Month: April 2023

It was like end of December coming back. We were just shopping for for the New Year’s Eve and coming back from the city on the Boulevard Avenue Kennedy, which is the main road to the centre. And I look at the left and I see a very nice restaurant. The name was The Last Supper, and I was with a friend and I said, Wow, look at that. It looks so fancy. Look at the lights. And people sit there in the lounge and drink champagne. Let’s go. Let’s go and have some champagne. And really, she said, come on, we have to go home to to prepare for tomorrow. And said, No, no, no, Let’s let’s go for a champagne. So and we went there and sit in this lounge, which was super modern. I think the architect, the interior designer was a designing opium in Barcelona or something like that. So really, really fancy. I look at there and I see the menu of the restaurant say, Well, what do you think if you go eat here for tonight because maybe tomorrow we don’t have a big, big party. So let’s go. It’s the 30th of December. Let’s celebrate the year and said, okay, let’s go have a menu. And sitting there drinking some champagne, eating fantastic food, seeing the people there, I told her, you know what? In this place here, I would really like to have a clinic. Like two, three weeks later, we go there and I sit at the first floor. It was something to rent. And in February I just signed a contract and it was in the same building. And I can tell you many things in my life happened. Like something from above came. You just have to wish.

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

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Violetta Klaus onto the podcast. Violeta I see as a social butterfly on the international lecture circuit who she absolutely knows. Everybody, When I see you, Violeta, you’re talking talking with all of the big guns and the fully connected in, you know, this podcast, we tend to start with a whole life story, but I’d like to start there. Violeta is also principal of the Violife Smile Design. Amazing practice in Luxembourg and The View Lifestyle brand, which I’d love to get into if you let, let’s welcome you. And are you a social butterfly in Luxembourg as well? Are you are you sort of part of the social scene in in touch with everyone or is it just in dentistry that you’re like that?

So first of all. Hi. Hi everybody. I’m really honoured to be here. I don’t know if in Luxembourg it’s starting now after 13 years maybe to get more known in the Social Network, but I think I can connect very fast. It’s a magnetic thing. So you attract people which are alike and sometimes same visions. And this is why everywhere I go I find people which I can talk to and get inspired and bring inspiration, of course, as well. What can I say? It’s just my nature.

Do you sort of take it back to something in your childhood or in your youth? Where did you talk to Loads of people And, you know, you couldn’t. You couldn’t. You couldn’t read the room.

Oh, no, no, no. As as a teenager, I was really very shy. Really? Yeah. Coming. I grew up in Romania, so I came from a little city, had a few friends. I was coming to Bucharest, which is the capital of Romania with 14, and I felt like, Oh my God, you’re in the big city. It’s terrifying. Everybody was, yeah, really very social, very everywhere. Dance parties. I was not really allowed to go out. So probably at one point I started to do it on my own as I came to Germany with 24 and in Luxembourg, I really started to enjoy that because here is a multicultural, multinational, very small country, a lot of languages, a lot of people from everywhere. And it’s really fascinating to communicate.

When did you know you were going to move from Romania?

Well, actually, I had an aunt in California. And my dream and my plan, the plan of my family was to go there when I finished dental school or when I finished university. But what happened was that I met a guy from Germany, so never wanted to go to Germany, never wanted to to speak German, but it happened. So we married 88 and 89. The first child came. Then I came to Germany. I was working there in a family practice.

And which town in Germany were you.

In three years? Three years is at the border to Luxembourg. So we had a lot of connection with Luxembourg. And I found this part of Europe very, very interesting. So after 20 years of dentistry in Germany, I decided to move to Luxembourg. This was 2009 and I never regretted that. Mm.

So when you look back as a child in Romania, your outlook was you were going to do dentistry in Romania and move. Did you know that you wanted to do that from the beginning? We’ve got loads of Romanians working in our company and massive asset they are to us too. But was it that time in the sort of political era that you thought you were going to move out or not?

Well, from one point moving out, it was just going with my whole family to to America. This was like, oh, that was the original. Yes. The three sisters, that that means my mum and her sisters. One sister was there. She moved in 72. The other one moved in 80. And the third sister. That means my mother, she just waited for me to finish school and to go there. The second part of the decision. So Dental school. It was not from the beginning, but it has a very interesting story because I was like nine years old. I was in primary school and I had an accident. So a colleague hunted me in the break and I felt on my central incisor and well, dentistry in Romania in the in the 80 seconds was super bad. I got a root canal very early. I lost my central incisor very early, and I spent a lot of time in the university for braces for really fixing my problem. And that time my stepmother, she was a dentist, my mother was a general. How do you say a family doctor? And I was very attracted to dentistry and I was there like days and days and years. I was in treatment. I was smelling that that smell of dentistry. And I hated that. I was really frightened and at that time I suffered a lot because losing a central incisor in your teenage time was traumatising.

And my biggest wish and vision was to develop a kind of dentistry which is focussed on aesthetics, on painless dentistry and dentistry, where you feel, where patient feel good and safe and to take care of. So this was the story behind dentistry. Of course, the idea of doing dentistry somewhere else was clear because at that time in the communist Romania, there was not a big chance to do aesthetic dentistry or to specialise in any way or in a in a short time. And this is why it happened to come to Germany. And I started directly, like 1991. I came to I started to work as a dentist and I started directly to make a lot of continuous education regarding veneers, adhesive dentistry, minimally invasive dentistry. And I think that until 97, I did many, many courses. I wanted to level up and to be better. Let’s say in Romania, dentistry was very good. We we learned diagnosis and we had practical exercises. So we started to work on patients in the sixth semester. But I felt that I’m missing the modern digital dentistry, the digital dentistry and everything. What would help me as well? Let’s say from my point of view, I wanted to find a solution and I found it for me and I found it for my patients as well.

And so at what point in that journey did you go from, say, working for other people to say, I want to run my own practice?

As I came to Germany. My husband’s father was the second generation of dentists and they already had a family practice. And a very funny thing is that his brother was studying in Romania as well. You know, both are Germans, but it was for them impossible to study in Germany because they didn’t have a very good note at the Abbey. How do you say when you finalised a school you need to be levelled to dentistry when you are very good in in in the last exams. So they found Romania as a very good way to study dentistry and they had to learn both of them Romanian, which was very hard. And so we met. That means that my future husband, his brother and his girlfriend were dentists. So as I came to Trier, it was like a family clinic with three chairs. It was five dentists. And for me it was very clear that we will not work together. And my husband opened a clinic in 1990. I came in 91. We already have had our first child. It was my son. And this first clinic was very, very small. It was 84 square metre and only two chairs, a little waiting room. And this was like the idea of his father that, well, she will come to Germany and she will just take care of kids cooking for you, doing like home.

You can’t imagine now seeing me. Well, and of course, 91 came and in 92, my second child came. It was the daughter. After three months of staying with her, I restarted work and we developed very, very fast. Three years later, we expanded the clinic from 84m² to 240 square metre. That means five treatment rooms and it went very well. So at the end I was never employed. I started as a self-employed with my husband in the clinic, but definitely both of us are very different, very different characters, personalities and it was a very difficult way to lead a team because if you do not have the same vision and the same way of thinking about dentistry, this leads to many issues. So patients said, Oh, we want to go to him because he’s just very, very conservative and he is able to compromise. I was a little bit more strict in my treatment planning and in discussing with them about long term solutions and most of them full mouth rehabilitations if was needed. That’s why at one point I decided I want to go my way and I left him with a clinic in Trier and I moved to 2009 in Luxembourg.

Wow, what a story. Wow.

That was the first going out of the country.

It’s the third country to be a dentist with.

How does it feel turning up in a country to be a dentist when you don’t speak the language? Or did you speak German?

Well, I learned German as I was six. I think my mother had a private teacher for me and I really hated the language that was so hard for me. I always had headaches or I didn’t feel well as the teacher had to come. Then I had it in the primary school like four years probably. My brain saved a few information from that language so that as I came to Germany and the family was German, and not only the family, but everything. I came from Romania and I found a new kind of living and a new mentality which I had to adapt to. And it was not easy, but I did. And I started to work as a dentist. And I felt that if I do not speak the language perfectly, I will have really problems to to do a consultation and a treatment options discussion with the patient. So I used the time being with the kids, with the babies at home. I used the time to learn German, not from a course. I learned it from television, reading books, reading magazines, watching movies so very fast. I can say I’m a very fast learner and I could speak German almost without flaw, and this was very good for me. So definitely the best decision to communicate is the language. The best tool to communicate is the language. So this was important for me. But coming down to Luxembourg, imagine that it was not only German and English.

I could speak Romanian because we have 2000 Romanians in Luxembourg and my first patients were British, so this was a different kind of treatment, I may say very challenging because. I noticed. Oh, they are totally different than the Germans, so they don’t look at me and wait that I say something and they are very communicative. And they were like, Oh, come on, Violetta, stop apologising. Apologising that my headpiece is not really correct. And if I’m okay, just do it. Yeah, you’re doing fine. You’re doing great. And this motivated me a lot. And at one point we were speaking four languages in the in the clinic because then the French people came and of course, they tried to speak English, but, well, I had to use a few words of French just to make them feel comfortable. And even Italians, I tried to speak Italian. You don’t need to be perfect, but I noticed that people were so happy just to hear you say something in another language in their mother tongue. And I was really tired in the evening switching languages because my team was combined English, German, our software was German. And so now, after 13, 14 years, we have a team where we speak 11 languages. Wow. And this is something outstanding. I think the biggest challenge in communication team development and yes, even patient communication or written patient communication in three languages is really challenging. But I love it.

It. These practices were your practice, the way it looks now. And I encourage anyone to go and have a look at how it looks because it looks amazing. Did it look like that from the beginning, or is that something that you did recently?

No, it’s like 2009. What we did recently, we just bought three new chairs. So this month we got three aksana from from Sirona, which are super beautiful and we just painted the walls now in another colour, this is everything but all the furniture. And the planning was like this from the beginning.

I mean, it’s such a beautiful practice. And now, now that you’re telling me you did that in 2009 when hardly anyone was doing anything cool in dentistry? Well, over here it might have been different in Luxembourg, but you’ve got like a I mean, another way of looking at things. It’s clear. I mean, me and Prav know how difficult it is to do good content. So look at your page and it’s just full of great content. And there must be like, what a team of people, you know, filming the whole time or how do you manage that? Are you the creative lead on that or is there someone else who’s directing all of that?

Yes, I have two accounts. What in on Instagram. One is Doctor Violetta account. This is my personal brand. Yeah. And just for your life, small design, which is our clinic, our team and I have two content creators and digital designers who are preparing the posts. But the videos which we are doing, it’s iPhone. So really iPhone really. And sometimes we have somebody to film like my my. Some movies are done by a film director from Hamburg, which is a friend of mine and the photos we the patient cases and the photos, they are done in our photo studio. My team is really trained to do perfect photos, the smiles and I like to show our cases. I do not like to show any any stock photos and something which doesn’t belong to us. And yeah, we love doing photos. We love doing videos. Sometimes just when we are in the mood in the clinic, we take our iPhone and we just. Yeah, take some.

When did you switch on to social media? Was it like, you know, because you’re like like me, you’re not digitally native, you know, you didn’t grow up with it. Do you remember a point when you realised that’s where I’m, I’m going to focus on that? When was that? Who influenced you?

Well, UK.

Really.

Uk dentist. Well, let’s say I was a little bit careful with that because as I came to Luxembourg in 2009, we are not even allowed to have a website which was looking somehow different and it was totally different than everywhere, even in Germany. And I started creating a website with, of course, a company and I was invited by our like your GDC person. So like the college medical, because they were really all the colleagues were really angry that I am doing marketing. The website was just about informing patient about our working hours, about our treatments and the benefits of the treatments. And we had like two, three years, a little bit of discussions here, but they stopped mocking me and it was a time I don’t remember now exactly. When I met Chris Barrow, it was Internet, it was YouTube. It was I was blown away seeing so many things about and watching his videos about marketing, about social media, about treatment, coordination and everything was was happening in the UK. I felt it’s totally different than Germany and it’s absolutely important and necessary at a certain level, of course. But I was starting doing coaching with Chris Barrow and with Laura Horton, so I am very influenced by the UK dentistry and I visited management courses in London. I was always in touch with, with London, with UK and as well learning a lot about entrepreneurship, about leading a clinic being, yes, a owner. And a principal dentist and trying to get associates and to teach them these kind of treating patients the new patient journey and all all I developed was based on my knowledge but as well a lot, which I’ve learned from Chris Barrow and Laura Horton.

Amazing. I’ve got a couple of questions for you, Violeta, and one of them comes through. We seem to have skipped a huge amount of detail from leaving Germany to landing in Luxembourg and then creating this super clinic as somebody who. Took that journey solo and created what you created, let alone, you know, doing it with a business partner or a team of people. You’ve done this by yourself. Just talk me through the steps of that process. What you went through the ups and there must have been some downs as well. What what were the really tough times during that journey? And were there ever any moments where you thought, What have I done?

Well, it’s a very, very good point because this is let’s say at the moment in my life when I knew I have a tough decision and I didn’t imagine it will be like that in three years. I already was working with patients from Luxembourg, patients who were working in Luxembourg, you know, the Frontaliers, which were earning a lot of money in Luxembourg, living in Germany, because it was more interesting and definitely cheaper. And I thought, Wow, I have these patients. They’re coming from Luxembourg here to to Germany. They are my patients. I’ll go there. They work all there in the banks and all the financial centre and it would be easier for them to come to me like in their break or so to have a cleaning or to have the work done instead of driving through the rush hour to Trier at at six, 630 in the evening, coming for a cleaning and sometimes being late. And my team was waiting, waiting, waiting. Yeah. The Luxembourgish guys are coming. They are in you know, and they have a traffic jam and. In my mind. I said, okay, I will search something, but it has to be in a place where I like. And it was very, very interesting because we were shopping in Luxembourg. I’m coming to Luxembourg City. It’s a beautiful city. You can go out, you can eat. There is a really fancy style. And it was like end of December coming back. We were just shopping for for the New Year’s Eve and coming back from the city on the Boulevard Avenue Kennedy, which is the main road to the centre.

And I look at the left and I see a very nice restaurant. The name was The Last Supper, and I was with a friend and I said, Wow, look at that. It looks so fancy. Look at the lights. And people sit there in the lounge and drink champagne. Let’s go. Let’s go and have some champagne. And really, she said, come on, we have to go home to to prepare for tomorrow. And said, No, no, no, Let’s let’s go for a champagne. And we went there and sit in this lounge, which was super modern. I think the architect, the interior designer, was a designing opium in Barcelona or something like that. So really, really fancy. I look at there and I see the menu of the restaurant say, Well, what do you think if you go eat here for tonight because maybe tomorrow we don’t have a big, big party. So let’s go. It’s the 30th of December. Let’s celebrate the year and said, okay, let’s go have a menu. And sitting there drinking some champagne, eating fantastic food, seeing the people there, I told her, you know what? In this place here, I would really like to have a clinic. And can you imagine that in January, like 2 or 3 weeks later, we go there and I sit at the first floor. It was something to rent. And in February I just signed a contract and it was in the same building. And I can tell you many things in my life happened. Like something from above came.

You just have to wish and it’s coming. And of course, you ask me about the difficult things. And that was the point I wanted to have that I went there, I saw this office, I saw the The view and I said, this will be my clinic. And of course, I was very new in Luxembourg. I was alone, as you say, and I didn’t know many, many things which are regulations or problems with the as a tenant building things. So that means that we just starting construction and we noticed there was no air conditioned and no heating in there so that at one point like 50 K additionally investment to build the air conditioned and then my not the landlord, I was a sub tenant and so he was bankrupt and he wanted from me 160 K because he said, well I built here everything and now you have to pay to me if you want to be there. And it was a lawyers and everything. What you cannot imagine what you go through without planning. And all my business plans and calculations were really in the first three months was disaster. And of course these patients who were supposed to come because they were working in Luxembourg could come to have the cleanings, have something done there, said, well you know, I rather be in traffic jam, but the cleaning in three years is like €20 cheaper. Okay so I couldn’t have the same price as in Germany. You can imagine the wages in Luxembourg are way higher. The rent and everything was way higher.

I had a new investment and my first two years in Luxembourg I stopped doing full mouth restorations once per month and I started with fillings. I was doing composite restorations like 80% of my time and it was super hard in the first two years to get to the level I had in three years. That means from the utilisation and the treatments, which really were good for the revenue. Yeah. And as well satisfying. This was a hard, hard part. And the second, let’s say the hardest part was the team building, because you needed to have somebody to understand English perfectly. I brought a dental assistants from Germany. They were as well now in traffic jam the other side, so they had to travel to to Luxembourg. They were one hour in a bus or in their car. They didn’t find a parking. They were tired. They wanted to go home. They didn’t want to have a break because otherwise they would be there 12 hours. And at 6:00 patient came. So now I would like to have a filling. And my assistant said, No, I’m sorry, but I have to go home, you know? And I was happy that was the first patient to do something in the day. So yeah. And yes, then teaching them the English way, the all the English content and how to talk to patients, which were totally different than in Germany. Team building was the hardest and it’s still the hardest part when you have a clinic with so many languages and yes, a high standard of dentistry as well.

Violetta As a as a leader, you know, somebody who’s leading your practice and your team having been through it, the difficulties and leading your team right now, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone, a prospective practice owner in terms of how to build a team or leadership advice? What would be your top three bits of advice? Managing people, Handling people.

Well, yeah, that’s the most important. I take first communication and of course for me it’s the language, but the language is not the most important. The most important is the attitude. If they do not understand my vision and they do not understand what we are doing there, they are not able to be in the team to find who is a team player. Sometimes it takes longer, but as a owner of a clinic you need to understand each person, the associate or the treatment coordinator or the. Untold numbers, but most of all the receptionist because they translate you to the patient and you can be the best in the room and can explain everything so they can really crash it and have a lot of time to discuss and to ask what they really want and have a test time. When you see maybe you you hire them to be a treatment coordinator, but at the end you see, well, they are a better dental assistant, dental nurse or maybe better in the reception. And then it’s better to ask if they are okay to change. And if they are not okay to change, they need to go.

What kind of a boss are you? Are you a strict boss?

I’m a very strict boss, yes. My people. So I have my my team. I have really people who who were in my team who left and came back. This is a good point. And they came back and they said, we know what we have here. You are really a bitch. So but you are one with a heart. So this is a bit different. They know that I really am very strict and consequent because I want a treatment to be smooth for the patient. I want them to learn. I want them to ask me when they need something. But when we are in the treatment room and they are doing the same mistake three, 4 or 5 times and I need to repeat that. And they know I’m not kind.

You say, because you want the best for the patient, but that could be delivered in a strict way or it could be delivered in a quite the opposite, right? I mean, you know what I mean. I want the best for my patient. I’m not a strict dentist at all. Quite the opposite. We all want.

That. We all want the best.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I’m saying is being being a strict boss is kind of. It’s in you somehow. Like, it’s not in me at all. Yeah, but. But it is. It’s in some people. Prav is a bit of a strict but Prav.

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe the word strict is has a different meaning.

Right now for me, strict is working with a protocol and checklists. This is a consequence. So having everything we need for the treatment, having the checklist and I really wanted to be prepared like that in the clinic is organised like that, but that doesn’t mean that they get.

Like.

We get a big discussion in front of the patient, but they feel exactly when something is missing or is not prepared.

You let them know properly. They know that I’m not.

Happy and they change it. If they don’t change it a few times, then I have to reconsider.

I think. I think when you said that if they and I kind of agree with what you said there in any any in any sort of role. Right. If they make the same mistake five, six, seven times, then you’re not kind. Yeah. And I think that comes to me it sounds like you’re you’re a take no shit kind of boss, right? That you have your thresholds and your limits. They’ve made the same mistake again, again and again. And enough is enough now, right?

Exactly.

When it gets to that point, Violeta and you, for me, I kind of make that decision instantly, right? So I’ve hired someone and there’s, there’s, there’s almost like that threshold. I can’t, I can’t put it into words, but that moment in time and it is literally a moment, I don’t want that person to work for me again. Okay. I know they’re out. Everyone has that. Do you. Do you have that? Do you have that? And then what’s what’s your when that happens, What’s your process? How long do you leave it? How long does it take? Do you have that conversation over and over again in your head? Or do you just go in like a bull in a china shop and say.

Oh, no, no, no, no. How would you do that.

To to yes.

There are two things. So I had people leaving, but they didn’t leave because I fired them. It was 1 or 2 who really decided at that point that they could go somewhere else because it was stressful or they didn’t feel really okay. And they told me that. And they said, You know, I really.

Need to try that, but please, I.

Love it here.

Anyway, if I would like to come back, would you take me back? So but I do not say that to everybody. It was.

Some employees which I.

Really.

Knew. They are very.

Good, but I felt they they are not. Not happy. And if they decide to go, they go. And if they decide to come back, we discuss and we see what are the conditions. And it happened two times for the others. Let’s say the new employees, they have a probation time of six months in Luxembourg. That means in the first five months we need to decide if they really are good for the for the job or not. And this is a discussion which is not.

It’s just, you know, would you like to.

Have something else? Would you like to do like.

You are not.

Trained or.

The role.

Of treatment coordinator, for example, we we we don’t think that you really fit in that position which you apply to.

But we, we appreciate you.

We see that you can do many, many other things. Would you like to do maybe reception or maybe to be a dental nurse? An assistant here is like that. They are trained for everything so they can choose. And if they say no, I don’t, then they have to go. But it has to do as well with the kind of attitude which we are observing. And, you know, this is not only my decision, I may say I always decide with the team, I always decide with the team, which is with me for years, and I can trust them because they feel if that person is really a team player, I cannot see it directly. Yeah, and I know that I can trust him as well because they really want help. They wouldn’t say, Oh no, we don’t like her, let her go. No, that’s not like that. We have a discussion about what are the plus, what is the.

What is the.

The pros and cons. Yeah.

In hiring, do you think you’re strong at seeing potential in someone when when you’re hiring? Yeah.

Yeah. Many times. Didn’t have a choice. Yeah.

Sometimes I had to hire somebody because there was nobody so many times I was applying in in the.

Uk because we really didn’t have anybody to for.

For a while. And the workforce problem in Germany and as well in Luxembourg.

Is, is very big. Yeah. At the end they have to have a.

Very high qualification imagine to to speak two three languages to come along with the software which we are working because it’s a complex software. I took this software with me from Germany. I changed, adapted this to the Luxembourg system. I translated letters and.

Everything in in.

2 or 3 languages in order to be able to print an invoice in English or in French.

So it was a bunch of work at the beginning.

And it’s as well a lot of.

Learning.

I am.

Absolutely aware you cannot learn.

In five months. Definitely. But you see the rate of learning, You see the progress in in five months, definitely.

And you can say, okay.

How long.

Will it take? I am I do I want to.

Pay somebody for two years until they really are there?

And mostly.

It.

Happens that they are there one year or two years and then, okay, the.

Babies are coming and they go and they are gone.

You spent I spent many, many months and years for.

People who left.

For maternity leave.

And some came back, some.

Didn’t.

They as well move. You can imagine Luxembourg is a country. People as well move out of Luxembourg.

So it’s a bit difficult. But by now.

I have a very good team and some are in. I think we got.

Three babies in.

The last two years and our.

Hyginus is coming back now.

After the second baby end of April. And it’s.

Ezra Ralph.

She was a dental hygienist in London. She was working in some known clinics, and she’s with her husband now in Luxembourg. And she’s lovely and we’re happy to have her back.

So I’m happy with the core.

Of my team because I know I can rely on. And when we expand, we are a little bit careful that it’s somebody fitting in the team, completing the team and not bringing it apart.

My other question V letter that I had was I’ve been asked both in Germany and also more recently in France to either speak or assist with marketing and stuff like that. But while differences between the UK and Germany, I’m not so sure about Luxembourg. I wouldn’t know in terms of what you’re allowed to say. And you touched upon that earlier that you come here and you try and bring the UK way and you’ve had some some conversations with the equivalent of the GDC, with your with your advertising. I think I think I heard that correctly Anyway. Exactly. And I’m just really interested to learn what actually happened there because like, for example, I’m speaking later on this year in Paris for Clearcorrect. I had to send them my entire presentation and there were certain things that I weren’t wasn’t even allowed to mention or talk about. And it related to advertising, marketing, incentivisation offers, all of that. And I had to really get creative with my presentation to try and get the same same points across. Right? And I’m really interested to learn how, first of all, the challenges that you’ve faced, both both in Luxembourg and Germany and how you overcame them because because it sounds like to me you kind of and I might be wrong that you kind of broke the rules a little bit and so what happened? And tested the water and then and then see see how far you can push the envelope. And I can see you laughing and smiling now. So. So I’m hoping I’ve guessed right. I just want to learn about what you’re what challenges you faced.

Yes, of course.

I think there’s always.

Somebody who is, let’s say, breaking the rules.

Or trying something new because.

We think we.

Are in. Right. To inform the patient. And in Germany, it was easier.

And I remember many, many years ago, it was like probably 25 years ago, one colleague from Trier, exactly the city where I was, was the first to go on Internet.

To have a website to sell toothpaste.

And he got real problems. He was many, many trials and he ended up really broken. And I think as well for him was the end of the career at the at one point. But he opened our doors. That means from that point we could have a website and we said, Oh my God, look at his website. Everything what you read.

On each page is because.

Of the trial number, blah blah. I am not.

Allowed to say anything.

So we are not allowed to say anything because he lost. But then.

He won.

It was too late for him.

But it was for us. Good. So this I’ve learned.

I never.

Discussed about fees.

Or selling.

Things in Luxembourg because of course this is still forbidden. The social media and Instagram is something coming up probably.

I was.

One of the first.

Here and now I.

See so many colleagues.

Having amazing.

Instagram profiles.

And clinic.

Presentations.

And I think there is one who can who is courageous.

Enough to make the move.

And then the others are waiting, watching, you know, how do you say stalking you? And that’s that one point I noticed. Nothing happens. And they start like very, very a little bit to put something on their Instagram. And then more and more and more. And so in the last one year I saw definitely very good Instagram and social media.

Presence as well.

In Luxembourg YouTube website. It is definitely different than 13 years ago as I as I did my first, and I’m very proud of that because what is the point? We are specialised, we are doing good dentistry, we want our patients to come into the door and know exactly what they what are they expecting. And if I am the.

One who.

They like. Maybe, you know, they.

Wait two months for.

An appointment. They come say, Oh, God, I don’t even like her, you know, But so they have the chance.

To meet me before they come.

They have the.

Chance to be interested in what I’m doing.

And to ask for it. This is for us as well in the patient consultation, big time gain, because.

We.

Don’t do 1 to 1.

Consultation on.

Veneers and explain from the beginning what is a veneer. They know already, what is Invisalign, what are veneers? And this.

Is.

Each of us. They have very high costs. So we want to to save the time.

And to inform the patient as much as possible so.

That they come and have the wish list.

And of course, they need consultation explanation, definitely.

But it’s so important and nobody can say this is forbidden because now we read about everything in Internet, about all all the reviews for something we buy or want to go in vacation, hotels, restaurants.

Why not for dentists.

Let’s say, you know.

Francis Sorry. And just to finish for Prav. Yes.

In France.

Let’s say they are the Leaders.

So Luxembourgish was always a bit French system.

And I think there is a little bit more difficult because it’s a bigger country and here it’s easier to to go near to the border.

But Violetta, what I was going to say, you know what comes to mind when you say that? Of course, I remember back just before I qualified, you couldn’t advertise in the UK either, and it felt arcane and it felt wrong and all that. On the other hand, sometimes the pendulum swings too far the other way. And one of the nice things about, let’s say not having Instagram dentistry is that you have to really focus on good old traditional blowing the socks off your patient, you know, like word of mouth, good old word of mouth. And and I know, I know Prav is going to tell me, Look, you can’t have a successful clinic without both. I get that. Yeah, but the purity of word of mouth means that you’ve got to make a patient journey in your practice. That’s guess, you know, memorable. It’s got to be something that people feel. You know, if you’re doing big cases, people feel like they’re finally jumping in. It’s a big, big step, you know, going for a full mouth rehabilitation or even Invisalign or whatever it is. What are your just like he asked you about your three big tips on managing staff. What are your big tips on patient journey? Um, you know, is it do you have tactics or is it are you just yourself and you’re listening and, you know, the whole thing. Patient journey. Give us some tips. Okay?

Okay. Yes. Um, patient journey.

Um, I do not know. I have the the feeling that everybody should do the same. I always thought I’m doing what others are doing. So for.

Me.

In Luxembourg.

And for for our team.

Word of mouth is very important. Think about the 600,000 people living here. And I can tell you the Luxembourgish, it’s not a I think it’s.

45%.

Is.

Is Luxembourgish, the rest are foreigners.

And word of mouth is I think more more important than than everywhere because people know each other, they live together, they go eat together. So if you are really doing something good, they hear and they want to come. But if you do something bad or if.

If you have.

A.

Failure, this is very bad for you. And even if it’s not a failure from.

The medical.

Point of view, from the clinical point.

Of view. So I was from the beginning aware that here I have to be good, I have to be transparent, I.

Have to.

Explain what I’m doing to.

Explain.

What is necessary to hear what they.

Want from me, but.

As well to notice that it is a lot. They were not educated about like for example, a gum.

Disease that was that is something.

Which was.

Not.

Really.

Something. They knew what that means. So we started at a at a.

Basic level of communication.

Explanation before starting to discuss about.

Implants or veneers or Invisalign.

So that’s why I developed the new patient journey. In that way, we are sending a questionnaire where we find out.

What.

Is their main concern.

So before they they enter the office, they fill out a questionnaire. There. And when they come in, I know a little bit about them. We have a little telephone interview. Of course, when we get them at the phone.

Sometimes we don’t.

And most they come. Yeah.

Yes. Before they.

Come. So to.

Explain how to find.

A clinic, to ask again, what are the main concerns and what how are they recommended and so on.

Then.

As well, this is a filter for the patient.

So they know.

My, my, my front desk team knows if it’s a patient interested in aesthetics or wanting to come to.

Me or is a patient who is.

Interested in implants and needs to see the implantologists or it’s just an.

Emergency patient. Yeah. Then we know how much time we.

We plan for this.

Appointment.

We send a letter where they know exactly what we’ll do in the first.

Session and.

How long time it takes, because most.

Of the patients were used to go.

To the dentist like ten, 15 minutes, check it a little bit and then say goodbye. And when they come to us and we do an intraoral scan, we do interior, we do extra photos, we do probably an x ray as well if it’s needed, if they don’t have a new one. And we take our time to.

Sit down with.

The with Itero scanner.

And to explain.

And to have a risk assessment, we cannot say in the first session directly the.

Whole treatment.

Plan and give.

An estimate.

But they have an idea.

About treatment steps.

And 99% start with the with the dental cleaning.

Program.

They are informed that we are taking photos because we had many.

Times.

As I thought, yeah.

It’s normal. We do photos and patient.

Comes please go do photos through x ray. And so they were sitting there and the photos say, No, I’m not here.

For the magazine, I’m not at the.

Vogue, what are you doing with me? So they were really uninformed, was very bad. So we.

Informed, I think, the information about what’s going on and as well.

The let’s say the option that they choose a very normal short check-up or a comprehensive check-up is very important. So and the second is.

Really to sit down because before.

Entering the.

Mouth with any scanner or.

Dental mirror.

Is just to sit down for five minutes.

And ask them how they come to me and.

How do they know the clinic and just have a.

Chat.

Just a normal chat.

Not where are you coming from? Oh yeah, I’m coming from.

Greece and oh yeah, that’s so nice there. And so a little bit of chat. I think this time is very, very important.

And what are you doing? You’re building rapport at that point, right? You’re trying to see if you like them and if they like you sort of thing.

Yeah. You feel if it’s a patient, I of course you need to be as well to take your time, be empathic in the moment. You’re not a machine to do the same all the time. I cannot give a recipe for that.

But I am there.

I’m communicating and I feel okay. I know how much information the patient needs, how much information they don’t.

Want to hear. And I feel directly.

If they.

Are anxious, not.

Interested or even don’t getting it. So it happens as well.

So you’re gauging all of that. Yeah. And so. So then keep going. Keep going. Yes.

And then you’ve done the.

Preamble, you’ve called them, they’ve come, you’ve told them what to expect. All of that is very different. Right. Very few practices do that. Did you learn that from Laura Horton or did you just make it up yourself?

I think as well From Chris Barrow. Chris Barrow Yes. Yes. But I did in Germany the same.

It was like my feeling that I need to know the patient who’s coming into my chair and I don’t want to enter his private sphere. So going in.

This.

Mouth without.

Seeing his eyes and knowing who he is and.

Who she is, all this.

That was important.

