This week, Prav and Payman have the privilege of chatting with a giant of implantology and restorative dentistry.

The great Koray Feran shares insight into his exacting work ethic and reveals how polymathic status has helped secure his position at the very top.

Koray also talks about patient-clinician alignment, his thoughts on the bees, butterflies and leeches in practice, and much more.

Enjoy!

 

“Now for me, generalism is the new speciality.” – Koray Feran

 

In This Episode

00.36 – LCIAD

02.28 – Education and becoming polymathic

14.36 – Holistic planning – cost, benefits and considerations

24.42 – Trust and delegation

29.06 – Mistakes, patient alignment and psychology

33.31 – Associates & excellence

41.49 – Value and USPs

45.32 – Bees, butterflies and leeches

48.06 – Marketing

55.08 – Life outside the clinic

57.53 – Teaching vs clinical

59.34 – Last day on earth

 

About Koray Feran

Koray Feran graduated from Guy’s in 1989, where he stayed until 1991 on as house surgeon in prosthetic dentistry and oral and maxillofacial surgery. 

From Guy’s, Koray went on to practice in North London while completing an MSc in periodontology, also from Guy’s. 

In 1993, he gained a restorative dentistry fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons in England and has since pursued a special interest in complex multidisciplinary restorative work.

In 2005, Koray founded the London Centre for Implant and Aesthetic Dentistry (LCIAD).

He is also a successful lecturer and dental educator. 

Koray: I think one of the things that we all suffer from in this profession is we don’t spend enough time doing nothing, and you need nothing time. You don’t have to constantly be doing something. Just being able to sit in the garden and chat with your wife because you don’t see her for more than a couple of hours a day during a normal working week.

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

Payman: It gives me great pleasure to welcome Koray Feran on the show. Koray’s one of the most highly regarded implant surgeons, restorative dentists in the country. What do you call it, call it LCIAD?

Koray: LCIA, London Centre for Implant and Aesthetic Dentistry.

Payman: Is that how you refer to it? LCI …

Koray: LCIAD, yeah. We just call it the LCIAD.

Payman: You couldn’t come up with a more snappy name?

Koray: Yeah, we thought about Excellent Smiles and all that sort of stuff but yeah, honestly I obviously didn’t give much thought when I named it. I should have called it The London Clinic for LC, at least, if when people search for The London Clinic, they would have got me.

Payman: So you started that clinic, I think, what? 15 years or so ago, wasn’t it?

Koray: Yeah, 2005 I became a limited company, which was … that’s the name we adopted for it. It was just me to be fair, LCIAD was me because the thought process was, look, if it’s all about Koray Feran, then when you come to build a business and you want to then expand it or sell it on or whatever when you retire, if it’s just your name, it’s not going to be particularly valuable, so I think by … the objective has been over all this time, has everybody knows I’m at the helm but it’s about nurturing other people to do that standard, so that the whole team is recognised and then it becomes bigger than the sum of its parts, ideally. That was the idea.

Payman: Yeah, so I think we’ll get to how you’ve built that and why you’ve got such a fantastic reputation because when you talk to dentists, I mean, I guess that must be the nicest thing. When you talk to professionals and you ask them, “Who are the top implant people?” Definitely your name’s always in that list. So tell us about where you grew up and when you decided to become a dentist, Koray?

Koray: How far back do you want me to go?

Payman: Day you were born.

Koray: Okay, I’m the son of Turkish immigrants, so they came here in 1971 and I grew up in North London, first of all very briefly in Crouch End, but then mainly in Wood Green and Turnpike Lane, where we lived for a number of years and we then moved up to New Southgate, into a flat which my parents still live and I grew up in North London, went to skill, Latymer School in Edmonton and what got me into dentistry? We have quite a few family members who are dentists, I think I had eight over the last 10 years or so, we’ve got dentists in the family. All in Turkey though, none here.

Payman: Were you born here or in Turkey?

Koray: I was born in Turkey, I was three when I came over, I was three, three and a half. So I was toying with medicine and to be frank, my grades weren’t probably going to be good enough for medicine when I was doing A Levels, I didn’t really know how to study, I wasn’t a particularly … I was bright but not particularly good at applying myself. I think the word immature came up a few times on my school report. So I actually chose dentistry because actually the artistry appealed to me as well, which you don’t get so much in medicine. I think the artistry of dentistry was there. I was a good artist, I was a good painter and drawer, I liked building models and LEGO and I was very practical. So I think dentistry probably suits me much better than medicine anyway. So I applied for it and I got in.

Payman: Where did you study?

Koray: I was at Guy’s, so I got into Guy’s Hospital when it was still Guy’s rather than-

Payman: [crosstalk 00:04:04].

Koray: … the convoluted name it is now. Still Guy’s to me. I had a very good time there, I spent four and a half years as an undergraduate. I then did a year as a house surgeon, I then did two years doing my MSc. So I spent eight years at Guy’s.

Payman: What was your MSc in?

Koray: Perio. I did the perio MSc, under Richard Palmer, and Trevor Watts, and Peter Floyd, and [Ravi Saravan 00:04:33] and [inaudible] and it was a very good perio team, very strong perio team in London. The thing was though, I’ve always been restoratively minded, I just felt that perio was probably the thing I understood the least when I was a student and that was thing I said, “Right, I’m going to learn more about this so I understand it better.” But I’ve always been a restorative dentist at heart. I’ve never wanted to be one specialty because I’m a control freak and I want to have control of all aspects of the treatment and I couldn’t just do one aspect while somebody else did everything else. I can’t do that, just not in my nature.

Koray: So the buck stops here. The thing I love most about what I do is the multidisciplinary aspect of restorative. I think the only thing I don’t do is ortho, but pretty much everything else I do on my own.

Payman: Endo as well?

Koray: Endo as well, yeah.

Payman: Oh wow.

Koray: I enjoy it, I think I find endo really therapeutic.

Prav: So if you’re doing a big case, will you do … So you won’t refer bits of it out to other team members or anything? You’ll do the whole thing? What would you do?

Koray: Traditionally yeah, I’ll do everything. Everything from the occlusal planning to … everything, so bone reconstruction, endo, perio, cause, provisionalisation, aesthetics, everything and I like that, I like having control of everything. Now I’ve got a bit more flexibility, I’ve got colleagues round me that I really like and trust. The orthodontics, I’ve always referred out, working with Asif Chatoo for a long time in the same practise was very good. I also work with Moira Wong now and they both do different types of cases, so I know what to refer to whom-

Prav: To whom.

