Once a northerner always a northerner.

Dr Prav Solanki: Always. Yeah. Did you miss London in the same way?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Do you know what? I think because I had already set my mind to the fact that I didn’t want to be in London for university, I wanted a different experience. I didn’t want the student life in London. I wanted to be somewhere completely different. Bristol was my first choice and I was devastated when they rejected me because I had an interview there and I had all these dreams and ambitions, when you really imagine yourself-

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s a lovely city. Bristol.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. Then I was in Leeds, which has… My friend from San Andrews came to visit me in leads and she was like, “Oh, are you having riots on the streets?” I was like, “No, we just coexist with rubbish. I’m really sorry about that.” Literally. This was an all kind of student road area. But I think that I didn’t necessarily miss London, but I knew that I wanted to be back down South after university. It was kind of like, “This is my years in university.” I only visited leads thereafter a few months ago when the university invited me back to do a talk.

Dr Payman Langr…: So your network, how much of it comes from your friends at school? How much of it comes from your friends at uni? How much of it comes from the work you do now? To network. Because, you know a lot of people.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: You keep sending me videos of people I know-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Who was the recent one?

Dr Payman Langr…: Camra. My friend Camra. You know a lot of people. Right? Is that an active process or is it just that you’re just super sociable or whatever? How does it come?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think one of the strengths that I have, I mean I’ve always been very open about the fact that I’m an okay clinical dentist, but I’m extremely ethical and I think my power to connect with people is something that’s strong because wherever I go, it doesn’t matter. I love to get to know people and really understand who and what they’re about. I think it’s just been growing slowly. It’s not been particularly active, but I actually thrive off other people’s energy. When I make them feel good or we have a conversation, a connection is built and I don’t like to separate that. I think in dental school we’re really taught we have to be so professional and sometimes professionality equals a bit of coldness. And that’s why people feel that we’re like-

Dr Payman Langr…: The first time we met at Rahul’s course, how long were you out of college, then?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh gosh.

Dr Payman Langr…: I would agree, few years ago.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. So I graduated in 2010, it was about 2013, ’14. That was when-

Dr Payman Langr…: Two, three, four years out of college.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: And the first thing you said to me was, “I want to do something different in dentistry. I want to make it more accessible to the public.” I didn’t really get it to you, to tell you the truth. I heard you, what you said. Yeah. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get what you-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I can’t believe you remember that.

Dr Payman Langr…: I didn’t get what you meant by it. But now I look at your output, right? I get it now. Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: But that feeling of trying to make it more accessible to everyone. I guess, that’s what you’re saying now.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly.

Dr Payman Langr…: Clinical people are a bit cold and scientific and you want to translate that into-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, I think as well, the thing is that I just have this fierce ambition to do something different. The way that my mind works is so much more on a kind of emotional level, like you said. People always think I’m crazy because what I said to you then is exactly what I’m manifesting right now. I saw social media as a platform to reach as many people as possible on an emotional level. That’s exactly what I’ve done because people now see dentistry has been quite glamorous. They want to take selfies with you. I get invited to events, you know what I mean? I get invited to influencer dinners, because they now see you as somebody that they can talk to and hang out with. Again, that’s something that maybe at dental schools they won’t promote. But

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I believe that we’re all human beings and if we can’t treat each other as humans, then you’re not going to get anywhere and you have to be brave enough to break those boundaries. Which is what I have been doing. Even I said to my Invisalign rep, when I had only been doing Invisalign for about six to 12 months, I said to my territory manager, I said, “Oh, I remember looking at poster.” Do you remember that poster of the Invisalign girl? The one with the Blondie hair holding the aligner?

Dr Payman Langr…: Holding the aligner, yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. Exactly.

Dr Payman Langr…: It was such a bad post.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. I used to look at the poster and I said to him, I said, “Do you the dentist should be the face of the product? Do you know that?” Then he thought I was mad. Then last year he reminded me as well, when we were at the dentistry show, when I’m on that big campaign, all those videos of me-

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. I saw this giant screen and cologne at IDS.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It’s quite haunting. But anyways, he said to me, he said, “Look, that’s the face of you and these are posters.” He said, “Do you remember when you said to me, four years ago when I didn’t know what you were talking about and I thought you were mad?” I was like, “That’s it. Just this obsessive thinking and that whole thing.”

Dr Payman Langr…: Do you remember Instagram and the first time you used it? I mean, I look at your content, right? And it’s very authentic and authenticity really does work.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. That’s a lovely thing.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Thanks.

Dr Payman Langr…: But you can’t have grown your influence in the way that you have without studying it. So have you done that? Studied the platform and the algorithm?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, do you know what? I’ll tell you what it is, is that when Instagram was quite new but still very established, I again had friends in the arts and who were creative. Like I said to you about my friend Nina Parker, who’s a very successful chef, she was one of the originals on Instagram. I have a friend that’s a very famous magician. They were using the platform to grow. I said, “Why don’t dentists do that?” I said, “Why?” Then in my mind I thought… The thing is that I always try to learn from people that I admire and I thought, “You know what, this is a platform that can be used to grow.” Again, people thought I was mad. My practise manager was like, “Okay, you can crack on. I’m not sure what you’re on about, but go ahead and do this.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I just started. You play around with content and you see things like I don’t obsessively try to look at the algorithm. Sometimes I get 200 likes on a photo and sometimes I get 2000 and I think, “Okay, clearly that hasn’t worked.” But I try not to worry about it too much because social media is toxic in its own way and you really can’t obsess over the things that you post and stuff because it becomes an addictive validation as well, which is really difficult balance. And to be honest, haven’t really worked out.

Dr Payman Langr…: I noticed you’ve just started TikTok as well.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. It’s not great, my TikTok yet, growing it.

Dr Payman Langr…: TikTok’s difficult, isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: But one thing I quite admire about the way you’ve done Instagram is you’ve brought Anna Middleton along with you and now I noticed you’re also-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: London OT but it’s like Charlie’s Angels when you come into Chelsea Dental.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. That’s quite a nice thing. It’s empowering women in dentistry. Should we get onto that?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Okay, go for it.

Dr Payman Langr…: What do you feel about this wave? Why is it that now there’s so many women’s groups?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Okay. So the really interesting thing is that people see me as a strong female figure, which I’m so grateful for. But as a result, they want me to be at the forefront of a lot of speaking events that are just inclusive to women. I have actually made a decision in the last year not to accept any of those invitations. Not because I’m not here to support other women. It’s because I think that this is basically a trend and people don’t understand what it means. I think that women should have a voice. I think that women should be empowered, but I don’t actually think separating men from women on any platforms is the way forward because I think it’s all about diversity, inclusivity, and not about separation.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Now, my chief business partners are male. I work with males all the time. I get on with them. I have never felt intimidated or disempowered by men. So actually I don’t think that this whole wave, which kind of tries to display men as being the enemy and suppressing women is something that I relate to. I think it’s all about integration, to be honest.

Dr Payman Langr…: Do you think it’s harder to be a woman than a man?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. So sure.

Dr Payman Langr…: Really?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, for sure.