For me to to to get the feeling of who are you? Who are you? That’s important and for sure as well to see who am I?

And before giving to my treatment coordinator or my dental assistant.

To start with the photos. Well, sometimes.

I do myself the extra photos because the studio are so my my office in photo studio are the same room. So we sit there at the at a nice table.

Maybe you see it on social media as like the white table with the big screen.

And on my screen is I have a photo.

Gallery with nice smiles. So they say it somehow.

It’s a kind of of subliminal getting used to what is going on here. And I am watching their.

Reaction when they see very weighty. So. You know, it’s just very interesting when they look at that way. No, no. This is no Hollywood patient and no Hollywood smile here. And then we do the the extra photos first.

So they get used to that.

We talk, we chat in the meanwhile, and the treatment coordinator is there with us and takes them in the room and is doing the the scan. Sometimes we do internal photos as well.

When there is directly clear.

What are we having going to do? But the INTRAORAL scan is enough for the first comprehensive consultation.

And we don’t want to.

To bug them too much with the with the mirrors, with the retractors.

And and anything.

But when they.

Come with a specific wish of.

Dental aesthetics or Invisalign, then we do some close ups.

Violeta how do you handle it when a patient in the preamble tells you, Yeah, I’m just here for a Check-up But then when, when you, when you do the exam you realise, look, this guy could or this, this patient could really benefit from much more involved treatment. Do you, do you bring that in after you’ve done the initial cleaning phase and all of that stuff? Do you do you hint at it? How do you manage that situation?

Well, we we are not taking patients.

Who are not going.

Through a prevention treatment and going only for repair and.

Emergency.

That that’s we that’s not our.

But let’s let’s say they want they tell you on the phone, look, I want to come I want I want to have the hygiene. I want to have a general check-up. I’ve got no no ambitions for a beautiful smile or or whatever. You know, they’re not they don’t want to get involved in big treatment. But then you see you see that they would really benefit from either aesthetics or functional work. How do you introduce it in?

So it’s like that.

When the patient is coming for a general normal check-up and cleaning, then.

Definitely they get that. They get the check-up, they get a cleaning and our dental hygienist is doing a scan. Very easy. Has an internal camera. Very easy. And then it is their work to sensitise the.

Patient to come.

To me for a comprehensive consultation.

With errors and clinical mistakes. I always want to reframe it and say, you know, a failure is just is not a success yet. It’s a success in pending because actually, how much more do we learn when we make a mistake? Yeah. Then when everything goes smoothly because we look back and I, you know, I reflect a lot of my cases and sometimes I see something in the photos and I’m like, Oh my God, I didn’t even realise that happened. And then it’s only when you look at the photos and, you know, typical one for ortho is you lose anchorage and you get a little bit of medial tipping of the 60s and you’re like, Damn it.

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 gives me great pleasure to welcome Millie Morrison onto the podcast. Millie is a dentist I’ve known since just after she qualified. Actually, I think one of the crop of super talented dentists that came out of Birmingham University under the stewardship of Lewis Mackenzie and Lewis contacted me after he’d introduced me. Well, after we talked about Depeche, I’d met Depeche sort of separately, and then he contacted me and said, There’s another. There is another who’s who’s very talented at composite. And we met and really hit it off straight away. And Millie’s been helping us with Mini Smile Makeover. We’ve been to the US several times together at Aacd. And latterly Millie’s really gone into Ortho and Invisalign in a massive way and much to mine and Lewis Mackenzie. I wouldn’t call it disgust, but. But it’s a shame. It’s a shame you’re no longer interested in resins. Millie is now really focusing fully on Invisalign treatment and teaching. Thanks so much for for coming on the podcast. Mills How are you?

Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, I’m really good, Thank you. Um, sorry that I’ve disappointed you.

To get that far. So really, this, this, this part, right? We used to want to sort of start from the beginning and end at the end. Where were you born and how do you want to be remembered? But then what I’ve noticed is, as I as I do them, sometimes the key question I want to ask someone doesn’t find its way into the conversation. And so now I’ve kind of gone this other way of asking that question early. And it’s a little bit unfair because, you know, we’re not in the rhythm of it yet and so forth, but it goes around sort of success for me when I think about you, you seem like such a like a contradiction in terms in terms of your success is as a human being. You know, I spoke to people in your year. They said you were top of your class. And yet when I met you, you were a proper party animal. One of those rare individuals, those rare individuals who who who manages to carry it all off at the same time. I mean, you’re amazing with patience and at the same time amazing at the work itself. You look stuff up and all of that. And you find with with most dentists, you know, skewed in one direction or another. But you seem to be very good at a lot of things. Have you always been like that or do you remember as a child or something deciding to be that person or what led to this?

Oh, gosh, that is a what a question to start with. Um, so yeah, I suppose I have always done it all and, and even when I was at school, I was very academic. I did a lot of extracurricular activities and I started working really young. I guess the main thing for me is I’m quite stubborn, so if I really want to do something, I’ll get it done and I’ll find a way. Um, and yeah, so yeah, I have really always done it all. My dad used to tell me that I was burning the candle at both ends and they were, they, as parents do, always concerned that I was taking on too much and too much and too much. And at times it has been too much and I’ve had to slow down a little bit. So, for instance, now I have less of my party animal ways for sure, more like ten. But then, you know, the other side of it is working in bars and I’ve worked in bars from a very, very early age. Um, working in bars really gave me a different window into communication and, you know, communication skills because, you know, I dealt with very lovely patient, lovely customers and dealt with, you know, more difficult customers who had maybe taken that one too many drinks, etcetera, etcetera. So you really get this range. And actually, I remember one of my very first jobs was working in a bar in a restaurant in my village, and it must have been maybe my first or second shift and I was probably 16 at this point, so I wasn’t allowed to work behind the bar.

But this young guy who was well known, I grew up in a village, so everyone knows everyone. It’s a well known guy walked in and asked to look at the dessert menu and I was a bit flustered and I was like, Oh, yeah, let me get get it. So I gave it to him. He was like, Oh, I don’t. And then he said something along the lines of, Oh, I don’t see you on it. And I just remember going. Right read because I was like, Oh my God, what do you say? I was 16 and I just remember going bright red and sort of running in the other direction out the back. But now, you know, instead of, you know, quitting the job and not wanting to work in that environment, I really pushed forward. And now if someone came up to me and said that, I would react completely differently. So I think it was quite helpful for me to be in those sorts of environments and pushing myself in different directions because it definitely gives you this, I suppose, elasticity in dealing with different types of people.

Yeah. So Prav puts a lot of his success down to working in the corner shop as well. And he says a similar thing about different types of people. And you know, he’s got the gift of the gab, if you like, as well. But why were you working in bars? Because your dad was in that business.

No, no, no. So I am. I mean, me and my sister started working really early, so my first job actually was training dogs. And then I moved into working in, in a in the local restaurant. I don’t really know why I was working there, probably for some extra pocket money, pocket money. And so I could go out and do what I wanted to do because again, quite strong willed. If I wanted to go buy something, I probably did want to go and buy it and I’d find a way to go and do it. Um, and then to be honest with you, I really, really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the, the busyness of it. And I remember be running around and there would be this great team, this great work ethic. And at the end of the night, you know, we’d all have a drink together, obviously when I was over 18 and, and, and we’d, um, you know, I just really enjoyed that sort of family feel, but that really hard work. And then I carried that on after school. So when I was after school, I really instantly decided I was going to take a year out. I actually had my place at Birmingham and realised I’m just not ready to go.

So decided to take a year out, had no money saved. Then I went and took on four jobs and I was really working from 6 a.m. till 11 p.m. most days within these four jobs to save up to go away. Then I went away. And really that’s the only time in my life I haven’t worked was when I was was travelling. And then I came back and I worked in bars the whole way through university as well to again fund the lifestyle I wanted to have whilst I was at university. And it was really that, you know, obviously we had that family with the dentists, but I really loved having family outside of dentistry, and the girls that I worked with in the bars at Birmingham were still very, very good friends with Now, like they they were a really important part of my life. And, you know, we had I remember, gosh, at university I’d go out drinking till 4:00 in the morning and then literally drag myself, dragged myself to university to sit in lectures all day and then in some ways miserable.

Be top of your class as well with it. I mean, what’s the secret to that? Do you really, really listen the first time? Is that what it is?

I was really disciplined. I came home after every lecture and I wrote up my notes. Like every lecture, every day I would come up and you should. I’ve still got them, actually. I’ve got everything in word documents from those lectures. So I learned by doing. But I also learned by writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. So, you know, those lectures in the good old days when they used to print out handouts, I’m not sure if they’d do that anymore, but you sit there furiously scribbling your notes as the lecturer was teaching. And, you know, it doesn’t it’s not that easy to read. So I’d go home and I would write those up into legible notes in word documents that when it came to revision, everything was neatly organised. I knew exactly where everything was, and my brain works that if I’ve written it out in different colours, I will I will remember roughly well, not roughly. I remember exactly on the page in what colour though that bit of information was. So I still remember A-level when I used to do, I used to do it by hand for A-levels in the exercise books. I can still tell you where you know photosynthesis is and my biology and what colour it is and all those colour codes. It’s just how my brain works and keeps those synapses, you know, going together.

Okay, so I’m interested in two things. What did, what did your parents do to make you that person? Number one and number two, number two. What did your parents do to make you the person that you always going out getting a job? I mean, I didn’t have a job. How come you did?

So.

One might. So my parents were both very, very successful. My mum worked in HR and was very high up in BP. Very, very high up. Very, very senior, very well respected. And she really was very focussed on women in industries being successful and how, you know, women can be successful. And she was a really you know, she really is an inspirational person. Um, and you know, seeing her, I suppose, fight those battles and win those battles and really overcome them, it’s something that was very special growing up. And also, you know, my mum used to tell me when she was younger, when I was younger, that she in the village where I grew up, all the mums and that’s a generalisation, but a lot of the mums didn’t work and she would have more in common with the men than she did with the women. And she found and you know, the women in the village didn’t necessarily like that. And I always thought that was really sad and that my mum had these dreams. My mum was very inspirational and people would judge her for that. And I would most people would say I look quite like my mum and I’m almost a carbon copy of my mum in terms of personality. We’re quite driven and we quite want what we want and we’re probably, you know, more Type A entrepreneur too. Yes, and my dad is an entrepreneur and he’s less he’s in some ways quite opposite to my mum.

But, you know, he has the same work ethic. You work hard. He he always taught me never chase money. He was like, Chase what you want to do, chase what you love, because the money will always come. And also there’s more important things in life than money. And he is he again, he would he was very successful in what he did. He does branding and marketing. And he went from Heinz to Mars, very high up in Mars, and then all of a sudden decided to open his own branding company called Elephants Can’t Jump. I mean, I think that name just really tells you everything you need to know about my dad. And then, you know, 12 years after that, he was getting, you know, getting a bit bored and he decided to open up a brewery with with my uncle. And again, it’s been very successful. And he just you know, I watched my dad to this day and we talk about beer labels and and, you know, the designs. My dad’s eyes just light up when he talks about them. And my dad’s close to retirement. And I said to him, I said, Dad, I just don’t think you should give that part of it up because you come alive when you talk about it like he really does. Exactly. So, you know, I feel like he always gave that that level of passion to to me and my sister as well.

And so somehow, somehow, they kept it real. I mean, I’m presuming, you know, you’ve got two successful parents in the industry. You didn’t have to work, but somehow they kept it real for you and sort of, you know, the environment was that you and your sister used to work all the time.

Yeah, I think well, they definitely well, they definitely encourage us to work. And you know my mum in typical my mum fashion, she, she when we were doing a, an allowance, she, we had to make a spreadsheet of everything we’d spend, we thought we would spend in a year in categories. So clothing, CDs because they were CDs in back in the back then um shoes, stationery for school, you know, if we’d spend any money on Apple Music, you know, iPods were just coming out. But all these things we had to categorise put into a spreadsheet. And she would then say, right. She would tell us if she thought we were being ridiculous. So we’re like, you know, say if we put £100 for clothes for the year, she would like, No, I think you probably spend more like 50. And then she would total that up and she would divide that by 12. And that would be our allowance for for the for the month. And, you know, that really taught us budgeting. So if we wanted to do anything, make anything else or buy anything else, we had to go out and work for it. And I think that was a really nice way of doing it because, you know, we weren’t told, no, you can’t have an allowance. But if that’s that’s all you’re going to have from us, you can’t come and ask us for more. And if you want more, then you’re going to need to fund that that lifestyle because this is what we think is fair. So it worked very well and I’m really, really grateful that they made us that they made us do that or didn’t make us do that. They gave us the that environment where we made that decision ourselves. Yeah.

And tell me about your year off. So once you’ve done the work, where did you go? What was the vacation like?

Oh, gosh, it was. It was fantastic. So we. Well, I went to l.a. I did. It was a very typical UK backpacker backpacker trek. Did you get one of those round the world tickets? Yeah. Yes. By travel, I think it was like really difficult. Really? On the beaten track. Nothing. Nothing crazy. Which probably my parents were quite happy about given that I had. I literally I decided that I wasn’t going. I actually went on a girls holiday to Kavos in Greece, and I had such a good time that I decided I really not ready to go back to uni. I want to go back there and work. So I landed, went on a family holiday and told my parents. Then I was like, I’m going to defer my place. And just so you know, I’m going to go back to Greece next week when we land and I’m going to go work out there for a few months. So that’s what I did. And then I came back from Kavos in October, and then I picked up back up my job, my various jobs. I was childminding. I was working in two, two, two bars in the village and a deli. And then in January, I think I left and then I did Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and then Southeast Asia. Which was amazing. Wow. Wow.

So I never knew all that about you. I never knew you did all those jobs. But it makes a lot of sense now. Yeah, because when me and you used to sit around at 2 a.m. in Toronto talking about how dentistry should be, and you’d say you’d say things way beyond your years about patience and patient care and people. And now, now that you put it in that context, it all makes a lot more sense, you know? All right. So why dentistry? I mean, I’m imagining you were academic enough to do whatever the hell you wanted.

So funny enough, I actually decided I wanted to be a dentist when I was four because I liked how fluoride tasted the fluoride. Yeah. What a terrible, terrible reason to be a dentist. And I remember. So, you know, when it came to writing your personal statements for university. Yeah, I wanted to put that on my personal statement. And my mom was like, No. I was like, But that’s the truth. And she was like, No, like, you can’t say that people will think you’re stupid. And I was like, Oh, but actually, yeah. So I decided I did want it was because of the fluoride varnish. That is what I wanted, you know, from a very young age, like really stuck with me that I wanted to be a dentist. And then, you know, as my personality, I guess developed and, you know, I was doing well at school, it became clear that actually a job in health care would become would probably be suit me the best. And I was deciding between medicine and dentistry. And ultimately I and this might sound a bit crass, but I didn’t want to see sick people every day. I wanted to have some really happy experiences with my patients and I wanted to really be able to see people more than once every five years when they’re unwell. This was, you know, from a 17 year old, 16, 17 year old’s perspective where I was thinking like, I don’t like hospitals and anything else.

You know, they’re not happy, happy feeling places for me. I get it.

Well, exactly. And I just in the end, dentistry felt like a really good fit. It had that flexibility. Um, I have to say, I didn’t really appreciate that there were all these different aspects of dentistry that you could go into. I mean, I knew about them, but I hadn’t really.

Did you shadow a dentist? Did you did your parents not did your parents not sort of say, hey, why don’t you go and spend a week in Shell or, you know, Mars or industry? It was industry. Never an option. Were you never thinking of that?

No, no, no. My I think my parents knew very you know, when I said I want to be a dentist or a doctor, they were like, okay, well, off you go, then. Sounds good to me. Headstrong And I actually went and did work experience with my dentist in the village. Along from where? From the village I grew up in. And I remember I used to get the bus and I used to go every Monday morning because I had that as a free period from school. So I’d go every Monday morning and then I’d get the bus back up to school because that was in another village. So I was there for a long time and it was when the rules were slightly, slightly more relaxed. So I was allowed to hold the suction. And, you know, I was there as like a clean nurse. And it was all very exciting. And actually he was a fantastic dentist. And you don’t really realise it when you’re just watching someone because you’re quite young, young, I think did that from when I was 15 to when I was 18. So I did it for about three years. And then it was only when I went to university and you know, they talk to you about what makes a good dentist or a better dentist or a great dentist. And he did a lot of the things, you know, in terms of the communication, the type of treatments he was doing. So I think I was quite lucky that I had that opportunity. And he was literally, you know, a tiny little village and you wouldn’t really know that he would be so good until you really know how good he was, if that makes sense.

So then in your time in Birmingham, were you what stands out as the best and worst of that period? Because I remember going into clinical like the bit with the phantom heads at the beginning. I was just I just hated it so much. You know? I hated it. I did not like it. Then when I got it, I got it. It was. It was the slow learner. Slow learner. What stands out for you as far as what you loved and what you didn’t love?

God, do you know what I really. I really. I loved. I really loved learning. I really, really loved pushing myself. And I guess I’m quite detail oriented and that and luckily I ended up at Birmingham because Birmingham was quite academic, you know, Dental University. So they quite liked the detail as well. I really loved the the Phantom Heads. I loved the phantom heads. I would have spent hours in the phantom heads. I loved being on clinic. I suppose the things that used to irritate me the most is how long I’d have to wait for feedback from tutors. You know, you’ve got to line up and I’m such an impatient person. I was like, Come on, come on. And. And I loved that. I mean, I loved the support. I remember my first tooth I ever took out was a low right to and my patient was diabetic and was on blood thinners. And I really like quite a lot of bonus, really easy extraction. But this guy would not stop bleeding. So my tutor was like, Well, look, you’re going to have to put Stitch in. I mean, this is my first extraction I’ve ever done, and now I’m having to put a stitch in my hands. You should have seen me. I was shaking so badly. And then we did it. We went fine. And I came out and I just burst into tears because of the like, nothing had gone wrong. In fact, it had gone really right.

But I was so like, there was so much adrenaline going through my system. Like I was shaking and I cried and bless him, he just came over and gave me a massive cuddle and he was like, It’s absolutely fine. So we really had that lovely support from from the tutors. And, you know, Lewis Mackenzie has been instrumental in my, in my confidence, in my abilities and in my career because he introduced me to you. He introduced me to ads who I still work with. And he’s been he’s been fantastic. And I was so lucky that I had him for my second year all the way up to my fifth year. I suppose the things I didn’t like is I actually found working in a hospital quite challenging for like a few different reasons, but I did find it quite challenging, like the actual hospital setting. And when I came out of university I was applying to go to the Army because I thought that if this was what dentistry was like in a hospital, it’s just not going to be for me. So I was applying to go to the Army and then when I got to vet and worked in a practice, then I really loved working in a practice and withdrew my application. But I found the hospital setting quite challenging and I think it was to do with sort of the it was quite slow paced, but also the different areas were quite cliquey.

So you had, you know, it was they didn’t really gel together. Everyone was very separated. And I don’t know if that’s the case now, obviously, but it felt quite cliquey and I didn’t really appreciate that. So I was going to go off and go to the Army again. My parents weren’t greatly happy about it, but they did say, You know, if this is something you feel you have to do or if you go, we want you. You know, in the end, I enjoyed practice. And the other thing is, is that I saw I think it was my medical exam. It was one of one of one of the hurdles you have to go through. And I was sat at the back of the hallway and I was watching the back of the hall, sorry. And at the front there are all these kids, 16, 17 year olds being told that they’d been accepted. And they were so happy, like, they like jumped up and they were like, Yeah, I remember looking at them and like, God, I really, really don’t feel like that. Like, I really don’t feel like that. And I was like, I’m doing this for the wrong reasons. I’m doing this to escape something rather than because I really want to do it. And so, you know, that really compounded and the fact that I was now enjoying dentistry and practice to withdraw the to withdraw the application.

And the city of Birmingham itself. Were you were you like aware of it? Of course you were aware of it. But had you been there a lot? Did you know it? Were you aware of it? So did you know it?

Did it shock you particularly well? Um. Well, do you know what I’ve always found really strange is that people were like. Birmingham is the second biggest city in in the country, but it doesn’t feel that big. I feel like a lot of that is to do with the suburbs around it. Um, but I wasn’t that aware of it. My mum went to Birmingham actually, and my granny was a nurse in Birmingham Hospital and she lived in Droitwich, which I believe is just around the corner. My geography is terrible by the way, so even though I have lived, I grew up just outside London. I’ve lived in London for many years. I still struggle with where things are.

Because you’re not, um.

It’s. It’s my. It’s my weakest, weakest point. Like sense of direction, geography. Terrible. So my mum lives in the States. She lives in Florida. And I remember we were around the dinner table and I had somehow got Florida confused with, you know, that little, um, I think it’s like a the outfit of LA or California. And I honestly, I was so confused as to where we were. And I’ve just got my mum. Oh, I know what you’re talking about.

You’re talking about my.

Sister.

Baja, Mexico or something. That peninsula that sticks out the other side. Yeah.

Yeah. I just got it confused in my mind. Like, it was like my sister’s really intelligent. My mum’s really intelligent. Bill, my mum’s husband is really intelligent. They were looking at me like, You’re an idiot. I was like, I’m so sorry.

So what was your.

I was just sort of aware of Birmingham.

Where was your where was your job?

South west London in Enfield. It’s a really, really good shooters. So I was lucky. I had two. One was a prosthodontist, one was an oral surgeon. Very different personalities, one, you know, quite energetic, quite loud, like me, quite extroverted, and the other was quite introverted. And it was a nice mix because, you know, I got to see different points of view and different techniques and different ideas on the treatment planning side of things. And I mean, we had so much fun, like our lectures on a Friday and the, the group of people that we had just gelled really, really well. And I’m still very good friends with a lot of them. And um, we would finish lectures or that the lectures for the day and we would go to the same bar every week. I’ve probably spent all of my wages that year. My annual income at this particular particular pub, the castle in Tooting. Um, and we just had an absolute, a fantastic time. So, you know, we were having a great time in practice because of the support. And I was, you know, it was a really, really nice practice. And then we were just having great fun at the weekend, creating all these new friendships, lifelong friendships. So I was very, very lucky. I was very, very lucky to be end up where I was.

I think. I think, you know what? It’s a brilliant year. If you’ve got a good practice and it can be the opposite if you haven’t. But, you know, when I when I’m talking to young dentists now, I always worry or I always warn them about the year after vet because the year after vet is very sort of isolating you suddenly a normal person, Aren’t you going to work every day in that one room with your nurse? Whereas just it just seems like an extension of union and weird way, like a fun little way. Like you say, you’re meeting new people, you’re learning things all the time. But I think that initial launch pad, I was very, very lucky with my I mean, I put my boss, I put that down to like almost everything I’ve done with Enlighten down to him because he was just one of these guys who wanted to to find out more about stuff. But it sounds like you had a similar thing. They had like a like a good launch pad. Do you remember others who didn’t? Because I do. You know, my partner had a terrible first job. Terrible because I hated dentistry after that. It’s difficult, isn’t it? Some people have. I think that first year is so important that it can, like, make or break the direction of flow, you know?

It’s yeah, it’s definitely really important. And, you know, we were quite we I don’t know how I don’t know if it’s still the same but we, we got ranked and then we went and we, we interviewed so each tutor would have like 15 minutes with each prospective student of, of the, of that region. So it was quite nice because then you ranked them on who you liked the best and who you got on with. So I think that was quite important because it wasn’t just done on your grades, it was done by a personality match as well. And I don’t think that’s the same now. I think it’s now really just on your ranking, isn’t it? I think they might have changed it.

Yeah, I think it is. I think you’re right. Yeah.

But that that getting on personality is really important. I mean, I speak to a lot of young dentists and there’s a massive mix bag, and I genuinely believe that all the tutors want to be able to pass on their knowledge, otherwise they wouldn’t be a tutor. And I believe or would hope that the students want to you know, they’re just newly qualified dentists would want to, you know, get as much information out. But there has, you know, different people work well with different people. So I do believe that like that personality point where you get to meet them first was a crucial part to why we you know, I had such a great year.

Let’s talk about Emily. Do you get do you get contacted by a lot of young dentists asking for advice?

So, yeah. So I speak to a lot of young dentists, I think naturally, because I’ve been, you know, sort of teaching Invisalign go for the last sort of five years. I speak, you know, I see a lot of dentists see me. Yeah. And I, you know, I always say like, please reach out. I’m always happy to help. And they do, which is fantastic about range of things. Sometimes it’s about Invisalign, sometimes it’s about, you know, career progression or, um, what courses they should be looking at. Or they might have had a difficult situation with the boss or they’re trying, you know, they want to leave and they’re looking for the next step. Um, not, not necessarily just young dentists, some older dentists as well, mainly younger dentists. Um, which is nice.

I love helping. I’m going, Yeah, yeah. Where I’m going with it, though, is I get contacted by a bunch of people. I get contacted by a bunch of people who think I’m like super successful at business and so I can help them be, you know, I’m not. And they’re you know what what, what, what the funny thing is, this is this is my question, right? It’s a massive responsibility to answer those questions. And both of us, I think, are kind of people pleasers. Yeah. Like I want to please whoever, whoever it is, it could be a first. It could be a fourth year dental student or it could be, you know, I’ve had a guy contact me about he’s got an invention and he wants to put it to market. It’s a massive responsibility to give an answer. I think the important part of giving that answer is to sort of. In a gift of sort of health warning with it that, you know, this is just like my opinion is, you know, it’s difficult because because, you know, you know, the guy was asking me about patents. You know, I don’t really believe in patents personally, but that might be completely the wrong advice for him. Or I’m telling young dentists not to do not to do a bit of everything and then decide, you know, I’m telling them, pick something early, very early and run with it. And I have I find myself now thinking, well, you know, this is just my my particular slant. And same question to you might give a completely different answer. And it’s important someone gets, you know, understands that just because you’re you or I’m me, we haven’t got the answers to all the questions. Yeah.

That’s true. And, you know, our own experiences will greatly warp our view of the world. You know, there’s always that great saying, you ask ten dentists for a treatment plan, you get 15 treatment plans. And it’s not just the treatment planning side of it, the clinical side of it, it’s the non clinical side of it as well. Like what’s important, how you should, you know, in inverted commas, sell or communicate with patients. Like everyone has their own tips and tricks, but really. The important bit is that, you know, yes, they’re asking maybe your advice, but maybe not only your advice and also having a little bit of common sense. Sometimes people have advised me to do something. In my mind, I’m like, Mm, I don’t want to do that. So no, and I’ll go do something else and it’s not. But actually having that different opinion doesn’t mean that you don’t do it. It just means it’s a difference of opinion and it might make you feel stronger about what you want to do or it might change your mind. You know, just because you’ve had a certain opinion doesn’t mean that that’s what you’re necessarily going to go and go. And do you know, for instance, you know, if you think about me in composites like Lewis Mackenzie was like, oh, you’re going to be fantastic at composite. And and you know, let’s not lie. It’s really nice to be told you’re good at something. It gives you a lot of confidence and you want to go and do it. Do you know what my first report card from Ortho was at university? Disinterested. Do you know why? I was just interested? Because it was 9 a.m. on a Thursday and Wednesday nights were meet you. So I was always tired and I was disinterested in the subject and it wasn’t really taught. So I.

Found undergrad. Also teaching was very poor anyway, in Cardiff, I don’t know about in Birmingham, but it just wasn’t they, they, they didn’t really explain anything to us man did they. How was it in Birmingham. Did they. Was it a good, good grounding.

Well I wouldn’t want to say anything too negative, but I found watching teeth move around, wax in hot water, really quite soul destroying. So and you know, it wasn’t as hands on or there wasn’t as many opportunities, you know, as it were in other disciplines. But, you know, I was always told you’d be very good at composite. You love composites. And I really could have run with that. But, you know, the more I did them and the more I tried to do, you know, did all the layering and this I did enjoy it, but I wasn’t I wasn’t really passionate about it. I didn’t go home and read about it. And I remember speaking to Dipesh and he was like, Yeah, I lie in bed looking at teeth. I was like, really? Like God was like, I couldn’t think of anything bloody worse. When I’m in bed. I wanted to be like, you know, cuddling the dogs or watching Netflix. And so and then and honestly, then I started doing ortho and I found this, like, massive passion. And I was like, I love it. Like, I really love it. And not only do I like it, but I want to be the best I can possibly be at this. And, you know, now I go home and I read books and I read journals and I read papers and I, you know, spent masses on postgraduate education because I want to know as much as I can. So, you know, when I was asking advice from from people what, you know, for instance, Lewis Mackenzie or you probably said, you know, do compost because you’re good at it, but actually that in some ways made my mind even stronger that just because I was good at it doesn’t mean that I want to do it. And actually, I want to go do something that I really love and I want to learn about and I want to become really good at it.

So I was listening to the your podcast with Qadhi, and you said, I can’t remember exactly, but you said like it was it was a very short amount of time before between your first Invisalign case and your first course that you taught on Invisalign like a year or something like this. Yeah. So, so, so you must immediately realised I love this. And then did you go off and start like researching like hell to, I mean how did you become a teacher of it within a year of doing your first case?

So was it a year? Actually, I was. I was actually I was not I was not a quick starter, and I’ll tell you why. So I like to understand things. I really like to understand things. I really want to understand something. You know, to go to the wide, the wide, the wide, the wide, the wide, to feel like I understand the very first why. And oh my gosh, revising was a nightmare because it would take me so long to get through a topic because I’d be like googling and searching for the last wide find. Yeah, just to understand the first concept. And but when I first started doing Invisalign, I was actually one of the first cohorts through Invisalign, you know, Invisalign go actually. And I went, I was working in a practice and all the treatment planning was done off site. And I mean, I think that’s a great service service, but for me. I for me, for my personality didn’t work, like it really didn’t work because I didn’t understand what was happening. And ultimately I was doing PR and putting attachments and I had no really true understanding of what was happening within the plastic or within the tooth. Aligners And I actually left that practice because I moved house and, um, and it was just, you know, it was just a nice. Was that a.

Practice?

Yeah. Yeah, it was fantastic practice. Practice, like really, you know, advanced in terms of this level of care and everything, but Dental Dental in the end, Yeah. And I really, really love working there with Avi and the team, but it was two hours of practice, three different buses. Yeah. Really gorgeous practice. Yeah. And I did try, but two hours on three different buses and nearly killed me. And in the end I went and, and moved to the other practice. I was working at part time, full time, but I had no understanding of the system. So I stopped doing Invisalign and I started doing fixed because I understood, fixed. You know, I could really understand the biomechanics. Um, and I could see it, I suppose it was, it was, I felt like I could feel it with my hands. And I’m quite, you know, touchy feely. I could feel it with my hands instead of it being on a screen. And I was doing loads of fixed and then all of a sudden, um, you know, my Invisalign, Invisalign territory manager popped up who got really, really well with and she was like, Why are you doing so much fixed and you’re not doing Invisalign? And I was like, Well, I feel like I can understand it and I’ve got more control. And she said, okay, I understand that, but let’s take it back. Let’s, let’s do some like do some really simple cases. Here’s the help, here’s the support and, and see how you like it. And then honestly, all the issues I had with fixing because, you know, fixed I do fixed for me when you put the wire on, sometimes you feel like you’re firefighting because you put the wire in and then you see them four, six weeks later, you’re like, Are the teeth exactly where I wanted them to be? Or am I going to have to now tweak this and tweak that, etcetera, etcetera.

Um, whereas, you know, when you’re, you’re planning things digitally, actually you’ve got lots of control, not just over where the teeth finish, but how the teeth get there. So like round tripping thin biotype things like this. Um, and I just started building up really slowly with really simple cases. Um, and it was massively successful and I really, really loved it. And I was asking for help and I was asking for support, um, and getting some really fantastic results. And I was always sharing that with my team. She was, you know, when we got on really well, we’d go out for dinner and drinks and she would come to the practice and she actually started bringing round these random people from Invisalign who just happened to be with her for the day. And they’d come in my lunch hour. And let’s be honest, I was working the NHS at this point. I had my hair in like the messiest bun on top of my head. My makeup had probably sweated off by that point. I looked a bit bedraggled and I’m not like the neatest person ever anyway. And um, in terms of looks.

This is Kentish Town, right?

Yeah. Um, and most of the time, because I was balancing the NHS and really driving through with this author, I was working early, I was working through lunch and I was working late to try and balance it all, hitting targets.

You were working hard. I remember when I came to see you. Even even when I came to see you, I remember you running around, jumping between patients and opgs and whatever it was.

Oh, of course. Yeah. I worked. Really. I was working really, really hard, actually. Anyway, she was bringing all these people and they weren’t random people. They. They end up end up being like head of marketing for a mere for Invisalign and all the, you know, all these big shots of aligning technology and they liked the cases. She was like, oh, show them some of your outcomes. Show them what you’re thinking is show them this. And you know, in my way, chit chat, chat away, not really thinking anything of it. I honestly thought that some of them were TMS in training, and these are people who are like the driving force of Invisalign through EMEA.