Koray: … depending on what I want. Some things Moira’s very good at, some things Asif’s very good at. I have Isabella Rocchietta in with me who [inaudible] do I do bone grafting and tissue reconstruction, or do I leave it to Isabella, she’s got a fantastic pair of hands. So she’s got me out of trouble a couple of times, where a couple of things I’ve done haven’t worked as well and she’s re-attacked it and done a better job than I did. But I like thinking in 3D, I like planning aspects, I like documenting everything, it’s a very big part of my practise that everything is photographed.

Koray: So I now have digital records going back 20 years, I think I’ve got about 120,000 photographs. So there’s a few lectures in there. You learn things as you go along and also, I don’t just take photographs, I have this habit of optimising them and logging them and tagging them with names, so if I go for a search, I’ll actually get a meaningful response out, so I can look for something that’s got … fractured abutment or something, then all my photographs with fractured abutment will come up. So it’s my way of studying my own work outside hours and it’s served me very well. If I’m preparing a lecture, it’s very easy to find everything I need.

Prav: You’re a dream customer for a web designer, Koray and the reason I say this, and I’m just going to bring this up now, is because when I’m having conversations with clients, I’ll say, “Send me 10 ortho cases with crossbites and send me five single tooth implant cases and send me four same day teeth cases. And I want one case that’s at least a full face, blah, blah, blah.” It sounds like with your tagging system, in a heartbeat you’d just be able to find all that, right?

Koray: Absolutely.

Prav: That’s amazing.

Koray: Absolutely.

Prav: And you’d be amazed at how many dentists just do not have that, everything just goes into a folder and at best, we’ll get names and that’s one piece of advice I can give to any dentist, is just organise your photography.

Koray: I use Photoshop and I do basic things, rotate, crop, light and dark and that sort of thing. I don’t ever change content, you shouldn’t do that.

Prav: No.

Koray: But I use Adobe Bridge, that comes with Photoshop and Adobe Bridge allows you to have a tagging system and I run lectures on this as well, or I did before the lockdown, so we do two days on photography and archiving and also doing presentations for your laboratory, so if you want to send a case off to the lab and specify what you want, how to use PowerPoint to do that. Also, luckily we don’t get nailed with it very often, but one of the things I always try to teach my associates is every single one of those photographs should be ready to send off to a third party at a moment’s notice. Referring to somebody, referring dentist, colleague GDC, everyone, every single one of those photographs should be of a level where somebody who looks at them says, “Yeah, this guy knows what they’re doing.” If you’ve got scrappy photographs and everything’s disorganised, it doesn’t look good and I think this habit has served me really well.

Prav: Impressive.

Payman: You seem like you’ve got this, let me call it OCD, attention to detail going on, at one point did you go from being the lazy 17 year old, to-

Koray: Good question.

Payman: Was it in dental school when that happened?

Koray: I had the great honour of the great Atiq Rahman calling me the most anal bugger he’d ever met. I think it was a compliment. When you get that from Atiq, you know that it’s … Where did it go? I think it actually happened in my first year at uni, because I failed my first term exams. I think everybody did, because the previous eight weeks had been a drunken stupor but it honed me to realise that actually, these guys are serious and I need to not do this again, I need to not fail again and my dad … I went through the reading list that Guy’s had given us, there was the recommended list and there was the other reading and I bought everything, or he bought everything, so I basically had every single undergraduate textbook and they’re still in the cupboards behind me, I still have them. So basically everything we needed for the course, I think at the time we spent almost two and a half thousand pounds on books, which was a big deal in 1986.

Prav: Wow.

Koray: So went to Foyles and basically bought the dental department and after that, I think what happened, I would go to lectures, I would come home and everyone went down the bar, I was living at home, so I would sit down, I would open all the books and I would take the same subject from each book and I would collate them all so that I knew that my notes was a culmination of everything in the books and that’s I think where the obsessive compulsive bit started. I think I got to the point where I wanted everything to be complete, everything to be in one place, to the point where I remember having some people in the class saying, “Can I borrow your notes?” Because they knew it was a distillation of everything in the books. I think that’s where I really started learning-

Payman: [crosstalk 00:11:28].

Koray: That’s where when people say … Dave Winkler calls me his encyclopaedia, that’s actually where I started learning stuff because you remember it when you do it that way, rather than just going over it once, you’ve gone over it twice or three times. That laid the foundation for later, I think that’s probably where it all started.

Prav: Are you one of these guys who’s got an excellent recall, so you can just fish it out really quickly, or is it just certain facts, or-

Koray: In some things. I remember patterns, I mean, I’m very good at remembering movies, I’ll see a movie, I’ll sit there and quote it and my daughter’s inherited that from me as well. I’m not very good with names for example, so I’d [inaudible] this guy’s name, he was on our course last year, what was his name? And I recognise the face, I recognise the personality, I recognise the conversations, but I don’t remember the name, but I do remember trivia and I remember patterns, I link things together. So something leads to something else, leads to something else. So I’m quite good at forming patterns but I’m not one of these people who would … I remember interesting facts and I’m the sort of person, if I enter into Wikipedia and read something and there’s a link to something else, I’ll go into that link as well and then go from that link to whatever else is there, I’m just interested.

Prav: And then find five other websites on the same topic and write some notes on each of them, right?

Koray: Pretty much, pretty much. So I think the bottom line is, if you want to summarise it, it’s I like complete information, I don’t like to know scraps, I want to know the whole thing, I want to understand.

Payman: So does that mean Koray, that your examinations take an hour and a half and you need everything?

Koray: Yeah, exactly. Hour and a half. The thing is, someone says, “Why do you spend that long?” It’s like, well that’s how long I need to get all the information I want and they say, “Well, can’t you just get bits of it and then get the rest later?” It’s like, “Well, which bits shall I get first and which bits shall I get later?” For me, it’s like I can’t think unless I’ve got all the info and I’ve done this for Dentinal Tubules now, so Tubules have got the way I treatment plan, it’s not a right way or a wrong way, it’s just the way I do it but I think that it’s stood me in really good stead because it means that I know that patient off by heart by the time I get to treat them and that I think is the bit that’s really undervalued in dentistry at the moment, it’s the bit that isn’t taught well, it’s the bit that I think most of the younger dentists don’t do well and I think it’s the bit that gets people into trouble because they haven’t really looked at a case and analysed it and talked about it. They haven’t spent the time to do it.

Koray: Again, that then leads onto this concept of why are we not paid for that time? Why are we not remunerated for the consultation period? If I was a barrister or a solicitor that was spending time analysing you and giving you advice, I would charge at the hourly rate and so we do, we charge for treatment planning time. If you don’t, that’s where you come a cropper, all your thinking should be done there, not on the hoof. It makes your dentistry much more relaxed, it makes everything much more organised, your staff know what’s going on, your patients know what’s going on, the payments are organised properly.