Dr Payman Langr…: I mean, if that’s true, then there’s nothing wrong with empowering. You know what I mean?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah But I think-

Dr Payman Langr…: Why is it harder to be a woman than a man?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I mean, for me personally, somebody that’s built their profile and career and has lots of dreams and aspirations that I want to fulfil, I’m also very much aware of the biological clock, for example.

Dr Payman Langr…: Okay. I get that.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So it’s the whole family thing.

Dr Payman Langr…: Of course, having a kid and all that. But outside of that, I mean you haven’t got a kid yet. Have you?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No. Okay. My father keeps reminding me.

Dr Payman Langr…: So, in your journey from zero to now you think it’s harder to be a woman than a man?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, for sure. I mean-

Dr Payman Langr…: Why?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think that there has been elements of… In my industry, which I’m not going to go into in detail, there have been elements of also like I sometimes certain men have wanted to help and then it turns out they actually wanted to try and get physical and then you go, “No, no. This is a purely business thing.” I’ve experienced some of that and then they lose interest in trying to help you. So I think there’s definitely a little bit of that Harvey Weinstein culture that still goes on in every industry. But having said that, I think that if you assert yourself in a certain way, you can get the respect from both sexes, to be perfectly honest with you. The reason why I say that is because I did assert myself and behaved in a certain way that gained respect.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think women for some reason, don’t feel like they have a voice. They don’t have the confidence to speak out. It’s not the men are saying, “You can’t speak out.” It’s because they just don’t maybe that ego like men do. I think that’s a problem with women. Trust me, more women have said negative things about me online, behind my back and so forth than men. I think that says a lot because I think that’s insecurities-

Dr Payman Langr…: Is that right?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: That’s insecurities projected. Does that make sense?

Dr Prav Solanki: If you were born a bloke, would you be more successful?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: If I was born a bloke, would I be more successful? No. I’d have no idea how to answer that question, but I definitely think that I would nail being a bloke.

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s a strange question, really. Isn’t it? It’s a strange question.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, I understand what he’s saying.

Dr Prav Solanki: It relates to your question about-

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s a strange one to answer, but-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, but I mean-

Dr Payman Langr…: Tell me about these terrible things that these women have done to you. Are we talking trolling?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, I think that… So for example, I’ll hear from some of my peers that certain female dentists for example, that have never met me will say things about my persona or about my clinical work. I find it very strange because I’ve never even met them. Sometimes on Instagram I have had to deal with comments of trolling. But to be perfectly honest, there have been male trolls as well. As we know, there’s forums that I think it’s just awful. The group still on Facebook that allow dentists to publicly within the space of the forum shame of a dentist and troll them. And you know what? To be honest though, Payman, some of my male friends who are dentists also suffer from anxiety about these groups talking about them, screenshotting things about them, mocking them. This happens for males and females.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But I think that it’s just outrageous that we allow it. We’re allowing it. I mean, with what’s happened with Caroline Flack recently, can’t people understand that the power of words can have on you? It’s so real that people say you have to develop a tough skin and just get on with it. Because if you put yourself in the public eye, you’re just going to expose yourself. But I’m like, I don’t want to live in a box. Do you know what I mean? This security thing, but I don’t think that gives people the rights to think that I’m invincible or any of my friends are invincible. Does that make sense?

Dr Payman Langr…: To you, does it hurt, then? Is that what you’re saying?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: 100%.

Dr Prav Solanki: What’s your deepest, darkest moment in social media? Whether it’s a comment that someone’s made or content that someone’s published or a screenshot that you’ve seen where you’ve just, “Holy crap.” Heart sunk.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: And sleepless nights.

Dr Prav Solanki: It sent you into a spiral of depression or sleepless nights or whatever that may be.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So, when I was on ITV… I got asked to be on ITV and then the second time that I was on that, I posted about it and someone with zero followers, zero posts. This is the interesting thing, right? Because, these trolls sometimes it’s obviously a made up-

Dr Payman Langr…: Hiding behind, yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. They’re hiding behind a mask, they didn’t even have the guts to tell you to your face. Have basically trolled me, had attacked the way that I speak, my accent and the way that I looked, totally made digs at my eyebrows and I was like, “They are my signature, thanks very much. Lebanese all over.” But attacked the way that I looked. I just deleted it obviously and tried to ignore. A few weeks ago I had a dental student, female dental student that tried to attack one of my photos about being in the Telegraph and I ended up having to disable the comments on the photo because all these other students were jumping on the bandwagon and I just don’t have time to deal with that, when I’m dealing with patients on a busy day.

Dr Prav Solanki: Imagine that happens first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Awful.

Dr Prav Solanki: You come into work the next day, you’ve got a day full of patients. How does that affect your day in your interaction?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: You can’t focus. You just really can’t focus. Going back to the whole Caroline Flack thing, because I think it’s just such a prominent thing that’s happening and I think it shows the way we have to change like behaviour. A lot of my patients were very good friends with Caroline and had come in and they had confirmed to me that she really, really suffered with the things that were being said about her constantly. Again, I just don’t know why people feel that they have the right to really attack people on a personal level.

Dr Payman Langr…: With famous people, definitely. Do you remember there was a picture of, what’s her name? Posh Spice.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: She’s gone to America to have her teeth done. Even dentists jumping in, making… Somehow you feel like you have licence with famous people. It’s a weird thing.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s a weird thing, isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, I mean 100%. I think on that note as well, is that the influencer world has also sort of affected me. I have some influences that are extremely loyal and we formed a very strong bond on the treatments that we’ve done. The influences now, because I was one of the original dentists treating influencers, remember? Now everyone’s doing it. But I was one of the only ones if the only one and now everyone’s doing it. They’ll jump from person-to-person. Right? And now dentists, I find gloat when an influencer changes dentists because amongst the dentists, “I wonder why she changed dentists. Obviously dentist X did a crap job or didn’t fulfil their needs.”

Dr Prav Solanki: You alluded to earlier when you gave a little intro, “I’m an okay clinical dentist.” You weren’t blowing smoke about yourself. You weren’t saying, “I’m the best clinical dentist.” Talk to me about why patients come to you and what it is that you do.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. I mean, I noticed one of your stories a couple of days ago and it was someone famous I guess. She said, I went on Twitter and asked who’s a good dentist and it just all stormed in as Rhona.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, that really shocked me actually. Because I had no idea who she was initially and then everyone was like, “She’s a really big deal. She’s one of the most… Lots of dentists messaging like, “Oh my God, you’re treating this person, that’s amazing. I’ve been following her for ages.”