And.

Oh, so naive. Um, and anyway, they were interviewing me, but she hadn’t told me because she didn’t want me to be, you know, overwhelmed I guess would be. Yeah. So then they liked my personality. And, you know, let’s be honest, I was a young female dentist who who was being, you know, having lots of success with the Invisalign product and getting good results, you know, not just going doolally with it, but taking my time in terms of, you know, planning and everything. And so yeah, so they onboarded me really quickly and gosh, I always say that Invisalign changed my life. And always sounds such a corny line. I do know that, but it did because I made that conscious decision to do more Invisalign. I remember, you know, when you do the enlightened training and you said Whitening Wednesdays. So I talk about you and Whitening Wednesdays when I’m when I’m talking to my sort of delegates. Because if you talk, you know, you said if you talk about whitening to everybody, you will do more whitening. I remember I got to talk to everybody about Invisalign and I will do more Invisalign. And that’s what happened. And it really changed my life because not only did I move out of the practice, you know, the practice into into private practice, but I also got this opportunity to speak and to educate. And I found my second passion through that. And bearing in mind that when I went to the social sector in Birmingham University, when I had I remember it so clearly Payman it was awful. You had to give a speech and I was shaking. I was bright red and I barely made it back to my seat because my legs were shaking. I can’t imagine. So to go.

From.

Oh, was I was so nervous. But to go from that to to, you know, going all over the world like it’s been such, such an amazing journey.

Yeah, Yeah. So. So listen, a lot of that kind of stuff is to do with getting out of your comfort zone, isn’t it? You know, and, and growth growth comes from getting out of your comfort zone. And yet in the moment, in the moment that you do something that’s out of your comfort zone, especially someone like you, who likes to be in control, must be really difficult for you. Like, you know, like you were saying, when that when you had to put that suture into that tooth. Yeah. That first time where you’re not in control of what’s happening. And by its very nature, the first time you gave a lecture, the first time you did Invisalign, the first time or the many times that you do things slightly differently, they must all cause you like massive internal anxiety because you’re the kind of person who, like you said, wants the full detail on everything, wants to know exactly how things are going to turn out, How do you square that circle?

So that’s actually it’s really interesting. I suppose I’m slightly addicted to the like to the high of learning something new. Like I really I love it. Like that’s it’s quite an addictive thing to be, to learn and then to learn something else. And you know, when you reflect on the case, you’re like, Oh gosh, like, I didn’t do that and I should have done that. And now I know I need to do that. And you get better and better and better, and I find that quite addictive. And also one of the things I’ve learnt and I’ve been taught by my own sort of mentors is that when you feel uncomfortable, when you feel that fear, instead of trying to lean away from it, which is our natural reaction, is to lean into it. Yeah. And really lean into it. And it’s tough because you’re naturally wanting to run the other way, but you’ve got to lean into it, lean into those difficult, difficult scenarios, the things that you find most challenging, and then you grow. And sometimes I have like these butterflies in my stomach. I’m shaking. I feel so nervous and like the other week I did a TED Talk where a TED type talk and, you know, normally when I lecture, I have my screen, my presentation, I’ve got my slides and I’ve got my clicker in my hand, and that’s comfort. And this TED talk talk was 20 minutes. No, no slides, no clicker to a room of dentists who had done the diploma in clear aligner therapy. So, you know, the challenge there was to also find something to make them think and to, you know, to not just, you know, something different and slightly different point to point in the view. And oh, my gosh, even though I will go up on stage in front of hundreds of dentists in different countries and talk with my slides and my clicker, that was not that was the barrier. I was really, really nervous and I was shaking. And before I was stood there at the back of the auditorium doing my power poses from Amy Cuddy.

Like literally just to make yourself feel better. Oh, gosh, yeah. I was there. My hands in the air, my hands on the hip. I was deep breathing and I was doing these items.

I was like, I am confident. I am capable.

I am going to nail this. I was like, I had.

This mantra going through my in my head because it was so out of my comfort zone. And and the whole time my legs were shaking. At one point I was like, I can’t feel my face. Like my face had gone numb.

Everyone enjoyed the talk. Like, you know, I got great feedback from it.

So it came across well. But internally, you know, just because someone.

Looks like everything’s.

Fine and smooth.

Doesn’t necessarily.

Mean everything.

Is like we’re, you know, we’re.

All growing. And Ramon, who asked me to do that, he said, I’ve asked you to do it because I know it’s going to be difficult for you, but I want you to grow.

I mean, I’ve obviously done a bunch of events with a bunch of speakers, and what I always tell them is if you’re not nervous, something’s wrong. You know, before a big you know, if you’re stepping out on stage, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it at that moment, you you know, it’s just I mean, we all know that the Simon Sinek thing about nervous and excited being the same chemical translated in different ways, and I understand all of that. But being a bit nervous before a talk is sort of normal. You know, there’s a, there’s, there’s nothing to be worried about there. I’m quite interested in. You work at Chris Hall’s practice to be asked by Chris or to apply for a job. Is that how it worked? Did he. Did he. Did he did he ask you? Yeah. Given to be given that job when there’s hundreds of dentists going through, you know, that course. So did he tell you what did he see in you that made him sort of ask you and the handful of others who’ve worked at that practice?

He said he does say he knows I did the reading every week because he’s a stickler.

He’s a stickler for that.

And, you know, actually, funny enough.

You’re the one that told me to go for the course because if you remember back then, they wanted two years experience out of out of dental school and I only had one. And you were like, you need to do it. And I was like, Really? But and, you know, rule following me, I was like, The rules say that I shouldn’t. And I emailed Zenith and I was like, Is it.

Is it okay if I apply? And she and she was like, Yes, we do want we do like to, but if you want to apply, then you think.

You can do the work then? Absolutely. Because it’s not necessarily the two years experience. But I think they really want to make sure is that you have the ability to put into practice what they’re teaching you straight away. And, you know, sometimes your first year out of dental school, that’s like, that’s just not going to happen. But it was I mean, it was a great opportunity. And I remember I was so honoured.

Yeah. I mean, look, it’s an extraordinary course, which is why I advise you to go on it. But how soon was it straight after the course that they said, Hey, come work?

No, no. It was a couple of years later. So I did the course. I did the course 2016, 2017, and then I joined the team in March 2018, I believe. Or maybe maybe it was March 2018 or March 2019. I think it was 2018, but don’t hold me to that. But he he was Chris. He Chris was coming to do a talk at one at the end of the Invisalign days and I was co-presenting as sort of a lead in to the into teaching. So actually it must have been March 19th and he sat at the back and we were looking at a case together because I just asked him if he wouldn’t mind having a look at a case. And then he did his thing and we were walking out together and he was like, you know, do you do you have 1 or 2 days you can give me? And I was like, Yeah, Again, I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m so nervous. But okay. Yes.

And then eventually I had a.

Presentation together with my cases and sit there with him and going through on this massive screen. Um.

But what an honour, What an honour.

Did you, did you feel, did you feel the way you would expect someone to feel in that moment when Crystal says, Come work at my practice?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing I did is I came like ran home and called everyone called. I called everyone. I was like, Oh my God.

You’ll never actually actually know. Do you know what? I’ve just realised what happened. So I we actually went to the theatre that night round the.

Corner and.

I remember.

I can’t remember what we saw, but I remember meeting my family and everyone there and us getting, you know, the little bottles of prosecco.

You can get. I’ve got one of those each. And we did a cheers and.

And no one, none of my family, no one knew who.

I was like Chris Chris always just asked me to go to like go for an interview and go for a job. And they’re like, He was Chris Oh. And I was trying to explain. I don’t get it. They had no idea. But anyway, they still got like, we still got a little thing of bubbles.

You know, for what it’s worth, for what it’s worth, I’ve been proud of you many times in your career, but when I heard that, I don’t know why, I. I was very, very. I was probably more proud of you that day than than any other day, because I’ve known Chris and Zayn for a long time and they’ve got very high standard. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the difference between working I mean, adarsh mega entrepreneur, maybe the least sort of emotional person I’ve come across when it comes to, you know, I’m sure he just wants you to make people happy, end of story. Do whatever you like, make people happy. Um. Chris or, you know, I’m sure his practice is full of systems and processes and everything has to be exactly done his way. And then, and then the family business, which was, you know, gentle Dental with so many different branches and so many different people inputting, you must have learned something different from each of these, right?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely very different places.

So it’s such a pleasure.

To work in different in different practices under different bosses who have different approaches to things. And it you, I mean, you just get introduced to different ways of working. So you know, yeah, ads is like super, super laid back. And when I went to Chris, you know, it was a bit more of a shock because they, they wanted to like check, check the letters and, you know, look at, look at our treatment plans and a lot more detail. And at first I was a bit I was a bit like, oh, so you don’t trust us?

But actually how stupid was I to think that?

And also kind of egotistical isn’t the right word, but, you know, that sort of thing. Like how I mean, the reason they wanted to look at the treatment plan isn’t so that they were checking up on us, but it was to give us this opportunity where they would look at our plan and say, Yeah, okay, well, this is a really good idea, but have you thought about it this way and have you thought about it that way? And what about if you did this and did this and did this and again, they just instead of you following the same protocol for every patient, they would bring in different you know, Chris and Dana saying it’s less clinical. But, you know, they’re both pull in different ways of looking at the case ten times better. And, you know, you just learn so much that way. So yeah, systems and those processes in place, but it’s still both approaches are there to support and to guide you and to and to make you better. And it’s just different ways. But then I remember doing my first full mouth rehabs adds his practice and him helping me, talking me through, going through everything. So, you know, again, I’ve been very lucky in terms of in terms of my principles, in terms of my therefore mentors and the different approaches, because it’s given me the opportunity in the space to try different things and to really work out what I like to do and how I like to do things.

Yeah, to have to have someone like Chris or on hand to ask questions must be a massive learning thing. I mean, to have your cases all sequentially going through him, you must you must learn so much from that dictionary encyclopaedia. I should say.

Honestly, his mind works in a completely different way. I mean, to anybody else’s I’ve met and the way he puts things together and you know, sometimes I feel really, really, really stupid because I ask him the same question about five times. But, you know, he’s really patient. He’ll explain it and he’ll explain it and he’ll explain it and he’ll sit down. And I remember, you know, I had someone come in and they’d had direct to consumer aligners and their occlusion was a mess. And so we were setting it up the articulators and we were, you know, looking at whether we were going to add take away or realign. And he sat with me doing sort of looking at where the contact was. We’d set it up and looking where the contact was taking that away. Then what happened to the occlusion? Then what happened? And then what happened? It was hours that he gave me sitting there doing that. And when I wanted to understand more about Bimanual manipulation, he sat with me and, you know, he did it to me. And then I did it to him. And then we did it on my nurse. And, you know, he’s very he’s so willing to share his his knowledge and his time. It’s just fantastic.

But tell me this, you know, with with the work that you’ve done with Invisalign, have you have you done anything else with other Aligners or have you only exclusively worked with Invisalign?

Because there’s so many right at the beginning.

I know. I know. So right at the beginning I did try a few different aligner systems and I found I personally found the Invisalign system the most reliable in my hands and the easiest to understand from the interface. So I always say to my patients, you know, you’ve got the option of having clear aligners The brand I use is Invisalign. At the moment it’s the market leader because of X, Y and Z. But there are some new aligner systems coming on to the scene which are exciting, you know, and there’s a massive sort of upturn of people doing their own aligners because once you understand the biomechanics, you know, you can manipulate the different systems. I like, you know, when you when you’ve used one system for so long, it’s difficult to move because you know the system, you trust the system. And I guess, you know, the cases I’m doing now are the cases where they’ve been rejected to have aligners, you know, they’re being told, no, you can’t have aligners you have to have fixed. And then they land at my doorstep going, please, I really don’t want to have fixed appliances. Can you do this with Aligners? Because I’m doing those more complex cases. I really want to use a system that I know like the back of my hand. So it’s almost like a catch 22. But yeah, I did use other systems in the past for a couple of cases and I just found that with Invisalign I got what I needed and what I wanted.

Well, look, I understand why Invisalign invested in you early and they’re the market leading. They’re the biggest Dental company. Not not the biggest clear aligner company. They’re the biggest Dental company. And so it makes sense, right? And at the same time, though, you know, Dipesh, for instance, he teaches for for us with enamel, but he insists on on staying on top of every other material that’s that’s out there. He’s doing work with doing cases with all the other materials at the same time to make sure that his teaching is, is, is correct teaching. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not saying I’m not saying, you know, you’re doing something right or wrong, but there’s so many new ones coming out that it’s important for your for your students, for you to be able to answer the question. Right. Because you’re now a teacher of it. You know, what is it? What are the advantages of Suresmile over Invisalign? I’ve got no idea, by the way. Yeah, but but there may be 1 or 2, right? I mean, you’d be crazy. And I know it’s a strange thing because each one of those, you know, dense ply, if they can get 1/20 of the valuation of Invisalign with suresmile, that would be well worth it. That would be a $2 billion company or something. Or Spark or Philips are bringing one out candid or there’s 100, isn’t there? Or making them yourself like you said.

Well there’s there’s angel coming from there’s Angel coming over as well which is going to be quite interesting. I mean, absolutely. I think I think for me, if I can, it’s all about case selection, right? I need to I need to be able to to to do that with the right patient, with the right aligner or the aligner system. So and there are dentists that I mentor and might help who who use slightly different systems and we can, you know, talk about it and manipulate it and get it to where where we want it to be using the principle of biomechanical principles. So I guess vicariously, yeah, I’m using some of the other systems, but it’s that case selection and I guess, you know, when you and I was approached to use some different systems and etcetera, but it’s about choosing the exact right case where I think it’s going to be possible. And because of the type of cases I do, I need the route talk or I need the, you know, the intrusiveness I need I need to know that I can get those more difficult movements and I know I can get them with Invisalign. So it’s waiting for those maybe slightly easier cases to come through the door, which I really wish would come through the door more often.

Because I spend less time planning them. But then I can.

See and then I can experiment with the with, with the other systems, because also I’ve got a responsibility to my patients that if we’re going, you know, I don’t want to have to abandon treatment. Exactly. So it’s a and you’re right. That’s that’s something I need to I need to work on.

It’s How about, you know the difference between you who’s doing advanced cases and an orthodontist? What is the difference?

Uh, I mean, there’s a lot there. I think it’s different.

To have a general practitioner, um, to do orthodontic treatment than an ortho. Obviously they’ve got the extra training, they’ve got sort of that understanding of growth potential. So I really treat adult patients. I’m treating my first child patient at the moment, which is my it’s actually my cousin.

Again, I know.

It’s always nerve wracking. But again, I haven’t done it by myself. I’m I’m I’m working with a specialist orthodontist who does a lot, who spends all his time doing clear aligners for children. And we’re going through the case together step by step, looking at it. So, you know, I like I’ll do things that are slightly more challenging as long as I’ve got the right people around me to understand and to one, explain everything and to look at things because you can read a textbook, but when you put it in practice, it’s very different. And also, if I hit a hit an issue or hit a problem, I can go and ask them. So it’s twofold. Ortho and general dentists will always look at things slightly differently, but I honestly think that it’s we’ve got a wonderful opportunity where actually we can work more closely together for the overall benefit of the profession and and of the patients, because, you know, general dentistry maybe shouldn’t be doing, you know, really, really crazy stuff all the time. But then also some of the authors are more trained in fixed appliances. So perhaps there’s something they can learn from a general practitioner who’s doing more complex stuff in terms of biomechanics and clear aligners. So I think there can be that bidirectional relationship rather than us, you know, knocking heads and going against each other.

That could answer a difficult question.

It’s a difficult question.

Do you come across the 32 CO?

Yes, I have, actually.

And I am I think I’m 329th in the list to be to be contacted.

So. Right. Yeah.

I’m waiting I’m waiting patiently.

For for people. I’m going to have Sonya on the podcast soon. But the idea is that they firstly mentor with orthodontists. They’ve got a bunch of free education and then orthodontists plan the case. But then there’s the really funky piece, which is once the case is planned, then they put it onto a marketplace of all the different aligner labs around the world that make aligners. And then those labs bid for the case. And I guess, you know, some of them are in China and some of them are in Europe and some are quicker and some or whatever. But it’s an interesting idea. And, you know, she’s she’s trying to disrupt Invisalign. Everyone’s trying to disrupt the line. Are they because of the value of that of that product? And let’s get on to darker days.

Yeah. So no, I’m waiting. I’m waiting for my callback.

So I can trial it.

I’ll put you in touch. She’s. She’s very busy.

I actually met her at the bar. She’s.

She’s a friend of a friend. But I didn’t take her. Didn’t take her contact details. And also, I don’t want to be pushy, so I’m just patiently waiting, you know?

I’m sure. I’m sure she’ll be in touch. Let’s let’s talk about darker days. This kind of my favourite part of the podcast. It’s weird why I enjoy this bit the most errors. Let’s talk about errors in general. I really want to talk about clinical errors because of that whole black box thinking and learning from each other’s mistakes. What comes to mind when I say clinical error?

Gosh. Um.

Well.

I think, well, gosh, with errors and clinical and, you know, mistakes, I always want to reframe it and say, you know, it’s a failure is just it’s not a success yet.

It’s a success in pending because actually, how much more do we learn when we make a mistake? Yeah. Then when.

Everything goes smoothly because we look back and I, you know, I reflect a lot of my cases and sometimes I see something in the photos and I’m like, Oh my God, I didn’t even realise that.

Happened. And then it’s only when you look at.

The photos and, you know, typical one for ortho is you lose Anchorage and you get a little bit of medial tipping of the 60s and you’re like, Damn.

It. Like you’ve checked the.

Occlusion and I go around the shim stock. I’ve got, you know, the occlusal grind on the itero and da da da da da. But that little means little tip that she didn’t see until you reflect back on the on the photos. And then, you know, you need to get better. I mean, my gosh, I’ve had cases where I have done way too much buccal movement, buckle proclamation recession. That’s never fun, especially because it doesn’t always look as that bad when you finish the case. But when you review it a year later, you’re like, Oh my God. And then you got to get, you know, refer to the periodontist, you know, mistakes. A lot of my mistakes have to be honest with you, are poor communication. So I know you said earlier that I’m a good I get on well with patients and it’s true. I get on well with patients, but I really don’t like difficult conversations. And I, I used to really, really struggle with it. And I would feel bad for having to tell patients they were going to lose a.

Tooth or they had to or they had periodontal disease. So I’d really try and not tell them. And honestly, I’d always try.

And sugarcoat it or make it seem in the best possible way I.

Could.

And that led to more problems than anything. Because ultimately, whilst I thought I was being nice to the patient, actually I wasn’t. I was I thought I was being nice, but I wasn’t because I should have just been much more upfront and direct. But let’s get specific.

Let’s get specific about a real, real painful episode in your past. Oh.

One really painful episode. Really, really painful episode. I had a patient who. Had and this is this is my most painful episode ever. He had a upper left, too, with a big crown on it. A little bit of spacing in the upper arch, a little bit of crowding in the lower arch, really simple alignment. And then we’re going to change the crown or the veneers three quarter crown on the upper left to anyway. He we changed the crown. We went through, we did the Invisalign was fine. Did did all the ortho came to the crown. Honestly he didn’t want to whiten.

It.

Because he didn’t want to maintain the whitening. And even though he went through that, he didn’t want to whiten and he had quite quite discoloured teeth with lots of character in even though he’s quite a young guy. And we went through one crown which she didn’t like the colour of and I agreed. We went through another one. He didn’t like the colour as I agreed. And then the third one he was happy with, we cemented it, but when he walked outside he wasn’t happy with it. So now all my patients, when we’re doing a single tooth, they go outside.

The light is too light, right? Yeah.

The light was different, so he didn’t like it. So anyway, we cemented it and I say, Right, fine, that’s okay. But I have to say the previous prep was, was quite heavy and I was talking to him. I was like, I’m really nervous about, you know, not nervous, but I really want to avoid taking this on, off, on, off, on, off again. So let’s try and get as close as we possibly can without removing the veneer. So even though it’s slightly grey and he was like, Yeah, no, I agree, but I think I gave him a slight complex because then we were going through different, different veneers with the lab and the lab was sending two three back sometimes because we just couldn’t get it right. And unfortunately, halfway through, not only did we have this difficulty getting the shade, but he started he got this pain.

And we looked needed.

Vitality testing. It’s coming back fine. There was no apical area. Everything looked normal. And then the pain went away. And then he came back a little bit later and later and he was like, Oh, it’s back. And I looked at the back of the tooth and the tooth was pink. So he had internal internal resorption. And I was like, No, Oh, I’m the worst. You know, the thing is, is like I had a really good from the start of treatment and the alignment had taken two months. It really hadn’t been long and I hadn’t taken a PR because I had a good quality view of the tooth on the OPG. But that was a mistake. I should have taken another PR, even though when I took the PR, when he first got pain, there was no changes. But from a medical legal point of view, I should have taken another PR, So then I sent him off to my endodontist who I use, and he had a CT scan. He was like, Yeah, it’s internal resorption. I think I can fix it, so I’m going to go in and fix it. So he went in and and repaired it. Obviously there’s a risk that it’s not going to work. And of course it didn’t work and it continued, but it continued silently. So there was nothing, you know, nothing going on outside. And we just managed to fit a veneer that.

Was finally the right colour after it had this root canal treatment. And then he comes back a.

Week later and he goes, I’ve got some pus. And I was like, No. And then honestly, I took another PR and this point was swimming, swimming in in space.

And I was like, Oh.

I’m going to cry. I was like, I’m literally I’m going to cry in this moment. So he sent him back to the endodontist. He had another CT scan. And it’s, you know, it’s it’s much larger now at the same time. Okay. This this patient was really lovely, quite demanding in terms of his his aesthetics in the aesthetics that he wants, which is fine. What I deal with that a lot, but he was becoming progressively, progressively more and more anxious, which I completely, completely understand. And like, let’s not lie. My anxiety levels are rising by this point. And, you know, every time I saw him in the diary, I was like, Oh God, I just want to go home.

My anxiety is rising.

Listening to the story. Come on, come on, come on.

Honestly, it was so bad.

Anyway in the end. And but the problem is, is because his anxiety was, was was increasing and we had this like, opportunity that we thought we could repair the tooth again and get on control of it. And you know, I don’t I’m. Anyway, he was so anxious that he didn’t want to go ahead and he was umming and ahhing, umming and umming and ahhing umming and ahhing. And then when he decided he did want to go ahead, it was too late. So then now we’re talking about extraction and implant. So what should have been a really simple case and you know, it was one of those, one of those things and I reflect on it loads and gosh, I had so many sleepless nights. It was awful. Um, and in the end.

What was the.

What was the feeling was, was the feeling that he was blaming you or was he blaming himself or. But you know, the feeling between us, the confidence slipping in the relationship.

The the confidence the relationship was was definitely slipping, of course. And he kept saying he was in contact with my daily he was in contact with me weekly via WhatsApp. All my patients have my WhatsApp number. It’s a business WhatsApp number so I can put an out of office on.

Yeah, but it.

Was slipping. And he kept saying, you know, I don’t I don’t blame you, but this isn’t what I thought would happen with treatment. And I was like such a low risk. Like, I literally, like I got, you know, and you get to a point, you’re like, I have nothing else I can say. And I spoke to different people and funnily enough, they were like, right, refund him for the veneer, but don’t refund him for the Invisalign. This isn’t your fault. But I actually I refunded him everything so he could go and, and you know, they were saying if you do the implant here then it’s going to, you know, we’ll obviously do it for free and then you’re only going to pay the cost. But he had lost confidence. He had lost confidence at that point. And he had found something he was really confident in. And this was the cost of the implant and that’s where he wanted to go. And in the end, I was like, Yeah, fine, you like, I’ll I’ll give you that refund. And I know there are going to be people who disagree with that approach and that’s completely fine. But that’s what I felt was the best thing to do in the moment. And I’d do the same. You know, everything has gone half everything’s gone well afterwards. So it was who paid, Who.

Paid, paid.

For all the Endodontics Was that himself or did you refund that as well.

He, he paid. He paid. He paid for the endodontics.

That’s okay.

You paid for the endodontics.

So now. So now reflecting. Reflecting outside of outside of that that you think you could have taken if you were being a proper defensive dentist. Anything else that you think you could have done better?

I feel that we could have.

Taken the first initial episode of Pain a little bit more seriously, but because it went away and there was really nothing to see. And I remember and and honestly, something niggled me. And it did niggle me and I know it niggled me. And, you know, sometimes you have a gut feeling about things and I really wish I’d followed my gut more and sent him to the endodontist earlier because even though I couldn’t see it, you know, this is what I think is amazing about dentistry is we’ve got so many people who specialise or have special interest in different things. You don’t have to rely on your own judgement. You can you can send people. And if I’d sent him, then when I was having that gut feeling that could possibly could have been avoided, possibly could have been saved. That’s not for sure.

Was it a while ago? Was it recently also?

Were you younger?

Less experienced Few a few years ago. A few years.

Ago. But not, you know, crazy long ago. Not right at the beginning of my career. Probably about midway.

As far as I’m concerned. You’re still at the beginning of your career. You know, I mean it. I mean it. I mean it. Yeah. Because. Because these. These spidey sense things. Yeah. Having, having the, the, the sort of the conviction of your feeling and, and when, when something feels wrong not doing it. But you don’t know why something just feels wrong. Yeah. That, that takes years and years and years to develop and you know even with your accelerated rate of, you know, getting, getting on with all of this, if it was two, three years ago, that was really at the beginning of your career. You know, it takes time for that spidey sense. It’s not the Spidey sense itself. It’s acting on the spidey sense. That’s the point. Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, it’s yeah, it’s it was. You can’t really blame yourself for that one though.

Well, I don’t know.

The other thing that I really wish I had done is I wish I had taken a photo of when I had sectioned the old veneer off the old three quarter crown off and I didn’t have that photo. And so I wasn’t sure if I had gone more subgingival and nicked the cementum somewhere. Like I. I couldn’t say for certain. I didn’t think I did because generally I really hate taking off ceramics. It takes me ages because.

I’m like, Oh, have I gone too far? Oh, have I gone too far?

But so I don’t think I did. But you know, and I quite like answers. And so there were, you know, I should have taken should have taken photos or more photos. But then again, I only know I now want to take that photo because I went through that experience. But if I hadn’t gone through that experience, I probably still wouldn’t be taking those photos today. True. True. Yeah, it was terrible. Honestly, I.

Felt so sick. I felt I felt the pain there a little bit.

Yeah.

And and, you know, even the financial implication of handling handling that back because you’ve already paid for it, right? You paid 50% of the lab bill.

With.

The principal, and now you’re handing 100% back all the honestly pay the hours and hours I spent in clinic. So, you know, it hit hard from from multiple different angles. Have you ever.

Had have you had a situation where a patient comes in and it looks like a tough case or they seem like they’re a tough patient? And then there’s one side of you is sort of the ego side of you saying, I can do this. And there’s the spidey sense side of you saying avoid. And you know.

Yeah.

So we used to. We used to, we used to, we used to trying to make our patients happy. Are we in any way that we can? And then you’re good at what you do, right? So there’s always the, you know, niggling sense sense that whoever tried it last time didn’t know what I know. And, you know, there’s that that piece. And often that’s the case, right? I mean, that’s often the case. Have you have you ever had that situation bite you?

Oh, my gosh.

So there’s always you know, you.

Really have to step back from your ego. Like I want to do like, I want the challenge and I want unless, you know, if there’s something really challenging, then I go and speak to mentors all the time. I have lots of different mentors in different walks of dentistry that I have no qualms about going to ask and going to ask for help or going to ask for guidance. And, you know, I actually really like it because we get to geek out a little bit, but oh gosh, like so many times you look at something, you’re like, that’s a really terrible margin. Why have they done that?

I can do that better.

You do? And you’re like, Ah, this is why it’s a terrible model.

Yeah, you’re there and you’re.

Like, Patient can’t open their mouth.

I know. And you look at it and you’re like, Why did I do it? And you just you’re there, you’re slightly sweating. Your nurse is like, Oh my God, now we’re going to run late.

And just you’re like, Why? Why, why, why? But, you know.

Yeah.

Does a case come to mind that that happened?

No, not one in particular, to be honest with you.

It’s not one that went wrong badly. No, I mean, to be.

Honest with you, I’ve been quite, quite fortunate that I’ve hit bumps. But most of the bumps, apart from that one big case I just told you about. Most of the bumps have been really easy to fix. Like, you know, created an anterior open bite because I forgot to cover the apex and I put a liners in. So the apex over erupted. That was shocking when that walked in the door.

I can tell you, God. But then. Oh, gosh, yes, honestly. And but in what timeframe.

Did that happen?

Oh, my gosh. Payman. I had just been asked to be a.

Speaker for a line and my first text.

The next.

Week to Ramon, who is.

He’s the founder of a line of consulting who does all the training, who was actually going to start working with. That was my first message. After he.

Had just hired me.

I was like.

I’m really sorry to be asking you this.

But bless him, he was really lovely. He was like, No, you’ve really owned up to what you did.

You know what you’ve done wrong. This is how we’re going to fix it. And he walked me through it and really see my blood pressure then came down because I had a plan and it was fine. But.

You know.

Teaching and teaching as well. The situation comes up where someone asks a question and if you don’t know the answer to that question, I don’t know is the best answer. And yet we find that. But but we find that, you know, as the teacher, you know, you’re there to answer those questions. So there’s again, one part of you saying, you know, thinking, I don’t know the answer to this question. And there’s another part of you saying, well, let me just say something to to make this right. And it’s I think it’s a massive responsibility, not only in teaching in all the people I deal with, the ones who say, I don’t know, I end up respecting the most, you know, suppliers, lawyers, whoever the hell it is. You ask them a question, they say, I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s so difficult as the teacher. It’s difficult to admit to that, you know. But I think it’s.

A great response. The only answer they give I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

All day.

I don’t know. Sorry. I think so. Normally, if I don’t know something, I’ll say I don’t know. But also I’ll be like, but if I’m going to really apply some logic to it, this is what I think. But I can go.

And I can go and find out.

And normally you’re in the right.

Rooms and I do sort of have this like what I’m doing now, this like snake back and forth, which I do when I’m tend to be tend to be thinking and thinking around, you know, what’s what’s the logical explanation or where would the logic be taking as I’m thinking of an answer, because sometimes, you know, you do get a question you’ve never had before, and maybe it’s just a different way of thinking about something, you know? But then if you don’t know, I’m always like, Oh, I’ll go and find out and I’ll and I’ll email you or I’ll text you. I like to WhatsApp. I really I’m not a big fan of emails. I’d much prefer to WhatsApp people than anything else.

Me too.

So now, now you’ve got this mentoring and online course that you’ve started and remind me if I’m about this. I said to you, Are you going to open a practice? And you said, Absolutely not. This is what I’m doing. Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. No, I have no interest in owning a practice.

Though, right? I wouldn’t write it off right now because I think you’d be an amazing you know, you’d have an amazing practice. But. But, but I get it. I get it. You know, in the same way as Jaz Gulati said, he definitely doesn’t want to practice because he’s gone into, you know, protrusive and all the things that he does. Yeah, but but go through. What is it? What is it? Is there, is there an element because I saw you actually visited a dentist a couple of days ago in Devon or whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there’s an element of face to face and there’s an element of online. Is that right?

Yeah. So I guess one of the.

Things I found incredibly valuable throughout my whole career is having mentors and having someone that can go and ask and go and talk to so and so I developed this program and it combines 1 to 1. And mentorship. So for treatment, planning for general questions with me, but also my treatment coordinator for the team because it’s not just the dentist. If you only focus on the dentist, then, um, then you know, I feel like you miss a massive part. Like the team is so important. So we’ll do, you know, Zoom calls and chat to the team as well. And my, my treatment coordinator is fantastic. And she comes on and, you know, she chats. She chats the team and we we help them, you know, look at their patient journey and really go through that. And then as well as all the clinical treatment planning. And then we have sort of a lecture element to it. So we have that level of knowledge. Um, and it sounds like it’s going to sound like a massive commitment, but then there’s group mentoring. So you’re part of this safe community where you know everyone and it really is a community, so it won’t be for everyone.

But that’s okay because we, we want we want people who have that like mindedness and want everyone else to do well and want to grow. And we celebrate our wins. We we we look at our hurdles and we dissect them as a group because you, you know, as you said, dentistry can be really isolating. And this is a way to get out of the four white walls. And then there’s the live, you know, going to practice. They come to my not my practice, but ace in Wimpole Street and with ads and they’ll come there. I go to go to their practice and then we have a we you know, we’ve organised a couple of dinners. We’ve got a live day at the end with live patients. So it’s trying to create a blended learning environment that’s not just a one day course where you may or may not put it into practice afterwards, but where you have that mentorship sort of six months and you know, I can help you. And our our aim is to get you getting you to do many more cases.