Payman: Tell us, from when a patient calls, or is referred … and what percentage of your work is referral and what percentage is non-referral?

Koray: It goes in waves actually, [inaudible] the get the waves of referrals of interesting cases and sometimes I get them through patients and sometimes I get them through website.

Payman: So patient contacts you.

Koray: Yes.

Payman: Take us through the step-by-step that happens at LCIAD.

Koray: All right, so the first thing, either they’ll fill out a form on the web, or we’ll get a letter referring them from the referral portal on the web, on the site and then my receptionist or my treatment coordinator will phone them up and say, “Look, welcome to the practise, this is what we do, this is how we do it.” They’ll refer them to the new patient page on the website, where all of our information is, as to what we do and how we do it, and why we do it and we’ll inform them they’re going to be here for about an hour and a half for their first consultation, we tell them they’re going to get a report and all their documentation afterwards and we tell them the price and we take the payment upfront.

Prav: How much is that?

Koray: We take £400. We take £400, which I think is a loss leader, considering it takes me an hour and a half chair-side and probably about two and a half to three hours afterwards to put something together.

Prav: Wow.

Koray: So by the time I get all the patient’s photographs, analysed them, looked at them, done a presentation, done the letter, worked out the treatment plan, done the costing, it’s a lot of time and I do most of that at weekends.

Prav: Is the work that you tend to see, is it mainly multidisciplinary complex stuff, or do you do some simple stuff as well?

Koray: I mean, sometimes I’ll get somebody come in who’s got three interproximal composites to do, fine, it’s not a problem but a lot of the stuff I do get referred is where people have thrown up their hands and just said, “I don’t know where to start.” You’ve got collapsed occlusions and perio mixed with caries, gingival stuff and resorption and no bone all that stuff, so I like planning everything step by step by step. That’s the kind of cases I’m good at.

Payman: Where did you learn to be such a holistic treatment planner?

Koray: I think it was gradually. I think the person that probably had the most influence early on was Mike Wise because this is his approach, or this is the approach that he made known in this country which he bought back after going to the states. I mean, he was in Indiana and it was a case of, “Look, you cannot do good dentistry unless you do good planning and you can’t do good planning unless you’ve got good information and you can’t get good information unless you have a proper consultation process that everybody understands.” He was also obsessive and I spent … I mean, I did his year course back in 1996, I think and I carried on doing his study clubs for a number of years after that and whilst he wasn’t the easiest person to engage with, he made it very clear. He basically said, “Look, this is how it’s done, this is what the literature says. If it’s going to take me six hours and I need to make this money, that’s how much I’m going to charge and if my laboratory needs to charge 10 hours, that’s what they charge.” You tot it all up at the end and you draw the line and that’s the figure and that’s what you tell the patient.

Koray: While some of us where really happy about getting a patient to accept a £500 crown, he was doing £50,000, £60,000 treatment plans and it was like, “Okay.” But then I realised it wasn’t just a case of charge more, it’s like you have to justify … you need to make sure that what you put in the patient’s mouth does not fail. You have to make sure you elucidate all the causes for why the patient is needing treatment in the first place, everything from personality and habits and occlusion and caries rate and perio rate and risk and accountability and patient’s motivation, who’s around them, how much they’re willing to commit to it and then you basically say, “Look, this is what you’ve got, this is what I think should be done and this is what it costs and this is how much time it’s going to take. If the patient bites, then great, you’re on the same page. If the patient … “God, I’m not paying that much for my teeth.” It’s like, “Okay, we have different ethoses, so I can’t help you. Or I can only help you up to a point.”

Koray: But the interesting thing is that even though I will end up having a number of patients, I would say probably one in five patients don’t take up treatment and they’ll … “Look, you’re just too expensive.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s fine.” But they will always appreciate the fact that I sat down and wrote them … “Thank you for the report, I’ve never had a report like this.” They’ll obviously take that report elsewhere. There was an occasion in the past where I was being sent patients who just weren’t returning calls and it was the associate of another dentist that said, “My principle’s sending people to you for the treatment plan and then he’s undercutting you.” There was this flurry of patients all coming from the same sort of postal area.

Payman: Amazing.

Koray: I thought, “Okay, right. Maybe I’m not going to do this any more.” But the thing is, that treatment plan, your notes, that treatment plan, your photographs, when you put your signature on it and you send it to the patient, that is your signature on the future. That treatment plan’s still going to be in circulation on the patient’s notes or in their hand, or under the observation of another dentists, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, 10 years down the line. If you’re true to yourself and your true to your patient and you really are giving the patient best service, you’ve got to give them information that they have to make their own decisions on. The patient may completely chose to ignore what you want to tell them.

Koray: They may say, “Right, yeah, I get it all, I believe you, just don’t want to do anything about it.” Fine, I’ve done my job and I’ve done it well and I sleep better.

Payman: Do have patients who, I don’t know, a full mouth reconstruction in your place must sometimes get to a hundred grand, right?

Koray: Not often, I mean, I think the way we do dentistry nowadays, we’ve got it quite slick but certainly upper double figures is not uncommon.

Payman: So do you have patients who turn up, have had no idea that that’s how much it could cost, or do you somehow prime them? Or is the referrer priming them? Because a lot of people don’t know you can spend £50,000 on your teeth.

Koray: The crazy thing is, yeah, how do you justify that? Well it’s very simple, it’s because this is how much it costs me to run my practise and this is how much it takes to treat you.

Payman: No, no, I get that, I get that, yeah.

Koray: But yes, there are patients who just basically come in and say, “Look, yeah, I just cannot … this is just not something I can do.” I appreciate that but at least you’ve come in for a consultation and I’ve given you my opinion and that’s fine. If you can’t afford it or it’s completely out of your ballpark, I’m not sure I could afford me. I would really have to think hard, I’d have to have really major problems but it’s just the way it is, is it’s reality. It’s reality and there’s no getting round the fact that if you’re going to be spending 60, 70 hours treating a patient, that’s the amount of time and laboratory fees and … How does it cost you to treat that patient? You work that out in terms of your hourly overheads and laboratory fees, I’m thinking, “Well actually, I’m pretty good value.”

Prav: How do patients finance this on the whole? Do you do a lot of finance?