Dr Prav Solanki: But what is it about the way you make people feel?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think it’s just that, it’s about the way that I make people feel. Now, I think that I never realised about the interaction, but I always think it’s such a cliche saying, treat your patients as you would your friends and family. I always have that in mind. I actually am really excited to treat a case of a patient who is going to come to me. She had messaged me saying that she had gone through a massive surgical process and that she wanted to talk to me about the feminization of her teeth.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I thought, “Well what does that mean?” I looked further and I realised that she’s transgender and when I responded back to her, her immediate response was, “Oh my gosh, you’re the nicest person. Your energy is so warm.” Because, I’m very much about all inclusivity. Again, Payman, if you ask me now like you did a few years ago, what’s my vision? Is to show the world that you can be anyone, you deserve to have good teeth. Now people now are like, “Oh yeah, I want to treat an influencer. I want to facial a famous person.” Show everyone. I’m like, “Do you know what? I want to take a step from that because I want to show that no matter who you are, what you look like, where you’re from, male, female, transgender.”-

Dr Prav Solanki: Access to it.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: You have access and you deserve a smile. That’s kind of my next vision, for the public. So stay tuned for how I’m to be doing that. But I think that that feeling, as you said, of making them feel comfortable. I’m very good at gauging body language. I’m very good at gauging fears. I’m very good at gauging how people feel from the moment they walk into that room. My job is to make them feel comfortable and I think that I’m personable and that I really care about everything they’re going through. I think that’s why that word of mouth has spread because what dentists don’t realise is clinical dentistry is so important, but patients don’t really know what’s going on in their mouth. Of course, they want a nice result, but at the end of the day, if you make them feel good in that chair and really show all your passion-

Dr Payman Langr…: But spell it out, how do you make people feel good?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: How do you make people feel good? I think the way that I make people feel good is by reassuring them, being honest with them. So, for example, if a procedure’s uncomfortable, like I’ll say, “listen, the anaesthetic might hurt, it’s going to be a bit of discomfort.” Just like, “Sit tight.” I never sort of sugar coat anything, but I say, “You know what, it’s all going to be worth it.” Or if I’m putting on the rubber dam, I’m like, “This is going to be really uncomfortable for a few minutes. But once it’s on you can do your thing.” I think that also it’s checking up on them because people say like when you are on social media, you need to separate and log off. But the problem is I don’t really log off. So if they’ve had a big procedure in the day, I’ll message them going, “How was that? You feeling okay?” And they feel that way.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: There was one particular influencer I treated and he kept asking me questions, about how his teeth are going to look. I sensed that because he’s always making videos, he’s anxious. He was being so polite but is read between the lines. I said to him, “Listen, I feel that you’re really worried about what they’re going to look like. If you don’t like them, we’re not going to fit them. Don’t worry about it.” That’s all he needed and they totally chilled. So I try to give that reassurance whereas I feel now and I-

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s almost EQ, isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: If you have stronger EQ.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, exactly. I think that, that’s the really important thing and I think that-

Dr Payman Langr…: Do you have that stress? I mean, Dipesh tells me all the time, he stresses around, what if a patient he treats season other dentist and the dentist sees the work? He has this perfection paralysis. That’s mainly his thing. If another dentist sees the work, it has to be spotless beautiful five years down the line, because he’s treated-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It’s his work, yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: He treated, it’s his work. As your profile goes up, that stress must go up as well.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh, 100%. But the thing is that-

Dr Payman Langr…: I guess it makes you better.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No. You know what, it does make you better and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head because I’m pretty sure I’ve had average to poor work that’s probably been seen by another dentist.

Dr Payman Langr…: We all do.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think that you learn, for example, probably about once, two years ago, I was placing way too many composite veneers because I was pressured by patients and I know that they’ve probably needed to be upgraded or changed to porcelain. But I’m really embarrassed to be honest. I’m like, “Oh my God, another dentist has seen that and I know that now bonding, composite bonding doesn’t look that great.” Do you know what I mean? Yes, it may look great in the hands of Dipesh or Monic. Do you know what I mean? Five years down the line. But it’s very rare. Also even Monic, he did my composite bonding, my composite veneers.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: He even said to me, “These look amazing because your diet is point. You don’t drink. You know what I mean? You don’t do this, you don’t do that.” So he was even quite surprised at how good they look. So we know that there’s all these external factors. But I have to say Payman, I am at the mercy of judgement all the time. I think my biggest problem is that I still care what people think. I think, probably you suffer that.

Dr Payman Langr…: We do, really do. I mean, I’m sure you do, but when you look at this thing you do, when you’re talking to the phone on a bus-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, I know .

Dr Payman Langr…: I can’t. He talks-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Am I allowed to say that?

Dr Payman Langr…: Prav talks into a phone in his car. I can’t talk into a phone, on a bus in front of other people.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I mean, so many people text me going, “You take the bus. I thought you were an Uber Luxe girl.”

Dr Payman Langr…: You don’t care what anyone thinks really. Right? You don’t care what the people around you on the bus think.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No.

Dr Payman Langr…: You don’t care that much. It’s like, it’s a real balance between-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh, I think-

Dr Payman Langr…: Tell me when did you become like that? Were you always like that? Did you talk to the phone on a bus?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Hello. Didn’t we just say I was amazing at drama.

Dr Payman Langr…: Oh yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So the thing is that like for example, public speaking, being on stage, being in public has never scared me. I don’t have… That’s never… You know how you said for example, Dipesh is that he’s probably born with a bar in his hand, I was just born speaking on stages. I’ve never had that fear of being dramatic or being really animated. The interesting thing is because obviously a lot of journalists come to see me. When they write pieces about me, I really laugh. Like the recent one about in the Telegraph was like, “Dr. Rhona, she’s not your typical dentist. She comes into the waiting room, calling all her patients honeys, beautifuls, darlings.” I was like, “God, she pick up on that?” But people, I’m very animated and that’s something that I found is very easy, but I still care what other dentists think.

Dr Payman Langr…: Of course.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think that’s the problem. I think I have the validation from patients. I have the validation from celebrities, I have the validation from people, my friends, et cetera. But dentist, I still feel don’t admire the work that I’m doing and I think that I’ve always found that really hard. But as you said, I’ve used that as a tool to get better and I don’t know if you’ve noticed Payman, but in the last year I do think my clinical dentistry has got better. I have upped the game and sometimes some clinical dentists that I admire have actually DMd me being like, “This is a great case.”

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s a constant case of improvement. Isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: I mean, you’re pretty early on in your career but you’re going to be improving for the next 25 years as well, is one of those things.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Prav Solanki: Talk to me about influencers. There’s a lot of people out there who are dentists who won’t know what an influencer is or at least what’s involved in treating them as in discounting treatment, free treatment? Are they demanding? The difference between a influencer and a real celebrity and you treat both? Right.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Prav Solanki: I know your business partner, Adarsh has mentioned to me that he knows some people in high places in terms of from a celebrity perspective that everyday names that all of us would know. Just tell us what it’s like to treat those people and what’s involved.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So the thing is as well, whether you’re an influencer or not, I love treating all kinds of people, but the one influencer that really changed my world. I didn’t really know who an influencer was. A couple of years ago I got a DM from two, one’s called Beauty and the Blog and the other one’s called Melissa Wardrobe. They messaged going like, “I really like your work. It’s not fake. Can I come see? Do you do collaborations?” I was like, “Who are you and what is the collaboration?” I was like, “I have no idea what these terms are.” I was like, “Hey, I don’t do anything for free, but I guess you can come in for consultation and we can just chat about what you had in mind.” Now, Melissa came in before Michelle and Melissa documented this journey showing the eye tarot scanner and the whole experience, and honest to God, it was two years ago, I still see four patients a week from her, four patients a week.