But in a safe.

And predictable way. So you.

Are.

You’re you’re really serving your patients in the best way. And also that growth, because I find so many people want to do clear aligners, but perhaps they’ve never spoken to patients about that value of treatment or, you know, they they don’t feel confident in planning with the software or, you know, whatever the barrier is. But actually having someone to hold your hand and say, it’s okay, let’s go forward together makes then changes. And, you know, even just having the confidence of, you know, to say yes to patients because you know that I’ll be there behind you or over your shoulder helping you get get to the right result is great. And it’s different from a treatment planning service because whilst I’m helping them treatment plan, I’m not just saying we’re going to do X, Y, Z. I’m saying we’re going to do X, Y, z because of A, B, C, So it’s that next level. So, you know, they they can go and they can. Everything I tell them they can and give them they can ten x it, you know they can grow and grow and grow.

Let me ask you a couple of unfair questions. Oh, good. Look, I’m looking for an aha moment. Yeah. Yeah. Around Invisalign. So, look, of course, it’s a massive question. We could. We could talk about it for four hours longer. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure your course is a few more hours than that. But. But, but, but the bigger heart in your, in your mind that clicked. Something that clicked. I asked Sam Jethwa this about veneers and and he said to me really interesting about the occlusion, not just being inside out, but being outside in. And, and yeah, it was a Southerner half for me because I hadn’t never thought of outside in. Yeah, I’d always thought of it inside. Inside out. Yeah. Around Invisalign. Let’s start with I’m not looking for a sales one. I’m looking for a clinical one. Treatment. Planning one. What, What comes to mind when I say that?

Gosh. Um.

It’s unfair. So in.

Terms of.

A.

No, it’s not unfair. So actually, it’s it’s.

So I guess for me, what I.

Really used to think is I used to think that it was a displacement system. So where you’re just moving the crown from place to place and when you realise actually that’s not true, it’s a force.

Driven, it’s.

A force driven system. So now when I’m treatment planning, I plan where I want the teeth to finish and then I plan how I want the teeth, like the teeth. I’m looking at how the teeth are going to get there and like I’m looking at the forces that are going to be needed and I will overcome. I mean, honestly, I have one clincheck for the patient and I have one clincheck for me.

And clincheck for me is, you know, the teeth don’t look like they, like.

They’re in a straight line, in a straight position because I’ve over treated in some areas, not all areas, but it depends on the predictability of the movement, the correct movements appearing with it. Yeah. So, you know, most of my everything looks slightly torqued the wrong way because I know the line is going to struggle doing maybe doing, you know, expansion with proclamation. The two moves don’t work. So that staging and that that looking at it not just as a clincheck but that force like dissecting the forces behind it that has like changed complete approach and now I’m getting much much better results much more quickly and the patients are so much happier. I mean and a lot of my patients on five day changes and we’re finishing in one set of aligners, which is awesome. Like it’s awesome, but it’s because, you know, and I was blaming the patient, I was blaming the system and actually it was all my fault.

Because I wasn’t looking at the forces behind the system.

Properly. I mean, the biggest variable is that the plan, isn’t it? That is the biggest variable. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, but you can.

Plan and plan and plan. But if the patient doesn’t have them in the mouth, it’s not going to work. True.

True.

So yeah, so it’s like it’s half done, half of one, six, a dozen or the other. I think that’s the saying.

Yeah.

But you know, but that.

That’s that’s interesting. So the forces, you know, you’re saying to start with the end in mind and the particular forces on the particular teeth and the full understanding of that and the overcorrection piece where you’re asking it to do something, you know, rotation or extrusion or whatever it is, that’s difficult to overcorrect on the clincheck so that it manages to get aim for the stars. And yeah, so that yeah, that’s interesting. And what about on the, the selling side? Because I know when you’re super confident about something, it’s much easier to sell it because you’re just super confident about it. But, but how do you teach your, you know, your students. Do you ask them to go after the health benefits of straight teeth or do you assess the patient based on what you think is important to that patient and then hit them with those benefits, or how do you do it?

So there are two things I think are really crucial. One is to listen to the patient and actually listen to the patient and find out their why and chase that why a little bit. So why is this important and why and why and why? And I think it’s more important to find out the why than to chase the. Yes, I know. You know, I don’t I don’t like chasing lots of yeses. I like chasing the why. And then the other thing that ruins it is if you don’t look confident. So my biggest piece of advice.

Is for for.

Dentists is to take the photos, take the scan. If you’ve got one, put the photos on the screen and talk your talk to your patient through it and say, look, I’m seeing this. Are you seeing that? And think about it as a whole. And but but give yourself the space. Most of my patients don’t get a treatment plan when they’re in the chair. I say, look, I’m going to go away and think about everything we’ve said and I’m going to I’m going to come up with the ideal treatment plan for you. And then we have a zoom call a week or two weeks later, depending on how many other disciplines I’ve got to get a hold of and get an answer from. And when I come back to present the plan, I know exactly what I’m saying. I’ve thought it through. If I’ve needed to speak to mentors, I’ve spoken to mentors. So then when I’m talking to the patient about it, I’m not only in my super confident, but I’m super excited because I can already envision what’s going to happen at the end and the patient then picks up on that and they’re like, Yes, okay, Right. No, this is going to be good. And because I know their why, I’m tailoring the why into that treatment plan and only then am I bringing in my why. So your why is that? You want a nice smile for your wedding. That’s great. My why is, you know, your teeth are falling to pieces because your class to div two and you’ve got a restricted envelope of function. So you know you bring you then you focus on their why and then bring in your why. So you’re coming at it from both angles, but you separate it from that initial conversation later on. And I tell my patients when they come through the door that I might not be able to give them the answers that they want today, because if it’s complex, I want to go away and think about it so I can come up with the absolute best plan for them.

I bet you get massive word of mouth from your patients though, because they can feel that you care. You know, that’s much better than spending money on marketing, right?

Yeah. We have a lot of friends, family.

Mothers and daughters are.

Another one. Like, you know what I love? I love it when you’re.

Treating like husband and wife or, you know, any partners because and actually brothers and sisters as well. I have to say, siblings are another great one to treat at the same time because there’s this like level of competition between them. Yeah, Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And they’re like, I want to finish first. I want the best result. I want this, I want that. And you can really leverage it, Um.

Because, you.

Know, then they’re like, they’re so driven and each one is like keeping on top of the other one. It’s great. Like I’ve, it’s like a little bit bad playing.

One off the other, but it does work really, really well. I’ve been there.

I’ve been there with the same thing. Our times come nearly to an end. Um, we’re going to finish off with our usual questions that we ask all the guests. So. My one first fantasy dinner party. Three guests, dead or alive.

You know, this has actually been playing on my mind like the last three weeks because I hate this question. I was like, oh, it’s such a good question.

Matty did not want this answer to this question. He wouldn’t answer it.

I really feel him. I really, really feel that.

So did come up with an answer for you.

So the first person who I.

Would want is is J.D. Gleason or Jackie Gleason, who’s not not the actor, but he actually was.

The first guy.

In Australia to breed an Australian kelpie. And anyone who knows me knows I’ve got two dogs, Luna and Frank, who are Australian kelpies, and they are my absolute world.

But my God, are they challenging dogs?

They’re like border collies, but they’re sassy with it.

So I just think, you know.

Like going back to their roots and really understanding where they came from and what the thinking was about it and like how that then breeding went on would be one. It’s just so awesome to know and two would really just help me do better for the dogs because knowing, you know, just the, you know, the inside out and I’m really obsessed with my dogs, like really obsessed with him. At the weekend, we went to see some friends and they’re like.

Are you.

Dog owners? Are you dog parents? I was like.

Obviously we’re dog parents. They are my children.

So you got two of them? Two of the same breed?

Yeah. So they’re. Yeah, they’re two.

We’ve had Luna since she was a baby. And then we adopted Frank literally a year ago, a year and a month ago. And they are. They are a handful. A lovable handful.

But they’re very, very funny. Dog. Luna is like the sassiest.

Of just Googling it while you’re talking. Is it chocolate brown? The ones I’m looking at.

Yeah.

So Luna’s chocolate brown.

And then Frank is black.

And tan. So Luna is, like, really sassy. She’s really judgemental. So we were hiking at the weekend in Devon, and there’s a there’s a steep, really steep and the switchbacks and Luna would run up, run down, run up and then wait for you at the corner. And you knew she was like, Come on. I was like, I am walking as fast as I can.

I cannot walk any faster up this hill. Stop judging me. And then Frank’s just a complete goofball, like, complete goofball. He’s the funniest. Like, he’s just such a funny dog.

But anyway, so that’s why I’d want Jack.

Gleeson, because he is the person.

Who first decided.

To breed.

Kelpies and the second person is actually a mentor of mine who I speak to all the time. So Romano Clarke, He just because like, as I said, I love to geek out and him like when we’re together, we just really, really geek out. And I find it so fun just to really, really geek out on the biomechanics and the materials, everything. And it’s this really nice relationship we’ve got where we really bounce off each other. So I just and I really enjoy that. And then the third person would be my grandma who passed away when we were really young. But I have such wonderful memories of her. Me and my sister skipping down.

To the.

Newsagents in the village because she’d buy us a £0.10 packet of penny. The penny sweets. Do you remember those?

Is that your mum’s mum?

My dad’s mum.

And she, you know.

She had this really interesting history where she was born in Angola, grew up in Egypt, met my grandpa who was Scottish originally from Malta, however, and then moved to England. And, you know, I don’t she died when I was young and I don’t I never really got to talk to her about it or appreciate our heritage. And, you know, it’s something that’s sort of been lost within the family. So and and I just she was such a wonderful person. And I remember her being a wonderful person. But I don’t I feel now I could appreciate her being a wonderful person so much more because I’m older and I can remember and I can ask other questions I really want to ask.

It sounds like you’ve got like feelings but not details. And that’s what you want to get from her.

Yes, yes.

Yes, exactly. I need the detail.

That’s lovely. Yeah, you too. All right, let’s move let’s move on to Prav deathbed question. On your deathbed, got your friends and family around you.

Is this is this.

Three pieces of advice? Again.

This is the other one I’ve been really worried about.

The perfectionist is coming out now. Finally, one hour 44 into the podcast.

If you want to make Milly not sleep for a week, ask ask questions like these. Don’t tell my patients. So so one So.

I really, really suffered from imposter syndrome. So, you know, I was very I was really young when I started like educating. I was, you know, especially.

With you guys.

On Mini Smile Makeover. I was really young and, you know.

It was quite.

Daunting. But like you helping out the students and and you were a baby used one year out of university, but you’re still good at it. You were still good at it back then. You’ve got a real, real talent for teaching. I got to. I got to save that money. You really do.

But go on. Thank you. Thank you.

But gosh, But you know that imposter syndrome.

Makes you feel like the smallest.

Smallest person and you feel like a fraud and you feel like you’re lying to everyone. And actually you’re not lying to everyone. It’s just that you know how mentors can see something in you that perhaps you can’t see in yourself or a coach can see something in you that you can’t see in yourself. You know, trust other people when they say you’re good and that you can do it and you are meant to be here. So, you know, that would be my first piece of advice. The second piece of advice would be to take, to lead in and take on the challenges. So don’t be comfortable. And obviously you can have a comfort, a comfort Saturday every now and then.

But most of the time you want to be.

Uncomfortable, you want to be challenged. And you you know. So last year I actually reached out to a new coach because I wanted to to leave dentistry because I didn’t know why I wanted to leave dentistry.

But I was so fed up of going.

In to the practice. And I honestly thought that that that was my career in dentistry over. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to start. It’s going to sound so silly.

I wanted to start a pub, but instead of the.

Owners bringing the dogs, the dogs.

Brought the owners and so.

All the dogs would be off lead. They’d all be having fun and playing together. And, you know, the owners.

Is just sort of there.

But you can go interact with other dogs like that. I was so close to leaving and, you know, my dad owns a brewery, so I was like, Excellent, it’s going to work so well. Anyway, going through that coaching, what I realised is that I was really like bored. I had stopped pushing myself. Yeah, I was doing some more complex cases here and there, but and I was actually the funny thing is I was doing my masters at the time. I’m still doing my master’s, but I really, really felt I had stopped growing. And one of the one of the areas I’d stopped pushing myself in is that that education and mentoring other dentists. So now that’s why this year I’m really pushing, pushing that because I really lights my fire. I love it. It’s like the most rewarding thing, you know, ever. Um, apart from when Frank learned to sit for the first time, that was pretty.

Rewarding as well.

No, you know what I mean.

But so.

You know, and. And one of the things my coach told me was to push and lean into the things you find difficult because then you’re going to grow. And it was having the confidence to step out and do something by myself instead of, you know, always hiding behind, you know, a company. So that was what I found really difficult. And now that’s what I’m doing and I’m having a blast. I love it. Like I come, I work most nights and I come off and I’m like beaming. And so, you know, lean into the things that you find difficult. And then my third piece of advice is to have fun whilst doing it.

Because you can work and work and work and work. And if you’re not, you.

Know, we’re only here once. Like, I really don’t believe there’s something coming after. And that’s just my that’s my personal belief. But if we’re, you know, we’re only here once and you have to have fun. And so, you know, like with the burning the candle at both ends, like I wanted to study, but I wanted to party. So I’m going to do both. And, you know, I want to work, but I also want to go to Devon. So we’re going we’re going to drive late at night. We’re going to get there at like midnight and we’re going to do both.

Um, you know.

All these.

All these things that you that we.

Have to balance. And it’s hard. And I think the other thing is, is that it’s not always, you know, 5050 in relationships or fun and, and, and work etcetera, etcetera. Some weeks it’s going to be 1090, other weeks it’s going to be 6040, other weeks it’s going to be 7030. But on balance, you’re going to find that balance. And you know, I now go, well, I always quite a happy person, but I do feel like a lot of the time I’m almost like playing and just chatting.

And having fun.

So it doesn’t always feel like work. And sometimes it does, of course. Um, but, but, you know, I’m genuinely happy doing what I do and I’m genuinely happy with the balance I have. So that’s so, so important.

I love that. I love that. For someone who doesn’t like these questions, you had some pretty good answers there.

Honestly, that’s the 3 a.m.. 3 a.m. thinking. I’m joking.

Really? When did you qualify? 2015. 16?

Something like that. 2015?

Yeah. So I’ve been watching you since then, and it’s been a pleasure to watch. And and you’re right that that thing you said about when when someone can see something in you that you can’t see in yourself, I come across that problem sometimes, you know, talk, talk to someone and say something. And they don’t they haven’t got the confidence to to acknowledge it to themselves that they might be the right person for something. But I really look forward to seeing, you know, where where all of this takes you. And, you know, I know you’re going to cover for me at many Smile maker, but I can’t I can’t think of any one better to do that. You know, anyone would trust more to do that And and you know, considering that but really considering you’re only qualified. I know you feel like you’ve been bit you’re only qualified since then. It’s a massive achievement. So maybe one day you will get that doggy pub thing going as well. Why not? Well, we’ll see. It’s been a massive pleasure. It’s been a massive, massive pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. It’s been a long time coming as well. We were thinking of doing this for a while, but it’s been a long time coming and best of luck with the the author thing. If someone wants to check it out, what’s the website called?

So a line of confidence.co.uk or pop me a message on Instagram and we can set up a call because you know, we want to make sure I want to make sure it’s right for you as well and make sure that I can I can help and I can serve you and you know, and we can work well together. So having that having that call is sort of it’s sort of really, really nice because we get to introduce each other and really important. But yeah, through, through Instagram. What is your Instagram?

Morrison or Dr. Miller? Dr. Millie Morrison.

Yeah. I came.

Across a couple of a.

Couple of people on the team.

A couple of people on Mini Smile Makeover who’d signed up for, for your thing. And yeah, it was, it was cool. It was cool. Cool to hear what they had to say about it. Really, really proud of you, sweetheart. Well done.

Thank you.

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

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

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

And don’t forget our six star rating.

We thought, well, what if it’s the back of. It’s the back that always moves, isn’t it? When you put a bleaching, when you put any appliance in the mouth, the front is very stable because the teeth are quite long. But it’s the back where you know, where you’ve sometimes got the teeth that are leaning in or you’ve got the short clinical crowns. That’s where and the back moving just lets saliva in. So thought. All right, well, what about an attachment to stop the back from moving? It was simple as that. Like no, no, no, no. Nothing deeper than that.

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.

He is co owner of one of the biggest whitening systems on the market. He is the course coordinator of Mini Smiles with Dipesh Palmer and he is a fellow podcaster being the co-host of the wonderful Dental Leaders podcast. Yes, listeners, it’s Payman. Langroudi. Payman.

Well, it’s an absolute honour to have you guys.

To be here, man.

I call you The Godfather, the Godfather of Whitening and of podcasts. Oh really? I hate the word legend, but you are a legend. Truly a legend. Uh, probably some of my viewers are too young, You know, being a Parkinson who used to hockey. Yeah, literally. You are. I think the Parkinson just smooth elegance in how you do things. And it’s interesting.

You say that because I always think Stewart is the most verbose guys I’ve ever come across. Man, when I listen to. I’m a fan of your podcast, by the way, dude.

Payman You are a gentleman and a scholar. You are the listener, then? Payman I’m the one.

I’m the one from London.

But all this time I thought it was Hatton that was downloading the London.

He’s not in London anymore. That’s the problem. Yeah.

I’m always double clicking. Clicking everything. But no, it’s the absolute, absolute gentleman. You are. And I’m really, really grateful because I know you’re busy, busy, busy, busy man.

But podcasting, I mean, we’re always looking for tips, as you can probably imagine. Having listened to our podcast, you probably you can probably think of a few tips you could give us. But how did you how did you get into it? And and what tips would you have for budding Dental podcasters out there?

So yeah, we got, you know, Prav and I were both talking about starting a podcast together, like we’re separately. So he was going to do one for his for himself and I was going to do one. I was just a big fan of podcasts myself. And then because Prav does some marketing for for us, you know, we talk a lot. He’s one of my best friends anyway. I’ve known him for since 15 years. And we said, Oh, maybe we do one together. And, you know, for me, I’m, I’m quite good with some things, but I’m really bad with other things. So I am quite good with, with, with creative stuff. I’m quite good with, you know, vision and all that, but I’m not really good at like execution and Prav. He’s the opposite. He’s really super, super good at getting things done. And obviously because he’s got a marketing background and understood the basics of you’ve got the product itself, which is the podcast, and then you’ve got the distribution of the product. And I knew he would be really good at that. I knew any time we didn’t have a guest, the two of us could just talk and we went for it. And you know, he’s one of those guys. If he wants to do something, he finds the best person in the world to ask about how to do that thing. And he he he said, look, I’m going to find the world’s best podcast coach. I said, is there such a thing? And he found a guy. We paid him $1,000 for a phone call. It was like a it was a half an hour phone call where he basically said, Look, just do one. That’s all He said, honestly, That’s all he said. He said, listen, go away.

Record One voice could give. I give. Yeah, basically just do one Stuart’s eyes.

But hang on. He’s a medic. And you’re a dentist.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that’s correct. Because he’s a medic, isn’t he?

He did. He qualified as a doctor. He never really worked as a doctor, but, yeah, so we found this guy and the guy said, Look, do one and then come back and we’ll have another phone call, another $1,000, and I’ll tell you what to do after that. And then so we did one, and then we went back and then he said, look, this is the way to launch it. This is the way to these are the people you need. And, you know, again, neither of us wanted to spend too much time on it. And we said, look, we want to just do the podcast and let other people handle other bits. And so, you know, there’s an editor, there’s a guy who uploads it onto libsyn for the all the platforms. I personally handle the social media because I wanted to I wanted to try that so that I could then boss around my other social media managers for enlightened and Mini Smile Makeover. Um, but you know, we have conversations. The biggest tip I’d give, dude, is consistency. Consistency in all of content. Yeah. You know whether whether you do it once a week, once a fortnight, whether you post once a day or six times a day, they say on, on you know tick. Talk or whatever. Consistency is the key. The audience likes the rhythm. And then once you could do consistency, then you find, you know, your audience finds you.

If you can, you be consistently inconsistent. Payman Is that an approach that you could take? Yeah.

That’s an approach that won’t work very well.

If it works very well. But it’s certainly an approach we’ve employed. But whether it’s worked well or not, I think the listening figures of you are a testament to that. So Payman mean, we would love to indulge ourselves in a meandering chat through Dental podcasting for the rest of the evening, but I suppose we should ask you a little bit about your career in dentistry. Can I ask you a little bit about your, your journey in dentistry, really how your career started and briefly up until where you are now and you’ve now become essentially the major tooth whitening provider and also a major dental podcaster. So how did you go from, you know, to to that?

So I qualified from Cardiff with three well, two other guys and my wife who The Who later became my wife. Um, I live. I lived with those other two guys for five years in university and they became my partners in Enlightened. Um, but we, we were dentists, right? So we did. We made sure we did in the same town back then you could, um, and then we were associates. And then I was involved. My, my boss was a guy called Nick Mahindra. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across him. He, he certainly had. He had this thing where he would, he would jack open people’s bites like by a lot edentulous patients. Back then it was, it was thought of as very dangerous to open the bite by more than, you know, two millimetres. But he was like he was just totally opening them up, you know, he was he was getting these amazing results, like facial results. These people were completely constricted, you know, completely collapsed. And he’d be opening them up and then you’d wait another sort of two weeks, and suddenly their faces would relax. And he called this thing the Dental facelift. And so I was his vet when he was going through this process, and he had the insight to hire a PR company. Um, and they got this story into the Daily Mail of this woman who’d been to him and the before and after. It was just a really profound before and after, like really weird totally changed her face. And it this one article in the Daily Mail completely changed the guy’s life like the phone didn’t stop ringing for six months continuously just you put it down and it would ring again, put it down, it would ring again.

And he ended up selling that practice and going to Harley Street and then only doing that treatment and then doing it on Dental patients and all of this. But it had a real effect on me. And he was he was a really good guy. He sort of involved me in every part of his business, you know, wherever I wanted to go, he would let me go into the numbers, everything. And I just noticed, man, you know, the press, you know, like it’s a it’s a massive thing. And so when it came to starting our own business, you know, we’d been associates. We were associates, all of us were associates. And we were skiing somewhere. And we said, Hey, why don’t we do like a practice that only does teeth whitening and, you know, it’s a teeth whitening centre, you know, that was the idea. And I thought maybe these city guys would, would, would come and have their teeth flossed by a hygienist and scale and polish and, and bleaching only that, nothing else. Those are the only treatments we were going to offer. And we said we were on this chairlift in Canada and that’s where we said, Well, should we call it or we call it enlighten, you know, enlighten me or whatever, all these sort of ideas. So then we got back and there was four of us. So these two guys who used to live with and my wife who was, you know, going to become my wife soon, and we said, Look, we’re four dentists.

Let’s open four practices all with the same brand. And back then it was quite, you know, even then branding wasn’t a thing, especially branded dental practices wasn’t a thing at all. Um, and we said, All right, we’ll open 1 in 1 in the middle, one in the West end, one in West London, one in North London, whatever. And we’ll call all of them enlightened. And the thing that the sort of the thought in my head was, what is the story? Because I remember being in on those PR meetings with those PR people and they kept on saying, all right, so Nick, what’s the story? What are we what’s going to be the headline of the story? And I kept on thinking, you know, what’s the story? What’s the story? And and so I decided, look, the story has to be some amazing new technology comes from the US for the first time to the UK in these and it’s in London and there it is. You know, it’s enlightened practices that do it. So we thought, all right, well, let’s go and find the best teeth whitening product in the world and see, you know, where is it and find it. The Internet just about started, so we Googled it. I don’t think we Googled it. I think we Yahoo! Did it. And this company came up called Bright Smile. Yes. Do you remember them? Yeah, with.

White.

With white. It was a beautiful light. It was. It was it was about five years before Zoom existed and they were making all sorts of claims. And it was funny because it turned out they they owned a duty free shops all over the world. They were the world’s biggest owner of duty free shops. And the guy had decided he was going to go into teeth whitening now and they’d raised like £25 million or something. And so anyway, we went we went over and said, Yeah, we want to buy four of your machines for four of our centres, you know, for practices. And the guy, you know, he was one of those proper American businessmen. You know, I remember being very uncomfortable in the meeting, 27 year old kid, and the guy said, look, you know, your your timing is excellent because, you know, you’re really early on this, but in a way, you’re way too early because we haven’t even got an office in New York yet, let alone an office in Europe anywhere, let alone an office in London. And he actually said he his parting shots were, you know, you guys, you’re great. You’re dentists, which is great. But we don’t need dentists. Right now. Right now we need distributors. And I don’t know what the hell he meant. I don’t know what that meant at all. So I went back to my wife’s brother, who was one of these McKinsey Hotshots, and I and I said to him, he said this thing about distributor. And he went, he went, Look, you know, in the end it’s just a different business plan. He’d written the original business plan. Anyway, he went, Yeah, listen, go back with this one, which is like, you want to be their distributor, right? So we went back and said, Yeah, yeah, guess what? We’ve changed our plan.

Now we want to sell the machine. We want to sell it all over the UK. And anyway, we’d never got that deal. Someone else got the deal, but we were so invested in it psychologically that we went and found the competitor of theirs, which was this ugly looking. It looked like a vacuum cleaner with a tube coming out of it with a crappy lights on it. Like, you know, the bright smile light was this amazing thing. They’d gone to idea. Do you know about idea that like these product design like the best product design house in the world you go there and you say look hard time. I bet you’ve had an idea for this, like interdental brush that comes in from every angle. Like if you ever want to get that product out there, go to idea. Yeah, give them like 250 grand and say, look, draw some pretty pictures. And they’d gone to idea and made the bright smile light. I don’t know Stuart if you’ve come across it, but it was like this robot thing that the head kind of came out and it was blue light. And then they had all this research that said, Yeah, the light makes a big difference. And then they opened on day one. They opened like 11 huge teeth whitening centres all over America, like in the major cities. And so anyway, we didn’t get the deal. Someone else got the deal. Um, this guy called Malcolm and he started on day one with like London cabs or with small signs on them. And we were like this other player, man, you know, this number two. And it was, it was interesting, man, because if you remember, teeth whitening was completely illegal at that point. Yeah, it must have.

Been so many people that told you it could never work.

Yeah, my parents, my parents were the main nightmare because my dad’s an accountant. Right? Very risk averse. And he read the business plan. He got to the page and said legality. And he said, I think that you’ve made a mistake on the business plan. It says your product is illegal. I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it happens to be. And he said, You’re going to give up dentistry to do something illegal. I said, Yeah, man. He was like, I can’t support this. He was he was really against it. He was properly and my mum, the fact she’d like struggled to get me into dental school, the fact that I was going to stop doing dentistry and, you know, to do this was was a big deal too. But anyway, what we had to do was we had to find carrier gel that didn’t have peroxide in it and then get the dentist to call up the local chemist and get peroxide, you know, chemical, mix it in with the carrier gel you could buy. Dental was allowed to buy peroxide chemical for whatever he wanted. Mix it up with this carrier gel, put it on the tooth, and then we were directly copying bright smiles model. The model was a Xerox model where they give you the machine for free and then charge you to turn it on. But we didn’t have the technology to do that, so I had to find someone to stick these card readers into the machines. And we were giving the machine for free and selling these cards for £190. And interestingly, the price of Enlightened has never changed since that date, always been that price has never gone up in the last 22 years.

The dentist would have to go to the pharmacy and have the gel made up some kind of almost like, well.

Like the peroxide liquid peroxide liquid. We’d send them this powdery stuff that was like a carrier and they’d mix the peroxide liquid with the powder and put it on the teeth and, you know, gingival protection. Lots of burns everywhere. That’s exactly.

As topical. Topical is exactly the same. But I remember a bright smile. There was a lot of relapse. It was fantastic packaging. It was the machine was great. I do remember a lot of relapse when it first came out.

It was just dehydration.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Fantastic. Packaging goes a long way, you know.

Just I know that packaging.

Right? And you can.

Put my glasses back on it. But so it was actually so it was in Dental Dental school days where you actually the passion was, you know, ignited then, would you say?

Or we used to joke about it in dental school that we were going to go into business together and we’re going to have a brilliant business and all that and.

We still together, obviously you and your wife, all four of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you share the workload or who’s. No. Can I ask who, who does what? Or is there a silent partner or. Yeah.

My my wife and indie are silent partners now. And myself and Sanjay. So.

So what was the ultimate what was the goal? The goal was, was to give up dentistry and do this full time. And I know obviously that’s the outcome now, but are you working at the same time? No, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The goal wasn’t to give up dentistry. I mean, I was I was very happy being a dentist. I used to enjoy being a dentist a lot, but the workload took over. It became very clear that I had to give up dentistry. That was the problem. And, you know, one of us had to it ended up being me. And then, you know, I talked to these start ups now and they’re talking about know on day one they raised £3 million. I mean, it.

Took the first few years were the toughest years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first few years were terrible, man. Really terrible. We had, you know, constant cash crises, constantly having to go to my parents and beg for, you know, I need £3,000 by tomorrow. So it was a really tough time. And look, these machines that we were putting out at the time, I think we were they were retailing for 6500 pounds, but we were getting them for 4500 because we were buying so many of them. And I remember when we got to 60, 70 machines and I remember looking at the how much we owed and the amount we owed to these machines was way more than the value of my flat at the time. And and the mortgage for the machines at the time was like it was like £17,000 a month. We were spending on on the machines on their own. And one day, Sanjay, my partner, Sanjay, he’s he’s the sort of real driver of the the business. He turned around to me and said, look, you know, he’s a Patel, Right. Good with numbers. He said, look, the more machines we’re putting out, the more trouble we’re getting in. Right. And up to that point, I was like, all we need is like another 50 machines and everything’s going to be all right. And he said that we’re just getting deeper and deeper into into crisis. Every time you put a machine out, it’s costing us. It’s not making us money because we weren’t contracting the dentist to any number of treatments. It was just like, take this machine, do what you can with it. And so, you know.

How close were you to that? We’re going to give up. How close were you?

Oh, no. Many times we were we were on the brink. I mean, once the bank we missed the bank payment and the bank sent in these turnaround accountant types who you were paying, who were charging you like another ten grand for these guys, you’re like, You’ll pay us later. Um, and I remember them telling us, Look, if something big doesn’t happen in the next month, we’re going to shut you down, The bank’s going to shut you down. And I remember that was the day before Dental showcase. And we, you know, Dental showcase. It’s funny thing. Now you go to one of these shows, you look around and many. Any of the companies at Dental Showcase are staking a huge amount on that show because, you know, like this, it’s coming up in two weeks time. Yeah. Okay, now. Now we can afford it a little bit, right? We’re spending about 60, £70,000, six figures.

Some of them six figures.

Oh, yeah, some of them, Yeah. I’m going to Cologne on on Wednesday. The stands in Cologne. I’ve spoken to the people from Nobel Biocare and from the the German companies go really huge in Cologne. The the classics. They’ve spent €1 million sometimes on a on a four day show. You know, it’s a double double floored and all of that. But they’ve got money. Some of them have got money. We didn’t have money, right? So we were staking everything on this show. And I remember I remember fighting for our lives at the show. Like if people didn’t buy these, we were at this point we were selling machines or these other they were like sort of like cure machines that doubled up as teeth whitening with these little sort of stupid microphone stand thing. It was. I remember Sanj telling me he said, Dude, if we don’t sell like 12 machines at this show, that’s the end. We’re finished. Okay? And then we had an amazing we had like a, like a record breaking show. We sold like 35 machines at that show. And, you know, like the Agony and Ecstasy was just it was massive. The what it taught me was the line between success and failure is very, very, very thin. You know, that.

Was a turning point. That was after that you were saying, I presume?

No, it only started turning around when we did the evolution system, which is the one we just launched the fourth version of it. And that was really because we were in light activated, right? And we were in light activated for years before Zoom existed. And then what happened was that bright smile company went bust. Zoom basically bought all of their assets and all of their patents and everything. And then Zoom came from nowhere, like as a as the big thing. And the marketing strength of discus Dental at the time was amazing. They’d already had $200 million of sales in the US before they even landed in the UK. And so we had by that point a few customers. But then Zoom came along and we realised, look, the light does nothing. At that point we realised the light does nothing. For the first three four years we were convinced the light was the key, but someone convinced me to put, you know, a bit of cover half the light over with some aluminium foil and I realised oh shit, the light does nothing. And, and so then when we came to.

Like cannabis growing guess, Yeah.

