Category: Podcast

Hey, can I ask you some questions? Because, you know, I’m. I’m just starting out. I’m young and I don’t know what I’m doing. I really want to do well. I’m like, man, I’m taking you out for lunch. I’ll give you whatever time you need because this is so brave of him to be like, Listen.

I want to do what you’re doing.

I want to be No, I want to. Maybe. But I also I want to listen to people and find out how can I be better, right?

This is Mind Movers. Moving the conversation forward on mental health and optimisation for dental professionals. Your hosts, Rhona Eskander and Payman Langroudi.

Welcome to another episode of Mind Movers. Today we have another one of my friends. I feel like I take over with friends where I’m just very lucky to have surrounded myself with people who have impacted my life in a positive way. We know that the conversations are mainly about mental health, and today I’ve got a really special guest, Arthur Sulkowicz. Did I say it right? Very good. Woohoo! I said it right. So he’s actually a name that’s synonymous with fitness, wellness, high performance coaching in London. Arthur is somebody that really has demonstrated to me the importance of exercise, physical exercise and also mental exercise in a way that he’s harnessed his life to become the person that he is. He’s had a really interesting childhood. He works with some incredible people, has done some amazing business ventures, so really happy and excited to talk to him. Welcome, Arthur. Well, thank you.

For having me.

Great. Amazing. So I’m going to start off, right, because I remember that when we first started talking, we discussed martial arts. Right. So tell us a little bit about your childhood. Where did you grow up? How did martial arts come into your childhood and how did how is it for you today as well?

So I was born in Poland in 1985, so quite a while ago already.

I mean, I’m 1987. Let’s just say that’s not old.

I’m not going to mention.

Um, and I always have been a very active child, so I played a lot of chess because my parents were more into that. They would always push me towards more intellectual pursuits, so it would be more playing chess, reading books, writing. Um, but I was also always very active, so I played a lot of football, a lot of volleyball, so always a lot of activity. And I grew up amongst a lot of boys that would like to get into fights. So and I was never really a fighter. So my parents, I think, decided my dad specifically initially decided to send me to karate classes when I was actually we wanted to when we were when I was six. But back then, because the training was so tough, you couldn’t you had to be eight, so you had to be eight to to to be able to start training. So as soon as I turned almost eight, we cheated a little bit. So when I was still seven, I actually started karate training. And that’s sort of that has set me up for the future in as in it taught me so much, the training, the people, the coaches that I had, the role models that I had there, um, the competitive side of it and you know, the, the discipline, those, those a lot of that.

So, uh, to the point, you know, the first, the first year I didn’t want to go because, you know, you had those one coach, he was a very, he was a very intellectual guy, but also physically very fit, right? So, but he was also very strict. So back then it was just normal. It was 1993, so it was very normal for for a class like this to be very strict. So to give you an example, he would have 120 kids in one in a dojo. That’s what you call it, the place where you train. And it was only him and there was no word spoken. It was silence, right? If you came late to the class, you had to sit down on your knees and just wait for him to allow you in. And before you went in, you’d have to do push ups just to punish you for being late. Now, I’m not saying this is these are the right methods to treat children and, you know, eight year olds. But what it did I’m never late now I I’m I’m always on time. I’m always sort of you know, the discipline of of coming to place on time or being regular with what I do.

And I attribute this exactly to back then because, you know, I taught karate myself. I taught martial arts myself. And it’s very different nowadays. And again, I’m not saying that was the right way, but there is a middle ground between what’s happening now with what was back then, right? And then further down the line, I again, as I said, I would, you know, the first four years, I did not miss a single session. And my mom was very happy because three, four times a week I would be out every evening and out. I mean, by being out. I mean, when I came back home, I was that tired and I would just go to sleep. So she, she had it easy with me. Um, and, you know, so I, I then I competed every other weekend. I would go for karate seminars, workshops, competitions mean a lot of friends. I had my first kiss with a girl. I met the karate in a karate competition. So, you know, it was it was it was a very important part of my life. And up until today, I do a lot of kickboxing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I do it frequently, 3 to 5 times a week.

The question is right, discipline. I think that’s the one thing that massively stuck out for me. And I think that you would agree that dentists harness a group of very disciplined individuals. And on the one hand, would you agree? Payman. No, really. But I think discipline, I totally I think discipline. We argue a lot on this, by the way. You’re going to get used to that. I think you have to be disciplined because you have to get the grades that you need to get to get into dental school. When once you’re in dental school, you need to be disciplined to get through your exams, turn up to clinical things. Right? That’s discipline, right? That’s all discipline. You have to also be disciplined, like a lot of red tape is around our career. You have to be disciplined to do your CPD, to do all the like the paperwork around our stuff. I think that requires more discipline than the average person.

Maybe. All right. Yeah.

See one. So I think that that’s a really important thing. Now, I don’t know actually about the younger generation of dentists. Maybe you know better, but I don’t know if that’s sort of that discipline is perhaps less now, you know, because there’s like, I can’t be bothered with this. This is causing me stress. And I think that a lot of times we perceive stress to be a bad thing. But like, as you said, as a child, it’s probably had a positive impact on you. So I don’t think that like putting yourself through situations where you’re expected to turn up and perform as necessarily a bad thing.

Well, I’m interested in what you’re saying, Arthur, that, you know, going on from what Rona is saying, when you say classes today, martial arts classes today don’t have enough discipline, what is it about, you know, how are they how is a class today? Because I recognise the one you’re talking about, the the dojo, the sensei, the respect, the the sort of the the hierarchy. What is it like today in martial arts and, and are you saying the same thing in dentistry. Discipline, Maybe. But go on. Go ahead. Go ahead.

I’ll. Okay. Two things. Two separate things. Number one, the stress, you know, the exposure to stress. There’s an actual term called hormesis. So that’s a dose of stress that’s good for you and that’s going to make you progress. You can overdose. So then stress becomes a bad thing, right? But stress in and of itself, it’s not a bad thing. Right. Because we’re so afraid of it nowadays that we we tend to stress about stress. So as soon as we lose stress, we stress more. And that’s sort of like a like a vicious cycle. To your point, your question again, I’m generalising now, but the the it seems to me that in a lot of them it’s the martial arts classes for children. That’s what I’m referring to. They’re more playful, they’re less, you know, they’re less disciplined. There’s, you know, and there comes a point in every child’s life. And that was back then the same thing, say, 15, 16. When other factors come into play, kids stop doing what they actually what makes them grow. So they go, you know, the gender or the same gender, whatever you’re into, and then alcohol, drugs. So all these things sort of interfere with your progress, whether it’s martial arts or whatever else, right? So your passion when you’re a teenager, I think is so important.

But nowadays it’s just more so. For example, if you give a coming to my classes now, Brazilian jujitsu, you don’t necessarily have to be on time, right? Because there’s always you don’t there’s no punishment. But I still show up on time. And I noticed that with my with my peers at that club that when whoever most of the people that did any type of traditional martial art so were discipline is an actual component that’s being taught they always on time. There are some other people that’s more you know, and it’s also very cultural in a way. So, you know, people treat time more loosely, but I think that component is missing. It’s one kids can do more. You know, they can they they they allow to do more, which is a good thing. But also they’re left to themselves otherwise. Right. So there’s no they just there’s an iPad. There is a phone on the mat. There is. That wasn’t the case. And now, you know, my dream recently in the one I trained in jujitsu, they said, okay, no more phones on the mat for anyone, children, adults. And initially I was, you know, my first reaction. Oh, But then actually, I did a couple of classes. I was like, this is the best thing they could have done.

Because you don’t have you have people interacting with one another, right? So you have people and and you know, we probably will speak about later, but it’s a community of people. Yeah, mostly, mostly men. There are women as well, more and more, which is amazing. But it’s also speaking specifically of men. It’s it’s a safe space where if you speak in the changing room with other with, with our guys, they’re like, this is my meditation. I come here, I don’t see my phone. I can’t think about, you know, whatever spreadsheet or a decision or whatever I have to do. This is where I have to fully focus what I’m doing, because otherwise you’re going to get choked out, right? But you can also you you have that component of aggression which important for men. You can have that component of of camaraderie, friendship, which is also very important. And you have a time away from a screen, the time away from anything else. So that’s so. That’s why I always tell anyone when it comes to children, send your kid to some sort of a martial art class and just research. First. Go and try it out and see if that, you know, because I think that’s the best thing that can happen to your child.

I think I hear as well. I mean, there’s a few key words there. Punishment was one that just came up because you said there’s no sense of consequence. And I think that I mean, I think there’s like good and bad to having consequences and punishment, because I think, again, when I relate it back to dentistry, the fear of getting in trouble, whether it’s with like a governing body or your indemnity or do you know what I mean? That also keeps us accountable to certain actions and decisions, decisions that we make. You’re giving me that look again. You know.

The thing is. The thing is the thing is in dentistry, it’s one of the areas where actually you can you can get away with a hell of a lot. I disagree without anyone finding out the difference between a great dentist and a not so great dentist is what he does when no one’s watching, which is most of the time.

Yeah, but you just made a great point that that’s the difference with anyone who performs in a high level and anyone who sort of is a very average what they do. Right.

But but I.

Think what I’m saying is what my point is. Yeah. That you you could have someone who keeps up with their CPD. Yeah. Who doesn’t get sued because of, you know, he’s good. Good. Charming. Yeah. And yet when he does the work doesn’t doesn’t do it to the highest standard because no one’s paying attention to the work. I mean, in our career, we know this. You. The longer the better job you do, the less money you make. Yeah. Because as you say, this restoration is going to cost you £600. Now, I can spend real, real time, you know, magnification checking everything, or I can not check those things and still get the same £600 and me and you know that that compounds and the thing will fail in five years instead of in 12 years. And the patient will have forgotten all about it. So what I’m saying is one of the aspects of our job of professionalism that you’re alluding to is what you do when no one’s watching.

I hear you. But I think that you’re mistaking that actually for like a sense of consciousness, like on the one hand, with.

Ethics where.

Ethics, right. Because I think in anything that you do like, I think you’re confusing the two because I think, okay, number one, like if you’re a lawyer or you work in finance or you’re in this professional jobs, yes, there is a degree of of us being like, we can’t get in trouble because we will get punished if we do something wrong and get found out, which is what you’re saying, we will get in trouble. So that keeps a lot of people like somewhat in check, right? But also the person that’s like, I want to do this because I’m genuinely, you know, and this is the way I practice dentistry, care about the person in the chair, and I want to make sure that I’m doing my best for them. And that’s the same in kind of anyone that like runs a business. That’s just really ethics to me, you know? But I think that a lot of people now, especially with accountability, because they don’t have anyone to be accountable for apart from themselves sometimes that isn’t a big enough motivator to keep you going, and that’s why people give up much more easily because as you said, as a child growing up, turning up on time because someone will tell you off because you’re not on time. Got you into that habit, you know, and you know, there is that quote that says habit will get you further than than motivation can because that’s the thing. You know the famous book Atomic habits right. I’m sure both of you know it.

I’ve got an important question for you, Arthur based on Rona in dentistry is she’s a very good dentist, very, very, very top dentist. But for me, her her absolute superpower is how she relates to the person. Yeah. Not not the teeth, the person. Yeah. What I’m interested in is when you’re doing personal training and you’re doing personal training for these high, high end, high top level people, what how much of your value add is that mental understanding the person thing? How much of it is technique, nutrition?

I’m going to say and I was going to be controversial, but I think for a personal trainer operating, having clients such as I have, personality is much more important than than your knowledge. And obviously you have to have a note. You have to have the knowledge, right, because you have to bring results, etcetera. But. At the end of the day, people spend. You think about this, right? I have clients who spend five, six hours a week with me and then I see them outside of the hours as well. So they spend a whole lot of time with you. Some of these people don’t like spending time with this much time with even anyone. Anyone. Right. So you have to bring something, something special to the table. I’m not saying I’m special, but value. Value. But also you need to, I think, okay, personality and by personality, personality also mean your level of emotional intelligence. Yeah. And I think I have I have a quite high level of. Yeah, quite high IQ.

And so do you.

Yeah. And that’s why, that’s why I mean to get on so well. Yeah.

But give us an example of that. So you’ve got some guy who’s a CEO of some company. Yeah. And he hasn’t got the motivation to come to the gym or he you double his motivation somehow. I want to interject.

That Arthur actually works with Lulu’s Hertford Street five Hertford Street. Yeah. He’s saying as well. So the type of clients, as you know, there are not necessarily like aesthetically driven just to kind of put in there. So their motivations, which I think is really interesting when we talk about wellness and fitness. So yeah, just for the, you know, for people that don’t know.

Okay, So motivation is, you know, again, it’s more habit than motivation, right? So once people one thing, especially for this type of a client, I would say it’s your meeting. Your meetings are important to you. This is your meeting with yourself. And you don’t even have to say it because, you know, you operate with people who are much smarter than I am. So the level of IQ there is just much higher than mine. Right. But it’s the it’s the ability of of of not taking the cookie cutter approach in which you understand the human being. So to give an example. Right, to understand the and that’s why I’m not that’s what I what I do I call more performance coaching rather than personal training because, you know, you take care of the full body and in that body I see the mind as well, right? So it’s part of your body in the end. I’m not saying I’m a psychologist, I’m doing anything special, but my interest is in more areas rather than just just the aesthetic part of it. Right? Because that’s easy. You can go to a gym in a few places in London. Their sole business model is is to get you fit in three months. If you don’t follow the rules, they fire you. And pretty much I know so many people that went there.

And they relapse.

But there’s no longevity in it. There’s no longevity. There’s no they don’t they they not happy afterwards. Right. And there’s a whole bunch of sort of technicalities we could speak about. But, you know, to me, understanding the person and what they like, what they dislike, and also personal training is a service thing. So your service matters as much as you know it does. People don’t get it. Your your if you work with clients as I, you know the type of clients I work with you general knowledge matters. So you have to read the news, listen to the news. You have to be able to speak about things. Right? So and then you see the there must be some sort of connection to connection. Communication. Right? So there’s not one way to do this. These people don’t like when I tell them what to do. They don’t really like anybody to tell them what to do. Right. And we still have. And but if you make it fun and games, you know, for example, I have a client now, very, very close friend as well, who has become a very close friend. And as I told you before, a business partner, we play chess in between. So in between his rounds, we play chess. And, you know, it’s just something that keeps his mind busy. And, you know, I have someone else who, instead of listening to music, he likes listening to the news or LBC, Right? So it’s it’s.

Such a hater station, by the way, the LBC, you know, just saying. Just saying.

Go on. It’s, you know, but you know, it’s how you keep the person interested. Engaged. Some people hate exercise, though. They hate it actually, but they still do it, which I admire. Right. But so how do you how do you keep people engaged? How do you keep people coming back to you and not anyone else? Right. So it’s it’s building relationships, I think, with the people I have now. I managed you know, I’ve been seeing them for five, six years. So we we and they still getting what they want to get out of it and also keeping it interesting right. So keeping it so that they they don’t get bored because also a lot of playful minds and a lot of people that, you know, have a lot going on in their lives and understanding stress levels as well. So understanding, okay, the accumulation of stress in you, your work, your family, your business, your whatever it might be, and physical exercise and the mental pressure you’re under. Well, you have to understand that level of it as well in order to prescribe the right exercise, Right? So as you can see, exercise is only one thing. It’s not really you know, there’s some of my clients I would do, um, there’s we spoke about it briefly, actually, but there’s, you know, neurogenesis neuroplasticity. You can actually there are ways and. That’s also on me to go to the right place. I go to the US frequently to two conferences just to find out about that stuff also because of the other project.

But I guess also whether he’s having a good day or a bad day. Exactly The same person could be different, different days.

And also you never take things personally. You know, these people and sometimes, you know, initially when you start a nightmare.

In my case, just saying my personal training session. Huh? Are you are you looking at me like I knew that, you know, am I am just because I’m on my phone as well, like checking emails in between. I’m not very present anyway. It’s a tough life. I would.

Probably tell you off for.

This. Yeah, but you’re not.

You’re not her personal coach. No, no, no, no.

I told him to give me a training session. Still waiting for that, but go on, go on.

No, but, you know, I think there is. And that’s why, you know, I’m the person training you perceive is sort of the what’s what’s seen on social media. So solely the physical part of it. Right. So we train, we get ups and that’s it. But think about dentistry. Okay, let’s put let’s let’s take dentistry. What if you were only doing the whatever, you know, so that people look good but the health is not there? Yeah.

Yeah.

There’s a lot of but, but there is a lot of that and interestingly.

That’s what I’m saying. But that’s, that’s what it.

Would be like.

But interestingly, because Payman knows, there was when Facebook was a thing like ten years ago, there was this like fitness dentist, gym group, right? And you’ll be surprised. There are dentists that are really obsessed with the aesthetic aesthetic. And I’m talking about like you’re like, are you on steroids that sort of look like super bulk, super lean and you’re thinking to yourself, and again, it’s quite common. I do think it’s because of the personality types of dentists, the way they put pressure, the perfectionism, etcetera. But like you said, like are you healthy? And I think that that leads me onto my like next question. Like there’s constantly like these fads that you see online and all these things. And I think that the perception that if you’re not ripped, you’re not healthy is really toxic and dangerous because as you said, having a very low body fat percentage for for a woman, for example, is actually really, really bad. Like you’re compromising your fertility, you know, and movement in itself is good for you and you don’t have to be ripped to do that. So how do you like maximise your performance and also help change the narrative that like being this physique is not necessarily the healthiest way to be? And by the way, there’s still a lot of young dentists that aspire to be that kind of like ripped look, which I’m like, No, this is just.

You know, there’s okay, there is this and there is also that other that. If you’re lean, you’re not healthy. So I disagree with both. So if you lean your healthy, that’s one group of people think, oh, you know, it must be super healthy. But if you lean you’re unhealthy. It’s just the other type of narrative you’re seeing now. Right? One thing. Okay, a few things. I’m not even know how many things, but we’ll get there.

We won’t count.

Um, so number one, fitness and health and wellness is a marathon, not a sprint. So you don’t get there in three months, right? So you don’t. You know, people. I get accused sometimes. I’m in a good shape. I got to do some people. Oh, So what are you taking? Like, what’s that? You know, like, are you in testosterone? No, but I have been doing this constantly. Constantly since I started lifting weights when I was 20. I started training when I was seven. Right. So. So it’s the it’s the marathon that you that habits it. Habits. Exactly. And, you know, it’s you just simply cannot get there in three months or a year. Right. You have to and and that’s purely aesthetics. Obviously I got into lifting weights because of aesthetics, because I went to a modelling agency. They were like, you don’t have you know, I was my performance was amazing because I compete in martial arts winning competitions. But I got to the modelling agency, they were like, Oh, you know, you don’t have apps, so we don’t want we don’t want you because for your type you have to. So then I was like, okay, I have to start lifting weights. And that’s what got me into it, right? And I’m not going to. But then once you understand the impact of physical activity on all other areas of your life, right, your confidence levels, your mental health as well, because you can speak to, you know, there’s a a meta review of studies which meaning over 128,000 participants overall.

They they the the the results were that the conclusion was that physical exercise. So I think high intensity to sort of moderate intensity was as effective or more effective than counselling and and medication for anxiety and depression. So if you think about the impact of just physical exercise going to the gym regularly, whatever you do there. Right. And then this impact on your relationships with people, your, your mental health, your relationship with yourself, there’s just such a huge impact. So my point being that once, you know, it’s all good that people want to look good, that there’s nothing wrong about this, Right? That doesn’t mean that they will be healthy. If they get there because Because of the way they get there. Right. But there’s just once you realise how many benefits it has for you and your family, your friends, your the people that you surround yourself with. Then you probably understand the importance of it. Number two is there’s this concept of back casting. The doctor, Peter Attia or Attia, one of the top people in the it’s like.

A longevity.

Person.

Yeah, he’s sort of the most prominent doctor, at least on the social media front on online longevity. He’s, you know, a super smart guy, has a podcast as well. And, you know, anyway, he’s got this concept of back casting. So essentially what he says in terms of your physical health, where do you want to be in the last ten years of your life? Right? So assume you know what 30 something, right? Not disclose here. We’re like 30. Okay. 38 right. I assume I will live, I don’t know, 100 years. That’s punchy being optimistic here. But between 90 and 100, what physical ability do I want to have? Right. So I probably want to be able to get up. I probably want to be able to go to the shop, which probably is not going to happen in six years, but you know, whatever. So I want to be able to the, the, the things that are a daily living activities and you want you don’t want other people to be to have to help you maybe have grandkids and maybe you want to play with them right So in order to achieve that, what do you start what do you have to start putting in place now in order to be there in six years time? And that puts fitness in a much, much different environment and context because then it’s a health context.

It’s not getting ready for my wedding, getting ready for the next Yeah, yeah. Spain trip or whatever. Right. So not, not not many people respond well to it because people don’t want to think about it, right? So it’s sort of like, oh, whatever, we’ll figure it out with some pill is going to come about. But this this is also the way of of putting fitness and performance into a context that’s more important than just the chiselled physique that you’re referring to. And, you know, health to your question. Sorry, I digress. But being in a good shape doesn’t mean you’re healthy. Being in a good shape doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy. It just depends how you got there. And it depends on many other factors, such as, you know, your recovery, your diet, your mental state and etcetera.

So there’s there’s a few well, there’s a few things there because first of all, I think and obviously I’d like to get your view on it, but I think, number one, there’s immense pressure to for people to exercise, especially when they are depressed, because there’s also a group of people and I’m sure we’ve all been there that, you know, you have days where you’re like, I’m actually paralysed with how I feel mentally. The last thing I want to do is pick myself up and go to a gym, often because of habits, even if when I don’t feel like it, I might even go to the gym for like 15 minutes and be like, I’m not feeling it today. But even like the act of going. But I know that I’m in a privileged position because some people are not. And you know, we talk about our bubble, right? The bubble that we live in, because there are some people that have like seven children to feed and like are on benefits and live like a really stressful life, you know, And they’re not like, I’m going to go to the gym because everyone says it’s good for me and they are suffering from all of this sort of awful things that obesity imposes. So I think that there is that challenge and difficulty and it’s all very well saying exercise, don’t take antidepressants. But I think that there’s much bigger mental challenge to even just get up and go to the gym for some people.

Again, just to clarify, I’m not saying, you know, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t, but what I’m saying is that as good or if not as.

Effective.

As effective. Right. So but I understand this. And I you know, I was fortunate enough that my I’ve been doing it for such a long time for myself. I’m speaking subjectively now that, you know, my parents got me to do it and I was an active child and that was my you know, and there’s a difference between siblings. There’s different there differences depending on what they do when they and you know, it is really it That’s why childhood has, you know, in terms of your physicality, it has such a huge impact on who you become later in life. I think totally as a person.

And I think as well, I mean, I don’t know. You’ve got kids, right? Do you know, sometimes think like I need to keep my health in check because I want to be around for them, like the priorities?

Chell Yeah.

Do you see what I mean? And so if you have a bit of a health.

Scare, I’m.

Quite interested in this question though, you know, I know people who, if they don’t do exercise for a couple of days, they become a mess and I can’t complain. It’s a bit like sleep, isn’t it? Like, yeah, if you get eight hours sleep every night, then one hour, one day, one day you get six hours sleep. That day you’re going to feel terrible. Yeah, it’s six hours of sleep every night. It’s this.

Anxiety. It’s. Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s a process, I would say. Yeah, I used to be. Stressy about. Oh, I didn’t work out today. So what’s going to happen now? It’s just I’m about to die and I’m depressed. Obviously I wasn’t, but it’s a process of learning that it’s okay. And it’s also, you know, one bad day is not going to is not a year, it’s not a month, it’s not a week. It’s just one bad day. And it doesn’t have to be a bad day. And sometimes it’s okay to say, listen, I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. It’s okay to do. And I think there’s a lot of especially with like tracking devices, for example, that you can track so much stuff, they can always almost get overwhelmed with data. So I have some clients that where the tracking devices, I don’t have them checking the data, I check the data. They don’t see them because I know their personality once they see I used to hate it.

But even like, you know, those machines that like do like the body fat and all that stuff, I used to just have a such big cry because I was like, I’m a failure. This is terrible. I’m technically obese. What am I going to do? Do you know what I mean? And like, I had a a coach that was like obsessed with the tracker and I just found it really mentally like.

But see, that’s why. That’s why you have to that’s why it’s, it’s a personal training should be a highly personalised service in a way that you understand the client and you work with what they like or dislike. Obviously there is always some sort of negotiation room for negotiation where you’re okay. You probably need that, but maybe we do it in a way that you don’t see that we’re doing it. So, you know, the the brain training that I mentioned to you before, I have some people doing it and they don’t they have absolutely zero clue they’re doing it. But because I think they need it because they’re a certain age or whatever, it’s I’m doing it with them so they don’t have to know about this. But it’s the way how you communicate with people. So as a trainer, as a coach, how do you get people to do you think it’s good for them and you program for them, But, you know, they they won’t want to do it. So there is there’s always it’s always all about communication on the standard of the person. Right. And the data, the the or you know, if you don’t go to the gym, you feel you feel guilty or you’re a mess. Two sides of it, though. One is I know that when I exercise or train, you know, I feel much better.

So if I have an issue, you have a problem. I this is my time to switch off. And I obviously, you know, I still need to take care of the right sleep and recovery and other recovery components because that physically it’s not a recovery protocol, but mentally it makes me feel so much better. Whatever. Whatever’s happening in my life is a Break-Up. There’s plenty of jokes, you know? But if there is anything with business, family, health always that, you know, the two hours of physical activity between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. in the evenings, it’s a sacred time. And, you know, for me and I said it, it doesn’t matter how big my business grows, this is going to be my thing. And, you know, I have been very busy with because I’m I’m trying to build stuff. But everyone involved knows that this is something Arthur does every day, right? So it doesn’t have to be, by the way, it doesn’t have to be intense exercise, but some sort of movement movement and some sort of, you know, thing that allows me to process as well. So I have and so many times when it comes to building my Start-Up or working on projects, you know, consulting people and projects, I had my best ideas, training or under the shower. But that’s a different but.

But the, the, you know, the thing you said about some people have six kids and can’t get to the gym or whatever, it’s kind of an easy way out.

Like it’s not an easy way out because we have.

I spent years I spent years, you know, I had a Start-Up as well. I spent years convincing myself I haven’t got time.

To go to the gym. Yeah, but.

This is different. Go on.

Here we are. It turned out to be bullshit excuse. Yeah, Because one day I realised at the time Clinton was the president. Clinton was going, like, running. Running? Yeah. He’s running the whole free world. He’s got time and. Yeah, I’m starting a teeth whitening company and I haven’t got time and you know. You know what I mean?

It’s priorities.

I get it.

It’s just.

I get it. I get.

It. But you’re talking about. You’re talking from a place of privilege. I’m like, the problem that I’m talking.

Clinton No, you isn’t.

Clinton And you. Clinton and you a place of privilege. Because me and Bill, it is.

True. Those my real problem what I’m trying what I’m trying.

To those younger than me is running Canada.

So so the thing is.

Is that he keeps going on about Trudeau by the way. I don’t know what the whole thing is. A Trudeau Basically, the thing that I’m trying to say is, is that we’re talking about a socioeconomic problem is what I’m trying to say. And those people in society, that sector of society that don’t have the privileges. And by the way, I mean.

Basic privilege.

But he’s he’s treating, treating, sorry, helping some of the richest people.

In the world. Totally. Totally.

You’re treating some of the richest people in the world. The Dental pain of a rich person is just as much as a Dental pain of a 100%. But okay, there’s some sort of cumulative effects of not being able to afford and so on. But but you know, there’s my point. I think it’s a universal.

Yeah, I.

Think I think it’s it’s it’s it’s a different problem but it’s, you know, essentially the same problem. It’s a lack of time. Yeah. But also but.

It’s also that mental capacity the.

Educational part of it. Right. Yeah. And also what you’re used to doing, what you’re not used to doing because I would argue for someone who, you know, has got billions in the bank and they are not used to someone’s calling me. They they’re not used to exercising. It’s going to be as difficult to get into the gym or whatever exercise is going to be as that person you’re referring to with six kids. Right. Because on the the brain doesn’t recognise money. It’s like it’s just it’s a lack of time. So I get I get I get your point. But your point is it’s just.

Yeah, go on.

Go on, go on.

I get it now. I’m being told. Go on. No, no, no.

I get. I get where you’re coming from and and I agree with it. Right. Because it’s much harder, much harder for someone who struggles with financial problems and potentially time problems and lots of other problems because they don’t have money to throw money at the problem. Right. So for someone to.

Buy their way out.

Of it, Yeah. So for someone who is, you know, for someone who’s wealthy, they’re like, oh, I’m just going to hire Arthur Fine. You know, totally taken care of. But I agree with you. But I also agree.

With you totally.

Very diplomatic.

And it’s very it’s very it’s very interesting as well, because when we you know, I do a lot of work in the refugee camps. I go every year to Greece to do work with the refugees. This year, I brought one of my best friends, Chrissy Keller, who is a really well known fitness influencer entrepreneur. And because obviously part of it was like we have a skill, like we’re really lucky as medical professionals. We go, we literally treat pain, you know, when we go out there. And that’s amazing. That’s what I love about my job. And so with Chrissy, what she did was, is that we found her like the Women’s Wellness Centre within the refugee camp, and she did a fitness class, you know, and it was so great and we like recorded it and it was so fantastic to see like these women and getting involved and like some of them were like dying at like three squats because they just never done it. But there was a real sense of community and that’s where I’m going on to kind of like the next subject, which I think is really important and something that is really close to my heart. Payman and I have often discussed that the biggest cause of male death under 25 is male suicide. And I think, you know, the problem is growing and growing, and we often talk about the unfairness within society when it comes to women.

And of course, that exists. You know, I’m very much at the forefront of that. But, um, men, boys in particular, you know, you know, you guys saw the shooter, the accident in Croydon, right, with that young boy. Right. And what it screams to me is that young men more and more, do not have role models. They are their support system is going down. They’ve got the likes of Andrew Tate as well, who is the person that they look up to who is spreading toxic masculinity and all that thing. But I want to know your views because one thing that you said was that there was a real sense of community. And I noticed that you were talking about, you know, previously as well when you played sports, like there was male only groups and things like that. And I think, again, that’s another challenging conversation because people are like, why should it only be male and why should it only be female? And everything is the same and we’re all equal and all that kind of thing. But I’d really love to know your views. And as well, when it comes to like male sport, like is it important to have like sexes working together against each other? What kind of community? How could we do better for younger males?

Okay, so broad topic. Um, I actually looked look the numbers up last night and in the UK 150 people a week take their lives, 75% of which are men, which is which actually blew my mind. I was just sitting there like, yes. So and annually I think it’s worldwide. That’s that’s 6000 people a year right. 75% from which are men. And then worldwide, I think it’s around 700,000 people, 700,000 people who decide, I don’t want to live anymore. That’s just you know, it’s actually it’s very scary. Um, when it comes to men, I think what you mentioned earlier, the lack of the right role models or the availability of way too many wrong role models and everyone getting a voice nowadays and everyone, you know, without the, the sense of. Consequence that without a sense of potential punishment, they can voice their opinions, however controversial they are. And then we have people like Andrew Tate spreading, you know, whatever he has been spreading. And it’s funny because he’s getting so much publicity even from us and we dislike him. You know, it’s that’s that’s just the phenomenon on on on the these kind.

Of people on the.

Media nowadays. Right. But and you have a lot of young men and even women I speak with they’re like oh I agree with some of what he says. I’m like, how can you agree with some of what he says? But he also, on the other hand, is just the most sexist and chauvinistic. And, you know, it’s it’s just it blows my mind. Listen.

On that subject, one of my kid’s friends sent me an Andrew Tate thing.

How old is he?

Uh, 18.

That’s and that’s the group.

But it was three hours I listened to in that three hours. He didn’t say anything. Yeah.

Yeah, but you don’t understand. He’s changing the narrative now because his recent accusations. His recent.

It was. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a new thing. But my point is, there’s definitely stuff he says that I wasn’t. I wasn’t massively into it, but. But but I could have been someone else. Could have been. And he didn’t say a single thing in that three hours. That was.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, listen, I don’t listen, we’ve, we’ve.

All listened to the three 32nd things here and, and we all know those are the ones that that trended. And and I’m not saying anything. I mean the name Andrew Tate is now linked to those. Yeah, but there’s plenty of people who’ve listened.

To the long you know one you should we should be taking care of boys. We should be taking care of not only boys, but children in general. Right? So we we should be giving them enough education and understanding of what it is to how, you know. And it’s difficult because the traditional split of roles is no longer does no longer exist, which means that men used to know how to behave. Now we don’t know how to behave anymore because there’s so many suggestions you should be this, You should be that, you should be this, you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t. So you sort of feel like, you know, unless you have a strong personality and you you stay strong with your values and aligned with them and you know, then you know who you are. But otherwise, a lot of men, especially young men, I can see that happening. They just don’t know who they should be and they don’t know how they should treat a woman. They don’t know. They have absolutely no idea. You know, they should open the door for her. Should not. Should I? I don’t know. And the.

Rules are changing.

And the rules are changing all the time.

But what do you but what do you think? Like, how can we do better? Like, is it like what kind of role models do they need? And also, I’m going to go, go, go back to the whole community thing that I asked you, you know, and especially when it comes to like male sport and things like that, you know, are those things that help harness. I know that before we’ve had conversations where you were like, jiu jitsu helps me get like in touch with my masculinity, you know, in a different way, you know. You know.

Jujitsu is so martial arts in general. An interesting one because you have you are everyone is tough there. Like you are able to go on the mat and choke all the people. They choke you Obviously it’s not. But it’s a it’s a dangerous sport. But then so that toughness is no longer needed because everyone knows you’re tough. But, you know, it’s a community of people. Maybe, you know, we don’t talk about everything, but you make friends, which then which then makes you talk to them about the topics that maybe you wouldn’t mention with other people. So you have male friends and male friendships are and I’m talking specifically of male, but there are also we also have, you know, we also have ladies only class and then we have mixed classes. It’s a community where where there’s sort of there’s a boundary that’s taken away. So there is no there’s a certain societal limit, I would say that just doesn’t exist there because you sweat together, you fight together, and then you laugh together and you have events together. Right. And that’s one specific community I’m talking about here In my karate days when I was a child, for me, that was everything. You know, I would I would spend weekends with these people. And as I told you, like the first girlfriend I had was from karate. It’s a friendships that stayed for life, friendships that I have up until today. And you know, people that because they were and I’m not saying I’m talking specifically about sport just because that’s my thing but I think there is more there’s more you can do that creates and teaches people how to be how to have certain values, right? And the values are freaking boring. It’s the problem we have nowadays. Everything needs to be exciting, right? It’s the paradox of choice. There’s this really good book called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz and what he says. The more choice we have, the less happy we are. And that’s true. The more choice.

So true. But this is why we’re all unhappy.

But listen. And then you have these two types of people. I told you about it before, but you have satisfiers, right? So people that make a choice, they’re happy with it. They’re like, Fine, I bought this coffee. Perfect. Then you have people who are maximisers. They’re like, I bought this coffee. You see a coffee shop? That would have been better, right? That’s me. That’s me as well in a lot of. But I think.

Me too. Jesus, We’re all doomed. My.

My theory is. But, you know, if you think of romantic partners nowadays and social media, I mean, we’re opening a whole another Pandora account, but it’s the Pandora box. But, you know, you’re you’re you are always presented with choice. That’s potentially a better choice. Right? So same same with, say, if you relate it to fitness, fitness is boring. You have to do the same thing over and over again, change it up slightly, but you have to be consistent. You have to show up and you have to keep doing this. People don’t want to do it. People don’t want to see it. Right. So and that social media part comes in and like, you know, you have people doing one people bashing all their people for saying stuff. Number one, that’s a trend where you sort of you sort of criticise everyone and everything and they just build that algorithm because of that. I’m not saying that’s a wrong thing, bad thing, do whatever you want, but you know, it creates that sort of where there’s the communication doesn’t, it’s not a conversation, it’s shouting in the and hoping that people listen. And there’s a lot of people listening and self-censorship.

We we talked about this many times, right? Yeah. You’re thinking something. You can’t say it because you’re worried about cancel culture.

We’ve talked you know, we’ve talked about this. But I’ve got a question for both of you. Do you think it is important to for men or young boys to still have a safe space, to have a community which is only men? Do you see what I mean? Because now it’s so frowned upon.

What is frowned.

Upon, I think. Well, I mean, Arthur might agree with me. Maybe it’s because we’re at the forefront of, like, social media. But like anything that doesn’t include women, everything they do, it’s like you’re misogynistic, you’re non-inclusive. This is it. Do you see what I mean? And I see sometimes that stuff going on in dentistry as well. Like I’ve called out, by the way, because there’s been like certain, um, I’ll never forget it. And actually, do you know the story about me? Chris Coachman? Did I ever tell you this story? No. So, Chris Coachman is an amazing dentist within our field, a really good friend of mine, and he was part of this thing, I don’t know, like six years ago called, um, dental stars on Instagram or something. And it was him and like four other men and they were really like promoting it. And I sent the course organiser or whatever like message and I said, This is really great. Topics are really interesting. I’m really sad to see that you don’t have any females on the panel because it was just one of those things. Apparently the message I sent was then screenshot in the group and then just being like ha ha sort of thing.

And Chris Coachman stepped in and he was like, I know Rhona and she has absolutely a point. He was like, Maybe we can consider like a female later on. He was like, No, no, no. You’re going to bring her on right now to the board because we need those female voices. And then I was the only female on there. And I think a lot of people were shocked. But I was like, well, you know, you don’t ask, you don’t get number one. Number two, I thought that that in that instance it was important. But now I think about it as well. And I think about like the way, as I told you, like young men are like, do they not have a safe space to be in? And also, like, what does that look like? Because I think that like, there’s also like toxic masculinity, as you said, like men commit suicide because, you know, they’ve got emotions going on. They feel there’s no way out. But then if you talk about your emotions too much as a man, you’re too soft. So where is it? Do you see what I mean? Where is that sort of like safe space?

First and foremost, you know, good friends. Yeah. And, yeah, good friends. You should have female friends. Male friends. But good friends are so important to men. Yeah, so, so, so important. And whether or not a club has enough women in it, we can talk about. Yeah, there’s been plenty of research that says diversity makes the strongest club, Right? But men. Men like to be around men, just as we would like to be. It’s quite funny, though, you know, Lebanese dinner parties. Yeah. Are very civilised affairs. Men and women come in together and they kind of stay together. Iranian dinner parties immediately at the at the.

At the.

Handing over of your coat, the men go to one side, the women go to the other side. And that’s that’s the way we like it.

Yeah.

You know, it’s certainly men together will have conversations that.

Yeah I think listen I think also it depends what we’re talking about. I think I agree with diversity always, always go first. But I think for men it’s important to have someone as that. It doesn’t have to be a large number, but someone else who can relate to their problems. And obviously, you know, and I don’t I hope that doesn’t sound controversial, you know, but men and women are different. Totally. And we have different we have various views. Right.

So amazing that that’s controversial.

I you know, I don’t like sport, like watching sport very much. Right. Yeah. I’ve been to the odd football game. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I end up watching the crowd more than the game because the crowd is just so amazing. It’s so.

Interesting to.

See like the human kind of like.

Tribalism.

Of it.

You know, there’s research that actually, um, men who watch football, their testosterone levels.

Yeah. Yeah. If they win, right?

Yeah. Yeah. No, but Jenny because, you know, essentially to for testosterone to be secreted, you need components like aggression and physical activity. So if you think of a martial arts, amazing. That’s just the best thing you can do. Right? But to your point, I think it depends what we’re talking about in terms of friendships. Friend, friend groups agree 100%. It’s important to have friends of both sexes. Um, important to have time with your male friends and male only. And because it’s I think it’s it’s and also it’s important to have different friends right so people that you can talk to about anything, right? And then people who have same passions and same hobbies and same, you know, do the same thing because they, they can connect over something. And this is important. I think the lack of the lack of passion is what what what leads to people having problems because they don’t know how to channel it and whether that’s a good way of coping with it or not. I don’t know. I’m not a mental health specialist, But, you know, for me, for example, I know that as I as I mentioned. Earlier that my way of dealing with whatever is going on here is through movement, right? And also talking to people. I’m very fortunate to have have a very close relationship with my parents, have some very close friends who, you know, I’m not my sister as well. We can talk about anything. So I’m very fortunate in that regard. Right. Maybe also because of my upbringing, maybe because my parents were slightly different, Maybe, you know, I don’t know. But I think coming back to your point earlier, you could ask the same question about, okay, girls only and boys only schools, good or bad, because that’s where it starts.

I went to a girls.

Only.

I went to a boys only, but then I insisted on my kids going to a mixed.

And do you think it’s.

Made a difference?

Yeah I.

Have. I don’t have a problem with it. I think it kept me focussed on like exams and stuff. Also, I think that like this is controversial, but also I think that it was really good because I wanted to as a young girl, you don’t really know what’s going on. And I think especially when you make decisions about like getting physical with guys and stuff, I felt like it kept me on the like, good path, if that makes sense, because there were no temptations and like I developed like a real sense of like, understanding boundaries and things like that. Controversial, I know.

But what about.

Like, sisterhood? Did you get that? Because in boys only schools you get this friend camaraderie thing. Whereas when I look at my daughter, the girls are just so horrible.

They are.

Horrible.

I still get it Horrible. I still.

Get it. But this is the thing. Like.

Was there sisterhood also? Or were you like.

No, no.

No, listen. No, not not at all. I’ve always been in sort of like the IT crowd, like as in like the popular crowd. Surprise, surprise. But I’ve also felt I’ve also felt that within that crowd.

There’s a hierarchy.

Know that I’m also really different, as in like there’s parts of me because I’m a very complex person. You know, despite what people say, um, that there’s parts of me that don’t necessarily like resonate and girls around me since I was at school have always been competitive. There’s always been a fight for boys. But again, this goes back and I think like I see this still all the time in society and I’m really interested now I’m going to digress a little bit on like the Primal Instinct. I was listening to the amazing podcast with Dr. Tara Swart. Did you see it in Steven Bartlett? So she’s a neuroscientist. I think I sent ATA, which I’m going to ask him some stuff and she talks about loads of different elements of society. So as you probably know, women, when they spend a lot of time together, their menstrual cycles sink. And the question was asked, who determines who sinks with who? And it’s actually the one that’s the strongest in the tribe. Now I come into work and I’m like, So am I the strongest?

You know what what device, the strength. Then what’s the.

Difference? It’s I.

Don’t know. I guess it’s like the strongest genes, like this is what she was saying. Does it matter? No, is what she was really saying. But anyways, that’s the thing that determines it. And it’s saying that those kind of like there’s certain elements that sink also back in the day, like primal days as well. Um, men. This is really interesting. The strongest man had to spread the seed so he’d impregnate five women at a time and then he’d have to go out and find food or whatever. And the reason why he’d do five at a time is because there might be a chance only 1 or 2 would survive. Does that make sense? So like, there is this really innate.

Sense of sex at dawn?

No, I’d love to read it. Is it good? Does it cover this stuff?

Yeah, well, it’s sex at the dawn of humanity. So. Yeah. So what did the cavemen do for sex?

I think it’s. I think. Do you know? I think. I think it’s really interesting. I’ll let you know how I go on that. But I think it’s interesting because we’ve moved on from like primal stages right now because as we know, like, we could be attracted to someone on the primal level. Again, studies have shown that, like women from the Primal will go for a man with like a t shaped physique, right? Because it’s that strength of sense and protection. Men on a subconscious level will like women with like a waist hip ratio because it’s like childbearing instincts. They can carry a child. You know, one of my friends dumped a girl because he thought her bones weren’t big enough so she couldn’t carry his children. Did you know that? Like, so anyways, so anyways, I digress again there. But the point is, right. I think that there’s been a confusion.

Not only because of that.

But that was one of the reasons he was like, Oh, apparently her bones were too little. So that was like he just thought she couldn’t carry his children anyway. Whatever.

Did he.

Make it up for.

Himself, huh?

Did he make that up for himself?

I think so. But he’s quite like he’s quite like old school like that. He’s definitely about, like, the DNA sort of vibe.

Okay.

I think. Let’s not.

Discuss it. Let’s not discuss. This is another conversation. Anyway, the point is. The point is when. Now, I think also there’s a challenge with mental health, which I want to come on to with you because we’re not in a primal state anymore like you. Might fancy someone because of the way that they look, as in on those like physiques. If they don’t stimulate you or if they can’t provide for you emotionally, or if there are so many other elements now which contribute to our survival, does that make sense? Which I think maybe you disagree, which I think is also impacting men and women as a whole, right? Because we’re so becoming so much more complex. And do men feel that because there was such an onus on those like primal features that now they’re a bit lost? Do you see what I mean? And then how can exercise support them? Because you said at the beginning, quite rightly, it shouldn’t just be about physique, right? But perhaps that was such a big motivating factor because they knew that’s what attracted women being more muscular and broad. Does that make sense? You know, but we’re saying now it’s actually to kind of like stabilise you, make you feel good, etcetera. But how would you say, you know, to young men like this is why you should be exercising and this is the goals that you should achieve?

Um, good question. I think it’s tricky because if you think about young men, I don’t know what we define here as young men, right? Say 18 to 25 or.

Yeah, I mean, I’d say even younger, maybe like 13 to 25.

Okay.

It’s initially nowadays because of what’s going on, every single boy is going to go into exercise either because they do a sport and they want to perform really well, but there’s going to be some type of a an aesthetic goal that’s there, right? So they will want to have abs, they will want to have that physique because they still they are still hormonally growing. Right. I recently someone sent it to me, I’m 38 and they say, oh, men are mature when they’re 43. I was like, okay, I still have five years. Right?

But really.

That’s so don’t know.

I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if that’s true.

What about.

Women? Those are friends. Um, I don’t know. I don’t know.

I’m still a child.

And I don’t look.

At a nightmare. Go on, go on.

Yeah, but, you know, it’s so you have to take and. And it’s okay because. But you just have to show them the right way to get there and you have to teach again. I think people should be taught consistency. Consistency in any any level of performance, you can be good at it just by doing usually for a long time or just learning how to do it very well. Right. And it’s no different with fitness physique wise now. Right? But also, if you think about the human body, it’s the brain is part of your body, right? So your heart is part of your body. And these are quite vital parts that will keep you alive for a very long time. I’ll keep you attractive to people if we if we refer to that. But also it’s a super important part to get you to, to to get you where you want to be, right. Whether that’s physical or mental level. So it’s it’s hard to speak with people because and you can you can tell, you know, sometimes whenever I see someone new and people ask me and interestingly, actually today I will digress a little bit, but speaking of kickboxing and jujitsu, which I do now, there’s one of the like really young boys, like he’s 18 and he sees that I’m building a business, I’m doing this and that, you know, on social media, he he reached out to me. He was like, Hey, can I ask you some questions? Because, you know, I’m I’m just starting out. I’m young and I don’t know what I’m doing. I really want to do well. I’m like, Man, I’m taking you out for lunch. I’ll give you whatever time you need because this is so brave of him to be like, Listen.

I want to do what you’re doing.

I want to be know. I want to maybe. But I also I want to listen to people and find out how can I be better, right? Whatever, whatever he wants to do. But I’m so up for this because I have been supported by by various people. And I think whatever support you can give, you should be you should be given the support, especially if you think that someone needs that support or they have the potential, you know, whatever that might be. But I think it’s it’s it’s always a very subjective and personalised conversation that should happen because people react differently to they have different motivators, right? So different. So it’s really hard to answer this question actually. So generally speaking.

Yeah, Yeah.

I think what you said is, is interesting because you know, t shaped t shaped body is what you’re saying sort of your program to, to be into.

But primarily.

Apparently. Yeah but but then now now we’re getting confused with other things you’re saying sort of thing.

Well no it’s not that but I think like survival then was completely different to survival now is what I see because as you know, like there are women that are like they value more like security and safety, financial like wallet. Lol. So. So, um.

So yeah, I get it. You know, good business.

Idea. Yeah.

And also like. And also for men. For men, you know, you’ll find plenty of men that don’t necessarily like women that have hips. Do you know what I mean? Or whatever it is. So like there’s a lot of different elements.

I think. You know what.

I think it’s still. That’s the attraction part, the physical attraction part. It’s still going to be quite primal, I think.

But this is the thing, like on according to this podcast, the Primal was very much, as I said, like so women with like small hip waist hip ratio, like, like men are going to be like, Oh, she can carry children. Do you know what I mean? That kind of thing, on that very primal level. But it’s super interesting. But I would argue and say that now it’s changed, right? Because you might find men that like super skinny, straight girls. Do you know what I mean? You know, like he’s like me.

No, but listen, the Iranians.

They love their Eastern Europeans. I think.

I think I think it’s very, very general. It’s a general statement. I think that the the sort of primal instincts will still have an impact as to who we are attracted to. Right. Whether or not you have a type or whatever. And you you probably could go very Freudian here and like discuss a lot.

Mom, Mom will come into it.

And I’m.

Interested. You’ve got you know, you’re clearly mentally quite nuanced, right? You think you’re thinking deeply. You’re you’re when we spoke before we started, you’re definitely an entrepreneur, you know, like, you know, you could call me an entrepreneur, but I don’t think I’m wired that way. But listening to you, your story from Poland to Austria to the businesses you started and the businesses you’re starting now, I feel like you’re you’re definitely an entrepreneur and how these things have now, it’s possible now to be in the fitness space and and someone who’s intelligent. Whereas back in the day.

Yeah, you definitely.

Have a Johnny Bravo effect. Sorry. Like my parents.

My parents were definitely was like a joke. Yeah, it’s a joke.

And there was a scientist.

You have that.

Stereotype, you do have that stereotype. And I think that, like, as I said, it’s really important because people think like you couldn’t be one or another. And I think I think people still have that stereotype. And like if they if they see someone also that’s physically in really good shape, like, well, he has he’s a personal trainer, there’s time to just be in the gym all day.

I play a very I always experiment with it and I enjoy it. Actually, I used to get very insecure about this, right, by the way, because also I moved here like I didn’t I, you know, I, I one, I just, you know, I lived all over the world modelling. I was a journalist for a while and writing. So, you know, I have absolutely no issue talking to people. I can go and talk to anyone. I can travel by myself. I always find new people that I that eventually become friends, right? But what I do now, sometimes, you know, there is a lot more strings to my bow. But what I always people when people ask me what I do, I’m a personal trainer. But the reaction of that person, you kind of can see, okay, we’re not going to get along because they disregard you straight away, especially in certain, you know, certain cultures, cultures.

I have to say, like because my parents are amazing, they would love you and get on with you really well. But obviously there’s like a my mom definitely being Lebanese, you know what I mean? And like even like my dad, when my sister loved art, he was like, to be an artist. For what? You know what I mean? You want to be poor, you know? But I think that’s a cultural thing. They didn’t get it.

They’d want a PhD in it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I get, I get. No, no, no. But I’m probably going to get smashed for this. Right. But I got so much I don’t know people. So, so there’s so many assumptions based upon the way I look. You know, I have been a model and I’m, you know, probably quite a good looking guy judging by made money from it. So, you know, there must be something to it. But the amount of times that people judge me as a as a guy, just based upon my just my looks, same.

With me all.

The time, appearance all the time. And you know, if you think if you think about it like and that makes me understand women a little bit more because that sounds funny, you know, but it’s and I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this as well but.

Cancelled.

But it’s it’s it’s it sucks it sucks to be based to be to be judged upon based based based upon you look yeah. And because you know you have that and you know this is why I like talking to people and getting to know people better because there’s I believe there’s so much more to me. And and I, you know, I, I, I’m interested in so much stuff and you know, I university degree etcetera, you know, started a second one whatever but that’s just not you don’t you shouldn’t be you shouldn’t have to and that’s never going to be the case. But you shouldn’t have to prove people, oh, I’m not that stupid. Right? So I’m not stupid. I’m not as stupid as I look. I was I.

Was guilty of that. Siloing people into physical and mental. Yeah. And the point you made about the mental being. The physical, you know. Absolutely right.

All the way it to me.

No, all the all.

Did you did you did all the.

Way. No all the all the way until Joe Rogan was the one that made me realise, wow, he’s a super clever guy. That’s super physical guy.

Like, you’re making a great point because this is the role model boys should have. Right in terms of men that they should understand that physicality, you know, and and the mental strength and the intelligence. They don’t they have to go. They should go together, really? Because they it’s there’s no you know, there’s there’s is it I think from I’m going to I’m going to quote now from Conan the Barbarian. I think he says this is a the this is a task for men with skinny arms, for old men with skinny arms. So that’s sort of the separation between I’m so strong, I’m going to kill everyone and, you know, sleep with a woman. But you make the the important decisions. But that’s just not the case. It’s just there is a way of connecting, being in good health, being in a good shape as well, and and and being interested in a lot of. Things that would normally be assigned to someone who’s more intelligent, more smart, more academic and more. But it doesn’t it’s not it’s not mutually exclusive. It can go together. It can go hand in hand.

I think. I think also, like for me, as I said, like we’re failing a whole generation of young men and it’s not being talked about enough because we focus so much on other things and people don’t recognise how how pertinent it is when it comes to like male mental health. But as you said, there is a balance because there are good role models. We’ve spoken about it before. I absolutely love Huberman. Do you listen to Huberman? I absolutely love Lex Friedman. Lex Friedman a little bit is a little bit more of the archetypal like geek in a way, isn’t he? Because he’s like an academic. He doesn’t. He doesn’t. But.

But he’s.

But he’s really sexy. No, no, no, no.

No, no. He’s a black belt. He’s actually a vicious black.

He doesn’t, he.

Doesn’t he doesn’t like the thing for me, as I said, going, I don’t want to give Andrew Tate any more airtime, but he represents the archetypal Johnny Bravo, which I personally don’t find attractive. Do you see what I mean? Whereas, like someone like Lex Friedman, where I’m like, I find it so attractive when someone’s intelligent, like I genuinely do and that’s, and that and that and that for me, that for me as well is really important because for me, I’m like, you’re a great role model. And Huberman, you know where I’m like you guys. But also you can see they they embody the degree of masculinity, but they also respect women. Do you see what I mean? Because you can tell the conversations they have, the conduct. They have the nuanced way of thinking, you know, And I think, you know, there are there are men out there and like you said, Joe Rogan, you know, like he can have very balanced conversations. He can you.

Know, he’s in a very fulfilled relationship, but.

He’s And human and Lex Rubin not. But you know, but, you know, they talk about that. So I think it’s important. And actually, I didn’t tell you about this, but I got trolled. I’ve actually been trolled recently, as you know, I get trolled by some male dentists recently.