Dr Prav Solanki: Still now?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Still now. And she only had about 80,000 followers, which isn’t big as you know in the influence world. But it opens up the door to an entirely new market. It was all Afro-Caribbeans okay. Because, they really trust her. That’s the key thing. Because later on I discovered I had influencers with 13,000,000 followers and I got about five patients overall from them. But Melissa, it’s because her audience trust her. She’s funny and she’s authentic. She actually put her teeth experience on her highlights. It was really funny because I also work part time in Westminster and we have a lot of politicians, a lot of politicians you guys would know. You know what they’re like, conservative party, labour party, whatever. They’d be sitting in the waiting room. They’d been going to this Westminster practise for ages.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So you go in there and you’d see like a really famous politician next to an influencer with a huge wig lashes up here, nails here, on her phone, right next to this really established influencer. Then I realised the power of influence as you said, I was like, “Gosh, this has brought in so many business.” That’s when business for me boomed on a way that I’d never imagined. So then Michelle came in after that and Michelle had a similar effect, but also they were just people that were just signing up for treatment plans. Again, it was mainly millennial patients and z generation. So it’s different. It’s different from the kinds of old school patients. I found that treating influences was great in the beginning. Now I think it has zero to no effect on my business if I’m honest with you because I’ve established that reputation.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So if another influence that comes to me, it’s really a big deal. So I’ve actually now changed the rules. I was treating most for a discounted fee, very few completely free, if only probably a handful. Now I’ve gone back to just reduced fee for kind of good video content and so forth. Because to be honest, I feel like every dentist is doing it now. As Payman said, it’s just lost its authenticity to me. So it was just like, “So what?”

Dr Prav Solanki: What’s your yardstick for measuring whether you should give an influencer discounted, free, 50%, 30% just from some kind of-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I mean, when Mel B came to me from the Spice Girls, I was not going to charge her. I was like, “Let’s begin on this.” I think that I basically just have a look at their profile, try to gauge what their following is and so forth. With Melissa, she’s going to upgrade a few things in her smile a couple of years on and I just think that because of the power of what she’s done so far, I know that it’s a vetted case, but I think-

Dr Payman Langr…: I think what you said before is really important, right? That the depth of the influence rather than the breadth of the influence.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: Isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: You’ve got, I don’t know, how many? 50,000 followers on Instagram, but that’s a number.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: Firstly that can be bought and all that. But the depth, if you’ve got… This is what I was saying about the authentic content.I’ve seen you go on Instagram and say, “I’m ill and I have to take some time off.” And all this sort of-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: For me, that deep connection to 3000 people is much more important than a shallow connection to 50,000. And so that’s what she has.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. I think again, that’s really interesting because a lot of my following was built through influencers talking about me, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure good engagement, for example. So, as I said to you, some of my posts would have had so many likes and then really reduced. When people look at it, they’re like, “That doesn’t make sense, because the following board.” Or whatever. But the problem was that when I had someone to come in that had 12,000,000 followers, I may have gained 3000 followers from that person. But it doesn’t necessarily mean engagement. Do you understand? It just means followers.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But the thing is that I always believe in honesty and vulnerability and I think that as dentists there’s this massive bravado thing that comes along where we can’t show how we’re really feeling and there’s this, we can’t be human. I just feel like there’s so… Let’s just start talking about it because I think the younger generation are going to suffer more than us. It has been proven already that social media is linked to anxiety, to depression and now it’s also linked to suicide. If we don’t start being more honest about the way that we’re feeling, it could be catastrophic. You’re looking at these reality TV programmes like Love Island where four people have now killed themselves.

Dr Payman Langr…: Four people?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. Because remember there was that Mike Guy, then there was that Sophie girl, then her boyfriend killed himself as well. Then there was Caroline Flack. That’s four people. It’s like we need to start taking note that people become so elevated, they enjoy that status of elevation and validation to only be torn back down again or to have enjoy people revelling in the fact that they’ve done something bad or they can’t sustain that level of success and they become depressed. I think that’s the same for dentistry because denfluencing, seeing as you know, Dental Hope called it is the thing now, isn’t it? People want to become denfluencers. Young people are messaging me on Instagram saying to me, “How do you become an Instagram dentist?” I’m like, “Is this even a thing now?” Because, that’s what people want to be.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. And there’s always been a KOL, but the KOLs used to be older, established people who’ve done real things with their careers and now it’s people who have influence. Right?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: But the interesting thing is as dentists, we want to follow other dentists. It’s one of those things.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I mean, another is-

Dr Payman Langr…: I wish I realised that earlier and Enlighten’s progression in the first eight years, enlightened, I wasn’t onto that fact.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. But I think the thing is, Payman. I have to disagree with you there because I think the thing that makes me different from other dentists is that I’ve always thought beyond dentistry.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. Sure.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Even with the movement of Pärla, the thing that makes it different is that the traction that I’ve gained is from non-dentists, right? This is from people in the PR media world. They’re like, “Whoa, this is it.” If it was just focused on dentists, I’m sorry, like there is a world outside of dentistry and there are people beyond dentists and this is a thing that you’ve got to realise, you have been promoting and doing bonding for how many years? But it didn’t become a buzzword until it became in the media through influencers and through celebrities. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Dr Payman Langr…: Of course.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But it’s been in the industry for years, we know that.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. When did you first think of Pärla? Was it you who thought of it or with Simon or Adarsh.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I think the thing is with Paula, it was a really lovely thing of great minds come together because so many people come to us saying, “Promote our products, promote our products.” Simon turned to me one day and he was like, “Rhona, why don’t we just come up with our own product?” I have to admit to you, I was so scared. I was like, “I’m not good enough. What is this is? This is out of my comfort zone? How do you even start? I can’t do this. I’m just not good enough for this.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Simon was great because he really encouraged me. Again, Simon as someone that’s perhaps misjudged in the industry because people think he’s invincible because he literally looks like a perfect human being. I mean, he is literally, he looks better than me, 99% of time. But the point is that Simon is one of the most emotional, authentic people that I know.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. He’s much softer than he looks.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: He’s so soft and do you know what? He is one of the men that have elevated me in so many ways and who I feel safe with. He is such a dedicated husband, an incredible father and as a friend, he makes me feel really safe in any male dominated events or anything like that. I’m really lucky that I’ve got to know him because I was perhaps a bit intimidated by him and people also feel again that he’s an invincible person and he’s really not. Because he said he’s actually a big softy, when you get to know him.

Dr Payman Langr…: We had him on here and he was telling us the anxiety he feels.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, exactly. And I speak to Simon about that. When Simon came to me and encouraged me to do this product with him, I’d actually spoken to Ads and Ads had been approached by other prominent people in the industry about doing products and Simon and Ads already knew each other. So I was like, “Listen, why didn’t the three of us have dinner?” There was actually someone fourth involved that didn’t want to be involved in it, in the end, which is fine. But when the three of us came together, we realised that we have three completely different skillsets that compliment each other.