I mean the number of times in period you’ve had something like that right. Yeah. So it came to, it came to pivoting right out of the light and Sanj was my partner. He’s one of these guys. He just wants everything to be perfect, you know, He doesn’t care how much it costs or what we have to go through. It’s got to be perfect. And he turned around to me and said, Look, dude, I didn’t enjoy being number two at all this time. It doesn’t matter whether we make money or not, whether we go bust or not, let’s be the best home whitening system around. And, you know, tray whitening. We hadn’t done tray whitening at that point, so we’re now going to do tray whitening. And so we looked at it for about a year and we said, Look, what is tray whitening? It’s. It’s the tray, right? It’s the gel. It’s the impression. And it’s desensitises. At the end of the day, those are the those are the four areas that you have to really look at.

Why? Why your trays so good? Every talks about your trays. He even did a few before. You know, moving away from John. Why? Is it because you do everything in house or you.

Do everything in house?

Yeah, but is that the secret?

That’s not the reason. No, no. What happened was we. We met a guy called Guy Rod Kirthi in the US who said, look, I’ve got this new tray that that that really is a better tray that you can do tetracycline cases with. Up to that point, you can do tetracycline. And all he was doing is he was increasing the pressure on vacuum formers by covering over the holes. And we said, look that’s that’s not sustainable. He was he was selling a book on how to do this. That was his interest selling that book. And we told him, look, the thing that’s going to work well is if we can just make these trays for dentists rather than teaching them how to make the trade themselves. And so we we. It was the first time, really, that a bleaching product was sold with the tray as well as part of it. And the results were just sort of were mind blowing to us at the time. It was just like it was just the first time you could see really white teeth, although sensitivity was also through the roof. I mean, we used to have to give patients painkillers throughout treatment, you know, from sometimes one week before treatment and one week after treatment and throughout the whole treatment because the sensitivity was so, so, so high. You know, back then, we really didn’t understand bleaching gels at all.

Everyone talks about digital flow and all this. You basically mastered the flow of whitening, haven’t you? Now, you know, would you say or know in terms of I’ve seen the Evo four, is it called Evo four? Yeah. And you’ve seen to that that pathway both for you, for the clinician and for the patient seems to be really quite perfect or. No.

Perfect is a big word.

We’re easy. Simple. That’s what everybody wants.

Yeah. Although, although our focus is the patient, not not the dentist, you know, the dentists complain to us all the time about the bits of the treatment. Our focus is the patient. You know, what we realised is realise is a big word as well, because I don’t think it’s necessarily true for everyone. When you look at Prem Boutique, he managed to go on price against the big guys and win. Yeah. Um, whereas we what we thought was there’s no way we can take on the big guys on price. So the only thing we can do is go on quality. And so we just obsessively trying to make each bit better all the time, every time we do a new evolution. So this is either towards the fourth evolution. It’s when we make a big break from what we’ve done before. So we were constantly changing all the time. Everything. I mean, my my partner, Sanjay, is just he’s just that he’s wired that way, constantly trying to improve everything.

Um, but basically you just get people, you know, to try it out, give us the answer. How do you do that? How do you go do.

A lot of split arch testing? So one thing on the left, one thing on the right, sometimes you can’t do that because either you haven’t got the patience or, you know, you just can’t. I mean, we now we’ve got attachments in the trays and you can’t you can’t split arch test attachments on the tray. It just doesn’t doesn’t work. But yeah, we’ve got we’ve got 6 or 7 sort of very close dentists who help us and show us sequential photos. And then every time a new gel comes, I mean, we get contacted a lot by every single manufacturer and try my gel. Every time a new gel comes along, we try it. And to be very frank with you guys, you know, I try it myself one night and I’d say 80% of them I reject after that first night because either it hurt too much. The teeth didn’t change colour at all or white spots came up. And I know with enlightened gel, none of those three things happen, you know, regularly. So if it happens on the first night with the first gel, that gel just gets thrown out. So then so then the other 20% that passed that test, then we try it with patients. We try it left and right with our existing gels.

Let me just come back to that every second. So that’s quite a big advantage in the gel that you’re you’re you supply. What do you think it is about those other gels that caused those issues you described?

So one big thing with peroxide gel is that it’s volatile. Yeah. So it’s the reason why it makes teeth white is because it’s constantly breaking down. It turns out the secret is to have a gel that’s very stable before it comes out of the syringe, a very stable in the syringe and then very unstable when it comes out of the syringe. And that’s quite a tightrope. Um, and then, you know, you know, when you’ve got no control over how long ago the gel was made, what, what, what sort of conditions it were stored in. As, as the gel breaks down, it becomes acidic and acidic. Gels. They end up causing all the complications of teeth whitening. So. So sensitivity, white spots, chalkiness, opacities. All of that stuff comes from acidic gel. So, you know, we’ve all come across that situation, right? You put the the, you give the patient the gel, they come back massive sensitivity, no whitening. And that’s because I mean, yeah, they could be predisposed because of their bruxism or whatever but generally it’s because that gel severely broken down, it’s become very acidic, the concentration has gone right down, but also the PH has gone right down. So some gels break down in the syringe very quickly, others don’t. And so we’re after the ones that don’t break down the syringe. And then you’ve got the viscosity solubility kind of equation. So you want it to be viscous enough so that when saliva gets in, it doesn’t, you know, immediately denature it. But also you want it to be not viscous enough, sort of watery enough that oxygen can get out of it and the radicals can get out of it and it can penetrate, you know, get. Into the nooks and crannies, if you like, of the two. So those are two variables. And then you’ve got the desensitises. We try and put the minimum amount of desensitises into our jails and have external desensitises.

What would you recommend? What’s your go to external desensitiser?

We have one which is a HEMA based Desensitises HEMA fluoride and benzalkonium chloride as the main desensitiser we use. And then we have a hydroxyapatite toothpaste that we use two weeks before bleaching. So from impression day, the patient brushes with that toothpaste. It’s a fluoride fluoride hydroxy apatite and potassium nitrate to.

Dumb it down for anatomy. What’s the name of the product? Those were some big chemicals you mentioned there. What’s the name of the product? Is it a what’s it called? The HEMA based Desensitiser you recommend?

We call it Enlightened Seal.

Enlightened seal. That’s that trips off the tongue better than It’s quite nice. Yeah.

And the hydroxy appetite toothpaste, we call it enlightened serum.

Enlightened serum.

And how long is that? This two week program before you start whitening. When did that start? Is that is that recent or is that always been the case? I out of touch her?

Yeah, that started in 2009. Wow. Yeah. So so the evolution system we started in 2006. Yeah. Evolution two was 2009. Evolution three was 2012. And now this is Evo four, which is, Wow, it’s been 11 years since we changed it properly. Changed it. And what the big change that’s happened in that time is digital and it’s a nightmare right now. Now our lab is in house and it’s difficult because you can see digital, the wave of digital coming through like it was. It was about a third of our impressions were scans, and now it’s become half of our hands, half scans, half impressions. And that means you need to separate, you know, entities in your lab to handle the physical and digital. And the digital ones are a lot easier to handle because you don’t have to pull them up and all that. But we make tighter fitting bleaching trays on stone models and we do on printed models. And the reason is the stone models gas permeable. So, you know, we’re dealing with gas, we’re dealing with pressure and suction. And when the model itself is gas permeable, that helps a lot to get the the blank to really adapt properly to it. So with the digital, we’re trying everything. We’ve tried to print holes into the models. We’ve tried maybe 25 different resins, we’ve had three different types of printers in the lab. We’ve certainly improved it a lot. We’re doing manipulations on the on the the, you know, the scans themselves make it 5% smaller, 5% bigger. We’re doing something with the bell effect. Do you know what I mean by that? No. See, you got your tooth, and then you’ve got your. The gums and the alveoli. Right. And what tends to happen is as as the blank comes onto the tooth and then you’ve got the gums, it pulls it away from the gingival margin as the more pressure you put pulls it away. So we’ve been trying to sort of undercut under the teeth so that it pulls it towards the gingival margin.

It’s amazing. I mean, you have a phenomenal product and the amazing thing, you’re constantly, constantly developing and and it’s good for us to know because, you know, it’s it’s the ignorance that we all have as dentists is like, oh, this is just a product. Nobody knows the amount of hard work, dedication, innovation that you. You know, it’s it’s it’s same thing as a dental practice. You know, why am I paying all this money? Because, you know, we’re providing all this service products, and sometimes you just need somebody to say, hang on, this is like the eureka moment for saying, hang on, there’s more to this than just a box.

Yeah. And especially outside of a, you know, breakthrough. Yeah. There’s been no breakthrough in teeth whitening since its inception, right? Since since it started. No real breakthrough. I mean, okay, we got to the point of being able to guarantee results in 2006 that that was that was a massive breakthrough that you could you could say we could say that if your patients don’t get to be one or whiter, we’ll give you a free kit. You know, that was that was amazing. But the technology itself, there’s been no change at all, real change. Um, our understanding of the technology has got more but no quantum leap, you know, And in a way that’s what keeps me up at night, right?

Because that’s what we do every morning. Yeah.

No, but keeps me up at night like it’s some, there’s some genius sitting in in Korea right now. Yeah. Working on some sort of nanotechnology thing. Yeah. That looking at a way of doing it, that that could be, you know, twice as fast. Half the price, you know, half the sensitivity. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could happen while it hasn’t happened. We’re working on marginal gains on the current technology and the current technology is gels, trays, desensitises impressions. You know, um, it’d be amazed that the standard of the impressions that come in that we get a lot of amazing ones and then we get some really bad ones too. Yeah.

Did you do that? What’d you do?

Welcome to retake. We also I mean, right now the lab is, is is asking 5% of all the impressions to retake. That’s not bad. But it’s a nightmare for everyone. It’s pain for you guys.

But 5%.

Yeah, but it’s a nightmare for everyone right now. The dentist gets very annoyed. Yeah, yeah, we’ve done that. And then he has to call up his patient and say, come back for another impression. Makes him look bad. I think it’s got something to do with alginate, dude. You know, because. Because we recommend alginate. We supply the alginate. It’s a very stable alginate. It’s a five day stable alginate. Yeah, but because it’s alginate, people get their head into alginate mode where they’re not really worried about it so much. Maybe it’s that obviously people are running late. There’s all sorts of reasons why, right?

You Stuart, this is Stuart’s speciality first day.

When did Prosthodontic training? Um, that’s what we spent. We spent the first two days learning how to take a proper alginate. And you, like you say, it’s kind of we were talking about, you know, does it matter? It’s an algebra. I remember the consultant saying to me, the punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. And he was kind of saying that these little simple things that you think you’ve got, right, you don’t. That’s the stone in your shoe that will ultimately wear you down. So get it right. Learn how to get it right. Nothing is frustrating, as you know, being asked to get the patient back, as you say, for another impression. And one of the good tips for a lower offer you get the air blows in the lower is to get a big wedge of it on a little, take a dollop of alginate on your gloved finger, hold the lower lip back and rub it into the gum before you see the tray, the gum around, the lower incisors and the alginate binds to the alginate, doesn’t it? And that gives you a nice little labial sulcus rather than the big classic air blow you get around. The lower lip is often a site for that and obviously rubbing it into the fissures as well. It’s quite handy.

With with either for we’ve shortened the tray so the tray no longer goes to the sevens, it stops at the sixes. And the reason was we were getting so many drags in, the sixes in the sevens, sorry, both in impressions and in scans. The sevens obviously difficult to get to. And and also, you know, the back of the tray, you know, the longer it is, the more likely it is to move. So we’ve the tray just to avoid that, you know, because like 10%. Yeah.

What do you think of these, um, thermoplastic trays? Payman Are you a fan of those, the ones that you kind of, you warm, you dunk them a bit hot water and you kind of mould them to the, the shape of the mouth? Is that something you recommend or do you prefer a bit of space around your, your alginate to capture. A bit of land space around the teeth, more like the thumb.

I think the thermoplastic states have have trays, have a place, but not in dental practices over, over over the counter applications of that. And we’re certainly looking at that because, you know, outside of Europe, it’s legal to go with, you know, up to 6% hydrogen peroxide. I mean, as it turned out, thermoplastic trays themselves, the ones you heat up, boil and bite didn’t turn out to be the best ones that we found. We found we found ones that you don’t have to boil that form a lot better. They’re just sort of a rubbery material that you really can put into the teeth. And I know right now, because of Brexit, Procter and Gamble are doing kind of a push to make it legal in the UK to sell 6% over the counter. Um, I guess it’s a way of getting into Europe with the crest strips and all of that. So we’re certainly, we’re working very hard on, on, on finding an over-the-counter system that makes teeth very white or as white as possible in case that happens in Europe. But also for us to be able to sell in the US and abroad.

Can pick you up on two things. Payman Just two things I just wanted to ask you about there. And first thing is we’ll come back to crest strips because I have a number of patients that go out to the States and they come back with crest strips and say what great results they get with these and they’re only $40 or something and you can’t get them in the UK. But they’re, you know, patients are finding ways to get them sent across. But when we come back to that but what what was interesting what you were saying is you would you guarantee the results and now what is your protocol, your whitening protocol that you recommend to dentists to use to get the guaranteed results that you describe?

So it’s about the the impression, the trade, the gel and the desensitises. We optimise all of those. And right now with the zero four, it’s a it’s a three week at home treatment. So we do we supply the impression material, we ask for that impression or the scan we make the tray while the patient waits for the tray. They use the hydroxy appetite that the enlightened serum to desensitise. And that also reduces things like white spots as well, because it’s a hydroxy appetite toothpaste. And then the new protocol is the first week, night time at the lower concentration, which is the 10%, the second week, night time at the higher concentration. So we call the first week condition, the second week whiten, and then the third week day time, one hour a day. And we call that blast. That’s the hydrogen peroxide. And we’ve been really careful this time to make it more patient friendly so that you don’t have to bother with the concentrations with the patient. You know, they’re labelled the biggest thing on the on the syringe is one, two and three, you know, week one, week to week three. And for some reason, I don’t know, it’s probably a historical thing. Most other systems that one syringe lasts like three days for some reason.

Whereas we’ve always from the beginning we said, look, one syringe, one week, it’s sort of obvious, right? So, so once it’s three, three weeks, three syringes and they’re called week one, week to week three. And the only thing the patient has to remember is week one and two is night time. Week three is one hour a day. And then we have attachments on the trays. So on the sixes we build in attachments, the little composite attachments, just like Invisalign and and the dentist makes, you know, puts Flowable composite into there. And then when the patient uses, it clicks into place. It’s like bond composite, just like you would with Invisalign. The tray clicks into place. And what we find is when the attachments are used, you get you get much more predictable whitening at the GINGIVAL margin. And also the patients and I’ve treated them myself, the patients who started out without attachments and then it didn’t work out very well. Then we stuck the attachments on and we talked to those patients. The patients say they’re much more comfortable with the attachments because, you know, the biggest thing with whitening, the biggest problem with whitening is para function and bruxism. Definitely the biggest issue by a long, long shot. So, you know, I’ve looked at 3000 failures and I’d say three quarters of those were due to parafunctional bruxism.

And the, you know, the patient grinds their teeth, saliva gets in gel escapes, they tend to have more sensitivity than everyone else. They tend to have thinner enamel as well. And so, you know, one, one realisation I’ve come to you guys, you guys probably understood this instinctively, right? It’s not that the patient is a bruxism or isn’t like in a binary way. You know, we all, we all at times grind our teeth within a night’s sleep. We grind our teeth. And so the other thing is, you know, how can you tell if the patient is a cyst or not? For me, looking at the teeth is kind of a bit historical. Yeah, like if it’s some 26 year old who just had a kid and now she’s bruxing, the teeth will still look amazing. They. Teeth don’t look worn yet. So I’d say a muscle examination and a tongue examination is the best sort of indication of current bruxism. And so bruxism are the big problem with bruxism. We sort of try and train from the beginning, notice the patients of bruxism and tell them, look, it might take a bit longer, we do a bit more daytime whitening with the bruxism rather than Night-Time.

The idea is. And whose idea was that? You know, the composite. Whose idea?

It was mine. It was mine. But. But, you know, they’re not. All the good ideas are mine. That one happened to be mine.

And literally, based on trying our guess.

As you said, it was, where it started was the scans. We couldn’t make the trays as tight on the printed models. And we said, What’s the way of doing it? We’ve tried so many things. We’ve tried manipulating the model, scoring the models, changing everything, changing up our pressure formers, increasing the pressure in the pressure formers, printing holes into the models, trying everything to make the printed model as good as the stone. And then we thought, Well, what if it’s the back of it’s the back that always moves, doesn’t it? When you put a bleaching, when you put any appliance in the mouth, the front is very stable because the teeth are quite long. But it’s the back where you know, where you’ve sometimes got the teeth that are leaning in or you’ve got the short clinical crowns. That’s where and the back moving just let saliva in. So we thought, All right, well, what about an attachment to stop the back from moving? It was simple as that. Like, no, no, no, no. Nothing deeper than that. That’s a good.

Idea. I’ve previously used situations where you’ve got very discoloured teeth in certain spots. Say, for example, there’s a little, you know, brown spot or something like that. Maybe Icon has diminished the need for this, but I would tend to take bond on a little bit of composite to the brown spot, then take my impression so that the the reservoir would be a bit deeper in that area with a view to some gel sitting on there a bit longer. That’s interesting my my theory but it seemed to seem to work I think in a sample size of about six. But yeah, it seemed to work. But it sounds a bit like, you know, it sounds like you’ve taken that idea to to a degree. And and you know what.

I find interesting, Stuart, is that that every dentist has a couple of hacks, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got some dentists who’ve got loads of hacks and they become teachers like, you know, like Artem, you know, or Depeche, you know. You know, if you ask Depeche, he’s got like 30, 40, super duper original hacks. Yeah, but every dentist has a couple of hacks. And, and it’s interesting when asked the younger ones and obviously they haven’t been around long enough to develop hacks, they almost find it like a dangerous question to ask. You know, like. Like, you know, no, you know, don’t do anything outside of the the the the research what’s available out there. But we all have something don’t we. We all have a way of doing it.

Well, you’re right. There was a a textbook that was produced as a German guy and I’ve forgotten his name, which is and I’ve just remembered it. Listeners, it’s Dr. Wolfram bucking rhymes with a. Plucking. So, yeah, he has written a textbook called the Dental Treasure Chest. Tips and Tricks. Tips and Tricks for Daily Practice. And yeah, it was written about in the 90 seconds, but loads of good tips still relevant from everything from the way you sit. How to make your posture better to easy removal of crowns and troubleshooting with implants, patio, etcetera. Great book, well worth a look.

I think there would be no enlighten but.

That’s that’s that’s the worry because everyone’s worried that worried about you know procedure being sued or whatever the case may be and innovation is you know, it’s being stifled because of that. Absolutely. No doubt about that. You know, certain people, you know, including ourselves, really will say, well, do I want to do this procedure on this person? Well, you know, is it worth it? You know, do I want to challenge certain people? And even people we teach to say, look, please challenge what I tell you, Try different things. Oh, we don’t want to try anything because the implications are a bit worrying. But it’s amazing because the innovation that you’ve done, has that been because you’ve been away from dentistry or because you’ve been a dentist? You know what is mean.

We just tried everything to do it. It was a matter of survival to start with. You know, we had to try and make it better and then and then you end up becoming that person. Then you, you know, you end up being good at 1 or 2 things. You know, I was talking to a guy who was saying that he was working in Henry Schein when they were buying companies and he was saying, Yeah, they’d buy companies. And then and then they’d realise this entrepreneur was good at 1 or 2 things they shouldn’t try and mess him about and make him do other things well, they just let him carry on doing the 1 or 2 things that he knows how to do and and work out. Don’t bother him on those 1 or 2. Um, and I feel like that as well. You know, we got addicted to improvement because we had to to start with and then we realised oh well that’s, that’s, that’s what we’re good at and I’m really bad at making things cheaply, you know, like I just can’t do it.

So I think whatever you do, you can’t sit still. But in saying that if we, if we, you know, I don’t know why I got this right or wrong and I’m a bit scary if, if it’s true. Um, you know, the biggest problem being a, you know, a boss, an employer is obviously employing people. It was. I’m saying that you employ 100 people. What did you say that.

No, no, no. About 44 we have now. Okay.

44. And is that the hardest challenge or no? Do you find that easy? Do you do you to pass it off to somebody else?

It’s it can be. It can be when when there’s a disagreement and when the team gets bigger, you end up having problems you never thought you would have, you know, cultural issues. There was some bullying going on. We had no idea about it until, you know, 6 or 8 of them came to us and said, look, this person is doing this. We had no idea. And because we grew quite quickly, we thought everything was fine. And, you know, it’s difficult keeping the culture going with so many people. Um, it’s difficult taking the risk of hiring loads of people as well because, you know, your wage bill goes through the roof and you know, the business becomes a very serious thing. You know, you’ve got to make loads of money just to break even. Um, and you know, the, you know, the latest thing is the sort of Elon Musk thing about, you know, what he did at Twitter, which is he said, all right, who here is essential.

And who.

He is and who here is exceptional? And then he fired everyone else and he ended up firing 70% of the workforce. Um, and that’s become a thing now. That’s become a trend and we’re certainly looking at the business in that sense as well. And in the good, good days you hire, you know, just like we at one point we had an in-house videographer, in-house, uh, copywriter. We do, we already have two in-house social media, you know, full time social media people, a marketing manager, um, her assistant, you know, just just in marketing, just in that one area of marketing, there’s like six people. Um, you know, it’s a, it’s a big commitment. Yeah. Which, which you can always outsource as well. Yeah. Um, but what I’ve found is that, you know, let’s talk about marketing, right? You, you’ve got to make things right. Right? You got to. It’s difficult to make things right. Just a simple photograph, like a photograph of a smiling woman. Yeah. Is really difficult to make that right because it’s cheesy and it’s shit, you know, like, so. And to make that better. Yeah, you’ve got to take that photo now.

Okay, Now we’ve got to take the photo. So who’s it going to be? Is it going to be a white woman? A black woman? You know, is it going to be a man? As well. Yeah. And you know, the creative comes out and says, Yeah, no, we need a white woman, a black woman and a man, right? That’s three models. Now we need, um, in London. Yeah. All the models are Eastern European and all the Eastern Europeans have terrible teeth. Yeah. Um, they haven’t, they haven’t been to the orthodontist or anything, so we had to look outside of London. After a long search in London, we found similar problems in lots of European cities, but not not for instance, in Amsterdam. So we went to the Amsterdam modelling agencies. In the end, our our hero model is a girl from Dallas. Yeah. Which we had to fly over for the shoot. And then to use her pictures, we can only use them for two years. Yeah, we spent a huge amount. The photographer is one of the world’s top fashion photographers. Um, the music we composed.

I’m panicking with this. Yeah.

And. And so, look, we get you get to this point of all we’re talking about is a picture of a model or a video of a model turning around and smiling. Yeah. And I’ve involved one of the world’s top fashion photographers. A huge search around the world for a beautiful girl who’s got a nice smile that, believe me, was a nightmare. Yeah. Because we couldn’t Photoshop, you know that you couldn’t Photoshop pictures. But dentists will see through that. So. So. So you can Photoshop for the public, but not for dentists. Um, just that. Just getting that picture. Yeah. Nightmare. Now, you can go and buy that picture tomorrow. You guys could go in one hour and buy a picture. Yeah, but they’re all a bit cheesy. A bit crap, you know.

Yeah, but do you think Payman Dental school really did not equip us for high glamour fashion shoots with texts and models? Did it just. There wasn’t enough teaching on that subject?

That was. The funny thing is that it taught you a lot about looking down the microscope and stuff.

Being, you know, being really sort of perfectionist. Want this repeating or is it your partner or is a combination of like, if we do things properly, we’re going to go to the extreme and make it right.

You know, dude, what happens is that there’s the time that that takes and the cost you the time is the time, right? But the cost it tends for me, this is the way I think about it, is the cost of design tends towards zero the longer that product is out. So if we did the exact same thing with Evo three and Evo three was in the market for 11 years, we treated a quarter of a million patients with it. And you know the you know how much I spent on the photoshoot back in 2011. Um, I spent a lot by 2011 standards. Yeah. But it per kit it tends to zero is my point. Yeah. Um, now that’s not for everyone, you know, It’s a big risk. Yeah. Doing that. It’s a big risk. We’ve got the paper that we’ve got the products made of. We’ve, we’ve put the data recorders, you know, you can get these things that that record temperature every ten minutes over a period of a week. And we put the data recorders inside the package to see how temperature stable the package is. And you should see the detail that the packaging specialist, I mean, he’s like almost like a physicist like detail he goes to to get the two sides of the package to come together. Exactly right. So that there’s no air exchange there. And then we’ve got a bubble envelope that’s plastic. And we have to you know, we don’t want to put plastic into the environment. So we’re paying another company to take out twice as much plastic as we put in and all of that.

Now, all of this, you know, I don’t talk about it in the marketing because it’s difficult to talk about this stuff. Right. But the reason for it is if you could see what I saw or what I see that when when a shipment comes in from the factory, the first few treatments are magical, like magical, magical. The teeth go super white, zero sensitivity. Then the following month they’re good, but not quite as good in the final month. And this was back in the day, you know, ten years ago when we used to keep the gel just we used to make big orders to get the biggest discount and keep the gel for six months. Sometimes the final few would get complaints, complaints coming in. So then we realised that you shouldn’t keep gel any period of time at all, keep gel for the minimum amount of time, and then convincing our partners, our our manufacturing partners to make it in small amounts because they don’t want to do that, right? They want to make it in big amounts. It makes it easier for them to make it in small amounts and ship it to us cold every month during the pandemic. You know, it was tough, but but if you saw the results that I saw from those first and we’re not quite there, we’re at the point of going from factory to patient in two months Right now, I’d like to get that down to one month because I saw the results.

I’ve seen the results. Um, the big issue with it is either you end up with, um, you know, supply issues because you haven’t got enough or you end up with wastage issues. And by the way, I’m not worried about throwing gels in the bin. Oh, shit, That’s. That’s my red wine. I’m not worried about throwing gels in the bin from the cost perspective as long as I can get a really good result. But you know, from the plastic, we’re now measuring every bit of plastic that we throw away and every bit of plastic we put into the environment from the plastic perspective obviously doesn’t work. So that’s kind of a balancing act. Interestingly, to reduce the plastic in our kits, we end up doubling our carbon footprint. So so now we have to work work out a way of reducing our carbon footprint at the same time. And, you know, I didn’t use to take this stuff seriously before until, you know, we’re now a little bit partnered with Pala, with Simon and Rona and Adarsh with their with their toothpaste apps. And I’m talking to them. I realised that these guys aren’t doing it for some sort of marketing thing. You know, they, they literally give a damn so much about the plastic and the environment and looking into it realised, oh god, yeah, all of us have to completely take care of this, you know, Dental practices included, you know, chucking away.

Still goes on. Yeah, yeah. It’s scary what goes into especially this, all this, you know, HDMI or what do you have to do? Oh, that’s. Yeah.

Right.

It’s just crazy. Absolutely. What goes, what goes into clinical waste.

It’s it’s mad.

And then and then you find out that the local councils won’t, won’t recycle. They don’t know about Scotland Stuart but you know the local councils won’t recycle because this is a business. But if it was, if it was a residential like in Kent, you know, when is it residential road? You can’t recycle because you’re a business. But the next door neighbours who are residential, they can recycle. It just doesn’t make any sense. But anyway, we. We digress. Sorry.

Sorry. Had to recycling. No, sorry. I was just distracted there by Payman spilling his large goblet of red wine. And I’m just so impressed that a man with such a snazzy smile is an avid red wine drinker that says a lot about the quality of enlightened tooth whitening products. They must be the business. I digress. I better get back on to asking some questions. Do you miss clinical dentistry? I told you miss the day to day. Do you miss doing other things like operative dentistry?

I don’t know about operative dentistry. I miss people, human beings, not dentists. I know a lot of dentists, but. But I don’t know many regular people and I miss them. You know that when you see a patient every six months you have that chat. And and I used to have some very interesting patients, You know, I was working in the city at one point, and then I was working in Hampstead after that. And really interesting conversations I used to have. And you see the kids grow up and all of that. Um, they particularly miss the teeth, although once in a while I go to a lecture at Depeche was like that for me. Jason Smithson was the same. Ended up working with him. Um, Gallup Grill was the same. Um, uh, some, some of the, obviously the guys from USC at McLaren. Um, just, there’s a few people that you see the lecture and you think, God, I want to try that. Um, and when, whenever I get that feeling, I realise, oh, that’s a brilliant lecturer, you know, whereas the actual meccano bit sticking things together and I definitely didn’t like surge surgery, so, you know, what does I take my hat off?

You’re very sociable.

It’s obvious you do podcasts. I think when you do the courses, I don’t know whether you like, you know, just move into that because you miss the social aspect. I mean. Yeah, definitely. This is another rumour I’ve heard. I heard that if there’s a squat opening your first at the front door. Yeah. Is that true? I’ve heard Payman there before. Before patients there literally just says you’re so sociable, You like. You know.

I like people. For sure. Like people for sure. And you know that that translates to, obviously, our team. Yeah. Although our team, my two teams, I’m in charge of two teams Enlightened and both of them are remote now. So they come in one day a week. So I go in that one day a week or for me it ends up being sometimes two days a week because they go on, on different, different, different days. But the social aspect of work was a big thing for me. I used to enjoy that. Um, and you’re right. Many Smile Makeover. As much as I enjoy watching the dentist, um, you know, that light bulb moment, which is, which is important and enjoyable, the meeting of the people, the conversations for me are even more important. And so your question, Stuart I definitely miss people. Um, I did up a flat, um, when I was a dentist and my patient supplied everything, you know, the kitchen, the floor, the plumber, the electrician. There were all my patients. Then I did that. This, this, this house. I’m sitting. I’m not sitting in the Seychelles like it looks like in the background. This house I’m sitting in, I did this up just pre-COVID, and I knew no one. I had no contacts apart from dentists. I knew a lot of dentists. Yes. So I called up dentists. I said, Hey, the only one who could do a house.

Can you bring some cement? Yeah, yeah, the cement is there. But, you know, dentists complain of stress. You know, we all do. It can be stressful. There’s no doubt. Clinical dentistry is stress. It’s rewarding, but stressful. Do you? You obviously have your own day to day stress. If you were to compare, you know, how you know your day to day work comparison to dentistry.

Yeah. No. Day to day. I’d say it’s less stressful than dentistry day to day. And I remember there were periods where I was doing dentistry two days a week and I was doing Enlightened the other five days a week. Um, and, you know, dentistry, the problem with dentistry is, number one, you got to turn up. That hate.

That helps.

That helps.

It’s horrible that you have to turn up. Yeah, you take it for granted when you’re like you have to turn up, right?

There’s that same ethos applied to your courses.

But the courses course courses are kind of fun. It’s like a holiday for me. It’s a bit of a holiday, especially when we do it outside London. In Manchester we go get the best hotel. We go the party and the best rooftop and meeting people. Depeche is a great teacher. I get the best projector, the best everything. You know, to try and make it just fun for us as well. Yeah, but dentistry, it’s relentless in that you have to keep turning up. And I’ve found that hard, man. Honestly, honestly. And one of the best things about not being a dentist is that if you want to not turn up, you can not turn up. Now, I’ve got a meeting with the head of operations, the operation director of one of the massive, you know, corporates with 400 practices. Yeah. I got turned up to them. I do have to turn up to that meeting. Yeah, I’ve got to go to some dentist. We do a thing called Regional Centre of Excellence where it’s our big partner in each area and I’ve said I want to be the one who turns up to those meetings. So I do have to do sometimes that guy’s in Aberdeen, right? So I have to get on a plane and go to Aberdeen to see that guy. Yeah.

How many centres do you have?

200 of those. I’ve been to every single one. Yeah. Um, now the thing is, so I’m busy and I’m turning up and I have to turn up to Cologne next week and I have to turn up to showcase. But it’s that daily, day in and day out having to be there for your patients that don’t have. That’s my best thing about not doing dentistry. And the worst thing is you don’t meet people and dentistry, even though it’s high stress, it is high stress. Yeah, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s you’re going to find it’s easy money. Yeah, but there’s some the trust the patient by sitting in your chair they’re implicitly saying I trust you. Whereas you know something to dentists is a whole different matter. You know, as dentists, we’re trained to be distrusting. Yeah. And the next time, let’s say Enlightened comes up to you and says, I’ve found this breakthrough Perio product. Yeah, yeah. No premier product. There’s a premier product that’s based on a bleaching trays that. Yeah, yeah, they do, They do, they do pocket charting and then they extend the tray up into the pocket, Right? And they use peroxide. Yeah. I could, I could, I could go and get that and make that and do that and even improve on it. Right now let’s say I come to you and say, Hey, I’ve got this new period product. It’s a breakthrough. Implicit norm. You’ve seen so much crap come in front of you before making these promises that your first thing is going to be, Well, here’s another bullshit, right? Another another marketing angle.