Koray: We do finance, we work very closely with Braemar, I’m going to give Colin Cornish a plug here, I’ve been working with him for a number of years now and he’s terrific, he does my finance, my domestic finance, my business finance, my patients’ finance. So Braemar have been terrific over the last seven, eight, nine, 10 years, I think now I’ve been with them. If I want the new bit of equipment, that’s where I go. If my patients need to finance treatment, that’s where I go, if people want to come on our courses, like the implant year course I used to run with Phil Bennett and then [Sanjay Seppi 00:22:15] and then Fazeela Khan-Osbourne and Zaki Kanaan, there’ll be people who say, “I really want to come on the year course but I can’t afford the 10 grand, what do I do?” I’ll say, “Well go to Colin, pay for it over two years, three years, pay for it after you’ve got the information and it starts paying for itself.”

Koray: So for me, I think financing stuff is just part of life. Most people don’t have very large wads of cash sitting in the bank doing nothing to pay out but a lot of our patients do. They come in and you give them and estimate and you say, “It’s going to be this,” and they say, “Okay. When can I pay?” Transfer comes over. When you look at it, it’s a lot of trust. Someone who’s just met you, is coming by your reputation, presumably, they’re in your chair because they trust you at that level, but then they meet you and then you think, “Well actually, this guy is someone who know what he’s talking about, I trust him, I feel like I’m in the right place, but you have that initial contact and you have that hour and a half and then you have that report and that’s all the time you get to convince somebody that you are worth investing in and the fact that so many of our patients do is actually very gratifying and it’s a great thing. I think it shows an enormous amount of trust and they know that we’re not fly-by-nights and we take responsibility for our work and if something doesn’t go right, we’re not going to move premises the next day.

Koray: That reputation takes a very, very long time to build, a very long time to build and it takes very little to tarnish it, hopefully on a relatively small scale, with me, if you’ve got one disgruntled patient, or one disgruntled staff member or one disgruntled colleague, it can be jeopardised, but I think if you do the right thing all the time to the best of your ability, you eventually build up a reputation where people trust you and they know that what you’re doing is in their best interest and the money is necessary. It’s not even something I … I’m not somebody who regards myself as financially successful because I’m 53 years old, I’m still in practise, I still have loans, I still have a mortgage, I still have to pay bills, it’s not like I’m sitting on a pile of money I can retire on tomorrow, it’s a good lifestyle but it’s certainly not an ostentatious lifestyle, ignore the guitars. But I think when you get to that balance, where you’ve formed a reputation for yourself, then it’s-

Payman: Do you have problems trusting others?

Koray: Do I have problems trusting others, no, on the contrary, I probably have problems over trusting others. I expect people to do things to the same standard I do them and think like I do and I’ve learned repeatedly that they don’t but it doesn’t stop me. I’m still the eternal optimist when it comes to human nature but I’ve been stung a few times, as we all, I’m sure.

Payman: But when I stay trust, I mean like delegation, because someone who wants things done to your level, and it sounds like everything, not just [crosstalk 00:25:16].

Koray: I wind people up, yeah. For sure. I’m not a hard person to work with in so far as I’m not a nasty person to work for but I will keep asking for things to be done in a certain way and for people who have a much more relaxed attitude to life and how they live and how they work, I wind them up, for sure. People burn out under me when they work for me but on the other hand, some don’t. My nurse has been with me for seven years, she hasn’t killed me yet, I don’t know if she has plans to but Nina’s been with me as my right hand for seven years and she understands and my practise manager who I’m working with, Zoe Harmer, has known me for a very long time, probably 20 years. Although we haven’t worked together all that time, she understands, she gets it, she understands what the stakes are, she’s been around for a very long time.

Koray: When you have staff members like that, I have no problem delegating. In fact, they do it better than I do, all I tell them is what, they deal with the how. The what is my decision based on how I want to run my practise. The how is their expertise. I’m not going to tell my other dentists how to nurse, I’m not going to tell my practise manager how to manage, but when something doesn’t go … In fact, I probably spend more time telling my associates how to be good associates than I do with my staff and it’s my associates, not my current ones, but past associates in the past, it’s usually them that have been the most frustrating people to work with because they want to do things their way but they don’t really take responsibility for it sometimes. When you have a set of rules in a practise that have been honed over time and if somebody’s not toeing the line and then they cause problems for other people, some associates are not as ready to take responsibility as perhaps they should, whereas staff members, I find are actually the opposite. I think most staff members take a great deal of responsibility and I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really good people. Unfortunately not everyone together, sometimes you get someone really good coming in and then they leave and then not so good and-

Payman: Do you have associates as in general dentists as well, or is everyone a specialist?

Koray: Yeah, I mean, I think most of the people that I’ve taken on have been generalists with few restorative … or Isabella doing perio and implant only for example. I’ve got Geoff Pullen at the moment, who’s known as an implant but he’s a restorative dentist. I’ve got Shiraz Khan working with me, who’s terrific, I mean, he’s a great pair of hands.

Payman: [crosstalk 00:27:43].

Koray: So they’re all general dentists. I don’t really want a single specialist. I’ve got Milvia Di Gioia just doing facial aesthetics for example, which is a much more niche aspect of dentistry, which honestly, until I saw what she could do, I didn’t really believe it and then I saw what she could do and I think, “Yeah, actually this is really good.” I didn’t know it could be this good. So Milvia’s been fantastic in terms of … she’s got an Italian flair for everything but I don’t want this kind of practise which was in position in the ’90s where you had the prosthodontist and the periodontist and the endodontist, practises don’t work that way, it’s very, very difficult to have continuity of patient care when you have a bunch of specialists. You need a really good generalist.

Koray: Now for me, generalism is the new specialty. I think to be able to bring everything together and be the leader, or the director, or the manager of the case is probably the biggest thing. So the buck stops here, who’s going to do what, when, is probably what I’m particularly good at because I really think it through step by step, literally on this visit what’s going to happen, how long is that bit going to take and then how long before they can go and do this and who needs to also be there and that’s where I’m strong at and when I’ve thought the case through that way, I don’t tend to make mistakes and it runs really smoothly.

Prav: Does it ever go wrong Koray? Have you ever made a mistake? What’s the biggest clinical mistake you’ve ever made?

Koray: The biggest clinical mistake is not recognising that your patient is not on the same page as you. It’s not the dentistry, it’s the person you treat. It’s embarking upon treating somebody who-

Prav: You’re not aligned with?

Koray: Either I’m not aligned with or they’re alignment changes during treatment, they start off very enthusiastic and then suddenly their demeanour changes, you don’t know why. So really, I think my biggest clinical error has been the patients I’ve taken on for treatment whose demands have changed, or whose demeanour has changed. From a clinical viewpoint, of course we all make mistakes, we’ve all done silly things like, I don’t know, perf endos and have a bone graft fail and an implant fail. That’s part of clinical dentistry and part of that is not so much a mistake as just part and parcel of what happens. Okay, maybe you’ve failed to diagnose that a patient isn’t very healthy, or is low vitamin D and just isn’t healing or whatever, in which case, you send him for a blood test, you find out, “Okay, let’s repeat it.” But I’m pleased to say that I don’t really have any major clinical disasters. Clinical setbacks, all of which can be rectified, so I don’t really count those as major.