What would they say?

It’s really weird, but the way that they’re behaving is that they’re annoyed and angry about my success. And I’ll tell you the context of later. But I don’t get it because I’m like, why? Why am I threatening you? Or why are you trying to compete with me? Or why are you trying to put me down? And the ages, they are about like 22 to 25. And I’m like, I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Like, why the needs to attack me? Do you see what I mean? And again, I’m like, Is it because of the younger generation? Is it because they don’t understand there’s some kind of like undertone of hate or wanting to see me fall?

You’re quite a public person. So it’s it’s you’re you’re out there, you’re not afraid to say things and you’re not afraid to present your work. And you also, you know, you’re prominent, prominent in the in the field that people didn’t think you could be prominent in. So that will always attract because you’re different. That will always attract people who are that’s probably pure envy and they will probably always and men probably. Easy to call.

It envy, though. Yeah, it’s a bit easy to call it envy. I mean, I think Rona, the thing about her is she knows social media better than us.

Yeah.

No, I’m asked is pretty good.

Not as good as better than most. Right? She knows me, so she knows part of social media is trolling. Yeah, but what I’ve noticed with her more recently, before she used to complain about her a lot. Now she wants to understand it.

She’s writing. She wants.

To know. No, she wants to know. She wants to understand it. And I don’t think it any longer comes from the same place of hurt that it used to come from before. Now now you just want. But I.

Understand. But I have.

I have empathy and nuance thinking. Right? Because with the stabbing, it was such a heinous act, right. With the guy like stabbing the 15 year old girl in Croydon. But also my nuance part of the brain is like, what have we done to fail these people? Like, why are people committing these acts? Because again, like another off topic thing, but like when people go to prison, right, people are like they’re criminals. They deserve to die. People become criminals because they’ve had some trauma or something awful happened to them. And unless we address that, people will keep going to prison and then they get released. And by the way, 90% or some crazy statistic end up being going back to prison for the same crime because you don’t get back to the root cause of the problem. Right. So that’s why I said to you, punishment is an interesting one, right? Because there’s on one hand, a little bit of fear keeps you on the straight and narrow and just like, you know, focus on what you’re doing. On the other hand, it can you know, it can just create a sense, you know.

I guess there is there is a correlation between mental health, one to the space to to be able to say stuff without again, without, you know, without being punished for it. Because, you know, I don’t know what these people said to you, but it was probably not very nice. Right. So it’s online bullying essentially. In the US, you have guns, you have them available and you have mental health issues and you have more shootings than ever before. Right? You have more stabbings than ever before here. And so I think. I think there is something happening. I don’t know what it is, you know, not that smart, but there is something happening that we’re not only failing men, we’re failing society as a society In a lot of ways. It’s sad, you know, because there’s just so much more available and so much more. And then there’s.

The there’s the crisis with the number of people being prescribed antidepressants and how that takes empathy out of you. Yeah.

And you know, you have, for example, if you correlate that with obesity numbers the obesity even though. Yeah. The the knowledge about it, you could argue that the available knowledge about health, fitness, wellness so much more than than ever before yet you know for children so many more opportunities you know still even the the underprivileged children they have more opportunities than the underprivileged children back in like, I don’t know how many years ago. Right. So but you still I saw I don’t remember exactly. So I don’t want to misquote but the obesity rates amongst children in the US were absolutely shocking. Same in the UK. So and you know, we have so, so much more, so much more available to us. So much so so many more resources to help these people.

Yeah. But also.

To damage.

But also to.

Damage but also damage them. But you know, it’s easier to the.

Phone itself is a is at the end of the day an addictive mechanism.

100%.

And obesity, a lot of it is to do with addiction.

Yeah. But then obesity has links with depression. That was my point. Right. Course. So you can see there is a correlation between that too. And then it’s it’s it’s just, you know, I don’t know what’s happening, but I think something really has to change on a systemic level for sure.

You know.

You quoted numbers or you said 700,000. Yeah.

A year.

Humans or guys, humans, humans killed themselves. And I always think about this sort of number as like, you know, what’s the number of people who got close to it? Probably a thousand times that, you know?

Yeah, but let me ask you a question. Do you know do you know anyone who got close to it? Sure. Do you know anyone who got close to. Yeah, I do. I know anyone. I ask this question. Everyone knows someone.

I know several who actually did it.

But especially in dentistry.

In dentistry, it’s.

Huge.

It’s the highest suicide rate. So we know. We know Payman. I know people we could name probably like five people that we know killed themselves. Yeah, yeah.

What’s the what’s the actual reason.

We don’t know.

This is the thing. Like, this is why we started this whole podcast. We delved into it with my therapist. I brought her on and you know, as Payman was saying, like you got, you know, like brain surgeons and heart surgeons. And, you know, my dad had traumatic time delivering babies, babies that don’t survive sometimes, you know, like there’s a lot of stress why dentists and, you know, like we try to hone in on it. But obviously some of the reasons are the patient’s awake. So some surgeons, for example, the patient’s on a table, but you’ve got patients giving you feedback, pain, stress, tiny fields to work in. Do you know what I mean? Like there’s all these accumulative effects. And quite interestingly, some dentists I don’t know if you knew this Payman, but I know too they commit suicide in their surgery, which I think is quite must mean something, you know.

Well, there’s access to, you know, things in the surgery that there is. But but I mean, it’s a very isolating job. Yeah. So it’s not like a brain surgeon community. Massive hospital. Right. Whereas dentists work sometimes in one room all day, all day. Um, but it’s not a new thing.

You haven’t ended the family. My uncle is actually was a dentist in a long retired.

It’s been it’s been true for 100 years, which is the crazy thing. Yeah. So. So maybe it’s the mercury.

Well, listen, we could. We’re probably going to have to bring you on for like, episode two. But I want to just ask you as well, um, what would you say to people that are struggling if they could do like three easy things to help them with regards to fitness and mental health kind of takeaway?

I think if they’re struggle, if they struggle mental health first and foremost, seek professional advice, right? So never underestimate someone else who can who’s trained to help you. Yeah, that’s number one. When it comes to other tools such as fitness and health and, you know, just just sign up for something and just commit to it. Yeah. Make a deal with yourself. Whatever motivates you. It’s really always hard to hard to answer a question that’s very general, especially when it comes to that, because I really like the sort of personal approach to, to, you know, to say, a client or um, but if there is, you know, mental health issues or people don’t feel well, it’s probably somewhere where there is a community where you can meet new people or you can meet like minded people. Yeah, probably as well, right? And then if you on a on, you know, on a very basic level, take one step at a time. Don’t try and change everything at the same time because if you do you’ll fail and most people do. So just do one thing, establish a habit and then so step. By step. So really it’s consistency and understanding what the issue is, or at least having having a brief understanding of, hey, this is this is wrong, I have to do something about it. So number one, establish there is an issue. Number two, be consistent in your approach that you do. But then again, we could probably discuss how can I be consistent, etcetera. So I think the professional help is always going to be number one.

I think the other thing was, is that we discussed like an on an ending note is about the importance of like neuroplasticity as well.

What does it mean?

So again, according to this, neuroscientists like our brains are always malleable To change the neuroplasticity is is that we absorb and our minds change according to our environment. The people that were in etcetera. Now it really drastically slows down at think 25. And what happens is, is then it’s almost like play Play-Doh. So before then you can mould it after, then it’s a bit hard and crusty. The Play-Doh you can it’s just a lot harder to deal with. But again.

There is actual I’ll interrupt you here, but go ahead. It’s funny because I in July, I went to Los Angeles for a conference, which is sort of idea world fitness. And, you know, there’s a lot of brilliant minds presenting. And one of the workshops was exactly on that. Yeah. And there’s an actual method of, of training that. Right. So you have to connect a few different things. So you have to give a person a cognitive task. Yeah. And auditory slash verbal cue and then also a physical task and it all has to be performed at the same time.

So can you give an example?

So for example, you have a clock, right as they call in the US the military clock. So 24 and you would say and then you have the quadrant, so you go lunges in different directions. So you tell them the time. So they have to think about the time and they have to step towards the time and say a their favourite colour or whatever. So it’s a few different things that you have to your brain has to multitask essentially at the same time, right? So your body has to do something, your brain has to do something, your voice has to do something. And that is proven to you to generate new brain cells, which is which is so and to establish new connections in your neural neurogenesis.

But then what do you get from that? It’s it’s.

Okay. Number one. Okay. Number one, it’s you take care of your brain health. Right. Which as we as you guys probably know amongst women. So dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, these are the the the I think the largest cause of death in the UK at least if I’m I might be wrong here but I looked at it but essentially taking care of your brain and and and helping the brain to stay stay vital for longer. So if you think about it, you know, you can even reverse or stop dementia or Alzheimer’s disease if you do it correctly and for a long time. Right. And trust me, if you do it for five minutes a day, I did it in that thing. At some point you’re like, whoa, what’s going on? It’s a great tip. It’s it’s actually it’s actually because your brain is takes burns. So much of your energy that after a few minutes you’re like, oh, God, like I’m fried. Right? But you just like when just like when a muscle you adapt, you.

Go muscle memory. Yeah, Yeah.

Now, that’s a great tip.

Are we allowed to.

Ask you how much it costs for you to be the, you know, your private trainer.

Payman wants to do once? You know.

I’m not I’m not taking any more clients at the moment because I’m busy.

Well, how much are your existing clients pay?

Uh, around. Not that much. That’s probably going to give me nothing. No, I don’t want to discuss this here, but. But we can talk about it afterwards. We can talk about it.

Yeah. Perfect.

Thank you so much, Arthur. It’s been amazing. So insightful. Really appreciate you coming.

Yeah, Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for coming. It’s been brilliant.

Thank you so much.

My view on that is it’s very, very fine balance because imposter syndrome can actually hold you back if you’re not kind of progressing. But also you want to do it from a safe viewpoint. Again, give patients the best service. So my kind of simple tips to anyone wanting to start doing more endo is firstly take on referrals from 2 or 3 very close people, close friends or colleagues who you know, you trust. Explain to them exactly what level you’re at. They show you the x rays before you even see the patients. There’s no kind of awkwardness, etcetera, and slowly build your confidence. And if you are, you then do have to push yourself. And that’s where mentors come in. So sharing certain cases with mentors. So I remember when I did my first retreatment in practice and it was on a patient who I’d known as a GDP for 4 or 5 years and we kind of safer space. Safer space. Exactly. So so those are the two, 2 or 3 kind of key things. If anyone’s looking to push more into any special interest or specialism, let’s say in practice.

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. Assad Rahman onto the podcast. Assad had a meteoric career insomuch as he’s done lots and lots of post-grad. He’s onto his fifth qualification, which is now an MBA dentist with special interest in Endodontics and now a clinical lead at Portman who’ve just merged with Dentex and sort of 400 practices in that little stable as as head of two of those divisions. So lovely to have you, buddy.

Hi, Payman. Hi, everyone. Lovely to be here.

It’s really nice to have you, man. I think I’m going to start with you. Where did you grow up?

So I was born in Doncaster, but my dad was training as an orthopaedic surgeon at the time, so we travelled around, moved around quite a bit and eventually when I was about 5 or 6, settled in Birmingham and that’s where I grew up. And often a lot of people say I don’t have the Birmingham accent until I say Birmingham and then it comes out. So yeah, grew up there and then but I always had this kind of affiliation with Yorkshire and then as soon as I could go to university I ended up in Yorkshire and kind of ended up staying up here.

Do you remember the first time you thought, I’m going to be a dentist?

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky. So I was one of those children. And to this day, I’ve never had any restorative work. I’ve recently just had my Invisalign done, but before that I had no dental treatment. So for me, going to a dentist was, I’d say, you know, a really relaxing experience. So from quite an early age I realised I wanted to do something in science and science background. My dad, my mum, both being doctors, but dentistry kind of dragged me in really from I’d say 13 or 14 when I realised I couldn’t do the long hours that medics do. So dentistry was kind of the the career for me.

What kind of a doctor is your mum?

So Mum was an anaesthetist. She retired when I was born, so my parents had me quite late. I’m the oldest of two. Yeah. Um, my mum was late 30s at the time, so she kind of retired after I was born. My dad obviously carried on working.

And as a surgeon he was he obviously didn’t see much of him as you were growing up, right?

No, very busy. He’d always make time for us on the weekends though. So whenever me and my brother, we play a lot of sports, so we play a lot of sports. And he’d always make time to come and see that. And that was the real kind of bonding we had with him on the weekends when he’d come to see our football matches, cricket matches, rugby. But during the week, yeah, very busy. And that kind of work ethos I suppose, rubbed off on me as I grew older.

What was your parents advice regarding whether to become a doctor or to become a dentist? Were they dead against you becoming a doctor or was it the opposite?

No, my parents obviously instilled certain kind of ethos, so it was hard work and it was education was very important. But I suppose if I’d gone and said, I want to do a degree in maths, let’s say, or finance or whatever, they’d have been happy with that. But like I said.

But specifically medicine, what do they say about medicine? Did they say do it or did they say don’t do it?

Well, my brother’s a doctor. Oh, really? Yeah. So he’s a he’s a doctor. He’s going to orthopaedic surgery now, So he’s becoming a surgeon.

How is your brother?

He’s 30 now, so a couple of years younger than me.

And now when you. When you compare you and your brother career choice wise, what are your reflections?

Well, obviously, I mean, I talk about this a lot when I when I see young dentists and dentistry is is a kind of a strange career in terms of we let’s say we we reach our peak or we can reach our peak very early on in our careers and let’s say we qualify 23 within 7 to 10 years, you can actually reach, especially financially, a position where you’re kind of at your peak earning. And with that brings obviously positives, negatives with other careers, especially medicine. You know, even today, junior doctors are striking. It’s kind of that slow, gradual progression, which in the past was seen as good. But in this kind of current day and age, when people want everything really quickly, I feel sometimes people struggle with with that aspect of things. So yeah, big difference in terms of kind of where I am in my career and where he is, even though he’s doing really well. He ranked number one in surgical training last year and he’s going to do his surgical training. In London, really prestigious post, but it will be still another 8 or 9 years of his training left. So yeah, big difference.

And but lifestyle wise, he’s not seeing much of his nearest and dearest now, is that right?

Definitely, yeah. Very busy. And I suppose that’s where you choose to take your career. You can. Yeah. That’s the kind of flexibility that dentistry gives you. You can choose to take career at your pace if you wanted to.

So where did you study Leeds? You said.

Leeds. Yeah, I did my undergraduate in Leeds. And what kind of.

A dental student were you?

Um, middle of the road, I’d say. I’ve always been in all my education. I’ve been kind of middle of the road and never got close to failing. Never got close to distinction, let’s say. So just a good solid student. And that was that was despite me really trying, revising hard, working hard. But I just I never can end up getting a distinction when it’s an exam or something in front of me.

So then I’m quite interested in this question of, you know, you’re right now obviously to me, when I’m looking at you, you’ve got that look in your eyes, which is like there’s a kind of remember that looking in so many of my my friend’s eyes here, there’s this sort of determination to make a difference in the world, kind of look in your eyes. And at what point did that happen? Have you always been that cat, or was there a moment when you said, God damn it, I’m going to like, do the best I could, be the best I can be, fulfil my potential.

I think. And I speak to a lot of friends about this and that’s where kind of people talk about school education, etcetera. I’ve always wanted to be the best and I’d love to get a distinction in exams etcetera, but I feel that especially GCSE or A-level exams, let’s say again, I didn’t do badly because I ended up in Dental school, but they often are geared towards a certain type of thinking in a funny sort of way. When I’m doing my graduate learning now, I’m a post graduate degrees, especially my MBA. I’m getting my best scores yet and my best marks yet. That determination, I think, comes from seeing my parents, especially my dad, from kind of his upbringing in rural Pakistan, to end up obviously in the UK and then just seeing what we saw of him throughout his career, the ups and downs that all careers have. But the continuous aspect of keeping on going is a big thing for me. Day to day we can all have struggles, but it’s the fact that we continuously must keep going on. So that’s my big ethos, I’d say.

So when when did your dad study medicine in Pakistan or here?

Yes. Yeah. Both My mum and dad studied medicine in Pakistan, then came here to do their postgraduate training with the view to eventually going back, but then kind of the NHS took them on and, and they stayed for the rest of their careers.

What about the question of like race? Did you did you did your dad complain of not getting promotions? Because that was that was I mean, now it seems like a like a crazy thing to say and we’ve come a long way. But back then, remember, that was a complaint massively so.

My dad was actually the first non-European consultant in the UK and that was in 96. So when he came over first to Ireland again, I feel so as you’re saying, we’re very lucky nowadays. Situation is completely different. And personally, for example, I’ve never had any racism either personal or kind of systematic, systematic etcetera. But my dad does mention, obviously he, he, he, he was in a time when the opportunity wasn’t there. There was a simple kind of bar on non European consultants and even sit the exam was a big kind of barrier to to pass. But as you say with time I feel like we’ve done well in the UK to get to a point where now there’s masses of equal opportunity. I was speaking at the International Women’s Day last year and the topic of diversity came up. And now, for example, if we talk about just dentistry, if you’re a prospective student from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background, you’ve got a higher chance of getting into dental school than a white student, for example. So, you know, so.

Some sort of positive discrimination?

No, I don’t there’s not been any study. Again, the percentages are very small difference wise.

But just the fact that it’s on the same graph, it’s quite interesting. Yeah, exactly.

It’s just yeah, it’s I mean, it’s kind of a full circle moment, let’s say.

Yeah, Yeah. So then tell me about your first job.

So I qualified in 2015 and I was very lucky to end up in Coventry. So as my parents from Birmingham, after doing your PhD exam that you do ranked high enough to be end up in Coventry, which is close enough to allow me to be back home, let’s say, and my trainer, their manager who I’m still in touch with.

I know many. Yeah, I know brilliant people. Brilliant people.

Yeah, great, great people still in touch with them to this day. And so Mandy was my trainer. Anoop was obviously in the other dental practice that they own and manage. I thought it was a fantastic trainer because she knew exactly when to let you kind of get on with things because when you’re a. Trainee. You have to have that kind of impetus to learn by yourself, but also do it in a safe manner and manner, as you’re saying. Fantastic experience. Trainers, you know, 15 plus years being trainers. So they knew exactly what kind of level I was at and how to push me. And then I was lucky enough that they offered me to stay on as an associate and then ended up staying with them for about three years. Oh, really? I really enjoyed that. And again, every time I speak to and I was speaking to a lot of you know, we met at the BCD conference a few weeks back and a lot of young students coming up to me and I was saying, try and stay in your practice if you can. If it’s know it’s a good practice, try and stay there. Try and see your mistakes. Try and and build your career in one practice, at least for the first 2 or 3 years before you look to move on.

It’s interesting you say that. Yeah, because remember as a PT, we used to call it I adored my practice that my boss was still one of my best friends, mentor, wonderful person. But I on purpose left that practice because I thought that it’s the opposite, right? I thought I thought I want to see something else. And it’s quite an interesting question. I mean, I think you’re right in so much as now with with the benefit of hindsight, seeing some failures would have been good. Yeah, because I moved to a whole new practice. That said, I did see another way of doing things. So you stayed there for three years. The amazing thing about Anoop and Manny is the life lessons you must have learnt from those guys because just successful humans not, you know, the wonderful relationship, wonderful practices, that’s just the way they think is just amazing. So that’s lovely, man. So then what happened after that? Why did you leave after three years?

So I think I was getting to a point where, as you’re saying.

You won’t see something else.

Yes, essentially. And there was lots of factors to it. One was I’d done a pgcert in sedation by then. I’d just started my restorative master’s at Birmingham, which I ended up doing a pgdip. And at that point I kind of wanted to transition into private dentistry. And the reason for that was I’ve always kind of my values belief system is always, you know, we’re talking earlier about wanting to do the best quality work. So nowadays when I do my clinical days, for example, I’m seeing 3 or 4 endo patients a day. And it’s about the fact that I can really focus on quality, create exceptional experiences for those 3 or 4 patients, and that’s it. So that’s what you have to focus on. And it was really just wanted to progress in my career to to a fully private practice. And I got the opportunity. It was hard to to say goodbye, but like I said, I left on good terms and still in touch with Mani Anoop, and that’s when I ended up with Portman and I joined as an associate five years ago in Malton, and as soon as I joined the practice, everyone kind of looked at me and said, We don’t like doing Endo. And I said, Well, I like doing Endo. I’d had some endo training on my restorative degree, so I started taking kind of internal referrals, doing my own endo, and then decided to formalise my endo training that way.

Oh, how interesting. So and that’s it. The rest is history. You’ve been you’ve been with Portman ever since, right? Yeah. And have you worked in any other practice? Just those two?

Yes. So I do a day of endo in a non Portman practice at the moment as well. So Mondays a do a day of render in a non Portman practice. It’s a practice five minutes away from me in York fantastic practice love the team there. I just go and do my endo and come home But as soon as I join the practice in Malton at Portman, I could just see kind of dentistry where the whole team is kind of geared towards providing the patients a fantastic service and I feel a lot of people, a lot of dentists, you know, going with the mindset where you’re going from Udas to private dentistry and you even initially have the thought. So you know what? If I don’t earn money, what if patients don’t come in, but they do come in and if you give them a good service, they do come in and they do value you. And that’s what kind of led me on to trying to move more non-clinical to try and pass that kind of feeling and knowledge onto others to help them develop and grow their careers.

Well, there’s quite a lot I want to talk about in what you just said there, because, you know, what’s your advice when when a when a young dentist asking about private is your advice to follow your path, which is three years of mixed, get your hands dirty? And then is that your advice or or is your advice different in. Much as it doesn’t have to be like if I’m a young dentist coming and asking you if you just regurgitate what you did and think that’s the best thing to do. Not necessarily true, is it? So. So what’s your reflections? If I say if I if let’s say I was this young gun and I said, listen, I want to go from university, from PhD to a private job or even skip PhD and go straight to a private job. Am I not going to be like in a in a in that frame of mind that that excellence frame of mind quicker by doing that rather than doing any time on the NHS?

So my my personal view and the reason I highlight my personal view is because lots of people nowadays are trying to go. There are certain pathways, let’s say, to private dentistry even before having done PhD. Yeah, but I feel if we’re all honest with ourselves, what do we get in dental school? It’s kind of a basic it’s that driving analogy when you pass your driving, when you do your driving lessons, you’ve had 20 lessons with an instructor. Where are you then safe to go and completely drive? Yes, to a certain level, but you still need, let’s say, a year or two of practice and that’s what the PhD training gives you. It gives you that safe, basic standard, even in terms of if I talk about my personal. How often does your car fail when you’re an FD to All the time. If you’re in private practice, you can’t have your car fail even once. So or you shouldn’t have your fail once. So it’s those kind of basics. The other things, the mentality. Even on the NHS, there’s nothing stopping you from doing a spending an hour and a half doing an endo if you’re an FD, And then as an early associate, let’s say all you’re going to do is make less money and you’re not going to be doing that all the time.

You’re also going to be able to do 12 Udas Very quickly. So it does balance itself out, but you have to kind of sacrifice something somewhere. But my advice, yes, I think staying in mixed practice, but you have to do I always say postgraduate education is the key. And again, with postgraduate education, I say, yes, courses are great, but try and do degrees with degrees. You get the kind of holistic teaching. You can then supplement them with certain courses out there. But if you’ve got, let’s say, a restorative pgdip or master’s, you can then add courses onto that to give you further skills rather than doing lots of different courses. It also ends up being the same amount of money as well. If you think about it, restorative pgdip 19 to 20 £21,000. By the time you’ve done 4 or 5 six different courses in lots of little things ends up being the same. So I’d say build a good foundation for yourself early on.

The thing is though, I mean, I did then went straight to a private job after that. Yeah, I found the private job a lot easier than the job. Yeah. And so when I say easier, you know, fewer patients, right? Fewer patients to deal with. And for me not being able to say, hi, how are you? What do you do was the hard bit. Yeah, because there’s no time to do that in the NHS. And you know, of course I understand your point, Right? Let’s not, let’s not be about I understand what you’re saying about the driving analogy. At the same time, there’s a, there’s a sort of this, this thing we have in dentistry of hey, go practice on the patients, make all your mess ups there and then and then go to private after that. Well, what about those patients, man?

Like I was saying, that’s a that’s a very good point. And what you said and I say this to a lot of people now, you know, so one of the things I’m working on in parliament is helping a few of my practices transition from NHS practices to private practices. So NHS contracts are going back and the kind of 1 to 1 work that we have to do with clinicians and colleagues in practice is to change that mindset. To say it will actually be easier because let’s say somebody who’s coming into a private practice, patients again, not to stereotype, but will be more kind of looking after the dentition, let’s say. Well, so your actual dentistry might be easier itself. But going back to your point when I was saying I mean, like I said, my personal view, but as I also said, times are different nowadays, aren’t they? Because, I mean, I had lots of people coming up to me a couple of weeks ago saying I want to go straight into private practice. And the key there is finding a mentor. Yeah. So I found my mentor early on in the NHS practice so you can find your mentor anywhere. But if you are thinking of whatever you’re thinking of doing in your career, you have to have a mentor, let’s say, who can guide you in your career.

What do you say to someone who says, Look, I want a mentor, but you know, my boss isn’t interested?

Well. Renters don’t have to be within the practice. They can be external. Yeah, they can be external. So it’s often just reaching out to someone you know, or you might see someone at a conference. They can also be I mean, I’ve found a lot of my mentors in the postgraduate education I’ve done, and I call it a likeminded network. So one of the biggest things, let’s say in life people struggle with nowadays is even if you have 1 or 2 negative people in your life, that kind of drains a lot of your energy. And I am very fortunate after doing lots of postgraduate education, having people who are like minded. So two reasons why that’s important. One is they’ll be able to guide you, give you the correct advice, but the days that you’re not feeling your best, you’re not wanting to grow and develop, they’re actually holding you accountable. So those mentors don’t have to be, let’s say, a different age to you or or might be slightly older than you, but even those 1 or 2 years difference in dentistry can mean they have the the opportunity to be a mentor for you.

Yeah, very true, man. I used to play badminton with a super super dentist. Super Pete Strand. For anyone who might know him, he’s a specialist, periodontist, big implant guy, and I used to play badminton with him once a week and we used to just go for a beer and talk about teeth. Right? And I thought I was just talking to a guy about teeth and, you know, I mean, I wasn’t I wasn’t realising how much mentorship I was getting from this guy and, and, and, you know, his principles. And we challenge each other and so forth. And massive Pete’s a massive mentor of mine but didn’t know it at the time. So your point is brilliant. Yeah. That a mentor can be a professor like someone who’s, you know, officially your mentor. Or it could be anyone you’re talking to or a peer, which is which is very interesting because you think a mentor needs to be the senior person. But you know, you sometimes get a group of PhDs living together and one of them’s going to end, though the other one’s good at selling, let’s say, or good with patients. And, you know, you teach each other. So let’s go to Endo. Yeah. How is it that you like Endo? And so many of us don’t? And by the way, when I say us, I did a restorative house job and the my direct boss was an endodontist. And so I got the bug. Yeah, I did. But I did. I had this perforation in my undergrad and it put me off. What what was the moment that you decided like, you know. Endo And how, how did you get into it?

So it’s a very, very early on and so I’m probably not might not be the best person to ask this question to because I was in third year actually of dental school. Yeah. When I when we first started getting introduced to Endodontics and that was it for me, I realised.

It clicked, then.

It clicked then so to the point where I was the first person in my year to get loops as a third year because I just thought I’ve got an endo coming up in the beginning of fourth year and I want to be able to see what I’m doing. And it was just it was that early on, but it as kind of my career started, I still did give myself the opportunity to see if I liked anything else. Yeah, but I just kept coming back to Endo, even to the point where I even did formal training in sedation, restorative. But I just still kept coming back to the endo and that’s why I even applied and got accepted for an indent. And the plan was to go and do a full time.

Specialisation.

Pathway specialisation. And then that was just before Covid and Covid hit and lots of things happened. So I kind of spun around and and went towards doing an MSC in Endo, which has given me so much knowledge, etcetera, along with my restorative degree, to be able to accept internal external referrals for treatments, re treatments. But what.

What Endo training did you do?

So my MSC.

The restorative one.

Know my MSC and an endo.

Okay.

So in my final year now.

Oh I see. I see. I see.

Yeah. So yeah again. So this is why I was saying earlier about degrees rather than courses. So if you look at lots of societies, so the British society, British society, for example, they’ll recommend or they won’t use the word accredit, but they recommend certain degrees in the country to say if you do one of these kind of degrees, you’ll be off a certain standard. And I went and did one of those. So I did the simply Endo one, which is affiliated with the University of Chester up in Liverpool. Great people up there. Mike Horrocks running a great course. And from that I’ve built up quite a big network of kind of fellow dentists who do some fantastic work. And one of my good friends is actually training to be an endodontist in hospital, and we now share cases. For example. And there’s not much difference in our treatments and re treatments. Obviously he can do apicoectomy, etcetera. But my kind of viewpoint was how often does a patient want that in practice? So I’m happy doing my treatments and re treatments and passing on apicoectomy to people like him.

So you feel like in a way, you feel like that is the one difference between you and a specialist is the discectomy.

Again, every field is different. But in endo, yes, I feel it kind of it depends on the kind of teaching and how you then go off. And I mean, another key point is I didn’t just go and do this. My restorative pgdip and my endo and then go and start taking on the most hardest of referrals. Yeah. So there’s, there’s lots of factors that come into that. And one of my friends was actually talking to me the other day and he’s in his first year of Endo training and he’s saying he’s and I was kind of pushing him to start taking on some referrals. And he was saying, Well, he’s feeling some imposter syndrome, let’s say. Yeah. And my view on that is it’s a very, very fine balance because imposter syndrome can actually hold you back if you’re not kind of progressing. But also you want to do it from a safe viewpoint. Again, give patients the best service. So my kind of simple tips to anyone wanting to start doing more endo is firstly take on referrals from 2 or 3 very close people, close friends or colleagues who you know, you trust. Explain to them exactly what level you’re at. They show you the x rays before you even see the patients. There’s no kind of awkwardness, etcetera, and slowly build your confidence. And if you are, you then do have to push yourself. And that’s where mentors come in. So sharing certain cases with mentors. So I remember when I did my first retreatment in practice and it was on a patient who I’d known as a GDP for 4 or 5 years and we kind of safer space. Safer space, Exactly. So those are the 2 or 3 kind of key things. If anyone’s looking to push more into any special interest or specialism, let’s say, in practice.

But sort of don’t talk about endo a bit more. Yeah, insomuch as I mean, this is such an unfair question, man, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Yeah. What would you say is the crux? Like what was the what was the thing that flipped in your head that suddenly made endo seem like something you want to do for the rest of your life? Well, that’s one question. The second question is clinically. Clinically, what is the crux? I mean, I know what an endo is. I know what access and isolation is. I know about Rotary. But what’s the crux of it? What’s the most important thing.

Shall I say, Why I enjoy it. So, yeah, let’s start with that.

Let’s start with that.

I go in, I know I have a day of three maximum for patients because I’m seeing patients for an hour and a half. Yeah. So, I mean, I don’t know how to put this, but if I put it in a simplest way, I’m seeing that patient for 90 minutes and then hopefully never again. Now, it’s not to say that I don’t want to continuously see my patients, but and I don’t kind of build a rapport with them in early on in when I’m meeting them, etcetera, or doing consultations, let’s say. But it’s the viewpoint where lots of implant Dental let’s say you have this phrase where you’re married to the patient, or so there’s none of that, let’s say. The other thing is that endo, I feel lots of people worry about the complications, but once you have a certain level of training, those complications.

You know how to handle.

Yes. And also you reduce those complications. So one of my tutors in in Liverpool used to say if somebody has and again, I’m not quoting them or putting this out there, but the common phrase is kind of say if somebody has a high incidence, it’s 100% their fault. And the point is that once you have a certain level of endo training, you know how not to have a hypochlorite incident. And it’s those kind of things where once you take the complications away, the day to day becomes comfortable and then predictable and you’re in control and then enjoyable. Obviously, I think that control aspect lots of dentists want and when you’re a GDP you struggle with because one second you’ll have an oral surgery patient, next second you’ll have an endo and you have to kind of be a master of all. And it’s very difficult to do that.

Not to mention profitable, right?

Yeah. I mean, so that’s the other thing. So no lab bills.

You know, the other thing, dude, forget forget the money itself. The best thing about being an endodontist is you don’t have to sell anything to anyone. Yeah, and selling is tiring, man. Yeah. You know, I remember as a dentist thinking that, like, another day of of getting people to go ahead. Yeah. Whereas in endo that’s not a problem is it?

And again it referrals. Once the patient’s been referred to you, they’re on board. They’ve even had the discussion of how much it’s going to cost.

It’s all being done. Yeah, it’s.

All been done. So. Yeah.

And then what about my second question? The crux of it clinically, like what is it like? I see some endodontists I’m a sad fool. I follow a few Endodontists Right. And and they’re like, they’re doing this super like, minimal access cavities. Is that some sort of macho thing in endo? Like the smaller your access cavity, the better you are.

That’s the latest kind of buzz. But I think in all kind of fields you get things coming up, obviously. So I come at come at anything from a restorative viewpoint. So maintaining as much tooth tissue as possible is important. But the crux and I say this, the kind of this can be actually extrapolated into other fields as well. But the simplest thing is breaking the bigger task into the small. So when I’m doing the LA, that’s all I’m focusing on giving the best LA the most painless LA. And so the patient thinks that’s the best seller they’ve had. Then I’m putting the rubber dam on and then I’m just focusing 100% on the access until I’ve found the canals. I’m not thinking of anything else. And it’s that kind of step by step process, methodical approach, which like I said, you can take into lots of fields, but especially endo feel the more methodical approach you have. Technically all your endos and your approach should be the same for all of them.

That painless injection is such a massive thing. Man. Such a massive thing. What’s your tips for that? Just put the topical and go slow.

So I did. When I did my Pgcert in sedation at Bristol, we had about six months learning about Endo LA Sorry and making it comfortable. Yeah. And lots of little factors but topical. Lots of dentists don’t wait for it to work. So if you’re using lidocaine needs to be 3 or 4 minutes for it to.

Work and use those 3 or 4 minutes to make like talk to the patient, like give that amazing service that we were talking about. Right, exactly.

And there’s lots of there’s a vibration technique, for example, when you’re doing the infiltration and.

Dry the area. Right. Dry the area before putting the topical on there. Like it’s so interesting that you forget that like for ten years of dentistry didn’t do that. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what dude, you one thing I’ve come to realise, okay, I’m going to put myself out there, so I’m an expert at bleaching. Yeah. One thing that I’ve noticed is being an expert really is about getting the basics right. It really is. And it’s not. We put it up as this sort of voodoo thing that so-and-so is a specialist at so-and-so at whatever it is, but actually that guy is just in whatever subject He’s an expert at taking care of the basics. Man in bleaching is take a damn good impression. A simple thing like that.

I can’t stress that enough. And when I did all my postgraduate teaching I’ve done, I thought I’d go back and I’d learn lots of massive differences of what I’d been taught in undergrad. But essentially it’s just reinforcing your undergrad teaching and the the kind of basics that you’ve forgotten because you’re trying to cut corners when you’re in practice and just learning not to cut those corners. And before you know it, you’re a special interest or specialist. Yeah.

So, so now with that in mind, yeah, we can say, look, excellence is a state of mind. Yeah. Not a technique. Not, not. Not a product. Yeah. That said, what’s the latest in Endo? I mean, is there. Is there some wicked arrogant That’s wicked. Is there some rotary thing that that solves a problem like I’ve been out of it for, I don’t know, 12 years. Haven’t seen a patient? Yeah. What’s the latest thing that you’re excited about in Endo?

So, I mean, I wouldn’t even say it’s the latest but active irrigation which is still feel. What does that mean?

Just irrigating.

So active irrigation. So most dentists are doing passive irrigation with the normal syringe. Yeah. So you’re kind of bringing in hypochlorite and then sucking it out with the aspiration. With active irrigation, you’re agitating it in some way so ultrasonic or whatever, ultrasonic. But nowadays you can get something called an endo activator. So it’s sonic activation. It’s the easiest thing in the world to use. Obviously hard to explain on the podcast, but if everyone just google it, you can find it easiest thing in the world to use. Essentially it moves the irrigant around and that improves your success rates. And why I say it’s not even it’s not not a new concept. So one of my essays I did in my endo training was on active irrigation, but it’s still surprising as to how many people don’t use it. And it’s a piece of kit which I feel all GDP should be using in their endo, and it would just improve success rates across the board.

So. Well that’s well, well, well documented. Is it Well, well supported?

Yes. Well evidenced. Documented. Now again, there’s lots of. So the reason why I mention active irrigation with Sonic is because you have to take factors into account like cost. So there’s active irrigation machines in America, for example, which are about 50, $60,000. No one’s going to do that. There’s active irrigation machines which are have a high risk of breaking in the canal. Nobody’s going to use those, but they may, when they work, provide a slightly better result. But when you balance everything out, like I said, this is when I did my literature search on it. The endo activators, the most simplest piece of kit that everyone can be using and improve success rates.

And what about the Irrigant itself? Is that just hypochlorite or is there something hypochlorite? Yeah, there’s nothing else.

No, no, no. No magic. No irrigant.

But you heat the thing or not.

No. So again, there’s lots of studies done and that’s where I mentioned active irrigation. So people have done studies on kind of does heating improve success rates? Not significantly, but active irrigation does. So another common method of doing active irrigation, which lots of people try and do is the GP pumping, but you’re not going to be able to move the arrogant around fast enough in the canal. And that’s where the endo activator comes in.

What about when you’ve got a tooth that’s really broken down and it’s like subjectively broken down? Are you now a ninja, like rescuing, like doing heroic antics?

No. So my viewpoint again, so and if you speak to it.

With implants or.

Yes, exactly. 100%. So I work very closely in both the practices of work clinically with the implant dentists, and often if it’s a consultation, we’ll both be in the room. And again, like I say, my restorative training and why I recommend that to anyone before they go on, even if they want to specialise in anything else, do some restorative training because treatment planning is so key. So with endo, you want to be saving the teeth that realistically can be saved. And with everything else, you know, we’ve got implants nowadays to a certain standard, A big factor which people miss out is age of the patient. So when you’re treatment planning, let’s say if when we mark up the success rates of an endodontic treatment, the younger the patient is, it’s worth taking that risk to prolong that tooth for longer because the implants. Not going to see them out. Yeah. When when a patient gets older, you want to try. And the highest chances are that the end is going to fail. There’s no point taking that chance. So you want to go towards implants. So even a simple factor like that needs to be taken into account. But Hiroden antics, you know, patients are paying you for a service. They as much as they can consent and you say it’s not going to work. Let’s be honest, they want it to work. So you have to be pragmatic and explaining all the options that they have.

And so you actually manage for posterior indos in a day’s work.

Yes. So I do an hour and a half sessions, 15 minutes in between for my nurses to clean up, set up.

Is that beginning to end? You do the whole thing in an hour and a half.

It depends.

So the situation.

Most likely I do single treatment, but for example, if you can’t get the canal dry or if there’s just a huge lesion or there’s a swelling, for example. Now, again, by the time a patient’s been referred to me, the dentist has either accessed or etcetera. So the swelling has come down. But so often I can do things in one session, but if I have to go to a second session, I do. Personally, I don’t charge for the second session. It’s all part of the same price. My viewpoint, obviously you win some, you lose some, etcetera. Yeah, it is what it is. The the treatment needs to be done right and the the best standard.

And what are the numbers? How much do you charge for a molar endo and for a retreatment.

So different in the two practices I work at. So we have set prices in both practices. So beginning from £800 for a molar and then slightly higher in my Portland practice.

And a retreatment.

Retreatment I add on £150 extra for per tooth. So whatever the tooth charge is, plus under 50. But that’s another key factor I always like to point out. And for example, we have this at Portman where we have set prices. And it’s really important that I feel for patient service, patient care and Endo can do this. And no implants, for example, can’t do this, but where you can to try and have set prices because it allows the patients to know where they stand. And you also don’t get kind of patients talking and say, oh, I had this tooth done for this much, this much, this much. So I have set prices wherever work GDP is, know what to say, etcetera, is all very clear.

That’s nice, man. The vast majority of days that you work, you grow 3500 pounds.

Yes, hopefully. I mean, that’s that’s the aim. If you have four, three, four molars and like I said, but then, for example, you have some second stages which no charge. Yes, it works out well.

I think people should think about endo more, man, because honestly, I’ve always thought that because I had a endodontic Endodontist used to work with me who unfortunately Covid took him. But, but yeah, but he was a lovely guy. No, he, he, he, he, he used to be very relaxed day to day. He really was. And I asked him, I mean he was a specialist. I asked him, listen how many times a week do you, do you hit like a situation that you’re not sure what to do? And he’s like, it’s not it’s not even once a week. It’s he said it’s maybe once a month that it gets really like hairy for him, you know, like he doesn’t know what to do. And that’s. That’s lovely. I mean, what a great life to have to sell Anything to anyone. You can do it with your eyes closed. I’m joking. I’m joking. I mean.

That’s where I kind of got to a point with my clinical work where to obviously progress my career or whatever. That’s why I started going into the or started looking for the non clinical work because that’s what kind of and now I knew what it was. Yeah. Nowadays I’m more if if I split my week it’s three days 2 to 3 days non clinical and a couple of days clinical.

But then like the non clinical days have to pay pretty damn well too. If we’re talking money have to pay pretty damn well to make up for you not working right.

Well I mean obviously non clinical when you talk about that there’s lots of different roles. Yeah. Non-clinically But I think with the non clinical roles, they never they never will make up. Yeah. What someone can earn clinically if they’re a special interest or specialist dentist if they’re a GDP for example, it’s comparable. But like I said, they do the non clinical work. It’s something.

For growth.

Yeah. For growth. Yes. And and to be able to help others grow, that’s the main thing for me.

Yeah. That’s so funny. You talk to you talk to dentists, even the ones who want to be specialists, not enough of them want to be endodontist. I find you know, people it’s not the most sexy subject. Enough of us have had a trauma in the background that we’re worried about. And then, you know, it’s the thing that’s covered late in dental school and not very well. You know, what’s what’s dental school going to do for you? Foreigners. It’s a postgrad subject in the end, isn’t it? Let’s face it. Yeah, but but when I talk to young dentists and even the ones who say I want to specialise because, you know, hey, what about Endo? The majority aren’t interested. And it’s a shame because it’s actually a fantastic career. It really is. Oh, definitely. Yeah. All right. Well, let’s move on. Let’s let’s let’s talk about firstly, how did you start going up the sort of ladder of the corporate world and how does the corporate world sort of are you are you built for it? I mean, do you like it?

So, I mean, like I said, I joined as an associate and a few years back, we’re talking.

What, five years ago?

Yeah, five years ago, joined as an associate. How many practices.

Did they have then?

I joined Molten and we’d just been taken over by Portman and I think we were practice number 71. So. Wow. You know, rapid growth recently, especially after a merger with Dentex, we now have 400 practices. So the largest providers of private dentistry in Europe, so massive organisation. But during Covid we acquired some we call it NHS practices practices with NHS contracts of 15,000 or more. And an advertisement was placed on a kind of our internal emails looking for a regional clinical lead for the NHS division and the job description was someone who can support these NHS practices to grow, develop etcetera. And and that’s what I’d kind of done with my career personally. I’d never done that at a practice level, so I applied, went for a couple of interviews. They must have liked me and obviously got the position. And as soon as I got the position I realised, you know, it’s a it’s a very heavily business role. It’s a big role. On leadership now personally, for example, leadership comes naturally to me, but I still have to do a lot of development on that side of things. And that’s why I decided to formalise my business training by doing the MBA. So I applied to Warwick, which was voted the number one business school in Europe last year. So I was lucky to be accepted to that and really enjoying that some six months into the MBA at the moment. But the learning I’ve got from that is directly usable for my clinical lead role really developed me. As a leader and my kind of non business side of things.

But I’m interested in how do you go from being associate to clinical lead and, you know, what were the steps?

So for me, so we have lots of different pathways. So for example, we have practice clinical leads as well. So there’s clinical leads within practice. Now in the near future, the hope is if someone wants to be a regional clinical lead, so we have kind of a ladder. So there’s associate dentists, people working in practices, for example, there’s then practice clinical leads who look after certain practices. There’s regional clinical leads who look after regions where I am, and then there’s director of dentistry and the kind of hope going towards the future as we get more practices is to for people to end up as practice clinical leads, regional clinical leads. I like I said, for example. So yeah, the pathway I for example like I said, saw the regional clinical lead advert and applied to that literally just like that. Yeah. Oh I see. And so again, the reason I applied is because part of the advert really interested me in it was talking about doing something at a practice level that I had done personally. I had gone from being an NHS clinician to working in a private practice and kind of developing practices for the future. But like I said, I mean, I was talking about imposter syndrome earlier. Yeah, when I first got given the position, I did suffer from that slightly and that’s why I decided to do the MBA, because my kind of there’s only in my mind there’s only one way to kind of counter the imposter syndrome. Well, there’s two ways. One is time, but sometimes you’re not afforded time if you’re in a position, and the other is to educate yourself to a point where you have you genuinely have the skills. So the MBA is definitely added that for me.

But what is it added? Give me an example of that.

So an MBA, obviously it’s a business administration degree, so leadership, like I said, for example, I’m a natural leader. But one of the biggest things that when we talk about leadership nowadays is knowing yourself as a leader and how you come across to others and how certain situations require either you to be different or if you naturally can’t be different in that certain situation, delegating a certain task or working with others around you and leadership. In the past, it was seen as a leader at the top of an organisation kind of dictating what others should do. And nowadays it’s more about the journey and bringing people along with you and even that kind of simple learning and that kind of simple mindset. Mindset shift has been massive and I’ve been fortunate to do kind of psychometric analysis through it. So I really you really learn about yourself as a person, and that’s actually something I recommend for anyone to do, even if you’re not looking to work on clinically or clinically learning about yourself. We don’t often think take enough time to learn about ourselves, our own values and how we respond in certain situations before it’s too late. So those kind of things have really developed me as a as a person even, let’s say.

So when you’re working, I mean, how tactical are they as a group? Are you are you are you running someone’s agenda like the clinical leads? The director of Dentistry’s agenda, is it how often do you meet with that guy? How often do you meet with your juniors? How does it work? Like give me give me a feeling of the structure, the org structure.

Well, I’ll talk about my kind of week, let’s say. So. Directors Dentistry. I talked to director dentistry once a week. That’s my kind of 1 to 1 check in with them and I give them. That’s often towards the end of the week where I give them a report for the whole week. I also have to write a written report for my practices and explain exactly what’s happened, certain situations, exactly what kind of decisions have been made, how things have been improved, certain things in a weekly report, and that goes to the Directors of Dentistry and the board.

So how many practices is it?

So I look after the two divisions of about 25 to 30 practices. So you write.

About you write something about each of those 30 practices?

Yeah, it takes a lot, takes a lot of time. So take to write. My weekly report takes me about an hour and a half to two hours because you’re kind of so throughout the week I’m jotting things down to write in my report and obviously discuss with the Director of dentistry. But alongside that regular 1 to 1 time, you can obviously communicate with director of dentistry any time. If there’s a there’s a situation at any point during the day or the week that you need kind of assistance advice on. But my day to roll day to day role and my remit, it’s a really wide ranging role. So it ranges from interviewing clinicians for practices, deciding who we take on to join our practices, to kind of ensuring compliance to working with practice managers. And then the wider aspect is working with the business to help develop those regions. So. The regions I look after. There are certain different criteria we’re trying to work on in those regions. So one region you might be looking to, for example, transition away from a certain type of dentistry, etcetera, or grow and, and those remits and working with the wider business colleagues to help those kind of decisions and be made from a clinical viewpoint. So that’s another thing we’re proud of at Portman, that we have a strong clinical leadership structure. Every decision that’s made is run past a clinician, let’s say. So for us, it really puts us apart at the forefront of dentistry there.

Compared to other corporates.

Compared to the corporates. Yes. So obviously, independent practices you have that kind of figurehead there from a clinical viewpoint. But compared to the corporates, we’ve got very strong clinical leadership structure there at Portman.

Do you mean explain it to me? What happens? What’s what’s the agenda? What happens? How does it work?

Do you mean the agenda for the practices in general?

For example, because we’re talking clinical now, aren’t we? We’re not talking acquisition of or are we? We’re talking clinical.

Yeah, so clinical. So I mean, examples can be day to day. So I’m a point of contact for clinicians for support. So let’s say they want any support from either if it’s directly involved. I’ve just had I’ve just seen this patient. I don’t know what to do. If it’s an endo thing, fantastic. I’ll answer. If it’s restorative thing, fantastic. I’ll answer. If it’s not an endo thing, we’ve got implant clinical leads. We’ve got other clinical leads and other aspects. I pass it over to them and vice versa. Complaints. One of my clinicians gets a complaint. I’m their point of contact. Just too often clinicians can go through personal issues. You know, I’ve been through lots of personal issues in my time as well. I’m their kind of point of contact. I’m available to talk to clinicians, you know, nine, 10:00 at night sometimes speaking to them if they’re having some issues and then from. So that’s kind of direct clinical support, let’s say. Yeah, there’s then the wider point ensuring compliance. So you’ve got audits running throughout the week, throughout the month, ensuring that everything’s running correctly, how we would like NHS standards, etcetera. And then the third kind of aspect is the growth piece. So we want all our practices to be growing, developing, adding in new services and as you know, running independent practices. That’s different and varied for each practice. So just because it’s important practice doesn’t mean there’s a one size fits all approach. And again, that’s what the MBAs brought kind of learning for me. You can’t have kind of a one size fits all approach. It needs to be implemented in different means and different practices.

But mean how much of it is is based on sort of top line, bottom line, you know that and how much of it is based on professional development or.

So I’d say 50/50 really, because so one of the key things we say at Portman is we want our clinicians businesses to grow so that our business grows. So and that is a very key but subtle but key point because clinicians self employed, yeah, they have to see the kind of growth in their own business, in their own development for the business to grow. So any decision I make for a practice to grow, it can’t be. This is for the practice to grow because if it doesn’t help at least one of the clinicians to grow, then the practice isn’t going to grow. You’re only going to grow through one of the clinicians, essentially adding in a new service, working extra hours. I don’t know who would want to do that, but working extra hours or a new clinician coming in, etcetera, etcetera. So it’s those ultimately it boils down to that, isn’t it? It’s working with the clinicians and colleagues on the ground to, to improve, move forward, adding new services develop.

And then how many dentists are we talking about?

So some practices I look after, we’ve got about 3 or 4 clinicians, some practice I look after. I’ve got 15 clinicians in total. So in total I’d say I’m looking after about 200 clinicians to 50 clinicians. So, so.

Any one time you’ve got several of them being sued, you know, loads of complaints. Yeah. So you’re doing all of that in two days. Bloody hell man. You’re working your ass off aren’t you?

So it’s employed for two days. It’s not a two day role a it’s a seven day role. And that the work ethos from earlier. But it was interesting, you know, I was saying earlier, my my dad’s passed away now unfortunately. But even him with his work ethos he when I took on this role two years ago, he used to think it’s it’s a lot of work. And that was coming from his work ethos.

So how are you fitting it in man? You’re doing the and what’s what’s the commitment there.

So every month we have kind of it’s a it’s module after module so there’s 12 modules. So I’ve done six modules so far. I’ve got six modules to go and then an elect a dissertation to do and it’s, it’s six weeks for a module and then a new module starts so there’s no break in between. So my days and weeks are very, very regimented. So I’m a big organiser strategically plan my days from kind of the moment I wake up. So work out early on in the morning. Then if I’m working clinically, I work clinically. When I come home, I’m taking any meetings at lunchtime or after work, phone calls, etcetera. If it’s a non clinical day, then it’s just a full day of 12 to 15 meetings, phone calls and then in the evening I’ve put time aside for kind of my MBA work, but most of my MBA work is done on a Saturday, so I’ll often. Like a big, long six, eight hour block on a Saturday and Sundays and two other days in the week have my son. So kind of saves time there. And then it’s just repeat. So that’s good. Go, go, go for yeah. Week after week.

My goodness That’s that’s made me tired just listening to that, man.

It’s. I find it exciting. Yeah.

I know. Now I’m starting to think maybe that look in your eyes wasn’t wide. Wide maybe that look at your eyes or something other than determination. No, but I’m going to take my hat off to you. That. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. I mean, don’t burn yourself out. You know that. That’s important, isn’t it? I feel like. I feel like you’re fed by it.

Yes. I mean, so that’s another thing. I was listening to someone online and they were saying so again, knowing yourself is so important. So after I’ve done this psychometric analysis and it’s really strange when you fill out this questionnaire and you have this 30 minute conversation with someone and they come back and they kind of tell you things and you almost think that someone’s been following you for six months. Yeah. So my first line on my analysis said Assad is all work and no play. Yeah. And, and I had I had not even told them about my roles that I do my work but they just managed to pick this up. And I think the point is that I personally don’t see work as work. It’s a career for me. It’s certain things I’m trying to achieve. And but I also know when I’m getting to that point of burning myself out. So I’ve got certain tactics where I’ll go away and take myself away for a couple of days or have the evening and even an evening off, for example, really refreshes me. So go for dinner, go to cinema. And that really refreshes me for the next day. But it’s important to do that before you get to the point of burnout.

Have you got a psychometric test that you like? Is there one that someone could look up?

And I’ve actually done two. So we at Portman, a lot of the employed colleagues, we were fortunate to do the Spotlights one and so the business insights one at Warwick, we did the business insight, the spotlight, sorry, and both similar, slightly different in terms of how they’re the scores are calculated and, and the kind of the results they give you. But both times I did them about 18 months apart and both times my results were almost identical. And the whole point is that psychometric point is that that is who you are. You can only adapt a certain way left or right, but to the core, who you are is is who you were kind of raised to be. Let’s say they.

Are. They test that anyone can go online and take.

Yes, you can do them online. Yeah. So again, as with anything, they vary in terms of price ranges. Often the more you pay, the more accurate they come out, etcetera. But yes, you can look at them online.

We put everyone through something called 16 personalities. It’s it’s a good website. It’s a free easy to go 12 minute thing. And you’re right about people are just amazed at what you can tell them about themselves.

And it’s important for, you know, other colleagues around you to know that what brings the best out in you and what brings the best out in them. So that’s a big thing I focus on. I I’m almost after doing so much of the kind of psychometric analysis myself, I can kind of take within five minutes of talking to someone I know where they’re kind of positioned roughly on this map of psychometric analysis and what will get the best out of them. The first five minutes I’m talking to someone are kind of analysing that and you end up doing it subconsciously. And it’s amazing to do with patience as well, because when you’re kind of giving your taking consent from them, you have to tailor it to what they understand. You know, the GDC says that to us now and how how are you meant to do that? Well, there’s lots of different things you can use to help you with that guy.