I’m hoping you’d turn up first.

And so it’s the same with all dentists. Yeah. They’re trained to be trained to be distrusting. It’s correct. You want your dentist to be distrusting of these dodgy companies. Coming up with all these new ideas. It’s difficult. Makes it difficult in.

This course thing because, you know, I love social media and I see. I see your courses. Depression. It’s like, wow, this is A it’s entertaining. B, it has that. Wow. You know, isn’t that like that? But you see the wow factor and it’s like, you know, I presume based on, you know, you’re so passionate about things, you go all out.

Dude. The thing is the thing is he’s, he is exceptional. He really is exceptional As a teacher. As a clinician. I mean. Yes, yes, definitely. I met him when he was one year out of dental school, and even then he was exceptional. Lewis Mackenzie contacted me, who was his big his his mentor, and he said, Oh, you met Depeche? I was like, Yeah. He said, Oh, he’s the best student I’ve had in the last 20 years. And and all he is exceptional at the teeth, he really is. And then we’ve been distributing Renamo for 12 years now, 40 and it’s an exceptional composite. It really is the best composite. Yes, it’s expensive as well, but it’s the best composite. So. So you’ve got these two things, the best teacher and the best composite. And I thought, look, it’s a case of sort of if I don’t do my bit, my bit would be, you know, put on the best hotel, the best food, the best entertainment, the best projector. And, you know, I went to this show at the weekend, the north of England one, and I grabbed the guys from FMC and said, look, we have 30 delegates and we have a screen six times the size of the one that you’ve produced for 1000 delegates. Yeah. You know, we really take it seriously. We spend £3,000 per event on AV, just on AV. Um, with the hotel, we constantly upgrade. We’re constantly telling them, how can you make the food better, the coffee better, you know, everything better. And like hotels, they find that a difficult question. Like better coffee. You know, the coffee’s crap. Can you organise better coffee? And they’re like, no, they can’t.

Honestly changed since COVID, things have changed a lot. But that’s a different story.

But that you know, you know how everything’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it? You go to a hotel, everything’s a bit rubbish isn’t it? Everything’s a bit rubbish, man. Everything’s a bit rubbish. We found one hotel in Manchester where the people are just extraordinary. The Edwardian, the Manchester, the staff, they just. They.

That’s a good hotel, but a great hotel. That is a good one.

The Ave is of a standard that we don’t have to bring external Ave in, which is amazing for a hotel. It’s like, you know, it’s brand new and the food’s good. Yeah. So in Manchester, we good in London? Haven’t found a hotel. That’s. That’s of that standard. Yeah. And you know, we’ve been trying, we’ve been, we’ve been switching hotels every single mini smile makeover to try and find one that’s at the right standard and there isn’t we have to bring in separately. Sometimes we have to bring food in separately. Bring it from. Really?

Oh wow. That’s that’s a the food.

So rubbish in this chicken and beige. Right.

The food is. Yeah it is what it used to be but that’s a side thing.

So and actually doing these courses, how often are you doing these courses. Every three months.

Four months? No, once a month. Once a month.

Wow. And that rotates from city to city. Or you?

Well, we used to. I used to I used to want to see other cities. Right. So we used to do London, Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol, Cardiff. We never came to Scotland. We tried once and then the pandemic got in our way. By the way, dude, is it true in Scotland your your GDC or something pays for your courses, is that right?

Nhs Yes. If you apply to be a, you got to have a is that right? Cpd And then the dentist can apply to get the cost of the course back based on their level of commitment. So it’ll be capped. It might be say £400 a day and if you do 50% NHS you’ll get £200 back. And if you do 75%, £300 back, that type of thing.

That’s amazing, man.

I suppose. Is that not a thing in England? You don’t get that at all.

Payman I’d encourage you, it’s different. The education in Scotland is different. I mean, we do when we do the course, I’m there in two weeks. I can tell you it’s a different Everybody arrives on time. Unbelievably polite. That doesn’t apply to you when you turn up on time. Polite. Courteous. A feedback is always exceptional, but it’s a different market.

We did a lot in Belfast and noticed a totally different outlook from the Belfast dentist and.

No.

Scottish person. The Dental will say, Can I leave early? You know, it’s, you know, down south it’s like, but I’d recommend it go in Scotland is where.

Do you go? Glasgow, Edinburgh, Glasgow. It’s, that’s where the population is, right. Glasgow. Yeah.

Yeah. She was, she was based in Edinburgh.

I love Edinburgh man.

Well, you could go to Glasgow if you wish, but. Oh, I’ll just stop myself there. And what I was going to say is everybody knows that Glasgow and Edinburgh are centres of both culture and hospitality renowned throughout the world. So either city would be a superb choice for a visit or to put on a Dental course we should bring you up and do a course on Edinburgh. I think that would for sure, for sure.

If Edinburgh is where we plan to do it. And then pandemic stopped us.

Edinburgh Castle. You know, I think you’d fit in well there.

We were in Edinburgh for the BCD and we had a big party there. Oh, the museum? Yes. Well, BCD had their part, the museum. But we went to a place on George Street. It was like a nightclub thing.

Some good venues.

You know what I’ve found about Edinburgh? There’s lots of cities with one little tiny pretty bit. But Edinburgh is like the whole town. The whole city is beautiful. It’s like it’s unprecedented. I love Glasgow people too. I love Glasgow. People are.

Unbelievably.

Friendly. I mean. Yeah.

Are you finding are you finding in Edinburgh you’ve got now more of the sort of the cosmetically orientated patient as well.

It’s a really good question. Edinburgh is a I would say that it’s quite traditional. So people will invest in education. There’s a high number of private schools here, but based on the size of the population buying that, you know, people tend to drive nice cars here and people tend to go on lots of holidays. When it comes to aesthetic dentistry, implants are big business, but we don’t tend to see the kind of Instagram style practices here as much as you would. Let’s say if I go down to Manchester, I’ll see quite a few of those and I’ll go to Birmingham. Go to London. Certainly you’ll become conscious of choosing Glasgow. Yes, you’re right, it is in Glasgow.

It’s amazing how different those two cities are with one hour between them, right?

40 miles.

Payman 40. It’s mad. Like totally different accent. Totally different people. Totally different people. Totally different. Yeah.

In Glaswegian, I think.

Yeah. You have. Do you have trouble with the accent?

Hutton Wow. Yes. The we.

Have a few.

Uh.

Northern Ireland and, um, and a few Glaswegians. We have to, I have to really concentrate and you ask them to.

Repeat, right?

There’s one chap who who we’ve been mentoring for a few years. I won’t mention his name. He’s a lovely, lovely guy. And, um, he recommended a colleague of his Northern Ireland colleague. And I find it difficult to understand him. And he was telling me my children can’t understand my Glaswegian body. And I thought, God, how does that work? But unbelievably friendly. It just takes over everything. Polite. Nice. But yeah, there’s a I love.

That, though. I love that. That there are accents that, you know, we find difficult because in our part of the world that’s massive. Right. In Iran and where, you know Yemen and all that, you know literally two, two two villages next to each other, two different accents. Right. Um, and I love that that’s true here as well. You know, that’s but yeah, I find Dipesh he’s, he’s in Belfast a lot of times he’s like, come again? And you can’t ask that more than once, right? You can’t say come again again because.

They speak.

Really, really fast. The Northern Ireland and also some of these gloves you’re okay case you you speak very slowly. I think it’s probably because the.

Edinburgh Edinburgh is different.

Hello Dundee. Actually, boys, what do they call you in Glasgow? Hatem do not call you Haytham.

We hate him.

Hate him.

So aggressive on there. But Payman Let me ask you two quick questions. Two quick fire questions, and I’m going to ask you what your best day in dentistry was and your worst day in dentistry was. So let’s start with the best day.

I mean, it’s a little bit shallow. It was it was the model day. The model Day. Evo three. Model day. When we first time when we when we really like I called up my buddy he’s he’s in fashion and all that, I said, listen, what do I do? I need to I need to find some models. He said, just call up. He said, you know the names, the big names, the storm and all of these you just call them up, say you just want to find the model and don’t worry, everything else will be all right. And he was absolutely right. I called I called up the biggest names I could think of. And one day, maybe, I don’t know, 100, like super beautiful girls came one after the other to be to to be interviewed by me. I really enjoyed I enjoyed that day very, very much. No.

No comment. I’m not going to comment on that.

I’m joking. I’m joking. No, the best day, enlightened was the day that we sort of, you know, when when, when when patients when when dentists tell us. Yeah. That we made a massive change in the same way as when you treat a patient. Yeah. That. Thank you. Right. That you get from a patient who’s truly, truly thankful makes your day. And it doesn’t make any sense on paper. That one thank you. Makes your day. But you know, it happens sometimes, you know, when when we bring in a new process or we bring in a new product, often we get lots of people saying, Oh, I’m not happy about changes. And then we get a bunch of other people telling us how brilliant it was or, you know, the same thing. You must see this all the time, right? You do a course and the the delegate starts producing amazing work.

But it’s interesting because you I think you just nailed it. Exactly. You target patients and we know this. Patients are happy. They go back to their dentist and say, and you do the reverse bit, don’t you? You target the patient because you know the patient’s happy. You produce the product. You get the result that passes on to the dentist, passes it back on to you. Yeah.

What comes to mind, though? We did a we did a conference called the Minimalist Conference in 2017, the conference for Minimally invasive Dentistry and just, just really enjoyed that one. It was like 200 people turned up and big speakers and everything really enjoyed that one. The worst day. I mean, we’ve seen so many bad days.

I’m going to say this podcast, isn’t it?

No, no, no, no. Just in those early days, you know, those early days, the cash crises and those. Oh, I know, I know. I know. We had a product called Smile X. It was. It was. It was a it was a it was a direct application thing. And I honestly thought this was the product. It was going to make me rich. Right. Because it was it was a breakthrough. You you applied it on the teeth and your teeth after two applications a day would just go super beautifully. Lovely white. And it was because we were able to keep the in this, in this, in this um, it was like a glass container with a plastic around the glass and you squeeze the thing and break the glass and then the peroxide would come out onto this applicator and you’d apply it onto the the teeth. And we spent a whole year trying to find the right supplier, the right gel, everything right to try and make this thing work. And it was working. It was like making teeth white because we’re trying to be able to keep it fully stable in that glass container. But then we sold some, we sold some in the market. But then the supplier, the the factory in New Orleans called up and the guy said, we got a problem. And they were exploding. They were exploding by themselves. And glass was coming out of them. And and we put these in the market. We’d sold a number. And, you know, you’re thinking some patients are going to push this and it’s going to explode because they’re exploding on the shelf. You know, they were just pushing.

Um oh, spooky.

We managed to get them back. We did a recall. We managed to get them back. The ones that we could. I don’t know. There was no terrible stories. Yeah, but I was thinking, Oh, someone’s going to blind themselves with this glass that’s going to smash up. But the pain of two years, like I think it was two years of work really, Um, and thinking you’re on the edge of a breakthrough and then you’re on the edge of a disaster. Um, it was hard, man. It was hard at the time. I think we’d invested every penny we had into the project.

And what about you Got two young children. Would you encourage, discourage them dentistry or just say whatever you want to do? What would you do with the kids?

You know what? I want them to want to be dentists. Yeah, not necessarily to become dentists, but want them to want to be. It is a neither of them shown much interest. In fact, they’re saying, I don’t know what I want to do, but I know I don’t want to be a dentist.

Your wife’s a.

Practising.

She’s a real dentist. She does. She does. One day a week. A real dentist. She. She does one day a week of dentistry, sometimes two days a week. But yeah, it’s. I feel like a bit of a failure. Both of us are dentists and our kids could could get massive advantage from going into dentistry. And yet neither of them are really that interested. Both of them say they want to run Enlighten.

Well, there you go. That’s that’s the.

That’s their path. They think it’s a failure. I just think that, you know, if my kids want to come, you know, I’d say, you know, if you wanted to, but I wouldn’t encourage them. But, you know, No, you should. You got to get your two girls.

Um, interestingly, I kind of my, my, my philosophy for a couple of years was what you’re thinking. Payman thought it’s almost the advantage is that you could provide them knowing the inside track, knowing the hacks, as you say. Yeah. Would would be a huge advantage but don’t know there’s it’s, it’s a stressful job isn’t it. And you just don’t know. Um, I think the best answer I had was was last episode we recorded with Grant Macari. He said, Yeah, I wouldn’t encourage it, but I wouldn’t discourage it. Yeah, that’s listen to that as well.

Good episode, that one.

I think that’s probably my feeling. That’s where I probably sit at as well. I know a number of friends and colleagues, incidentally, said they would never encourage their kids to do it, but I don’t know, you know, Do you.

Guys know about Revere?

Which is that it’s.

The the fund that Mark Zuckerberg’s dad has opened up. Mark Zuckerberg’s dad is a dentist. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes.

This is recent. This came out recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he’s he’s done obviously, very well. Yeah. He sold.

His dad. Must be gutted. He didn’t follow in his footsteps.

Well so, so, so he, he sold his Facebook shares and has a lot of money because of it. The dad I’m talking about. And now he’s investing in Dental Start-ups. And some of the ideas, I think they’re investing in one a week right now, but some of the ideas are super duper man. And like, you know, what’s going to be the future of dentistry. It’s it’s so like interesting. They were talking about nanorobots, you know that go into the periodontal pockets with the with the hygienist sitting with the virtual reality glasses driving the thing in there talking about we talked about we we talked about the link with dementia and he’s on this whole mission to get rid of that bacterial what’s it called.

Oh that would be a.

It’s lovely to see that thing. Yeah, right. You and you know, we were talking about this before, about being at the edge of a breakthrough and whether or not you can you can do it when you haven’t got the evidence. Every single move forward in dentistry or medicine has happened because someone said hey, what if I try this? You know, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without those those moves.

All on for Champ. What was his name now? What’s his name?

Marleau.

Yeah. You know, he was in deep trouble, you know, they went to strike. Strike. You know, there’s a lot of issues there. And look at look at that. Now there’s people just, you know, have innovations. And they just said we said earlier, it’s it’s it’s something like we should be encouraging, not stifling. It’s a, you.

Know, the guy who invented Invisalign was a banker and he he he had his retainers and he’d forget to put them in and then he’d put them in and he’d, he’d say once he’d put them in for a few days the teeth would go back to where they were before. And then it was easy to put them in. It was to start with, it was hard to put them in, and then it became easy to put them in and he realised retainers can move teeth because he was a banker. He went and raised $1 billion and they were doing it all by hand. You know, they’re cutting the teeth and moving it by one step and suction, you know, vacuum forming onto the that they were the first Invisalign cases. But, you know, the fact that a banker had to do it, you know, some sometimes a Nick Mahindra used to talk about this all the time. Yeah. That you know, you’re lost in your in your knowledge. Yes. You know people talk about, you know, the curiosity of a child or an outsider looking at something. Can come out with something, a breakthrough that the people who are in it can’t. And if you’ve ever driven a Tesla, you know, you know that guy, he’s the fastest car like by far the best, you know, thing screen thing you know interface. He’s got the best stereo in it you know like, you know, the cars have been all these companies all these years and this dude comes along and just reimagines the whole thing drives itself, you know.

It has the.

President I’ve got one. So it has its pros and cons, let’s put it that way.

Ugly.

It’s ugly.

Okay. Lawsuit, lawsuit.

But, you know, it’s right now we I’m hoping we have a lot of young listeners. Um, and you’re and you’re obviously very influential, you know, when it comes to your podcast because a lot of people listen to it. Um, you know, you mentioned their reluctance to, to sort of have a bigger challenge. You know, a lot of the youngsters have bigger challenges. They’re sort of a bit too scared, a bit too worried. They overanalyze things. Exactly what you just said. Now, you know, as dentists, we critical overanalyze things. Probably risk averse. Yeah. Risk averse. Uh, what advice would you give, uh, you know, young dentists, both in terms of being entrepreneur and also a course provider and also obviously a dentist.

I mean, number one, by the way, I’m in touch with a lot of younger dentists. Yeah. I don’t know. Somehow it gives me energy to to help younger dentists. And I know I can help. You know, it’s an interesting time. Like if a dentist is, I don’t know, one to 1 to 5 years out of dental school, I can help massively propel their careers in that time. But I’m a bit you know, for me, it bothers me sometimes when they say they want to be teachers straight away, like everyone wants to be a teacher. You know, in a way, it’s like in our day, not everyone wanted to be a teacher, right? In a way, it gets to me like, why? Why do you want to be a teacher? You know, what’s the reason? And the thing with these youngsters I found is they’re so good at timing, you know, they’re so good at making you think like the way they answer questions, the way they. They’ve got all the words right already, you know? And so, you know, whatever you challenge them with, they end up giving you this answer that you could sort of think, Oh, God, right. Guess he’s thought about that even if he hasn’t.

If you think about it.

All clinicians want to be liked. And we’re not in a profession where we’re liked, so we all like to be liked. Let’s be honest. You want to satisfy whether it’s a course patient or whatever. So I just think the youngsters probably just want to be, you know, liked, admired. I presume that’s the case where that’s the issue.

I find a.

Disproportionate number of them saying they want to teach, which is fine. Okay, fine. Okay. Maybe they do. Maybe that’s the way it is. But my my advice my advice is opposite to what most people say. Most people say, oh, get out there, do a bit of everything. And then after that, decide if you want to go into one thing or. My advice is figure out the one thing very quickly. Almost pick it out of a hat. Yeah. It doesn’t matter what the one thing is. It could be perio, endo. It could be bleaching, minimally invasive. You could be whatever you want it to be. You say, I want to be a restorative guy. I want to be an orthodontist. Whichever way you want to go, you want to open 100 practices, whichever way you want to go. I’d say the earlier the better. So I’m fully, fully happy for someone to go straight into endo without doing any general practice at all. I’m fully happy for someone to to start in dental school, getting their head into endo and going on endo courses and Dental Dental School and coming out of the other end of that being way ahead. Um, it’s opposite to what most people say. Most people say, oh, you know, go spend a bit of time on the NHS and treat a bunch of general patients, see what you like, what you don’t like, and then decide, Um, I just think pick something and run.

Yeah, but.

Controversial.

Yeah.

We spent five years in dental school. And by the time you come out of it and I see this. The young graduates are desperate to learn, and they’re doing so many courses because they didn’t learn any of these things.

In dental school. Yeah.

What does that tell you? They didn’t learn the occlusion. They didn’t learn the Perrier, they didn’t learn the alignment. They didn’t learn the endo. And that is scary. That’s what scares me. Maybe. Maybe you’re right. And so so maybe we should encourage them to sort of say, Right, you can’t be good at everything. Just go for one particular thing because it’s going to be impossible for you to be good.

Dental school is flawed. What do you think? I think Dental school’s flawed in the same way as school. School is flawed. You know, the stuff that making my kids do every day is not going to help them in their life very much.

No, I think you’re right. I think there’s there’s obviously it probably comes down to, in some ways box ticking, isn’t it? You’ve got to you’ve got to cover a certain number of things. Tick that to say that, you know, to to satisfy the requirements that it’s been covered. But you know, it’s interesting what you say about, you know, should should students be encouraged to go on postgraduate courses as undergraduates to develop an interest. And and I’ve actually come I’ve encountered somebody who did that who whose father was a dentist. We talk about hacks. And she was on a course and was in fourth year at the time. I couldn’t believe this. What you do in this course, you know, my dad’s paid for it because I’m interested in this and he thinks it’s a good thing to do and I’m going to go work for him. And he he wants this service in his practice. But wow, that’s that’s ahead of the curve. And it’s like you’re saying, what an advantage this had over over somebody who who perhaps wasn’t pushed in that way. Um, but yeah, I think most students that you talk to, I did training for a while.

I As the trainer.

As the trainer, yeah, yeah. Before I went back to, to do specialist training. And you know, you come across dentists and the, the feedback you get from dentists is you we didn’t cover this or we didn’t cover that. And as Hattam says, it’s, you know but just chatting today about running a course on Crown and bridgework and it’s it’s going to be for 22 dentists signed up to it they’re all within the first five years of qualification and it’s been um it’s linked in with a corporate body. It’s their dentists and they were saying on when I was chatting to them that they’ve looked at the numbers of this cohort and they said that, you know, very low percentages of them doing any, any invasive treatment, you know, with things like crowns and onlays and endos even and extractions, things like that, they’re really hesitant to do them. So really, it’s the comfort zone, isn’t there? They’re just not comfortable doing these things. So there clearly must be a disconnect if if the graduates are not comfortable doing some of these treatments.

I mean, just just in my little world of, you know, bleaching. And I know it’s not the big priority, right? But they still don’t teach bleaching at all in Dental school. No, they do not teach bleaching. You know, your patients more interested in the colour of their teeth than all this other stuff we talk about. It’s completely safe. It’s complete now. It’s it’s been legal for 11 years now. Like fully legal for 11 years. But no dental school teaches bleaching. They have one little chat about internal, um, you know, and that’s just bleaching, which is like on the edge. I mean, but you know, there’s so many things they don’t teach and it would be, it would be good to know, like, you know, they don’t, they don’t. When I talk to people who’ve been out like two, three years, there was no discussion of digital at all. Yeah. Um, and yet, you know, we used to sit there. I don’t know about you guys, but when I qualified, we to sit there and make dentures ourselves, right? Yeah.

Think about the. You know, you’re right. I mean, you think about the kind of the pillars of of practice today, the kind of modern, modern practice, the things that prop it up and keep it going. You’ve got digital, you’ve got alignment, you know, orthodontic alignment, dental implants and aesthetic dentistry. Yeah, those are the four things, aren’t they, really? And as you say, you’re not really taught any of them, any of them into practice. Patients are probably expecting some of those services to be discussed at the very least. And you must be you must feel quite ill equipped if those things are. It’s different for us. Three, because I think, you know, implants were emerging when I qualified. They were there, but it wasn’t it wasn’t everywhere and alignment wasn’t a thing. And aesthetics were basically veneers and whitening was coming in a little bit. Um, but you know, um, and digital wasn’t a thing. So, you know, our training was pretty close to what you would get when you walked out to practice. But now, if they’re not covering those things that you could find yourself in a practice where you really you have to train all over again, you’re on the job.

And then we’ve got the disconnect between the NHS. No one wants to work in the NHS anymore, the young ones, and and I fully agree with them. Yeah, I fully agree with them. Yeah. It would be good if if the NHS was was was somewhere where you could provide good treatment and, you know, solve problems, then fine. But when you can’t, I fully agree with them not to want to work in the NHS. If you think.

They’re spending all this.

Money on these courses and rightly so, and they want to apply that and they can’t in the NHS.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

They have no choice but to say, well, I need to apply it. So where do I what do I do? I have to. I have to go down the private avenue.

It’s in Scotland is is different. It’s still fee per item.

Yeah, it’s still fee per item.

So do people consider the NHS as a viable place to work? Young dentists.

Probably the ones I speak to would I would say no. I think you’re quite right. It’s it’s it’s getting the nobody wants to work in NHS dentistry any young dentists you know you just either they’re looking for an avenue out of it or they’re looking actually not to see general patients. I was chatting to a younger associate recently, a guy who do a bit mentoring with and a really talented guy, and I was saying to him, he was saying he’s just giving up his practice job. Nice private practice. He works in as an associate. Big list of private patients. I kind of said to him, You landed on your feet there only a few years out. He’s like, Yeah, I’ve given it up. So why is that? So I don’t want to see general patients. I just want to come in and do the stuff I like to do and go again. And he’s carved this niche for himself where he goes around 4 or 5 practices. He does a day in each one, and he’s doing just the type of work he likes to do. And he’s he said, What type of work is it? Composite build-ups, crown bridgework, veneers. And he said, That’s it. So I want to do. And if that’s, you know, I’m not not seeing patients for check-ups or broken fillings, that kind of stuff. And you think your.

Principal, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I get a lot of principals complaining to me of, oh, these young dentists, they, they come in and they say, I just want to do three days a week and I want private. Yeah, yeah. And you know, they haven’t put in their time and all that and I think, you know, that’s a good thing man. It’s a good thing that people know what they want. They want to work, you know, the work life balance and and they want to do the kind of dentistry they want to do. It’s actually a good thing. And, you know, we don’t all have to go like, you know, hard time. You did some hospital jobs, right? I did. You know, oral surgery where you got decimated by that system. Right. And and it was almost like this sort of the abused becomes the abuser kind of thing. Yeah. With your. It was, wasn’t it like, like the the consultant would make me wake up at 3 a.m. to go and push that flap to make sure it’s still, you know, perfused or whatever. And it was the system. It’s like boarding school or something, you know, Why does it have to be like that? Why can’t a dentist say, I want to do three days a week?

I think. Right.

I think it’s really assertive to say, this is what I want to do, this is what I’m going to have. I’m going to do it. And they do it. You know, it’s and yeah.

And going back to that, you know, telling my kids, you know, I really want it more for my daughter than my son because I just think it’s such an amazing career for a woman, you know, because you can you can dictate the number of days you want to do. Which job can you do that man? Which job is there that you can earn really well and dictate? I want to do work one day a week, two days a week, three days a week. You can say however many number of days a week you want and change those as you go. So as kids come along and and all of that very, very few jobs that you can do that unless you work for yourself. Right.

The flexibility of.

Dentistry is amazing.

It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

I’ll go in this field going going to research, teaching innovation like.

I went from five days a week, four days a week, three days a week, two days a week. And I did one day a week for years before I had a bad day and said, forget that. But but what I’m saying is it served me perfectly as enlightened, you know, took over it served me to, you know, pay for my life and whatever, while Enlightened wasn’t making money. And then to do less and less and less. And you can basically you can you can do exactly what you want in dentistry, which is beautiful. I love that about it.

We had discussion.

Previously, Now you’ve got dentists writing books, manufacturing thing, making things, designing things. Yeah, that was unheard of ten years ago, you know, now. Yeah.

I’m going to just rewind you a bit there, guys. Payman What I’d like to ask you Payman is we just touched on the NHS there, but we were asking this question last week that as you all know, as a regular, as the regular listener to this podcast, the other regular listener is Rishi. Rishi Sunak Yeah. And Rishi Sunak, if he comes on the phone tonight and says, Listen, I like the sound of that guy Payman I want him to fix NHS dentistry. Do you think it can be fixed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How would you fix it?

Look, let me let me tell you what you annoy me the most was that there was a third party involved in in clinical decision making. Yeah. Me, the patient and then third parties. And you can and can’t do this. What I would say for the NHS is it’s a fun it should be a fund of money that people who are means tested have access to. Yeah. And it could be, you know, if you earn below x, you could have this much a year towards paying a dentist from the government full stop. No, what you can spend you can spend it on bleaching implants, scaling polishes or not spend it at all. Yeah, it’s up to you. You can go to any dentist and use these credits and it’s and that that to me would be the only way that would work. And it should be means tested. It should be for the poor people who can’t afford it. Everyone else, I think, should start to get into that mode of saving up for your teeth like they do in most countries, Right?

Or insurance based.

Yeah. Same thing. Right? Same, same, same story.

Who’s inspired you the most in dentistry?

Let’s let’s before we go on to that question, let’s just explain to Payman. This is the drum roll, the dry ice and, you know, the pizzazz associated with this question. Hatem, that this is the this is the Richard Thiel Prize in dentistry. You’re Richard Kiel Prize. And you know who Richard Kiel is. Don’t you Payman know.

Who’s Richard.

Kiel? Richard Kiel is the actor who portrayed Jaws in James Bond. So he had the oh, yeah, the best set of teeth in the movie and television history. And we’re going to ask you to give the Richard Kiel Prize to the person in dentistry that inspired you the most and why.

It was Nick Nick Mahendra, my first boss. He had this he used to say, he always used to say, Why not? Whatever, whatever the question was, his answer was why not? And I just seeing this one guy in a little practice in Ashford Kent come up with this new way of doing something and then put it into the newspaper and it’s life changing because of it. And actually, like chasing that little dream of of making a difference from one little dental practice. It really changed what I thought was possible. And that, you know, that idea, they say like make a dent in the world. And I think your first boss is a massive influence anyway. Right. Which which way you end up going, your first boss really sets that agenda. And I couldn’t have hoped for a better first boss. I mean, he was just brilliant, man. He really I still see him all the time. Just a brilliant mind. Brilliant mind.

Retired. Retired.

Not quite. Not quite. But he’s. He’s. He’s getting there. He’s getting there. Um, a brilliant mind, man. It just, you know, and up to that point, I was like, well, research is done in laboratories by massive corporations and scientists. And, and this guy was just in his practice in lunchtime trying things out. It was it really inspired me to try and do stuff myself.

That’s great. Nick Mahendra The Richard Kiel Prize is on its way to you. And finally, we will finish the podcast with the question we ask all guests Payman. And that is what is your favourite movie and favourite album and why?

So my favourite album is a Prince album. I was a massive Prince fan, brilliant back in the day. Um, and I just can’t get away from him and um, I don’t know, one of one of the Prince albums. I loved them all, but Sign of the Times or something. Great. Um.

Did you see Prince live?

I did, yeah.

Several. Yeah. I went to the O2 to see him. Yeah, we do.

Dodgy sound, wasn’t it? I don’t know where I was standing. It was, like, amazing. It was good Live, though.

Unbelievable. Just. I didn’t quite appreciate that he played all the instruments, wrote all the music performed. You think this guy is a musical genius, isn’t he? Yeah. Tremendous. And the artist as a guitarist, you underrated. I mean, amazing guitarist. And at the.

Time, do you remember at the time it was Michael Jackson or Prince sort of thing. And and I was I used to, you know, Michael Jackson at the time. You could even then it was like a cartoon character, right? So like, you just knew there was no Billie Jean. There was no kid. There was no person. He said, beat it to. Like none of that existed. He was like a comic book. But whereas with Prince, Right, all the songs, you just felt like he’d he’d actually been in those situations. He felt so much more authentic to me. So I liked it movie wise. I’m not a big movie guy now, but, um, I love Darren Aronofsky. Do you know him? The director? Yeah, The Wrestler movie. The Wrestler. Yeah. Not his best, but. But. But yeah, he did. He did one called Pi. Did one called Requiem for a Dream.

I’ve seen pie. Yeah. Pie is a crazy man. That’s a niche film.

Yeah. I liked it, though. I liked it. The obsession. Part of it. I liked a lot. Yeah. Um, he did one recently called Mother, which was like, a about the earth. Crazy thing. He did Black Swan. So I, like. I like all of his films and I like Kubrick a lot as well. I like I like all of all of Stanley Kubrick’s films. Kubrick.

Yeah, like Kubrick, because every film is slightly different. Different? Yeah. Yeah. Um. Favourite Kubrick.

Oh, man, that’s so difficult. That’s so hard. I mean, I think Clockwork Orange in the end, I think in the end, I was thinking of making my stand at Dental showcase that, you know, the milk bar.

The molecule. They call it Molecule. Yeah.

Molecule milk. Do you. Do you do it? These these cats, they go. They have, they drink this milk, which is like, I don’t know, you never he never tells you what’s in the milk. Right. But they drink this milk, then they go berserk. It’s drugs. They go berserk and they stop committing crimes. But I don’t know when it came out because I must have watched it years later. But it probably came out in 68 or 60 something. And this molecule milk bar. Yeah. Like if you if you see an image of what it is, it’s just all white and the tables are made of like parts of humans like women or whatever. And these guys are sitting there looking just like, like crazy psychopaths, right? Drinking their milk. I was going to do that. I was I was thinking of doing that at Dental showcase, making the molecule milk bar and and just just just having people come in and have a good time.

You could do a follow up where you make the maze at the end of The Shining as well, with the Jack Nicholson full on rage Eyes. Um, what’s your favourite.

Film, dude?

Wow, that’s a good question. What is my favourite film? It kind of changes. Do you like it? Changes it. For a long time, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Oh, great, too.

You can’t. You’re just brilliant, isn’t it? And yeah, in. I went through a phase of really liking documentary films, so. Yeah, me too. When we were Kings. Muhammad Ali one. Great. Yeah. Watch that every day. Just so good. Have you seen.

The one where it’s about the South African Sugar Man searching for Sugar Man?

Searching for sugar man. Yeah.

Yeah. So love that.

What a great story that is, isn’t it?

Have you seen that hotel?

No, I haven’t seen it.

Check it out. Searching for Sugar Man.

Will never happen again. That. That particular chain of events.

Not anymore.