Dr Prav Solanki: Tell us about the product. What is the product?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So Pärla with an umlaut on the a, because that’s the important part.

Dr Payman Langr…: Does that change the pronunciation?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, it’s actually a Swedish word and it means pearl. So we thought it linked to pearly white teeth, pearl of the ocean. For me, basically we knew that the plastic crisis was something that was getting worse and worse. And I think in the dental industry, it’s awful. I mean, I’ve even been having conversations with Invisalign being like, “You guys need to start recycling your plastic. Look how many Invisalign trays there are, being thrown away, every week, every day.” But then I decided to like research the toothpaste industry and I just feel like toothpaste is something that’s always going to be in plastic. So even if it is recyclable, you still have to cut the tube up and wash it up and people are lazy.

Dr Payman Langr…: There are metal tubes.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, but the things that… Some of the brands that are out there, they don’t have the fluoride in them. The recycability.

Dr Payman Langr…: Metal tubes.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: What for-

Dr Payman Langr…: The toothpaste.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: The toothpaste.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, it’s just the recyclability isn’t as easy as one thinks and we-

Dr Prav Solanki: Plastic cups.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, exactly. Plastic cups. Microplastics. Exactly. So don’t give me that. Have you seen the little tackles, choking?

Dr Prav Solanki: I have.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Okay. I’m not even going to.

Dr Payman Langr…: Listen though, I’m a bit bitter about Pärla, I’m not bitter. San is bitter.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Is he?

Dr Payman Langr…: Sanj wanted to do it about three years ago-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Well, you didn’t get on it, babes.

Dr Payman Langr…: You know why I didn’t get on it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Why?

Dr Payman Langr…: Because I was looking at it from a business perspective and what I had noticed when we went looking for the product, whether there’s loads of manufacturing, there’s loads of manufacturers of the product. It’s from the business perspective. I didn’t see in that barriers to entry for boutique Pärla-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, it’s been hard though Payman, but the thing is… Okay but that’s the whole thing. You know what? They said that’s an interesting point you raised because right now at the moment, me, Simon and Ads are not in a position we’re going to die. If a product doesn’t work, we have the mindset that we want this to work, we want to change the habit of a lifetime, we said this. But the fact is what you just said, it is starting in a way to make people think differently and to be part of a movement where you’re getting people to be like, “Hang on a second, I can do something different.” I mean, for God’s sakes, how many years ago doctors smoking in a room or smoking in front of pregnant people. It’s getting people to think differently. For me to be part of something like that, is way more important.

Dr Payman Langr…: I mean, the advice I can give you on it is what you’re basically saying, don’t build a product, build a brand and-

Dr Prav Solanki: Build the message.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. But that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah, I get that. You’ve been doing that well, for sure. Because you do you, I mean you have to sell hundreds of thousands of tubes of toothpaste to make money. It’s one of those difficult-

Dr Prav Solanki: Selling tubes, man-

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Tablets babes, tablets. Popa Pärla.

Dr Payman Langr…: How much is it? How much is a pot?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Prav knows the answer to this.

Dr Prav Solanki: 6.95, 6.95 for a pop. Or you could subscribe four months supply for 20 pounds.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly. Why didn’t you know that?

Dr Payman Langr…: No, I don’t know how much you’re charging for it.

Dr Prav Solanki: That’s what she’s charging.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. That’s what we’re charging. Okay. Should we move on from the tablets?

Dr Payman Langr…: No, it’s the best of thing to get something off the ground. It’s like having a-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. I mean, as I said to you, the thing is that the blood, graft, sweat and tears behind closed doors is unbelievable. The response from patients has been great, especially the beauty industry. People are really into it. A lot of my media clients, PR clients, they just love the innovation and the idea because they are looking for something different and that’s what I love.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. The thing I said is actually rubbish in the end. Yeah. Because listen, how many different brands of clothes are there and that there’s no barrier to entry to making this top. Yeah, but I’m buying the Ralph Lauren version of it, because I’m sold on that. You know what I mean?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, we all align ourselves with the brand and I think that… I mean, have you seen the Chelsea look?

Dr Payman Langr…: I have. I like that. That I do like.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: That I do like.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So it’s really interesting because people actually call me up. Yes, it is trademarked now, FYI. People actually call up now and they go, “Oh, I want the Chelsea look. Could you make sure I’m not booked in to discuss the Hollywood look.”

Dr Payman Langr…: I like that.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: And so it is an interesting thing because it’s a brand that you’re aligning yourself with. I realise that my style of dentistry was aligned with a tribe and I want to remove it away from the Dr. Rhona tribe because I know that I will have my own practise and I want the brand to build around that and not just around me.

Dr Prav Solanki: Let’s talk about Rhona, the 32 year old business woman.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I like that. Forbes 40 under 40, do you think we can make that happen guys? Pärla Pärla.

Dr Prav Solanki: Just talk to… Obviously Pärla comes along and all of a sudden you’re a business woman, right? You own a business, you own a brand, you’re developing it, marketing, which you’re excellent at. Then also you’re looking at going into practise ownership as well and all the challenges that come with that. Just talk to me about what’s spinning around in your head and-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Well, do you know what? I’m going to tell Payman, what conversation did we have about five years ago when I called you up?

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah. Remind everyone, you tell them.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, so I called Payman up and I saw… He doesn’t remember. I saw Payman-

Dr Prav Solanki: That was brilliant.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I saw Payman as a mentor because I met him on Rahul’s course a few years ago and I used to call him up for advice. One of the massive things that I love to do is that I like to ask people that I see as being successful what they do. That is something that I have been doing obsessively since I was about 16 years old. So, even things like Tony Robbins like listening to those cheesy talks, if you want to call them, those motivational, I don’t focus on negativity and failure. Started watching Miguel Stanley from really early on who now is someone that can proudly call my friend, Christian Coachman and when I saw Payman, I was obsessed with Enlighten, I couldn’t believe the vision he had. Honestly. I mean it, I was like… The branding, how do you do something like that?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I just thought, you know what, I’m going to call Payman for advice. At the time I was working in a practise in High Street, Kensington. Again, I was working in a really normal NHS practise in Kent. I CV-dropped everywhere in London. No one wants to give me a job. I was in part of BACD. My clinical skills weren’t so exceptional that someone in the private sector was going to give me a job. But I CV-dropped everywhere. High Street, Kensington gave me a job because they found my CV. My boss at the time was trying to sell Chelsea because the High Street Kensington practise was thriving. Then he said to me, I said, “Let me come and work at Chelsea.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: He thought, “Okay, but it’s not busy. You’re going to have to build up your list.” I call Payman, Payman goes, “You lost your mind. I mean, if you want to learn how to build a business, then you could, but why are you going to build up a business that’s not already yours? You could think about just buying a practise and doing it yourself. I think I was too scared at times to have the financial commitment of practise on my own. Now Chelsea is a thriving, fully booked practise that has grown. We have hygienists, therapists, specialists, et cetera.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I’m so happy that me and my practise manager, Josh had made that happen together. So I really feel proud of that journey that I’ve been through. I can’t believe the PAC practise is where it is, but I recognise that there is need for improvement. But what I would say is don’t obsess on the things that you don’t have, try to make the best of what you’ve already got. That really is the key to success and happiness in every part of your life. If I was obsessive, really worried about the fact that I wasn’t in someone else’s thriving practise already, but tried to make the best out of my situation, that’s how I got to where I was.