Then tell me about me.

So, Well, I met you at the show, didn’t I? So I knew straight away that you’re kind of there’s. I’d say you’re obviously built these businesses up, so you’ve been very successful in your career. But let’s say they’re not from an organisation or kind of an organised or traditional organisational approach. And there’s one thing that you even said you kind of gave it away because I was I was talking to James Martin at the time and I was talking about my dentist who investor anyone doesn’t know. I was talking about my kind of MBA and you were saying to him, You don’t want to do an MBA, you and James Martin. And it’s interesting what you can pick up when you listen to people. But I mean, and that’s that’s not wrong advice because you’ve been successful in your career. He’s done fantastic with his kind of business. But some people need it, others don’t. So yeah, by listening to. People picking up on different things. It’s amazing what you can pick up on.

Yeah, you obviously don’t know James Martin very well.

Yeah, that was the first time I met him. That was the first time I met him.

Shaky. Shaky. So, look, you said you have your son every other weekend, is that right?

No, I’m three, three times a week. So every Sunday. Every Sunday. Mondays and Wednesdays. So obviously Mondays and Wednesdays in school. But having Mondays, evenings, Wednesday evenings and Saturday from 12:00.

So. And how old is he?

He’s coming up to five now. So just starting school. And he won an award last week for being enthusiastic, which he was delighted with. Amazing. And it was funny to see because he’s obviously I’m obviously kind of subconsciously rubbing off on him, let’s say.

Tell me about divorce, because, you know, you’ve got your son these days because you’re you’re divorced. Give me some reflections on on on on your divorce.

So saf and so SAF. My ex’s dentist, she knows I’m coming on the podcast. She listens to your podcast a lot. So I said I’d give her a shout out.

So sorry for asking that question.

So we everyone kind of laughs when I say, but we still work together. When I work my clinical days, we still work together. She’s still my biggest referrer as a friend and, you know, it’s all amicable. Ultimately. I think we met when we were kind of 23, 25, and it was, let’s say we were different people at the time. As time moves on, you grow and develop in different directions. Sometimes lots of kind of life events happened which kind of affected that as well. You know, with my father being ill, a son being born really early into our relationship, for example, and then moving to York where we had no kind of family support. So it does add pressures into into a relationship. But ultimately, we’re still good friends, we’re still amicable. And, you know, we do the best for our son. So that’s the I think that’s the main thing going to the future. You know, I’m I’m I’m still a I always use this analogy of wars and battles. So life, let’s say, or certain aspects in life is are kind of like let’s say it’s overall it’s a war and you’ve got little battles and you can’t let little battles affect your overall war. So when I went through the divorce, lots of people feel can sometimes end up being, you know, angry or upset or kind of against the idea of marriage. But I’m personally not. So I feel like you can’t let little things that happen to you in life affect the overall aim of the goal that you’re trying to achieve.

As you were going through that process of like, you know, finally, I’ve never been divorced. I’ve been married. I’ve been married. Um, the moment when you’re thinking. It’s over, you know, like that moment. It’s interlaced with so many different sort of feelings, especially from an Asian background. Right. I mean, there’s it’s even more complicated, I think. Did you feel sort of the stigma of that or did you not did you get over that wasn’t part of your issue?

Slightly, and I think so For me personally, it was that it was a bit out of the blue, the divorce. But I think the stigma point of view, I feel you can feel that in anything. So yeah, again, surrounding yourselves with the right people that don’t let you feel the stigma or kind of aren’t with that viewpoint. Essentially life’s a game of opinion. So some people will have a stigma about something that’s perfectly normal and other people won’t. So ultimately, our families understood it was two people that gave our all. It didn’t work out. But the best thing is that, you know, our son is doing well and we’re still amicable. So if that’s the outcome from a divorce, let’s say, which is, as you’re describing, a kind of tough moment in someone’s life, then I feel like we’ve not done too badly there.

How is it that you stayed amicable with so many people? Don’t.

Well.

I think actually work at that. Did you like sort of want that to be the outcome?

So a bit of a strange one because, I mean, even through our marriage, let’s say we’re two people who aren’t, let’s say arguers. Yeah, we’ll always kind of communicate in the correct manner. And I think that’s always important to try and communicate in the correct manner, whoever you’re talking to in life. So that helps. And then obviously still working together, there still has to be that colleague relationship. So, you know, it’s a relationship of colleagues now and just how I am with my other colleagues and how she’s with her other colleagues, it’s exactly the same there now.

Because I think, you know, often you see it in divorce rate where especially where there’s kids involved. Where it’s not as friendly as yours. And then people people sort of forget that, you know, like while you’re hurting, that your your ex-partner, you’re also hurting your kid badly. Exactly. And I think we all we all know this instinctively, right? But somehow we think the the acrimony takes over and revenge or something. I mean, like some sort of tit for tat. You know, I’ve got family divorced and they can’t even call each other. It’s only email only, you know. And what can you get over in an email that it’s like it.

Yeah. I mean, lots of people ask me about this and there’s no kind of one set thing that I feel we’ve done. It’s just the feeling was mutual to be amicable. And, you know, it’s good that it’s worked out that way and hopefully continues because like I said, and going back to if I talk about me personally, why I’ve really focussed on being amicable is because it’s not worth winning a battle or let’s say kind of causing a battle when the ultimate aim is for a son to do well. So that has to be the centre point and the focus.

With this in mind, let’s get to the darker part of the thought. What would you think is some of some of your darkest days in, of course, divorce your dad, but where it’s interlaced with dentistry, What comes to mind when I say darkest days?

Well, I mean, so I was about 18 months qualified when I was actually sued. And, you know, that’s probably that kind of time period was one of my darkest days. But so it was one of those patients. And again, you were asking earlier what kind of triggered me to really start developing my career. It was kind of that unfortunate event, let’s say. So as a patient I’d seen for an extraction, long story short, but kind of no complications. Patient was a smoker, got to infectious a dry socket, ended up in hospital and we didn’t hear from them again for, you know, they were meant to come back to have some prosthetic treatment. Didn’t hear from them again. We just thought, you know, they’ve gone somewhere else. I even tried ringing them a couple of days after, you know, to check in on them. I was one of the tips I learned quite early on in my career to ring patients after big treatment to try and see, but they didn’t answer the phone. So I just thought, right, they’ve gone somewhere else. And then it was it was almost a year after that point when I came into work one day and I had this solicitor’s letter on my desk and they were the solicitors were asking for about £80,000 because they had said it was a strategic tooth.

I shouldn’t have extracted it in the first place. I should have. It was a grade two mobile, a compromise tooth. I should have crown lengthened, root treated post and chord crowned it because it was a strategic tooth. And now at the time when you when you were young dentist you don’t and the importance of mentors many years later lots of people and even myself. If someone else was coming to me with this, they would say, Look, ask your indemnity to kind of fight this and and fight your corner here because there’s no issues. The my indemnity and the kind of wisdom settled with the patient. It was a no blame on the dentist. So that got me to sign a piece of paper. A patient signed a piece of paper, patient still got, you know, a handsome payout.

And how much did you get?

£7,000.

And you’ve done nothing wrong. Just dry.

Socket. Yeah. And it’s one of those where obviously in hindsight, you ask your indemnity to fight it for you because you know, it’s the the correct thing to do. Ultimately that kind of those dark days kind of kicked me into action because I kind of started thinking, look, I’ve always loved Endo. And the ultimate aim was to do an indent. I’ve not done any postgraduate training, so let’s try and go and do some postgraduate training. So the first thing I could I was accepted on because when obviously when you apply for postgraduate training in universities, there’s an application process, etcetera. Was this Pgcert at Bristol? And obviously I carried on from there. But the kind of stimulus was from those dark days. And one of the things I always say to younger colleagues now is dark days won’t last. If you’re able to get yourself out of them, you have to try and get yourself out of it by thinking of a course of action to move forwards. And there always is a way in dark times, there is always a way to move forwards.

But, you know, I’ve never been properly sued. I mean, there were some there were some, you know, things that could. Only practice for like 4 or 5 years. But, you know, properly full time. But remember that when a complaint became dark for me was where the patient was kind of implying that I wasn’t paying attention, where I was really going out my way to pay attention for that patient. And that that disconnect makes you question everything about yourself. And so in this situation, did you feel like you’d done anything wrong other than that, you know, the communication piece that you didn’t manage to get through on the phone?

No, I mean, that’s where you when you I describe it as almost all the stages of grief, really, because you go you go you start off with anger, but ultimately disbelief. Disbelief, Yeah. Because it’s like that. It’s got that far, let’s say, for example. Yeah. And then obviously continuous disbelief that people are trying to settle it for you, etcetera. Yeah. And you think maybe this is the system. But again, going back to the point, there’s only yourself that can get you, that can get you out of that. And it’s important that you, you kind of see the tunnel. Now having mentors helps you with that because many years later, when I discussed this with mentors, I mean, early on in my career, I was almost embarrassed to talk about it. Yeah, because you were kind of embarrassed that you’ve been sued. But many years later, when I finally started talking about it, people are like, We would have fought this for you. We would have you know, I’ve had restorative consultants in university saying these are the kind of cases when people reach out to me, I come and defend them in court and and fight for you. So, yeah, try and reach out for support.

So I can imagine being sued 18 months out of university is, you know, a painful dark moment. Right. But what about if I said, what’s your biggest clinical error? What would you say to that from the black box thinking way of looking at life so that we can all learn? You know, in medical we don’t tend to share our errors.

Yeah. I mean I mean clinical. So you mentioned earlier, I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never had a major, major disaster in Endo. And again, which is probably why, you know, I always ended up enjoying it. But one of the things I realised quite early on is that I mean, I almost have two left hands when it comes to doing oral surgery, and part of it is undergraduate teaching. Part of it is just never had the passion for extracting teeth and wanting to save teeth. But this piece kind of goes to, I feel, whereas very what that kind of got me to realise. And so my biggest kind of clinical errors are leaving retained roots, etcetera, that then even with the help of a colleague etcetera, couldn’t be removed and you know, had to consent the patient about the process and you know, there’s a root left, etcetera, etcetera. But from that there’s two kind of things I learned is and I explained this to a lot of people, firstly, if you’re struggling with a certain aspect or you’ve made a certain mistake, you have to really analyse it in depth. So when I would analyse those things, it would come back to being a training deficiency for me. And then the next part is what are you going to do? So don’t just kind of analyse and say, Right, I’ve got a training deficiency, what am I actually going to do? And I’ll explain what I did which is which some people may find funny, but my kind of solution was I put myself in a position where I’m not doing oral surgery anymore.

So that’s one solution. I’m not doing oral surgery, so I’m not going to have disasters in oral surgery. But if somebody said write oral surgery matters to me and I want to make a career, then you have to try and kind of push yourself to go and do that training. And again, the reason I didn’t go and do that training was I chose Endo and I thought, I’m going to make a career there. If I say it as a GDP, I know 100%, I would have had to go and do further training in oral surgery to bring myself up to a certain standard. But then you come back to strengths and passions. My strength and passion was always endodontics and one of the key successes, key ways for success I feel people can utilise is focus on what your strengths are naturally. Really enhance those, get your weaknesses or delegate your weaknesses to somebody else. I refer all your oral surgery out and you won’t be too far wrong in your career.

So your biggest clinical error was you broke a tooth in an extraction and left some roots.

Yeah.

Ever. That’s your biggest clinical error?

Yeah. I mean, I’ve been so let’s say I’ve been fortunate in that. So one of those so I’ve had that, let’s say 2 or 3 times in oral surgery, but even one was too many for me. With my kind of ethos of doing the best. And in my mind, if I can’t do something to a really high standard, I don’t want to do it. And that’s the way I’ve always thought about things personally. Now, it’s not always an option for for people doing general dentistry because we we get patients and we’re kind of forced to do oral surgery. We’re forced to do things that we were not good at. And we can’t always refer patients out because they’re not always willing to pay for a special interest or a specialist dentist. But me personally, I put myself in a position where I wouldn’t have to do oral surgery, where I’m able to refer it to colleagues or work with, for example.

But going give me another clean clear.

So obviously no fractured files, but don’t see those as well.

Let’s talk about fracturing first. Let’s talk about fracturing first. So so first of all, the language is beautiful, right? The file has separated.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s beautiful language.

Well, there’s a funny story about that, because somebody was telling me once that a dentist basically fractured a file. So he sat the patient up and he showed them the file and he said, look, this is titanium.

Yeah.

Titanium. And the patient said, How much do I owe you? So so it’s it’s the way you explain things too often. But.

But when does it happen? When does it happen? Is it out of the control of the endodontist or is it. No.

So it’s essentially there’s two types of fractures. You can either get torsion or rotational. So you’ve either gone around too far around a corner and the file stuck there and it’s still spinning at the top or you’ve got a fracture at the whole shaft. Now, the point is there’s again, going back to the basics, one of the first basics we learned in dentistry is creating a glide path in dental school. And when we get into dental practice, we kind of discard that because it takes time. But that taking of time will save you from fracturing a file. So I’ve fractured a file and remind me.

What that means. Does that mean that your access reflects the curvature of the canal? I’ve forgotten what glide path is.

So there’s. So there’s that as well. You kind of your access, but your glide path is your kind of path in layman’s terms, path from the coronal section to the apical section. And it should be essentially smooth, able to smooth to pass file that requires either hand filing first. Yeah, yeah. Or now you can get kind of rotary glide path files to use. I use hand filing for that. But the key point is that if you following those basics, you spend time creating glide path. Your axis is correct. You shouldn’t be fracturing your file. But going back to the time when I fractured the file, it was on my first ever day in the new job and in the new job where I was just doing endo. So I’d done a PG cert. It was one of my first ever patients. And you can imagine you’re already thinking you’ve already got this kind of feeling in your mind, thinking, Am I at the correct time to be accepting referrals? Am I at the correct time to be starting a brand new job where I’m just doing Endo Yeah, and then you go and fracture your file. And that required a lot of mental resilience to get past that because essentially, again, went home, analysed. What mistake could I do? And that was my first and ever fracture. But again, it’s the analysis that let’s me kind of feel lets me get out of those time. You have to analyse it and it has to be brutally honest. So sometimes we analyse and I could have analysed and said, Oh, it was a brand new machine to me because I’m using a slightly different rotary machine to my the practice. Well, if I’m being honest, that’s not actually the reason I fractured is because I didn’t create a glide path. The machine had nothing to do with it and I’ve gone on to use that machine many times and it’s been fine. So you have to, when you analyse a mistake, you have to be honest with yourself.

And then once the instrument is separated, is there any any justification for leaving it in or do you always take it out?

So should always look to take it out again via referral. Or if you’ve got the you know, is that.

A common referral that you receive?

So I personally don’t do many fractured file removals. So again, this is on my master’s training in Liverpool. I met a dentist, Rob Eades. He lives five ten minutes away from me, works five, ten minutes away from me. And between us we get a lot of the endodontic referrals in York and he’s gone and done a lot of training after his master’s on file removal. And again, you send them to him? Yeah, I send them to him. Or. Well, I advise people to refer to him if there’s a fractured file because he’s fantastic at removing fractured files. And the key point is he’s gone and done so much training in that it’s kind of bread and butter for him. And there’s fractured files now in this day and age with the tools that we have aren’t anything that is, let’s say, a game over because you can either look to bypass the file or remove it with the tools that we have.

And what are the tools, some sort of kit.

So yeah, one of the one of the best tools out there is it’s, it’s kind of a simplest way to describe it. It’s kind of a small loop. It’s almost like a cowboy loop, which you throw around the file. You kind of pull back and it grabs it, grabs it and pulls it out. To do that, obviously have to widen your access. You have to widen the canal. What’s that called is a Yoshi loop. Yoshi. So it’s a Japanese instrument, really fantastic dentist who invented that. He does courses now and again. So he charges almost four figures to just remove a file and he can he can remove his kind of claim to fame as he can remove any file in the world. Wow. With this with this system that he’s developed.

So now now in the position you’re in now, your your advice to colleagues who get sued is, okay, stay calm, number one. Yeah. But you know, you’re thinking as as a as a dentist. Often I get this call sometimes from some of our customers, friends of mine who got sued suddenly. It’s not just you’re not a great dentist, it’s you’re not a great dentist. And you may lose your job and you may not be able to feed your family and you may have to take your kids out of private school. And, you know, the catastrophize is what do you do about it? Because you’re kind of a young guy, man, and it’s you’ve got quite an old head on your shoulders. You do. It’s clear. But how do you calm down that dentist? What do you say?

So again, I’ve had to support a lot of dentists with kind of complaints. And the first thing is this again, with anything like putting in perspective. Yeah. So we’ll often catastrophize and make the situation worse. But once you put things in perspective, you realise it’s it’s not the end of the world because it’s a, it’s either an honest mistake or a mistake that that you’ve attempted to rectify. Often dentists will look to rectify this by referring the patient out doing exactly what’s right. And those things are taken in favour of dentists when complaints are made as well. But my advice is always try and obviously take things as your indemnities advising, but also if you want to reach out and take advice from university professors, often quite helpful or again in Portland, my kind of role, reach out and take advice from me and what to do next. Steps and see if there’s any thing that we can do to support you along with what your indemnity is saying. The complaints are going to happen. A long time ago, somebody said the only sure way of not getting complaints is just not going to work and not practice.

If you’re in work, you’re going to get complaints. And as long as you’re trying to be honest, you’ve done everything right. It’s all documented. You’re not going to lose your house. You’re not going to lose your job. The wider point I see and again, my me being sued really hit me on that. And this is part of the discussion I was having with James Martin is I’ve been a kind of a heavy investor financially in things outside of dentistry for and having kind of a rainy day fund. And I feel the earlier people can do that in their career, it gives them the kind of security. So having kind of either with this non-clinical role, for example, another string to my bow, another way to make a living, other aspects to either your kind of financial output, just kind of money in a savings account. Even again, people in dentistry talk more on this than the detail I want I’m going to go into, but seek those people out and have something in place and then complaints, etcetera, shouldn’t be something that, you know, is a scary thing.

Tell me about the great man at the top of Portman. Sam Waley-cohen. Have you met him?

I met him once briefly. So he’s like, lovely guy. So obviously, the kind of inception story into Portman is, you know, he was from a business background and he really wanted to create and I’ve used this phrase a few times tonight, but create exceptional experiences for patients where we really focus on putting patients at the heart of what we do. And it goes beyond just kind of a phrase, but lots of things that we do in practice is revolve around creating that kind of impression. And it’s the key thing from every colleague or every team member is a valuable part as a valuable part to play. So the patient journey for us starts from the moment the patient rings up to book an appointment or interacts with us online to book an appointment via email, etcetera. That’s where our patient journey starts. And, and from that kind of simple ethos. The other kind of big vision that we have at Portman is to be the best dental group in the world. So one of the phrases we use is ultimately, at some point in the future, when somebody thinks of dentistry, they think of Portman. They kind of the two are synonymous with each other. And and that’s the kind of ethos that we have and the vision that we have to go forwards. And that comes from Sam, from everything that he’s done in his career, even as a sportsman, let’s say, continuously working at it, until he won the Grand National.

And now that you’ve got this Dentex merger. It’s not clear mean from from from my side. From the supplier side. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not really clear. Is it going to be one big Portman model? Is it going to be one big dentex model? Is it going to be a hybrid essentially?

So there’s lots of work going on behind the scenes for that. So if you imagine when two companies merge, yeah, there’s initially, you know, the competition, mergers, acquisitions, the CMA authority who want to to to talk about kind of is this a monopoly, etcetera. So we’ve gone through that process. There’s lots of little processes that you go through before you merge a company. And we’re now finally reaching the point where we’re able to merge kind of essentially all the departments within the business into one kind of unified departments. Of the two marketing departments, for example, are coming together to one, two clinical departments coming together to one. So that’s the process that we’re going through. From your kind of point of view during that time period? Yes, that month or so, things kind of are transition. Yeah. Up in the air. But very soon things will be kind of fully merged and everything will be kind of announced and ready to go for the future.

Yeah, but what’s the answer to that question is, are the 400 practices going to be more like Dentexes or are they going to be more like Portmans, or are they going to leave them as they are? By the way, you should go into it. Go into it. What’s the difference between a Portman practice and a Dentex practice? From what I can see, the Portman practice is fully owned and the Dentex practice is kind of kind of isn’t. It’s almost like the Dentex practice. They’re leaving them to do whatever they want. The Portman practice is a bit more managed. Is that right?

On the surface, yes. Yeah. In answer to your question, which model are we going to go towards that? That is the. That were in figuring out and figuring out now. Yeah. So once that is kind of finally settled and figured out, that will obviously be announced to the industry. Well, firstly to our practices for example, and then to the wider industry. But it’s an exciting time because you mentioned the subtleties in that the dentist’s practices, let’s say, are.

Left to their own.

Devices. Well, let’s say less.

Decision making wise.

Hands on. Yeah. The ultimate ethos of both businesses is exactly the same. So if you and it’s been interesting, I’ve met a lot of colleagues from Dentex now and the things that they’ve been working on completely independently over the past two years have been exactly the same as what we’ve been thinking and we’ve been wanting to work on. So now the two kind of combined departments coming together will be. I say might be biased, but it will be industry leading.

And what was the first time you knew about it? Was it the same time that I knew about it?

So it was announced as clinical leads was announced just a bit before obviously it came out.

So what was the reason for the merger?

As simple as that. It’s there’s two companies here who have exactly the same ethos and what they’re trying to provide. So discussions were had between the execs and the decision was made to obviously look to merge the businesses. And let’s say by a by-product that has brought growth because all of a sudden we’re now almost 400 practices going over 400 practices. So all of a sudden it’s a bigger entity. And having a bigger entity allows us to kind of input our vision to the wider Dental industry a lot quicker of becoming the best Dental kind of group out there.

But, you know, when when, when businesses by each other, you can understand what’s going on there, right? You’re almost you’re accelerating market share or whatever the when businesses merge. Mean you’re in the middle of your but you tell me for me from from my from my amateur perspective it’s a cost saving exercise. You’re trying to sort of get rid of people.

Not necessarily because I mean, a famous merger I always talk about and again, with the NBA, you got you get lots of case studies and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, you’ve had GlaxoSmithKline in the past. So Glaxo and SmithKline merged and that was done for a reason of that both develop the similar type of drug. I can’t remember exactly what drug it was, but it was the case study that we read. It was a similar type of drug. They were both trying to go for the same market and when they broke the drug down, the kind of products and the constituent products of the drug weren’t too dissimilar. So they both said to each other, look, this is going to be our leading drug in the market for each of us independently. Why not merge and just take over the whole market in that kind of field? So there’s lots of different reasons why companies merge. But for us it’s a clear and it’s I think it’s been shown to the industry, it’s a clear growth strategy because it’s we could have continuously run as two independent organisations. I mean, even a simple thing of we as a combined organisation now have a head office kind of head based in London, whereas Portman, we didn’t have much of a head space in headquarters in London for many years. We were always attempting to try and get one, you know, costs in London etcetera hard. We now, after the merger, have one in London and one in Cheltenham. So, so a certain practices. For example, in the past both our mergers and acquisitions team and this is when the exec kind of started realising wait a minute, we’re both going for the same practices and it’s not a coincidence how many times it’s happened. And then it would be a coin toss between the, the vendors. And sometimes they go to Portman, sometimes they go to Dentex. So it was essentially those kind of.

Pushing the price of the practice up as well.

Guess Yeah, if you’ve got two competitors going for it, Yeah, yeah.

And going forward then what’s the plan is are they planning to buy more and more practices? You know.

I’m urging the acquisition department was one of the first that fully merged. So yes, essentially we want to continue to to to grow.

Grow the numbers of practices. Yeah. And so now you you’ve got an insight into I guess the numbers right. When you see how many practices do you say you’re looking after now.

25 to 30. Yeah.

So you’re looking at those 30 practices and you can see the numbers in the 30 practices and you can see the performance of the different clinicians. And obviously in my world, it’s it’s like the number of teeth whitening treatments that they do. Yeah, yeah. And, and it’s massively different even within the same practice you get one dentist does, you know, 20 a month and you get another dentist does one every six months. Yeah. And obviously in my world it’s very simple. It’s all about teeth whitening. Hey, talk about teeth whitening more. You know that. That’s that. But when you look at it, how do you have you have you successfully addressed that when when you see one dentist not performing from that perspective from the production perspective?

So this is where at Portman and part of the reason the clinical lead role came about is we have a big ethos of clinical freedom. So yeah, as long as a dentist is providing the best standard of care, productivity essentially doesn’t come into it because they’re self-employed clinicians, they can choose how long to work, etcetera, what they want to work, where they want to work, as long as they’ve got the best equipment, materials provided to them, they’re able to do the best dentistry. But my kind of answer to your question, there’s lots of different factors why one dentist can be providing 20 and whitening treatments, let’s say another is providing one. And let’s kind of take away the fact that, okay, the person who’s providing one is a special. No. Let’s say GDPs. Yeah. So why is there such a disparity? Well, it can come down to even subtle things. For example, a newer clinician in the practice can be focusing on if they’re early in their time in the practice, they can be having to kind of build a patient base and they’ll trust of new patients. They’re building trust and they’re actually having to do lots of restorative treatment. And again, that’s where a lot of my role comes into it because I kind of add colour to the numbers When I’m talking with operations colleagues, I’m adding colour to the numbers and kind of putting a story behind the fact that it’s not as simple as one clinician is just doing 20. Very good point.

Very good point. Because because in the corporate situation, often the numbers are the only thing that are doing the talking. Yeah, and you’re absolutely right. You know, being able to, as you say, put colour to it. Yeah, it makes a big difference. But go on.

Well I mean I think the other the other factor is it’s going the other way. It could be that let’s say one dentist has just gone and done. I’m just using an example of like an ethical sales course and actually that of course they’ve just gone and done that and the others haven’t. And then I’ll kind of sit down if, if the if after putting the colour to the numbers, it genuinely does show that, you know, one clinician is, is outperforming, outperforming for a genuine reason, then obviously we’ll look at that. But you get that again clinicians and people can are self-motivated and self-motivation. Nothing can beat self-motivation. There’s no amount of external motivation. You can dangle all the carrots in the world in front of someone, but self motivation always outweighs external motivation. So some people will always just sell more of your whitening than others.

Yeah, and I notice Portman did it doing a thing where they’re sort of buying associates. That’s an interesting move. What do you guys call that internally? What’s the name of that buying associate? Sounds strange.

I’m not sure what you’re.

Where they ask an associate, someone who’s an associate to move over to Portman but pay them like a big golden handshake to move.

So we are actually one of the corporates that’s not actually doing kind of golden handshakes. Oh, you know, no. So some of the other corporates do. But I don’t know if you want to. Yeah. Got that wrong. Yeah. Because there’s a big self-employed piece around that. So some of the other corporates might be in a bit of hot water soon around that but you’re not it’s it’s hard to give a self-employed person a golden handshake.

Is that.

Right. Yeah. From HMRC point of view I.

Got that wrong. Maybe I got that wrong. You talked about your your dad and it’s obvious to respect that you’ve got for him and you know, the relationship you had with him. Tell me tell me about, you know, as you’re going through this. Stressful job, let’s face it. When you said your dad got ill, what was the what was the time between finding out that he had a problem and then when he passed away, how long was that?

So we ended up having cancer about two and a half years. And his first cancer went into kind of almost remission. And then he got a secondary cancer. That secondary cancer was in January this year, and that was kind of an aggressive and as soon as that was diagnosed, it was kind of terminal. So he passed away in April, middle of April. And again, that kind of time period was very stressful and obviously very busy because I was working full time. I didn’t miss, you know, I was trying to when you have a responsibility to practices and clinicians, you know, I take that very seriously. On top of that, the kind of final week before he passed away, I had my MBA study week, so I had to be at Warwick for five days. So I was going to go into Warwick, go into hospital, sleeping at the hospital till kind of five, 6 a.m., then going back to Warwick, then hospital. And I think the point is through that you, you often sometimes don’t realise how strong you are or how much resilience you have until you get tested. And I always felt and it’s always come out in my psychometric analysis, let’s say that I have a certain amount of resilience naturally, but that was a time that I could really kind of lean in on that. And in some ways I kept it business as usual as much as possible. But obviously, yes, it was a hard time supporting my family emotionally, etcetera.

You said to me, I don’t know if it was in in the pod or out of the pod, but you said to me that your dad had just retired.

Yeah.

When this happened.

Well, so he hadn’t actually the illness kind of retired him, so he, he was one of those same kind of with the work ethos. He never wanted to retire. And he was only 67. Oh, my goodness. So he he didn’t want to retire. And even till kind of his the last year of his life. And I feel like this is where I get a lot of my kind of natural inclination to help others and not just sit in a room and do endo all day, let’s say. Yeah. So in the last year and a half of his career, he set up a big kind of pathway for foreign doctors to come into the UK, and he set up kind of four training centres in UK hospitals off his back. So just a few weeks back it was the first kind of graduation ceremony of those doctors having done two years in the NHS and my mum and my brother and me were invited as kind of guests of honour to that, which is a big kind of moment for us to see, kind of the hard work and see in front of us all these doctors that had come over.

What a lovely legacy for your dad. Yeah, a lovely thing.

Yeah, He left a big legacy. And I think that’s why, you know, I’m very you know, when I talk about him, it’s there’s obviously the sadness, but also kind of the happiness and the pride because of what he achieved in his career.

That’s beautiful, buddy. I know that we’ve kind of we’ve been talking for two hours, man. Let’s let’s get to the final questions. Yeah. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone so quickly for me. I just looked at the title. Yeah. So let’s start with mine. Let’s start with mine. Fancy dinner party? Yeah. Three guests. Dead or alive? Who do you have or why?

So obviously, what I’ve been saying earlier about my dad and so obviously my first guess would be my dad. And, you know, as I’m saying, he wasn’t just what he achieved in his career, but my dad was one of those people that ended up, no matter how busy he was, he ended up knowing a lot about, let’s say, politics, sports. He wasn’t a big sports fan, but he ended up knowing all the sports news, so to the point where anyone could come up and have a conversation with him. So I feel if he was at the dinner party, no matter who I go on to invite, you know, there’d be good conversation there. My second one, and I think obviously title of the podcast Dental Leaders podcast and obviously in the talking a lot about leadership. My second one would have to be Queen Elizabeth. The second, because of what she achieved as a kind of being thrust upon leadership, being thrust upon her at the age of 25 when she probably thought she had a few more years before she became queen in the aftermath of World War Two, you know, was just last year. Everyone was talking about her achievements and then also kind of staying relevant throughout all these years. So relevance is something that, let’s say celebrities or certainly people in dentistry even clinically, let’s say we struggle with because we’ll we’ll work for five, ten years, we’ll get set in our ways. But here was someone who was able to stay relevant for 60, 70 years.

Yeah, she’s come up once before. Flawless. No. Flawless. Yeah. Incredible. Go ahead.

And the final one? I’m a big football fan, not a fan of Manchester United, so I will kind of add that in. But Sir Alex Ferguson and the thing that fascinates me about him as a leader is often leadership is very easy or I wouldn’t say easy, but it’s easier if things are not going well and a new leader comes into an organisation and says, Look, these are the kind of changes we want to make. People are more receptive to those changes and you often have some success. But what happens after success is either people get complacent or you kind of get to a plateau point. And the thing that fascinates me about him, again, not a Man United fan, but how he was able to continuously renovate kind of teams, reinvigorate players after success and to continuously move the club forwards. So those are my three people that I’d have.

Nice. Who do you support?

I’m a Birmingham City fan, so of course my my sins of living and growing up in Birmingham.

Prav final question, a deathbed one. It’s weird with someone so young on your deathbed. Friends and family around you. Three pieces of advice you’d leave them.

So I say some of these to my son every morning when I’m dropping him off to school. And I thought I’d share some of those because. And on the surface of them, they seem kind of simple ones. But then obviously I’ll go in to explain them a bit more. And the first one is, and we’ve talked earlier about enjoy what you do day to day life can be can, can become mundane. And, you know, I talk about this in my career. One of the key factors I feel like I don’t get to burn out easily because I’m genuinely enjoying what I’m doing. And you see that in a lot of people. If you genuinely enjoy what you do, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like something enjoyable. So if and the counter of that, if you end up at any point in your life doing something that you’re not enjoying, then change it, change that. And I’d say very quickly, because it’s very easy to get set in your ways, either kind of something might be financially right or whatever. Exactly. If you’re not enjoying it, change it quickly. My first big one. Second one touched on this earlier, but surround yourself with the right people. And I said even one negative person in kind of around you can really drain that negative energy from you. So I kind of really focus on having people around me who are really positive. Now, it’s not to say if one of my friends is going through a tough time, they’re gone and I’m there to support them. I was going to.

Say, Have you fired anyone before?

Um.

We’ve a friend. I mean, not. Not. Not an employee.

No. So. No, no, but I think not yet. Yeah, let’s say, um, but I think it shows because if your values are such and if what you genuinely sit down and talk about is a certain kind of thing, then you’re not going to attract people to that friendship group, let’s say, who aren’t along that line. But it’s really important to have the right people around you. And the final one, again, like I said, on the surface of it will seem so simple, but we always forget. And you know, again, touching on my dad, my dad was 67. He had still until his last days, he said he had all these kind of ambitions, things he wanted to achieve. And it’s the final piece of advice. Give it your all. So we all only get one chance at this life. So really, whatever it is, big or small, just give it your all. And you don’t know whether by giving your all in that one small thing, it becomes a big part of your life. But remember that you only get one shot at it.

How do you want to be remembered, sir? Assad was.

Assad was somebody who. Who went out of his way to help people. And I put that in there, went out of his way because it’s what I’ve seen my dad do and it’s what I firmly believe in, even to this day. And I don’t say this lightly, but every single kind of message I get on any kind of LinkedIn or social media, I’ll always respond to whether I feel it’s not relevant to me or not. Even if it’s just to say, Look, it’s not relevant to me. I just feel if someone’s giving me their time, I want to be there to help them in some way. So if I can be remembered as that, that would be it for me.

That’s lovely, Melody. Well, think. Think. You know, your future’s going to be bright, but your future’s going to be bright. So someone so young, What are you, just eight years out of university? Yeah. That’s really nice. Eight years out of university. Um, talking the way you are. It’s nice. You got, as I say, you’ve got an old head on your shoulders, and, you know, I don’t know where it’s going to go for you, man. Whether you’re going to stay in this corporate thing or, you know, as I said to you on that day when we met, people who finish MBAs come out and say, I want to run GlaxoSmithKline now, you know. So let’s see. Let’s see where it goes. But maybe maybe we do a second one five years down the line. And you know what? I was thinking of you. I was thinking of saying, hey, where do you want to be in five years or in two years? And then doing another 1 in 2 years and seeing what happened, you know, something like that. Maybe we’ll include that in the in the in the following ones. Lovely. Lovely to have you, buddy. Thank you so much for doing this. Great. Really, really enjoyed that. Thank you, man.

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.

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Learn very methodically. So the way I’ve created a program where I have my my book, as you know, full mouth reconstruction for GDPs is one of the best seller. So the book is there for people who just don’t know what full mouth reconstruction is and just want to understand how I work. But the course, the way it works is I’ve recorded everything online. So all the lectures, all the practical demonstration is there online. They do a online course. First, they watch all the videos and everything. Then they come for six days, training, three weekends broken down, different three weekends. And I teach them exactly how the full mouth reconstruction, all the steps, the three steps. And I teach them those three steps. The beauty is I don’t give any demonstration because everything is recorded online. So when they come in, they literally start doing practical work. And when they make mistake, I then show them how to improve on them because I’ve been on so many courses myself where the, you know, the lecturer or the the the teacher gives demonstration and you’re like, Wow, this is amazing. And then when you start doing it, you can’t implement it. It’s like, you know, you, you see the demonstration of the toy or something and why the toy and you come bring home and you can’t really replicate what the guy was doing. And that’s where I feel that it’s a waste of time. Me giving demonstration. I would rather people use that time in practising, practising, practising and figure out what makes it work.

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. Devang Patel to the Dental Leaders Podcast. Devang. I’ve known for quite a while now. He came on to my feed as a geeky looking Indian guy who sort of pitched himself as the full mouth reconstruction guy or the fMRI guy. And I thought, Who is this guy? Right. And then, um, I could see he was lecturing in front of, you know, a big audience on a big stage and running these courses. And I think Devang you reached out to me at some point and asked for asked for some help on, on, on. I can’t remember what it was at the time and we connected and Devang one one thing that was very clear to me is that aside from everything else, like just it sounds very sounds very cheesy, right? But your passion, your intense passion not only for full mouth reconstruction, but your passion for your delegates to implement and execute what you teach them. Right. That was very clear to me. I speak to hundreds, of course, providers and I meet lots of lecturers and they, you know, they do their thing and they walk away and whatnot. And I think one big difference that I learned from you, Dev, is that for you, it’s more about it’s more about implementation and execution.

And you want your delegates to go from single tooth dentistry to full mouth reconstruction or being able to do full mouth reconstruction and start delivering it. I remember why you reached out to me now. Devang and it was it was to put on a specific course for your delegates and, and actually what was what was really interesting when you reached out to me was this you said, Hey, Prav, I want you to put on a communication course for my delegates and I want you to teach them how to sell full mouth reconstruction dentistry. But I’m going to pay for it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, because the fee that I charged you and the fee that you took from your delegates, there was a shortfall. And you said to me, I’m going to take the hit on this prof because it’s really important that they can sell the clinical skills that I’ve taught them. Right? And that’s when it became really clear to me that you’re so passionate about the delegates who come on your course that they can implement and execute to the point where you’re happy to take a hit and lose money in order for that to happen anyway. Devang Welcome to the Dental Leaders podcast. That was a bit of a long introduction.

Thank you.

But, but it was just a foray into, well, how we met, right?

Thank you for inviting me. I’m really grateful.

It’s a pleasure. Devang And on this podcast, I’m sure we’ll come back to talk about full mouth reconstruction and and your teaching and all the rest of it. But I want us to take a step back to your childhood. I want to learn about where you grew up, what kind of a kid you were. Were you always that geeky kid, amazing at exams and all the rest of it? Just just tell me about what was your childhood like?

Uh, my childhood was really amazing. I mean, I am very normal guy. Like, I. I can’t really, you know, I had an amazing childhood. Um, I had always looked at the positives. Well, everyone loved me, and that could be because when I was three, unfortunately, my father died in a car accident and we lived in a joint family. So my grandfather became kind of my father.

Where was this divine? Was this was this in India or.

Yes, in India. So I grew up in India, a small town called Mehsana in Gujarat. And my grandfather was the first GP in the town when the town was there. And kind of everyone knew, everyone knew him. So we had to kind of behave whenever we go because everyone knew who we were. So you can’t do any mischief. So otherwise my grandfather would know, know about it. So we like even if you go out to eat because my grandfather keep telling everyone not to go out and eat and we go out. So we had to be very careful. Um, so yeah, I had a very lovely childhood. I lived in a joint family with my uncle, aunt, my grandfather, grand mum, my mum, my brother. I have a older brother who is also a GP in India. And yeah, it was, as I said, it was, it was really lovely. Everyone, even though some people who didn’t get along with each other, they, they loved me. So I had no hate whatsoever at all when I was young.

Growing up as a kid. Yeah. Do you remember your dad?

No, I don’t. I mean, I just remember just one memory when he was holding me. But no, I don’t remember much. And I guess maybe because I was so young to compensate. For my loss. Everyone, you know, made sure that they look after me. But yeah, I mean, I when I was a kid, I didn’t ask for anything. To be honest, I just whatever I got, I was very happy with that. Um, and whatever I didn’t have, I just make do with that.

And so it was your mum and your grandfather that essentially brought you up, right?

And my uncle, my aunt, like everyone literally, but my grandfather was an still until he was alive. Even now he’s not. But still he’s helping me and guiding me in a way.

Okay. And then and then. So in terms of your childhood, what was it like in India? Just sort of talk to me about the day to day, the mischief you used to get up to or not get up to because you were scared of scared of people telling you I.

Was a straight I was a very straight kid. I used to go to school, you know, come back and study. I did have many friends. My mum tells me a story where I called my friend to my house and he’s like, Look, give me this toy. Otherwise I’m not going to be your friend. And I basically took his hand and I threw him out out of the house. So I was pretty independent from from the beginning. I did all my school work and everything, and I was actually telling my son that no one actually asked me to do homework. I don’t remember. And my mum doesn’t remember, even as young as I was like 4 or 5, six years old, no one had to help me with the homework. I would do it myself. If I don’t know, I would ask. And you know, so I was quite independent from the beginning. I did become dependent when I was seven years old. I’ve suffered from something called Goldenberg syndrome. So it’s a viral infection where you get paralysed. So I was completely paralysed, neck down.

At what age?

Seven, seven, eight. Yeah. So my grandfather used to carry me and they kind of lost hope that I would walk again. Um, but then my grandfather really believed in me and, you know, really worked hard into getting different opinions. So we used to travel two hours every week to see a specialist and then see six months of rehab. And yeah, I was, I was I was back on my feet and slowly sort of recovering. But yeah, even then I just see everyone helping me, loving me. So, you know, it was again, even though it was a adversity, I see it as a opportunity for me to connect with my family.

So do you have any memories of the Guillain-Barre syndrome? Were you getting do you remember like getting the tingling sensations in your fingers and stuff like that?

Yeah. So I it started when I went on a summer holiday to my mother’s side, my mama’s side. So we went there and I remember the swing was swinging and all of a sudden it hit me on my knee because I could not move. And then literally within a few days I was paralysed. So it was quite, quite rapid. Yeah, quite quick. But then with schools and everything, because my grandfather knew the school people, they supplied with the materials. So we did like a study at home and then, yeah, six, six it was 6 to 7 months and I was back on the school.

So you were so you were paralysed from the neck down, you couldn’t move your hands, your legs, anything like, you know, day to day stuff going to the bathroom.

So my mom used to carry me, you know, so it was difficult. But I was young, so I guess I was lucky because there not that many people completely recover from it. So.

So how long were you paralysed for? How long did you. Seven, six months.

7 to 8 months?

Yeah, 7 to 8 months. Okay. And then from there onwards, tell me, did you grow up in a family that was quite well off and fortunate? Were you were you were you struggling again?

No. I mean, again, my childhood is a really good we we were we were well off in the sense that but we lived very well below our means. My grandfather helped his brothers with all the all the things, you know, money wise and everything. We didn’t live lavishly at all to the point that I didn’t use to get birthday gifts. My birthday gifts used to be my grandfather used to get me ice cream, so we used to just have ice cream. There is no cake cutting until I was 13, 14. And then the thing started, you know, you cut the cake and stuff. So, you know, even now, I don’t expect any birthday gifts or anything. I don’t really celebrate birthday that big. I mean, I was 40 last year. We didn’t do much because I believe in sort of day to day enjoyment rather than just pick one day and then go all out.

Live every day to to the. Yeah. So. So. So. Curiosity. You don’t you don’t get birthday gifts and you don’t believe in them. How old’s your son?

He is nine. He gets three birthday gifts, sometimes four. Okay.

So you haven’t carried you haven’t carried on that tradition, then?

No, unfortunately, I’m weak parent.

That’s not weak, mate. That’s not weak. That’s not weak.

Yeah. So, no, he gets he gets four four gifts for the Christmas and but they are little again, he is a very amazing kid. He doesn’t expect much. So small gifts, nothing too too big or too expensive. But it’s just the number, what counts. But yeah, so with regards to the school’s pretty strict. I was in a state school. Nothing expensive. My. My yearly yearly expense for the school was in pounds. It was probably £6 for a year. So and that was just the examination fees. That’s it. And probably the school, the school clothes and stuff like that. So nothing, nothing very expensive.

So fast forward throughout your academic career and stuff. At what point did you think to yourself, I want to be a dentist? Or was it a foregone conclusion that because coming from a medical background you had no choice? So.

Mean because my again, I was we were very well known family in the town. My teacher used to call me doctor even when I was nine years, ninth standard and 10th Standard. They used to call me doctor. So it was kind of ingrained in our brain that, you know, you’re going to become a doctor. And when I finished my year A-level equivalent in India, I had 87% in maths and science sciences, but I couldn’t get seats in in medical or dentistry.

Did you apply for both?

Yeah, I applied for both.

So what? Why did you apply for both and what’s the system there? Did you. Could you. Could you. Yeah, you could. What did you want?

You could. I wanted to go into medicine because I didn’t know any better, to be honest. That’s the only thing. I mean, I’m unlike my son. I had no aspiration. Like, I’m going to grow old and I’m going to become this person or whatever. I was just going with the flow. And I remember it was 87%, but I didn’t get into medicine and then dentistry. So then the option were either become going to engineering or in India there are legitimate seats where you pay. It’s called donation. So you pay like a charity or something to the college and they give you that seat. So it was that option. So my grandfather, I remember very clearly, my grandfather and I was sitting in the sitting room and he he asked me like, look, he’s like, we’ll pay for whatever you want to become. If you want to become doctor, we’ll pay for that. And if you want to become dentist, we’ll pay for that. Or you can go and to become engineer and.

And that’s free.

That’s free because I had a percentage for that. So I didn’t want to become engineer, so I wanted to become either doctor or dentist. And I selected dentistry because the donation for the dentistry was one third of the medicine. And I said, Look, I don’t want you to pay so much money for me. So, you know, he’s like, Look, money’s not an issue. We’ll pay whatever you want. But I just had that that, you know, that my father is not making, you know, whatever I’m getting is a bonus in my life. So I didn’t want to burden anyone. So I said, okay, you know what? Just pay for the dentistry and I’ll be fine. So that’s how I went into dentistry by kind of a legal bribe.

A legal bribe. And the reason you chose dentistry over medicine was the price point. It was nothing to do with your aspirations of transforming patients smiles or doing teeth or dentists earn more than doctors. No, nothing like that.

It just purely other medicine, dentistry. Dentists are cheaper than medicine. So I said, okay, let’s do dentistry. And then obviously you ask people and you try and find benefits, right? So I remember my grandfather used to do on call, so people used to come to our house. He had a small clinic in our house. So like 12:00 at midnight, 2:00, 3:00. And my grandfather used to wake up and, you know, do that. My uncle’s a gynaecologist. So again, he used to be on call. He used to wake up middle of the night and someone said, Oh, you don’t have to do that. It’s 9 to 5 dentistry. You know, you you go 9:00 and come back 5:00 and there is nothing else afterwards, which is completely untrue, by the way.

But it is it is in your world, that’s for sure.

In my world, yeah. Yesterday was 12:00. I was working. But, you know, it’s not.

Not lunch time, right?

Not lunch time. It’s a midnight. 12:00. Yes, but. But that was. And they said, okay, that’s the thing. So we went and the seat I got was 20, 24 hour travel time from my house. So it was in a different state, but there was no trains or plane, so it was by bus and it would take me 24 hours to go to that university.

To get there. Before we talk a bit more about university, I just want to learn a bit more about this legal bribe. It is.

Definitely illegal.

Yeah, no, I’m sure it’s I’m sure it’s legal. But you said they have these seats, right? And so typically, how many seats are we talking?

Probably if there is, let’s say dentistry has 80 seats in total. Yeah, probably four seats are like that.

Okay. So we got four seats and they go out. Do they go out to the highest bidder or is it there a fixed price? How does it.

Work? No, they just say whatever they want. And it’s a lot of factors apart from just money. Like you have to know people. But generally money is the main thing.

So is the fact that your grandfather was a well known person. He was a doctor. Does he have any influence in that?

No, because the seat I got was in Maharashtra. And the the reason they got me that seat is it was a remote town where there was nothing else to do. So they’re like, You’ll study here. If we put you in city, you’re not going to study. So they put me in like a remote town where there was like, nothing. Literally no cinema. There was only two restaurants to eat outside. That’s it. No cinema, you know, Very remote. Very remote.

Wow. And so I asked you, you know, does it go up to the highest bidder? And you say, no. They say whatever they want. What do you mean? Like is there So.

There is a there is a price. So everyone knows that this universe. But when you go there, they will tell you that this is a mount, but it’s not fixed. Like you have to take it in maybe, let’s say a week or ten, ten days, otherwise they can give it to someone else. Yeah. Or they can raise the price depending on what they feel like.

But generally just the way the wind blows. I mean, what do you mean, what they feel like?

It can just. It just can go up. It doesn’t they don’t do that very often. Generally, we know what’s the fees?

How much how much are we talking How much we’re talking though?

Uh, at the time it was seven lakh rupees, so I don’t know, £7,000.

Is that per year or for the whole program?

No, that was just to get the seat. And then the program was £5,500 a month and then a year. And then that went up to year after year like £100 more. So at the last year was £1,000.

Okay. So £500 for a year. £600 for a year to £700 for year three. So and so on and so forth. Right. And, and so if there’s only four places and I come along and say, hey, I want to pay, um, you know, £1,000 more than this next guy. Would I get your place?

Probably. But generally, once they give you a place, they don’t take it away, if that makes sense. So in that case, that sense, they are good. So once they commit to it, they won’t like they won’t say, Oh no, you gone.

Okay. So my next question is, you’re one of four kids in a team of 80. Yeah. Yeah. Who paid your way in? You didn’t earn your place, right? Yeah. You know, I’m being a bit thingy here, but. But you didn’t earn your place in dental school through academia or whatever. You paid your way in? Yes. How did that manifest itself in the. In the group? Right. With 76 kids looking at you, Four guys as the. Hey, the rich guys who paid their self in or anything like that?

No, it’s pretty accepting. People are very accepting. There was there was nothing like that because there was remember, there’s other things like in India, there is a caste system as well. So we had someone who had only scored 35%, came as a free seat because he was from a quota. So there are quota depending on what caste you are. Yeah. So, you know, it depends. So it’s pretty accepted.

Okay, so, so, so we’ve got now we’ve got a pay system and irrespective of caste you get in if you’ve got the money right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you’ve got a caste system which determines whether you get a place and this person who got 35%, I’m assuming you got higher than 35 because you said 80 something, right? 87, 87% right. So someone else got 35% and got a free place in dental school without paying the money. Is that because he came from a high.

Caste, lower caste.

A lower caste? Okay.

So the lower caste people get priority because the belief is that they’re from a disadvantaged background. So we help them giving them the seat because they didn’t have all the facilities which the upper caste. It’s not to do with the money, it’s just the pure caste system. So you could have a lower caste people with no money. Yeah. Who are loaded and then the low upper caste people who are not loaded, but still the lower caste person would get the seat. At least that was the case in my case, which was 1999.

Wow. Any other dynamics in getting into dental school? Because you’ve got money, you’ve got caste.

And I think there is a political. So the the university I went to was owned by a MP in that area so he could give the seat to if someone wants if he wants to someone. So just like that.

Just sort of got. Yeah right. Okay. How interesting. How interesting. Yeah. Well that’s really interesting. So what was university like there? So you went to this town. No cinema, two restaurants, Nothing there to do other than study, right? Yeah. So tell me about university.

So I lost. I was very homesick because I was pampered a lot at home, spoilt, but didn’t obviously behave like that. But one particular food, which didn’t get so lost, like, um, I lost 25 kilos in two months and my mum was worried. She when she came to visit me, she was crying. She’s like, you know, we don’t want to get him. She wanted me to take you out from this college and everything. I got a, I didn’t understand English because I was from Gujarati medium. So my all my under-graduation was in my mother tongue, Gujarati. And then when I went to university, everything was English. So I did not understand a word of what they were saying in the lecture. So. So you were.

Just walking around saying chem sarrocchi all day long? Exactly.

And, and actually people were talking in Hindi, which I could understand and talk. Yeah, yeah. The lectures, you know, the lecturers, they were talking in English, they were giving lectures in English. And I had no, I had no clue the books were in English, although I did English language as a language. But it’s like you do French as a language, and then you study dentistry in French. Not a chance.

It’s completely chance.

So, so same thing to me. So I struggled a lot. So I used to have a dictionary which translates English, Gujarati to English, English to Gujarati, and then a book Dental book next to each other and trying to figure out like small, like a cell, like, you know, um, what do you.

Call nucleus or whatever, right? Mitochondria or no.

Idea. So, so, so it was, it was really hard work.

I mean, it’s hard enough without that, right? Yeah. Yeah.

One is definitely hard, hard for anyone. But this was definitely very hard work.

And Gujarati is not, not written in Abcd. Efg either, right? So. So, so. So you were learning a new alphabet? Yeah.

No. Not new alphabet because obviously learned English.

English language. Oh, of course. Yeah.

I scored I scored 52%. Just 2% of 2% more than a passing mark. Right. So you weren’t a pro? No, I wasn’t a pro. Definitely not. Well, so. So. But. But, yeah, so first year was really tough, but then. Yeah, go got got out. Then this the second year was tough again.

At what point during that journey were you conversant in English?

None. Wasn’t even until I came to UK. Because the thing is, the viva the orals happen in Hindi most of the time. Okay, some words in English you can write in English, which could anyway. Um, so it’s just understanding and then writing which is which I could do. So that wasn’t a major problem. It’s just the first year understanding English terminologies to Gujarati and then that that was the main challenge.

Okay. And then in terms of just going through like knocking about with your friends and colleagues and stuff like that, were you just talking in Hindi or.

Yeah, Hindi, but then that so not only had to learn English, I had to learn Marathi because the patient wouldn’t talk in Hindi. So so and they wouldn’t even talk in, in English. They didn’t know because it’s a village. So I had to learn Marathi to, to, to communicate. Otherwise they wouldn’t even talk because they would understand Hindi. It’s like, again, I’ve heard that in France sometime when you go, if you speak English, they ignore you kind of thing. So it’s the same thing here. So you know, you speak Hindi, they understand, but they won’t answer. You need to speak to them in Marathi. So I learned Marathi.

So you learnt English and Marathi?

Marathi, Yeah.

Wow. So you get to the end of Dental school? Yeah. Assuming you qualified, right. Did you have to sit exams? What sort of student were you? Were you passing with flying colours or were you just scraping to a C?

I struggled first two years quite massively. Third year was okay ish. Finally I was I was I was in the topper, but I was eighth in the class. Okay. So, you know, and the final year I started understanding dentistry because in finally we all had all the subjects were dentistry related. So I could understand the dentistry a bit better.

And what was the structure of the course there in terms of clinical versus theory? And from what like year two or whatever, how much clinical experience did you get?