Prav: I guess when you’re doing a one and a half hour exam, as thorough as you’re doing it, you’re very unlikely to pull the wrong tooth out.

Koray: No, I’ve never done that.

Prav: Never done that?

Koray: I’ve never taken the wrong … I’ve taken more than I need out, so I’ve fractured tuberosities and taken out the eight, seven, six while I was taking out the eight, for example, I’ve done that.

Payman: [crosstalk 00:30:52], well done.

Koray: That was early on in my career, but I think nowadays, when you really think … with experience obviously, you look at a case and you think, “I know what the problem is going to be here. I know what I’m going to be faced with, I know that this bit is going to be difficult,” and that’s the big advantage of having experience and that you’ve attacked these things before and you know how much time it’s going to take.

Koray: So if someone said, “You charge how much for taking out a fractured abutment?” Well have you ever taken out a connection fractured abutment? Fractured at implant level? Takes time, a lot of time.

Payman: Great, in your position you must attract some patients to you who, let’s say their problem might be more psychological than [crosstalk 00:31:35].

Prav: [crosstalk 00:31:35].

Koray: Sure, this is what I meant by the kind of patients that … I had one lady recently who came into as my TMJ [inaudible] and she was, she had massive slides and she had non-functioning TMJ on one side, headache … Having taken her through the process of getting her a Michigan splint done and equilibrating and all the rest of it, it’s like, “Yes, but you’re not accounting for the fact that my skull is flexible, my sutures move and my cranial osteopath has said this and … ” Okay, we’re going to get nowhere with this. You just say, “Okay, bye-bye.” Some people just come in with a preconception and it’s not necessarily compatible with reality and with those patients, the ones are completely out of kilter, you can tell straightaway and you kind of think, “I can’t help you.” It’s very difficult sometimes to say, “Look, I don’t think your problems are … ” you can write it in a letter and say, “Look, I don’t think your problems are dental, I think it’s your perception of your problems and I would perhaps actually talk to your GP and maybe seek the attention of a psychiatrist just to see why you feel this way.”

Koray: That’s quite difficult to write but once you’ve written it and you’ve realised how to word it, it’s something that you should actually put in your letter if you feel the patient has a psychological issue. The problem is the ones that are almost there and then at some point, there’s something happens and you’re thinking, “Where did that come from?” Again, it’s just either you don’t read the patient or you … what Malcolm Gladwell calls reverting to truth. You revert back to what you think is happening when actually something else entirely is happening and those are the ones that I think really make you think about, it’s not clinical dentistry, it’s patient management, it’s person management and that first hour and a half is actually quite a good … it gives you quite a good insight but sometimes you’ll get caught out.

Prav: At the beginning of the conversation Koray, you spoke about obviously trying to make the practise not be all about you and having some kind of an exit plan. Have you got that in mind and has that changed as a result of the pandemic and what’s happened? I know I’ve spoken to a lot of dentists who’s views has changed just because of obviously what’s happened over these last few months. What is, or what was your exit plan and how are you working towards that?

Koray: I mean, the perpetual dream has been you set up an environment to a high level, where people who feel and want to do the same things as you do and are dedicated [inaudible] just going to have an environment where they can thrive. For some people, it’s great. For other people, it’s not great, so there are people who will take full advantage of it. I mean, if you give somebody something good and they like it and they thrive with you, a couple of my associates with me for seven or eight years but what then happens is that there are some that will come in and try to take advantage of the practise for their own ends and they really don’t care about your practise, they don’t care about you, they don’t care about the staff, they basically want the reputation that you’ve made to start bolstering them, they don’t follow the rules.

Koray: When I give a little talk on associates … I mean, I’m not having a go at all associates by any means, I’ve got a reputation for being anti-associate, I’m not at all. On the contrary, I want my associates to do better than I do. It’s in my interests for them to but that also means that they have to subscribe to a certain ethos and the standards of which are set by me but not by me just as a person, “Well, this is how it must be done,” but “Guys, this is what we’re trying to achieve and these the steps that we need to do to achieve it.” If you cut corners and hope to still get the same results, you’re going to be disappointed as an associate and I’m going to be disappointed as the principal and the staff are going to be disappointed because they’re going to have to pick up the pieces.

Koray: So how do you choose associates is the most difficult thing because everybody wants it to be a successful collaboration but some people are more driven than others and some people prefer to rest on their backsides and let other people do the work and still expect to form a reputation. I think people come and go, there are no constants. Sometimes it suits people for a number of years and sometimes it doesn’t and I said I’m a hard taskmaster, I demand a certain level and if you don’t want to keep plugging for that level, if you don’t want to put in the extra hours at home, if you don’t want to do your homework, if you don’t want to record the clinical level of your activity and you’re not dedicated to it, I’m going to piss you off because I’m going to be at you all the time and I have broken a few people like that, who’ve just basically said, “I’m not doing this any more.” Which is fine.

Payman: What’s your advice to someone who wants to get a job at your place, let’s say for the sake of the argument. Or a young dentist who wants to do well?

Koray: That’s fine, okay. About three years ago, I sat down with my practise manager at the time and we said, “Right, what are with really looking for in an associate?” So I wrote an advert in LinkedIn, together. We basically sat down and said, “Right, we want them to be this, that, this, this, this, that, this, that, this, this. This is our ideal associate.” We got 24 applicants and the person that we chose actually ticked all the boxes until you realise that they ticked all the clinical boxes but they didn’t necessarily tick all the personality trait and ability to get on with people boxes.

Koray: So the advice I would give is you’ve got to love what you do and you’ve got to be dedicated to making sure that you do the best for every person and being seen to do so. It’s not just doing it, it’s also documenting it. Documenting stuff is a major part of what we do, right from the way you write your notes, to the way you talk to the patient, to the way you write to the patient, to the photography, to the diligence you show and it requires a certain amount of homework that you have to do outside the practise to be just one step ahead of everybody else.

Koray: I spent as much time doing admin as I do doing clinical dentistry and I’m not exaggerating, I really do. Now that’s maybe over the top for some people but I think I can’t do it any other way. I can’t treat a patient to the best of my ability without putting in the time outside. If I push my associates to do that, sometimes it leads to resentment, and it does lead to resentment, because they’ve told me it does. “It’s not necessary.” Well, it is necessary if you want to work here and then when something happens with a patient and they are asked for clinical records and the clinical photographs, it’s like, “That’s why we do it the way we do it.”