Amazing. We’ll tell listeners the premise. If we’re known for one thing on this podcast, it is meandering and lengthy, self-indulgent chats. So let’s let’s do that. So Searching for Sugar Man was about an American blues musician, bluesy kind of rock and roll musician in the late 60 seconds. Him and he released two albums and they didn’t really make an impact in America at all. You know, a little Ripple, but nothing. And he was working in construction, so he essentially was was working in construction. Then he kind of was unemployed and he was living really a you know, he was, you know, in Skid Row, basically. Meanwhile, in South Africa, he was an absolute megastar. His because of apartheid in South Africa, there was an embargo on trade from the United States. So music that got in there and pre-apartheid became very popular because they couldn’t.

Scrape music as well. Really brilliant music.

You listen to it. Why is this? Why did he not make an impact in the States? But yeah, but because the apartheid restricted what they could import and what they were given access to this this stuff had gotten just before and it became very popular. It was on radio stations and he was a superstar in South Africa, but he did not know this. He was living in a kind of Skid Row lifestyle. And when apartheid ended, essentially, you know, people were he was still popular. But this guy then made it his kind of wonder what ever happened to him. He must be a big star in America. I’m going to go and find him. And he was astonished to find this guy basically living almost like a homeless existence.

There was some legend about he’d killed himself on stage, wasn’t it? They weren’t sure about it. So he goes and looks for him and finds him. He finds.

Him. And then he brings him to South Africa. When he puts he puts on a concert.

Huge concert.

100,000 stadium like Wembley Stadium, packed. And they said at the start, Elvis Presley and Rodriguez is I don’t know who’s bigger in South Africa. It’s between the two of them. You know, the guy himself did not know any of this, you know, because of no social media, no Internet. You know, this news didn’t travel over there. And it’s such a great story. Such a great story. But as you say, Payman great music as well. Brilliant music.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me and my kids love that music now. Brilliant. How about you? What’s your favourite.

Song You guys are? Leon.

Oh, on. Ready? That’s good.

That’s good.

That’s a bizarrely though, Leon table. When we’re off air, it’s just.

You aren’t from.

London. You’re from Cardiff, weren’t you?

Cardiff City. Yeah.

So I’ll tell you the story about that another time.

But you know, we’re going onto two hours now. This has been amazing. Two hours past my bedtime now.

But sometimes these things feed you, man. They wake you up.

It’s been a quick one by our standards.

We wanted you on board. Honestly, it’s been a phenomenal, honestly eye opener. And it’s covered just about everything in terms of your journey.

Enjoyed it, man.

How passionate you are. You know, the love for dentures that you have, the youngsters you’re hopefully mentoring and also, you know, the perfection that you always want to strive for. You really are honestly, as they say, a legend. Thank you so much. Stuart.

Yeah. Payman Yeah. Absolute pleasure to chat to you and you can tell you’re just all upright elegance. Isn’t he just kind of easy to talk to? But as you said, the Parkinson of dentistry, I think you’re absolutely right with that assessment and brilliant.

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

Thanks for listening, guys. 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. And you know, we really, really appreciate it. If you would give us a six star rating. Six star rating.

That’s what always.

Leave my Uber.

Driver.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Bye.

I know why I did mini smile because I knew that my composite bonding wasn’t at the level it could be from what I was seeing out in social media and stuff.

But the fact that you’re even looking and you’re paying attention and you’re trying to improve at this point in your career where you just told me you’re looking at winding down. Yeah, but you know what I mean, that that curiosity to continuously improve. I mean, to go to Pankey, to learn ortho, to the level that you’ve learned it. Where does it come from?

I just love making a difference to the patients. See, I’ve always mixed with people at quite a good level, like Bard. And, you know, I’m blessed at having colleagues and friends who are some of the best dentists in the country. You know, I’m really, really lucky. Always look at anything I’m doing that. Could that go on a screen? Could you show that at Bard? You know, could I show a colleague that and be proud of it? You know, And no, I saw that composites had gone to another level. I wasn’t doing these beautiful, layered composites with all the halo. And I needed to learn that if you could do that, then why wasn’t I doing that?

No, But why?

Because you want to give the patient the best.

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

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Yasmin George onto the podcast. Yasmin is a dentist of over 30 years experience who I still see on the lecture circuit. It’s a great thing that there are people you qualify with that you never, ever see on the lecture circuit. And then there are people like Yasmin, who I’ve been seeing for the last 20 years on different events. Dentists with an interest in orthodontics has been a principal, has been a teacher. The Pankey Institute. It’s a massive pleasure to have you, Yasmin.

Thank you. This is an honour to be to be here.

So, Yasmin, we tend to start with sort of where did you grow up? Why did you become a dentist? When did you first have dentistry on your radar?

So I was born in Kent, in Chatham, in the Medway towns, which isn’t a terribly exciting place. And still isn’t. I went to the local grammar school. Girls, girls, grammar school. And okay, we’re going back to, you know, born in 1965. So there weren’t many brown people in Kent then, and there certainly weren’t any Indian restaurants. And we were the only me and my sister were the only brown kids in school. So it was all rather interesting. But mean, you just accepted this, this was life and you got on with it. And my father was a chartered civil engineer and he worked abroad in the 70 seconds because there was, you know, economically Britain wasn’t investing in the same way that, say, the Middle East was. And there was very interesting, exciting work abroad. And he took an overseas contract or he took a number of them. Actually, he was in Iran and then he was in Saudi Arabia. And my sister and I went to boarding school. So I was in the girls grammar school, got my what were O-levels in those days? And I got my eye on the King’s School, Canterbury, because I was really into music. I was obsessed with music. I was going to be a professional musician. I played the flute, the piano, the piccolo. I was also singing. But in the girls grammar school I felt a bit limited and I couldn’t wait to get to another school. My sister also went to boarding school. She went to Benenden School and she went a bit earlier than I did and parents lived abroad.

And as I say, we we boarded and I went to King’s Canterbury in those days, didn’t have girls until 1982, which was the year I went there. And they took 24 girls in the sixth form. Competitive entry, 300 girls applied. And it was very interesting. They certainly weren’t coming from the local Kent Grammar School sort of thing. There were girls there. We all had a stunning set of O-levels. We all had 910 A’s type thing. And the boys that we were mixing with certainly didn’t have those grades. So that was very interesting. And the girls came from Cheltenham Ladies College, they came from James Lane’s in Dulwich. And you know, I mean. Top schools, but places I’d never heard of, you know. And I was from a state school and there were a few other girls from state schools as well. But, you know, there’s 500 and something boys and 24 girls in the school. I mean, now it’s co-ed and now it runs very, very differently. But some of the experiences we had. Oh, they they’re just off the scale in terms of political incorrectness or, um, I mean, the things that happen would make your hair stand on end now. And I look back on it, especially in this world that we’re now in, where, you know, you can’t say anything to anybody. Yeah. So, yeah, very interesting experience, quite bruising at times, but quite a sheltered, sheltered home Indian background. You know, two sisters. You know, I hadn’t been exposed to some of what I did get exposed to.

So I went to a boarding. I went to a school that had boarding. I didn’t I didn’t I wasn’t a boarder. But that experience that you had in boarding school and I know it’s very different now, did that affect whether you were going to send your own kids to a school like that?

Yeah, it absolutely did. And both my boys have been to the most fantastic boarding school from the age of 13. Um.

So you wanted that for them even though you’d been through this?

Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s really interesting. I mean, it wasn’t great to be a girl at this boys school. Yeah. You know what I mean? But it showed me that private education was better than state in my mind. There was no doubt the teaching was of much better quality, all of that side of things. So the academic side. Yeah, the music, the drama. I mean, I was in productions, I was in choirs, orchestras. I was busy, busy, busy doing all the things I wanted to do. Yeah. So it opened my eyes that there was a difference between state and private, which some people would dispute. But my lived experience was that I don’t think I’d have got two guys to read dentistry unless I’d been at King’s. If I’d been at my grammar school with the fairly mediocre science teaching. You know, I got good grades at A-level, but I don’t think I would have done an A-level.

Yeah, but specifically with regards to boarding, I mean, you could have put them in a private day school. Was it? Was it were there loads of benefits to being a boarder that you now you wanted for your kids?

If you’re doing sport music, drama, if you’re busy, busy, busy, yeah, the schools run a certain way. So some run on a boarding school timetable where they do all the sport in the afternoon and they do all, you know. So then other schools run on on a day by day thing. And then I, I marry a man who who went to private school from the age of seven and boarded from the age of seven. Now, that isn’t something I would recommend. And and I think he wouldn’t recommend it either. But in the 1950s, 60 seconds, when he was going to school, that is what you did. Yeah. So, you know, it’s times have changed. But he was fairly adamant that that with the incomes that we both had as two professional people, we needed, we both wanted our children to have the best. So it’s then a question of what do you think is the best? And he was adamant that he wanted his children to go to the type of school he’d been to in terms of facilities and teaching and at prep school level. That’s what we looked for locally. And the best school, in our opinion at the time was ten miles away. Well, our friends in the village weren’t sending their children ten miles away, but we decided to and we had a full time nanny and she drove 40 miles a day, you know, taking them to and from school and picking them up. And then from there, we then went round a lot of boarding schools, all the top schools, Winchester, Tunbridge, Seven Oaks, Charterhouse, you name it, all the ones around here. And we were looking particularly for weekly boarding where they come home at the weekends or you’ve got the flexibility to do that. And Tunbridge ticked the box for us and.

Is it co-ed or is it.

Boys only? No, it’s all boys. And again, we debated this long and hard and I read up a lot about, you know, what’s the best for boys, what’s the best for girls and all the rest of it. And and they obviously we only have two boys. They don’t have any sisters, but the school does a lot with all the local schools in terms of drama and, you know, productions. And suffice to say, my son had a steady girlfriend by the age of 15, so I really don’t think it mattered.

Well done. Well done. You know, because because I went to I went.

To a boys.

About it. I went to a boys school. And it’s made me adamant for my kids not to go to a single sex school. But then but then I didn’t have that level of success that your son seems to have.

Well, we you know, no, we honestly we debated it long and hard. And I cross-examined.

The headmaster at Tunbridge.

Who isn’t there.

Anymore. But he was a lovely, lovely man. And I said, Well, I said, you know, what about girls? I mean, it’s not very progressive, these in this day and age. And he gave me some sort of answer. Now we looked at this school when our son was two years old, so we didn’t even know what sort of child we’d got. But in those days, you needed to put their names down. You know, things have changed a lot, but 26 years ago, you needed to get names down at schools. So that’s what we did. And I can I can remember, you know, in 2002 going round Tunbridge, but we, we looked at lots of schools and, you know, yeah, we looked at schools that took girls in the sixth form, the same sort of, you know, model that I’d been to. But in the final analysis, we eventually let Harry choose when he was, because obviously we went back to the school when he was a bit older and stuff like that and let him look round the schools and we got it down to two. And then we said, Which one would you prefer? And he chose Tunbridge.

Fair enough.

And it was fantastic choice. Fantastic decision.

And your husband, what does he do?

He was an investment banker.

He is a chartered accountant by training. But when I met him in 1987, he’d come out of a sort of he’d left accountancy, as it were, and he’d worked for Coopers and Lybrand, and then he worked for Nabisco, and he’d moved into investment banking with a French bank, Banque Paribas, and he was an investment analyst. And when I met him in 1987, he’d been in London six months.

As in where was he before that?

Well, he was based in Birmingham and and just around the world, really. He’s literally travelled the world before. He met me on audit in all sorts of places that Coopers sent him to.

So I’m interested, you know, we’re having these conversations about sort of private school boarding school and dentists do well, don’t they? And I guess they can most dentists can can afford to send their kids to to schools that are paying schools, although the cost is the cost is so high that it’s eyewatering. Yeah. Yeah, but I’ve got, I’ve got a friend who, you know, he’s, he’s got perfectly good means, financial means and, and he, he doesn’t believe in, in paying. He says it’s more to do with the kid than the school. I kind of disagree. I disagree with it. But what I’m interested in it in is, you know how much in Britain your your social standing is very dependent on the school you went to. More dependent on the school you went to than the university or. Everything else.

Somehow I think that is the case with some schools.

It’s surprising somehow.

Well, yeah, I mean, it is quite a sort of controversial subject. It’s always great fun at a dinner party when this comes up because.

You know, like you say, there are people.

That can well afford private education, but they don’t agree with it. And I sort of respect that, but I respect it.

I don’t agree with it myself.

But, you know, at the end of the day, I don’t know.

It’s all about what you think is the best. Everybody wants the best for their children. But we don’t all agree on what the best is. And there are schools, I think, that are more sort of famous, if you like, or whatever. But you see Tunbridge 26 years ago, Tunbridge wasn’t one of those schools. It was flying under the radar a little bit. It was getting really good results. I mean excellent Oxford and Cambridge entry, if that’s what you were after and all of this type of thing. But we didn’t we didn’t choose it for connections or name. We you see, I was very worried about letting someone else look after my children. You know, these are my children. And what if, you know, you were you were you were going to work, somebody was going to be in loco parentis. The housemaster was going to be an absolute key figure. Absolutely. And what happened was I, I met the housemaster that was going to be my son’s housemaster. But of course, stupid me didn’t realise. Time goes by, they get promoted and somebody else is going to be there by the time your son gets there.

So, so, so my son.

Wins all these scholarships to go there as well because, you know, he was he did quite well to get in. But all of that. But two years before he’s going there, we get told that the housemaster that I had chosen in inverted commas, isn’t going to be there anymore. He’s now deputy head, but there’s this other nice person coming in and would you like to come to a drinks party and meet him? I was beside myself.

I was like, Oh my God, what am I going to do?

And my husband was much more sort of sanguine about it. And I met this lovely man called Andy Whittle, who was a blue. He’d read maths at Cambridge. He was a Cambridge blue in cricket and he had played for the, I think the Zimbabwean cricket team. I’m going to get this wrong. But it was like he’s really famous in cricket and of course I hate cricket. So like that didn’t mean anything to me.

And I remember.

Meeting him and I’ve just sort of said to him, I didn’t choose you, you know, how dare you sort of thing. And we laugh about it because he turned out to be the most fantastic housemaster. He’s a lovely, lovely man. And for us, we shared the same values. And if you share the values with somebody, whether it’s your partner or your, you know, who you work with. But this was a man who was had day to day care of my son, sort of Sunday night to Saturday lunchtime, you know.

Very important job.

Yeah. And he was he was fantastic.

So let’s finish. Let’s finish the story. What did your sons end up doing?

Oh, so Harry.

Went well, He went to Tonbridge. He then went to Oxford, read history. Wow.

And then. Yeah.

And then. Oh, he was a choral scholar at Oxford as well. Sang in the Merton Choir for three years, which was incredible experience. Then he got a place at UI to train as a chartered accountant, and he’s a qualified chartered accountant.

Followed his dad’s footsteps.

And he’s still with the same girlfriend.

That he met when he was 15.

You’re kidding. How cute.

And they’ve just bought a house. Well.

So. And did you not want any of your kids to be dentists?

And I got told by my kids fairly early.

On, Forget that, Mum. We don’t like sciences.

They’ve got they’ve.

Got A’s at everything they could have done either. Yeah. Neither of them had any. And they just said mum going to tell you now. Not going to do anything like what you do.

Yeah. So both of mine are telling me that but both of them like science. I was, I was talking to Jack Basra. I don’t know if you’ve come across him, but. Yes, yes. His wife was telling me both their kids are in dental school. One just qualified and one’s in dental school. His wife was telling me, the secret is for you not to be the one to recommend it. The other other people need to do that.

So I don’t know. I think it’s I think.

It’s an Indian Asian thing.

I think we pressurise I mean, I.

Don’t particularly want them to be dentists, but I want them to want to be dentists.

Well, mine I think from what mine.

Have seen about.

How hard you have to work.

They think I think they think that they can earn their money easier, although I don’t think they are because my son is working very, very. Heart. And my my baby son has just started. Teach first. And he’s teaching in a school in South London, and he’s just finished his first term and he’s worked incredibly hard.

So I bet he has.

So when did you think of dentistry? Why dentistry? What age?

And so I liked sciences.

Okay. Asian upbringing. You’ve got to factor that in in the sense that it’s not really on your radar not to be professional. Yeah, it’s the professions, isn’t it? Doctor. Dentist. Lawyer. Accountant. Mum and dad were immigrants into the UK in the 1950s. What the culture is and it still is. And I told my kids, doctor, dentist, lawyer or accountant, sort of half joking, but not half joking, you know, but not, but half joking, you know.

So that was that. So, you know, I was, I was looking.

At those four things. I didn’t really wasn’t that interested in medicine. I was a bit scared about medicine. I thought it was too broad. And how would I. I could I couldn’t be a doctor, I decided. But I did have we had some close family friends who was a dentist, and I got on really well with him. Now I just got on with him as a personality, so I wasn’t that interested in the actual technical side of dentistry. But because I liked him, I sort of thought, you know, maybe dentistry might be good. And I liked the idea of being self-employed. I was mindful that I wanted to work. I was I was quite career minded. So I wanted something that would be flexible with motherhood if that was what I wanted to do. But I wasn’t really bothered about having a family mean. I didn’t really want children at the time. When we did have children, it was my husband was keener than I was, so it wasn’t really that. But I just my dad always said to me, If you can work for yourself, it’s better than working for somebody. So there was. There was that. There was. I like the idea of being self-employed, and I like the idea that dentistry was quite focussed and targeted. You were just going to learn about one bit of the body. Yeah. And yeah, so I think and then just, you know, compared it with different things.

And when you got, when you got to guys, when you got to guys, what was your initial reaction? Because if I’ve done my calculations right, 83, 84 around that time I was there.

84. 88.

84. Yeah. So 84 guys was a, I guess quite a lot like your school, like a rugby dominated.

A little bit. 20% Asian. Yeah, 20% Indian. Asian, which shocked me. Yeah. Yeah. Was it the first time.

You were meeting lots of Asians? Yeah.

All of a sudden I said, Mummy, there’s so many Indian people here. My mum’s like, Really, darling, you know? But that hadn’t been my experience of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was fascinated by all of that, but I didn’t.

Really hang out with that.

Crowd.

Were you a rugby girl?

No, definitely not.

No, definitely.

Not. No. I was up for the all the socialising, dancing. Drinking. London Bridge.

London Bridge at that point was wasn’t what it is today. London bridge right now is this amazing area, right? It was a dump. It was it was proper dangerous wasn’t it. It was like a dodgy it was dangerous.

And also I got.

I went from glasses to contact lenses.

When I became a dental student. That changed my life.

Uh huh. As in. As in you reinvented yourself?

Mhm. Definitely.

Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.

So whoever said that, that was my experience. So that was quite interesting.

Um, sadly, I dropped all the music. Sadly, I think I found the whole experience of being doing dentistry actually quite overwhelming.

And it is. And yeah, I mean I.

Found the first year okay, because that was fairly academic and it was a move on from A-levels and won a prize and, you know, all that stuff. But when we got into the practical side of things, I, I didn’t enjoy it. I found that really hard.

Yeah, me too.

You know, And other people.

Did you stay.

At Wolfson house? Sorry. Wolfson House.

Did you stay? I remember it well. Yeah.

We we’ve stayed in Saint George’s.

So I was they.

Had they put 20 of us in a medical school like housing accommodation place at George’s. So we used to commute in from Tooting.

So.

We had a little sort of sub community there for the first year. And then after that you were on your own.

And were your parents still abroad when you went? Yeah. So, you know, I guess I guess you were already quite an independent person because boarding school does that to people. It makes you makes you quite self-reliant and all that.

Yeah. You learn to be. Yeah. Cried a lot. Cried a lot. Listen to a lot of.

Slush.

Tapes they were called in those days. You know, every sad.

Heartbreak song that you could.

And I fell in love.

In.

At King’s.

With someone I shouldn’t have fallen in love with. And.

You know, that ended badly.

But, you know, you’ve got to have your heart broken. So I did have my heart broken.

Did all of that.

Yeah. Well, haven’t we all? And then. And then. And then at what point did you or did you have any idea during Dental school of the kind of dentist you wanted to be? Or was that you were just just having a great time and learning? And, you know, some people have got like very early on ambitions about what they want to do. Maybe it’s more these days.

Back then I just wanted to qualify.

Yeah, All I cared about was getting qualified. Yeah, I was. I was so I was a real girly swot. I always worried that I hadn’t done enough work parenting to boys. And I’ve tried to parent them really differently and let and, and going back to the boarding school, one of the reasons I sent my boys to boarding school is I did not want to micromanage them on a day by day basis. Yeah. And I am that sort of person. I would be freaking out about whether they’ve done their homework. I’d be worrying about this, worrying about that. And so I just decided that it would be better if they were managed by somebody with a different style. And that’s worked well. This this blended approach to bringing up your children for me has worked really well. And my boys, they don’t overwork, they don’t swot, they do what they need to do. But and they get where they need to get, but they don’t make heavy weather of it. I made heavy weather of the whole thing.

Yeah I think I think this Gen Y, Gen Z, they’re just much more rounded anyway. You know, they seem to just understand the love of living more than, let’s say, our generation. That’s, that’s my feeling from them, you know, seeing them, they then we.

Were, we were brought up in a more.

Insecure environment, weren’t we?

True. You see.

We’ve given these kids unbelievable security. They’ve never worried. I mean. I mean, my parents, they. They. They struggled to give us what they gave us.

No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say that for me. I wouldn’t say that for me. Quite the opposite. So sometimes sometimes I wonder, you know, I’m not giving my kids as much as my parents gave me. Right. No.

I. I mean, I can remember when.

I wanted to play the flute. It it it wasn’t easy for my parents to afford a flute so that I could go and have lessons. And. And yet when my son decided he wanted to play the trumpet, I went out and bought him a £2,000 instrument immediately. Yeah. But I said to him, You better now. Make some progress. But. But he did. But you know, we’ve been way more comfortable in being able to facilitate things.

I’m not sure, but I’m not sure that’s the reason. I mean, I think even even even poor Gen Z’s today, people who didn’t have much, they’re just more rounded, you know, I guess people you know, there’s an evolution just in the same way as you’re more rounded than your mother. You know, it’s one of those things as as sort of information goes out, people, people, people understand more about. And it’s just my it’s just my sense of the youngsters these days. It just seem to have a lot of different strings to their bow. And this thing, what you said, what resonated was what you said. You know, they do they do what they do to get to where they want to get to. You know, there’s a balance about them, even even some of this politically correct stuff that one side of me just wants to just, you know, hate it on the other, on the other end of that, there’s a kindness to them that that wasn’t, you know, the kind of things that happened to you at boarding school and the things that were said. And just you’re just in this this current generation. You just can’t imagine some of those things. Now, you know, there’s the two sides to it, isn’t there? There’s the apparently these days you’re not allowed to ask people where they’re from, which is just just it’s making my life a hell because it’s it’s the first thing I ask everyone, every single person I meet. Yeah, but but but it but you know, some my kids, 13 year old cousin was telling me it’s very rude to say that. And I was I was saying, you know, come on, don’t be silly. And then she explained it to me. And once she explained it to me, the way that she explained to me was, you know, her her best friend’s mom’s black, and she went to a dinner party and it was the only question anyone asked her. And they asked her 30 times that night and no one asked her any other question. And, you know, the 13 year old was explaining something to me that.

I’ve been asked that so many.

Times. Where are you really from? They want to know why you’re brown and you were born in Chatham, in Kent.

That’s what they’re asking you.

If I ask you where are you from? And you say East Africa. Yeah, then then we can discuss East Africa. And that’s interesting. Yeah. For me, but, but the point, the point the 13 year old made me understand was that you asked that question based on the way the person looked. And if they were a white person, you might not have asked that, Although I do, I ask Polish people and Lithuanians, they’re white people. But but I get it. I do get it. And what I mean is this generation, they seem to have that side really clear in their head more. They seem they seem to be more rounded. It’s the best way I can put it. Okay. What was your first job?

Uh, the house jobs at guys to house jobs.

Oh, really? Which ones? Medicine and oral.

Surgery.

Professor Challacombe Scully. Professor Challacombe. But all was Crispian Scully.

Was he there?

Uh, no. No, I can’t remember.

But he came to Guy’s later.

No. So did all surgery. Dan, Mr. Haskell and I did oral medicine Professor Challacombe, and then I went out into general practice.

Did you enjoy the house job? Did you enjoy on calls and all of that?

Um, oral.

Medicine. There wasn’t any on call. Um, oral surgery. Yeah, that was entertaining. It was very good experience. Yeah. Very, very good experience. I’ll never forget the day I somehow messed up taking blood on this oral med patient, and I had a bright yellow skirt on. And before I know what’s happened, we’ve got half a pint of blood all over my yellow skirt, and I just don’t know what to do with myself. You know, I haven’t come to work with two skirts and.

And I remember going on the back stairs at Guy’s. You couldn’t go in the lift looking like that, right? And I’m on the back stairs and I run into Professor Challacombe and I just want to die.

And I think he just said nothing. He just raised his eyebrows and walked past me.

You know, I just felt like that big.

So then you went to practice. How was practice for you?

The first in an NHS practice in Sussex in Horsham. Lovely, lovely market town. And the owner.

He owned he owned.

Nursing homes and dental practices and he did practice, but he was in a he had two practices in the same town opposite each other, you know, literally 500 yards apart. And I was in one and he was in the other. So I didn’t really see much of him. But in my building there was a senior associate called Tony Lawley, and he was really my my mentor. You know, he I turn up on the first day and don’t really know what to do. And he taught me how to work in the NHS and, you know, the forms and all. What you had to do in, in 1990, 89, 90, you know, when I started and I learnt a lot from him and he was very ethical, very proper, lovely, lovely man. And he then became a trainer so didn’t exist, then came in afterwards and we became a practice and he was the trainer and then and then associates came in under me, if you like, but he gave me a experience, if you like.

And so how many years of that practice did you do or not? That practice, but NHS practice in general.

Yeah.

Was there. That was the only NHS practice I worked in and I was there until 93. And I was working five and a half days a week. We then got the sort of pay cuts which basically, you know, you know, they had that contract where we all did too much treatment and they had to claw it all back. So the following year they gave you an 8% pay cut. And I was like, What? I was scandalised by the idea that I would work harder. I was getting better as a dentist and I was going to earn less or I was going to have to do 8% more hours or whatever. And I used to be quite tired after five and a half days a week. So I used to go, go get into bed on a Saturday afternoon in order to recover from working Saturday morning, especially if we were going out Saturday evening.

And it’s a lot. It’s a lot of five and a half days. It’s too much. Five and a half days. Oh.

Absolutely. I’ve never, never done it since. But I did then. I didn’t I didn’t know any different. Yeah. And we were young and we’d got 99% mortgage on the house.

And, you know, you know, interest rates were 15%, you know.

And also that day I’d heard the receptionist be quite rude to a patient.

I, I thought, I really don’t like.

This way that we have to treat people or whatever. I was quite upset by it and I started looking through the job pages in the bdj because that’s what you used to do.

Yeah.

Sitting in bed with my because I was a girly swot and, you know, God knows why I’d be reading that on a Saturday afternoon. And anyway, I looked through the jobs and I saw this job in Reigate and I couldn’t work out what which practice it was. And I thought I knew quite a few of the practices, but I obviously didn’t. So I went for an interview at Ringley Park and they were looking for an associate. They only had two days a week work. It was an all private practice which was quite revolutionary in 93 and long and the short got the job was an associate there and then became a partner.

What’s your advice to, you know, there’s a lot of young dentists now who just don’t want to do NHS and it’s a different NHS now to the one that you grew up in. I speak to people and it’s actually surprises me that people think that, you know, they can’t pull off a private job. Sometimes they, they, you know, they haven’t got the confidence to do a private job. What’s what’s your advice to a young associate now who is thinking, I don’t want to be an NHS, I want to get into private dentistry? What moves should they make? What should they be? What should their mindset be?

Mm Okay. So there’s, there’s two angles, isn’t there. You look at it from the dentist angle and you look at it from the, the, the principle, you know, employing. Yeah. So I would have said ten years ago I’d have said you should start in the NHS. It’s a good like training ground, you get experience, you get to work out what you don’t want to do, but it’s a good way to start. I don’t think I would say that now. And part of my reason for saying that is when I teach at Pankey, we have got very, very young dentists now coming on the entry level course, and I teach the entry level. So the institute is is a series of four levels, E one to E four, and there’s 200, 250 faculty. And we’re all divided up into teaching which of those levels we feel most comfortable in. And I teach in E one and we always used to have people coming to E one with like five years experience, six years experience, three years, ten years, 15 years. But more recently we have people coming with 18 months experience, 12 months, you know, or, you know, fresh out of dental school now what they’re saying there is I want to I don’t want to learn the wrong way. I want to start off the right way. And because that’s what we teach is how to do a complete exam, how to take good records, how to talk to the patient about comprehensive care and implement the good stuff you’ve learnt in dental school. And and obviously you don’t learn everything. But but so many people throw away a lot of the principles of treatment, planning and all of these types of things when they get into a busy practice because they sort of feel that they can’t they can’t work that way. And guess what we teach at Pankey is that you can there is a way there’s also a in America, there’s a bigger network of Pankey practices looking for these young dentists that want to work that way.

Oh, wow. In that. Right.

Yeah. And that is fantastic. And that’s what I’ve seen over the 30. Well, how long have I been associated with Pankey coming up? 30 years. Because I went there as a student, but as a dentist. But, you know.

Speak a bit more to Pankey because, you know, out of those I guess correct me if I’m wrong, but if we’re talking sort of Spear Khoy, Dawson Pankey, those are sort of the four comparable sort of angles there was that Las Vegas, but that became Speer, didn’t it? So the question of Pankey is different to those, right? Is it a non for profit, not for profit. Is that right?

Yeah, it is. It is. Having said that, you.

Know, all of the.

People you’ve.

Mentioned, they’ve all taught at Pankey or been students at Pankey at some point, have they? So it’s an incredibly kind of like an overlapping sort of world. But yes, Pankey is the only not for profit out of all of them. And all of us visiting faculty teach for free. We even pay our own airfares to to get there. The students, what the students pay runs the facility, which is a state of the art teaching facility. And obviously there’s core staff that are there. But the the visiting faculty, there’ll be 3 or 4 and every course there will be anything between 15 and 24 students being taught. So it’s a very high ratio of faculty to student and it’s an all encompassing experience because it covers every aspect related to dentistry and even your personal life. It’s not just teaching you to how to do a full mouth rehab or how to prep veneers or, you know, it’s not just technical, it’s it’s personal development. It’s development of your team, it’s practice finances. It’s it’s planning your, your pension and your, you know, right at the beginning in E-1 when we’ve got 23, 25 year olds there, we talk to them about their pension planning and how are you going to save for your retirement, How are you going to structure it? And we show them all these graphs that show how much more money you would have if you start saving before you’re 30 and all those types of things which all young professionals should know about, not just dentists, but made sure my son knows all that stuff because. But, but we talk about communication. That’s my thing. I do the communication styles lecture on the on the first or second night where, you know, we talk about personality and styles and how people come across or how to communicate effectively within your team, but also with your patients. So yeah, I mean, going to Pankey has changed my life, changed my life personally, professionally, and I’m very, very grateful, very lucky.

And if you wanted to go to that, I mean, how long does it take? How many different classes you said ABCD.

Well, well this.

The the core program is is for courses that are about five days each. And they it’s it’s it’s they take you through a progression of of how to do big cases and and all the other stuffs built in. But Pankey run loads of courses to do with occlusion sleep apnoea you know anterior aesthetics you know there’s there’s a number but I would probably say to someone coming to it fresh, if you go in at E one, you know, we’re catering for people that have no.

Clue what they’re coming into.

You know, But if you know a bit about it already or you’ve been on 1 or 2 courses and.

Something else takes your fancy, the quality.

Is is excellent. But I don’t touch on those satellite courses.

Who are some of you know, guys who’ve been I know Mark Hughes has done a lot there that you were talking about before.

Yes. Um, Hap Gill. Andy Toye There’s quite a few open.

Vilani More recently, there’s another.

Um.

There’s, there’s, there’s so few youngsters that have been through like more recently and they’ve done like 1 or 2 levels. And then there’s like us older ones who’ve done done the whole sort of program.

So you’re teaching you said is on communication. Okay. Yeah. Communication with your, with your patients. Let’s start there. Give me, give me, give me your, your nuggets regarding that. Are we talking about different treatment plans recommending different treatment plans, the pros and the cons putting people at ease.

It’s it’s communication.

Style.

Social styles is.