Very minimal actually, because it was a deemed university in the sense it was almost prioritised university and patients were not that many in there. So we all the good cases like extraction, for example, the we only used to get loose teeth to take it out. The extractions used the the firm teeth used to go to the people who are doing masters. But we did have a good experience in Endodontics because you know, and having said that, I would say I had much more experience than what UK undergraduates goes through nowadays.

Okay, so you get to the end of dental school. Yeah, you’ve got your degree. What happens next?

Then my aunt comes around from London and she’s like, you know, dentists in London, they are caning it. They are like loaded. They are like so rich. You should come to UK and, you know, do dentistry. And I said, I don’t want to go to UK. I love my family. So I said, You know what? I’m not going to go abroad. I will try and sit exam for my MSC in India. Yeah. Which I did. And I didn’t didn’t get score. I mean, the India is so competitive. I did get good score. But again, not enough to get me into get into my what you call the seat masters. The master’s.

Program. Right. Yeah. So you sat an exam to get into the master’s program, and you failed that?

No, I passed. But not not enough. Enough percentage. So again, I had high ATS, but people get 98%, 97%, which I’m not capable, capable of. So then I went back to my grandfather, obviously. So he’s like, look, so there are seats, there are donation seats for you.

And we go.

There we go. So he’s like, okay, we’ll pay for it. And wanted to become I wanted to really do ortho. Yeah. So he’s like, okay, we’ll pay for ortho. And at the same time IQ International qualifying examination, which is the examination you had to pass if you want to come to UK, they did first time in India, so my aunt obviously was talking to my granddad. So my granddad is like, You know what? You sit this exam. Yeah. If you fail. Yeah, we will pay for we will pay for your sister’s master’s. Yeah. So, so I set the exam. Unfortunately, I passed.

So did you go into that exam wanting to fail? No.

No, I never want to fail. So I did my. I did my best to give exam. Yeah. So I passed. And then I came to UK. I passed the second exam. Third exam?

How far after dental school was this? You’re straight after. Straight after you passed an English exam. Yeah, and I do.

I do Pass. Yeah. That’s a big story. I had to pass in English, but I had to take classes for that because there is a speaking and listening and all that space called IELTS pilot.

Did you do that in the UK or did you do that in in India? Yeah.

So I had to take like two months. I took lessons and can, you.

Know, can you not pay your way through that and get a seat.

Probably we could have, but no I didn’t ask for money. Um, I, I stayed, I stayed in amdavad. I remember the really dodgy flat because, again, I was a dentist now, right? So I didn’t want my parents or anyone to pay for my. So I tried to cut the cost as much as possible. So I, I rented the cheapest room, which I could, and it was really bad, like bugs everywhere. And it was filthy. But so I stayed there for two months and passed the exam just enough.

So you studied for two months for this? For this exam? Just exam? Yeah. And were you practising dentistry at the time?

No, I wasn’t. I was just studying for English.

Wow. And so you passed the English exam, and then how how long before you hopped on a flight to the UK?

So the so all these IQ exams happened in 2005. So I did it was pretty good at my right now people are struggling to get seats, but at the time there was a shortage of dentists in UK, so they, they expedite the exam. So I set number one in February 2nd in May 3rd, one in I think July or something like that, June, July, August or something. And then and then I was registered, registered by December 2005. Then I came here 2006 March.

Where did you land?

March 16th of March.

Where did you go? To London or.

London? Yeah, my aunt’s place here. So I went there. Um, I had an interview, telephone interview two, and I got a job. And the guy. The guy is like, you’re going to get this much amount of money. So that’s a lot of money. So yeah, that’s fine. I said yes to the first offer. I came here and realised I got paid less than half of the value which normal dentist gets paid.

Right, Right.

So that’s fine. Yeah. That was my first year. Your first.

Year? First job. So tell me about the practice and then what was your English level like then How what was the was there a I think it was the first time you went to the UK or not. Yeah.

No, I mean I came to UK for my exams, so every time I came I came for exam, stayed for a week and went back to India.

But, but, but this was the first time you were living in the UK for an extended period of time, right? Yes. What was that like? Culture shock? Um, language barriers. We you struggling to. Talk to patients.

Yeah, so I did. I was struggling and I’m quite at least believe I’m very good at adapting. So I was. I was in here. I didn’t. I adapted what it is, what it is, and that’s how I believe. So, you know, you just have to adapt where you are. Yeah. So I didn’t, I wasn’t I learnt to cook, I learnt to clean, I learnt everything in regards to the practice. It was in Southall. So not too much of a cultural shock. No, of course not.

India from India, right?

Yeah. But still, I remember very clearly my second patient. She walked out of the room saying, I don’t want to see a fresh dentist. My second patient patient ever. Yeah. And she was Indian, but yeah, she just went out. She’s like, You can’t talk. And I mean, I was struggling, you know, I could talk in English, but not like the way the English people speak. But that’s fine. That happened for first year. I saw lots of patients there. Like, this guy looks too young. We don’t want to see him. But slowly it completely changed then people requesting me to see see me because I was there working hard. I was the one actually responsible for asking them to open Saturdays because I’ve got nothing to do. So said, Open Saturdays. I’m going to work on Saturdays. In the history of the practice, they didn’t work on Saturday. They started opening. They started eating like me.

Just for you.

Just for me. Because I had nothing to like. I was like two free days, a whole like, what am I going to do? Two free days?

Like, so what am I going to do with this Saturday and Sunday? Right. You you’ve definitely got cinemas in South Hall, right? Yes, we.

Do. But, you know, I’m not so because I’ve never seen my family. Yeah, my grandfather used to work seven days. My uncle works seven days. My brother still works seven days. We didn’t have a weekend off. So, I mean, I’m not used to having weekends off, so I was struggling to do something and I said, look, you know, might as well might as well work. So yeah, I was the one who started the even now, actually, the corporate I work for all the practices where I go. I started eight till eight sort of days. Yeah. Before no one did that.

Wow.

12 hour days.

Wow. But you had in your own words, you had nothing better to do, so you might as well work, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Which I enjoy. I mean, and for me, dentistry is like a like a typical. So I was I was actually talking to someone and I said, kids nowadays, it’s like a they want a love marriage. They don’t understand the arranged marriage. So dentistry for me is like an arranged marriage. I got dentist first and then I fell in love with it. Whereas now people are like, they want to love dentistry before learned. And it’s just it’s quite difficult to understand what things involve until you start getting into it, if that makes sense.

Understood. Yeah. So I guess. I guess you were. You know, the reason the reason you went for dentistry because it was a cheap option. Yeah. And then you fell in love with it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I fell in love. Actually. I fell in love way after I was just sticking along.

Was it a was it a means to an end? You were doing all these hours? 8 to 8. Working six, seven days a week. What was it? What was your motivation? Was it money at the time? Was it I want to upskill and and and really earn my stripes and get some experience under my belt. What was your motivation for doing those 12 hour days, six, seven days a week?

Yeah. Money has never been a motivation for me because I’ve I’ve come from a good background and, you know, as far as I have enough money, I’m okay. I don’t have a very flashy lifestyle or big dreams that I want to have like a, you know, big holidays or anything. I hate holidays as well.

You hate holidays.

The thing is, I love I genuinely love what I do. So people go on holiday to really get away from what they’re doing most of the time. Not all of them, but most of the time I don’t. If I want to rest, then I’ll just I’ll just. That’s different. Resting is different then going on a holiday to get away from something I do, like rest, you know? I mean, I don’t want to work seven days, so, you know, I prefer resting holiday concept is completely, you know. But having said that, I do go on holiday because my wife and my son, they will eat me alive if I don’t. So. Oh, gosh.

Flipping heck yeah. So the only reason you go on holiday is to is to placate your wife and son, right?

100%.

Wow. And your concept of this is really interesting is your concept of holiday is to get away from work.

Not my concept. No, no, no, no.

But what you think people’s concept of holiday.

Is my because, you know, if I want to do holiday, I would just go somewhere for a week. Nothing. Just rest and relax. That would be my holiday. But that’s that’s not most of the people. They want to go in different countries. I could I could go on a holiday in a Premier Inn for seven days and I can be fine. Does that make sense? Because I’m relaxing. Yeah. Okay.

So could could you go on holiday in a Premier Inn two miles from your house?

I could, and I completely switch off.

Bloody hell. So, look, I. When I go on holiday, I don’t go on holiday to run away from work or escape work. Right. My thing of holiday, I guess it’s. It’s reconnecting and having that time, that unfiltered time with family, loved ones, friends, exploring new places. Yeah, the intrigue of that. Get some sun on my skin and just being in a different environment, Right? Whether it’s experiencing different cuisines. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s definitely not the work thing. I mean, I’m going to go on holiday in two weeks time. Yeah, it’s going to be a working holiday. I’m off to Thailand and I’ve scheduled four hours of work. I’m going to be on a different time zone and I’ve got some overlapping time zones so I can still have calls with clients. So I don’t see it as escaping from work, but I see it as a switch of environment, a change of mindset.

That’s good because I think for me it’s mainly to, as you said, for reconnecting with family because we farm at home. My wife would just continuously doing something. If you go on a holiday, she has got no choice but to spend time with us. So you know, it’s for me. And that’s why even we’ve just been to Dubai because my brother, you know, he’s like, look, we need to go away from because if I’m at home, I’ll be working. Yeah. So we just went away. But that’s different. That’s connecting with your family and that’s, that’s completely different. I’m talking about the holidays where people just want they look, look. I mean, I’ve never seen a craze on a holiday again. Maybe it’s a cultural thing where I’ve been brought up. When I was young, my holiday was to go to my mama’s house. That’s it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting. Even my wife growing up, she would go to her uncles or her aunties house, you know, three towns along or whatever. Right. Or, you know, to another town or whatever. And that would be her holiday. And it’s a break from home, right? Whatever it is, it’s it’s it’s away from your familiar environment. Yeah. And you know yeah, it’s really interesting that actually your concept of holiday so okay so so so it was money was never the motivation.

Yeah. Money is no motivation for me. I again had nothing else to do. And one thing motivated me was I knew that I wasn’t a good dentist.

You wasn’t a good dentist?

I wasn’t, no. So I wanted to improve. I’m constantly. Trying to improve constantly even now, you know, for me, improvement, learning new things, improving myself is is right at the top. So I did lots of courses. I did certificate courses. I did I did two certificate courses, I did mjtf, um, lots of cpds I used to do three 400 hours of Cpds like crazy amount of CPD to learn and improve my skill.

We just one of these course junkies. Any course you saw? I’m just going to go on that. I’m going to book on it. Were you earning money to pay for courses? Was that, was that your thing?

No, I wasn’t earning so I was still 99.9%. Yeah. You know, and I used to, you know, if I used to give an option to an amalgam or composite, I used to pray that they choose for amalgam because composites were associated with sensitivity. So I just don’t want patients to come back for sensitivity. I’ll do amalgam. So 99.9%. But I loved improving even. But even when I was like cram prep and stuff like that, there is no private Crown Prep versus NHS. Does that make sense? There’s no ando. You can still do a good endo under, you know, whatever conditions you are in. So it’s a it takes time. So I do take took time so I wasn’t profitable dentist I still do 9000 Udas though so that’s a lot that’s more than my current practice whole practice target.

And but that was you as an individual. You were doing me as.

An individual used to do 9000 units because I used to work long hours and more days simply so not that I was quicker. So that’s the that’s kept me going. Not money is continuously learning, but I wouldn’t say I was very passionate about dentistry. Again, I was in the dentistry and I didn’t want to do a bad job. So I would make I would learn to to make sure that and for some reason, like from the very childhood we see how my grandfather treat patients and, you know, patient care was always discussed upon like, you know, we need to care about patients and all that stuff. And that’s, that’s sort of ingrained in my brain. So I wanted to give my best to my patients from the beginning. So that was the reason everything changed, though, when I did my MSC in Cons. So after six years of my.

Msc in what.

Conservative dentistry. So from Eastman Okay, so I did I had worked six years like this and the reason I was in UK is because I said I will do my MSC because I wanted to do Masters in India. So I wanted to do Masters somehow so but didn’t join straight away. Because if you are an overseas, you have to pay double the fees. Whereas if you are citizen or whatever resident of UK, you pay half. So I waited until I got my residency, which is six years, and then applied for the MSC in conservative Dentistry in Cons, which is a one full, full time one year program because I used to I did a certificate in restorative dental practice from Eastman and that was an MSC. It can you can work towards MSC, so you do certificate. Then the second year, two years were diploma and then MSC and I was doing certificate, but I could not implement anything in my practice because I was like purely NHS. So I went to my tutor at that time and he’s like, Um, for you the best is to do this MSC in Cons where you treat patients in hospital. And he was his name is Rob Moore. Rob Moore. Rob Stone He, he recommended that. And he, Andrew Kreuztal is the guy who actually wrote me a recommendation letter for my seat. And that was pure Indian style. So he he basically picked up the phone with the head of the Department of the MSC in cons is like, you need to take this guy like literally. And he’s like, I’m sending you send you a reference, but you need to take him because he’s seen my work. And he was quite impressed. And he’s like, You know, you deserve this place because he was also an ex. He was the one who started in Cons along with Derek Setchell and all the rest of it in 1989, long time back.

And I’m assuming you couldn’t just pay extra for that seat, right?

No, no. Welcome to the real world.

I had to.

Work really hard. I did work hard. Yeah. Um, so. So that’s that’s how I got into my the cons and. Yeah, that was a hard one year. I mean, I. I worked. I’ve worked again seven days a week. I used to go to the hospital and seven days a week. So we used to treat patients three sessions. But then we did our own lab work, so I used to go there every morning, 730 till 11:00 at night time because.

So you quit your job to do your MSC, right? You have to.

You have to. It’s a full time, Full time. Right? I quit everything. And I was working. I gathered money enough to pay mortgages and stuff. So I had I had savings so that I know that it will last me for a year.

So you weren’t still living with your aunty at this time, right?

No, I had my own house. Okay. Um, and I was married at the time as well. So. So between.

Between, between coming to the UK, starting your NHS job and then doing your MSC, you got married at some point in that in that.

Gap. Got married? Yeah. Got married. And my wife was quite supportive. So I got married. And then the next year I said, I’m going to go year sabbatical learning, although I had a savings. So. But but it wasn’t that. It was like we a newly married couple and I’m now working seven days a week in the morning, seven till 11 night time. But she was very supportive.

And we were talking about arranged marriages earlier. Was it an arranged marriage or did you did you meet her in the cinema?

No, it was it was introduced so mutual sort of family friends introduced us and then we dated. And then. And then we got married. Yeah.

So sort of some kind of.

Semi arranged.

Semi arranged matchmaking. But you had some you had some choice and she had some choice, right?

I mean, I wasn’t I’m not a party guy or don’t go to pubs. I don’t.

You’re not a drinker either. Don’t drink. Don’t drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you were introduced by what? Family, friends, aunties, uncles.

Yeah. So it’s a funny story. So when I used to work in Southall, so basically my some of the relative of mine introduced to my wife. Yeah, but this is completely different story. So when I used to work in Southall one one aunty used to come and she was my patient. She’s like, Are you married? And every time she come check up every six months. And I said, No, I’m not. And she’s like, I have a really amazing girl for you, you know, Can you introduce to your mum? And I’m like, No, no, that’s fine. I’m, I’m thinking, I’m not I’m not getting married any time soon. This carried on even until like we were engaged. And then when. When we were getting married. Yeah. The aunty is my wife’s aunt. No way. No way into the wedding. She’s like. She’s like I was telling her about this girl. You’re kidding. Yeah, it was funny.

That’s hilarious. So every time she was saying, I’ve got this girl for you, it was your future wife.

Yes, it was.

Okay now. Wow.

That was funny. She still reminds me every time we meet. Um, but yeah, so that was. That’s the story.

That’s really interesting. Really, really interesting. So. So. So. Okay, so. So you got married and then. And then you went off to do the MSC and you were basically away from home for.

No, I was at Eastman, so I used to travel. Yeah. But yeah, I was technically away from home. Yeah. I’d only come to sleep to to avoid rent, you know, in the London. So.

And make sure your wife at least had a presence of a husband in the house every now and then, Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just to annoy I think. I think that actually saved my marriage. The the MSC in course is called, you know, Marriage breaker course. People get divorced after that and it has happened. But I think that has saved my marriage because like I’m good in small doses. So so I think that that course really changed my way of looking at dentistry. Hi, how I thought about how precision dentistry works, how precisely you can do stuff, how what good dentistry looks like. Yeah. And got to implement as well.

So from what point did you go from being a rubbish dentist to a good dentist? Was it after that or was it incremental?

It was incremental. So even before MSC and Cons I did this, you know, Eastman Restorative Dental Practice. So perhaps for improving my endo improved a lot. I invested a lot of things in materials and stuff myself, so I was improving. But that one year definitely made a huge impact because as I said, the amount of work I did was almost equivalent to what clean dental students do because I didn’t have to do it. But I said, You know, I’m taking a year off. Yeah, I’m going to do as much as I can. So I was there. I was working really hard and, you know, and because I was working hard and my work was good, I, I scored the highest. In the phantom head test in three months. So what you do is what they do is when you scored really good, they give you challenging patients, they give you good like big cases, complex cases. And that helped me because then I started finishing those cases quickly. Then not a hospital centre. I used to finish them as a private clinic standard, like quick because hospital, everything takes ages, right? But I used to finish them quicker, so I got more cases, more experience. So it was really good. And then I got a prize for the best student of the year as well, so.

Oh, wow.

With a distinction.

Congratulations. And so how did you go from there? Two becoming practice owner. A teacher? Yeah. In a full mouth reconstruction. Having your own training academy. And then all these other crazy ideas that you have now. Right. And lecturing and teaching and speaking. So you go, you know, if we take the journey back, you legally bribed your way into dental school, and the only reason you did that is because it was cheap. Yeah. And now you’re teaching, you know, hundreds of dentists how to do full mouth reconstruction. Dentistry primarily. What happened?

So, I mean, when I finished my MSC, I was like on my ego was really high and I thought anyone would hire me because I’ve got this credentials. And I applied like 200 places and I did not get any interviews. So I was literally bombed out. And so then I said, But I got offered for teaching at Eastman because of my scores and everything. So I started teaching three days a week at Eastman Dental Institute. The MSC course, which I did, I was teaching there, the Distance Learning one, and was a program coordinator. So a lot of my teaching, that’s when my passion started. You know, when I teach people like I thought it was normal what I’m teaching. But people really started enjoying. They’re like, Oh, this is amazing. You never appreciate when I never I still don’t like what I do. For me, it’s normal. But when they receive it and they the transformation I see was amazing. So that’s when the passion started teaching. But obviously the pay wasn’t great. So I started applying for jobs because I couldn’t get into private dentistry. And then my friend, he saw my CV and he owned like six practices at the time. Now he owns 16.

Wow. And he gave me opportunity to work in his practice and he actually helped me. He told me at the time that, look, you have to drop your teaching commitments if you want to work. And at the time I was broke completely, like zero money in the bank. So I said, Yeah, I will do whatever. So he gave me a opportunity to go around his 11 practices and do full mouth reconstruction in implants and endo. So I used to travel again, working seven days a week, travelling 11 practices to do all this work. But what it gave me is a huge amount of exposure to dentistry, a high end dentistry. So I did lots of implant very quickly. I did lots of complex dentistry in a quick session. And then what happened is a good referring dentist, like if someone refers to case for implant, I used to do full mouth assessment and then I would say, okay, I’ll place this implant and refer case back to the dentist saying that you need to do full mouth reconstruction basically because the patient needs full mouth reconstruction. And most of the time what used to happen was that the dentist would either not do it or they botched up the whole case and had to redo them.

So I said, you know what? As out of frustration, I started teaching them full mouth reconstruction. Only people who refer cases to me. I said, You know what, I’ll teach you so they can do a better patient care. Again, it’s all about like how we can give patient a better care. So I started teaching from Reconstruction in 2014, 2015. That’s when my first cohort was, but it was literally my referring dentist. And that’s why I still to date only take nine dentists in my hands on course because I never found more than nine dentists going to be easy to to give the kind of attention I want. So we started with nine dentists a year after year. I used to take 1 or 2 groups of nine dentists in our own corporate, so I didn’t promote anything. I used to just teach them because I’m referring cases back to them. Yeah, And then the pandemic happened. And then during pandemic, I was like three months. I was sitting and I didn’t want to get divorced. So, you know, I said I need to occupy myself. Otherwise my neck, my.

Want to spend too much time with your wife, right?

Yeah. If I spend too much time, she will. She will definitely give me divorce. Yeah. So to keep me occupied, I started sort of building up courses. What I used to teach already, but I said I’ll record everything. So I started recording everything. And that’s when really the the idea of spreading everything came because, you know, a year after 2021, in June was my first proper post, like my first post on Facebook, that’s when I started posting on social media in 2021. Wow. Before I wasn’t on any Facebook or Instagram, I was, but I wasn’t posting actively. Yeah, nothing. I mean, I was there just as lurking, you know, looking at what other people doing. Yeah. Rather than posting my own stuff. Right. So that’s when I started and then. Obviously I created my group Full Mouth Reconstruction for GDPs.

Did how did this all take off your first post? And then at what point did somebody what were you posting? First of all, we’re posting before and after.

Yeah, I was posting before and after cases. My intention was to help other dentists because I have 100% success rate in and the way I measure success rate as you really in the beginning mentioned, is not how many people come to my course, how many people who come to my course are actually doing what I’ve taught them to do, and that’s how I measure my success rate. And my success rate was 100% in my the corporate I used to work for. So all the dentists I taught from 2015 to 20 20 or 2021 even. Yeah, they all are doing full mouth reconstruction because I used to nag them. I used to like. And you’ve seen that in communication course, right? I’ve seen it when you, when you came to teach them. Yeah. I mean there is no barrier. I mean they, I treat them like, you know, kids, if they don’t do anything, I shout at them, make sure they do it and I help them 100%, you know, to, to implement stuff. Yeah. And I saw the I saw the progression and it is contagious. Like when you see, when you help someone and they, they achieve something, it’s like it’s amazing. Like the satisfaction you get is much more than you achieve the same thing by yourself. And I’m sure you know that as well. I mean, you probably help people, lots of people, you know.

All the time.

It’s it’s contagious. And if someone who doesn’t teach won’t understand this, but someone who teaches, they would understand what I’m talking about. Like the. So obviously, I wanted to get that joy and help lots of dentists and that’s where I started posting on social media. And then I created a group that full mouth reconstruction for GDP’s Facebook group. And that’s when everything started taking off because I get a good feedback and I could promote my courses to people who really want to improve rather than just going out there and saying that, Oh, do you want to join my course? Because again, for me, money is not the motivation for me. How can I improve the end goal, which is giving patients better care? And if if GDPs can do full mouth reconstruction, they can diagnose, first of all, more full mouth reconstruction cases which patients are not even aware of, and then they can help them out properly. And that’s where that’s where everything started.

So what’s the most common problem you see with GP’s who can’t do full mouth reconstruction and that patient walks into their practice or their clinic with a consultation and they’ve got wear or whatever, right? And they need comprehensive work. What typically happens in that scenario if you if you’re not capable of delivering this type of dentistry, you don’t have the confidence and a complex case walks into your into your surgery, what do you typically see?

So I’ll tell you from experience, I’m not again, I don’t want to generalise things because obviously everyone’s different and you know everyone what they think. But what happens typically is one case scenario is where you’re an NHS dentist and you’re seeing lots of patients like 15 minutes Check-up Okay, Now many time we and I’m guilty of that as well. We judge patients when patients come in, go there. You tell patient that. I think dentists are very good at understanding when they see the teeth wear cases. So they tell patients they got a tooth wear and they might give them a mouth guard, but because they can’t do full mouth reconstruction, they can’t visualise how the treatment will work, how it will help patient. And then it’s the cost as well. They may think that patient won’t be able to afford it. They got 15 minutes for a check-up Whether it’s worth discussing all that, where patients just going to say no or if they discuss, they send patient to somewhere else. Now they have built that rapport with patient and most of the time patient will say no because they don’t want to go anywhere else most of the time because they are not in pain.

They don’t want to go anywhere else. If the GDP they do full mouth reconstruction, then they more likelihood that the patient will say yes to that person because they trust them rather than going somewhere else. But I think in my opinion, the main issue is not knowing which cases, because teeth is not the only cases where you need full mouth reconstruction knowledge. There are lots of other cases, like if you’re doing full arch veneers, if you’re doing 5 to 5 cosmetic aesthetic cases, even general dentistry, if you’re doing like 2 or 3 teeth restoration, knowing occlusion and knowing the full mouth, how the whole mouth works can help as well. I mean, I get the side effect of knowing full mouth. Is your general dentistry gets like improves so much and becomes so predictable and you don’t feel afraid of like doing those five veneer case or, you know, even if you’re not raising or you’re not afraid of doing sort of a little bit more aesthetic, complex case.

Okay. And so you’ve created this online full Mouth Reconstruction Academy. You’ve got your, I guess, your I don’t know what it’s called, but your you’re basically your complete course where they can come and do hands on with you. They can take the online concept, etcetera, etcetera. How is your training or the training that you deliver different to someone else teaching, let’s say FMR or full mouth reconstruction? What’s your. I’m going to put you on the spot here. What’s your what’s your what’s your USP? Yeah, I know.

Exactly what my USP is, but what I want to say is that, you know, I feel that people right now, dentists are very lucky. There are so many good tutors out there. And I say this openly that, you know, there are so many good people, which I would learn from if I were, you know, when I was young. So it’s not that I’m saying that I’m the best and, you know, rest of the people are not great. The way I put together my course is how I learn. And I know that my dentistry really, really was bad, really bad. And I wish I would have taken photos because people don’t people don’t they don’t they don’t believe me when I say my. They’re like, No, your digital can’t be bad. It’s like, no, genuinely was really pathetic, but they can’t. I wish I could go back and just take photos of my, you know, older cases, but I learn very methodically. So the way I created a program where I have my my book, as, you know, full mouth reconstruction for GDPs. Yeah. Is one of the best seller. So the book is there for people who just don’t know what full mouth reconstruction is and just want to understand how I work. But the course, the way it works is I’ve recorded everything online.

So all the lectures, all the practical demonstration is there online. They do a online course. First, they watch all the videos and everything. Then they come for six days training. It’s three weekends, it’s broken down, different three weekends, and I teach them exactly how the full mouth reconstruction, all the steps, the three steps, and I teach them those three steps. The beauty is I don’t give any demonstration because everything is recorded online. So when they come in, they literally start doing practical work. And when they make mistake, I then show them how to improve on them. Because I’ve been on so many courses myself where the, you know, the lecturer or the the the teacher gives demonstration and you’re like, Wow, this is amazing. And then when you start doing it, you can’t implement it. It’s like, you know, you, you see the demonstration of the toy or something and why the toy and you come bring home and you can’t really replicate what the guy was doing. No. And and that’s where I feel that it’s waste of time me giving demonstration. I would rather people use that time in practising, practising, practising and figure out what makes them what makes it work. And this is yes, actually this weekend I was doing a weekend one of the complete and this is do every time that I ask them what did they learn? And everyone learned completely different things like not all nine of them learn different things and you would imagine that they all watch the same video.

Yeah, they all watch the same content online. They all made different mistakes. Yeah. Right. So I that’s, that’s, that’s where I feel the, my USB is where people watch everything online. They make they, they make mistakes and improve it. It simplifies and then when they start practising I then do 12 months of mentoring with them so that they are not left on their own once they finish the hands on course. In fact, when they start the online course, they start getting the they start getting the recordings and participation. But the ones they finish hands on course after that, they get 12 months of mentoring where they go into the clinic and they start implementing because that’s where, again, I feel it makes everything completely round circle where it’s fully supported. They’re not left alone. Yeah, when they finish because that’s when real work happens when you go to practice, because you can do on Phantom Head, it’s a big jump from phantom head to patient’s mouth and you need really a lot of hand-holding.

And so when they come on your whatever it is, your eight hour hands on course, are they literally doing hands on exercises for the vast majority of the whole of that time?

All the time. Not vast full time. There is no demonstration. I would give demonstration to that one particular person for the for the mistake they are making. So if someone’s not holding the handpiece properly, I’ll show them how to hold handpiece properly or someone’s not doing the margin properly, I’ll show them the margin or someone’s not shape’s not right. I’ll show them how to build the shape, but the demonstration will be different for everyone and it’s individualised.

Okay. Okay. Interesting. And so when you go on a normal I’ve never been on a hands on dental course, by the way. But, but, but if I was to go on then you probably have. Right. Typically, how much time do you spend with a drill in your hand or whatever, doing the hands on versus theory and not doing the hands on and mixing it up? Well, typically it depends.

It depends what courses you go to. Yeah. But there is always maybe let’s say if it’s 9 to 5 926925 course, at least there are I would say two hours of theory or hands on demonstration on average, some less, some more. But on average two hours of that, plus whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it for the first time. They haven’t seen it. They’ve just seen on the hands on demonstration and now they’re immediately replicating it. Whereas in my case, they watched it 100 times at home. So it’s not that they just watch the demonstration now implementing it. Got you. They’ve watched it 100 times again and again at home, semantic wise in their head, and now they’re practising. It’s completely different. And I guess.

The other thing is, if you’re in a group and you watch the demonstrator do a demo and you miss something.

Yeah, it’s very you can’t even see it. Also like even six people had around and it’s just difficult. So that’s why I don’t take more than nine people. Yeah. Even then, demonstrating something to all nine of them is difficult.

Yeah. Whereas I guess the close up video and everything works better, right? Um, and you mentioned that you’ve got 100% success rate in implementation.

Yeah, not now. So now obviously 100% success rate when I was teaching our own dentists. Yeah. Now it’s not 100%, it’s around 80%. And I’m trying to improve because these dentists, when they go. It’s I lose control. And that’s why I’m constantly trying to improve. So what I’ve just implemented now is that I want them to have a case ready. So what what people would do is when they enrol, they need to have a case and they start doing it together. And I think that would work much better. But yeah, so 80%, 85% I feel is still a good percentage. It is, but I don’t think enough is happy.

You’re not happy with the 80% that you used to get because because back in the day you got 80%. You had to pay for a seat, right? Yeah. Yes.

No, I used to get 100% right. But it was different because those were my referring dentists and I used to sell the cases for them, if that makes sense. Understood. So patients. And that’s why I called you in and I said, you know, can you help? Because I want to do anything I can to these dentists where, you know, I feel if they communicate and if they get the case, they have ability to do it, They’re not. And so I’ve asked I’ve asked every dentist actually, I’m asking that. Are you confident doing full mouth reconstruction? They all are saying yes. So there is 100% success rate into them. Being confident is getting patient.

Getting them, getting them to deliver or finding the patients to do.

Finding the patient.

Or selling it. Right. Because they may they may have it. But but then, you know, I think the biggest your curriculum that I delivered for you, you sent me probably one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had when it comes to teaching. Right. So you tell me, hey, I want you to put on a day for my delegates to teach them how to sell full mouth reconstruction. And I say, no problem, we can do that. And we put it on this day where they brought a case in and they tried to sell to me. And then I gave them specific feedback, right. Which I thought was a great way of doing it. But there was one caveat to that, which was they have to sell full mouth reconstruction to their patients in a 15 minute appointment. And that was the challenge. And it was really interesting because I think I learned as much from that course as I taught, and it really gave me an insight into the into the psychology of that. And it’s wholly possible, right? You can you can be running an NHS clinic and still comfortably sell 15 to £20,000 cases to these patients very, very easily.

And it worked because they are confident in doing full mouth reconstruction, if that makes sense. So if their communication is good, but they’re not confident in doing full mouth reconstruction, it doesn’t work because patient will see that they’re not confident. But if they’re confident and then they’re good at communication, then it works really, really well.

Interesting. Interesting. And so I want to take you through to my final question. Yeah. Which I ask everyone, which is imagine it’s your last day on the planet. Yeah, you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve and you’ve got, you know, you’ve educated 10,000 dentists in full mouth reconstruction more and more and more, more, more and more. And. And no, no, no, no. And you have 100% implementation execution rate. That’s nice. Yeah. And but it’s your last day on the planet and you’re still married because you didn’t spend too much time with your wife.

And went on a holidays.

And went on holidays. Yeah. Despite not wanting to run away from work. But you’ve got your loved ones around you on your last day and you want to I guess you want to leave them with three pieces of wisdom. What would they be?

That’s deep. Um. So I think one would be. To always work on your strength. And when I when I when I really imagine this scenario, I mean, imagining my son, um, as what would I give him an advice as, as, as my son because I feel more responsible for him, if that makes sense. Because he’s the one. I’m the one responsible for him. So work on your strength and find someone else to help with the weaknesses. Because what happened initially for some time in my Dental career, even, I was working really hard to improve on my weaknesses. So like, if I wasn’t good at scale, I literally hammered down in learning that skill rather than carry on doing what I enjoyed and work more efficiently, go more deeper into that work. And didn’t figure that out until I started doing implants and full mouth reconstruction that, you know how enjoyable dentistry, stressful dentistry can be if you like to if you if you like what you do. Okay, so work on your strength. Yeah.

And get help with your weaknesses. Weaknesses.

Okay. Like get someone else to do it.

So that’s number one.

Learn how to communicate with people. Okay? Because communication in day to day life or, you know, conflict management communication is so important. And I’m learning that because I’ve got a practice now, I’m a practice owner. Yeah. And, you know, you have to be, you know, you need to communicate well. I mean, I’m very I believe that I’m, I’m okay communicating with patients, but that’s not enough. You need to be a good communicator with people.

It’s funny, Devon, remember, you know, when we had that day together and we were going through, you know, your your business structure and your goals moving forward. One of the things you said to me is you’re naturally an introvert.

Oh, very bad. Yeah.

So, so, so, so that took me by surprise because when we spent the day together, we were laughing and joking. Right? Yeah. All the rest of it. And you stand up on a stage and you can comfortably lecture and speak to what, hundreds of delegates and you have nine delegates on your course and you engage with them and you teach them and you get execution and stuff. So then I asked you the question, Well, how on earth can you be an introvert? Right? And then and then tell me, give me an example of where you display your introverted behaviour.

In the parties and the weddings. I’m the guy with the phone right in the corner. I don’t want to talk to anyone. If someone comes and talk to me, that’s fine, but I won’t approach someone and talk to someone. Yeah, I am an introvert, but whatever I am right now is all learned skill and I genuinely believe we can learn whatever you want. I just love being introvert, that’s all.

And I guess for your you know, you’re saying you’re giving out advice to your son, right? Work on your strengths, get someone to help with your weaknesses and then be a good communicator. Right? Yeah. So important. Would you want your son to be an introvert?

Uh, I don’t mind if he is, to be honest. Yeah. You can be introvert and be a good communicator. I believe I’m not a bad communicator. Yeah, I can. I can improve and I will improve. Yeah, but you can be an introvert because I think it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s not a bad skill. I can be by myself. Yeah. I don’t need people around me.

You’re comfortable. You’re comfortable being an introvert, right?

I’m comfortable. Yeah. But I’m also comfortable coming out of my skin and presenting over 100 people and teaching. So, you know, it’s. I don’t mind. I don’t want him to be choose one or the other. I think you can be both.

Just nail your communication skills. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. So important. I can’t really stress enough. Before I used to be saying communication with patients, but no communication in general. Full stop.

Massive believer in that, right? I mean what what what I, I mean, it’s something I’m incredibly passionate about when it comes to teaching. Right. And and for me, brevity and conciseness in communication. So you’re able to communicate complex subjects really simply that that is something to me that’s so important.

So I’ve written a second book on implants. So so it’s called Introduction to Implant Implant Restorations. And on the second page I have a quote from, um, what’s his name, the guy who said that, you know, if you can’t explain.

To a five year old Einstein.

If you can’t. Yeah. If you can’t explain to five year old you haven’t understood yourself enough. Yeah. And really genuinely explain it in that way. And I’ve been I’ve been given, you know, people have told me about the same thing. Like, it’s so easy to understand my book, the book and I’m and this is all despite of English is not my strength.

It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Right. So you, you, you come into the, you know, to your dental college just knowing Gujarati and running around throwing chemicals and savages all over the place. Right. And now you’re writing a book in English. Yeah. Not just one. Two. You’ve recorded an online course. You educate dentists. Yeah, in English. Um, I think it’s bloody amazing. Right. So. So you’ve. You’ve nailed communication as far as I’m concerned, especially if people are coming up to you and saying, Hey, not only are you teaching, but you’re doing it in a way that’s concise and easy to understand. Yeah. So yeah, and that’s.

A really, really good, that’s, that’s the that’s what I love to hear, you know, and that keeps me going to be honest. Okay, well, um, what’s the third.

Three?

Third is like a combination. I want him to learn how to run a business because this is something I wasn’t taught. And it’s so important to understand because even if you’re an associate dentist, you are running your own business. If that makes sense. Whatever you do, you are your own entity and at the end, enjoy whatever you do. Yeah. Not find what you enjoy. Like it’s okay to find what you enjoy, but you need to find an enjoyment into what you are doing as well. Like one day I was, I was washing dishes and I’m smiling and my wife’s like, Why are you smiling? You don’t even like washing dishes. I said, Well, I’m enjoying like, what’s the point? Like, I don’t like washing dishes, but, you know, I’m trying to enjoy it. You know, I’m thinking of something I’m enjoying. So it doesn’t have to be that, you know, you need to. Otherwise you’ll be waiting for your lifetime sometime to find something. What you love. You have to sometime just start doing things.

Enjoy, enjoy. Whatever it is you’re doing.

Exactly. Yeah. I’m sure there will be something you enjoy about.

And I think that what you’re saying like, you know, just just being at peace with the fact that, hey, I’m washing dishes, but I’m cool with that and it’s fun, right? I’m enjoying it. I think I think part and parcel of that they call that mindfulness or whatever, right. Is just maybe focusing on what you’re doing and thinking about it and just being content and happy. Right? Um, yeah. Amazing. And then, um. Fantasy dinner party.

Which never go to.

Which you never go to because you’re the introvert. Yeah, but let me just, just, just just think deeply about this. Yeah. Three people you could invite dead or alive. Who would they be?

Uh. Well have three disciplines. Probably so. And this is how I think would break things down. So I would break it down into dentistry. Dentistry, I’m really love the way Pascal Marnier teaches. So, you know, I would love to invite him and get to know him better, although I’ve been on his courses and you know, all the stuff. But yeah, it would be good to have him. Yeah. Then communication wise, I, I really like Tony Robbins the way he really understands people’s psychology and how people think and you know, all that. And I really would love to learn how he does it. Yeah. And thirdly, for life, my grandfather, he died when I still get I wasn’t as mature probably as I am now. I would be asking him different questions, you know, like he was a GP. And I’m sure like things gone wrong in the practice, I never felt like every time he came home it was the same guy. Like it was not like stressed or like, you know, frustrated. And I’m like that as well, like, But, you know, he he pulled it off. I mean, I learned from him. Yeah. You know, I never bring issues of work to home stays at work.

As a really good skill. It’s something that I something I definitely practice right and I work hard at which is leaving home at home and leaving work at work. And it’s something I really struggled with coming out of Covid because our whole agency went remote. And then I set up a home office and then I started working from home, right? And it was really, really hard for to not allow work to spill over into home life and home life to spill over into work. It was so tough, dude. I mean, I mean to the point where, you know, Prav comes in like 3 or 4 different incarnations, Right? And it’s true, right? So, so work Prav is a completely different beast to to Daddy Prav and husband. Prav Yeah, they are three completely different human beings and people. Yeah, but you know what I found during Covid? I was working from home. I had to I had to shift between those people in a second. In a second. Yeah. There was no time to decompress. There was. There was no. And so the reason why I’ve got an office now, which is a 20 minute drive from home and I go to work every day and I go to home every day, is that 20 minute decompression, whether it’s music, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s thinking about, you know, walking through the girls and walking through the door and the girls just, you know, with their beaming smiles on their face and come and give me a hug and all the rest of it. It’s that separation and it’s something I really have to work on, you know, that that work life balance. What about.

You? Yeah, I’m not. Yeah. I mean, when I say stress, I leave the stress and the worries at home, but I’m. I still work from home because my teaching, my recording, everything still is from home. But my my son and my wife, they are they are used to that. And I guess I don’t want to take that completely away because I want my son to know that, you know, you’ve got to work hard. You can’t just, you know, have it everything without work.

I’m going to ask you a question that came up recently in our family, which is, look, I’m a hard worker, right? My my girls know me for working hard. And more recently, I’ve spent a few weekends away. Right. Which is not normal for me. Right? Very speaking engagements and stuff like that and teaching courses. So I’ve been away for a few weekends and my girls really don’t like that. Yeah. And they know that daddy works hard. And then and then there’s a lot of conversations with my six and eight year old. Why do you work hard? What’s the reason for you working? Why do you go to work? Etcetera, etcetera. Why don’t you work from home, blah blah, blah, and you give them the standard answers, right? It’s, you know, we have nice things, you know, I want you to have the best and blah, blah, blah and, and to give us all a better life and all the rest of it, Right? So. So you give them the standard answers and then they go away and they start thinking. And my wife said something to me the other day and she said. Would you really want your girls to be working as hard as you? Yeah.

Or do you want them to actually enjoy more of life? Yeah. Like what example are you setting them? And you know why that why I’m saying this right now is actually based on what you said about your grandfather being and everyone in your family being this that your brother works seven days a week. He works seven days a week. You know, no different, right? Like working seven days a week is normal in your household, right? Yeah. And I look at my wife and her family and she says to me, I’m the hardest working human being she’s ever met because all her family would be like, Hey, it’s dinnertime. It’s relaxed time. It’s home time. There’s no work now, right? Yeah. I have to work at that pace. Yeah. And I. And I do it. I manage it really well, but. But but I really have to work at it, right? And for me. And there’s no right or wrong with this. Right? I definitely don’t want my girls to pick up that habit and that trait from me. Yeah, okay. But, but but everyone’s different, right? And so what’s your take on that?

For me, the thing is, as far as for me, it’s not work. I can I have I’m privileged to. I can stop teaching completely. Yeah. And I can still live the way I am right now because I earn from clinical income. So money is not the motivation. I really genuinely enjoy the day I stop enjoying. The first thing I will stop doing is teaching. Yeah. Because it’s, you know, you have to enjoy. So that’s something I truly believe if you’re not enjoying it, there are so many things you can do to to make a living. Yeah, you don’t have to pull through. I always say that you need to give a chance a few years to make sure that, you know, you’re not just discarding it without giving your all, but if you give your all and you start not enjoying, then it’s not worth it. But this is something I always have discussion with my So in my house, you know, as an Indian parents, there is a common saying that money doesn’t grow on tree. Right.

It’s true.

It’s not it’s not allowed. So no one can say in the house that money doesn’t grow on tree. So I was watching a documentary. My son is big into docu. He doesn’t watch any movies at all. He watches documentary. So we were watching Very normal The Life in a lobby BBC documentary. So they go to a different hotel, a remote hotel, like a expensive hotel, and tell you what goes underneath it. And one of the hotel was like, one night was £7,800 for a night. And my son’s like, Oh, dad, it’s so expensive. I said, What? He’s like, We definitely can’t afford it. So I said, Well, I said, Do you like to go there? And he’s like, Yeah, I’d love to go there. So then you need to the way you need to think is you need to raise your standard. Does it make sense for for what is expensive for us, for Elon Musk? It’s not expensive. Does that make sense? So relative excess is relative. So if you want to go to that kind of a place, you just need to raise your standard. You need to be become that person who can afford it. That’s all. But you know, you need to stay away from material things. And that’s what I teach him as well. And he’s very good that good at that. So I think at least until now, I’ve done a good parenting. I don’t know, you know, these things can go like literally, you know, when they become 12, 13, 14, they have their own mind.

Yeah, look, it’s really interesting. And then and then with my older kids, you know, they go through that and then they go to uni, then they come back and they grow up and all this different person really interesting. And me and my wife have a lot of conversations around, you know, what’s the best advice to give children? What’s the best example, What’s the right way of doing it? And, you know, all these conversations about mental health and stuff like that, right? But there was one really powerful statement that my six year old made to me about three weeks ago. So, you know, whenever I talk to her about work and she’s why are you going away and stuff like that and she gets upset, um, you know, I can see the cogs ticking around in her head. Yeah. And she said this to me, and it hit me like a train. She said, Daddy, can you stop working until we’re poor again?

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And was like, fuck. Like, just. Just the. The innocence in that comment. And what that actually means is so powerful.

And this is same thing with my son. Like he knows my calendar better than my wife, so he knows what time I’m going to come home, which days I’m off. And I’ve slowed down a lot since after pandemic. Um, and that’s because of him. Because I want to spend time with him. I can work seven days, but I don’t because I want to spend time with him. And, you know, he’s. He’s our only child. So, you know, it’s that’s also a different. Yeah. But I think they deserve it. And I enjoy I enjoy everything I do right now. You know touch wood I’m I’m in such a amazing place where I enjoy a family time. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy working. Um, you know, in my practice, I’m gone back to doing a little bit general dentistry. I enjoy it. I enjoy seeing, you know, doing like class one cavity, which has been ages since I’ve done like a simple filling. But yeah, it’s good.

Brilliant. Well, Devin, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. What I’m going to do in the in the show notes as well is just put some links to your courses so that people can learn about you and your books and things like that. So please email everything across to me and I’ll, you know, I’ll link through to the books. And then if you when you publish the implant book as well, I’ll hopefully that will be a bestseller as well. And we can we can get that on there as well. But but thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you very much for inviting me. 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.

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Having to almost like suppress certain emotions and thoughts because we’re being professional, we’re looking after someone else, and we’re constantly in that caregiver role, and that takes its toll. And beyond that, like, we want to be happy and we want to be thriving. We want to get, like you were saying, we want to get beyond baseline to optimal states. And how do we do 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.

A special episode of the podcast from the Brooklyn book launch of Mark’s Mark Wojo’s book, which is called Resilience and Wellbeing and Well-Being for Dental Professionals. I was surprised at the name of the book, Mark, because all the other names of your brands are so cool and and zippy. Mind flossing. Mind Ninja, was it? Brain flossing. Yeah. Mindfulness. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate that question. So I actually desperately wanted this to be a really fun, cool, catchy kind of name. But I’m working with publisher Wiley-blackwell and they were not having any of it. So for them, it was really important that it was a searchable title. And so and people were able to find it. And so it made sense for them to put those. That’s the. So there was no way around it. They weren’t they didn’t even want me to have a subtitle. And so I would have loved to have a little, little something in there.

So tell me, from the moment that you decided I am going to write a book to the moment that a week ago it came out, how long was that process?

It’s been a really long process, actually. I think I started talking about this 2019 and then I actually got around to pitching the concept to Wiley in 2020.

And how did you even know that’s what you had to do? Like pitching to Wiley, Did you research? Did you Google? How do you publish a book?

No, actually, I have, um, so I have a dental coach. I’ve got quite a few coaches, actually. And Dr. Janine Brooks has written quite a few books for Wiley. Okay. And I was in a coaching session with her and I was just talking about publishing a book and creating something. And actually I thought you had to write the book and then you pitch it to the publisher. Actually, that’s not the other way around at all. Yes. So you pitch a proposal. So Dr. Brooks was being kind in kind of introducing me to Wiley in the first place, because actually, what you would otherwise do is have an agent. You can’t just approach a publisher and you have an agent, and then they help you with creating a proposal and putting that together. So yeah, I wrote a proposal and also attached this really fun, um, little kind of teaser of the book. So I had actually been creating kind of worksheets whilst I’d been teaching like the year before. So I’d done lots of kind of workshops and created loads of worksheets around that. So that was always going to be integral to the book. It needed to be practical.

So it’s full of worksheets and exercises and colours and just a lot going on in that book. 300 pages, yes. What was your process for researching and then writing that?

I mean, honestly, it was a complete joy to write. So the way I did my writing was I sort of a skeleton and what I wanted it to look like. And for me, it was important that it was a journey. So exploring and spotlighting the evidence based tools and coming up with some sort of resilience framework and then actually thinking about how to make those habits that stick. So that kind of that really spotlighted the whole journey. So firstly, like learning about the tools and how do you make them sustainable and, and so then, yeah, it wasn’t actually too, too bad at all. So it was a matter of sitting down, working on it chapter by chapter and getting on with the first draft. So putting pen to paper as you will, and just writing, um, looking at the evidence base, incorporating that thinking of creative ways to, to do that. But firstly, you’ve just got to get the words on paper and then you can start having fun in the editing process. So yeah, it was really honestly joyful and not as hard as what people make it out to be.

It seems like you, it feeds you, it feeds you. You seem so, so energised by by this process. And it’s so lovely to see that because I remember the beginning of this process. Four years, 4 or 5 years, three, four, five years ago when you initially started talking to me about just just getting into this space, when you when you pitched this sort of stuff to not only publishers, but when you when you talk to dentists and and it’s such a big area mental health. And just when we were sitting there, you were making the comparison to, you know, going to the gym and and really nice thing that you’re saying, you know, it’s not only for when you’re in trouble, it’s for optimisation and other other tools you use for someone who’s in trouble. Similar to the tools used for someone who wants to optimise mentally. It’s a lovely thing. It’s almost like, do I have a therapist because I need a therapist or do I have a therapist because I want a therapist kind of thing. What are your thoughts around that?

Yeah, I think it’s it’s a really, really important kind of question. I think it’s really important to think of training your mind as you would train your physical body. And so these tools, you can use them in so many different ways. So whether you’re unwell. So it would certainly be applying those same kind of tools, but in a slightly different way because you don’t want to overwhelm the self when you’re experiencing illness. So it would be a slightly different approach, but certainly you can apply a lot of the things no matter what, where you are on that spectrum. Yeah, absolutely. It’s just delivering it in a way that’s engaging and also truly experimenting with the tools and seeing what fits the person best. That’s like really, really crucial.

And then the work that you’ve done where you go into organisations and try and change the culture for sort of positive, positive culture. Explain that to me. If I know you’re going to bigger, bigger and better organisations than Dental practices only, right? But, but from the dental practice perspective, if you were going to come into a dental practice and try and improve the culture of that practice, let’s say, let’s say it’s a bit of a we’ve all worked in a practice where there’s a bit of a toxic culture. Yeah. And not only, you know, I know you had some examples where you had a boss boss associate nightmare and that happens a lot. But, but we see it a lot in dental practice just within teams, there’s toxicity. How do you start to, first of all, even assess what is the culture of this place that I’ve walked into? And then secondly, change that culture in what how I mean, it must take more than one visit to change culture in a place.

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a whole chapter on this very topic where I delve into creating positive work cultures. I think it’s absolutely massive and crucial when it comes to our sense of well-being and also the team’s productivity and stability is all linked. And so there are many kind of roots to this. But I mean, firstly it is talking to your team and finding out more about their needs as well and creating a culture of psychological safety. So when we use this term, we’re talking about a environment where your colleagues feel safe to share concerns without reprimand. You can actually, um, yeah. Just be your general concerns. Yeah.

General mental health concerns, general counsel.

General, like things you’re unhappy about in.

Terms of be able to talk openly.

Be able to talk openly and to create that culture. That’s open door policy. Not every practice is okay with that, certainly not that embedding psychological safety is really underpins wellbeing. And as I was saying, it all leads to positive outcomes anyway. So creating that culture which is open, you’re, you’re saying that you’re comfortable for feedback. I want to know it and I want to know your thoughts and, and to not be defensive at that point. It does take a lot of work, I think, from management side of things. Yeah, really, really important. And then another aspect that’s absolutely crucial is thinking about mental health first aid and having this available for the whole team. So go on a course on mental health first aid. It’s very accessible. Two days, brilliant time. What do you.

Mean, What does it.

Mean? So you learn the tools and you learn the early signs and symptoms of mental illness.

In yourself and in others.

Exactly. So now you can as a team, start recognising when your team member needs support and then you can have the conversations with them around mental health, ill health, I’m talking about. So, so we’re talking about things like depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and you can signpost them appropriately because there are things at crisis point for us. So if you have, say.

Throw out a couple of those, what are they? Irritability, sleeplessness? What is it?

Yeah. So it’s it’s when someone is appearing to act differently to how they were before. Yeah. So it’s about maybe eating more or eating less, not sleeping well and you might notice them physically look different and they might be more aggressive. They might be withdrawn. Yeah. But just start starting to recognise those signs is really, really important. And then you’ll actually be taught how to talk about mental illness in a way that’s kind, loving, non-judgmental, compassionate and you’re going to start creating that culture that’s more accepting and open. So that’s one aspect. Another massive aspect I believe obviously is um, resilience and wellbeing education and have psychological tools accessible for everyone. So it’s not just about reducing burnout. Team, but it’s equally as important to get your team members to feel more engaged at work and living a life of meaning and purpose. And there are routes to this. So with the way when I’m teaching my programs and workshops, I’m talking about finding your strengths and bringing them to work. And there’s different ways we can do this as well. So in positive psychology, there’s a lot of research to support. If you’re using your strengths in challenges as well as outside of challenges, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to be happier, and you’re going to be more profitable.

There’s an acronym, isn’t there, for the five, six things you bring to that?

I don’t know. The acronym. Yeah, you said it.

You said it yourself. Maybe it’s a different thing. I don’t know. I heard you speak. I heard you speak. Speaking on some other podcast on Qadis.

Okay. I don’t remember an acronym, but but strengths is really, really massive. Then you’ve got values. So bringing those into work and understanding your values, gratitude. So creating a culture of gratitude and there’s so many cool ways you can do this. So in your team meetings, playing ping pong, so sharing compliments back and throw like wins in your day, like small moments, big moments, actually sharing it with your team amplifies positive emotions. And that is amazing. You’ve you’ve we’ve all understand that experientially we’ve we’ve talked to others cheered our wins and we’ve noticed an increase in our feelings of you know feeling more inspired, more grateful, more um, feelings of compassion, fulfilment and meaning all of these beautiful emotions. So what positive emotions do when a team is they help broaden their perspective and to increase psychological resources. So that’s really, really important. And so that’s a great way. So creating a culture of gratitude, it could be as simple as spotlighting someone who’s a really well in your team. You could have a gratitude board at work, you could have a gratitude WhatsApp. But actually honing into what’s going well in your team is really, really worth celebrating because you’re going to create a culture where people feel recognised and supported and and and it’s joyful. So yeah, finding ways that you can integrate that could be a great way of changing culture. But yes, it does take time. This isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes conversations really getting to know your team and their their unique needs. But there is there is wellbeing education out there that’s evidence based. There are frameworks that are useful.

You know, get resistance when you when you go into a place from individuals.

Yeah.