Dr Prav Solanki: So, have you build that practise?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, well I built the name and I’m pretty much the busiest dentist there and stay tuned for the next step of Chelsea Dental Clinic and the Chelsea look. But it’s definitely my baby and I just want to keep it growing and I definitely have so much vision for the future.

Dr Payman Langr…: You want to share some of that with us?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Well, I am going to be buying the practise, which is now taking off. Yeah. So practise owner, I have a vision for it becoming a digital practise. So I’m actually going on the DSD course. I have been invited as Christian’s guest in Miami and in Rio and I want to go and I want to have to give patients the experience. Right? Because we talked about experiences with patients and that’s the thing. I want them to come in and feel that from the moment they walked through the door, given an iPad or being shown something completely different but also with a twist of Soho house. So think of like Apple stormy Soho house. My sister is a set designer. She is unbelievable and I’m not just saying that because she’s my sister, she designed the Windows for her mez. She’s done Mr. Porter, the VNA. Think of something very kind of abstract and arty. I basically want her to help me redesign the practise.

Dr Prav Solanki: Wow.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: For anyone out there that wants a collaboration on the contracting, I’m open.

Dr Payman Langr…: Do you feel like you’ve raised the price of the practise and now you’re paying that price. Is that something that’s happened?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: You know what? I think my boss has been fair to be honest with you because-

Dr Payman Langr…: He is a good guy-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, he is a good guy and he’s recognised that I have brought up the practise and actually for what it is valued at now, he has not charged me that price because he knows that he could. Of course, he knows that I am… People would want to buy the practise with me in it. But I think it has been fair and to be honest credit should be given where it’s deserved and he’s a hard working man and he’s going to-

Dr Payman Langr…: Give him a shout out, girl.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Joseph Omidvaran, you are a great man.

Dr Payman Langr…: Lovely guy.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, he is lovely.

Dr Payman Langr…: Yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: We do a lot of Enlighten, don’t we Pay?

Dr Payman Langr…: You do.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. And so it’s been great and I’m really excited for that next step to be honest.

Dr Prav Solanki: What have been the challenges in going through the whole acquisition process in terms of funding and just getting everything, your house in order and challenges of what’s next? Any low moments?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. So do you know what? It’s been hard? I fear I actually fear for things in my personal life only on the level. Because I’m like, “I can’t imagine not working because I’ve so much to fund for myself.” Again, lots of people assume that, “Oh Rhona got bought a flat. Rhona’s daddy’s little girl.” I’m like, “Listen, my dad said to me, he’ll put me through education and nothing more.” So, I had to pay off my student loan. I bought my own flat-

Dr Payman Langr…: Even if your dad had bought a flat for you, you don’t have to apologise for that.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Totally. You know what? You guys are absolutely right, but I think the thing is people have made these massive-

Dr Payman Langr…: People make assumptions about you.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I’ve taken a lot of financial responsibility and you are right, I sometimes get anxiety because also Pärla is a huge responsibility as well. But at the end of the day I’m a little bit of a risk taker and sometimes I believe, you know what? You’ve just got to go in with blind faith a little bit sometimes and believe that your passion and drive will get you to where you’re going to be. That’s what happened with Chelsea. When I called you, I had no idea, I didn’t really have a plan. I had marketing ideas, but the passion, the love and the driver is what got me triumph-

Dr Payman Langr…: I’ve got a good buddy. His dad bought him a £12,000,000 house. He’s achieved a lot more than I have after his dad bought him that £12,000,000-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Totally.

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s neither here nor there, yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, totally. I think I can-

Dr Payman Langr…: But I get where you’re coming from.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I do think in British society as well, we get really obsessed with people coming from nothing and building themselves up, but I feel like if you’re born into money, if you’re born with that luxury, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have the right to be successful.

Dr Payman Langr…: No, it’s really hard. It’s really hard because you have to prove yourself.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly.

Dr Payman Langr…: No one thinks you did any of that.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly.

Dr Payman Langr…: This guy, I’m thinking one of my best friends from school, he is an amazing business man, one of the best I know.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, exactly.

Dr Payman Langr…: Is he going to worry about someone saying-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, exactly. But this is what I’m saying, don’t judge people on their circumstances. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say, judge people on how they do, how they treat people and what they’ve achieved. That’s it.

Dr Payman Langr…: What was your lowest moment, professionally?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I had a patient that sued me and it was a very unfair case. It didn’t go anywhere, obviously. I mean, indemnity, pay them off as they do.

Dr Payman Langr…: What happened?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: She basically was dissatisfied with an orthodontic result and that was pretty much it. She was obviously a lot better than when she started, but she still felt the need to complain. I thought I had a good relationship with her, but she just still was satisfied and it was a really low moment in my career. I lost a lot of sleepless nights over it, but I-

Dr Payman Langr…: Did you offer to give all the money back?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I just let my indemnity had dealt with it and they dealt with it really, really well. They recognised how massive-

Dr Payman Langr…: How nice to hear.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: They dealt with it really well to be honest, because they actually recognised how bad it was for my mental health. I lost sleepless nights. I started having thoughts in the middle of the night being like, “Maybe I’ll get a job at Google, maybe Google will employ me. That’d be quite cool.” Because I literally thought I was going to have to quit my job.

Dr Payman Langr…: Really?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It is scary.

Dr Payman Langr…: Did you take it personally?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh, so personally. The horrible thing was that when I sent the case to my mentors to even kind of orthodontic colleagues and stuff like that, they were like, “This is a great case to be honest. But I think that you’ve just got to learn from it and you’ve got to…”-

Dr Payman Langr…: What did you learn from it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Definitely, that pushed me to do my orthodontic diploma, which was life changing. So because I knew I was doing so much ortho, I wanted to know I was doing things properly. Getting an orthodontic therapist to help me with my load. Does that make sense? And recognising that notes have to be really pristine. So all those things that I’ve been doing and also developing a little bit of a sixth sense to patients that might be difficult, dysmorphic. Do you know what I mean? That kind of stuff. I know both of you can probably relate to, we’ve had those moments of being really in debt to patients and being so stressed about it and you almost do as you say, want to go be like, “Have all your money back.” You know what I mean? Just please… Because you do use and patients in cosmetic dentistry can get obsessive over what they look like.