What is what I sort of hang it around and there’s a couple of books written on it and it’s it’s really like perceiving or working out how your patient is going to receive the information the best. Are they an analytical type? They may well be engineers or that type of or those type of jobs, but they want a lot of data. An information. And until they’ve got data and information, they aren’t making any decisions. So give them all the data, all the information in whichever way you feel is appropriate. But probably, you know, I always do a if I’m doing a big treatment plan for a patient, I’ll always sit them down with all the records and the computer. It’s a no fee visit. It’s 30 minutes and we go through everything together and then they take everything in writing home. And again, this is something I learned at Pankey back in the 90 seconds, and it stood me in very good stead to give them a bespoke document, not something out of so that I’ve spent quite a lot of time on. But I have no bad debts and I have no misunderstandings with treatment because it’s all laid out and all my treatment planning is there and you just put it in a version, you must put it in a version that they can understand. But so that’s your analyticals They want that your your driver type personalities. They’ve, they’ve probably already decided when they came to the consult that they’re doing the treatment anyway because they wouldn’t waste their time coming to see you unless they weren’t already fairly confident that they have confidence in you and they want. So they’re going to say, okay, that looks fine. Boop, boop, boop. Yeah. Okay. When can we start? So you need to have next step ready. Yep. Yes, we’ve got some appointments next week or next month or you know, and they’re going to ask you maybe, how do you want this paid? And that’s your driver.

And they’ve got to be somewhere else quite soon. So don’t run late.

You know, then you’ve got an expressive and I’m an I’m an expressive and I flex into being a driver at work, but I’m a natural expressive. I want to talk about the outcome and, oh, see somebody else’s pictures.

And oh, I want that. And you know, and more of a.

Chatty sort of.

Thing.

So that’s an expressive. Now, if I get together with an expressive, I’m probably going to run late if I like them.

Because we just get talking.

And then you’re amiable. All your amiable is wanting to want sometimes wanting to please other people, but not always themselves. And your amiable may often have a significant person that they want to be involved in the decision. So they might want to bring somebody with them. They may or may not like want to, you know, take the information away with them. I mean, everybody gets the same documentation regardless, but it’s just how you handle the different.

They want to corroborate that with someone else, with a with another.

They might do, but they also might flex more because it’s a grid. They might flex.

More onto the analytical.

Side as.

Well that that they they, they might not want to give you their their decision straight away. They want to go away and think about it. And so if you know what you’re dealing with, you can kind of then not be too concerned. If you don’t get any commitment.

How long will it take you to work out which which one of those for your patient is? Can you tell after the initial exam?

Um, well, by the time I’m.

Presenting something comprehensive, I will have met with them 2 or 3 times because they’ll have had their initial exam. I then will have maybe got them back for more comprehensive records, models, photographs, maybe we’ve got a wax up. We’ll have had some sort of dialogue, but I also spend a bit of time in the first appointment, not actually talking about I don’t put them in the chair and start looking at them. I have what’s called a pre clinical conversation, and I always used to like to do that in another room, go and meet them in another room and then take them into the clinical environment. Haven’t been able to do that more recently.

Space Yes, and but.

Now all the patients that come to me come to me on referral and pretty much I also do a lot of ortho, So that’s kind of changed the slant a bit as well. I would say my practice is 60 to 65% ortho, and so then I will always have an initial consult with the patient. And if it’s a teenager or a child, then with the parent. And then I’m really looking at do I get on with the parent? Because it’s very difficult if you don’t get on with the parent treating the child. So I sort of interview them both really. Um, so I don’t hang everything on this social style thing. I just.

Use it as what you.

Teach.

But that, yeah, that’s what I teach and you can use it in the team as well. How to get the best out of your team and how to, you know, understand your team better.

It’s a fun session.

I bet. And is it the same for is it the same classification for your team members?

Yeah. Yeah. So we when.

We do it as a as a staff training sort of thing, there’s a questionnaire you fill out, first of all. So the questionnaire is a social style questionnaire. It’s something like 40 questions or whatever, and then depending. On the answers that that you give. You get a score and then from your score you work out where you are on the grid.

So did you go to Pankey saying, I’ve got this content that I want to teach, or is this kind of their their content that you’re delivering? No, no, no.

No, not at all. I went there in.

The 90 seconds as a student.

No, no, no.

But when it came to teaching.

Oh, no.

They invited me to join the faculty.

Yeah, and.

But specifically the content. Is this your own?

No, no, no. Then.

So basically, you.

Then they. They.

I basically tried.

Out teaching.

In different eyes, as it were. So in different levels. And then.

I, I, I found that.

I was most comfortable in e one, probably partly due to the other people I was teaching with. And there were some phenomenal, phenomenal people I’ve had the privilege of, of being on their teaching team, as it were. And then.

I used to watch this.

Presentation being done by other people. And then it sort of came up that I would quite like to have a go at it and in fact, it used to be done by the CEO, Ricky Braswell. She left a few years back and so she always did it.

And I.

Used to sort of do it.

With her.

And then when she moved on to pastures new and whatever, I kind of then sort of put my hand up and said, Oh, you know, if there’s a chance of me doing this, but you have a lead faculty on every course and the lead faculty person decides who gets to teach what. So we liaise a few months prior to a course and we all talk about who’d like to teach which bit. And if I put my hand up for that bit because I quite like that bit.

But it’s very interesting that they convince people to take time off from their own practice. Fly over on your own, back on your own.

They don’t convince you when they when they when they ask you to teach. It’s it’s an honour. The biggest honour was. I couldn’t believe it. I was like me. Yeah.

But. But what I mean is that the atmosphere, the culture of the place, I’d like to kind of get, get to know it a bit better. Where is it? In Miami.

South of.

Miami. Key Biscayne.

Oh, that’s a fun place to go.

Oh, it’s.

Lovely. Yeah.

Go in the winter. Go this time of year. It’s good. Wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. No, it’s.

It’s an incredible sort of place with incredible people who, you know, when we’re there as faculty, it’s all about the students. It’s all about we work unbelievably hard to try and ensure they get what they came for. They get what they came for and more sort of thing. And someone did that for me nearly 30 years ago and supported me. I mean, I, I did the courses between 93 and 2006. So I was very slow progressing through the courses and there were 6 or 7 at that point because the curriculum has changed and whatever. So but every time I went, I came back feeling happier, more confident, a better dentist, a better wife.

Really? Yeah. Oh, loads of I mean, you really you.

Do some personal development there as well, which is not always it’s sometimes that’s a bit painful too, but yeah.

So if you were to sort of you understand what I mean when I don’t know if I’m saying it in the right way, but the straw man panky as in as in make the case against panky. What would that be?

What do you mean, make the case again?

So I don’t know enough about it. So. But if I were to make the case against it, I would say that by by British standards, there’d be an element of overtreatment. Is that.

All?

Oh, is that true or not?

Oh, no, it’s not like that at all.

No, but if you had to make a case against it, what would be the the thing you would say? Mhm.

I mean, what’s bad about it is what you’re asking me.

Yeah.

What’s bad about it?

I like that long silence.

Oh, really?

Because I know people think it’s all full.

Mouth rehab.

Sort of thing. Yeah, but.

It absolutely isn’t, you see. So people do go there to learn more complex dentistry and.

As well.

Teach that. But we teach diagnosis. So you could get a patient that just needs a splint and a bite adjustment, a minor equilibration.

I mean, there’s some UK dentists who would say that about the whole of US dentistry, right?

Oh no, they’re so mistaken.

They are more interventionalists than we are. But, you know, in a way, I guess, you know, it’s the right thing to do sometimes, right? Well, I.

Don’t. I don’t know. Yes, I suppose. Okay.

So certainly one thing that I came back with right from the beginning is what is the best for the patient in the longer term? Yeah, right. And I’ve always said this to my patients, but I’ve always had it in my head when I’m treatment planning. And I think. Some of my training here. Fear of telling the patient they needed to spend some money. Yeah. Fear of of telling an adult they need ortho before they need restorative. Now, I know we’re doing it a lot, a lot more now, but.

25.

Years ago, we weren’t right. So I think we went for a short or medium term solution. It was more palatable to the patient at Pankey. They don’t do that. Comprehensive implemented a lot of that 25 years ago. Bit by bit, those patients are still with me. Those patients have still got those crowns that I did 20, 25 years ago. So that investment they made has made their dentistry the most cost effective and best value for money ever. And they’ve had very little intervention because the work was done well and it was done properly at the right time.

Yeah.

So when we say at the right time, is there an element of treat that tooth early before it breaks?

There is an element of that.

If you’ve got a rare case, but you’ve see where is a really big issue and occlusal disease or.

Where is.

What I learnt about there. We didn’t really learn that in the UK at that time, but then those cases are unbelievably challenging to treat because they do look like they might end up as 20 crowns type thing. But of course nowadays things have changed and some of my heavily restored, heavily, heavily restored patients did end up with, you know, a lot of crowns. But like I say, 20 years later, they’re sitting pretty and I’m not you know, I’m getting very few problems, very few patients needing endo, all of this type of thing. But nowadays, with the way composites have come on and the you got Francesca Velluti and that whole philosophy of sort of composite work and it’s still full mouth dentistry, but it’s with different materials. So I’m terribly excited that you, you merge this diagnosis and this full mouth planning, working from wax ups and, you know, designing everything like that. But then you’re using materials like composites. You literally are just bonding to the teeth. And the teeth with their wear are just underneath. And I’m doing more and more work like that.

So have you.

Done some of Francesca’s.

Style of stuff? Yeah, and I love the way she explains it.

She talks about.

You know, this is like putting new.

Tires on your car, and depending how you drive, you will wear these tires down at a varying rate. And the patient has to understand this idea that we do dentistry that has to last forever. People go out and buy 40, 50, £60,000.

Cars.

The whole time and they buy another one five, ten years later.

Even £10,000 car, 15,000 car. But the idea that you might have some dentistry done and then it might have to be done.

Again 20 years later, patients go.

Get all upset. I just don’t get that.

Have you followed up? I mean, you’ve worked in so many different places over a career of 30 years. The patients that you treated 20 years ago, are they still did they follow you around?

They followed me. I’ve only been in four practices in 30 years.

So they followed you? Yeah. Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah. I haven’t got.

Anybody from the practice in Horsham. Yeah, I’ve got loads from Reigate. Loads and loads from Chertsey Courtyard and then am.

Where I am now. I haven’t, I’ve and.

I’ve stayed in Surrey. If you want to come and find me.

You can find me. You know, I haven’t run away anywhere. Now I’ve been in the same place.

I noticed you also. It’s quite, quite good with nervous patients. And it’s kind of a thing, a bugbear of mine that I want to get it more out there that, you know, be gentle, be gentle, give painless injections. It’s such a massive practice builder. The reason why people follow you again, it’s these days it’s quite common to understand all this. But it seems that you understood this a long time ago.

I’m a nervous patient myself. I had terrible treatment as a child. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

My parents didn’t know that the dentist was rubbish, and he didn’t give preventive advice either. So we used to go to Kenya because my grandparents were in Kenya and that’s where my mum and dad were born. And the water wasn’t safe to drink out there. So when we went out there for six weeks in the summer holidays, we lived on fizzy pop with sugar in it. There were no diet drinks. We’d come back to England and I would cop a load of fillings and the dentist didn’t use local.

It was.

Awful.

It was awful. So I have.

Horrific memories of this practice in Gillingham that we went to, and I think that is a lot of where I want to help these other people. I also have had the been fortunate enough to work with the most fantastic sedation team and sedation Solutions, and I met Joe Omar back in the late 90s. I think it must have been. And he came to work with us with with his team so we could treat really, really nervous people with IV sedation and do comprehensive work. But it’s that initial consult when you meet them, they’re really nervous. They cry, they feel you’re judging them. You. That’s where the real I think the you’ve got to be patient and you’ve got to kind of like try and get over to them that you’re not judging them. You’re here to help them.

And oh, we together.

As a team. And I say, you know, we’ve got tender loving care, which is, you know, the wand and just taking your time and not rushing and and all of that. And then we move up into, you know, IV sedation and we talk about what’s going to be appropriate. But but yeah, I mean, I’m I am I’m very proud of some of the cases that we’ve we’ve been able to sort of help. And and yeah, those patients follow you. They follow you.

I think, you know what it is that we’re taught about the breadth of the problem. So in dental school, they talk about 50% of the population or whatever it is, a large percentage of the population is anxious about dentistry that we’re taught. We tend to forget it quite quickly. But what we’re not particularly taught is the depth of the problem, that if you can if you can solve anxiety for an anxious patient, it’s such a massive thing for them that they will literally stick to you for the next 30 years until everyone they know to come and see you. And that’s the competitive sort of advantage piece of it. You know that. Yeah. Okay. Be human, be kind, be do do the right thing. But it’s so huge as far as just just that a word of mouth thing. If you’re known as the gentle dentist or someone who’s aware of these things and the number of times, you know, Prav, she records phone calls and things, the number of times it’s missed by reception, You know, a patient might say, Oh, I want to have some implants or whatever, and then throw in, I’m terrified. And the receptionist just misses that completely and goes straight to the cost of implants or whatever it is. It’s such a big thing.

Understanding how people make decisions and the emotional side of things is really, really. And I think maybe women have a little bit of an advantage there, maybe for sure. I certainly seem to see that around me. And I don’t know, I’ve never really been that bothered about production, so I’m not bothered about being the fastest dentist. So I’m willing to give people time. I think I want to be given time as a patient and I always think that if you treat people how you’d like to be treated, that’s always been my motto, right? And again, like the the other thing was, was what’s best in the long term. So those two sort of things I think have been my guiding lights, if you like, for for how I decided I was going to work. And then I.

The.

Money just came.

The money. Yeah. It tends to work out.

I mean, you.

Do have to structure your fees properly and you.

Can’t.

You know, treat people for hours and hours and not charge them an appropriate fee. But but that isn’t the most important thing. That’s not what gives me It’s.

Not the focus.

Yeah, that’s not what gives me a buzz.

Tell me about your ortho journey. When did that start? And you know, you’ve gone to all different aspects of it. You’re doing lingual, you’re doing Damon, You’re doing Invisalign.

Yeah. Um.

When did it start?

So it, it started when I joined Ringley Park. And the one of the, the partners who was a real visionary and in fact had been part of the team that built that lovely practice because it was purpose built just a few years before Tom Heesom, who unfortunately passed away a good many years ago, probably about 15 years ago now, it must be. He introduced me to what we called orthopaedic orthodontics, and this was the ability to widen the dental arch and reduce the number of adult teeth extracted. Now, before that, obviously I’d worked in practice and I’d been sent letters from the local orthodontist asking me to take teeth out for some of my patients. And as you know, a newly qualified dentist I respected what was told to do sort of thing. But I do remember a couple of mums sitting there watching their children have these pre-molars pulled out asking me if there were any other options. And I said No, you know, because that was where my knowledge went. We’d had no inkling from the training as an undergraduate that there were other ways of doing things. Yeah. And so, so that, so then I go to this practice and I see this other type of work being done by a non-specialist. He was a general dentist.

And I was fascinated by it.

And because he was there in the practice doing it, that was a fantastic sort of place for me to sort of dip my toe in. And I started doing all the skip through IT courses. And he at the time was teaching a lot in the UK and the courses were criticised, you know. Oh it’s a. And course in a hotel. But but the people who criticised it never went on one of the courses and the amount of information and content that you got in three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

It was.

Unbelievable. It was exhausting. It was you had to repeat the course at least twice to get everything because there was just so much information there. It was unreal. So that’s where I started. But that then led me into training with with with other people. And but you couldn’t get a lot of that training in the UK back in the in the 90 seconds, there weren’t people willing to teach general dentists. It was difficult to get any training. So I went abroad, you know, if.

I heard of a good speaker.

Like, say, Dr. Derek Mahoney, he was lecturing in America. I went to one of his courses and there I am in this room with 98 American general dentists all learning this fantastic also. And he was going out there fairly regularly and he was their their teacher, as it were. I was blown away, you know.

Wow. And then you go to a Damon conference and you’ve got.

A thousand.

Dentists there, and some are specialists and some are not. And you all have a way.

Of looking at a case.

You know, there’s a.

Philosophy that.

Goes with it.

And it was yeah, it was incredible.

I’ve been I’ve been very, very lucky.

So, I mean, for people who don’t know, what’s the difference between orthopaedic orthodontics and sort of the traditional I mean, things have changed again. Now, now, now, now you do you do get more, more dentists that way inclined. But but what would you say is the key difference? Is it the facial orientation?

I think well, we.

Look at the face, look at the teeth. It’s our diagnosis. We take, you know, a care for a full records and then it’s it’s you do a space analysis.

And.

My understanding and I’ve I’ve, I’ve trained at master’s level so I have I have looked at looked at all of this. And my understanding is that traditionally a lot of the planning is around the lower incisors. And there are certain sort of criteria that you stick to that you believe you can’t.

Change.

Like the crowding in the lower arch or something like that. I’m not 100% sure because I’ve never done a case this way. But this is my understanding was we look at things differently. We look at the upper Arch, we do a space analysis, a Schwartz courthouse, measurements to do with the size of the teeth and the width of the arch. And you can have situations where the teeth are really, really big and you’re going to have to extract. You can also have a situation where the teeth are really far forward and the patient can’t get their lips together. And in those cases you need to extract and pull things back. But those are different racial groups and you don’t tend to see so much of that in the UK. You know, your typical Caucasian European facial structure and everything is that that they might have very tight musculature and they might have crowding, but you can widen the arch and that’s that is the basis of where we start. And then what you find is when you start widening the upper arch, the lower arch, the crowding resolves because.

The lower crowded because it was trapped so free it and then.

And similarly, class twos become class ones because the lower jaw can come forward and you have natural growth at puberty where the lower the mandible comes forward anyway. So you quite often don’t need to treat a class two because it’s going to sort itself out if you expand the upper arch impacted canines. Similarly, you.

Know, I’m passionate about.

The fact that you that we should be taking appgs around the ages of eight, nine, ten, assessing the position of the adult canines. And if we’ve got them overlapping the incisors, you need to expand. You need to, you know.

Stop.

Canines getting impacted.

So so yeah, I mean, I’m I’m, I’m really passionate about this. Probably, you know, more than I should be. But we can.

Make such a difference to young kids, you know, Such a difference.

Yes. But, you know, I’ve met you a long time ago in Courtyard Clinic, I remember. And in courses before then. But then I met you recently on Mini Smile Makeover. And, you know, you and I were the oldest people in the room. You know, we were. We were.

We were. You’re right. I hadn’t thought about it. But you are right. Yes.

The the you know, there’s a reason why there’s there’s associate young associates come to Mini Suamico. But, you know, it helps them get jobs or whatever. And then, of course, you get principles, but it’s more young people. And yet. Ever find you again on a composite bonding course. You seem to have, like, an insatiable curiosity for dentistry. What is it? Is it. Is it? Do you love it? Or are you just that sort of super perfectionist who wants to always improve in your life?

No, I don’t think I’m super perfectionist. No.

You come across as a perfectionist. You do?

Do I really? Oh, gosh. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe am with my work.

Maybe I’m with my work. I’m not with my Christmas preparations.

All the state of my study. You should see it. You think it’s, like, tidy? From what you can see, it’s horrendous down here. Um, I know why I did mini smile.

Because I knew that my composite bonding wasn’t at the level it could be from what I was seeing out in social media and stuff.

But the fact that you’re even looking and you’re paying attention and you’re trying to improve at this point in your career where you just told me you’re looking at winding down.

Yeah, but that’s now.

And Mini Smile Maker was a.

Few years ago wasn’t.

It? It was.

It was. It was pre-COVID. It was pre-COVID. Yeah. But you know what I mean. That question, that curiosity to continuously improve. I mean, to go to bank, to learn ortho to the level that you’ve learnt it. Where does it come from?

I just love making a difference to the patients. I just. I just. And I do. I want, I.

Want.

I see. I’ve always mixed.

With people at quite a.

Good level like.

Bard and you know, I’m blessed at.

Having colleagues and friends who are some of the best dentists in the country. You know, I’m really, really lucky. So I suppose I like. I’ll always look at anything I’m doing that. Could that go on a screen? Could you show that at Bard?

You know, could you.

Could I show a colleague that and be proud of.

It? You know.

And no, I saw that composites had gone to another level.

I wasn’t doing these beautiful.

Layered composites with all the halo.

And I needed to learn that if you could do that, then why wasn’t I doing that?

No, but why? Why?

Because you want to give the patient the best.

Yeah, but.

Lots of dentists want to give the patient the best. Yeah, but to keep that level of learning and curiosity going for as long as you have. You know, look, I know a lot of dentists, don’t I? I know a lot of dentists. Yeah.

You know what? It’s.

It’s. I don’t know, really. I mean, I know what you’re saying, because people say to me, Yasmin, you’re never going to quit. We can’t imagine you not being a dentist.

But I do want to quit. I really, really do.

But, but but you know what I mean.

There’s not many over 50 in many small makeover. Why? Why haven’t all the other. They all care about their patients, too, don’t they? But why aren’t they coming?

Do they say they do? No, they do. They do.

Come on. They do. You know they care about their patients. But, you know, people kind of wind down. They know what they know and they they kind of. But that’s not you. You seem to keep building on it.

Yeah. I mean. Yeah. I mean, I’m incredibly.

I’m overawed by Depeche as well. Okay, so I did choose it because of him.

He is great.

He is absolutely fantastic. And he does not have an ego. He’s not up himself. He doesn’t make you feel small, you know?

I mean, there.

Were so many factors that made me choose him as opposed to many, many other excellent composite courses that are available. And I’m really glad I made that decision. And I’ve sent loads of colleagues to him. You as a result, which you know, which you know about. And but I say it as it is, you know what I mean? And I think shortly after I did the course as.

Well, I.

Reached out to him with a question or a query or something. And, you know, he was really, really nice in how.

He dealt with that.

And not everyone is like that when you’ve attended one of their courses.

Yeah, you know, um, yeah, no, I just. I don’t know. I mean, it’s my since.

Covid, there’s been a dramatic change since COVID and the level of I was doing, I have not returned to that.

At all. Go on.

Tell me about that. Did COVID sort of was it like a wake up call about, hey, live your life a bit more rather than being a worker bee? And did you have the three months off like some of us did?

Some absolute agony the whole time.

Agony? How?

Well, I couldn’t look after my patients.

Yeah, but didn’t.

You barbecue and chill?

And I think I stressed too much.

Yeah, well, none of us knew what was going to happen next, did we?

I hated that.

That was a big worry. You know, I’ve talked to lots of people who say that it changed their outlook a little bit.

Yeah, it did a bit.

Because I got to exercise every day. I got to look after myself. I got to sleep a lot more. And it did show me that actually I quite liked all of that.

Yeah.

So when I went back, I went back three days a week. I think I was already three days. I used to do Saturdays. Saturdays went out the window. I used to do one Saturday morning in for that went for me. That was a big thing. I went to three days, but my husband’s been wanting me to retire for a long time. He’s been retired five years.

But he also knows.

That you can’t force retirement on people no matter who they are. But certainly not your wife, because you’re not going to have a very happy.

Life otherwise, are you?

And it’s taken me.

Covid was part of.

It in that I haven’t gone back to the same level of See, I don’t go on many courses and conferences like I used to. I used to travel the world the whole time.

I’m not going to complete my master’s.

Which was a big decision, but I’ve just decided it’s not a priority for me anymore. So I did most of my masters, but I won’t get my won’t get it because I didn’t finish my dissertation and I’m not going to finish it now because I’ve decided that I just don’t want to spend the free time that I’ve got doing that.

So was it.

Author?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Because it affects nobody. I mean, there’s one part of me that says, Hey, it’s just a dissertation, do it. But there’s a, there’s a definite other part of me that says, Hey, do what makes you happy, right?

If I tell my husband that I’m going to spend the weekend six hours at the weekend working on my dissertation, he’ll say what?

You know, you’ve got all these.

Commitments with your patients, your treatment plans, your you’re.

This, you’re that. I mean, I do so much for.

My patients anyway. And he gets that.

He gets.

That. That’s that’s my job, you know. But he says you don’t need the masters even paid for it. Paid for the whole thing.

But so look the question of, you know, we haven’t it’s quite late in the day to get to my darker part of the podcast, which which I so enjoy, but I want to sort of wrap it into the fact that you’ve been an associate, you’ve been a principal. Those journeys come with all sorts of, you know, in a 30 year career you would have had massive highs and massive lows. Tell me. Tell me about some of the darkest days that you’ve had in dentistry. And.

I think probably.

My worst.

Time. Well, it would probably be both would be at the transition of when you move from one practice to another. You know, why? Why did I stop being an owner? In 2005, I stopped being an owner because I was part of a partnership. We were six. We were six individuals running a ten surgery practice with 27 staff, big overheads. I’ve got younger children. I’ve got a husband whose career is is off the scale, so he’s out the door at 530 every morning. He’s back home around 730. Well, the body comes home, but the the man doesn’t really come home. You know, it. He’s he’s busy. He’s busy and he’s he’s doing very well. So. So he isn’t interested in, you know, what’s going on with me, but not in a disrespectful way.

But there’s only a certain amount. You’ve only got brain power so much.

And I’ve got five partners who I’m really not getting on with all of them that well. And dentistry is changing. We’ve got whitening coming, we’ve got cosmetic dentistry coming. And I’m seeing all this and I’m wanting to drive forward in this to the point that I develop my own brand. So I am part of Wrigley Park dental practice. I am a partner. I am a, you know, a full owner, whatever. I’ve got two kids and I decide.

To start confidence, Miles.

With one of the other partners.

Well, looking back on it, I’m like, You did what?

So internally.

Within within that.

Practice, we go.

Off on a photo shoot, we develop a brand. So of course it was the nail in the coffin, wasn’t it? And of course, with two different personalities and I’m the one with the big mouth. I’m the big gob that can’t can’t has to think.

Out loud instead of thinking and then opening your mouth.

And I learnt this about myself at panky. I, i, i, I speak think if you like you.

Process by talking. Yeah.

Not a good thing to do, especially with some of those individuals.

So. So go on the darkness. What was the.

Darkness. What happened.

So we fell out. We fell out to the point where.

Partners meetings became screaming.

Matches.

The practice manager started playing the politics. It got really difficult and I decided to sell. It was sell the practice or lose my marriage. I was that stressed so.

I probably could move.

The market was really good. I sold above the asking price. I thought everything was great and I took a year off. Then I joined a courtyard and I was clinical director and I thought this was great. No financial investment at all. I would be paid as an associate and but I was in control. I was clinical director.

And, and this is described what.

That practice was because I came there and it was maybe the most state of the art practice I’d been to at the time, because your partner was someone who was supplying Sirona stuff, is that.

Right? Yeah.

So?

So the so he wasn’t really my partner. But, but, but, but.

Basically, yeah.

There were two individuals that owned the business that supplied all the well owned a business that supplied sirona equipment. So they had this grade two listed building kitted out in three surgeries with all state of the art sirona everything. And it was used as a showroom. And then behind that building they had the company that supplied CEREC and all the equipment and the engineers and everything, and then they decided that they would make the dental practice into a going concern rather than have it as a showroom, make it into a dental practice. Yeah. So there were no patients at all. And it’s 2007 and we’ve got a recession coming. But we didn’t know. And I went out to lunch. I was introduced by George MANOLESCU, who was.

I know George. Yeah, yeah.

So I’d known George a long, long time. Good friend, lovely man.

You know, lovely guy. I think the world of him.

He introduced me and we all had lunch together and they said to me, you know, what do you think? And I went, okay. Shook hands and went to work. And building a practice from scratch is unbelievably difficult and it takes a lot of hard work. But after two, three years, you know, we were really doing quite well. And we got associates in and and I was clinical director and I did all my dentistry as well. And I was paid an associate and everything was great and I’d been promised a third of the goodwill and the plan was. They’ve got a plan to sell the practice. They were similar age to my husband and they’d got a similar sort of plan sort of thing, and everything was done on trust. I didn’t have a contract. I didn’t have any paperwork. I had nothing. And looking back, I think there was probably a plan.

All the way along.

Never to consolidate things in writing. I employed somebody to negotiate for me to to get everything in writing and get a contract because I couldn’t do it. It was too personal. So I employed somebody to do that. They failed. It didn’t work. Long and short of it is after eight years. I was driven out of the practice. I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I weighed seven and a half stone. I had all these patients to care for people in treatment who’d paid in advance. I was terrified of what the GDC would or wouldn’t do because the GDC are only interested in patient care. They’re not interested in the business side of things. Yeah, got support from MPs. I had to employ lawyers. I was on holiday and they wrote to all my patients and said that I was leaving the practice and I wouldn’t be working anymore. Now I was leaving the practice. I had handed my notice in and given six months notice. But I was going to be working.

But that’s the sort of thing.

They turned all the staff against me.

It was.

It was the worst time of my life.

Do you think being a woman made that more likely? More possible?

Yes.

And I handled it like a.

Woman instead of.

Handling it like a man.

That’s a funny thing to say. Go on, tell me. Tell me. Tell me what you mean. Why? Why? Why? Why?

Women? I mean, I would.

Write emails to them, like trying to sort things out, you.

Know, it wouldn’t take you.

Seriously.

Oh. And then my husband would.

Say, the email is too long. Then, you know, you’ve got to be much more, you know, to the point and much more matter of fact and in my opinion, much more male.

And and I think my.

Husband’s right, but that’s not my style.

And I, you know, I trusted them.

I gave them eight and a half years.

Between 40 and 58.5 years, best years of my life. I should have built my own practice.

Yeah.

I mean, I would have the most fabulous practice now. Yeah. But, you know.

Thing, you know, things happen.

But it was very.

Hard.

Very you’re learning point from that is that next time if something like that came up you what you would do differently is you would have contracts signed watertight or you wouldn’t trust people as much as did it. Has that affected how much you trust people?

Well, I will only work as an associate now.

No, but in general. In general, have you become a less trusting person because you feel like these people took advantage of you that way?

Now. I don’t think I’ve.

Become less trusting.

I think that’s nice.

Now I think. I think what I’ve done is, is look at all the good stuff in my life and whilst that.

That was awful and horrible.

All my patients followed me. They all left that practice. Not all, but, you know, really loads and loads and loads. So that was a bit sort of satisfying in a way. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. But my boys are fine. My husband is fine.

You know, those.

Are the important things. And I’m still a dentist. And I.

You know, I still.

Enjoy my patients enormously. And we can all look back and say, oh, I should have done this. I should have done that. You know, I look back at why I left Wrigley Park and if I’d handled those personalities better and those interactions better, maybe.

I would still be there. But then how would I have.

Felt during COVID with those massive overheads and not knowing what the future held?

Yeah, we’ll never know what the other side of the decision is, do we?

Yeah.

So, you know, when you when you think back, we do a thing on this show about blackbox, thinking about errors in clinical errors. Do you know about blackbox thinking is every plane’s got a black box. So when the plane crashes, they share with the whole industry the mistake that was made so that that mistake isn’t made again, for, you know, for flight safety and all that. But in in medicine, dentistry, we we tend to hide our mistakes a little bit because what tends to happen is rather than all of us learning from everyone’s mistake, it ends up pinning down on one clinician and that person takes the rap for it somehow. The culturally, that’s the way it is. So we tend not to talk about our mistakes enough. So if you had to talk about clinically an error that someone could learn from so that they don’t have to make that mistake that you made, what comes to mind?

Oh, gosh.

I think there is something. And that is a case where I had done 6 or 8 veneers. I had. I’m at the fit appointment. I’m taking off the temporaries.

And.

This has actually happened to me twice in 30 years, but the first time it wasn’t a disaster. But the second time it was in that these old these are older patients. I do veneers on older patients.

And I think.

You have to be really careful about how brittle the actual tooth structure is. And our temporary materials are getting stronger and stronger. And I damaged an incisor. I find this really hard to actually admit.

This is going out on a broadcast.

There’s nothing wrong with. There’s nothing wrong. We’ve all done things right. There’s nothing wrong with. Especially when you’ve done things like something like that. Are you saying you took the temporary off in a bit of the tooth?

I took the temporary off and I perhaps. Well, I wasn’t careful enough as I took it off the incisor tooth underneath that only had a veneer prep split or cracked. Yeah. You know, and basically we ended up the patient ended up not immediately, but ended up losing the tooth and needing an implant. And it was a really nervous patient. I’d got his trust, I’d got his partner’s trust. This was this was a really, really big thing. And I thought I’d sorted the problem. He needed to have a veneer, an implant. I thought everything was all right. But then he sued me.

So did you. When you say you sorted the problem, did you? What? Pay for the implant?

Um, I don’t.

You referred it.

You referred him for an implant?

Yes.

Yes.

In fact, No, What happened was. So he. I referred him for an implant and he didn’t want to see my colleague, so, you know, And then we could have worked something out.

Yeah, I just.

He. He just cut off all.

Contact, went.

To a third party.

And then sued.

You went somewhere.

Else and then. Then eventually heard about it. Now, he then didn’t ask me to pay for the implant, which I would have probably been happy to do. He decided to go to lawyers, so it then went to.

And. And they they dealt with it.

Oh, so was it quite quick? I said you didn’t have problems with it.

No. No, because nothing like that.

No, no.