So the stigma is still there, right? And some people some people feel like, I don’t need this conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. And you can’t bring everyone on to the table. You can only just share. Look, we’ve got a course on if you’d like to be part of it. This is you might be that it’s compulsory, but I’d like you to engage in it like it’s fine if you can’t engage in the way that I want you. That’s absolutely fine. You just. You’ve got to just make those choices available and not force things on people. But I think normally when people start to understand what this can do for them, then normally they’re quite receptive actually, because, you know, people want to speak openly and be free and talk about things that truly matter to them. And this is where wellbeing truly shines because you can share what’s really going on, right? And often as Dental professionals, we’re having to almost like suppress certain emotions and thoughts because we’re being professional, we’re looking after someone else and we’re constantly in that caregiver role and that takes its toll. And beyond that, like we want to be happy and we want to be thriving. We want to get like you were saying, we want to get beyond baseline to optimal states.

How do we do that? So even if, like the illness side of things doesn’t resonate, like because you’re like, okay, well, I’ve never experienced depression like that just doesn’t I wouldn’t that doesn’t impact me, right? That’s okay if you feel like that and you can certainly benefit from just understanding mental health better and you can help, you know, maybe your family or your kids or you can also just learn to be more resilient or happier or more optimistic. So there’s always something you can learn because actually the brain is wired for negativity bias. It’s full of automatic negative thoughts that are unhelpful. And so actually, just even learning about thought patterns better and mindset is going to be really beneficial to you in terms of thriving. So I think anyone can get a benefit from this. It’s fine if if that person’s resistant. We don’t want to push anything on anyone, but it’s just. About hopefully them being curious and having an open mind. And who knows, they might discover something really useful and beneficial.

So one final question. Yes. And it’s a serious one. Suicide and dentistry. Now, you’ve looked at so much research. Is there research that says, number one, it’s real, that dentists do commit suicide more than other professionals? Or is that sort of urban myth sort of thing? And number two, what’s your opinion on why dentists, you know, why not brain surgeons? Why not some other type of professional?

Yeah. So the rates of suicide are higher in dental professionals in other sectors, of course, like healthcare professionals are all in a similar pool. So if you even look pre-pandemic. So there’s going to be a bunch of research, obviously post pandemic, but pre pandemic Toon and colleagues in 2019 did a study on UK general dental practitioners and found that 10% experienced suicidal thoughts. So yes, they didn’t commit suicide, but the general public is 5%. So this is higher in our population. And so what the research spotlights into why, like why is this happening? Why particularly us and lots of different reasons. It’s multifactorial. Some of the factors are because of organisational issues. So things like contract targets, admin issues, staffing, all of those aspects, work culture, obviously all feeds into it. Then you’ve got the risk of litigation.

But I read 50 years ago in Kansas, yeah, dentists had a higher chance of suicide than other professionals, you know what I mean? There was no there was no contract. There wasn’t. So. So what is it about the job itself? Yeah.

So it doesn’t so it may not be Udas, but it’s the organisation kind of framework that so like I said, staffing issues, that’s not practices. Yeah, Yeah. So that’s like almost like many, many practices can relate to that. But kind of beyond that, let’s just take the patient factors. Simply us working with patients who are in distress, awake, awake, but anxious, they might be going through trauma. You know, we see them regularly, like three monthly sometimes and we’re actually with them in their journey. They’re going through a divorce and they might be raped. There’s so much stuff that we deal with and and a patient comes in and we’re looking after them. We’re the caregiver. So simply being around that much trauma can feed into ourselves and we can simply take on a patient’s pain. That’s called compassion fatigue when you take it to its extreme. Yeah, but then why not, you know.

Psychologists or GP’s? I mean there’s something about dentistry. Yeah. I mean the, the loneliness of the room.

Yeah. So is it. Yeah. So, so then you’ve got other factors such as individual factors. So in our niche we’ve got high levels of perfectionism and that can lead to things like burnout and psychological distress. We’ve got imposter syndrome. It’s quite high in our profession as well, and we might not have the self-care tools. There’s loneliness as well, and loneliness actually increases our levels of stress. As we know, chronic stress states are really harmful for mentally and physically. So there’s all of those aspects.

And it’s such an unfair question to ask you, isn’t it, at this moment to say why? But I have to know what you thought about that.

It’s so multifactorial. There isn’t one aspect. And the other aspect I haven’t spotlighted was just the risk of litigation and the stress of regulation. So our bodies are regulating us. It’s not that they’re regulating us. It’s more like when there is a fitness to practice case. It takes so long for that case to go through and there’s so much anguish in that period. So there’s that aspect. And that’s not just UK based, that’s, you know, that’s everywhere globally. So there’s that as a factor as well. And so there’s a range there really. And then obviously you’ve got things that aren’t in the research yet. There’s social media and we’re making constant upwards social comparisons and dentistry, so visual. So you know, you’ve got that aspect as well. Yeah. And then on top of that, we’re not taught the tools, the psychological tools early on. Like I think it’s madness.

It should be in the undergrad, what you said, what you said, it needs to be in there, but much, a whole lot of stuff needs to be in the underground, right. And a whole lot of stuff that shouldn’t be in the underground. Yeah. We spend hours and hours and hours doing things that most dentists never do. Yes. And then things like this. Things like how do you get a loan for a business? You know, simple stuff like that.

Simple stuff like that.

Covered at all?

Yeah. No, absolutely. We could definitely shift that. But then even beyond that postgraduate, we need more of an emphasis on this. Sure. And not just anecdotal advice, but more evidence based. I think it would be great to move towards that. So I think that’s the way of the future.

Where it’s such a pleasure to see you doing this, to bring out the book one more time, say the title and where they can get it.

Oh, thank you so much. Hey, it’s been a pleasure. It’s resilience and well-being for dental professionals and you can get it in Amazon. It’s also available in Waterstones and spirits and all sorts of places. But yeah, yeah, it’s absolutely everywhere and it’s global, so which is wicked. But Amazon probably the cheapest space you can get it amazing. It’s a really good deal right now.

And such a lot of resource in that book. So check that book out. I certainly will be getting a few copies right now. Thank you so much.

Yeah, Thank you. So proud of.

You. Hey.

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.

It’s the hardest thing to do. I feel that I have done that many times. Many times, Yeah. I mean, over, you know, a thousand plus employees and you have a lot of people that are very dedicated and their heart’s in the right place, but they’re just the wrong fit for your organisation for any number of reasons, either their skill set thing or it’s the talent thing or it’s a culture thing, right? And the best thing that you can do, in my opinion, is be honest, be kind, be generous with those people and try to be helpful to them. But you have to protect the enterprise as a whole. And you have to make, in my opinion, very swift decisions as it relates to the to the personnel at the organisation. And this is why I don’t like the family analogy for companies, because you can’t fire your family. You know, I’ve tried but, but you know, a professional sports team, which is a good analogy that you know Reed Hastings uses a Netflix I’m kind of stealing that but I think it’s the perfect one because we’re recruiting top athletes and we’re expecting a lot from them and they get released if they’re not contributing in the way that we need them to. And that’s a much better analogy. That’s much more accurate, I think.

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 Tanz onto the podcast. As a serial entrepreneur who’s lately turned his hand to dentistry with Pearl AI, which has actually spun out of another computer vision, AI company called Gumgum. Computer Vision. I mean, it sounds like a crazy idea, but getting meaningful information out of digital images, I guess. Thanks for coming on the pod. Lovely to have you.

Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sophia, give us the sort of the lowdown on someone who, you know, we were just talking of of her as someone who’s had so many successful companies, You know, your your previous one, the Gum Gum company was looking at sort of logos. Is that right? Tell us what that company was doing that led you to to to Pearl?

We did a number of things with computer vision. But generally what we did was crawled much of the known Internet every day and on an ongoing basis and developed an understanding of sort of non-textual media. So primarily imagery and video and eventually incorporated text as well, and sort of made that computer vision analysis of that non-textual data available for a variety of purposes. And the reason that’s important is because historically that’s all kind of black space as far as the Internet is concerned, because nobody’s been really able to interpret it. But it obviously contains a lot of very important information. And that’s kind of what Gumgum was focussed on doing, was illuminating that part of the Internet.

So but what were the applications?

So there were a number of applications, so advertising, advertising, targeting work that we did around sort of valuing brands and their exposure online and on televised sports events, stuff like that. Basically anywhere where a brand or a company is interacting in a visual visual medium, we were able to sort of help. So what we did specifically with sports sponsorship, for example, is we analysed every moment that a sponsorship came into view and actually quantified the value of that moment of exposure and that became a currency for brands. And Rightsholders also worked with nearly 100% of Fortune 100 brands in relation to their advertising initiatives online as you related to both targeting but also providing access to our proprietary ad formats.

And then you sort of internally incubated Pearl out of that technology.

Yeah, we internally incubated a number of different computer vision driven applications as a function of that technology. So really around 2010 or so, what you’re able to do with I started to get very, very powerful and interesting, really a dramatic shift from what was possible before. And that’s really because of the resurgence of neural networks, which are an old technology that came back into fashion and suddenly were very plausible because we had the computing power to sort of run these things efficiently. And all the craze that we’re currently seeing around AI, everything from Chat ChatGPT on down is really a function of that shift and that resurgence of this particular branch of artificial intelligence. So it became very clear to me that while we were applying this technology, you know, it’s a very successful effect at Gumgum, there were other applications that were also very interesting, and we launched a number of initiatives internally, one of which was a personal passion project of mine, which was applying this technology in the field of health care. And to radiography. I believed at the time, and I think many people increasingly believe that AI is going to play a very fundamental role in becoming a standard of care, in elevating the quality and precision of diagnoses across all forms of radiography.

So then what led you to Dental?

Yeah, so Dental is an interesting one. You know, my father is a retired dentist, so I did kind of grow up in that environment and it was very familiar to me. But we did initiate a pretty systematic review of various forms of medicine and did look at a variety of opportunities outside of dental as well. The reason that we landed on dental in the end was, you know, I obviously was already interested in it. I’m just having some familiarity. But I think more importantly is if you look at all of medicine, more radiography is captured in dentistry than any other form of medicine. You have access to data. A little bit more readily because it’s not quite as sensitive as other forms of radiography. So you have things like brain cancer and various other forms of cancer, and there’s a lot of difficulty in getting access to that data and it becomes very difficult and costly and ultimately makes it more difficult to train effectively. If you also look at the the nature of dentistry, we liked that we were not competitive with the actual customer. So dentists by and large need to perform radiographic review in order to do their job, but they’re not first and foremost, you know, priding themselves on that fact.

And that’s not the totality of their value in the world. Is it something that they have to do? So the idea of unburdening practitioners so they can more effectively diagnose, which is the first step, often in sort of, you know, identifying the status of oral health and ascribing a treatment plan to us was attractive because if you look at radiology, we and the integration of these types of tool sets there, there is a lot of concern and consternation and resistance. And ultimately I do think that these technologies do work best with both humans and machines working together. But in dentistry you just don’t have that that high, high level of sensitivity. And then those other elements on the business side in terms of dentistry being much more fragmented and entrepreneurial, you’re not selling into very large hospital groups and, you know, stuff like that. So for a variety of reasons, we thought dentistry was just a wonderful place to apply this technology. And we also believe that because of the characteristics that I mentioned, it would very likely leapfrog the rest of medicine in relation to becoming a standard of care. And I think that’s actually playing out actively today.

What stage are you at with it? Have you got regulatory approval across different different areas? Are you confident it’s better than the human on its own?

We’re actually at a much more fun and exciting stage. The past few years have been about red tape, regulatory approvals, clinical trials, you know, things like GDPR compliance, just a lot of the, you know, IP sort of oriented work as well, a lot of R&D. And those are the necessary things that you need to engage in in order to to do this properly. Where we’re at now is we have regulatory clearance across over 100 countries. We have engaged in obviously successful FDA clinical trials that very rigorously prove efficacy. We have distributed infrastructure globally, so we’re now operating in the UK, in the EU, in the Middle East, in Australia, in Canada and America and other territories. And now it’s really about distribution and integration. So the company is growing very rapidly, the technology is becoming adopted very rapidly and we really do feel like in the next few short years it will become a fundamental standard of care. So this really is in the hands of many practitioners in the operatory patient facing worldwide today.

For those who don’t know what Pearl is or don’t understand how AI works in this, could you just describe to the average dental practitioner, you know what this is from? From my limited understanding, I see it as that now. Instead of me looking at a x ray and trying to figure out is do I see a bit of decay here or do I see a bit of issue here that you can fast track me to identifying stuff that maybe my eye would not have picked up? And the more times that this technology is used, as time goes on, it becomes more accurate and more efficient and better at picking up those things, making me essentially redundant. Looking at radiographs eventually is is my interpretation close or what would you say is.

Yeah, I mean, I would start off with some data. So, you know, we ran a study with a non-profit that we helped found called the Dental Council, which is intended to study the intersection of dentistry and AI. And in one of our initial studies, what we did was we asked 136 practitioners to diagnose and treatment plan a single patients. And what you found in that study was really striking. There was almost never greater than 50% concurrence. If you looked at select teeth in the mouth, you know, it was basically a coin flip as to whether or not there was decay present. I remember two three in particular in the study. I could share it with you. It’s available on our website as well. You know, it was like 51%, you know, decay, 49%, no decay, you know, 60. Like it was a. 60 over 40 on recurrent decay, and the treatment costs came in between $300 and $36,000 for the same patient. Similarly, there was another study back in 1997. A journalist working for Reader’s Digest decided that he wanted to do a review of the state of dentistry in America, and he travelled to 50 states and got 50 diagnoses. And I think his results were something like between 0 and $40,000 in treatment cost recommendation. So there’s this massive lack of consistency. We work a lot with university partners and all the deans of all the schools of dentistry say the same thing, which is that they know that they’re not sending dentists into the field proficient at identifying a range of pathology, and they’re expected to learn on the job.

But that’s very inconsistent and there’s not really a good feedback loop there. So the need is obviously very real. If you look at our clinical trials, we were able to show that we surfaced 37% more disease on average per radiograph encountered. So this is everything from various types of caries. Obviously, interproximal are often missed, but you have things like calculus that are often missed or early bone loss or periapical lesions or margin discrepancies. The list goes on. Our technology is called second opinion, so we are a real time patient facing non human in the loop tool that is simply highlighting radiographs and where it’s relevant. Also sort of measuring areas of decay or bone levels or other sort of pathologic and non pathologic conditions that are present. And the idea is to point out those areas of interest to a practitioner so that they can make their own assessment, they can check things clinically and they can ultimately then begin engaging on a treatment plan. So at our core, the thing that we’re most known for is this tool called second opinion, which is the most advanced and the most comprehensively regulatorily cleared product on the market as it relates to this kind of diagnostic AI. We have other tools as well for practitioners that go even a level deeper that interact with the practice management system. I’m happy to talk about that, but I’ll just stop there and see if see if that’s clear.

How do you train a computer vision model and how bad was it originally? I mean, someone I’m always interested in people who I mean, you are a veteran of this, right? I mean, there can’t be many people who were in on this in 2008. How bad was it before and how quickly has it moved on? And how do you train it? Do you show it loads and loads of radiographs and humans checking up its work.

Painfully and with a lot of money is the truth. So what do you do?

That sounds that sounds like the regulatory. I want to ask you about how much that cost you.

Yeah. What?

Everything costs a lot. This is not a cheap thing to do. Well, yeah. So we’ve raised, you know, about $31 million to date and are, you know, in Q1 likely engaging in a much, much larger raise on top of that. It’s an expensive endeavour. On the training side, what you need to do is, you know, a massive quantity of representative data. So you need to have represented demographics and geographies and sensor types. You want to do things like digital radiography and phosphor plates and just make sure that it kind of covers the market generally because this technology is intended to be used in market with any sensor and any imagery that’s thrown at it. And then you very painstakingly with hundreds of dentists initially, and then you whittle it down in various ways, label that data. So you go in and you annotate it and you sort of mark up where there’s disease and you have methodologies that are statistically valid for for litigating disputes between sort of two different practitioners or three different practitioners. And that’s actually one of the challenges with with the FDA, for example, is that they looked at the data and they said, we don’t know how you can have a ground truth set that you’re going to test yourself against because nobody’s consistent to begin with. So we had to engage in a lot of statistical analysis to actually show that we were able to, over time, develop a ground truth set that was actually valid and reliable.

And then you start to train. So you start feeding it into the neural networks and you see what comes out. But what people are often not familiar with is the heavy amount of pre-processing and post-processing and heuristic rule sets that are then layered on top of that. You know, certain things might be detected by the AI that just would never make sense, right? And you can kind of eliminate those and you kind of go through that process. So, you know, is really refined on an ongoing basis. We put out models every couple of weeks. It’s always reinforced with new data when we run something. Thing through our system. You’re really running through over 30 neural networks, not just one massive one. And we have, you know, 8 or 9 neural networks that are specifically focussed on different types of carries. So as far as the machine is concerned, those are all different models. And you know, a similar philosophy applies to other detections. So when you’re dealing with a medical application with a very high bar of expectation and requirement, then you actually have to go well above and beyond what you would do in other computer vision oriented applications. Although I will say that the general methodology, whether you’re training on cars or cats or or dental pathology, is pretty much the same process.

What is a neural network? Sorry for my lack of thingy, but you mentioned that, you know, 30 different neural networks and in one particular area, say eight different neural networks. What does that actually mean?

Yeah, good question. So a neural network is a branch of artificial intelligence, right? There are various approaches to AI that have existed over the years, and a lot of them get a lot of excitement and most of them have generally kind of fallen flat of expectation. What the neural network approach is is effectively a somewhat rough but also accurate representation of the human brain. So you have synapsis synapses and axons and you have this sort of network of synapses effectively interacting with each other in the brain and based on the understanding of the human brain. Actually in the 50s and 60s, this notion of a neural network was conceived of this notion that if you just feed raw data into this network, it will start to figure out patterns in that data and it’ll start to reinforce itself toward the right answer. That’s why this is often called reinforcement learning. So basically what you’re doing is teaching a computer to understand things conceptually versus describing them. So if you think about, you know, an apple, if I tried to with traditional programming describe an apple, I would say it has this curvature and it has a little thing that looks like a twig and that has a certain colour and a curvature and it could be these colours and, you know, that’s all fine and good, but then you feed an image of a rotting apple on the ground or an image of a monkey holding an apple or an image of an apple and slices and suddenly that thing doesn’t work well at all.

So that’s just not a good approach to trying to have a machine identify where an apple is or is not. However, with a neural network, you’re able to feed in every example of an apple that you could think of, and it will start to identify the edges and the colours. And ultimately the concept of this notion of Apple in much the same, you know, I have a two year old and I’ll show him something a few times, you know, say this is a spoon, and he’ll suddenly be able to identify a spoon even if it’s 2D on a piece of paper or if it’s upside down. And he’s developed this model of spoon and it really is kind of the same thing. So we’re just developing what is the sort of model and character of a carry or of a periapical lesion or of a filling or a crown or whatever the case may be?

And so when you’re talking about 30 neural networks, you’re talking about essentially 30 different ways or models of interpreting that, bringing them all together. Yeah. And then delivering the result.

Yeah. And we have all types of neural networks that don’t even look at pathologic data. We have neural networks that determine, is this an OPG or is it a right wing or is it a periapical x ray? I mean, it’s doing all types of meta data analysis to know we do things around rotation and orientation. We’re able to understand tooth numbering. We’re able to actually segment out. This is a very useful tool for practitioners. We’re able to segment out anatomical structures so we can tell the dentine from the enamel, from the cementum, from the root, and we’re able to actually overlay that data on top of radiographs. So when you’re explaining to a patient, Hey, you really want to address this decay before it touches the nerve, because if it touches the nerve, then we’re going to have to engage in a root canal is going to be much more costly and much more expensive. Then you are communicating to a patient in a way that’s very clear, is very visual, and we actually dramatically increase case acceptance as a function of that because the patient now really understands what’s going on and it elevates the level of trust as well.

I can imagine that that side of it, the patient communication side of it, is probably even a bigger driver than I think it’s 5050.

I mean, they’re everyone focuses on the pathologic detection side. But I agree with you in that the patient communication side is just as important.

Well, you know.

So many of us suffer with that. And it’s not it’s not about dentists generally, not that great at communication, to tell you the truth. But it’s a difficult thing to see. I mean, it takes years. You know, you really don’t know what is decay and what isn’t decay when when when you’re a young dentist and then you try and show a patient and say, hey, see this little grey area here? Yeah. And most of the time they can’t see that exactly. Whereas if it was there in pink or something.

That’s actually.

Would change the.

Game, right?

That’s the colour that we use is pink.

Oh really?

Every, every detection is a different colour, but we do different shades of pink depending on if it’s enamel, only if it’s actually encroaching into the dentine and stuff like that. But you’re right. I mean when you show a patient a grey smudge on, I think that’s already confusing. They’re not really going to understand what it is that you’re talking about. So this plays a huge role in patient communication case acceptance, and it’s one of the reasons why dentists, you know, sort of love using it.

Were you surprised when you moved into the sort of medical area about how many hoops you’ve got to jump through on the whole regulatory side? Because I’m in I’m in dental supply as well, and I feel like it’s a weird double edged sword. It’s kind of the the worst thing and the best thing about being in this area because it’s a nightmare to get the regulatory regulatory right. But once you’ve got there, then you know, there’s a real barrier to entry for anyone else. Yeah. However, however long it took you or however many millions you spent getting all of those FDA and I guess, you know.

I guess we’re also the.

Only cleared product really in the market. And that was.

What about Japan? Did you manage Japan? Because that’s a nightmare for everything.

Yeah, that.

Was a very difficult and very costly endeavour. And and you know, even the philosophy behind something like Emdr is very different than FDA or Pmda in Japan in that you’re looking.

You know, did you.

Know you were getting yourself into that?

No, I don’t know anything. So that’s kind of my that’s my strength, is that I’m just naive. If I if, you know, the pain you’re going to be walking into, you might not do it at all. So, you know, I historically have entered categories that I am not an expert in and naivety helps. I knew it would be a heavy lift and painful. Of course, I didn’t know quite in which ways or how. And when. You’re dealing with so many regulatory bodies concurrently and you’re still, you know, we’re not pre-revenue anymore, but we were pre-revenue for a while. You know, that’s a that’s a it’s a stressful endeavour because you’re spending a lot of money, you’re burning a lot of capital, and it’s kind of an all or nothing thing. Like if you don’t get through, you need to start from scratch, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it’s bouncing around in my head and we’re probably a million miles away from there right now. But sort of early detection for things like cancer or perhaps rare cancers. And and I guess you need the data to feed the model, as you were describing then. But, you know, even if I go back to my own personal story, I’ve got an l5-s1 disc tear to the right, and it took three scans for for somebody to diagnose me, right? And actually, the third guy could look at my first scan and he saw it like, stuck out, stuck out to him like. Like a so, so, so how how often does this happen? In the real world. Right. Let’s talk outside of dentistry now. Right? All the time. And then and then you think just how powerful this could this be? That if. Well, early detection, cancer. Right. I mean, that would be insane.

Yeah. And that’s happening very rapidly throughout medicine. I mean, this is going to be applied holistically across the board in a relatively short period of time, and it’s going to be hopefully resulting in much better outcomes. One of the nice features of whether you’re detecting cancer or caries is in our case, we’re proving that it’s almost we’re we’re servicing almost 40% more stuff that’s getting missed. It’s a lot of stuff, right? But a bunch of it’s going to be, you know, say like in Interproximal Carry that is just an early watch area. There’s nothing that you necessarily want to do about it. You want to be aware of it and you want to take preventative steps. And that’s a nice conversation to have with the patient as well. They don’t need to do anything differently other than engage in better oral care. And if you’re able to capture things, catch things early, especially cancer, then you’re able to have much more elevated outcomes. So when you catch something is critical. But yeah, I mean, that’s a great example that you bring up.

How far do you think we are away from that?

I think it already I think the technology already exists and is sort of probably, if not already FDA cleared is in a clinical trial phase. I think there’s about 200 FDA cleared devices that are able to look at radiography and detect things. You know, mammography is another area that’s been very popular and has seen success. So it’s all happening. It will all happen. This is kind of not a question of can the machine do this? Well, that’s not an outstanding question anymore. We know that it can. So, you know, people are getting after it.

Amazing.

I saw one of your main investors is David Saxe, who I’m a massive fan of from the All in podcast. Yeah. When you I mean just on the general thing from from the sort of founder sort of angle when you’re pitching to these investors to start with, I guess you’ve got to pitch like you’re going to you’re going to take over the world. You’re selling a massive dream, right? Was the dream that you sold dental radiography I or was it I in dentistry and is that the plan?

It’s really about elevating the standard of care across the entire field. So at our core, what we do in the first step is to get this plumbing and make it a utility in every dental practice globally. But that is really just a stepping stone to a huge amount of other applications. First of all, there’s a lot of modalities. So you have the 3D realm and you have CSF. And one thing we haven’t really talked about is that we’re actually able to correlate the data that we identify in the imaging system with the data and the practice management system and identify all, you know, like all the characteristics of the entire patient population. Do a comprehensive chart review, show all the undiagnosed opportunity, show how that leads into various specialities, whether that’s endo or Auth. I mean, there’s a massive amount of interesting work to do here.

With I mean, it could.

Even go to treatment planning rather than just diagnosis. Right?

Exactly.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we do with our practice intelligence platform is we actually will colour code the schedule every day and we’ll highlight areas where there’s an action to be taken, both driven by AI and not. And we’ll list out in various funnels the various appropriate potential treatment opportunities for a particular set of pathology that are present.

Did I hear that right? Could could the software retrospectively go into the practice management software, hunt around, find all the x rays? And then pick stuff out.

Pick all these patients.

Exactly. Previous patients, thousands of patients.

We go back by default, 18 months in time. But we can go back. In some cases. We’ve done, you know, 5 or 10 years and we basically highlight the characteristics of that patient population. So that’s where we’re actually starting to cut the stake for the practice, right? And that tool set really services management, IT services, front office hygiene and GPS. So you’re not just providing real time detections, you’re actually taking that analysis, you’re correlating it with this other data set about the characteristics of the patient and the other work they’re engaged in, what’s planned, what’s been scheduled, the notes, all that stuff. And you’re holistically bringing it all together.

Tell me about the sort of the offering to the dentist. Is it is it the monthly subscription? Is that how they pay for it? Does it integrate with the software? There? Practice management software? How easy is it to sort of onboard? You know, a lot of dentists are tech savvy, but a lot aren’t, right?

Yeah.

So it’s a monthly subscription, we think quite affordable relative to what we’re surfacing. In other words, typically, how much is it?

How much is it?

So I’ll give you the US dollars. It’s 299 US for second opinion per month and 595 for practice intelligence. However, we are surfacing typically thousands of dollars per week in incremental restorative opportunity, for example. So really you can pay for this whole thing, you know, within for the year, within 1 to 3 weeks. I mean, it is a is a big sort of production oriented ROI there. And we intentionally wanted to price it very accessibly because we do believe that this belongs, you know, in all dental practices globally.

And is that is that a per practice stroke per clinic fee or per practitioner or how.

Does that work? That’s per clinic, per practice.

So it doesn’t matter if there’s 20 dentists working in there or five dentists working in there. It’s a flat fee basis.

Typically we’re not really, but there is a limit at which if you’re like, you know, 30 operators, one of these kind of outlier practices, you might pay for a few licenses, but we’re pretty generous with the image counts. So I would say up to five practitioners. And then, you know, you might kick on another license. But if you’re a DSO and you have 100 locations, that’s 100, you know, typically 100 license.

Of course, of.

Course. And then what’s the distribution model? Are you I mean, have you got your own sales team in the US and you’re working with distributors abroad or how are you doing?

Good question. So basically, we have a variety of ways to access this technology. We have our standalone tool for second opinion, which integrates with pretty much every major imaging system and PMS out there. So you can just kind of subscribe and use this tool. Increasingly, we do have partnerships with a range of PMS and imaging partners out in the market and they’re engaging in more deep integrations where you’re able to actually access these capabilities just natively within your existing interface. So just one example of which there are many, you know, would be like Planmeca. We did a big announcement with them and they are integrating these capabilities into Amex’s you natively and directly so you don’t even have to go to another interface. You could easily turn it on. And from a distribution perspective, we have our own sales team both domestically and globally, but we also work with distributors in the UK. We work with Dental Directory, for example, and you know, we’re working with the various sort of channel partners to get the thing distributed.

I’m really curious about your backstory, right? I mean, I’m just sat here in awe blown away by what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved. But tell me a little bit about your backstory. You know, where you grew up, what sort of school you went to, what kind of kid you were, and how you managed to navigate to to where you are today. Were you were you some computer programmer type kid? Just just talk me through. Talk me through your upbringing.

Yeah. I’m actually very fortunate in that, like, I knew, I think from a fairly young age what my interests were and how I could apply them. So I was probably 13 or so and I was like, I think I’m going to run venture backed, you know, tech tech companies. And it was very much a programmer, sort of obsessed with all things technology and specifically programming. And that’s ultimately why what I ended up studying and I got my bachelor’s and master’s at Carnegie Mellon and it was just very clear on what I wanted to do. So I really feel like I’ve been at this for since I’ve been like 14. Wow. I actually started a company in in high school, which is kind of a development oriented interactive agency and, you know, sold that. And it’s kind of a. A typical story for people that are often sort of do what I do, which is you kind of identify young and start young and have the entrepreneurial bug. So for me, it was never really a question. And yeah, still, I still love it. I’m still fascinated by it. I don’t actually, you know, have hands on keyboard sort of programming day to day. I moved away from that quite a while ago.

When you were about.

15 or.

No, no, no.

It actually.

Did work.

I did. I did have one job in my life, um, working for a hedge fund. I worked for a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates out of college, uh, out in Connecticut. And I was a programmer there working on trading systems and whatnot. Did that for like a little over a year. And, and then I went and started a company and then I’ve been starting companies since.

Wow.

Okay, you don’t need to do this. What drives you now? I mean, surely the previous, you know, the gum gum success story, you could be sitting on a beach.

Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, I’ve actually been having this conversation. I don’t know that I will do it again in quite this way because it’s so much work and it’s it’s a pretty painful process. It’s never not hard to start a new company, especially when the expectation is to frankly, you know, quickly grow to $1 billion valuation and more. I mean, that is the hope and the expectation on the part of the financial backers and also on my part as well. So it’s a very intense sort of all consuming process and it’s probably why a lot of people in their 40s, you know, that have had success in their past, stop starting companies and go more so to the investment side or or do other types of work just because it is so consuming. But in particular with Pearl, I really felt that I was sitting in this very unique position where we had a lot of proficiency with this technology. It was very clear that this technology was going to have a massive impact on humanity and on medicine. And I just wanted to play a role in in sort of applying this technology to more impactful and meaningful effect. So I’m very proud of what we did at Gumgum. But a lot of it was selling advertisements, you know, and I became known as like a media guy, and I never felt like a media guy ever. And at some point I was like, okay, I think I just need to do something different before, you know, my career becomes a different kind of thing. And I did go to the board and I pitched him on the idea of spinning out of me going and running it. And, you know, that was surprising. And there was resistance to that concept because it was unexpected. But I think we created a scenario whereby it was it was very win win to go and do something that I thought would impact humanity more fundamentally.

So listen, going forward, then, what are you looking at in sort of a five year horizon? I mean, do you feel like your job will be done by then or how long will it take?

I don’t think the.

Job will ever be done. I mean, we have probably a five year roadmap that we’re engaged in. There’s a lot of obvious work to do, and then there’s less obvious work to do. But it all effectively revolves around how can we apply different forms of cutting edge AI and technology generally to help elevate the standard of care in dentistry and to help unburden dental practitioners? You know, dentists in particular have very, very stressful lives. My father I witnessed this, right. So you go to dental school, you become hopefully a good at practising dentistry, but suddenly you need to find real estate and you need to run a business and you need to do hiring and firing and you need to do back office and accounting. And it’s just a lot. Yeah. And, and.

You’re working, you’re working in it, not on it. That’s, that’s really a.

Big problem.

In it. Not on it exactly. And that’s just a lot. So I think that technology can be brought to bear increasingly to just help unburden practitioners and also elevate the standard of care for for practitioners, for for the patients.

What would you say is your superpower? I mean, how many how many people did you end up having in Gumgum?

Oh, uh, gosh, probably when I left around 650 or 700 or so.

700 employees.

Well.

So so so as a as a CEO, I guess you’re spending a bunch of time raising cash, then you’re spending a bunch of time selling the vision to everybody, Right. Including internally as well as externally. Right. What is it like? I mean, you’re you’re clearly a technology, you know. King as well. What is it about you that you know from your from your the way that you’ve worked, that you think is being your superpower in getting these companies off the ground, billion dollar valuation, so forth?

I think that is my I like building companies. I like taking ideas and making them a reality. I think when companies become about more so operational driving, operational efficiency, I get a little bit less interested. That’s definitely the stage that gum was at two. It’s just.

Like.

I don’t think I’m the best person at that, first of all. And I also am not the most interested in that. I’m more interested in 0 to 1 than 1 to 5, although it’s much more fun to be in the 1 to 5 mode because things tend to be sort of working and humming in in relation to raising money. For Pearl, it was a really different experience than gum. So gum gum we raised like, I don’t know, $130 million or something. When I raised my first, you know, 500 K, I was a nobody and had to pitch everybody and kind of sell the vision and and had to do a lot of that. And because I have a reputation and we built a successful company at Gum gum and have relationships raising the money for Pearl was one conversation with one person, literally did not speak to anyone else about it. So Dave David Sachs came to my office to just check in. Yeah, it was. It happened to be around the time where I decided to do this spin out and I was like, you know, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this thing and spinning out this company. What do you think? And he’s like, I think you should do it and I want to back it. And let’s just agree right now, like, name a price. And we shook hands and he did it.

How much did he give you?

How much did you give? You was right at the.

Beginning, wildly.

Easier when you have relationships and some success.

Under your belt. How much was that for? How much?

How much did he give you in that handshake?

11 million.

Before before you had.

Anything? No, because we had.

Incubated the idea. So we had some technology and some proof of concept, but we didn’t have much, to be honest. And frankly, I was probably overvalued relative to what we had pretty significantly. But he had faith. And his perspective is, you know, back good people back, good ideas, backed big markets and good things will happen, hopefully. And subsequent to that, we’ve brought on a number of other premier investors and it’s actually been incredibly easy and they’ve actually come to us. So that is not the typical story. I’m definitely very sympathetic to the other side of that reality, which I spent many years experiencing firsthand, but things have become markedly easier in that regard. It also helps that we’re doing this thing that everyone’s excited about in health care. So it’s a very bright spot within tech right now.

Yeah, as in as in from the from the investment perspective, people are still willing to invest in AI and health, whereas they’re not willing to invest in a whole lot of other tech, Right? Is that what you mean?

Correct.

It’s been a difficult it’s been a weird go at the whole from a market perspective since we launched Pearl because we had Covid and that was, you know, crazy. And then we had a bit of a financial meltdown. And, you know, then getting to the hopefully what is now a recovery. It’s been a very odd set of realities on a macro level.

So yeah, let’s get to the darker part of the podcast. We like talking about mistakes on this podcast, and a lot of times with dentists we talk about clinical errors that they’ve made. When I say mistakes, what comes to mind?

Um.

I mean, as it relates to Pearl in particular, I just think that the jury is still somewhat out on it. In other words, we received our FDA clearance in March of 2022. We’ve been commercialising to great effect since then and we’re growing very, very rapidly now. But I think that we have taken a certain strategic approach to the market that is ultimately going to determine how successful we are, you know, relative to anyone else engaging in the space. And I believe in our strategy and I stand by it. But I might find that there were some real errors there because you can’t do everything at one time. You have to kind of pick your lanes. You have to pick your distribution channels and you have to pick your partners and you have to pick the technology that you’re going to focus on, the problems you’re going to solve. There’s a lot of decisions that go into that with very imperfect information. I’m sure we didn’t do it perfectly, but I think that’s really going to sort of the mistakes that we made will rear their head over the coming years, and it’ll be more clear than right now. Right now, it’s such a greenfields opportunity. There’s so much demand, it’s so new, the market is so ripe that it’s hard to really tell. I can get into certain approaches that we took technologically, which ended up being dead ends, but that’s.

The price of progress. Yeah.

Yeah. So we took certain approaches technologically from a from a machine learning and training perspective that, you know, we’re, we’re wrong that we had to backtrack on and do better. I think that the way that we approached regulatory was, in retrospect, incredibly bold with the FDA. For example, we went after ten clearances at one time. Wow, nobody’s ever done that before. It ended up working out, but I think it was also a big risk to have to have done it that way. So I don’t want to say we got lucky, but it was definitely a risk and that was a function of not really knowing on some level what we were doing, even though we were sort of advised, I don’t know. I don’t want to I don’t want to give you a I don’t want to shy away from the answer.

I just had a mistake. It Yeah.

If you have ever had one of these as an entrepreneur. Right. And look, I’m a very small business owner, right? But I’ve had numerous falling down moments, right? Oh, shit. I’m in. I’m in the deepest, darkest hole. Right. How the hell am I going to get out of this, right? Emotionally, emotionally, you’re in that space where you don’t know whether to cry, laugh, break down, whatever that is. If you ever had those moments and what were they and how did you get out of the hole?

Oh, so many times. I mean, so often. So. So I’ve had those moments a lot, which is why it’s such a difficult and miserable endeavour to start a company like this. So with Pearl, it’s an easy one. I mean, there’s been plenty of those moments, but, you know, the most obvious one would just be, okay, now we’ve spent, you know, X amount of millions or tens of millions of dollars, and if we don’t get this regulatory clearance, we literally cannot operate. And I will have failed. I would have lost all the investor capital. I would have been a fraud and all those feelings, Right. And then that same thing comes to bear when you’re entering new countries and big partnerships or, you know, there’s just, you know, while we’re doing well at the moment and everyone’s very excited, like it does not feel like we’ve punched through into being a big company by any stretch. So that’s a very familiar feeling. It was a very familiar feeling at Gumgum. It’s all the same exact feeling. Everything that you mentioned, Yeah, it just coming in different in different forms. But yeah.

You’ve got a two year old kid, was that right? Did I hear that right? Yeah, yeah. Just talk to me about work life balance and what a day in the life of fear is like and how do you balance your duty and your role as a father and making that time and space. Maybe you’re one of these guys who manages it incredibly well and what a typical day looks like and how you manage your time.

Yeah, well, my partner, she’s a she’s a filmmaker, so she’s a writer director. She actually just made a movie. So she’s been in the editing room for the past three months. Every day. Yeah. Um, I actually so in during Covid, we became a remote company and that was actually pretty functional for us. There are some drawbacks of it, but while the majority of the executive team is in Los Angeles, we now have people kind of everywhere and we operate very remotely. So I do primarily work from home, um, which has actually been wonderful because that means I’m able to see my kid a lot in a way that I never would have been able to before if I was working. Pearl Like hours from an office, that would be difficult. Um, so that’s been a really nice feature of that reality. I’m able to pop up and, you know, spend 5 or 10 minutes and that makes a big difference. I would not say there’s a, it’s a I would not say there’s a very good. To work life. It’s kind of always the work is always on. I’ve gotten good at separating the two, at not letting you know the the current feeling about about the company sort of overshadow everything else, which is a skill you have to have, I think if you’re an entrepreneur, but it also makes it so that you know the two year old, it’s such a fun time and they’re so joyful and they’re so cute and it’s just actually like a great escape. So I feel pretty good about it and I feel very fortunate to be to be remote in that regard.

So I’ve got another question related to that, and it relates back to me right when Covid kicked off and we were forced to work at home, it was such a beautiful time because I was forced to spend that time and be present with kids, with my wife. And even till today, I will say for me personally, it was a bit of a blessing because I connected with with my kids and my wife in a way that I wouldn’t have done. I definitely wouldn’t have done during that time, right? Yeah. But then that became the norm. So we went back to work and perhaps started working from home and we became a remote company, right? And then what happened is the divide between work Prav husband, Prav and Dad Prav almost amalgamated into one. So this was very difficult for me to mentally shift between being work Prav and Dad Prav with within like 10s right? And then husband Prav and then walk into this home office where I’m sat now and then become the work guy, right? Mentally, I struggled with that to a point where in January I just had to get myself an office only 15 minutes from home. Right? But to make that mental shift of I’m going to work and then then the guy who’s going to walk through the door at the end of the workday is your husband and your dad. And and that that for me personally, I needed to make that shift because I felt like I was blurring the line between that and I wasn’t being challenged. Wasn’t being present. Do you do you feel that you just mentioned you go and like steal like ten minutes of joy here.

And provide office.

Space options for all of our employees for that reason? So if they want to go work out of the office, we provide them the ability to do that. For me, having worked in an office for so many years and doing the commuting in LA, I happen I’m fortunate enough to have a guest house that’s set far away from the main house that nobody ever goes to. So I.

Feel very.

Very quiet and I’m uninterrupted. For me, it’s more so about state of mind like, yeah, it’s not about the amount of time. It’s really about being in a good frame of mind, being present. And that’s where it can be challenging when you’re preoccupied with with other things.

What’s the competitive environment like? There must be there must be competitors. Who are they?

There are two competitors with FDA clearance in the United States. They don’t have clearances globally. So, you know, we’re competing on one way domestically and in a different manner globally. Certain other countries like basically have very like if you look at Australia and there’s not much not much else out there other than Pearl. And if you look at the UK, it’s more so regional sort of efforts often coming out of university with some subset of capabilities. Nobody’s really brought the kind of capital and firepower that we’ve brought to bear on this challenge. But you know, there are, you know, an array of competitors out there and, you know, there also an array of countries that have different sort of areas of focus. So I do think that there’ll be some confluence of companies that do certain things well that will help push those capabilities into the market. It won’t just be Pearl, you know, that’s not what we want. But I would say that it would be really hard for any new entity to enter the market now relative to where it’s at. It would just take years by default and a lot of money. So even if you’re a very large company, very committed to this, you probably have to buy something and and approach it that way versus build.

When you say people focusing on different parts of the market, do you mean some people focussed on dentists, some people focussed on DSOs? What?

Well, more so. Like some people might focus on applications for payers, right? For insurance companies, or they might focus specifically on C.F. or CT and not so much on 2D, or you have companies like Dental monitoring who’s really ortho focussed and not really focussed on radiographic anything, but more so on their own forms of AI and stuff like that. I mean there’s a lot of or you know, you have smile design which, which is employing AI to great effect. You have all types of laboratory applications that are, you know, applying AI for, you know, designing. Aspirations and stuff like that. There’s lots of stuff.

So before we looked at some of your darkest kind of days, when you look back on your career, what are the sort of the highlight days? What comes to mind when I say that? The high points. Was it like selling these companies or.

The high points for me are always pretty much the same. I remember the day where I realised that gum Gum had a thing that the market wanted enough that I could repeatedly provide to them, and I was like, okay, now we can just do this. And there’ll be a lot of challenges and growing pains, but now we know what to do. You’re not kind of meandering in the forest trying to figure it all out, right? And I would say that that’s a common experience across my companies and that I typically tend to do things that were historically never done before and unproven, and it was unclear if they were possible. We had a similar moment, I would say, at Pearl not even that long ago, where I was like, okay, this feels is like a more comfortable place to be because we know what we’re doing and we know that the market wants it. We know it’s good enough, all of that. So for me as an entrepreneur, that’s always the best moment because it’s like a real release that is often pent up for years. But you know, a lot of highlights along the way. Of course.

You said before.

When you’re looking at when you’re looking at all or nothing with the regulatory and you’re thinking about the investors money and that weighs on you, does it weigh on you when you have 700 employees or do you not? Are you not wired that way? You know, like are you thinking. Are you thinking that, you know, all of these people’s lives are dependent on whether we make it or not? Is that not in your thinking?

Is the question Is the fact that we’ve taken on a lot of capital and how will this responsibility kind of weighing on me all the time or not?

Is that capital?

Yeah, but but also the number of people, people that you have.

Yeah, it’s a lot of responsibility. And not only that, but it’s really like it’s responsibility to people who are giving like the entirety of themselves to the effort. So like, you really don’t want to let them down because they’re giving you so much, right? And you feel a lot more responsibility because of that. This is not your typical 9 to 5 work. This is like we’re all figuring it out together. We’re pulling weekends or pulling nights. And and yeah, I mean, like I said before, I think you have to get pretty good at sort of managing that level of responsibility and also separating it out and on some level realising that like you’re doing everything you can, you’re doing the best job you can do, and sometimes you just need to like let that be enough rather than drive yourself insane. But yeah, it’s all it’s all a big deal.

But you must have had moments where you’ve had some employee who’s really, really pulled weekends for you, laid their lives down for you, and then some. For some reason you have to let that person go.

Yeah, many times.

And that’s how do you deal with I think that’s like the hardest thing in all of business, right? Because it’s mean. It’s even hard to let people go who are terrible. But when someone’s been really good and really tried their best for you and laid their lives on the line for you to let that person go.

It’s the hardest thing to do. I feel that I have done that many times.

Many times.

Yeah. I mean, over, you know, a thousand plus employees and you have a lot of people that are very dedicated and their heart’s in the right place, but they’re just the wrong fit for your organisation for any number of reasons. Either they’re a skill set thing or it’s a talent thing or it’s a culture thing, right? And the best thing that you can do, in my opinion, is be honest, be kind, be generous with those people and try to be helpful to them. But you have to protect the enterprise as a whole. And you have to make, in my opinion, very swift decisions as it relates to the to the personnel at the organisation and this is why I don’t like the family analogy for companies, because you can’t fire your family. You know, I’ve tried but.

But you know, a.

Professional sports team, which is a good analogy that you know Reed Hastings uses a Netflix I’m kind of stealing that, but I think it’s the perfect one because we’re recruiting top athletes and we’re expecting a lot from them and they get released if they’re not contributing in the way that we need them to. And that’s a much better analogy. That’s much more accurate, I think.

And who who’s inspired you in business or who are who are the people you look up to in business?

Um.

You know, I find myself thinking, well, there’s a lot of people that I sort of more current that I know personally that I look up to a lot. But I find myself very cliche, I’m sure thinking of Steve Jobs a lot. I mean, what a phenomenal visionary. I know that he was very hard on people and could be, you know, a real. Hole and all that. But I think his level of of vision and commitment, like I understand where he’s coming from when he’s flying off the handle because he cares so deeply. Now, that might be the wrong human oriented approach, but I kind of understand and I’m sympathetic to like what he’s going through internally because he just wants to bring this thing to the world in a very, um, in an elevated manner. So, you know, I think there’s, there’s obviously many, but that’s one amazing.

I think we get to the final questions now.

Right Let’s get to the final questions.

Um, so we usually close off with, with the same final questions or fear and so, so my question is this a fear you’ve, you’ve conquered everything that you can in dentistry and I and and the business is financially done everything and you’ve achieved everything in life and you come to that point where it’s your last day on the planet and and your, your your little one is, is next to you and you’re surrounded by your loved ones and you have to leave three pieces of wisdom. What would they be?

First of all, how dare you for asking this hard question. I was telling you, Payman. I hope they had it sooner, but I’ll do my best.

Okay.

So I guess three pieces of advice. One would be. One for humanity generally, which I think would be well served to remember, which is it’s extremely miraculous that we’re alive and exist at all today. Like floating on this rock. And an infinite number of weird circumstances have led to the fact that life is possible at all. But the fact that we’re also living at a time of general peace and prosperity is just insanely fortunate and unlikely. And I think that to be driven by gratitude and love and light of that reality day to day is is well founded. And an important thing to keep in mind because we get very myopically focussed on, you know, the next thing or making more money or, you know, achieving and all this material stuff. But just the fact that we’re here at all is a real gift.

So do practice gratitude like in a in an organised way. Do you do it every day or something?

Oh, man. You know, one of the sacrifices that you make when you build a company like Pearl, because I got to that point at Gumgum, I had all this like time in a way that I got back to do the things that I wanted to do. That’s the nice thing about having a larger company is you can kind of focus where you want to focus. You have an amazing team elsewhere and you can get back to being a human being with a life and in particular interests. And you get into yoga and meditation and just like self-healing, you know, and all this stuff. And the truth is, all that goes out the window largely when you start a new enterprise because it’s gruelling and you’re just like, it’s painful, right? And there’s a lot of suffering. So I think that that’s the real cost that people just keep in mind if they want to start a business, that’s the sacrifice that you end up making. That is a very significant one, and nobody is really spared from that. I don’t think you could be somewhat better or worse in managing it, but you’re not really getting out of it. And you know, when you care a lot about something, I don’t think people mind working hard. But if you’re like, you work really hard and the thing is not realised, there’s just a certain type of pain associated with that that I think is challenging uniquely. So I guess the second one, I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’m getting back to it on some level, but I’ve probably been kind of bad at actively doing that. I’m playing more tennis. You know, I have a wood shop, so I do a lot of woodworking. I could always tell about my like the state of my mental health is a function of how often I’m in the wood shop.

That’s always a good time.

So you know a lot more now than it was, you know, a year and a half ago, say And another piece of advice, I guess, would be to find things to be genuinely interested in and vigorously pursue them. I think that I know a lot of smart, interesting people that are just not interested. And I think that’s a real struggle. And I feel for those people because I think there’s something they don’t want that it’s just that they can’t quite find it. But to the extent that you can, then I think that’s an important part of life. And then also just to be courageous in your decisions, because I think that fortune favours folks who are courageous and there’s obviously inherent risk in that. And you want to be smart alongside being courageous. But my guess is on a deathbed, a lot of regret will come as a function of not having been courageous.

Very true. Very true.

And and so how would you like to be remembered or fear was and finish the sentence.

Um.

My wife always says, you know. You’re not necessarily like super nice, but you’re very. But you’re. But you’re super good.

Um, and I think that’s accurate.

I’m not the I’m not mean at all, but I’m just very blunt. Um, and, but I’m, but I do feel like I’m good. Like, I want the right good things for, for my people and humanity. So maybe that.

The.

Blunt, good guy.

Yeah, the blunt.

Good guy.

Exactly.

Very cool. And then. Hey, do you want to finish with yours?

Yeah. We’ve got a fantasy dinner party.

Yeah, right. This is a tough one, too, because giving the hard question. So three.

People you want to spend.

Time with, dead or alive.

And I assume that these people could come if they come from different eras, the same language and conversation and all of that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my.

Mind immediately, just a science nerd in me goes to like Alan Turing and Lady Lovelace and Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton and people like that. But. I guess.

It depends on what you’re optimising for.

So that’s a certain kind of optimisation.

If you’re optimising.

For something that’s historically interesting, maybe like Jesus or Moses and like Julius Caesar and like, you know, like Washington or something like that. But I think if you’re optimising for just like something that is highly entertaining, maybe. Fran Lebowitz. Christopher Hitchens. Like Einstein, I imagine. I feel like he’s a very.

It would be fun.

Entertaining one.

It’s a question.

But an interesting one. Yeah.

It’s been a massive pleasure to have you on. It really has been great.

Thank you for your time.

And I’m feel pretty sure Perl is going to do very, very well. And I can see by the team in the UK are doing a great job. You know, they they’ve gotten that name out there and they’re they’re at all the right places. So it’s good. It’s good to see that too. Really, really massive. Pleasure to have you, buddy. Well done. Good job.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It was a real pleasure. It’s a unique podcast and appreciate the thoughtful questions.

Thanks a lot, man.

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.

On Monday, we woke up to the awful news that Dr. Uchenna Okoye had been taken away from us so suddenly. Uchenna was a close friend of mine, although I suspect there’s going to be literally thousands of us who feel that way about her. She had a unique humanity about her, a kind person who you’d instantly open up to. One of the most infectious personalities that I’ve ever come across. Her wonderful smile, her laser sharp intellect. I’d always looked forward to having dinner with Uchenna, knowing I’d be laughing all night and I’d be challenged all night as well. When I worked with her, she was such a professional, hardworking, willing to take on new challenges with with substance and style. She was a real trailblazer in so many ways. Her ability to connect with people, her patients, her staff at the brilliant London, smiling and with the whole nation with her regular TV appearances. Couple that with a strong sense of right and wrong and integrity in both her professional and her personal life. As I try to find some comfort from this tragedy, I find myself thinking that even though she was taken way, way too young, unlike so many of us, at least, she really lived. She loved. She laughed. She inspired so many. Her legacy will live on for years and years. She made a real difference to the world. Uchenna leaves a young daughter who she adored. Our thoughts are with her and with the whole family. She had a strong sense of faith, and I’ll know. I know they’ll trust in a bigger plan for her in heaven. As I read the comments and tributes to her on social media, one by Dr. Bediako really strikes me. You are larger than life. You made a mark on this world. Your legacy will live on and will change many lives for generations to come. Gone, but not forgotten. Uchenna, you’re the best. We miss you and we thank you. Dr. Uchenna Okay.

But make it very clear that this is what you’re signing up to. And sometimes people say, Do you actually want me to work here? And I’m like, Yeah, but if you’re going to go to Oxford and Cambridge, you know what you’re up against. You don’t have to come to Oxford and Cambridge. You can go somewhere else. But if you want to join us, it’s not easy. And I know that it’s not easy. So yeah, I don’t know if that made me an evil witch.

Yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah.

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’s my great pleasure to welcome.

My long time friend, Uchenna Okoye on the podcast. Yu-chien has had a brilliant career in dentistry, one of the most high profile dentists.

In the country right now and for a long time now. Welcome to the show, Uchenna.

Thank you. It’s good to be here. It’s taking you a while. You finally pinned me down, haven’t you?

You’re a busy woman, that’s why. Let’s. Let’s, let’s, let’s just start with, you know, where did you grow up? When did you think you want to be a dentist? Why?

Well, I was born in Nigeria, so I’m the oldest of six. And I grew up there, came over to England when I was about seven. And all I remember is how cold it was. And it’s still cold. I hate the cold. Um, and yeah, I went to school here. I went back to Nigeria for a year when I was about 1011 and then came back to England after that. So yeah, I’ve been here for a long time.

And what brought you back and forth? Um.

We came because my mom is a pharmacist, so she came to do her masters and we were never meant to stay here. So then my dad was like, We were becoming too anglicised. He used to moan that my my brother started talking through his nose. So posh accent. So we went back to boarding school and I went back for a year, kind of went thinking. I grew up on all these Saint Trinian’s and Malory Towers and thought I was going to Swiss boarding school. And instead it was like in the middle of the jungle and snakes and all that kind of stuff, which now was a great experience. Then thought my father hated me. So I went for a year. And it was great though, because it helped keep me, you know, have a real love of Nigeria. So if somebody asks me where I’m from, even though I’ve lived most of my life in England, I’d say Nigeria. That’s kind of where it resonates. And then I got ill and came back just after a year and then never left, really.