Payman: You’re saying you can’t do it any other way but are you saying no one can do it any other way?

Koray: I don’t mind if they do it their own, the thing is, there has to be a result at the end where things are done, a standard is achieved. Now, I don’t care whether they go that way or that way, I’m not saying that the way I do is sacrosanct, but what I do is, or what the ethos of the practise is sacrosanct and that is … My parents are not the sort of people that go to private things, they’re very low key. They’ve grown up just in normal jobs, they don’t have money and they wouldn’t go to a private doctor unless they really had to.

Koray: Earlier in my life, from memory, I think I’m second or third year at school. My mom went to a private doctor because she thought she had something seriously wrong with her and she wanted to go. This chap, whoever it was, treated her so badly she came home in tears and I thought, “How does a doctor make a person cry? How does that happen?” That had a big impact on me and one of the things I thought was, I do not ever want to be that person that a patient goes home and complains about and cries about. I want to be somebody who’s trustworthy. When they come and speak to me, they understand that I’m doing for them what I would do for members of my own family.

Koray: Whenever I’ve made mistakes in the past, I’ve always traced it back to not spending enough time and effort understanding to start with. When you try to teach that to people at the level that you work, “You have to get a photograph of this.” I have a case in point, patient’s come in now for the third time with a fractured distal marginal [inaudible] on her lower sixth and it’s been repaired three times by a past associate who’s never looked at the occlusion, there’s no photograph of the occlusion, or the guidance, or the contact areas and of course there’s a massive plunger [inaudible] straight into that area and you cannot get that restoration to succeed unless you alter the occlusion and I’ve taught them this, they know this because they have to look at it as part of their first new patient assessment, they just didn’t bother. They didn’t bother the first time, or the second time, or the third time. So, I don’t care how he did it, but he should have done it.

Koray: Now, when I see that, it pisses me off because the standard that I’m aspiring to should not let that happen. Is that fine detail or is that basic dentistry? Is that ultra high level demanding or is that how it should be? My views on that might differ to some people.

Payman: You’re in pursuit of excellence man, I mean it’s obvious, you’re in pursuit of-

Koray: But to me, it’s not excellence, it’s-

Prav: It’s your normal, it’s your normal.

Koray: … it’s basic because if you do the basics right, the excellence comes.

Payman: Yeah, that’s [crosstalk 00:41:12].

Koray: Excellence isn’t having a … I can’t do composites like [Govinda Burr 00:41:15], I can’t do crown preps like Mario Semenza, I can’t. I just don’t have that ability but I do have the ability to make sure that what I put in the mouth doesn’t break. I do have the ability to know the patient will be comfortable and looked after, and feel good and I will still see that patient 10 years down the line and they won’t need anything doing, that I do know.

Koray: So when somebody comes in, I want that full diagnosis, the diagnosis is not a fractured restoration. The diagnosis is it’s an occlusal issue. So when it breaks the first time, I got it, you might have missed it the first time, don’t miss it the second time round.

Payman: So we had Andrew Darwood on the podcast and neither me or Prav are implantologists, so forgive us our understanding, but from what I understood from him was that his particular USP was that he could think in 3D, he could keep things very simple, that was what he was saying and then imaging and the whole technology thing, the printing thing. His practise is very much specialists, lots and lots of specialists. What would you say is yours? I mean, I know you do things like bone graftings-

Koray: Andrew’s practise is probably the one closest to us in the West End, both in terms of the scope of work and the-

Prav: Proximity.

Koray: … proximity yeah, it’s 50 yards down the road. I have great admiration for Andrew, I’ve known him for a long time. I mean, I knew him when I was a house surgeon, so I’m talking nearly 30 years ago and he’s always been innovative, he’s always been at the cutting edge, it was at his practise that I saw Nobel really get into gear in the early ’90s and his imaging system and he’s an innovator, he’s got a spectacular mind so I’ve a great deal of admiration for him. He is somebody who … I’m the same, so our practise is multidisciplinary, we deal with all sorts of stuff but he takes it a step further because he also deals with the cancer patients and the facial deformities and the specialist implant designs and things. So with his imaging, he is a cut above the rest, he’s a special guy-

Payman: Definitely.

Koray: … and I think I’m not that level in terms of the scope of what he does but certainly-

Payman: Where’s your value add in the implant world?

Koray: Where’s my value?

Payman: Your value add? I do high level whitening, that’s what I do.

Koray: Do you do high level?

Payman: Because we don’t understand implants, so just tell it to us from a non-implantologist-

Koray: I don’t think there’s something special about implants as such, I think it’s just biology and patient management and good restorative skills. I mean, I don’t really like this term implantologist because it signifies it just somebody puts screws in, it’s not-

Payman: But you said the same, you said the same.

Koray: … that’s not it. You’re a restorative dentist and implants are the same an endo [inaudible] it’s part and parcel of your repertoire.

Payman: You said the same.

Koray: The important thing is I think realising when you should and when you shouldn’t and what solves that patient’s problems in the best way for that patient? It’s not necessarily what you would recommend. The patient may say, “You know what? I don’t want that. I want this.” You’re thinking, “Well, okay. It’s not the best way of doing it but it’s a way of doing it, as long as you’re aware of X, Y, Z, okay we can do that.” But sometimes you have to know when a patient says, “I want A, B, C.” You think, “There is no way A, B, C’s going to work. I’m not even going to go down that road. It has to be X, Y, Z or something Similar.” And they’ll say no in which case, needs to be part way.

Koray: The thing with Andrew’s practise is again, it’s a massive practise, there’s a lot of clinicians, there’s a lot of different clinical activity going on in there and it’s much more difficult for him to control clinical standards at an individual level. I’m trying to keep my practise small enough that I can do that where we all are on the same song sheet, but large enough that we’re flexible and we have a size that makes it a viable business, both to work in and to sell. I couldn’t run that practise on my own but equally, I don’t want a practise where I have 15 associates coming in and out, that’s a hospital.

Koray: So I think four surgeries where myself and the hygienist make up one half of the practise and the associates in two surgeries make up the other half of the practise is quite a good balance. When I talk about associates, I talk about bees, butterflies and leeches, so I think when you’ve got bees in your business, then you have very, very good thriving practise and you can just take your foot off the gas, lie back and just let everybody do their thing because they get it, they get the ethos, it’s integral, and you rest easy. If you’ve butterflies and leeches, not so good.