Dr Payman Langr…: I noticed patients, when I was a “cosmetic dentist” I remember having patients who’d be happy on the way out, super happy, go home and the family member says something and one of my mentors Id Strength, I’ll put it out there, told me, “Look, sometimes you love people for their weaknesses, not their strengths.” At the time I was young and stupid. It didn’t compute to it. Why would you love someone for their weakness? But now I get it. He was saying, “Look, if someone’s mum’s got gaps, diastemas everywhere, they’ve fallen in love with their mum because of that weakness. If you put that right, suddenly, it’s not their mum anymore.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But again it’s-

Dr Payman Langr…: Doing a lot cosmetics, you must come across quite a lot of this-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah. The whole concept of the Chelsea look again I suppose relates to emotional dentistry because people wanted to keep her quirks. I have a colleague who is probably one of the best clinicians I’ve ever worked with. Unbelievable hands, happily would give her my mouth to work on in every aspect. He is amazing at root canal veneers, you name it, he is fantastic. But the thing is that sometimes when patients come in, because we collaborate on a few cases together, whether he’s doing some of the work. He’ll be like, “Yeah, you should close your gap.” The patient’s like, “No, but I want to keep my gap. Can’t I have the veneers but keep my cup.” And he’s like, “No, no. But why would you want to keep a gap?” I’m like kicking him and I’m like-

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s that EQ piece, isn’t it?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But I said to him, an influencer I’m treating this afternoon basically again with him, I said to him, “We could do a little bit of gum contouring to make the laterals the same.” He goes, “No, but I like my uneven gums. I want this two to be shorter. He wanted the veneers to be like his own teeth basically. And you know what, some dentists again, “Oh, you didn’t fix the gum margin or you left the canine to pointy.” But I’m like, “This is bespoke to the patient and they love coming to me because I listen to them.” They don’t go, “Oh no, in cosmetic dentistry, we want everything to be perfect.” I’m like, “Okay, great. You love your gap? We’ll keep the gap. Okay, you love your uneven naturals, we can keep it.”

Dr Payman Langr…: Speaking up on the signals, Prav talks about. He sits in at dentist’s-

Dr Prav Solanki: All sorts of-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: And the number of dentists who don’t pick up on signals.

Dr Prav Solanki: They miss it. So someone comes in and talks about their teeth. In reality, they’re scared.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, exactly.

Dr Prav Solanki: They’re nervous, they’re anxious.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I say that to them. I say to them, “You’ve had really bad experiences, haven’t you?” I’ll say it to them.

Dr Payman Langr…: He’s saying there are a number who don’t pick it up.

Dr Prav Solanki: Don’t pick it up.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, but this is what I’m saying to you. I’ll say it and then the patient immediately when they recognise that you’ve said that to them, they go, “Yeah, I’ve had bad experiences.” Do you know what I mean? Because, they don’t… Lots of them won’t admit it. They won’t tell you that. Some of them. That’s the whole thing, I think, that’s kind of got me to where I am. It’s just having that, as you said, emotional awareness and understanding what patients are going through.

Dr Prav Solanki: Who’s this super duper dentist?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, he’s amazing. His name is Christian Pentato, I don’t know if you’ve seen him on my Instagram.

Dr Prav Solanki: No.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: He is one of the most gifted clinicians. He does a lot of my crown lengthening cases beforehand. Obsessive detail. I’ve never met anyone like it and honestly have a look. Have a look at his work. Yeah. Honestly, he’s wonderful. He’s Spanish. So he’s Spanish-qualified but obsessive detail. It’s so funny because we learn off of each other because he has made me more particular about the work that I’m doing. He comes and shadows me to do the emotional side. He even recognises things like saying to patients, tapping in my shoulder during treatment going, “Are you okay there?” Things like that. So he started developing things like that. So we learned from each other. I think that’s the best way to be, stop hating and start learning. We’ve all got something to give.

Dr Prav Solanki: Rhona outside of dentistry and business. That was all about her.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Outside dentistry and business. Okay. So outside of dentistry, I love to party, but I am a sober partier, so I’m a teetotal. People find that really weird because they’re like, “You went to Burning Man and you didn’t drink?

Dr Payman Langr…: Only crack up.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: No, shut up, you. You know what, I love music. So for me again, what did I say to you at the beginning of this? Energy. So if people are having a good time around me, I thrive off it. Do you see what I mean? I thrive off energy. So I love-

Dr Payman Langr…: Walk us through Burning Man, quickly. Go on.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Okay.

Dr Payman Langr…: Because it’s one of those things I’ve always wanted-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh, Pay. Can we do the next Enlighten-

Dr Payman Langr…: Party.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Exactly-

Dr Payman Langr…: George, our sales manager. She’s been twice in a row and it does-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: Tell us.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It’s absolutely incredible. I absolutely loved it because for me, I was going through a really tough year, emotionally. I’m somebody that puts a lot of pressure on myself because I hadn’t achieved the things that I wanted to achieve at the age of 31 and I’d gone through pretty bad year of breakup and that sort of thing. So I decided to just travel and every opportunity I got I was just travelling, travelling, travelling, and then-

Dr Payman Langr…: Running away somehow.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, people say running away, but in a way-

Dr Payman Langr…: I’m not judging.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, no, but I mean, run, run fast. In a way, I just wanted to kind of spend a little bit of time alone and I think I find it hard to spend time alone while I was surrounded by people, if that makes sense. So anyways, about Burning Man. I’d initially booked with a friend who we turn out not to be friends but Burning Man. So by the time I got to burning man, I had stayed in a camp that was recommended by someone and it was really scary. I had to take the Burner Express from Reno Airport. No. So I flew to Seattle then to Reno, then from Reno Airport, took the Burner Express for six hours into Burning Man. No phone, no money-

Dr Prav Solanki: The bicycle.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Had to basically learn how to ride a bike again. They say that you never forget. You definitely do. Basically when I got there, it was unbelievable because when you take money and phones away from people it’s a completely different-

Dr Payman Langr…: Changes the game.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, changes the game and I loved it. I actually had anxiety turning my phone back on because I was completely cut off from normality in the real world. And the self reliance thing that people talk about is so cliche. What I found a bit annoying is the people got very emotional. We’re like, “This is the most life changing thing.” I’m like, “Listen, I work at refugee camps. That is something to get emotional about. This is a lot of privileged people in a desert. Do you know what I mean? Having a great time.” Some are not, some are not. And I totally respect what you’re doing out there. But for me it was more of a personal thing. Things like you said, riding around on your own. Again if you’re cycling and you need water because you run out of water, you’ve got to talk to people to get water on your stop off points and you have to form a connection. Because now we’re just so used to the, “I’ll order an Uber, I’ll order Deliveroo.” We’ve created a world that there’s isolation whereas that you can’t do that.

Dr Prav Solanki: I don’t know, what is Burning Man.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Hilarious.

Dr Payman Langr…: You don’t know?

Dr Prav Solanki: No.

Dr Payman Langr…: Oh dear.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Burning man basically is a festival in the Nevada desert and it was made many, many years ago. Started out very small. They have incredible music there but they also have workshops there. So TED talks, yoga-

Dr Payman Langr…: Art.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Art, unbelievable art. Yeah. It’s unbelievable. One day I was cycling my own and then I met this guy that had been to Burning Man 10 years in a row and he decided to show me through all this artwork. I ended up in the deepest dark, the stack depths of the plier as they call it. Then I got hungry. Then there was a naked man cycling and he was like, “Do you guys want some ice cream?” I was like, “I’m lactose intolerant and I’m really hungry.”

Dr Payman Langr…: You’re not allowed to buy anything.

Dr Prav Solanki: You’re not?