What made you become a dentist?

Um, it was a toss up between dentistry and medicine. You know, traditional African family. You could be a lawyer, dentist, accountant, all that kind of stuff. So originally it was going to be medicine because my uncle was a doctor, and then I did a work experience in the hospital and realised that the doctors didn’t do and it was the nurses that did the caring, didn’t like the hospital environment, which I still don’t. And yeah, dentistry is just great and I love it. I love it because, you know, get to be my own boss. I get to be artistic and it’s just the best job. But at the time, you know, when I told my dad that I was going to be a dentist, he was very dismissive. He was like, You’re not, you know, in Nigeria we have great teeth. That’s not a proper job. It’s not a proper doctor kind of thing. But yeah, he was very proud in the end.

What does your dad do?

Oh, I had a wonderful childhood. He’s he’s. He’s passed, unfortunately, quite a while ago now. But he had an ice cream factory.

Oh, really?

Was in the ice cream factory. And it’d be like one scoop for me and one scoop for he was way ahead of his time. He was an amazing entrepreneur, and I wish he was alive now because there’s so many questions I’d ask him and I’d say sorry to him because, you know, as kids we’d be like, Why can’t you take a holiday? It’s your factory. You can just take time off, you know, like now I own my own business and I’m like, Now I understand.

And where did you study dentistry?

I went to Guy’s when it was Guy’s, so. Yeah, so the secondary primary school, secondary school went to Guy’s, which wasn’t the best experience. Think Guy’s was fabulous from the perspective of teaching and even now. Well, it used to be that I could tell the difference between the guy’s graduate, you know, the things that we were taught and how we were taught. But I honestly did not like being at uni. So yeah, it is what it is.

Why?

There was loads of racism, so I guess you might as well dive straight into that one. Didn’t know if I wanted to be there because obviously the parental thing, you know, my dad’s attitude towards dentistry impacted me quite a bit. So initially my first year was about changing to medicine because that’s what my parents felt was the, you know, the right thing to do. So but, you know, there weren’t many people that looked like me, guys. It was you know, I made friends and it was a great education, but. Uh, guys kind of was. I still remember it, the comments like, um, that, you know, like how you’d have demonstrators and stuff and they’d come and they’d look at my work and they’d be like, Oh, that’s a really good feeling, you chenna for you. So there was always that what I call subtle British, you know, racism type thing. Um, and a few of us had a rough time there, but, you know, it’s part of who we were because in Nigeria we have tribalism, so we have different tribes. So I’m kind of, you know, that happens. And my parents very much just be the best that you can be and nobody cares who you are kind of thing. So it’s just stiff upper lip. So I found the whole Black Lives Matter thing quite interesting. Yeah, Let’s.

Tackle, let’s tackle it because I mean, it was a whole different era as well back then. I mean, we’re kind of similar age, me and you. So I, I think we, I can relate to that idea that, you know, what was acceptable to say back then is different now. But, but, you know, being a Nigerian lady and we’ll get to the lady part as well being a Nigerian lady. Take us from experiences that you’ve had that you would class as race, racist, race related experiences, getting jobs. Has that been an issue, patients walking in and being shocked or whatever? I know people who wear hijabs sometimes say that. They say patient comes in and immediately you can tell and bring it right down to today. Are we saying today it’s all over and there isn’t so much racism and, you know, the whole Black Lives Matter and all that. But give us some give us give us some of your comments about race and in your sort of growth from being a teenager to.

I mean, I guess upbringing has a big role to play in one’s perception of of stuff. So, you know, because okay, like I still my first memory of school in England when I would have been about 7 or 8, you know, like I was really proud of my English because although Nigeria has loads of languages, English is actually our official first language. So we could speak English. And I was being asked to in primary school to, to read a story and the whole class bursting into laughter because of my thick Nigerian accent. So it’s kind of like, you know, from that beginning things or kids, you know, ask me about worms in my hair or, you know, or being called rubber lips, you know, Now patients want me to inject filler so that their lips look like I mean, I mean, I just find the whole thing quite bizarre. Um, so it’s kind of like always there. You’re aware of it, but for me, it’s just you just get on with it, you know? It’s not something that defines me or I spent a lot of time thinking about. And I think for me it was more difficult as well, because you’re a black woman in a, you know, in a very male chauvinistic white world, you know, or whatever. But so, so I get stuff of the woman bit where it’s, Oh, are you the nurse type stuff or, you know, or the letters addressed to Mr. Okoye and all that kind of stuff. The black thing I haven’t had, like a direct spit in your face. You’re black, you know, type experience. I have always known and was always told from day one, you’re black. So you have to work harder, you know? But then my family is and my mother especially is like classic African. Well, why are you second? Why are you not the one that was first? You know what’s so it’s just always been there. And so that’s like.

So what do you think about Black Lives Matter?

I found it really interesting on lots of different ways. Um, I mean, I’m glad that the conversation is being had and it’s long overdue. Um, I found it irritating that a lot of friends were looking to me to kind of almost absolve them or to tell them what they should do, or they’re like, you know, we’re sorry this happened to you and all this kind of stuff. Like, I’m just like, Why are you what what do you want me to say? Or what do you want me to do? Like, and they’re like, Oh, teach us. I’m like, It’s not up to me to teach you. You need to go and find out for yourself kind of thing. So that was. Surmised that on the one hand. I mean, I. You know, I’m glad that they wanted to know and all the rest of it. But it felt, again, that the burden was on me to make them feel better about themselves or to give them the information that they needed to know. I’m like, No, you need to. It’s your turn to live in my world. So that was one. But then the other thing that it did was it made me think about stuff that maybe you just ignore. You know? And I think that’s probably what I found the most uncomfortable, you know, to kind of just sit back and think, oh, all right, there was that time and whatever. But I really didn’t dwell on it. I think I’m glad it’s happened. And I’m one of those people that I’m like, Absolutely. That whole affirmative action thing. I know some people feel that it’s, you know, it’s a bad thing or whatever. It’s not about putting people that can’t do the thing in the in the post. It’s about giving them an opportunity. And as a woman, it’s exactly the same scenario. You know, whether it’s your black or a woman, it’s other people to kind of encourage you and and mentor you. And there’s not enough of that in dentistry.

You really think that we’ve talked about this a few times, me and you, I think in the past some some dinner somewhere. But you really think it’s a lot harder being a woman than a man?

Yeah. You know, it’s good that you’re where you are and I’m where I am because, of course it is. And to be slapping you about the face, of course.

But listen, is it harder being a black woman or a black man? I’d rather be a black woman.

Why?

Because I’m not going to get the cops stopping me and thinking I’m a criminal every five minutes.

That is true. That is true. I definitely agree with you that. But then there comes another baggage you have to carry.

Where I’m making an example, an example of where it is advantageous to be a woman over being a man. I’m not I’m not I’m not pivoting my whole argument on that. What I’m saying is there are advantages to being a man, advantages to being a woman. When you say it’s harder to be a woman than a man. Let’s go to dentistry. Let’s go to dentistry. Go on.

Tell me why it’s harder to be a woman. I think, by the.

Way, by the way, by the way, outside of child care. Yeah, because that’s obvious. Yeah.

No, that’s. You can’t say out. You can’t just take the child care thing out. That’s.

Oh, oh, okay. Okay.

That’s a huge thing because the guys should be involved in the child care as well. Nobody asks that dude. Oh, who’s looking after the kids here whilst you’re in your work and all that nonsense?

My point my point is, if we just crop children out of the equation. Yeah, yeah, children out of the equation. Because obviously you have to take to have a child, you have to have maternity, you have to look after kids. And kids tend to, you know, a lot of them tend to to, to look to their mother and all of that. But I’m saying just let’s just say let’s leave childcare out of it in terms of career progression, just as a man, dentist, as a woman, dentist, where are the problems?

Number one, you can’t leave children out of it. So sorry, can’t agree there at all.

But let’s say before you have children, like, you know, if you’re 25 year old who’s never had children, you’re a guy or a girl. There’s no there’s no children.

So they still because I think as a woman, you generally think a lot of the things that women are really good at is not what’s the word? Don’t think.

Confrontational stuff.

Yeah, like like women we’re into we’re nurturers. We we’re team builders. You know, if I’m if I’m in a room and we’re discussing a problem, my natural thing is to ask everybody and get everybody involved and all that kind of stuff. And that’s not something that is, um, I don’t know if encouraged is the right word or admired or whatever. It’s the bloke that doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but opens his mouth first and shouts out whatever is then perceived to be like, Oh yeah, he’s, you know, he’s, um. He’s got something to say and he’s, he’s making a contribution. Whereas women, we tend to sit back and we tend to be much more inclusive and want to try and involve people. So think that can create a problem and think like in dentistry. So how can you have a profession where the majority of, you know, even if you start even at my time in dentistry, it’s 50% women, you know, now it’s probably more women are the key elements that’s going to keep things going. But you don’t see women up there on the podium like you’re one of the few people that you know. Like when I kind of did a couple of things with you and it tends to be more, you know, you tend to have a few women smattered in there, but a lot of times the women aren’t there, but don’t think it’s necessarily because it’s just like not being aware. It’s like the Black Lives Matter thing, you know? It’s just not even.

Listen, I’ve been it’s been levelled at me. I think Bertie was the one who said it to me. We had a conference, The minimalist. I spoke, Prav spoke, and there was nine speakers and there was only one woman amongst them. And I hadn’t really thought about it, you know, I wasn’t really thinking about that question. And Bertie said to me, You should have had half and half. And I thought I found it a bit difficult, you know, because I wanted to make the best conference I could make. And I was thinking, Oh, I want someone from orthodontics. And it was minimally invasive. Someone from orthodontics, someone from Crown and Bridge, someone from whitening marketing person. I’m thinking, who are the best people I know for it rather than, you know, trying to find a woman. So there’s that. But but the other thing is that and I’ve discussed this before as well, is that if you really cared about women in dentistry, wouldn’t you look at nurses, hygienists, receptionists, they get a really rough deal in dentistry. Yeah, they’re the ones. Me Yeah. The fact that you all right. You’re not seeing dentists on the podium. That’s. That’s not the big issue about women in dentistry. The big issue about women in dentistry is that that group, the ones I said the Dcp’s are overwhelmingly women. Yeah. And their career prospects, what happens to them the way they talk down to by their bosses, all of that stuff? Yeah, that’s the real problem with women in dentistry.

No, don’t, don’t what you’re talking about, mate.

Really? Go on the hygienist forum. See what the way some hygienists are treated by their bosses.

Yeah, but. But that’s just think it has to start from the top because part of the thing of having more women like on the podium one is that from an inspiring perspective but to, to reflect the reality of the profession, you know, even within dentistry dental school. So I mean it’s a slightly off the cuff relevance this but had I had this fallout with quite a well known journalist, you know, from from a national magazine where we were talking about I was like flipping through the magazine one day, stick with me. There is relevance to this. And I was just like suddenly thought nobody in this magazine that looks like me, like like I get this magazine all the time and I love it and I love the articles and all the rest of it. I’m like and I just, like, flicked through the whole thing. Where am I? And they were like about to adverts or something that had somebody with colour. And so I knew her and it was like about midnight. I must have been quite grumpy or something. So I sent her an email, a message. I’m like, and she replied, And so we got into this altercation. I mean, we’re friends where she was like, I can’t believe you’re trying to say that I’m racist. You know? I’m like, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying I’m going through your magazine. I can’t see anybody that looks like me.

What was it, fashion magazine or something?

It was like a Sunday magazine type thing, you know, like style, style or whatever. Yeah. And so she was so affronted that she went to all the trouble of getting all the magazines, sending me a PowerPoint of all the things that had pictures or articles of people of black people. And so I smiled. I’m like, Yeah, there’s Beyonce here, there’s Will Smith, there’s whatever. I’m like, That’s so great. But I’m talking about people like me. I’m talking about doctors, dentists. And then that particular week it was interesting that there was a feature about lipsticks and they put lipsticks on. It was like a whole page of different lips, and there was not a single black brown lip there. Like there was just nothing. So I’m like, it’s about this. It’s about the fact that nobody has thought about this, that I’m not representing. I know that you’re all wonderful or whatever. You’re just going for that which you know, and that which you’re around. So you obviously don’t hang around with enough fabulous women that when you put on your lecture, they didn’t even occur to you. Or maybe if you’d hung around them more, you’d know it was more of an issue. And you like I do get it.

I’m not rejecting it outright. I do get it. I know.

You do. I know you’re right. That’s why I love you.

I do get it. But what I’m what I’m saying is, is that, you know, I couldn’t find the best people. That was that was my primary.

That’s a load of rubbish. No, no, no. Sorry.

No, no. Didn’t engage even the best men. Yeah.

No, you didn’t look hard enough.

I look. I look.

No, no. You just went to your buddies that you knew. Hey, can you, like, you know, the guys that you hang out with or the rest of the of, you know, And this happens so, so many times. And I will. No, I won’t. So.

No, go ahead.

Go ahead. Go for it. Go for it.

We’ll cut it out. Go on.

I will go there with, for example, you did ask me before about BPD and they’re doing job and all the rest and I’m not going to go into it. But that’s a classic one of what you’ve just said. So this group of great guys who I know, most of them like nobody, you know, that picture, that picture where there was all these men that they’d had their conference when the organisation first set up. And I’m just like, There is not one single woman and none of them saw that. Like, and then you ask like, what the hell happened? And it was like, Yeah, you know, we’re all buddies. We all hang out together. And some of us just thought, Hey guys. And we just happened to have this conference call and nobody there was thinking about it at all. So that’s why the conversation needs to be had, because if you have a you know, it’s scientifically proven that a, that an organisation that’s got that diversity is so much better, it’s so much more effective, it just functions better, you know, than just people that are all. Yeah. Anyway, so that’s all I’m going to say about that. But so that’s why and even when you’re talking about the thing about, um, you know, the dcp’s or hygienists or whatever, it’s again having the women there that will bring their problems to the front, to the first, so to speak. So I don’t know if it’s Facebook or what’s her name, the, the woman that’s, uh, Brains. Brains gone, huh?

The woman that what?

Oh, what’s her name?

The woman. The what? What does she do? I’ll tell. You know.

Isn’t it. Is she one? The CEO is the Facebook now. It’s not Arianna.

It’s the one that came from Google. Yeah.

Anyway, huh? Was talking about the fact of it wasn’t until she got she got pregnant because she suddenly realised that there was no parking, like she had to park for miles to waddle to wherever she needed to be. And so she was it was something that affected her. None of the guys had thought about it. None of them had had. It wasn’t there at all. And so that affected a change because she was there and she had Cheryl. Cheryl something about.

It. Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg, thank you. Yeah, she’s she’s one of the people that would love to sit and have a coffee with.

Definitely. Definitely. When did you start stop becoming just a regular, you know, general dentist and look to cosmetic dentistry because that’s definitely what you’re known for.

Yeah, I mean, I still consider myself a regular dentist. I’m a regular dentist. That just happens to be on TV. It’s not. It’s not. I didn’t go seeking to be doing what I’m doing. I think I got involved with cosmetics because, one, I’m a dental phobic, you know, I’m afraid if I had some really bad experiences and going to Aacd and I can’t remember how I got to Aacd the first time and it just totally blew my mind. It just opened me up to a whole world that I wasn’t even aware of. And that kind of started my my journey. And I started out with quite a lot of people. It’s like sometimes it’s a thing that dentists do that get really cross with people that behave as if they’ve always known what they know. Now, you know, they forget what it was like to know nothing. You know, like there was a time I didn’t know what a zenith was. And sometimes I’ll see some well known people putting other people down. I’m like, I was on the same course as you when you didn’t know any of this as well. So you need to be kind. You need to be kind to each other. And so yeah, that kind of started the journey and I’ve just loved it.

And I’ve always gone to America because I find it’s more forgiving. Um, more. I’m not a dentist. Dentist, as you probably you have told me many times before. And in fact, like I was saying to one of my team that if you had a year book guys, I’d probably be the person that people would say least likely to succeed. And um, they’re they are quite amazed, I’m told, apparently with my success which is, which is a bit irritating, but a part of me is like, no, no, no, no, no. But it is. I was always, you know, like I was a nerd at dental school. I was, you know, like I was like a mr. Bean kind of dental surgeon. Like if you’re disclosing somebody’s teeth, I would be the person that would drop the disclosing tablet on the patient’s white shirt. You know, that that that was me. So I have a lot of affinity and empathy for people that don’t know what they’re doing, that kind of that whole imposter syndrome thing. It’s always something that I always kind of struggle with. I’m told it keeps me humble, so that’s good.

It. Definitely humble, considering everything you’ve achieved, that’s for sure. But how did the thing happen?

Just busy minding my business, doing what I do, and they just approach me. It wasn’t because I was sleeping with a producer, as one very well known dentist told me.

Is that is that the kind of thing you mean about women? Yeah.

I mean, like, who would go and ask a guy that kind of ridiculous question, You know, like, um. So just they just came one day and they said, why are you.

I mean, did you have a PR working for you at the time? Why are you I mean, they could have gone to anyone.

No, I think there was stuff in in press about me. Okay. Um, so I started off, I had a I had like a part time PR person because I have her. Then I don’t think she was with me then.

You were very strong.

On your own PR, weren’t you? Because. Because we’re the practices are the very near sort of journalistic centres and you’ve always thought was always surprised me, is how strong you are at PR yourself without using professionals. I mean, it’s almost like you treat these people, isn’t it? That’s that’s the the rest of us have to get PR people to bring these journalists in. You mean you’re just their dentist? Yeah.

So it’s it’s the thing that I say to people, especially now in this whole Instagram era where don’t do the work for the picture or for the PR or for the article, do it because it’s the right thing to do. So when the reasons that I have a lot of journalists and people at my practice is because they might come, you know, like I had one Hannah who came for a whitening feature for I think it was The Telegraph, and she’d had whitening before, like about three years ago by another dentist who I knew. And she was like quite nervous. And she was like, it was so painful before. And I’m like, This woman had so much recession. Like it would have been like pouring acid in a wound. I don’t understand how anybody could, honestly. But but this person, the remit is do whitening one hour of my time or whatever and have articles. So instead I did buckle composites everywhere, sealed everything off. She was like, Oh my God. So this is what people that don’t suffer with sensitivity. This is how teeth are meant to feel. Then did the whitening. It was only the whitening that appeared on the article. But that’s okay. And I didn’t charge her for the bonding because it’s a PR thing. But that’s the right thing to do. You know.

Use the right whitening system for that.

You hadn’t come along then and that’s why they all stay, you know, and that’s why even though they might do an article, then they come back and, you know, and so like with the ten years younger, they just came, they came, they looked at they spoke to patients, they looked at pictures I’d done, they did a screen video thing, etcetera. And then they just turned around and said, would you like, you know, we really want you to do it? And I’m like, Yeah, sure. So is it going to be both of us? Yeah, Because at that time Surinder was also doing it and they were like, No, no, no, it’s just you. So I was a bit they came to me saying that they were going to change the format for it to be a magazine style. So I thought they were going to they were. And I know that they were talking to different dentists at the time.

For a while there you were the most famous dentists in the country. Definitely. When, you know, before it was kind of before the Internet properly took off. Right. How famous were you? Did you used to get recognised? I remember once we were having dinner and someone recognised you.

But wasn’t very.

Good famous person, whatever that means. I’m just even with the show, you know, it’s um, I could have done it smarter or if I was more millennial, but I would do the dentistry, you know, And so like, you know, there’d be somebody and I’m like, But she’s a stable hand. I know she’s having bright bleach. Shades isn’t going to work for her. She’s just going to stick out like a sore thumb, making sure that she can manage it afterwards. To me, the people is is key. So I was so busy doing all the dentistry. I mean, I think I’ve told you that story about the guy, you know, me coming out of the station. It was so funny. It was like on a Sunday morning and, you know, look rough, man. I’m like, real kind of like Sunday, rough stuff on. And he was like, Aren’t you? Aren’t you? He’s like, Aren’t you that dentist from the show from ten years ago? And he actually goes, You look rough, man. Can’t you afford a car? He’s like, Thought you’d be like, you’d be like a proper like you’d be in a BMW or something. It was so embarrassing. It was just. But for me, that meant that I even now, I don’t consider myself famous or I find the whole.

You get recognised quite a lot.

Not now because the show hasn’t been.

Yeah, but back then you used to.

But. I do get recognised because this, you know, it’s easy to recognise me as the black woman. There are not many kind of that. So I’ve learned to just smile at everybody. So yeah. But it’s, you know, I feel very blessed to, to be doing what I love doing. So yeah, but it’s not easy. You know.

The one thing about you, though, over the years gathered here is that you’re not interested in fitting in. So when you say you were the oddball, whatever, in dental school, just for the sake of the argument used to say to me, I’m never going to use website people that dentists use. You’d always look outside of dentistry, your practice. I remember when when I came there, everyone’s talking about guests. No one’s talking about patients. And and I remember you saying you recruit from outside dentistry and it’s kind of fashionable now. But you were talking about this 15 years ago. You used to say, you know, you used to recruit from hotels or wherever it was. Give me a little sort of first of all, why did you do that? Does it work well for you? But secondly, why are you that cat that’s trying to be different?

But don’t think I’m not trying to be different. You know, I’m not kind of purposely trying to be an outlier, as they say. I mean, like I kind of say to people, I’m incredibly shy, as I told you, and everybody just laughs. But actually, I really am. So to be one of the worst things anyone could ask me to do is walk into a room that people I don’t. I’ll just find the one person and stick to them like a leech. And so I but then I will notice people that are uncomfortable and I will force myself to overcome whatever to try and make them feel better, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I think that’s part of kind of what drives how I am in in practice and which is why most people assume I always find it so weird where people who have never met me just have these preconceived ideas, you know, have people that are friends now that they were like, Oh, we just heard or we assume that you have an attitude or that you’re really aloof and you, you know, you don’t hang out with. And I’m just like, But why? Why, why would you say that? But it is what it is. So I like the non Dental thing because because dentistry now is as you said, but before it never used to be about customer service, so had to go outside of dentistry in the UK. Yeah. To get that kind of you were.

Definitely one of the.

First service.

You were definitely one of the first that was looking at it directly from the customer perspective. You know, I certainly felt that when you everything about your practice, the the from the morning huddle to the decorations to the way he talks about your patients was was very much patient focussed, which is, as I say, very, very fashionable now. But but you were ahead of the game on that. Was that sort of partly to do with the phobia and you know, like some people get into dentistry and forget what it was like not to be a dentist and then there’s others and I can see, you know, people like Rona now charges another one that I’m very interested who completely want to take it the other way and just talk to the public and and sort of demystify. But you would definitely want the first who did that. Yeah. And you still do, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s I’m interested in people, so it’s always about the people and I’ll be the first one to be like, there are so many dentists with much better hands than me that I’m like, I can only aspire to do the kind of work that they do. You know me. I’m kind of like, you know, I don’t do good work and I invest a lot in courses. I know my limitations, but I’ve always been about the people. So it’s about making people feel good about themselves, making them be the best that they can be.

So in terms of just talk me through your patient journey, I’m a patient walking into your practice for the first time and just talk me through the entire experience from walking through your door to actually having a conversation consultation with you. What’s your consultation process?

Gosh, I’m still trying to redefine it in the Covid era. You know, I’m I’m actually struggling with it because I’m a hugger and a kisser. So let’s go.

Let’s go pre-COVID. What would happen.

Pre-covid would be schedule the appointment. And, you know, I’m guess I’m quite blessed that most people coming to see me know it’s, you know, it’s going to be an investment and they are looking for me or, you know, they’re asking for me. So they’d kind of come in. They come to reception. You know, we have a you know, by all the forms they’ve got, you know, what kind of lip balm they want and all that kind of stuff that I’ve learned from. So everywhere I go on holiday, I always hang out with the HR people, so, you know, Ritz Carlton and all the rest of it. And I pick little bits that will work. I’m always thinking about what will work when I come home. So we have that, the service menu, then the I’m always the one that comes and meets them, brings them in. We sit at a desk in my surgery. I don’t have a big posh space. You know, my my surgery is from Ikea, that kind of thing. I’m a proper Igbo girl. Um, so we sit on one side, talk about how can I help you? What’s going on? Just kind of that. That engagement.

What do you do to cater towards Phobics? Because you mentioned earlier on that obviously you you had a bad experience earlier on in your life and you were a phobic. Do you cater to their needs? Is there anything different that you do to sort of help people who are nervous about dentistry?

I think just just be interested. You know, all that old adage of nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Is that just literally being interested? I’m so interested. Like, you know, I have friends that will be like, I’ve known this person for ten years and you found out in five minutes more about them than I have because I genuinely love to find out about people. So once with the trust, I mean, they love the fact that I’m a phobic, So that’s always a good thing. And so and I address that right from the onset, you know, you’re in. So I always say when when I finished talking, we go to the chair and I’m like, you know, I’m going to do this. You’re in control. If I’m wittering on, you want me to stop, you just let me know and all that kind of stuff. And then I’m just always, yeah, okay, let me know. You know, it’s just like it’s a two way. And so for most of the time, just that in itself is enough. I’ve never had I mean, I had one woman that it took us about six weeks to get her up the stairs. So like each appointment, she’d go up two steps. So she got to the top. It’s very rare. I’d say that maybe 2 or 3 people that we need to do sedation or anything like that. But for most patients, gisla appointments longer and just it’s just time. I mean, we’ve got the DVD glasses and iPhones and all that stuff for them to listen to music that that helps. So finish talking, sit them in the chair, do all the normal, you know, stuff that one would do, take pictures. Then we go back to the, you know, the side table, show them their pictures, talk about what I see, what they see, and then do a treatment plan.

There And then or do you do it at a different time?

The treatment plan. Yeah. No, I get them. What I always try and do is find something small to bring them back with. So if it’s that they’re coming back for the hygienist and maybe I’ll do one filling and then I’ll give them the treatment plan, then if it’s something really straight, you know, like if it’s, Hey, I know that this is going to be a smile or whatever, and I will, you know, give them the fee for maybe doing the articulated models or something, and then they’ll come back for that. And then I give them the plan.

What kind of touring plans are you doing? I mean, in terms of value? Are you sort of hitting the 20, 30 grand numbers?

Yeah.

And some people just completely shocked by that. You know, like what I mean by that is there’s a lot of people who don’t know. You could spend 30 grand on your teeth.

Yeah, I had somebody today, actually, and this is. And I was so angry. In fact, I was going to do a video about it where this woman had juvenile periodontitis. She’s been wearing a partial denture since she was 21. She’s head downcast, doesn’t smile, saw me on the show, wants to come and see what can be done. She’s lost her job. She’s an office worker. You know, She hasn’t got a lot of money. And I’m just like, But has nobody, you know, talked to you about implants? She was like, no, she has tried inquiring with her dentist, but he kind of said that it was really expensive and she shouldn’t bother, you know, And she’s just, you know, she’s divorced and she’s just hasn’t had a new relationship because she doesn’t want to have to address that thing. So then she’s like, how much is it going to be? What do you think? And I’m like, well, I mean, I use the analogy of a car, you know, if because she had no idea. And I said, you know, if I told you it’s going to be like a car. And she kind of looked at me in shock and I said, you should ask me what kind of car. We had to laugh about that. And then I said, you know, if it’s going to be 25, £30,000. And she was like, oh, my God, you know, I don’t have that. How can I? And then I said to her, Look, even the so-called celebs, nobody has money. I don’t have that money. Everybody uses finance, you know? And she was like, Oh, I can do finance, Really? And the conversation just changed. I mean, I guess that comes with confidence. But to me, I was angry on her behalf at this person that judged no.

One had ever told her anything.

Yeah, no one told her. So she’s going to go ahead and have treatment. I mean, I’ll be referring her. So it’s not that I’m keeping the money or anything like that, but I’m just like, Oh my God, you’ve been wearing a denture since you were 21. And and I guess that’s part of the thing of the passion. And I’m like, If you were my sister, you have, you have outside, you have to have implants. You can’t I’m not going to make you a new denture. You have to like and she’s going to do that because that’s just the best thing for her, really. It make such a difference to her life.

You’ve done a lot of the spear.

Yeah. Love Spear.

So tell us about that. I mean, if I’m a young dentist who wants to be like you, is it a good idea? How soon and how quick and how much?

I mean, all.

The speed courses, like the workshops are about $10,000 each. The thing that I was. Yeah, yeah. And the thing I will say because I still remember, because I started with Larry. Yeah. I’m part of the.

Larry Me too.

Biz I love.

Larry.

That’s where the car thing comes from.

Yes.

And so, you know, honestly, I remember paying for this not with my credit cards, not knowing if the card would work or not. You know, that kind of thing. So a lot of people and this is you know, and I have to say, this is this is me. I’m not saying this is what other people should do. You know, I admire people that sit there and they work on a plan and they save up. And that is like seriously the best thing to do. But I didn’t want to wait. Like I just had this thirst for knowledge. So I did all my things in America. You know, I didn’t want to be in England because he was there and it was a totally different experience. So I kind of did that. I did all of Pete Dawson’s stuff. I did the whole thing up to Masters and then Frank. Oh my God, He is just amazing, like. Teaching occlusion. So that, you know, literally is like, yeah, there’s just these dots here. And if you get the dots around here, then you occlusion sucks. I mean, no, I’m exaggerating, but it was really there. And Scottsdale is an amazing facility and every time I just love it. And it’s Gary Dewood and it’s just such a great.

Because I’ve I don’t know anything about it. I mean, I’ve spoken to people who do it, but I’ve never been there. I’ve seen pictures. Yeah, but how do they keep keep people coming back and spending another ten grand? I mean, like, is it the quality of the teaching is like, so amazing that the penny drops and you’re like, I have. I need more.

Yeah, absolutely. Because even me, like, I’ve been doing spear for ten years, more than ten years, like, you know, maybe 12, 14 and it’s just like and I’m still spending ten K on new courses that are evolving. And it’s a combination. It’s, it’s a safe space to learn. It’s a great place to be away and to learn the quality of the education. I mean, course, I know that there are people like Schmidt that loves course and I’ve never actually heard him, but both Course and Spear used to work together and, you know, like lots of boys, you all go and fight with each other and and things happen. But it just means that there’s even more choice for for people. So I would say to somebody, you know, hone your craft, like do your dentistry at least two, three years before you start jumping into all these courses and all the stuff. Because you I remember actually, I think it was about a year or two years after dental school. I did the Mike Wise course.

Oh, well done.

The year. Well, it was a waste of time and money. Didn’t know what the hell. I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Like another planet. Yeah.

It was. It was just like and was the course at the same time as core, I think. And it was like way I mean, it was good because it started me on that journey, but I’m like, I’d have gotten more out of it if I’d waited a little, you know, done a couple of years of things failing.

And so how much how much of your work is the simple sort of lime bleach bond type? How much of it is, you know, porcelain aesthetics and then how much of it is the sort of full mouth rehab sort of, you know, that that kind of work?

See, I so desperately want to do a lime bleach and bond. I was just like, it would be so much better for my back. Um, but, but I was saying to somebody that my niche is kind of like middle aged menopausal women like myself, so their mouths are complicated. So it’s all multidisciplinary, you know? So if I’m doing all my Invisalign is comprehensive, it’s, it’s part of implants. It’s part of whatever else.

Do you place.

Implants as.

Well? Oh, God, no.

I hate implants. Oh, Meccano. No, no, I said I said the implants out. Um, all right. Fillings. I do, Yeah. So various people each time I keep thinking I should get somebody in-house, but I quite like it being somebody else’s problem. So bread and butter dentistry for me generally tends to be part of bigger treatments, you know? So I’m still doing the fillings and all the rest of it, although at the moment I’m probably thinking of getting an associate so that I can have somebody a day or two a week so I can do because all the plans take so long to do.

How would you handle the fact that people want to see you and they don’t want to see your associates? I mean, how many practices are you on now?

A two.

With three at one.

Point. Right. Yeah.

But that one that. So the Harley Street one is kind of like the best day of my week. I just sit there and chat to people like it’s.

Just.

So you’ve got associates. I remember. Yeah. Jasmine used to work for you as well. Yeah.

Yeah.

How how did you get around that issue of people who want to be seen by you? Do they are you able to sort of deflect them into associates or is that not.

No, it’s fine. So I did a thing which I learned from I think it was Frank. I don’t know if it was Frank or Gary where. So all you guess initially. I see. First, because what I was finding was, you know, like maybe they were having routine treatment, then I might see them for something and then I’d be like, Oh, have you thought about having braces? And then it’s like, Oh, really? And then, you know, it’s that kind of thing. Whereas like, I guess have the confidence to do that. So it became a thing and I learned it from somebody. I didn’t think of it. So everybody walks in and I see them and then I’m like, okay, you’re going to go and see this person or you’re going to go and do that and it’s fine. And I think for me, it’s. They don’t know any better. It’s a matter of fact. It’s like, this is how we do it here. And they trust me. So they’re they’re okay with it as long as it’s in house. They don’t like going out, which sometimes can be a problem. They want to just stay in because then it means that, you know.

There’s the price. The same if you do a veneer and if one of your associates does a veneer, the price is the same.

Yeah, I don’t do the two tier thing. We’re the same.

Yeah.

I like that. So now you single mum.

Yeah.

Tell us that story.

Yeah.

That’s actually the hardest thing that I’m doing right now. And maybe if I was a mum earlier, I don’t know, it would have been okay. But I’m. I’m a late mum. Not by choice. It didn’t, you know, you kind of assume it’s going to work and it didn’t. But she’s also she’s the best thing ever. And, um, but it’s hard. It’s hard because you’re constantly juggling. You don’t. You just don’t switch off. You’re here. You’re there. You’re trying to. I still remember this is. This is funny. So we were filming. And it was like, you know, in the middle of filming. And so I have to have my phone with me because I don’t know what’s happening with her and something happened with the nanny. So I’m seeing the person. The camera’s there. The phone’s here. I’m texting, trying to find another babysitter. In the end, I had to, like, say, look, you know, you guys need to down tools and they had to bring her to the surgery. And then the babysitter came and took her home because we were running late. And it was just so that’s just the nature of of how things are. And it’s nice now because I think people are more forgiving. You know, so like one of my first ever mentors, Linda Greenwald, I know you’ve had Linda and she’s so inspiring and I still remember her kind of she opened her practice and, you know, like a few days after she’d given birth and the kids were there. And, you know, that’s like way ahead of her time. Like, that can happen now. But in those days, that just, you know.

Was.

She’s a superwoman, you know.

With.

Four kids and then and then everything else she does. But, you know, tell me about being a single mom. I mean, that it must be difficult, right? So you must rely heavily on nannies and the like.

It’s it’s hard. And some days you just think, what’s the point where, you know, So like, we just finished filming and for a week I didn’t see her. Wow. And I would leave, you know, like six in the morning and I’d get back and she’d be asleep. And so it was quite off putting finally, actually on the Saturday of that week when she comes in, because what I used to do was I’d leave a note and a present and she was really disappointed that I was there. Oh today mummy.

Um.

But it’s trying to be, you know, there’s, I think that’s one of the thing when you talk about women men type thing is, is it’s a feeling of guilt. Like I feel like I carry, I’m guilty of stuff all the time, you know, like patients are hounding me because I haven’t done their treatment plan or I’m supposed to do appraisals or something with team or, you know, the other day there was something I was supposed to put in her in her school bag, but I forgot about. So I’m like, I failed there or the school gate and she’s refusing to go to school. So now I’m like, they’re all judging me because I don’t drop her off enough here. And that’s why she’s clinging to me like a limpet and she won’t go. But the nice thing about doing it as a late mum is that there isn’t anything else I’d rather be doing, you know? Like, Yeah, kind of. It’s just she’s. She’s amazing. She’s. She’s, she’s my world. And because she was chosen. So I call her. She, she calls me. I’m her heart mummy because she was adopted. Yeah. That makes it all. Every time I want to moan to my two friends, they’re like, you know, you chose this, you wanted this, enjoy it.

So I’m trying to, but it’s. It’s the most rewarding thing. So. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Love my life, love everything I’m doing. I mean, I think it’s hard. It’s so hard. Like, there’s some days that you’re just like, you know, what’s. What’s the point of this? There’s only one of me, but there isn’t anything that I would. I would drop. I just feel beyond beyond blessed. It is hard work and it’s constant. And and, you know, sometimes people say things like, you’re so lucky. Like there were days I remember the early days that I would literally I’m not kidding like sleep in the surgery, you know, it’d be like 2:00 in the morning and there’s no point going home. And I would have a shower here, give me my secrets now. And you just, like, wished I had a flat upstairs because you just so much work to do and all that kind of stuff. And you just get on. You just do what you have to do. But that’s, that’s kind of just I’ve always had that kind of work ethic. You you just have to do what you have to do.

What’s a typical day for you? You know, a day in the life? What time do you wake up? How does it all start?

Um, are you at work?

Yeah. Typical day. Normally wake up about five. So if I’m asleep at around 6:00, like, that’s a lie in and I feel behind. So I wake up. I’m a Christian, so I pray. I try and stretch because my back is having issues. And if. If I’m lucky, I can do all that. If I’m unlucky, a little person comes in like she’s an early bird, so she normally wakes up between 530 and 6 as well. So right at the moment we would spend about half an hour together. So she, she’d be reading or I’d be reading to her. She generally just wants to watch something, but don’t let her. And then I will leave the practice, leave home about seven, 7:15. Come to the practice. I’d like to have the first hour for myself. So to just catch up on stuff and determine what does.

The nanny come in at that point or does she live with you.

Know, she you know, Covid has made me more resilient because before that, I’m like, I don’t want anybody living with me and all the rest of it. And then I used to come in, but me and a four year old for all those months, I’m sorry, it was hell. I cannot lie. I’m like, it was just so hard. And because she was so little, she wouldn’t leave me alone. Like there was, you know, all these people having all these conference calls and all the things, you know, I didn’t get to do any of that at all. I just like, I was so jealous. So she she’s she lives with she’s in there with me. So that’s really helped. Yeah. Um, so I leave. I come here, we have a morning huddle. Um, normally the team would have sent me the night before, like we do what’s called a day list. So my nurses write, like, have a list of things, you know, the occupation, What happened the last time they came in, what they’re coming in for today. Any problems? So I read first beforehand and then we have a morning huddle and then the day starts and it just each day is kind of different sometimes.

What time do.

You get home again?

I try and get home by now. I try and get home by 630. So my job is to you know, it’s funny how I’ve changed. I used to be like, I have to get home in time to give her her bath, but that’s actually really boring and I’m tired. So now the nanny does the bath and I read the stories and put her to bed and then collapse.

What time do you go to bed?

Um, usually about midnight.

Wow.

Yeah.

Midnight to.

5 a.m..

Yeah, every day.

My dad’s growing up. I’ve always done that. My dad used to say sleep was practising death.

Yeah, I agree.

So you have eternity to sleep. So we’ve always, like, in my house growing up, no matter what time you went to bed, 6 a.m., morning prayers. Everybody’s dressed, seated around for breakfast kind of thing. So, um, friends didn’t like coming to my house.

One other question. I’ve always maintained your particularly strong on marketing and you always claim you’re not and all that, but. But you certainly, I mean, in the print age and the TV and print age, you dominated I mean, absolutely dominated. You really were maybe the highest profile dentist in the country. Now that we’re in the Internet age and the social media age and we can see all these youngsters kind of dominating because they’re you know, I mentioned Shady before. I don’t know if you’ve come across her. Um, she started her TikTok account in lockdown. Yeah. And lockdown now has 100,000 followers.

Oh, wow.

And TikTok is that kind of platform. It’s got it’s got massive reach. So what I’m saying, by the way, I don’t know anything about it myself, but my my question is, how how have you transitioned? Have you have you do you think marketing is less important than it was before? Have you transitioned? Um, you know, I myself had a chasm. Yeah. While Prav became, you know, one of the most important marketers in dentistry because he’d mastered Google. I myself had a problem when we went from print to digital. You know, I was very good at the two page spread ads in Dentistry magazine. And then when it came to digital, I don’t know what the hell to do.

Yeah.

Um. Think marketing. They’re coming for me. The police is vital, actually, especially in this day and age. I don’t think you can fight it. The world has changed. It’s just like, just embrace it. I mean, for me, I love Instagram, You know, it’s like this black hole that you can just, like, get. Sucked into. So you need to be careful and recognise that if I’m feeling insecure and bad about myself, you know, stay away from Instagram because it just makes you feel worse because everybody just.

The highlight reel, isn’t.

It the best? Yeah. And for me it’s interesting because, you know, like I treat all these journalists and people are sitting there and maybe like they’ve just finished sobbing in my chair. They’ve just had a Break-Up. They look rubbish. And then you just see, Hi. Yeah, it’s just like ten minutes later and I’m like, This is so fake. But as long as people kind of are aware of that. So, but the thing about the digital age is it’s allowed, you know, like there are people that I’ve met that could never have met, you know, whether they’re in Egypt or Syria or whatever the case may be. So it’s made the world a smaller place. I’ve had to how have I adapted? I think the thing I find challenging is just finding the time, you know, it’s kind of finding the time to do the things, to learn how to do it. I’ve dabbled in having other people do stuff, but it’s never the same. It’s not authentic. It needs to be my my voice. And I’ve kind of learnt like I like doing lives, you know, because people are there and it’s a bit like this, you’re just chatting to them and you don’t have to do all this hashtag type stuff.

It’s interesting because a lot of people are very uncomfortable in lives. I am myself, but I’ve noticed you. You’re living all the time. Yeah.

But I don’t know why you don’t like live because, like, looking at you, you know, you’re doing great.

But this is.

This is audio. Yeah. So if this was video, I’d be like.

Really? You begin.

To it. Um, yeah, don’t mind that, because I can. I guess that’s why I do the TV. Well, because I can switch off. I can forget that there’s a camera there because I’m so interested in the person that I’m. I’m engaging in. And also I now realise that I’m taking it much more seriously because it is actually starting to bring patience, which it didn’t before, not my kind of patience, number one. And then the thing is amazing. I mean, sometimes I think I give people too much free info because people are asking me questions and I’m like, You need to ask your dentist to do blah blah, blah. So somebody yesterday was like, Thank you so much. She started Invisalign, she’s up somewhere in Scotland and you encouraged me to do it and I just wanted to let you know it’s going well. So that’s I.

Think there’s a massive opportunity for someone like you in terms of the multi-platform story. So if someone’s seen you on TV, then DMS, you on the mobile, that that is a different level of engagement in terms of awareness engagement, then someone who’s only found you on the Internet, you know, and so there’s a there’s a massive opportunity. And then the other side to it is what you just said, that you’re clearly you’re comfortable talking to the camera, which I’d say 95% of people know, 99% of people. But no, I’m certainly I don’t pick up the mobile and start talking to it. I just don’t do that. Um, Prav does, right. But those two things, the fact that you’re comfortable talking to the camera and the fact that you’re on other media makes it just a really important thing for you to go all in on, I think.

I mean, I guess for me, the the USP has always been about education. You know, I don’t want people to feel about the dental experience the way that I do because I hate it. Like everything about dentistry is just awful. So it’s kind of to empower people, to give them knowledge, to be able to make their own informed decisions, you know, And it’s not, you know, because you’ll notice like on my insta, I don’t do I’m not a teeth posting dentist.

Like, why is that?

Because that’s not what I mean. I can’t say that’s not what I’m interested in or whatever. But my thing is I would hope that people would know that if they were going to come and see me, that the work would be okay. You know, that it would be good work. So I might be wrong. I don’t know. Maybe I should be posting more stuff. You should.

Because they work. Well, that’s the thing.

They want to that do work.

They work really well before and afters.

Yeah.

And also, I judged, you know, like, I’m like, nothing is good enough to post. There’s that aspect as well.

That perfection paralysis thing. That’s. That’s that’s the whole story of it. So. So you said you listen to this podcast, don’t you.

Tell me you do.

Oh, thanks.

I do.

It’s very it’s very good, actually. The other day I sent a DM to you, did one with Kunal and I loved his story about Prague. It’s just I was like, I didn’t know this about you. Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So Prav likes to end it on on his question.

So we’ve been wittering on without you.

I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening.

You know. You know, he’s been dieting. He’s. He’s not eating for 21 days. You know this.

No, really, he’s.

Yeah. I’ve not had a meal in nine days.

Why?

It’s just something I’m giving a go.

It’s what he does.

It’s a 21 day fasting challenge. So no food, just black coffee, water, electrolyte salts.

So coffee is meant to be part of it.

Black coffee is good.

Yeah.

He’s done a lot of research.

Yeah.

Good. How do you.

Feel?

I feel fantastic. I, um. About this time of day over the last couple of days, I start flagging, start feeling tired. But other than that, I’m feeling great. I’m productive at work. I’m still training in the gym.

Maybe I should try it.

After day three, it becomes really easy.

Really? Okay.

Hunger. Just the hunger just disappears. Really? Completely disappears.

He does. He has a lot of vitamins and things. I don’t know if that helps, but.

It.

Doesn’t help with the hunger thing, does it not? No, no, no, no, not at all. But it helps with the fact that, you know, I’m not going to be, you know, nutritionally challenged. Challenged. Yeah. Yeah. So make sure I get all my vitamins, minerals. The main thing is the salts. You don’t have the salts, you don’t have the magnesium, your neurones are not firing. You start cramping up all that. And that’s what I did the first time I did it. I really messed up, right? So now I’m drinking like 6 to 7l of water a day, 10 to 12 salt capsules. My vitamins are all packed in here, so I just rattle my way through them throughout the day and it just works.

Oh, can you send me details? I’d love to try it.

Absolutely. Yeah, no problem.

No problem.

And I’m actually at the end of this 21 day fast. I’m going to write a blog because I’ve had so many questions about the supplementation, about the process, the mindset and the reasons that I do it. Yeah. And the reasons that I do it are multifactorial, right? So on one of them is building mental resilience and mental toughness and the fact that if I can function and go without food for 21 days, then then it opens my mindset up to other challenges, right? And also when I get smaller challenges in life, then I should be able to handle them quite easily. So a part of it is about and then the other part of it is I’m probably a little bit crazy as well. And but, you know, on, on onto more important things, which is the final question. Imagine it’s your last day on the planet and your little one or not so little one at this time is is next to you and you’ve got to part giving three pieces of advice. What would they be?

Ooh. Yeah.

Three pieces of advice.

Um, I’d.

Say. Stay in your lane? Yeah, kind of. Just. Just. Just be. You know, it’s kind of like that thing of, like, just be you.

Focus on yourself.

Yeah, well, it’s not even to focus on yourself, but just be the best that you can be rather than trying to please anybody else. Or because you never. You never will. So just be true to yourself. Listen to your gut. Uh huh. Um, which I’ve not been very good at, but I’m getting better. Surround yourself with positive people. That’s so important. People that will lift you up, that will encourage you. Um, yeah. I don’t know. I guess the last. The last thing would probably be, you know, what’s a bit of my mantra, which is from the Bible, which is kind of like, you know, nothing is impossible with God. So if. If you just try it and even if you know that for me, there’s no such thing as failure, it’s just another opportunity to do the thing better. Of course. Yeah. Don’t know if that answers the question.

It does. It does. And just to just to finish that off, you know, how would you like to be remembered? You was.

You know, made a difference.

And then that’s the.

Thing I want on my tombstone, whether it’s the difference with the patients and you know that you’ve affected with the team. It’s funny being like, you know, really tough. I get teams that have left all the time sending me letters saying, Oh, now I understand what you were trying to get me to do ten years ago. Um, you know, or family friends kind of thing. But, you know, I lost my sister about five years ago. Unfortunately, she’s like my best friend, and it just came out of nowhere. And it really helped you realise that when all said and done, all you have is the memories of the things you did, the people you touched. Nothing else matters. It’s. It’s that so just. Yeah, that’s what I tell my daughter as well. Make good memories. Did you, did you did you question your belief at that point?

No.

Not at all. I mean, I was angry, you know, I was angry with God because I just didn’t you know, she she, I would say, was the heart of us. Like she was the best of us. And even now, I’m, you know, people say gets better with time and but it doesn’t you just like feel just thinking about her because she she helped run the practice for a while. So whenever I’m here, there’s always reminders of her. But you just get used to the whole being there all the time. So I just have to trust that, you know, God knows why. Um, when I get to heaven, I’ll kind of, you know, find out. But, um, yeah, it’s, you know, and I’ve never be like, oh, it was for the best or whatever because it was pants. It was horrible. And she was gone too soon and it was hard. But I still trust him and just like a parent, isn’t it? You know, that’s the whole premise of a relationship or my relationship with God in that in the same way as my daughter is like, we’ll get upset with me. Deep down, she knows I love her. She knows it’s for her best and she has that trust, whether she likes what I’m doing to her or not.

Yeah, that’s really well answered. Thank you so much for doing this.

On the phone for an hour and a half.

I knew you’d be good at this. Oh, it’s always enjoy talking to you. Maybe that’s the reason why Prav couldn’t get a word in. Um. Hopefully when times are a bit better, we can have a nice drink together. Or a dinner together. Yeah.

I miss your parties.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And it’s nice to see you. I think you guys are doing a really. This is my favourite podcast, I have to say, because.

Thank you.

Know, it’s true because it gives gives a different insight that very few do. In fact, I can’t think of any that’s not just about not Dental based. I think the thing that we as dentists need is to just try and kind of get to know each other a little bit better. Forget there’s enough teeth. I don’t understand the jealousy and all that nonsense. There’s enough teeth for everybody. It’s just like support one another and just, yeah, build each other up. So thank you. Keep on keeping on.

Cheers. Lovely to have you. Thanks a lot.

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 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.

Don’t forget our six star rating.

I think we’re far too quick to jump in offering solutions before we’ve listened to what the real problem is. So there are patients who are trying to get away from something, whether it’s pain or poor looking smile. And there are other people who are trying to go towards something. And the language that we use around that, the way that that’s presented. And I think one of the biggest pitfalls is to get sidetracked. There’s a lot of other problems in the mouth. But they came to you about the pain from the upper left central. You’ve got to deal with that first. They’re not going to pay attention to anything else you tell them till they’re out of pain. You’ve dealt with that presenting problem. And I think that we’ve had conditions in the past who are very, very good at certain things. They would start talking about the smile and the whitening and everything else, and the guy’s still sitting there for 30 minutes into the appointment in pain. So we have to figure out why that person is there and you have to get good at doing that quite quickly.

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. Nick Sisodia onto the podcast. It’s been a long time coming for me and Nick. We’ve been a few things got in the way. Covid and all of that. Nick is someone I think of as an experienced dentist, experienced in so many different ways, you know, accomplished clinician Implantologists one of the top implantologists in the country, runs a bunch of practices, a number of practices. I don’t know exactly what the number is right now, Nick, but we’ll get to that. But employs a lot of people and, you know, very sort of successful practices. He’s a teacher. This has been a past president of the BCD part of I.t. That I missed something out there, highly experienced in all of those different ways. It’s wonderful to have you, buddy.

Thank you. And I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to actually get around to sitting down with you to do this. I know you’ve been asking for a while. It’s a pleasure to be here.

You know, Nick, something I’ve always found with you is not only are you so accomplished at all this stuff on the other side of it, there’s a real human side to, you know, when we have an enlightened party and everyone is leaving and you’re like, What can I do to help? You’re sort of a hands on kind of guy in that situation. And what is it about you? You know, can you trace that back to childhood or what is it about you that’s good at organising stuff, wants to muck in and, you know, really do your best.

I’m not really 100% sure where that comes from, but it potentially is in the upbringing, as in my father is someone who’s over the course of his life, been involved with a variety of things, and you know, he’ll be the first one there. He may be the head of that organisation, but he’ll be there setting up the chairs and the tables and checking all the details. Be the last one clearing up in sort of mopping the floor afterwards. And I’ve always sort of followed in his footsteps, I suppose, in that way. So he set a good example, perhaps.

Where did you grow up?

So I’m I was listening to the podcast the other day and interestingly enough, I hadn’t realised, but George Pynadath George is local boy to me. I didn’t realise that until I listen to your podcast. I’m also from West London, so the Hounslow boy grew up childhood there, schooling there, played all my sport and other activities around that area till I went to university.

And you went to university in Bristol, right?

That’s right, yeah. Yeah. Bristol.

Same year as me, I think. Did you qualify in 95?

That’s right. Yeah. Both Martin I qualified same year in 95.

Same year as me. So tell me about your experience in Bristol. Did you and Martin, were you already plotting with Martin that you’re going to be opening a business together?

Not at all. Plotting would have revolved around social life and evening entertainment, perhaps at the weekend, I suspect back in those days. But no, we met very early on at university within the first day or two and became very good friends. But there was no plotting about business or any of those things. I don’t think we had a clue. My only objective was to get through the five years and qualify and to ensure that I had enough money to support the family and sort of keep people fed and watered. I didn’t have any ambitions about building businesses or anything. I had no idea about any of that back then.

So then do you remember a time when you decided you were going to be excelling at stuff instead of just getting through stuff? Because, you know, now now you’re, you know, so accomplished. But from the sounds of it, the way you’re characterising Dental school, you always want to get through dental school.

And yeah, so, I mean, dental school was an interesting time for me. I loved it, enjoyed my time there, but I didn’t find the first couple of years particularly easy. I was this needs to come out sort of not arrogant the way it might sound, but I breezed through school and that was a real problem. When I got to university, I didn’t really have to do anything. When you’re taught things and spoon fed things at school, GCSEs, A-levels were kind of a breeze. Got to university, not having done biology, A-level already on a little bit of a backwater.

The same was the same. What a nightmare. What a nightmare.

And then I didn’t know how to study Payman, So I kind of just, you know, was used to going to lectures or at school lessons, being told what to to learn. Didn’t have to do a lot of work afterwards. I just remember it and retain it. So that wasn’t intelligence or anything. It was just a great capacity to retain information and then regurgitate it. Got to university and there wasn’t any spoon feeding and I didn’t know how to sit down and study. I didn’t know how to revise, you know, all my friends would be revising and I’d be sort of twiddling my thumbs, figuring out what to do. So the first couple of years were tough. I did have a couple of retakes, I think, in the first and second year, but it did me good. I had to learn how to learn if. That makes sense. Yeah. And third year onwards, I’ve got my head down at the right times and had some good friends around me that helped me through that. So it was a fun time. I enjoyed it, but I also had to learn some new things that I wasn’t used to doing beforehand.