Koray: The difference between them is the bee will work as hard as you do. The bee will earn more than you, they’ll be on social media, they’ll be wooing the patients, they’ll be following things up, they’ll be doing things to a high clinical standard, they’ll be on top of their paperwork, they will be a version of you, me. Those are the people I want to cultivate.

Koray: On the other end of the spectrum, every practise has seen them, with the guy, the girl that comes in, complains about everything, nothing’s ever good enough yet they’re the ones that don’t turn up to meetings, they’re the ones that don’t toe the line, they’re the ones that don’t obey the rules, they’re the one that expects everybody to run around for them and it’s all about them, them, them. They’re the leeches, get rid of them and they’re the people that are going to take your patients and run off to set up their own practise.

Koray: So those are the two extremes. The difficult ones are … keep the bees, get rid of the leeches. The problems are the butterflies, who start off as a caterpillar and eat everything and they get into the practise and they’re wonderful and then turn into wonderful butterflies and they are there with you and they’re lovely and everybody loves them and their quality of work is good, nobody really complains about them, they occasionally drop the ball but they’re fine and they’re sweet and they’re charming and everything but they don’t really add any value to the practise, they don’t really bring in any patients, they don’t really do anything, it’s just a job. They come in, they go home and those butterflies are the difficult ones because they don’t really help build your practise but on the other hand, it’s nice to have them there.

Koray: The butterflies are the most difficult associate because if you push them to try to raise their game, they shrink back and if you don’t give them enough, they get bored. Those are the difficult associates and you don’t always know what they’re going to be but if you can find bees, pay them well, keep them busy, keep them happy, give them everything they need because that bee is going to be your future.

Payman: What do you do from the marketing side? Do you do marketing or is it word of mouth?

Koray: I’m terrible for marketing. I think the best marketing is word of mouth. I think patients and colleagues who know what you do and what you stand for, refer and keep you busy enough. The trick is always keeping your associates busy because when a patient comes to see you, they don’t want to be given to an associate. I call them associates but they’re not really my associates, they’re my colleagues, they should be regarded as colleagues. I want to share the job with my colleagues but if my colleagues … My colleagues need to be there to pick up the ball and wow the patient. If a patient comes to me, it’s very difficult to move them sideways. If a patient comes straight to the associate and really likes them, that for me is the best thing. I shouldn’t be involved at all and to their credit, that’s what I’ve got at the moment and I’m very lucky but it wasn’t always so.

Koray: When you’re really busy, booked four weeks ahead and you’ve got associates sitting their twiddling their thumbs because neither of them can be bothered to pick up the phone, phone the patients, that’s frustrating, that’s frustrating. I don’t do any marketing. I’ve got a website and my social media skills … we’ve got Instagram set up and Facebook set up but honestly, I don’t know how to use them, I really don’t and I get about 10 emails a day saying, “We can do your social media for you.” Do you understand us? How are you going to do the social media? “Oh, don’t worry about that, we have the formula.” You try them out and you pay them lots of money and absolutely nothing happens.

Koray: For me, I’m too set in my ways. I think word of mouth is still the way to build a practise, personal recommendation, someone who looks you in the eye and trusts you and says, “Right, let’s go ahead.” That’s the level of clientele I’m looking for. I personally cannot handle the Instagram crowd where somebody who … “I had my teeth done at X.” Attracts 200 people to come and call you and say, “Can you whiten my teeth,” is my idea of purgatory. I don’t want that, I don’t want that. I want the old company directors who understand, my sort of age level, old-fashioned values, who want one-to-one, face-to-face, trust. I’m not a marketer, never have been.

Payman: Although I think it’s wrong to generalise that that’s what marketing is. I get you because I’ve done the same. I’ve paid marketing agencies when I didn’t understand it myself, I didn’t understand the lingo and got it wrong but you know, the best marketing will sit with you and get all of that that you just said and set in your business and then come back and give you a plan you’ll be comfortable with, but I hear you. It’s not for everyone.

Koray: I find it a very abstract concept. I think I wouldn’t go to something just based on an ad, or a-

Prav: Yeah, and the type of practise you’re talking about and just sitting here for the last 45 minutes listening to you, it’s not the sort of practise that is the everyday. For one, you’re not going to be shouting about free consultations at your practise are you? It’s a £400 comprehensive, thorough assessment-

Payman: Loss maker.

Prav: … 360 degree … do you know what I mean? So from the beginning, it’s a totally different concept, so if I’m looking at it as a marketeer, the best type of marketing I think that you could do is sharing your patient’s stories. Sharing those life-changing impacts. Sharing their words in their words. Some of them may not be comfortable sharing their words because they’re just not that type of people. Then as you said, word of mouth, internal referral marketing. Marketing doesn’t have to revolve around social media and I think certainly for your practise, it’s the more discerning patient that you’re looking for, rather than your Joe Blogs who rings up and goes, “How much is an implant?”

Koray: Yeah, I mean, this is it. This is the question you get asked and in my experience, the way most marketing is done by marketing companies just doesn’t fit with the way we work.

Prav: Won’t work.

Koray: But it’s frustrating when the young associates say, “Listen, we need to do some marketing.” It’s like, “Okay, do some marketing. That involves you marketing yourself. There’s no point me marketing you. You need to get out there and show your personality so that people trust and come to you.”

Payman: No, but there is the issue of, I don’t know, the Four Seasons hotel in the Maldives might do an advert. I’m not going to go book my holiday to that hotel because of the advert only, but I may call up my buddy who went to the Maldives and say, “Hey bud, do you know what the Four Seasons is like in the … ” do you know what I mean?

Koray: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Payman: So the ad could get you just recognition.

Koray: It’s a snippet, isn’t it?

Payman: Yeah.

Koray: You need seven of those to get somebody to come in, as they say.

Payman: Because I totally understand. You don’t want people to … and have never heard of you, see an advert and come to you because that’s not the kind of person who’s going to go through this process that you’ve just mentioned.

Prav: No, no.

Koray: Much more than that, the objective was to make LCIAD the name to trust. So if it’s, “Actually I went there and they were really good.” That’s basically it. I mean, there are certain medical practises in London, so I had a couple of injuries in the past and I’ve gone to a couple of clinics in the West End of London and it’s like in fact, that’s the place to go and that I think is the reputation that you want and the people that know, know but the trick is turning that into a critical mass that will sustain you and that I’ve done probably much more slowly than everybody else and as a result of that, I’m not probably that well known outside the people that know.