Dr Payman Langr…: There’s no money. Money is not allowed.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But he turned around to me, wait for it. Then he goes, “Don’t worry, we’ve got some vegan ice cream here.” I’m like, “Early in the 21st century, this naked man giving me vegan ice cream.” So basically the thing is… The funniest thing was in my camp there were six dentists.

Dr Payman Langr…: No way.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So there I was, showering with Jose Navarro, do you know him?

Dr Payman Langr…: No way.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: No way.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: And his wife Carmen and it was like, “Hi guys.” That was the first time I met them, at Burning Man. So it was funny because they were quite a few dentists there.

Dr Payman Langr…: Tell us about the refugee work.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: The refugee work basically is something that’s very close to my heart and I know Pay you relate to me being of Middle Eastern heritage. I sometimes feel that I’m clouded in the world that I live in. I’ve become extremely critical of everything that I do, the way that I look, my dentistry, what I’ve achieved, what I’m wearing, everything now, I put so much pressure on. And sometimes my best friend Bianca was a psychologist and she said to me, “You’ve got to take yourself out of your situation sometimes and realise how lucky you are.” I thought, “You know what, she’s right.” Then I watched a documentary called The Human Flow, which I really recommend by Ai Weiwei.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It’s really the most beautiful documentary that I’ve ever seen. He goes round all the refugee camps all over the world and he basically focused on Lesvos, in Greece and showed the destruction and the horrible, horrible environment that people are living in. I basically didn’t really understand much about refugees. I didn’t understand because right, it becomes a statistic on the news, just background noise and you’re like, “Whatever.” Obviously being of a certain heritage, I was like, “I want to connect with people and I want to help and I want to give my skill that’s beyond making people look good.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So I contacted Health-Point Foundation, I went out there with Dr. Khali who is amazing. You guys should definitely have Ron. She has the biggest personality ever. She is so funny. She introduced TPs to me cleaning my eyebrows, life-changing. Basically Khali and I went out there and when you go there and you meet these people and you realise that they are normal people like you and I that have been forced into situations. Some of them are lawyers and doctors and things like that and they have their lives ripped away from them, their families bombed in front of them.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Then you were like, “This is unbelievable.” Khali was trying to understand from one of the refugees, she was speaking to him in Kurdish and she was like, “Tell me which tooth hurts.” He was pointing at one tooth. She was pointing at another and she goes, “Show me in the mirror.” She showed him the mirror, he stared at it for three minutes and she was like, “Are you okay?” He said, “I haven’t seen my reflection for eight months.” He hadn’t even looked in a mirror. Does that make sense? Because, he can’t face what he sees.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: You hear stories like that or you meet a little girl that doesn’t know her whole family is gone. To be able to provide a little bit of pain relief, I’ve never had tooth ache, thankfully. But if you’re somebody that’s ever suffered from wisdom tooth pain or-

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s the worst.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: It’s the worst. People say it’s the worst.

Dr Prav Solanki: I’ve had tooth ache.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But imagine being in those sordid conditions and then for you to just give them anaesthetic and relieve them. It’s so easy, isn’t it? I think that it really brings you back down to earth and it makes you realise. And at times in that refugee camp, I felt happier than I am here. Because, the volunteers that you connect with-

Dr Payman Langr…: The stories, I found the stories… You’ve got Lebanese heritage, obviously.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, of course.

Dr Payman Langr…: I go to Lebanon a lot because of my wife and the country’s population doubled with refugees.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Payman Langr…: The stories, as you said, father’s a doctor, the mother’s a lawyer, the kid is illiterate at 14 because they’ve been bombed out of their lives-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: So depressing.

Dr Payman Langr…: It’s so many terrible-

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Oh my God. And the children were just beautiful.

Dr Payman Langr…: How long at a time, did you go there?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I went for a week and then basically I threw a big charity event which raised-

Dr Payman Langr…: I remember, yeah.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I invited Juliard he didn’t come. We raised a lot of money and the money that we raised allowed them to build another chair and build basically another surgery. But from that they made me an ambassador of the charity, because they wanted me to help spread awareness. Then I went back again with Dr. Nima, Dr. Ansar.

Dr Payman Langr…: Did you have a lot of dentists contacting you saying, “I want to do a bit of charity.”

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah, I think so. But a lot of… Not enough to be honest. I’d love that to be spread more because it’s-

Dr Payman Langr…: That’s the message. I think a lot of people would give a week.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: 100% but a lot of people are actually afraid because they feel like they’re going into almost a war zone type thing. They’re like, “I have a family and I can’t put my kids at risk.” I totally understand that. But Greece is a very safe place and actually when you go there, you’re going into the Greek town in the evenings and you’re not staying in the camp. You’re literally going in doing your work and going home. But I’d definitely love more awareness on that. I really think that for anybody that suffers even, with this whole world that we’re living in now, they can go out there and they feel that they can really do something that’s going to make a difference, that they should definitely do that.

Dr Prav Solanki: One last question and we spoke about earlier, so you mentioned biological clock, you spoke about breakup very, very quickly. Single? With someone? Just relationship summary.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Are people are inquiring because I get this asked a lot, it’s hilarious. I’ve actually got a partner, he does not own social media so people get very shocked about that. But it compliments me very well. He is really great, supports everything that I do. Totally non-involved in the industry. I was one for really… I love a narcissist and I realised that I really kind of was attracted to alpha males, but actually I found more and more that didn’t work for me because being an alpha female that necessarily wasn’t great and some guys didn’t like the whole alpha female thing at all. So yeah. So he’s completely unrelated. But yeah, we’ve been together for about a year.

Dr Prav Solanki: Dentist? Non-dentist?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Non-dentist.

Dr Prav Solanki: Non-dentist.

Dr Payman Langr…: What about the deathbed question?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Deathbed?

Dr Payman Langr…: Too young?

Dr Prav Solanki: Too young, man.

Dr Payman Langr…: What do you want your legacy to be?

Dr Rhona Eskand…: I really don’t even know how to answer that. Such a question.

Dr Payman Langr…: Too young.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Yeah.

Dr Prav Solanki: Still a baby, man.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: But for now, as I said to you, it’s just knowing that I’ve made a difference to the way that people think. I think that goes beyond dentistry, which is why I’m so passionate about Pärla Because if I could be known for somebody that changed a habit that was hazardous to the environment, that’s really good for me, which I think is fair enough. Right?

Dr Payman Langr…: Been absolutely lovely, having you.

Dr Prav Solanki: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Thank you.

Dr Payman Langr…: Thank you so much.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Thanks guys.

Dr Prav Solanki: Thank you.

Dr Rhona Eskand…: Bye.

Outro Voice: 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.

Dr Prav Solanki: Thanks for listening, guys. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Make sure you tune in for future episodes. Hit subscribe in iTunes or Google Play or whatever platform it is. We really, really appreciate it if you would-

Dr Payman Langr…: Give us a six star rating.

Dr Prav Solanki: Six star rating. That’s what I always leave my Uber driver.

Dr Payman Langr…: Thanks a lot guys.

Dr Prav Solanki: Bye.