So, you know, like when when you think of a Dental career, it kind of you can for me, you’ve got that sort of university all the way up to, you know, first or second associate job that that period. And then and then you’ve got the next period and where it’s like sort of the ten year qualified associate might, might be, might be starting a practice. And then you’ve got your period now where you’ve been many years as a principal. What aspects of of you do you think have gone through the whole period? What kind of dentist have you been like because you’ve gotten yourself so involved in so many different things and excelling at things that, you know, sometimes the top implantologists doesn’t bother becoming the president of the OECD because he’s so into the surgery part. And yet you’ve got this broad sort of ideas, you know, broad sort of influence in so many different areas. What I’m trying to get to that what point was it where you thought, I’m going to excel, I’m going to excel at lots of things always that count mean no.

So I mean, I was very, very lucky with my first job. So I think we were the first year that had to do. You were probably the same qualified, same time was the same. So the first year that was was mandatory as it was known back then. And I was very lucky where I ended up. I had an amazingly generous principal trainer who gave me a real baptism. Baptism of Fire. I mean, the first day I turned up for work, having just been away for six, seven week holiday over that summer, turned up in August, and my first patient he’d booked in was for Molar RCTs all back to back on one patient and he said, Right off you go. And I never really looked back as And he was always there in the background, very patient. And I’d drill a bit and wait and blow some air and water drill a bit more. And about two hours later I might have probably just about got to the pulp horns, let alone the pulp chamber and the roof coming off. So. He took over the next tooth. He showed me how to get in there, how to access things. And he was always very generous like that with his time. And at the end of that year, I probably got an awful lot of experience. And I think one of the things at the moment I see is a lot of younger dentists aren’t keen and I understand the system is very different now to work on the NHS any longer, but I think we were quite lucky that that whole scheme through, through working on the NHS when the system was quite a lot different to the way it is now.

You could gain experience and learn. And my second job was also in a mixed practice in Hertfordshire. I couldn’t stay on in the practice because they had a new vet coming in. They only had three chairs and but they actually found me a job up in Hertfordshire. Just as generous to Co-principals and these guys would anything I didn’t know when I went to ask them help or advice on, they’d say, Don’t worry, book it in my diary and block your diary. And I would go in and the principal would do the appendectomy, show me how to do it. At the end of it all, he’d let me suture up. And then it also said, Yeah, just just charge that through. Nick Don’t worry. He would actually let me take the revenue for something that he’d just done where he’s teaching me. He was very, very generous like that. And I’ve always felt the same when we’ve opened our clinics and practices or at the BCD or currently at Bard. There are younger people that want to give back because people have generously given of their time and skill. To me.

That’s lovely, man. Do you think so? Do you think that was a bygone era when people used to do that? Do you think people still do that now? Do you still do that sort of thing now?

Well, certainly we do it in our clinic. I think there are a lot of good people out there, many of whom you and I know a lot of these people fly under the radar. They don’t really want recognition or anything. I think there are very many good people out there. It’ll be the exception where I think if you want to be a vet trainer or whatever that is currently called. I don’t see that you would do that for any real monetary gain. You’d be better off giving that chair to an experienced dentist if that’s what you were after or solely what you were after. So I think these people do want to train and develop and give back. And in private practice today, I don’t think you can run a successful private practice without having some culture of wanting to develop the team. I mean, the whole team nursing through two clinicians, through two therapists, whatever it is that you’ve got in your team.

And how long was it after that that you started? Ten Dental. How many jobs after how many years later?

So. Going back to what you asked me about excellence and wanting to sort of deliver that sort of dentistry, I think I probably worked two years in sort of NHS mixed practice, and I then went off to do a postgraduate MSC in Sheffield.

Oh, really?

And found very soon it wasn’t really delivering what I wanted. So I did about a year of a two year program and it was subject. So it’s period pros. People were very good. My consultants were great, but I really wasn’t learning what I thought I wanted to learn. I also came to the realisation that it wasn’t going to really allow me to do what I wanted to do afterwards. Very few clinicians are going to refer lots of complex work to Prosthodontists in the sort of volumes. I’m sure there are some established people out there, but by and large that’s the bread and butter for most GP’s. And given that it wasn’t learning what I wanted to learn at the time, I decided to leave that program. A very tough decision, but it was great. I left there, went travelling for a little bit with some friends, one of whom was a dentist, a friend of mine, and came back. Best decision I’ve made. I’ve met my wife very soon after that. Then at the time, wife to be so changed tack. But that year taught me that I did want to deliver dentistry at a higher level to do the very best I could. Whatever it was, whether I was doing a composite or a crown or a root filling, and I needed to carve out a way of being able to do that. So. Back then when you think.

That year, that year led to it, what dropping out led to it Because you thought, I’m not doing that. I’m going to go my own path and learn my own.

I thought I was going to get that as part of the MSC, learn to develop these clinical skills and it wasn’t happening. So I then dropped out and I thought, I’ve got to go and figure out where to get that education.

For myself.

For myself. So a bit of time off, as I said, went travelling, had some fun, saw a bit of the world, came back and then really got to work back in what was originally my practice. They were expanding their business had some more space for me, and I actually stuck around for about ten years almost in that clinic over a period of time. Best education you can ever get. So you’re learning new things on courses here and there. Got to deliver that dentistry in that practice. But I was there long enough to see the problems, the complications, the comebacks on my own patients. And I’m still in touch with the guys there at the practice. They’re still around, still both practising and on the odd occasion I’ll get a little WhatsApp saying, you know, Mrs. Smith is back and you won’t believe for that crown you did 25 years ago. Still going or and I’ll get a little x ray or a photo or whatever it is. It’s great.

So did you I mean, it sounds like there were brilliant clinicians and very good at teaching dentistry. But did you learn either directly or indirectly about practice management from these guys too? Because ten years is a long time to be in that practice.

Yeah, I think, you know, they were quite generous with that side of things as well. Nothing much was hidden. Not that I would ask any sensitive financial questions, but they grew that to three practices at one point and I would see what they were doing and we’d all, you know, of an evening once a week or so, enjoy a beer together and chat about things. And it was quite an open conversation. And I don’t even today really understand why people withhold so many things. You know, there’ll be things in your head Payman that you’ve learnt building Enlightened and these are business things that you’ve learnt, but by sharing them that doesn’t make someone else Payman Langroudi It doesn’t mean that they think the way that you think. So giving that information to somebody is not really going to enable them to go away and do what you’ve done.

Yeah, I think of that when people say, I’ve got a business idea and you say, So what is it? And then they’re like, Hush hush and don’t want to tell you as if you know, as if you’re going to take that business idea and do their business idea instead of the 11 that’s in your head. Yeah, exactly that.

And nine times out of ten, you know, the ideas that you and I have probably flop as well. I mean, you know, the number of things is ideas.

2% of the problem is it as we know, it’s the executions. It’s as if I say to you, Hey, Nick, I’m thinking of opening a bar in Soho. What do you think? Well, depends on the execution, isn’t it? It could be a massive success or a massive failure.

I think having been to having been to some of your enlightened parties, I think you’d be very, very good at that, sir.

So. Okay, what was was there was there a transformational, I don’t know. Course, in that period where you’re now looking for your own pathway, did you come across someone? Yes.

I think there was a watershed moment for me. So, I mean, I know some people love it and some people don’t particularly like it, but Paul Tipton’s year course, restorative year course for me. Was really kind of what I was looking for. And I get on very well with Paul that year going up and down to Manchester and back. Did change the way I worked and I learnt a lot about what I did want to do. Also certain things I didn’t particularly want to do. And I came back from that with a renewed sort of energy and enthusiasm for delivering comprehensive, holistic, sort of full mouth care. And that really helped me cement my thought processes around treatment, planning, understanding of certain things. And obviously from there things have springboarded so. You asked me why I got involved with certain things and. It wasn’t a deliberate plan. So I’ve never had this idea that I must. Get involved with organisations within dentistry and then go on to get involved with the executive committee or council or go on to lead them. I think that that’s just come as a by-product of things. I got involved initially, for instance with the BCD because there were a bunch of clinicians who were all striving to do the same thing as me, get very good at what they were doing, deliver excellent. At the time, aesthetic dentistry was the focus, but when we set the BCD up, it wasn’t just about, as, you know, aesthetics or cosmetic dentistry. It was about comprehensive clinical care. And I think there was a big misconception around that.

But that’s what we were striving to do a little bit naively, perhaps there was a lot of furore from certain corners about what are these guys trying to do? But that’s all we were trying to do. And the people that set that organisation up all in their own little way will have taught me so many different things. Some people about business, other people about clinical areas and we all still meet, you know, once in a while less frequently. So now, but we try to meet, if not the conference, but outside of that, as well as a smaller group and the same at Bard, I went to the 10th anniversary of Meeting of Bard, which is a British Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry, and that one meeting just blew my socks off. They had gone all out because it was their 10th anniversary meeting. Got speakers from all over the world who were at the top of their game. And I thought dentistry of a level that I hadn’t seen before in the UK and I hadn’t travelled much before overseas to see any dentistry. So I was seeing guys and girls showing stuff that I didn’t think was possible. Yeah, and I thought, I’ve got to get involved. I need to learn from these people. So I started travelling overseas because I wasn’t going to get that education in the UK and that involved clinical residency spending time with renowned clinicians for 2 or 3 days at a time, sometimes longer, and having the opportunity to ask them questions over a coffee or a beer afterwards as well.

How did you arrange that? Was that was that through your contacts at from the speakers? Or I mean, how does one arrange that?

A mix. So yeah, it would be occasionally I’d see a speaker, I think. Well, I want to go and learn more. I’d ask them if they’d organise a course, if they run a course and most of them do run courses and you can go off. Sometimes they would have said to me, Look, if you can get 8 or 9 people from the UK, we’ll run a an exclusive course just for you guys in English, because often it wasn’t their first language and I’ve done that. Certainly I’ve been across to Eric Van Buren’s in Antwerp. Eric’s recently retired but phenomenal soft tissue clinician and just actually really incredible pair of hands. I mean, he chose perio, soft tissue stuff, but all of his work was incredible and learnt loads from him, always kept in touch. But we had to take a group of, I think 10 or 11 there and we’ve done similar things in other parts of Europe as well.

Then. So when you finally did do ten Dental, was there not a conversation between you and Martin that said, Hey, one of us should be the implant guy and the other guy should do something else?

No, not really.

Not right, Because you both became implant guys. But, you know, that would have made kind of sense. No.

Yes and no. I mean, we don’t really tread on each other’s toes. There’s plenty of work in the practice. I mean, we get a lot of referrals for that sort of work. We don’t get the easy stuff anymore. The bread and butter stuff. But there’s plenty of work coming in and we from the outset wanted to share. So when we built the practice very, very quickly, we got our specialist colleagues in. Were going to deliver the endo or the perio or the other aspects that we didn’t particularly want to do. And at that time I was involved with implant dentistry. Martin was referring the surgery I was placing a little bit not huge volumes, but I knew I wanted to develop that side of my clinical skill set. I went my own way. But today Martin is far better qualified than I am. He’s got letters after his name and run, all sorts of things that I haven’t done. So I mean I’ve learnt by practising and he’s actually gone off and done it the proper way. Got a qualification?

Have you sort of subspecialized? I mean, do you do a different type of implantology to him?

No, not at all. We both cases come and there’s very little that he would send my way or my cases going his way unless we need a second opinion on something really tricky where it might usually in that scenario, it’s something that’s going wrong and we can’t figure out what’s going wrong. But otherwise, no, we both do the same work, not always the same route getting there. You know, we’ve got our preferences of how we practice. And in my hands, certain things work and vice versa. Martin will use something else to get the same outcome. But if you look at the pictures and the follow up long term, you’ll see that the clinical work is the outcome is the same.

So I guess, okay, so you’re splitting the implant work kind of 5050, but then what about the other roles? What are you responsible for and what’s he responsible for?

So it’s chopped and changed, but I think we both gravitate naturally to certain things when we first set the practice up. So the financial head was. Martin And he has a natural understanding of things to do with marketing, new technologies and social media and things. And I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to these things. So I normally sort of follow him along kicking and screaming in his wake on that front. But I tend to deal with the people side of things, the air side of things, and for the last few years sort of dealing with the business side of things and the background. So we’ve split that up, but we’ve chopped and changed over the years and swapped those roles as well.

Yeah, that happens, isn’t it? Over a period of time with partners that happens where you sort of you get comfortable in one position and then realise that, you know, maybe, maybe you should do each other’s job. It was certainly that’s happened with us as well.

But when we did that payment, it very quickly dawned on us that we need to kind of within 18 months or so we both realised we need to swap back to the roles. The reason we were doing the roles that we were is that that’s what we were good at. You know, we’re both good at different things within the business and that is why it worked so well.

Yeah. So. So you’re in charge of sort of operations then?

Yeah, you could say that. I mean, you know, it’s it’s not divided that it’s black and white that one mustn’t stray into the other’s territory. It doesn’t really work like that. Yeah. But yeah, by and large, you know. But we have regular chats. Every few days we’ll catch up whether it’s on the phone in person or these days via zoom often and whatever needs deciding on if it’s something that needs joint decisions. But we’ve been in the practice now almost 20 years, and I can’t think of that many occasions, if any at all, where I’ve done something that Martin sort of completely disagreed with or that he’s done something where he’s made a decision. I wasn’t around that. I disagree with that. That hasn’t happened. We think broadly think the same way.

Yeah. So, you know, what you said about sort of complementary skills. And certainly when I think of me and Sanj, we have very different what I’m good at and what he’s good at. And so things need to, I think in a partnership you need to find someone who does have opposite skills to you, but on the basic principles you need to be aligned.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s where we are aligned, I think.

Yeah. So okay, continue though. I mean, now we sort of fast forward to where is that group right now? How many practices are you, how many people are you? I can see the massive volume of just from the whitening, how much whitening you do to me, it makes me realise you do a lot of everything, like a lot of ortho, a lot of referral work outside of implants even so. So give me give me some of the headlines, some of the stats. Where are we? How many people you know?

So the team fluctuates a little bit here and there. I mean, like any business in London, we have an attrition rate and recruiting is quite a big challenge at the moment for all of us in dentistry and probably most sectors out there. It’s strange, but we are probably anywhere between 50 to 55 people got nearly to 60 odd at one point before Covid, but streamlined a little bit. We were three clinics until relatively recently and we’ve consolidated the third practice, which was our smallest site, and absorbed that within our practice not that long ago, very early part of this year. And that was a strategic decision because longer term, you know, before Covid, our plan was to grow and add more sites and then Covid put paid to that for a little while. We pulled our socks up within that sort of turmoil out. And at some point in the near future, the plan will be to probably grow that number of practices again.

Maybe explain it to me because. Because I don’t own any practices yet. But when do you when you look at buying another site, do you only do that when you feel like you’ve squeezed the lemon, squeezed the orange completely and the sites that you have? Because I think a bunch of people there’s almost a vanity metric in owning numbers of practices. And, you know, you can own four terrible practices or two amazing practices. I’d much rather have two amazing ones than four Terrible. And I know that’s not the strict choice, but when do you decide when do you decide to go for the next one? When you feel like you’ve you’ve got you’ve got, you know, the existing ones at full potential? Or is it when when a building comes up or. I know it’s a combination but what’s what’s been the driver.

So initially for us it was much more of an organic thing. We had a relatively small site in our original Clapham practice, which was three chairs and we tried to get upstairs, couldn’t get upstairs, tried to get next door, couldn’t get next door, thought about digging down in the basement, couldn’t really do that. And we don’t own the building. So we didn’t have the control that we needed perhaps to grow that site. So the decision was, well, the next best thing is to have another site, relatively local that we can manage. And that’s what happened. So we built our practice of both practices were built as greenfield squat sites.

Mhm.

Our third practice was an acquisition and that comes any business that’s acquired I think comes with this one little bit of baggage that you don’t realise till the first time you do it, which is a culture change within the business. It’s difficult to easily run through that business. You’ve got two sites that work very well for you, a third that you’ve acquired, but the culture within that business is different to your other two sites. And to inculcate that culture takes time. And it’s a lesson that we’ve learned. And I think for us, we would do that better Now. I don’t think we were particularly good at it at the time. We had to learn that it’s a skill, how to cascade certain things through the team, perhaps, You know, I tried to do it a little bit top down and that’s maybe not the way to do it. So some mistakes were made in that process for sure.

Expand on that. What do you mean top down? So you were dictating what has to happen and not getting buy in from the people.

Yeah, exactly. So you’ve got a team that’s working in a site and they’re going to continue to work there. We do things differently at the other sites and I’d sort of go in and say, Well, look, this is how we do it. Rather than asking why they did it their way and seeing what the benefits perhaps of adopting their processes might have been within our other sites, they will have had a rationale behind why they did it their way. And actually after a while I realised there were there were a lot of good things in the background that I wasn’t aware of. So it was more I should have listened for a bit longer before I started trying to make changes.

Well, yeah. I mean, look, dude, you’ve got two highly successful practices, right? And any successful endeavour goes down a few cul de sacs, right? There’s no way it’s by doing that, you get to it’s this wonderful word experience, right?

Yeah. So I think Martin told you our take on that Martin’s mother’s story behind that you might not remember, but I think she says something along and I’m paraphrasing experience is the best teacher, but the fees are too high.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can’t. I mean, it’s a funny thing. You can’t buy it. You can’t go on a course, can you? You can’t go on a course and get experience that doesn’t work. You can’t really accelerate it. I know what you said about those first two bosses. And and I get it, by the way, because I have some people sit in front of me here six years out and they just know so much more than I did when I was six years out. So you can accelerate it a little bit, but not a lot. Not a lot. And and it comes with a bunch of pain. You know, when you think you know, if you look at Nick, he’s an experienced implant ologist. What does that mean? That means stuff’s gone wrong. Wrong for him along the way. And he’s he’s got the battle scars or he’s an experienced, you know, practice owner. You’ve got you’ve got the battle scars.

But isn’t that what being a surgeon, a clinician, a dentist is all about is, you know, thinking things through to minimise potential complications. But we know we all know they happen daily. Whatever sort of dentistry you’re practising, whether it’s surgical or composite work or whatever, and you’ll make some mistakes and you’ll think, How could I do that better next time? And you learn from that and you move on and you’ll make a different mistake next time. And that’s the experience you’re talking about. Yeah, and it’s part of running a business or it’s part of being a dentist or a medic or a surgeon in any field.

Yeah. So. So with that in mind, then, when when when you think back on lessons that you’ve learned that, you know, perhaps a guy, you know, who doesn’t want to learn the same lessons in the same hard way as you’ve learned, what key things come to mind. I mean, for instance, let’s start with this. Those in that ten years, when you saw the failures coming in, what were some of the key failures that sort of made it made a mark on you and thought I’d better learn occlusion? So was occlusion you know the thing or what was it what were the key learnings in that ten years of seeing your own failures?

So I think it was probably much more to do with learning good isolation and bonding back then. I don’t think a lot of us were using Rubber Dam, you know, I didn’t get a lot of it because again, back then a lot of what we were doing was full coverage. So these were cemented rather than bonded restorations. But that transition was a big learning for me. You know, I thought arrogantly that a couple of cottonwool rolls in a, you know, saliva ejector would keep things isolated properly for me. And that wasn’t the case. So I had to learn how to use Rubber Dam properly. And I was reluctant initially. The other thing I mean, this is sound really, really basic, but. You know, we’re business partners, we’re friends, but there’s always a little bit of healthy competition, right? So I would look at Martin’s preps and his models and his dyes that would come back from the lab. And they’re always much tidier than me. And he’d laugh and he wouldn’t say anything. He’d laugh and wouldn’t say anything. And I’d be comparing his dyes with my dyes when they came back from the lab and the preps and the margins. And he kept quiet for a little while. And about six months he said, Nick, it isn’t that my hands are better than yours. He said, I wear loops and you don’t. And if something as basic as that, just wearing a pair of a set of loops and today wouldn’t work without my loops and actually probably without the light on the loops.

Yeah, I mean, that one’s changing, you know? I’d say still slowly, dude. Yeah, you’d be amazed on on our composite course here, more than half the class don’t have loops. And these are people who are paying, you know, £1,500 to come on a composite anterior composite course. It surprised me a little bit. Surprised me, too.

Usually it’s an attitude thing. I think so. I was at a social gathering last week, but there were quite a lot of dentists. There was the daughters, the daughter of that very first principal that I was telling you about actually got married last week. And one of the guests there was also an associate at the practice that I worked at back then before me. And he said something really interesting. He said, I’ve got these young dentists and they’re all reading their eyes. I said, What do you mean? He said, They’re ruining their eyes. They’re all wearing loops the day they come out of university and they’re all being conned by these loop companies. I didn’t have the energy to have this discussion with him, but I thought, no, this this is the problem. There’s a perception thing. You know, this chap is probably 60 years old and he’s probably not wearing loops himself, if that’s what he’s saying.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Did tell me about I mean, this is such an unfair question because, you know, I’m sure there’s a six year MSC on it. But tell me about Aha moments in Implantology.

So I think it happens in tranches of numbers of implants that you place. So my journey was I never actually set out to be an implant surgeon, by the way. So going to Sheffield was about doing Prosto, which is what I loved. And I started out found a surgeon. And I was going to refer to them. They would place the implants and I would restore them. But everything that came back wasn’t what I’d asked for. So I’d want, let’s say, an internal connection, and I’d want the implants put in a particular place. And the surgery was done very, very well, but it was kind of done to whatever he wanted to do. He’d got paid. He’d send it back to me and I know how to make it look like teeth. Yeah. And I thought, this is not working for me. So I had a different conversation with him. I said, Look, if I go off and do some course and things, will you mentor me to do this for myself? He said, Yeah, look, I’m busy enough. I’ll happily help you and guide you in things. So the reason for doing the surgery was to have the control. And it wasn’t to do with the fact that I actually wanted to be a surgeon.

And I would say that the first 5060 implants you restore, you’ll learn a whole bunch of things about the connection, about your system, about how to talk things in or glue them in, how to clean the glue, whatever it is that you’re learning. And you’ll follow those cases and you’ll pick up some things. Maybe you shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have done this. The next 50, you learn something else and the watershed sort of come in in big bunches of like follow up of your own cases. So you learn a new skill, you start doing it, but you’re not going to be very good at it at the outset. And you almost certainly need to evolve your technique from whatever you were taught, because in your hands it will work slightly differently. And. They pin things for me that have just allowed me. So I think you need to restore, let’s say, 100 implants, and that will make you a better surgeon. Okay. So if you want to do surgery, that’s great. But I would say you don’t do it because. Your surgical person, learn to restore first. You’ll see all the problems you might be facing and make you a better surgeon.

And I think I think I’m sorry to interrupt. I’ll let you continue the second, but I think when we qualified I don’t know about Bristol, but in Cardiff, Implantology was kind of a subsection of oral surgery. And then afterwards, maybe five, ten years after we qualified, it became clear that it had to be restoratively led. And it was, you know, that you you start with the end in mind kind of thing. Whereas whereas I remember at the beginning when I was qualifying and I was in university, the whole question was about this screw that’s going in the bone and the integration of the screw in the bone. It was all about osteo integration, just that was the most important thing. And then you almost do the restorative to that rather than the other way around, which is kind of where it went. So you’re kind of in a way you were in an advantageous situation. You came at it from the restorative side.

Yeah, we were quite lucky. So I think that division, I think existed in a lot of schools. So when I went to Sheffield, for instance, it was kind of 5050 in Brooke up there, Professor Brooke oral surgery side. And then there was Raj Patel in the restorative side. So I think but Raj came much later, so originally it would have been Ian Brooke I suspect so. It was a surgical thing at Cardiff. You’re saying it’s surgical at Bristol is very different. I remember there were two consultants particular Neil Meredith who you’ll know and Paul King if they had an implant patient, it was approved because there was a budget for all this and things. They would start running up and down the corridors, you know, doing a little jig and dancing because they’d found an implant patient. It was sort of those early days and but it was restorative. They were both restorative guys. So at Bristol, it was very much a restorative thing.

I see. So, okay. The Nuggets. The Nuggets. You say once you’ve put 100 implants in, what were those aha moment that you get from from from that sort of experience?

First of all, that these things are literally just, you know, screws in the bone. When I first.

Started out, it’s a great implant ologist. What makes it is it is it the soft tissue sort of integration? Like like making the soft tissues? Correct. Is that what it is?

Attention to detail. So I think you need enough hard tissue. But to make the case great, if that’s what you’re alluding to, I think you need. Abundant soft tissue and nine times out of ten, you don’t have it. You’re going to have to develop. That soft tissue. So these skills you only realise when you look at your own cases and they don’t look so pretty. They come back and they’re not so pretty. Or you see that there’s a little bit of a label defect as in a concavity around your upper central crown. It doesn’t just quite look like an actual tooth anymore. You start realising that, okay, there’s enough bone, the implants integrated, it’s healthy and you’re looking at it year after year and it looks great on an x ray, but. If you took a picture. It’s not one that you’re particularly proud of and that leads you to realise that, okay, I need to hone different skills here. This is a soft tissue thing and I need to build that tissue. Hence, for instance, talking about going to see Eric Van Doren, a lot of cases, posterior maxilla, you’re not going to have enough bone.

Even the anterior maxilla, you’re not going to have enough bone always. And you need to go and then learn how to regenerate and rebuild bone. And there’s a variety of different ways of doing that, and they all work. So you need to decide, okay, in my hands what’s going to work? You know, am I going to use urban sausage technique or am I going to do this with a curry technique and get good at that? Because ultimately it doesn’t matter which way you do it, it’s the outcome, right? Yeah. And sinus grafting for me was a big thing. You know, probably placed 100 implants before I forayed into that area. And I think in the UK at the time, the teaching wasn’t ever going to be hands on or practical. So I had to go overseas where people were teaching live surgery or there are some places doing cadaveric sort of teaching, but kind of cadavers don’t bleed. Yeah. And when you’re doing surgery and things are bleeding and you’ve hit a vessel, it’s a very different environment, right?

Yeah, for sure. And do you do. Where do you where do you stop? I mean, so do you do all on for. Do you do the implants and the zygoma. What are they called. Yeah.

So zygomatic pterygoids.

Mean, zygomatic. Do you do all that?

We place pterygoids We don’t place the zygomatic. We have a visiting surgeon that comes in and does the zygomatic for us. We don’t. Have that many cases a year. A handful. And I think if you’re going to get good at something. So both. Martin I’ve done courses to place and learn to do zygomaticus But we took the decision that unless the demand is there, where we’re going to be able to develop that skill properly, it’s probably not something that makes sense for us to do so. We know our limits. We’re not doing enough to get very good at that. We call a visiting surgeon into place the zygomatic fixtures and when they do that, they actually place all the implants in that arch. It’s not like they do the Dogmatics and the Martin take over for the rest. But everything else, yeah, we do ourselves. I do think there is a huge shift, perhaps in slightly the wrong direction with some of these implants as well though I think we forget that the sinus is something you can graft and regrow bone. Yes, it’s a slower route to getting there, but I don’t think this sort of surgery is for every surgeon. It’s certainly not necessarily for every patient as well. And they’re not without their problems and complications.

Yeah. So when I asked Andrew DeWitt that question, like, what’s the essence of being a great implantologists, he said something about spatial awareness. Yeah. You know, I wasn’t expecting him to say that it was.

Yeah. So I think what he’s alluding to there and maybe elaborated if you ask him a follow up question, but it’s about 3D thinking. So you mentioned occlusion earlier. Yeah, I. Haven’t ever really found occlusion as a concept. That’s that’s difficult. I just think of things and maybe I’ve always been like this. I see things in 3D. And that makes life a lot easier. But I think that can be learned if you’re not good at that at the outset. But that’s what I think he’s talking about. And I’ve seen some surgeons who not only think like that, but they’re ambidextrous. They can do things equally well with both hands. Some of these people are very, very highly gifted.

Mm. And what are the stats around implant patients now? Are there more implants going in than ever before? Have we caught up with the rest of Europe? Where are we with that? Uk wise.

I wouldn’t know the numbers in the UK, but I think certainly there are more and more places.

Behind.

For years we were you know, if you’d asked me 1012 years ago, I think for instance in Brazil we were about one tenth the number that they were placing in Brazil and lots of parts of Europe as well. And I think there’s two issues here. One is. Historical to do with the NHS and funding. You know, you could do a bridge, but you couldn’t do an implant and it’s taken a while for that perhaps to change, for people to start thinking, okay, well actually I need to offer everything both ethically and medico legally. So that I think took a little while for us to shake off. And then the numbers of surgeons available in the UK to actually place these things. I think we need more people placing, you know, we need general dentists with good hands placing. If there’s plenty of bone, there’s no real surgical risk. A competent dentist can place the implant, no problem at all. And we need more and more younger guys and girls doing that. And I think it’s only really when they reach their limits for perhaps whether it’s to do with lack of bone, soft tissue or, you know, sinus grafting, they then refer those complicated cases on. And that’s what Martin, I’ve always sought to do. So we’ve had a number of people over the years, they refer cases when they’re ready to do surgery, will help them. We’ll mentor them. We’ll guide them to do that. And people have said, well, surely you’re losing out. And the answer is no. All that happens is we get their complex cases and when they’ve learned those skills, we get their even more complicated cases.

Nice. Tell me about the organisational structure of the practices. Who are the reports? Is there a manager at each site?

So it’s a fairly flat structure. Martin Myself and we have an area manager which who covers both the practices. We have an operations manager in the office, and we have a finance person that looks after all of the ins and outs of money. And sometimes we’ll call me. Martin. Tell us off for spending too much on a on a new scanner or something like that that we fancied.

So have you on that side note, I went to Martin’s lecture at Bard and one of the most beautiful lectures I’ve seen in years, but very digital. If you have, you also taken on the whole digital side. Yeah.

So the whole practice now, you know, we’ve got multiple scanners, we’ve got CT scanners at both practices as well. Everything that we can do digitally, we do. And the only time that the comes out as if the scanner for some reason is having a bit of a moment, which does happen. Technology crashes sometimes. But otherwise pretty much everything. And that’s not just for Implantology but across the board. Restoratively is digital. Sometimes we’ve got two dentists waiting for we need more scanners. You know, I think that’s the way it’s going.

Yeah. And what about as far as associates? I mean, you’ve had when you look at the list of people who’ve gone through your practice, some of the sort of up and comers who then become, you know, in their own right, you know, teachers and so forth, what do you do? Do you actively try and search out young talent? How much of it is is, you know, what you can give them and how much of it is what they can give you. Tell me your sort of learnings, your nuggets around attracting and keeping these people.

So there’ll be two elements to that. I mean, there are obviously specific skills sometimes that we need within the team. So an oral surgeon, for instance, we’re going to go and find that person. They need to have a certain skill set already. And we tried and tested within that discipline because we’re taking referrals for those wisdom teeth or complicated extractions, whatever it is. Same goes for the endo or the perio, and we’ve got multiple orthodontic specialists as well. But from a general dentist perspective, we have a team that will have experienced people that like doing certain things. You know, the sort of people that you’re thinking of that have been in, gone perhaps on to other things, set up their own practices and we actively seek those people out as well. But equally we have younger dentists one or 2 or 3 years out. And if they’ve got the right attitude, what we want is that we will teach them and it’s a journey and at a certain point they realise, okay, I’m now doing this competently. What’s the next step? It’s building blocks. Go and learn about soft tissue, go and learn about X, Y, z, and they will all generally follow our advice. Go off and do a course, sometimes shadow us or internally shadow somebody else. And when they’re ready, if they want to go and fly solo, we’re happy to share that as well. 1 or 2 people that have gone on and set up their own practices will tell you if you have them on the show, they’ll tell you. We’ve shared freely and given advice. There’s enough room for all of us.

Yeah, I remember saying something like that.

Yeah. You know, he’s a good guy. Deserves the very best. He’s worked very, very hard. Talented guy. And, yeah, we’ve helped him along the way where he’s wanted help. He didn’t need much help. You. He knows what he’s doing.

Yeah. So, so then, you know, expand on that. When you say right attitude, of course, someone who’s curious wants to learn. Get all of that. But is there is there more to it than that? Is there sort of communication that you can’t teach?

So I think the soft skills are difficult for us to teach. I think they can be learned. I think they can be acquired. But yeah, you want to engage with people and see where their soft skill set lies because you could be the best clinician, but unless you can talk to a patient and unless they’re willing to come back and have that treatment with you and I know Prav did something recently, you know, the s word or selling. Yeah, we have to sell things to patients. We have to guide them to make the right decisions because you’re not going to deliver that dentistry otherwise. And that is something we’ve had talented clinicians sometimes who struggled with that but pointed them in the right direction. They go and learn some of those things, how to present a case, how to put that together and explain it to a patient in language that they can understand. Others have come and they’ve taught us, you know, they’re naturally good at it and we’ll pick up when we see clinicians who are converting really well. I want to my mind and Martin’s eyes light up in our ears prick up. We want to go and see what they’re doing because I’m sure we could learn from them.

Yeah, but so if you’ve got two candidates, one’s got the soft skills and one’s got nice before and after pictures, but not the soft skills. You’d always take the first one or not always, but you’d bet on the first one.

But it depends if, if the person who’s doing the beautiful dentistry is willing to go and learn that we think that they are open minded and can acquire those skills. Yeah, the soft skills, then I think that that’s okay. But yeah, I would favour the person with the soft skills because the dentistry can be taught to most of us I think far more readily.

It’s so interesting isn’t it, because I’m sure young dentists wouldn’t think that that’s the actual situation.

I think that there is a huge shift to a lot of younger colleagues trying to acquire very, very quickly certain clinical skill sets. And I would say that actually one of the things that we were very, very, very lucky at Bristol to have a master and I still talk about this once in a while. We had a whole module in our second or third year over two years. It was called Health and Society, and it was this wishy washy sort of bunch of things that you thought, What is that about? But at the time you’ll remember there was a whole furore back then with HIV and we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t have the antiretrovirals back then and we were still treating these patients in sort of almost like Covid type situations at the end of a session. So the room could be fumigated and wiped and sprayed and, you know, all of those things. And we had a session where they actually had the Terrence Higgins Trust come along and a couple of HIV positive people come along and chat to us and tell us their perception of what life was actually like living with HIV and Aids. And there was a lot of other stuff about inequalities in health and social strata, and it was the best thing because actually that whole thing was about soft skills. And I don’t know of any other school that is doing that or was I don’t even know if they still do it at Bristol now, but we certainly had the benefit of that.

Nice. So when you think about your practices, you know, you started them from a squat, which is high risk in a way. And, you know, someone else is thinking about starting a practice. And if someone hasn’t been to your practices, I mean, from memory, visual, minimal chic sort of look that they’ve got about them, they’re in funky sort of locations, nice, nice high street locations in nice parts of London. And how much would you advise someone today that location and design, how important is that? And I don’t think it goes without saying, right. No one wants a beautiful practice where it doesn’t. You know, the density is not right, of course. But how important is location and design? Because you guys, you know, you’re a bit ahead of your time in that sense, right?

I think location is probably the biggest thing. Once you found the right site, then of course you’ve got to make it attractive to patients and don’t think that necessarily involves. Too many frivolities and fancy things. It can be quite simple but elegant, clean. What patients want versus what we perceive them to want is often quite different. I don’t think we often try to drill down in that, and there’s a lot of research out there in these things. If you care to look colour, science, sound, smells, all sorts of things. And perhaps we were ahead of our time, you know, we didn’t have anything that contained. For instance, Eugenol smell is one of our most basic senses and it can take you back. If you got somebody who’d been in Auschwitz and you had burning flesh anywhere near them, they would know what that was like and it would take them back to a memory they did not want. Right? And we’ve all been there with certain smells. So we made a this is the detail of things. We made a conscious decision. No Eugenol We don’t want that Dental smell. And the water would always be turned on super high when you were drilling teeth. We don’t want that burnt tooth smell. And on top of that, we had scent burners, diffusing oils in and around the practice. And the patients could actually we got even better. We’d have our selection. We’d ask the patient when they walked in, what scent would you like in the room? And someone would choose Lang Lang. Others would want Eucalyptus, whatever it was, but we’d make it about them.

And this was before. Before every third shop was an aromatherapy shop. This was a while ago.

Yeah, 20 odd years ago.

So, yeah.

We were trying to make it about the patient. So if you walk down the street, what do you see? If you walked in the practice, what is it you’re seeing when you walk into the treatment room? What is it you’re seeing? Sit in the chair. And I think every dentist should do this. By the way, every few months, sit in your own chair, recline it, and look at what’s on the ceiling. That cobweb, that spider crawling around, whatever it is, that little spatter of blood, because we don’t look up often enough.

Yeah, true. And, you know, your own sort of bedside chairside manner. I mean, I’m sure it’s not just pure marketing, but Martin Prav, it says it says you, you listen to the patient and that’s that’s a key thing for you. Did you sort of hone it? Were you always good at that? Is that is it the big experience word? Yeah. So the hints, hints around. I mean, it sounds simple, doesn’t it? Listen to your patient. But.

Now, I think we’re far too quick to jump in offering solutions before we’ve listened to what the real problem is. So there are patients who are trying to get away from something, whether it’s pain or poor looking smile. And there are other people who are trying to go towards something. And the language that we use around that, the way that that’s presented. And I think one of the biggest pitfalls is to get sidetracked. There’s a lot of other problems in the mouth. But they came to you about the pain from the upper left central. You’ve got to deal with that first. They’re not going to pay attention to anything else you tell them till they’re out of pain and you’ve dealt with that presenting problem. And I think that we’ve had conditions in the past who are very, very good at certain things. They would start talking about the smile in the whitening and everything else and the guy still sitting there for 30 minutes into the appointment in pain. So we have to figure out why that person is there and you have to get good at doing that quite quickly. And a lot of that is verbal. They’ll tell you. You then need to ask more open questions, of course. A lot of it is non-verbal and I think we’re all pretty good naturally, if we just take the time to pick up on those non-verbal cues. We’re wired that way. You can see in someone’s eyes if they’re happy, not happy. Suddenly they cross their arms. They’re closing off. We all have these skills. You just have to tune into it when you’re doing that initial consultation.

And do you do you provide training for the team on this aspect?

We try and make sure that that initial appointment, the new patient consultation, is as close as it can be. For every patient that walks in the door the same. Now it won’t be because payments got payments. Personality and nicks got nicks personality. And, you know, you might be a bit more jokey than me. I might be a little bit different in the way I actually do things or say things. But broadly, the journey needs to be the same. And when anybody starts with us the first week or two, they will shadow not only me and Martin, but other clinicians, so that that initial journey is standardised for everybody as best it can be.

So I want to get to darker times and we talk about this word experience. We talk about experience coming from pain and from mistakes and things going wrong. Tell me, tell me about what comes to mind when I talk about things going wrong. And I’d like both, you know, clinically from a business standpoint, even even with your sort of teaching and, you know, around the the societies and all that, what comes to mind when I when I say that in those different areas.

So the first thing that comes to mind clinically is. Learning to recognise the problem. Patient. Nine times out of ten. When I’ve had problems with patients complaining or threatening to go medico legal, which we all get nowadays. It’s the patient that I was even sceptical about taking on in the first place. So I think, you know, we can’t turn away all patients. But if there are alarm bells ringing at the very outset, there are plenty of other dentists out there who might be able to look after that person better than you. So the biggest stresses have come from people that actually from the outset probably thought, no, I shouldn’t treat this person. And I’ve got good at asking my nurse, you know, what do you think? Do you think we can treat this person? And sometimes the nurse will say, Yeah, it’s just they’re nervous or whatever. And I’ll think about whether I agree with the nurse or not as to whether to take them on clinically. Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve made all sorts of mistakes. You know, compressing nerves all resolved. Patient isn’t numb anymore. But these are things that you really do start losing a bit of sleep over and sometimes biting off more than you can chew, thinking that you can do something just because you went on a course on Friday and doing it on Monday.

And I think my biggest mistake on that front was a patient who very wealthy young guy, parents had died young. He inherited. That much money that was flying in and out from Europe by private jet to see me. Money was no object, but he was in charge. He was wired that way. He’s one of those guys. He would tell you what you were doing. So, Alpha, here’s what I was doing for him. Yeah, but I was now prepping 28 teeth and fitting 28 restorations two weeks later for him. That’s what I was doing for him. At his request, he told me, and against my better judgement, I took it on. I delivered it. It’s all fine. It’s never no problems, follow ups. Great. But I can tell you the amount of stress that caused me, the sleep I lost over that case. Wondering whether he’s going to come back with a whole host of problems. Just don’t. Don’t bite off more than you can chew to.

Nothing actually went wrong there.

No, fortunately. But I kept the models, kept everything for seven years and always wondered, you know, every time I opened the cupboard, I saw the models there. I’d be wondering whether this was going to come back to bite me.

That sort of that unknown is actually, you’re right that not knowing whether it’s going to come to bite you might be even more painful than it actually coming to you. But but but what about when something’s gone wrong? I mean, the level of implantology you’re doing stuff must have gone wrong, right? Yeah.

So, I mean.

You’ll there’s one that we can learn a lesson from. Like someone could learn a lesson from.

I think you have to try and stay calm, even if internally, you know, if the patient picks up that you’re shitting yourself, then I think that becomes a problem. Right? So we will all come across things that become very worrying. I’ll give you an example of a something I hadn’t seen I haven’t seen since, but lower anterior mandible. Prepping an osteotomy for an implant. There’s an artery there that haven’t an arterial that I haven’t seen. And suddenly there’s blood literally squirting pulsatile blood going halfway across the room in squirts like a water pistol being shot out of her mouth. And my nurse is now just suddenly looking at me, panicking. I knew what had happened immediately. I hadn’t seen the vessel on the CT scan, but there’s only one thing I could do. You need to plug that hole. Well, luckily, you keep calm. What’s going in the hole? The implant is going in the hole. Just keep calm. Widen it and put the implant in. No more bleeding. But it’s very easy suddenly to panic and think about cauterising and, you know, trying to ligate vessels and all sorts of things that you couldn’t possibly do for an interosseous vessel. You just have to keep calm. Similar things will happen when you open sinus windows. You know, there are small vessels that you can often pick up if they’re intraosseous, but if they’re actually sitting inside, you’re not going to see the soft tissue on a CT scan. You’re not going to see that. Have you seen it before? Had I seen that sort of pulsatile blood? No.

Yeah. So how did you know that? You just it seemed obvious to you that putting the implant in was going to stop.

It every time the patient’s heart’s beating, this thing is squirting out that sort of pressure. I’m not. I’m not kidding. About three metres across the room, that’s how much pressure there is. Right? So.

Oh my God.

That’s no way that that’s a, you know, a that has to be arterial. Right. So yeah. So you know what’s going on there. But it’s happened when I’ve been mentoring as well. You know someone’s hit a vessel up in the sinus, it’s bleeding and they’re panicking, they’re worrying. You’ve got to stop that bleed. And whether that’s bone wax, cautery, whatever you choose to do, you need to have a variety of tricks up your sleeve to stop that. I’ve had phone calls at 130 in the morning having done an all on four patient is still bleeding. And I said, Oh yes, just a bit of pressure. This. No, She said, No, it’s bleeding like a tap. I’ve had to go back to the surgery and, you know, my wife’s in the waiting room. I don’t have a nurse at 130 in the morning. I’m now numbing the patient up, taking the provisional bridge off, opening the flap on my own. And it was an arterial bleed from the palatal tissues and I had to cauterise that and sew it all back up and put the teeth back in at 1:00, whatever it was in the morning on my own. So these experiences, you do learn things from them.

Well, that’s give me a level of PTSD I wasn’t expecting to get today.

I mean, the other things like membranes and the sinus blowing out, you get the big blow outs and you kind of need to know when you have to close up and come back. It’s not often, but every now and then you’re going to get one that you just have to close and come back to later on. So I think. What is it better?

Was there. Was there ever. Was it sorry? Was there ever a time where you were doing a particular treatment modality or using a particular system or technique where you did it on lots of patients and then you saw them come back systematically and you realise, Oh, what have I done? Does that ever? Because I remember I used a particular material that, you know, they said, Oh, this brilliant amalgam replacement composite packable stuff. And you know, I was a young dentist. It was not like I did loads of stuff, right? I might have done 30 fillings with it. But then I realised, Oh, wait a minute, they’re all failing, this is crap. Or the way I’m doing it is crap. But you know, that’s, that’s 30 fillings. Did you have that sort of situation with implants and thinking there’s ticking time bombs when something new has come along and you’ve jumped on it? Yeah.

So I’ve had the experience with a material that I won’t name, but it was a synthetic graph material. I don’t think it’s even available on the market anymore, but it seemed really nice and easy. You could inject it. It was set hard and it was some sort of beta tricalcium phosphate and beads I seem to recall, and every case that I did with this would come back and there’d be no bone afterwards. So I very quickly learned, I mean, it took a number of months because that’s how long it takes to make new bone. But when I wasn’t getting any and look, it may not be the material. I think we forget sometimes that it might be in my hands. That didn’t work. Technique Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I had to go back to what I was doing beforehand. But the reason the attraction of the synthetic, of course, was not having to have the conversation about cows and pigs and things with patients.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, being a sort of near the top of something like, like implantology, there’s that sort of moment of trying something new or sticking to what you know. Or you could say the same thing about analogue and digital, right? But, you know, it’s I find it a funny thing. The closer you get to being near the top of something, the more you’re going to have to try things out that aren’t necessarily researched properly. So I think.

We’re quite lucky. Martin We get involved with a fair few clinical trials stuff that’s not on the market yet. We get to try that out. And, you know, the first time we had to apply for Ethics Committee approval and things for this, it was it was a huge learning. It takes forever hours and hours of form filling, going back and forth with various stuff. And the companies help you, of course, but you have to do it because the company is overseas somewhere. You’re in London, the Ethics Committee is your local ethics committee. But yeah, we’ve got that down. You know, we know what to do now and that means we get to try things with ethics approval when new things are out there. And that’s quite a nice thing to be involved with. We enjoy that. Other times we get to try things that have been approved for launch the approved clinical products, but they’re not released to market yet. We get to play with those sometimes. Do the initial sort of one year follow up, five year follow up stuff that is needed for that. So that’s part of the fun for us.

Yeah, Yeah.

But I think in the UK we do have to be a little bit more cautious and perhaps other parts of the world if you’re going to start being innovative, doing things that are not tried and tested. You know, we work in a very different regulatory environment than perhaps. Other countries, and I think that can stifle progress and innovation.

So. So you detailed there a clinical error and a patient management error. What about if I said business error? What comes to mind?

We too many over the years to count. But I’ll give you 1 or 2 things that perhaps. We have. Done or not done as well as it could be. We a few years back we decided to relocate our Clapham practice. And we wanted a bigger site. Basically, it was double the number of chairs and we thought, this is simple. It’s just relocating a practice. The maths is all the same, but it’s not. You know, the building’s different, the cost base is different. And we didn’t really realise why certain things weren’t working for the first year or so till we realised, hang on a second, this is a effectively a completely new squat practice and that’s how you have to treat it. And that was a huge mistake. So what, you.

Mean you didn’t expect it to be like that?

Yeah, I think the the metrics are different. You know, we try to model it. Martin will sit down, you know, having built squat practices before. But the assumption in my mind certainly was that this was, you know, we’ve got an existing practice. These are the numbers. We’re just going to move all that across to a new site. And we’ve got a couple more chairs here. So that’s all that’s happening. But it wasn’t it was effectively like building a completely new practice.

So. Okay. What else comes to mind?

Yeah. So we’ve also taken a little foray into trying to build a facial aesthetics practice and. Didn’t perhaps do our homework. The idea was that that site we vacated in Clapham, we would keep a hold of it and build a facial practice there. Some of our clinicians were delivering this sort of dentistry already. But Martin and I don’t do any facial aesthetics. We’ve got some clinicians who do that sort of work. We hadn’t really realised what that market was fully about, perhaps, and we certainly hadn’t researched the level of investment that some of the hardware, the lasers and other things that might require. And that was a costly mistake. We started building a business. We started marketing for patients. People would come in, but we didn’t have the hardware to deliver what they they all wanted. These were savvy customers. They knew what they wanted. We hadn’t done our research fully. So I think that was a very valuable but expensive lesson.

So, you know, when when you’ve made this sort of highly successful group of practices now and you must look you must look back at that with some justifiable sort of pride. But when you think back on it, what what gives you the sort of I mean, if we’re talking the other side of it, sort of the most pleasurable memories you’ve got from building this?

You know, I’ve got to go on a journey with. I know they say don’t go into business with your friends, but Martin, I enjoy building sort of new practices starting from scratch. And that does excite us. And we’ve got to do that several times over now and, you know, back in the day. Yes, the families unfortunately suffered because we were spending far too much time with each other. We’d be at the practice till 11, 12:00 at night doing some work, whether it’s paperwork, spreadsheets or even around the practice, adding something or building something. But that journey and getting to go on that with Martin is certainly has been fantastic and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed that. In terms of pride, I’m not wired that way, to be honest with you. I don’t really sit there and sort of look back at achievements in that way. But I think winning practice of the year back in 2017, that private dentistry awards and best referral practice that same year was something that for the team and Martin myself was a real high really was proud of that.

What else. What else. What other high points.

High points. Yeah. I think, as I say, I don’t reflect in that way. Payman But. The pleasurable things for me are certainly that we’ve successfully built. A referral practice within a general practice. I don’t think that used to happen before we sort of broke the mould a little bit there and that took some active thinking and a deliberate strategy and it was to get local clinicians together, educate for free. We would share, bring guest speakers and a lot of colleagues and friends have given up their time, many of whom you know. I think 1 or 2 who you might even have sponsored on the evening to come and speak for us. But giving that back, but thinking about it from the referrers perspective, just as a patient journey for us is about the patient. We want to make that referral journey as friction free as possible for the referring clinician. And it took time, took a lot of time and effort. We would spend evenings with lectures and then a bit of social activity afterwards with a lot of colleagues, and that takes away from the family time. It’s a big sacrifice, but we’re proud of the fact that I would say over half our business is actually referral business.

Is it really? Wow. Yeah.

And it’s an ongoing thing that we work with clinicians of all abilities to whatever level they want, and it’s something that we will actively always seek to do. We enjoy the engagement with colleagues. Some of them will come and watch, learn, observe. Others just want to send the patient in and you send them back having done whatever they needed doing.

What are the bits of bits of this that give you the biggest buzz and the bits of it that don’t? The bits of it you don’t like doing? What are the bits that come really naturally to you? And you know, you could do it all day and then the opposite.

So the clinical work I really enjoy and I could do all day without breaking too much of a sweat unless I get another arterial bleed or something like that. But the.

Do you mean the Meccano? Do you mean the surgery and the meccano? Or do you mean the patient interaction or both or.

Um, no. I actually mean the Meccano. I mean the actual treatment. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the interaction with patients, but of all of those things, doing the active treatment and the surgery side, perhaps more so than the restorative in some ways really.

Zoned into it.

It’s just I find that very enjoyable. I don’t find it stresses me out too much in any way. And, you know, you’re giving back something that people have lost. I think a lot of the patients that we get are really they have a disability. We don’t often see it that way, whether it’s a single tooth or often, in our case, half a mouth, full mouth. You’re actually rehabilitating somebody, giving them back function that they don’t have. And it’s something that we all need to do. We all need to eat. We need to be able to chew our food to get the nutrition from there. And it’s something that we’re lucky enough in our practice to be able to do for our patients.

I think on the implant side, you guys are more aware of that than the rest of us who are not on the implant side. But the lesson should be drawn across across all the different disciplines that, you know, eating, smiling, you know, someone, someone. Laura Horton said something. She said, you know, you could help someone fall in love and have a have a relationship. It’s, you know, understanding that that that that could be part of dentistry. I find the implant guys it comes more naturally to them because they literally have you know people who couldn’t bite into an apple who now can. It’s a life changing situation. But you know, including knowing that makes it a much more sort of worthwhile thing that you’re following. And isn’t it in a way, rather than sort of drilling a tooth?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is about giving people back their freedom, their confidence. There’s a massive psychological element to all of this self-respect. Absolutely. Yeah. And it affects parts of their lives that they’re not going to necessarily share with you and me freely. But there are forums out there, and if you Google things, you end up down these rabbit holes. But I did one day stumble upon all sorts of people problems that people were having in the bedroom because of no teeth or their teeth falling out or whatever it is, whether, you know, some of them. The simplest level would be that they didn’t want to kiss somebody. But this is out there on forums, but they won’t tell you and me. That’s why they’re there.

So you said you particularly enjoy the surgery side. What else do you particularly enjoy and which bits don’t you like?

I enjoy mentoring colleagues and helping them develop their skills. I enjoy building those new practices. I mean, that’s obviously few and far between, but that process I think really thoroughly enjoy. You know, you have a squat site. It’s just a. The black hole, a building you’re pouring lots and lots of money into at the outset, and often a bit of sweat and tears dealing with builders and contractors and things. But when it then finally you open the doors and it’s a real dental practice. There’s a satisfaction in doing that. Yeah. Which I do enjoy. And yeah, so being able to help colleagues and along the journey, once we populate that practice with new clinicians, that’s another part of what I really enjoy as well.

I think that thing you said about progression, it’s difficult in dentistry outside of the clinicians. How do you how do you manage that for your non whether it’s non dentists.

So for our team, we’ve got the usual sort of platforms where they get their CPD and things for free. It’s quite interesting to see who does and doesn’t use it. You can often spot potential in people, you know, the ones that have done all the modules very quickly and they’ll come and ask you questions about it. And there are others who are getting free CPD that they need. They’re not even bothering. So it does give you a little bit of insight into your team. Our team are pretty good generally, but the other thing is that we will actually Martin will have a conversation usually about once a week, once a fortnight about people within the team. Somebody’s leaving. Somebody’s pregnant. Who’s going to take this role? And then we’ll actively seek to develop people. Too often we haven’t got the skills yet. We have to identify courses for them to go on, and they’re always keen to learn. They didn’t think they were going to get offered that opportunity. They’re always very grateful.

Could you give me an example then? Give me an example of where someone started and where they’ve ended.

Yeah. So we’ve got people who’ve started as just a trainee nurse and they will come through that journey, gone on to be a head nurse and then gone on and become a treatment coordinator. And there’s completely different skill sets in all of that, and it’s just taken a number of years for them to go through that progression. But they stuck around. We had another nurse who. Wanted to do. Hygiene helped her along with that. And then she came back and worked as a hygienist for us for a period of time as well. So anybody that wants to progress, I don’t think you should hold people back. I think it was Richard Branson. I think he said, look, train people well enough that they could leave you but treat them well enough that they don’t want to.

Mm That’s nice.

And that’s kind of the philosophy.