Koray: So I’m just not very good at it. I just find it abstract and whenever I’ve found somebody who says they can do it for me, I’ve been bitterly disappointed. They’ve not even come close to what I stand for. So I’m kind of a once bitten twice shy kind of person but for sure, I think you need it and the way you do it I guess is you just get people talking about you, that’s the only way you can do it. The people that talk about you sincerely, where their eye contact and their body language is, “Honestly, go there,” are the people that have been there. So for me, 90% of what comes through my doors is via word of mouth from other patients, other friends, family members, other dentists, dentists themselves and this is how it works for me.

Payman: Do you get quite a lot of dentists coming to you for their own treatment?

Koray: Not a lot, but I’ve got a few, yeah, a few colleagues who I treat. They’re tough to treat man.

Payman: That right? Koray, what about outside of work? I mean, you said that you work at the weekends as well, writing these reports.

Koray: Yeah.

Payman: I see a bunch of guitars there behind you.

Koray: During lockdown I had a great time because I really got into them and I think those two months were probably the best holiday I had since A Levels.

Payman: You needed a break.

Koray: I’ve not taken two months off before but I think one of the things that we all suffer from in this profession is we don’t spend enough time doing nothing and you need nothing time. You don’t have to constantly be doing something, just being able to sit in the garden and chat with your wife, because you don’t see her for more than a couple of hours a day during a normal working week.

Payman: Does she work as well?

Koray: She does all the bookkeeping. If you look, next to me are two more double screens and so this end of the room is office and that end is playpen but yeah, she’s got on her eye on … but she’s the bookkeeper and the finance and she’s the invoice person, so she’s highly organised, she’s got a background in being an assistant CEO for the biggest dairy company in Turkey, so she knows her spreadsheets. But it’s tough, my average day starts at six o’clock and it ends at 10 o’clock and you just don’t have time to do anything else.

Payman: Wow.

Koray: I normally work four days a week, so all my Fridays and all my Saturdays are spent doing letters and reports and mentoring people and assisting people and answering questions and, “What would you do with this?” I’ve got an inbox with 150 emails to answer. I tend to also Sunday as well, so it’s not until three o’clock, four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon that I finish, then it’s either Grand Prix, or PlayStation. The guitars, you have a burst, sometimes everyone will have gone to bed and I’ll just be here at half eleven at night and I’ll pick up a guitar and I’ll still be strumming away at half one in the morning. Sometimes, you just get that bit of creativity that comes through and it all works, but I’d really, really like to do this when I retire. I’d like to have a recording studio where I actually get to do something meaningful and learn my way through recording but I just don’t have time to do it at the moment and when you do have time, you have no more mental energy left, you just want to sit and do nothing and we don’t have time to sit and do nothing very much.

Koray: That’s what I really liked about lockdown, I got far more done because I was rested and we underestimate how much we fatigue ourselves in this profession, or at least I do. Everyone else might be having a much easier time.

Payman: Do you like the teaching side as much as the clinical side?

Koray: I do. I do like the teaching side, with a caveat in that you really need to teach people who are interested and not there just to tick a box. The most frustrating thing in the world is you go somewhere to lecture and people just listen and they say, “Yeah that was really good.” And there are no questions, there’s no interaction, people just … maybe it’s me, I don’t know but when you do get an interesting crowd, it’s fantastically rewarding and we ran the implant course for 10 years, running the sinus course for almost as long. So when you’ve got people who are really engaging with you and really asking you awkward questions and saying, “Well, what do you do about this? And how do we attack that?” It’s really nice to go back to first principles.

Koray: Sometimes you find holes in your own knowledge and you think, “I’m not sure, let’s go look it up.” That bothers me. If somebody catches me out, I will want to go and look up and understand why I don’t know what they just asked me, but I do enjoy it and I want to do more of it and I did have a number of courses organised, we’ve got the RCID Academy website now. We were doing everything from implants to sinus, to occlusion courses, to photography courses, to treatment planning and fee setting courses. So really, we’ve got a lock in the pipeline as soon as COVID goes, and I don’t know how much of that is transferable to a Zoom situation, but I do enjoy it and I want to do more of it as my clinical obligations reduce over the next few years.

Payman: So I know our time’s limited, I’m going to ask you one more question and then I think Prav’s going to ask you one more question and my question is not to do with teeth, it’s to do with meat. I do love seeing your exploits.

Koray: Yeah, I’m a verified carnivore, I like my steaks. I don’t know, it’s maybe a Turkish gene.

Payman: Yeah, it certainly is.

Prav: What’s the question?

Koray: Yeah but it’s not just steaks. [Mukesh] and I obviously occasionally throw lamb chops at each other on Facebook. I like it, what can I say.

Payman: Me too buddy, me too, well done.

Koray: A good steak is hard to replace. I know we’re ruining the planet, but while it’s there …

Payman: Prav, go ahead man.

Prav: So Koray, it’s your last day on the planet and you’re surrounded by your loved ones, what three pieces of advice would you leave them with and how would you like to be remembered?

Koray: And you leave that for the last minute? What advice would you give?

Prav: Three pieces of advice.

Koray: Three pieces of advice. Is this to my family or my daughter, or anybody, or everybody?

Prav: Your family, your family, yeah.

Koray: My family. The first bit of advice is carry on living. If I’m going, doesn’t mean you guys have to stop what you’re doing, just live life like I was still there and enjoy it because it’s silly mourning after people. I think death is part of life and everyone’s going to slip off this mortal coil at one point or another and sometimes you don’t know when. [Anoup] comes to mind up and we live in a fragile world.

Koray: The second bit of advice, probably for my daughter, would be always do your best and don’t trust everybody at the first step. Give everybody a little bit of time to prove themselves. I trust too much.

Prav: Especially boys.

Koray: Not so much with boys no, just generally in life, everyone from … The world, I felt, used to be a nicer place, I think it’s not such a nice place any more. I think there are a lot of odd people with more opportunities out there to take advantage of you, so just think before you let somebody into your inner circle. Just be a little more reserved is one thing. Behind every person you know, there’s a person you don’t know, so just don’t get too involved with people until you know what they’re about, would be one for her.

Koray: One for my colleagues I guess, is if you felt I stood for anything, don’t forget it. I don’t need to be remembered for anything in particular, just if you think that what I do has value, then pass it on.

Payman: Beautiful man.

Prav: Cool. Thank you Koray.

Koray: That’s a tough, tough question.

Prav: It’s a really, really hard question, especially when put on the spot like that.

Payman: It’s flown by, I just said how quickly that’s flown by. Thank you so much for doing this, buddy.

Prav: Thank you.

Koray: It’s a pleasure, pleasure. Thank you for asking me.

Payman: Really, really lovely listening to you, buddy.

Koray: Cheers.

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

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

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

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

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