That’s nice. So we were doing an interview last week and the person doing the interview with me, so on our side said, yeah, that that candidate was really strong. But in a way I think he was too ambitious for us. And it broke my heart, man. Broke my heart that that’s what she was thinking. You know, you have to try and find someone who’s less ambitious and, you know, and I get what she was saying. She was saying he’s not going to stick around or something. Yeah, but what you just said there resonates. But that’s a nice, nice way of looking at it.

Well, people, I think, might surprise you as well, You know, just because they’re ambitious doesn’t mean that they’re going to run off. And if they do, one of the things that she said, what gives me pleasure, one of the things that really is quite pleasing and it’s happened only last week. We’ve had a number of people leave us, go off and do other things. And I’m talking, you know, ten, 12 people over the last 20 years will then come back and want to work with us again because the grass is always greener, right? Yeah, but they’ll have gone. Feels good, doesn’t it? Yeah, but they come back and it’s always amicable, you know, The parting is never acrimonious. Most people get a little send off and drinks and all the usual things, and, you know, if they deserve it, the reference, all of those things. But then have some of them come back and say, look, I want to come back and work for you. That’s really quite pleasing.

Yeah, that is nice. I feel like that with people who leave Enlightened and come back.

So your team is about as big as ours now, isn’t it?

It’s about the same. About the same 50 people. No, but I meant customers. Meant customers. Oh, we’ve. You know, there’s always some accountant somewhere who goes, Why are you paying so much for your whitening? You know? And then you get someone. Maybe, um, we’re coming. We’re coming to the end. You didn’t tell me which bits of the job you hate.

You know, the bureaucracy. Sometimes I think most of us who are clinicians, and that’s kind of where I started out, that the business acumen and all the other things and the academies and things. That’s the secondary thing. I’m a dentist first and foremost. Yeah, the regulatory stuff, stuff that gets in the way. I just find that onerous and a little bit frustrating at times. It’s just the way I’m wired. I mean, we all have to do it. Look, I get that we need regulation. I don’t have a problem with that. Yeah, but I don’t see the sense in all of the things that we’re asked to do sometimes. And that frustrates too. So that part of the job I don’t particularly like. Other than that, there’s not a lot you know, I like a varied week and being able to do a bit of HR and a little bit of finance and a little bit of something else and some clinical dentistry along the way and maybe some mentoring or helping or looking at a case with a colleague along the way that that I think the week goes nicely like that.

Nick You know when I think about people who managed to become presidents of stuff and, you know get up that ladder if you like, I somehow always think there’s some sort of a machiavellian sort of skill if you want to look at it that way, you know, you’re good at that sort of thing. And I don’t mean to make it sound like because because I think you’re completely the opposite. This is my point that, you know, you’ve managed to get to the top of stuff without having sort of what I would consider the skill set that some people have to have politically to sort of, you know, manage things. For instance, you know, you have to get to the top of stuff. You need to sit in meetings, for instance, for the sake of the argument. Yeah. And I could never do that. That would disqualify me from the beginning. From the get go. I can’t even sit and have a meeting about like, the subject that interests me very, very much. You know, like the most important subject to my to my life. I can’t sit. So. So I would get disqualified. But. But what would you say to someone who wants to get involved?

So I think the first thing for me is why are you doing it? I mean, there are people you’re right, they’ve got ambitions. They see it as a badge of honour or something they can put on the CV and use and leverage. It’s never, ever been about that for me, and I’ve never used it in that way wherever I’ve been. You know, it’s for the good of the organisation or the way I see it, I’ve always seen it. I beg your pardon is maybe, like I said, this is going back to my dad’s teaching. If you get to the top of that organisation, you’re there to serve those members of that organisation and you need to think about how you best serve them, what do they need, what do they want? And sometimes that involves asking them. Taking a survey, whatever it is. But my job as a leader within any organisation has always been there to look after those people within the organisation. It’s not there to serve my own purpose. So if somebody young wants to get involved and you know, we’ve always been at the back, very progressive as you know, we’ve always had students engaged and some of them now are president of the organisation etcetera. That’s amazing to see that an organisation like the BCD within 20 years has taken Dental students through from their undergraduate days through to leading that organisation. There’s so much talent in that group of people there and the reasons they want to do it. I think for me at least, the majority of the reason needs to be that they want to give something back. Not to take something out, they will get a lot back for themselves. Invariably, you network with people, you make contacts, you get advice that all just comes, but do it for the right reason.

Okay, I get that. But what I’m saying is that to me, I would think that the kind of person you are who’s who’s not particularly sort of forceful or, I don’t know, in a situation, I don’t think you would be the one to raise your voice or, you know, be be be the outspoken one. You’re just calm, nice, you know, common sense guy. I’d imagine that person can’t get very far in a in a situation like BCD or whatever, in a situation where it’s by votes and by nominations and. But I’m wrong. Yeah. You manage it. You manage it so you make it look so effortless. But that’s that’s what explain that. Break that down for me. Am I first of all, am I completely wrong that it it doesn’t take a loud, you know, sort of influence the type of person to to move in these circles? Or number two, is it that you’ve just managed to dance on this needle more more elegantly than most?

I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never thought about it. I’ve always felt that in some way, shape or form, I’ve ended up in these places by accident. But the accidents keep happening. So you’re probably right that it’s not necessarily accidental. I from a relatively young age, I’ve been involved with organising things like this, whether it’s at school, whether it’s in my local cricket club, whatever it is. So, yes, you’re right. My style is not generally to to shout or be forceful, but I think there are different ways of leading and. People often will listen to the silence more than they will the ranting and raving. If you’re going to raise your voice. I think actually keeping quiet often speaks way more than than raising your voice or shouting or anything like that. But I think leadership is about getting people to come along with you, right? So, yeah, by and large, everything that has ever happened in the organisations I’ve been involved with will be by consensus. Of that group of people as to why they would vote for me to then be the head of that. I can’t answer to their thinking or rationale.

When you say consensus. Consensus implies you have a vote on every decision sort of thing.

No, not necessarily.

Leadership, is it?

No. You will propose something and you’re going to tell people what you’re going to do. But if they completely oppose it, you won’t get that show off the road. Yeah. So what I mean is that you need to have enough persuasion to get your ideas across and to explain the rationale behind them and the benefit to the academy or the organisation or whatever it is that you’re doing your practice, you know? Martin, I have to have these conversations. He has ideas that he has to persuade me about and vice versa. Some of my ideas are crazy and some of his are not always brilliant, but we talk about them. But before we go ahead, we do need that consensus between us. To implement them in the practice, right? So I couldn’t tell you how I end up heading these organisations. It isn’t a deliberate sort of. The strategy. It never was. Never has been.

But what’s okay, what’s what’s your particular. The word is wrong. I was going to say bugbear around these organisations. So, you know, unlike the rest of us, you and about 14 other people are able to say, right, my vision for the organisation is X, Y and Z. So what did you say on that day or what do you think? Like, you know, ask me. I’d say the events are too boring, you know, there should be more exciting. That’s what I would come in with. But. But that’s me. What did you say? What would you say?

Well, I think one of the things you’ve got to realise is that. Time is precious and depending on the organisation, you’re not going to be at the helm for an awfully long time. You have to be realistic about what you want to do and obviously there’s a journey, right? So you don’t end up as the president of an organisation on day one. You don’t just get voted in from the floor, you’ll have served on a committee, you’ll have seen how things work. So you know which buttons need pressing to get certain things done. And there’s usually a 2 or 3 person. Line to get to presidency that might be president elect or often it’s the Treasurer then becomes the vice president and etcetera. So you have a bit of time to work out what your pet projects for your period in office are going to be. And I think the key to anyone who’s going to do this is to identify what those things are going to be before you get there. Do a little bit of your own homework and then when you get there, you can actually explain it. In the right way. Get it done. But be realistic. I mean, if you’re in office for a year. With certain things. They’re going to eat up 90% of your time before you. You’re suddenly past president before whatever you want to do gets done.

He is not very long, is it?

A year is not long. At Bard. We have two years recently that that was broken. Nadeem Younis because of Covid had an extra year. So he’s probably the only person who served three years at Bard. I think at the outset, at the BCD, we needed a little bit of a steady ship. Chris was there for 3 or 4 years at the outset before he handed over to David Bloom, as you know. Yeah, but that any new organisation needs that. So what did you say.

You want to change? What did you say and what did you did you manage to, to to achieve what you thought you would? Or was it the opposite? Did you find it very difficult to achieve the things you wanted to achieve.

At the BCD? I’m not sure I changed an awful lot as president. A lot of those ideas were used up along the way. You know, I was on the board for over ten years, right? So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those things that you want to get done. We’re all ready. The ideas get used up. And this is where I think you need new people. I think you also need an element of younger people who may be a bit more savvy with certain newer technologies and social media and things coming on board in organisations to keep it fresh and relevant. And they’re the ones who are going to have new ideas. I mean, if you cling on and want to drive the car from the back seat as a past president of something or other, there’s something wrong. You need to let you know you’ve got enough young people with talent that you’ve brought on board. Let them run the show. And unless they’re doing something catastrophic, why would you get involved?

And he’s been very good at that.

Yeah, absolutely.

The execution has been excellent on that. And it’s nice to see new faces. And I always think it’s a combination of good old faces like mine and yours and then a few new faces. That makes it more interesting.

But last couple of years it’s been interesting. I mean, there’s a lot of new faces that wouldn’t know who Payman is or Nick is. I mean, that’s, you know, 20 years on. Well, yes, it is nearly 20 years old. Right. So, I mean, there are going to be a lot of younger dentists out there who wouldn’t know who the president was in 2003, 2005. Right? Yeah. And that’s fair enough. That’s okay. Bard is a much smaller organisation. We are probably only sort of 90 odd members, but clinicians of the highest calibre all wanting to deliver dentistry at a really, really high level. Presentations. As you said, Martin’s presentation was world class last year really was phenomenal. And it’s that sort.

Of education so high, the standards so high. You know what you said before that it was a bad event that kind of changed your thinking? Yeah, I completely remember exactly the same experience. And it was a bad event. It was at the Millennium Hotel in Gloucester Road years ago.

Yeah, that was the one. That’s the 10th anniversary. Was the one. That’s exactly. I didn’t realise you were there.

Yeah, it was the first time I’d heard the word zirconium for a start. And it was. It was all over the. I mean, the presentation blew me away completely. Blew me away and save me like it.

So that was John McLean talking about Zirconia and the guy, you know.

Just.

Oh, yeah. I mean, these guys were just so funny.

It’s a living legends.

Yeah. So it was the same event. But so change is potentially a little bit easier at Bard, but Bard’s also. In some ways a bit more traditional in its structure and culture. So there’s not a lot you want to change. And it is very much about academic excellence, clinical excellence, and there’s not much you know, the formula is not broken. You don’t want to really fix it too much.

Yeah. So now going forward. What can you tell me? What are your plans?

Yeah. So as I said to you earlier, I mean, we have ridden out the wave of Covid, and our plan is almost certainly to look at expanding our practices. We certainly enjoy building practices. Timing wise, not certain, but I think we will certainly be looking at that. And that means we’re always interested in meeting young new clinicians, whether they’re specialists or general dentists. We want to come and work with us. And, you know, the same that we’ve given everybody that’s been through the practice in the past will never hold them back. We’ll always want them to fly. And if they choose to fly solo somewhere else, that’s okay. They will go with our blessing. But we look forward to that next stage where we can maybe add a practice or two to the group.

Nice. And what will you do to stay in the same sort of South London? Is that is that the way you’re thinking? Keep them all close, like dominate that area sort of thing.

We toy with locations. We haven’t got anything solid. We haven’t actively started looking yet, but we will at some point. But yeah, you know, within London for sure. I don’t think either of us got the energy to to commute further than that.

Yeah, I get it, man. And any thoughts of winding down as in, you know, like at this age, me and you, we get to see some of our colleagues, right? I see people. People I went to school with talking about retirement. Do you feel like that you’re anywhere near that or do you love it too much and you’re going to carry on into your.

So certainly love the clinical dentistry. And I think we all have to at certain point think about that journey because it isn’t an overnight journey, right? It is exactly that. A journey of maybe two, three, four years, depending on whatever deal you strike with whoever is going to acquire the business. I think Martin is still relatively young. We’re only just turned 50 not that long ago. There’s a few few more years left in us, and at this juncture, we’re looking to to build what we have, really, and. We will have to start talking to each other. Hopefully our timings are in sync. You know, that’s always an issue when there’s more than one partner in the business. But. It will be together. It’s never going to be that I leave and Martin’s around or vice versa. I can’t see us doing that. So it will be a joint decision whenever it happens.

To do you think like that? When when that day does come? I think about it for myself. There’s an element of especially with a business where it was squat. It’s like your baby that you’re giving away. Do you think your is sort of who you give it away to rather than the amount of money?

Now, look, money’s always got to be right. I mean, at the end of the day, you sweat for this. You sacrifice all of that family time, often your health, mental and physical. In order to do these things, the rewards have got to be there. If not for ourselves, certainly our family’s security. You know, it’s your pension ultimately, for most of us, right? It’s dentists. And the flip side of that, though, is that, yes, it does matter not because it’s my baby or Martin’s baby, but there are people in that building that have loyally given their time and their sweat and tears to us. And we want to make sure that they were well looked after, whether that’s the clinicians or the nursing staff or the reception team or whoever it is. So that bit does matter. And the likelihood is that we’ll want to work in that business for it might be a day or two days a week or whatever it is for a period of time. So you don’t want to work somewhere that you’re not going to be happy just for money. But ultimately the money has to be right to.

It’s interesting. I mean, I’ve heard of people sell their practices and then depressed straight afterwards. So it’s an important thing to to manage correctly. The nice thing is it’s not like the valuation of this business of yours is is at risk. I mean, there’s the know, there’s gross economic risk, right? But it’s not like there’s going to be some sort of competitive risk or anything like that. So you can you can rest easy on it. But I’m so proud of everything you’ve achieved just in the time I’ve known you. So I’ve probably known you for half of that career of yours. Yeah. And watching the two of you turn each of these places into places where people are happy, patients are happy, staff are happy, and then achieving these brilliant things. It’s been a real pleasure. And as I say, keeping your humanity and kindness. You know, one of the easiest people to talk to, having achieved all of that. You know, no ego is rare in our profession. So it’s a wonderful thing. Man. I’m going to end it with the usual questions. I don’t know if you had anyone sent these to you because it was a last minute thing. But let’s let’s have it. Fresh fantasy dinner party. Three guests, dead or alive? Who would you have?

Okay. One. Unfortunately dead is somebody. I didn’t get to spend the sort of time that I would have wanted to. It’s my maternal grandfather. This guy was really a phenomenal guy and that the little bit of time that I did get to spend with him was incredible. He was you know, he could be a five year old kid with a five year old kid and be the mature old man that he needed to be with with that age group. But he wasn’t particularly well educated, didn’t have that opportunity. However, he had and maybe this is where I get it from these skills that you’re asking about to bring people along on a journey. He somehow could get the most sort of stubborn person. You just sit them down, have a cup of tea with them and have a chat and within ten, 15 minutes they’re doing whatever he wanted them to be doing. And it was it wasn’t for his own gain, by the way. It would be for their own benefit. You know, they’d be doing something daft. And he’s trying to steer them back on course or save their marriage or whatever it is. That little bit of counselling and therapy along the way. But he was hugely entertaining. You know, we’d have a story.

You could sit there and listen for hours and hours so that somebody that because he was in India and we were here, I never really got as much time as I would have liked to have spent with him, whereas my dad’s father was was in the UK with us. The second person I don’t know whether I would like this person or not, but I would like to have dinner with them. It’s my one of my favourite authors, a guy called William Boyd. I’ve read pretty much every single book that he’s ever written and I get deeply immersed in these books. These characters just come alive in 3D for me, and it’s a skill that not all authors have, and they’re also very, very well researched books. So there’s historical context and accuracy and things in there. It just is an incredible writer. If you haven’t read any of his stuff, do ping me a message. I’ll send you a couple of titles. But he’s somebody I think I would find hugely entertaining, lived around the world, lived in Africa, seems to have spent time in each and every place that he’s written about in the books. And it’s fiction, but there’s a lot of historical stuff along the way, which I find fascinating.

What’s your favourite book by William Boyd?

My favourite book by William Boyd. Any Human Heart. And they turn they televise that a few years ago. I think you could probably still stream it somewhere, but read the book first. And the third person. A giant of implant and surgical dentistry. A chap you probably have heard of, a guy called Oded Baart who set the sort of twilight end of his career. He’s out in California. Periodontists by training. But. On the few occasions I’ve had a chance to see his work. It’s just incredible. And it’s not the clinical stuff because there’s lots of people doing this, but it’s his thinking, the way he thinks about the case and the way he thinks about that problem is just different to anyone else I’ve seen. I can’t explain it, and I’d love to spend some time with him over dinner and try and get inside that head and understand what he’s thinking when he sees a case.

Another one of those South Africans done good in the US. Yeah. Like Ellen.

Yeah.

So what? So clinically, he’s your sort of your hero?

No, no, not at all. I mean, there’s too many of those. Who did you say?

Throw out some names of those people. Clinical heroes.

Heroes. Look, I’ll give you somebody whose work I think is just absolutely phenomenal. Every single case that I’ve seen him do. Eric Van Doren, who I mentioned before. Yeah. Here in the UK, you know, friend and mentor to a man who I think is someone who probably doesn’t get as much airtime as he deserves in the UK. Those two guys, their ability to look at a case and take the worst awful cases and make them look the way natural he should is incredible. There’s lots of other speakers that I could throw out there. There’s there’s too many to list.

A lot of integrity there as well. Right. With them to do in my dealings with him. All right, man. And the final question. It’s like a deathbed question on your deathbed, surrounded by your loved ones. Three pieces of advice you’d leave for them and for the world.

For the world. I don’t know. I mean, you know, my family. I know I can give them some advice. Perhaps the first one is actually a little bit almost of an oxymoron type thing. I was going to I would tell my kids in particular to keep their own counsel. Ask for advice, ask for help, listen to people. But ultimately, you’ve got to make your own decisions, keep your own counsel. And I think trying to help them grow up where they’re not afraid to fail. They haven’t got fear of trying. Those sort of things, I think are very important to me. So I’d want them to be thinking for themselves.

How do you instil that? How do you how do you encourage that?

You know, I think it’s difficult. We all start off as parents. There’s no proper manual for this. Right. And, you know, you love your kids. You want them to do well. But I think a lot of us might be a little bit too guilty of protecting them, a bit too much. And we kind of tell them to do things rather than asking them questions around things they want to do and having that conversation. And I’m guilty of this, by the way. It’s only in the last five, six years when my kids are older now that I’m thinking this way. But I wish I had a lot earlier and they’re both pretty confident. I think we’ve done a pretty decent job along the way, but I think it can be taught. I think that this thing about fear of failure, it’s no good when you’re 30 and as a businessman thinking, yeah, you need to be taught that from a young age.

How old are your kids?

So the older one’s 19. She’s at university. The younger one is just about to start her second year of A-levels later this week. If the concrete.

Budding dentists out there.

No, no. The elder daughter is currently doing theatre and performance, but who knows that that could turn into something to do with that or acting or something completely different. And I think, you know, in our Asian culture, Indian culture, I don’t know if it’s the same in Iran and things, but it’s doctor, engineer, lawyer, that sort of thing. And so the reason I’ve worked so hard is to allow them to have the freedom that they do what they want to do and get good at that. And, you know, they will flourish in that.

So I’m really interested in that question of, you know, first generation, okay, get it. Second generation. How many generations does it have to go on for? To go for only these safe bets? You know that the day when the day when you. Turning up to a dinner party and saying my daughter’s in theatre is a thing where people will say, wow. And if you said my daughter’s a dentist, they’d go, Oh, it’s a bit boring, you know? When’s that day coming? Because not all, not all, you know, Easterners believe in letting their kids into that sort of thing. Did you have to struggle with that, or were you totally the other way?

No, not at all. I mean, my parents didn’t ever, not once, tell me what to do. Oh, really? No, I think they’re probably hoping that I’d go into a profession, whether it was accountancy or law or medicine or whatever. Not. I don’t think it’s to do with any actual sort of snobbery around what you do. I think it’s just financial security, ultimately. True. You know, they know that you’re not going to starve. You’re going to have three meals and if you’re half decent, you’ll always be able to do that in those professions. So I think that’s all that underpins that. As to when will that I think that tide has turned. Certainly if you think about some of the younger Asian dentists that you and I will know, they all come from families now that are second or third generation parents have done okay. There’s a bit of financial independence and backing if they need it. I think it has happened. And, you know, there you go. My daughter’s an example of that.

Yeah, but the ones the ones we’re talking about are they’ve studied dentistry, right? So, you know, they’ve continued I’m saying I’m saying break with that. So the fact that your daughters I mean, look, by the way, by the way, my my son is about to embark on A-levels and my daughter’s 14, and neither of them want to be a dentist. And I feel like a failure because of it. So somehow I feel like we failed. Both me and my wife are dentists and all that. I mean, my son says, Look, I actually do want to do what you do. I just don’t want to do what Mum does. And, you know, Mum’s a real dentist. But anyway, let’s, let’s carry on. Other pieces of advice. So think for yourself. Love that.

Yeah. And then the next one I think is something that this journey that we will embark on as youngsters, we really don’t understand. And nobody told me this and I wish they had prioritise and invest in your own health and well-being. I mean, I just think all of this is for zero if you’re not able to enjoy it physically or mentally. I’m very lucky. I’m fit and well, but the number of people. That you see along the way when you start getting to our age that are either physically not able to do things that they like to do or would like to do, or they always thought they’d retire and travel and do these things. It doesn’t happen because of health. So I think that that’s something that they really do need to understand from a relatively young age as well. And then finally get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think that I was listening to another of your guests that you had on a little while back, and she was talking about learning to say no. But I think that only comes after you’ve learned to say yes for a period of time. I think you have to say yes. So I wasn’t a teacher. I wasn’t a lecturer. Somebody from an implant company approached me at a time when I didn’t even know what PowerPoint was. I didn’t have a laptop. And they said, Will you teach? What are you talking about? I said, Will you doing all this implant work? You’re photographing it, will you? Teach others how to do that. And uncomfortable as it was, I said yes, I’ve never looked back. I had to then go and ask Martin what laptop to buy and what is PowerPoint. But that thing about opportunities don’t always come knocking twice. You’ve got to learn to say yes to a few things before you develop that skill. To say no afterwards when you get busy, your plates too full.

It’s a very good point. It’s a very good point. It’s become very common, very, very fashionable to say, hey, you learn when to say no. But you’re quite right. That’s after you’ve said yes a lot. It’s been a massive, massive pleasure talking to you. But I think we’ve gone for two hours and it’s just flown by. Completely flown by for me. Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this and keep doing what you’re doing, buddy. Keep doing what you’re doing. We need more, more, more like you in our profession. So thanks. Thanks so much for doing this, bud.

Absolute pleasure. And I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to actually sit down and do it with you. You’ve been asking for so long, and I haven’t been avoiding you.

Both of our faults.

All right, well, look, thank you so much. Great fun. All right. 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.

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On the landing page. What’s really important right at the top. Clear call to action. Phone number button to fill out a form. Your contact. Your location. Right. So your address. So they know where you are. Okay. The offer that’s at the top and perhaps some social proof wires, some information about the steps that happens next. What happens at the consultation, some information about the treatment, maybe some FAQs, some information about the clinicians involved. If you’ve got won any awards, there’s anything unique about your practice, make sure that’s on the landing page. If you’ve got some before and afters of patients that have had that specific treatment, pick your best ones. Put it on that landing page. If you’ve got any Google reviews of those patients who’ve had that treatment, put them on that landing page. If you’ve got video testimonials of patients that have had that treatment, same again. So that landing page is all encompassing and that patient should have no reason to look elsewhere for that information.

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.

Welcome to the Dental Leaders podcast. Today I’m going to be touching upon marketing, and it’s going to be a session where we go through a few key questions that have been coming up when clients have been getting in touch with my agency, jumping on discovery calls with myself to explore lead generation, the possibility of our agency running Facebook ads, Google ads for them, and speaking to them about how we can help them implement things like CRM systems to essentially maximise the return on investment from their existing marketing strategy. There are a few common questions that keep coming up, and this is what I’m going to cover today. So what are the key differences between Facebook ads and Google ads? Which ones should I run if I want to get more implants through the door or all on four cases, same day teeth cases through the door? Should I be advertising on Google or Facebook if I want more Invisalign inquiries through the door and I want to mark it in a in a region that’s my local area and beyond. Is Facebook the best way to target that or is it Google ads? So so there’s a lot of questions around should I go Facebook? Should it go Google? Should it be both? And landing pages versus sending traffic to your website? Now, for those of you who are not sure what the difference is, a landing page is a highly targeted page that has usually has an offer on it, but the focus of that page is the treatment or the service that you’re advertising, nothing more, nothing less.

They can’t navigate to other pages, find out pricing structure and other treatments, can’t start looking at your awards pages, etcetera, etcetera. I’m going to talk about landing pages and structure conversion data tracking conversion. So a lot of agencies will send you reports typically at the end of the month or the following month for the month before. So there’s a few questions and topics I want to discuss here. First of all, how you should be monitoring your marketing and measuring it month to month. Should you actually be measuring it month to month? And what is a conversion and how should you track a conversion? And it means different things at different stages during the digital patient journey. The next topic I’m going to be covering is the concept of giving leads time to convert and long term nurture what you should be doing. And then finally, the topic of ROI and how you should or how you could go about calculating marketing return on investment should be should we be looking at this data at the end of every month to calculate the ROI for the month before? So we’re now in September. Should I now be looking at my data for August and seeing what the ROI on my August marketing spend was? Or is that the incorrect way of doing it? The fact that I’m asking this question will probably give the answer, but we’ll dive a little bit deeper.

Okay. And those are the key topics I’m going to be covering and maybe some other things will pop up whilst I’m talking. So Facebook ads versus Google ads, what the key difference is. So when a client asks me, should I be running Facebook ads or Google ads? And depending on which treatment or location or whatever. My answer to that question, as with most questions that clients ask me, unfortunately, is it depends. It depends on what your budget is. It depends on how quickly you want a scale. It depends on if you’ve got the infrastructure and the team to manage those inquiries. And it depends on if you’ve got a team and an infrastructure who can manage only high quality inquiries and I’ve only got the time and bandwidth for that. Or you’ve got a team who can filter through high volumes of inquiries and dig for the gold. Okay. So often when we’re speaking to potential clients about running ad campaigns for them, one of the key things that we want to learn about is the business, the structure, the infrastructure, who’s on your team, who’s following up inquiries, what their skill set is, what their level of resilience is, when they, you know, can they. Have they got the capacity to ring 50, 100, 200 leads or inquiries over a certain period of time and follow them up and chase them and text them and send them whatsapps And send them emails.

And calls and multiple calls at multiple times of the day. And once we get an insight into that, then I can answer the question and say, so should we should we be running Facebook or Google ads? On the whole, I can give you some general advice, and that would be that Facebook ads and Google ads vary in terms of the inquiry quality because of the intent of those two platforms. So nobody say nobody, but very few people jump on Facebook and say, do you know what? I’m going to find myself a dentist, I’m going to buy this item or I’m going to buy this product or I’m going to look for a chiropractor. I’ve just hurt my back. I need an osteopath or a chiropractor. What would you typically do if you put yourself in those shoes and you’ve just hurt your back? What would you do? You’d jump on Google, you’d look to find somebody local. You would read their Google reviews and you’d probably make a decision based on that. And that’s what most people are doing with a high level of intent with dentistry. But with Facebook and Instagram, you pop on that platform and you are inundated with smartly targeted ads. Yeah, I’m in the market for a small electric car as a little run around and I am getting targeted with ad after ad after ad for a wide range of different electric cars for different price points.

Used new people throwing technology at me. Et cetera. Et cetera. Right. Why? Because somehow the platforms figured out that I’m in the market for that. Whether I have searched for it on Google or whether I’ve done some social searches, whether I’ve seen some ads, whether I’ve been in a location near a garage where I went to look at an electric car and test drove them. Whatever it is, the systems figured it out and now they are serving me ads. But I don’t go on Facebook or Instagram looking for a new electric car. I go on there to see what my network have been up to, maybe watch some stories, perhaps some work related stuff. But my intention is not to buy because if I wanted to buy, I would jump straight on Google. And so when it comes to inquiries on Facebook, because the intent of me wanting to make that purchasing decision is low and the buying cycle can be so long, right? I could be very early on in that discovery phase of looking for a car. Your potential patient could be very early on in that discovery phase of thinking about Invisalign fixing their crooked teeth wherever they are in that journey. Many patients take 2 to 2 and a half years from the initial intent of thinking about it to actually going ahead and accepting a treatment plan.

And during that journey, patients will make inquiries. They’ll send emails, Hey, if an offer pops up on Facebook for an Invisalign open day, guess what? They might fill it out. They have no intention of attending, but they’re curious. They’ll want to. They’ll want to explore what’s what’s knocking about. They might even speak to you over the phone and not turn up ghost. You never respond to an email. Okay. And so the intent of Facebook ads, because of the nature of them, tends to deliver a higher volume and lower quality of inquiries for the same budget. So if you had a specific budget and you said to me, Look, Prav, I want to generate as many inquiries as possible for this treatment, and the quality of those inquiries is not a concern for me. I would go Facebook ads every single day. And when I say Facebook ads, I mean Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all their ecosystem, right? And when we refer to them today as meta ads, now there are certain things with Facebook ads you can do to elevate the quality of the inquiries that come through. It’s not all bad. So if all you’re putting out there is book a free consultation, usually £75, we’ve got these offers, we’re offering free whitening, we’ve got these discounts. You are going to get those patients who are just looking for that.

However, you can put filters in there, such as what your price points are, what your USPS are. Perhaps you could even have in the advert finance options, you know, and things like filters, right? So on Facebook you can. Have these forms, or you can send them to a landing page and you can get intent for them from them. So you can make them fill out a form that says, Are you serious about Invisalign treatment? What do you know about it? Can you upload a photo of your smile? And if you were suitable for Invisalign, would you be interested in going ahead with treatment straight away in 30 days time? In 90 days time? Or are you just looking for information? Are you aware that the treatment costs for Invisalign vary from point price A to price B yes or no? Have you had any previous consultations? We offer finance for Invisalign treatment that starts from so much per month or you can pay upfront if you are suitable for Invisalign, which option would be best for you? So by asking more and more and more questions during that initial inquiry process, you filter out inquiries. So if you want high quality or Facebook, which is traditionally a high volume platform, ask more questions. The more questions you ask, the less inquiries you you will get, but the more information you’re collecting and the higher the quality of that inquiry will be.

So you can you can add various filters along the way. And that’s typically what we do. If a client says to me, Look, I want to advertise on this platform, but I just want to drive quality through the door. We add various questions, barriers and filters to give us more information about that patient. Ideally, when we’re booking patients in for complimentary consultations in my own clinic, what do I want to do? I want to know some information about that patient before they earn the right to attend my complimentary consultation. I want to know what they know about that treatment. I want to understand how long they’ve been thinking about treatment and the why now. Okay. Patients don’t wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, Holy crap, where did those crooked teeth come from? They’ve been there a while, so understanding the why now is really important when we’re booking patients, understanding what they know about the treatment, what research they’ve done, understanding that they’ve got a clear understanding of the typical investments of Invisalign and what the costs would be, and for us to understand what their funding sources would be so we can talk about finance during that phone call. And then based on that, we can ask the patient, would that be something you’d be interested in or would you just be looking at paying up front, as many of our patients do, just by asking that simple question, We get an idea if this patient needs to borrow money or if they’re ready to go and they’ve got the cash in the bank.

So once we know all that information and we book the patient in, there’s another quality level filter at the phone call level. And whether we’re running Facebook ads or Google ads, it’s exactly the same conversation that we’re having on the phone now. When we compare Facebook ads to Google ads, we know the intent is different. A patient jumps on Google and they type in Invisalign near me, best implant surgeon in my area, best implant surgeon in Manchester. Cost of all and for. Dental implants in Manchester, right. They are putting specific keywords into Google. And then based on those keywords, when you’re running Google ad campaigns, you have the opportunity to show your ad to that person who is searching for a specific keyword or set of keywords in your area. So you can tag it based on radius as you can with Facebook and Google. Okay. But you can essentially say I want patients to type when they type in these specific keywords. I want my ad to show and when my ad shows, I want my ad to say a certain thing so it could have an offer in there, it could be a complimentary consultation. It could literally just have some copy in there that speaks to that keyword and asks that patient to discover more or book a consultation or book an assessment appointment, or talk about your five star reviews or your award winning services, whatever that may be.

But the intent is so much more because if I’ve hurt my back and I’m looking for an osteopath in Manchester. I’m looking for an osteopath in Manchester. There’s no there’s no misconceptions of why I’ve typed that search in. It’s not like I’ve jumped on Facebook to see what my mates are up to. So when you get somebody who fills out an enquiry form from Google ads, on the whole, the intent is different, so the quality of the enquiry is higher. We can still add even more filter questions in to elevate the quality of those inquiries. But on the whole, with Google ads, you don’t really need to do that because the intent is there. So hopefully now you’ve got a clear understanding. Facebook versus Google. And the question is which one should I do? Often the answer is it depends. The performance and the success of a Invisalign campaign in Manchester versus Liverpool versus Winchester versus Birmingham versus Solihull. Even if you run the same campaign with the same creative, with similar targeting will be wildly different. So often agencies like myself and lots of other agencies out there will have to do a degree of testing in the early days. The performance and the success of those campaigns will be highly dependent on the local competition, what they’re offering.

Your budget that you’re going to need to put in is going to be based on what is the local competition doing? How many competitors are there? Who else is bidding on the same keywords as you? What offers do they have in place? If they’re offering free consultations and you’re not, you’re going to have to spend a lot more to generate the same number of inquiries. And whereas, if you know you’re both offering free consultations, then the offers are on the table. Ten patients inquire in. They both see. They all see an ad. One offers a free consult. The other one doesn’t. The one that’s offering the free consult is going to get more inquiries. Therefore, if you’re not, the cost per inquiry will be a lot higher. Okay, So in that sense, you know, in terms of which one should I do? Often we have the conversation. What’s your budget? What are you looking to achieve? And we will either start depending on what the budget is, both platforms or one within 30 to 45 days, you’ve got enough data to figure out is this working or not? What type of conversations are we having with these patients? Should we pause our Facebook ads and and put the rest of the budget into Google because we tend to be booking more of those patients? Or should we take the budget from Google and put it into Facebook or are both working really, really well and we just need to tweak things and put some filters in place.

Who knows? Every single practice is different and having this continual feedback loop is really, really important when it comes to the different campaigns that you’re running and the platforms that you’re running those campaigns on. On the whole, what do I get asked for? Same from every practice. I want more implant leads. I want more people who want teeth straightening and bonding. And then some practices will be looking for general dentistry. So patients who want general private dentistry, we do run some campaigns and then there’s some campaigns that we run for some clients that are a little bit different, and we tend to get more success from them because there’s less competition, right? So incredibly nervous patients who are looking for sedation treatment, for example, not many practices competing for that. So the quality of those inquiries tend to be a bit higher. The intent is high. The competition and the choice is low. And so when you speak to these patients, especially the nervous patients, there’s rarely a conversation around price. The conversation mainly revolves around can you meet their needs? Can you help them with their anxieties and can you fix their mouth without judgement and embarrassment from their point of view? So we do really, really well on these types of campaigns. Invisalign open days are all the rage.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry is running them. So if you’re considering running them, just be aware there’s one every week in every area and everyone’s got a different offer, right? So you might say, Hey, I’m running an Invisalign open day and we’re doing a £500 discount. We’re offering free whitening worth 500 and we’re offering complimentary retainers worth 300. And then the practice down the road is offering complimentary retainers worth 450. And instead of offering standard whitening, they’re offering enlightened whitening. And what happens? The general market gets confused because now they don’t know whether your offer is better than theirs. It’s very difficult for them to compare apples for apples. So what does the consumer do? They attend 3 to 4 open days. They then make their mind up. Sometimes they forget what happened at the previous open day. Yeah. And so sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself the question, does it make sense to follow the crowd? Does it make sense to have an open day or do we do something slightly different? And these are all the types of questions you should be having with yourselves internally, your reception team, your tcos, but also with your marketing agency. If you employ one to come up with some ideas and strategies that perhaps are slightly different from the from the classic open day structure, that yes, it does work. Yes, it can be successful. But bear in mind a lot of these patients may be a little bit more difficult to convert, and I’ve just explained the reasons why.

So one of the questions that get asked a lot revolves around the concept of landing pages versus your website. So imagine you’ve got a website and you’ve got an Invisalign page on there and someone goes to that page, but there’s a menu at the top. There’s various items that they can navigate to, such as Look at your fees page, go to your veneers page, go and have a look at your emergency dentistry page. Read the profiles of one of the dentists. Oh, click on an Instagram link and go off to view your Instagram profile. And that patient who’d originally thought about Invisalign has now been all over your website, has learned about you, has gone to the team page, has learned about your values, has watched some video testimonials. But there is a lot of opportunity for them to get lost. The difference between a web page and your website that just has an Invisalign information on there and gives them access to everything else. And a landing page is a landing page, locks that patient in to that treatment or that service and doesn’t allow that user web browser or patient to navigate anywhere else. So what does that mean? Well, if I’m running an ad campaign and somebody has searched for Invisalign or somebody has searched for dental implants, I want to lock them in to that treatment.

I want to present them with all the information they would possibly need on that landing page to make a decision to hand over their name, email address and phone number, and perhaps some more questions that I may ask them, or pick up the phone and speak to one of my team. I don’t want to give them the opportunity to start looking at other bits of information. Learn about root canal, emergency dentistry, read our reviews page because the conversion rate, when you send someone to your website versus the landing page is like night and day. So we find that landing pages convert better. And so what’s really important is the makeup of that landing page. So when someone clicks on an ad and let’s just let’s just stick with Invisalign is one of the most popular or teeth straightening campaigns that we run. And when they land on that landing page, what’s the first thing that they see? Well, it needs to mention that you offer Invisalign. Perhaps it would be a before and after of one of your patients a video. Perhaps it will mention an offer and that you can claim a complimentary consultation. Your phone number needs to be highly visible. Ideally, you’ll be using a unique tracking number so you can know which campaign made your phone ring and you could listen to those calls later to analyse the quality of those calls.

But then a call to action with a contact form on there to hand over the patients or to attract the patients details. Right. And maybe some more filter questions to elevate the quality, as we discussed earlier, what else should be on that landing page? Social proof Google reviews that relate to that treatment in question. So 5 or 6 half a dozen Google reviews that you’ve pulled from Google that mention Invisalign, 2 to 3 video testimonials of your existing patients who’ve had that treatment, perhaps some information about Invisalign and what it is, maybe some usp’s about you. Are you one of these so-called apex providers? Have you won some awards? Who’s going to be the clinician carrying out the treatment? Maybe some information about them, some photography, perhaps a little bit of information about the process, What will happen at the consultation? What are the next steps? Is there an offer that they can claim? Is it limited everything that they could possibly want to know about that treatment, the usp’s of that treatment in your practice and how that works in your practice? Everything should be on that page. They shouldn’t be able to navigate to your website. I would argue they shouldn’t be able to navigate to your social media because the sole purpose of that landing page is to collect their data. Once you’ve submitted that data in, that contact form picks up the phone, you can send them to what’s called a thank you page, invite them to view your Instagram.

You could then send them a link to go and view your website because they’ve already converted at this point. But don’t give them the opportunity to go elsewhere. I mean, one of the things we often get asked for is, hey, can we just put our software of excellence or our dentally online booking link on our landing page? Often advise against this. And the reason being is neither of those platforms offer the opportunity for the ad platform to be able to track that booking. Now, this is really important because the ad platform optimises and works based on conversions. So if someone picks up the phone and calls or someone fills out a contact form on that landing page, we can pass that data back to Google or back to Facebook to tell them, Hey, this person converted. Use your eye now to find me more of these people that converted. And that’s how your campaigns optimise. Now, if that data can’t be passed back, for example, it’s an online booking or if they’ve, you know, filled out a form somewhere else where we can’t pass that data back then, your campaigns can’t optimise as well. There are little tricks we can use based on link clicks and if somebody clicks an online booking link or button, we can send that data back. But that doesn’t necessarily mean just because they clicked the link they booked.

And so if I’m going to put an online booking link anywhere on a landing page, it will be after they’ve submitted the initial information and then I’ll give them an opportunity. Why not book your complimentary consultation straight away and book into our diary using this link to avoid any delays or whatever. Right. Claim your offer straight away and they can do that. You can send them to the website, you can send them to social media. The argument of landing pages versus website. We have tested thousands and thousands of campaigns, hundreds of thousands of pounds of budget split testing. Is it worth going website versus landing? Page In my personal experience, landing pages win every single time. So if you are sending Facebook and Google ad traffic to your website, think again and perhaps give it a try to get some targeted landing pages built and test it and see how the conversion changes. But make sure when you build a landing page or you instruct a company to do this for you, that includes the key elements of what should be in a landing page. So I’m just going to reiterate that again on the landing page. What’s really important right at the top, clear call to action phone number button to fill out a form, your contact, your location rights, your address so they know where they know where you are. Okay.

The offer that’s at the top and perhaps some social proof wires, some information about the steps that happens next. What happens at the consultation, some information about the treatment, maybe some FAQs, some information about the clinicians involved. If you’ve got won any awards, if there’s anything unique about your practice, make sure that’s on the landing page. If you’ve got some before and afters of patients that have had that specific treatment, pick your best ones. Put it on that landing page. If you’ve got any Google reviews of those patients who’ve had that treatment, put them on that landing page. If you’ve got video testimonies of patients that have had that treatment, same again. So that landing page is all encompassing and that patient should have no reason to look elsewhere for that information. And so that answers that question. And the next question that we often talk about is conversions. What is the conversion and what does it mean? Depends at what stage that patient is in the marketing funnel, I would say so no matter what platform you’re on, let’s say it’s Facebook or Google and the patient fills out a contact form or the patient picks up the phone. As a marketing agency, we would consider that a conversion. So a conversion, as I would define it, is a patient who has responded to some marketing that has handed over their contact details sufficient enough for if you wanted to, you could have a conversation with them with a view to booking an appointment.

So you’ve got the name, email, phone number, you’ve got a bit of information about that particular patient and you can contact them to book an appointment or it generates a conversation, a phone call, which is long enough for you to have that conversation with them. So in the platforms, typically what we do is when someone fills out a contact form, we class that as a conversion. When somebody has a phone call with a team member, that’s over 45 seconds. Since we classed that as a conversion, some agencies may class a phone call as two seconds as a conversion. Some agencies may say that actually we class a conversion as name, email and phone number, the minimum amount of information we need to be able to contact them. We may say, okay, we need a little bit more information and every clinic is different, right? So that’s conversion number one, what happens at inquiry stage. But once we’ve got from inquiry to the next step of the journey, what’s what’s a conversion then? Well, the conversion is a consultation, right? So that takes your number of inquiries. So let’s say you’ve had 100 inquiries, okay? And to generate those 100 inquiries, you needed to generate 1000 landing page views. Okay. So your conversion rate from landing page views to inquiries sits at around 10%. Now you’ve got 100 inquiries. Your next conversion that you’re looking at is bookings.

So what’s the conversion rate from inquiry to booking? Now, let’s say of those 100 patients, ten patients decided to book a consultation. Well then your conversion rate from inquiry to booking now sits at 10% as well. Right. If it was if it was five, it’d be sitting at 5%. And then from there, the next level of conversion is those patients who’ve had a consultation and then decide to put some money down and proceed with treatment or book the treatment. Right. And that’s the next stage of conversion. Most practices I deal with track each stage of the conversion so they will track media, spend two inquiries. So then they have a cost per conversion or a cost per inquiry. They will then track those inquiries, conversions of them to consults, and then they will then track consults to proceeding with treatment. Dentists, practice owners, associates will ask me, what is a good conversion rate? What is the industry standard? What’s typical? Answer the question. It depends. How good are your team at picking up the phone and converting those patients? What’s their level of emotional intelligence like? How much time do they have to follow up these patients, to chase these patients, to have conversations with them, to convert these patients? How good are your team who are doing consultations, whether they’re Tcos or dentists? What’s their conversion rate like? What’s the filtering process like before they get to consultation? The more information you’ve got and the more qualified those leads are, the higher the clinician’s consultation rate is going to be.

So it’s a highly variable process with so many steps in it. There is no industry standard, in my opinion. It’s different for every practice, but the beauty is we can tweak every single stage to get the perfect digital patient journey for your specific practice and the resources you have in that practice. What I am a big believer in though, is how you should be looking at that data. So I believe it’s incorrect to look at the data from the previous month and draw conclusions based on that. Why? Let’s say we’re looking at the month of August and we’re sat in September as I’m recording this is the 4th of September today, and I’m analysing my data for August. And in August we had 100 inquiries and three of those patients have gone ahead with treatment. So that sounds abysmal. And let’s say we spent two grand on marketing, right? That sounds absolutely abysmal in terms of cost per conversion. All the rest of it. What’s gone on? Well, the first thing we need to think about is have we given those patients long enough to convert? What’s if some of those inquiries came in on the last four days of August, have we really given them enough time so that we can follow them up, chase them, have conversations, book them in for a consultation, then have a consultation and convert.

Absolutely not. Have we given every, you know, the typical buying cycle? What does that look like when you’re inquiries that were poking around on Facebook? Their intent may have been so low that they’re going to go ahead with Invisalign treatment in three months time no matter what. They’ll go ahead with treatment, but not this month. And so looking at that data in that isolated 30 day window, in my opinion, most practices do it and that’s how they analyse their conversions is incorrect. Because you’re not getting a true measure of your return on investment and you’re not getting a true measure of the performance of your team. Just because we had, you know, your let’s say your dentist did ten consultations and only converted one, and they’ve got a 10% conversion rate. But this ten treatment plans that went out and four of those treatment plans accepted treatment. Four, five and six months later. Now, what’s their conversion rate because we were only analysing the month before. So in my practice and the practice of clients that I work with, I try and educate them to look at their conversion data three, six, nine and 12 months later. And it is surprising what that looks like. So let me give you an example. If we were to look at August’s data today, maybe the conversion rate from inquiry to console and console to going ahead would be underwhelming.

Let’s say out of 100 inquiries, ten booked a consultation and two went ahead with treatment. Now let’s look at those 100 inquiries. In six months time, the data will be completely different because those 100 inquiries will have had six months to convert. And if your follow up team is using a robust CRM system, is following up those patients over six months and not stopping after two weeks, which is what the majority of practices do, then you will convert more of those to consoles. They just won’t convert in that first month. So some patients that inquire in August might have their consultation in October or November, and those patients who had that consultation in October or November may go ahead with treatment the following January. But the conversion rate for those 100 inquiries in August must be attributed with the data that follows through in three, six, nine and 12 months time. And if you are looking at your data month to month, all I would encourage you to do is go back and look at your data from six, nine, 12 months ago and see what happened to those patients. And you will be shocked. You’ll be surprised because your conversion rate at every stage in that journey will be a lot higher than the report you produced for that specific month. A month later, and this is probably one of the first things that I’ll educate my practices that I work with straight away is how to know what your ROI is on your marketing or just in terms of how to know what your true conversion rates are.

It’s to actually look at that data. Yes, look at it the month after. Look at that same data in three months, six months, nine months and 12 months. Now, doing that manually becomes an incredibly laborious task to do and incredibly manual if you use a CRM system to manage that process, for you to automate inquiries and to automate follow ups. So you’re consistently following up with those patients for that period of time, the reporting dashboard will be able to work that out for you. Press a button and it will tell you what happened in that month six months ago. Okay. It’ll tell you what will happen. Well, after the time is gone. What happened? Nine, 12 months ago? Just by the click of a button and the little filter, looking at the dates for my clients, obviously naturally biased. We use a platform called Lead Flow and it works incredibly well to be able to feed that data. Back to you. On what was your return on investment? What was your feedback in terms of, Okay, we spent in that month, we spent a month, we spent £3,000 on Google ads and a month later it only generated two grand. So what would your data tell you? You’ve made a negative ROI.

You have lost £1,000. You put you put three grand in and you’ve got two grand back out of the machine. But six months later, you got 35 grand out because you go back, you look at the data in the CRM system and it actually tells you, hold on a minute, all these patients now converted a few months later and went ahead with treatment. So looking back at that data is super, super important. I think that pretty much covers what I’ve got to cover today in terms of the marketing lessons. And these are the key questions that are coming up time and time again with my clients. Just leaves me to say that, you know, what can you do? What are the action points from from this podcast? Number one, if you’re running Google or Facebook ads, both one or the other, just think about testing and think about quality. If in your marketing campaigns, quality of inquiries is an issue, start thinking about putting some filters in place that can elevate the level of quality. Just some questions that create some friction in that journey so you get less inquiries, but higher quality. Think if you are driving traffic just to web pages, think about implementing and executing some landing pages. Make sure you’ve got a clear idea of understanding what conversion data is and when your agency sends you data or information that, Hey, we’re converting at this rate, what does that actually mean? And then when you’re looking at your conversions for a particular month, look at that data a month later, three months later, six, nine and 12.

And to calculate the ROI, if you wanted a hand with that, utilise an intelligent CRM system, customer relationship management system that will do all the heavy lifting for you and make sure that any inquiry that inquires today you are following them up for a minimum of two years. Sounds crazy. And many clients that I speak to when I ask them, What’s your follow up process? We’ll call them. We’ll text them how many times? Two times. Three times, Four times. And then they ask the question, When do you give up? The really good practice is never give up, right? Because not now to me is maybe later in my practices and in practices of clients that I work with that utilise some kind of automated system to follow up with patients and encourage their team to follow up with patients at various intervals. We’ll consistently be chasing their inquiries for a period of up to two years and patients fall out of the woodwork. And if you still surprised at what Crikey, I’m not going to follow up these patients for two years. Ask yourself this question. Have you ever had a consultation with a patient? Where six months later, 12 months later, maybe 18 months later, they popped up out of the woodwork, just out of nowhere, and said, Do you know what, Prav? I’m ready to go ahead with treatment now.

And you’re like, Crikey, I’d forgot about that patient. I had a consultation with him two years ago. Six months ago? 18 months ago. And if that rings true. Then surely you should be following up those patients for that period of time to increase the odds and the probability of those patients proceeding with treatment? Look, guys, if you’ve got any other questions in and around marketing, tracking, marketing, conversion rates and how to elevate them within your practice or your own practices and your processes, feel free to send some questions in and I’ll cover them on another podcast. I am also running various courses throughout this year and you can find the majority of the courses that I run with the Academy. So if you just go to their website, there’s various sort of courses that I’m running, some on courses, courses on how to convert on the phone. And then next year, early next year, I’m doing a masterclass, a consultation masterclass, where I’m sort of working with a very small group of clinicians on how to elevate your case presentation and acceptance rates. Other than that, just leaves me to say thank you for your time and attention and hope you got some value out of today. And if you did, please do consider leaving us a review.

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.

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I think, follow your passion. I mean, for someone like me, I mean, it comes natural. I’ve got to say to people, you know, if if it was my kids, I would I would say if you if you really want to do something, go and do it. But if you’re unsure, then I’ll guide you. But yeah, I would always say if you have a passion, follow it.

If you’re unsure, become a dentist.

Become a dentist.

Yeah.

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. Ravi Morjaria to the podcast. Ravi is a model actor and dentist and his stage name if you want to look him up. Ravi More interesting combination of things thereof. Pleasure to have you, buddy.

Thank you. Pleasure to be on.

So tell me about I mean, in this podcast, we tend to go with a life story sort of piece, but I want to just go straight in with the question I want to ask the most. Sure. And say, were you always going to be an actor? And your parents said, No, no, no, go and study something.

You’ve hit the bull’s eye. I think that’s exactly, exactly how it started. I was, you know, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an actor. I always wanted to be on screen since the age of maybe even five. Six. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, um, if I start from the beginning, basically, my grandparents, who were immigrants via East Africa, came to Leicester, opened up a takeaway, and I was kind of brought up for my formative years in the shop. Three, four years. And if anyone knows Leicester, there’s, there’s something called the Golden Mile, which is Belgrave Road, right? So it’s Mini India. Exactly. And so that’s where I was brought up, being around Indian music, Bollywood for as long as I can remember, my family’s been taking me out to the cinema to watch Bollywood films and watching it on TV all the time. And yeah, I was just was just taken by it. And since then I was a performing monkey for everyone in the family. So every time we go to someone’s house, there you go. Ralph can do a little dance, a little number here. And that’s what I used to do, you know, even at school. I mean, I didn’t have any inhibitions when I was a kid. I remember going to summer scheme, play scheme, playing football. You know, football is also my life and put it was all a bunch of white kids. And I remember during lunchtimes I used to put on a Bollywood performance for them and I don’t even know where this came from. Me Um, so I was always a performer and then I got a good taste of it when I was about 1011. When I got into a big audition, I did a big audition and I got into the to a big musical and then, yeah, and then my parents were like, All right, now you can stop all this. Just focus on your studies. And that’s what I did.

So tell me, tell me to that audition, what was it for? What was the play?

So the musical was called Precious Bazaar, and it was I think it was just post Bombay Dreams, I think. And it was on a big newspaper spread in the Leicester Mercury, and my mum was like, Oh, look, this looks interesting. Why don’t you go for it? Because she knew she likes performing as well and she, she, she likes the whole Bollywood thing. And, and at that point I was like, yeah, you know what? I would do it. And I was studying drama at school at that time and I had to do a monologue. I had to do a dance piece or a or singing, and I had to do the script. So I got my drama teacher to help me out, helped me with the monologue and then it was actually the auditions were in collaboration with the BBC. So BBC were recording all these auditions over two days. It was all across the country. It was in Leicester, it was in London. And when I got to the audition I realised that actually there’s not many kids here. And it was at that point where I was rehearsing for the actual script that the producer, the writer, the director came up to me and said, Well, came up to my parents and said, Actually, this, you know, that this auditions for over six only and I was 11, 1011 and, and then he goes the the musical was about prostitution.

So I don’t think this is actually, you know, viable for him to be in it. And then he, you know, sort of, you know, sort of tried to give me some consolation to say that on the panel. You can still do the audition on the panel. There’s some big music artists. So there was a big musician called Bally Sagoo at the time, and his wife was on the panel along with other people from the industry. So I didn’t have a care in the world. I said, Yeah, whatever. I’ll do the audition. And it was on the second day, I think the phone call came at 10 p.m. at night to my dad, and he said that across every one auditioning, Ravi got the highest marks in the audition. And we wanted we want to write him in the play. So, you know, I was obviously ecstatic and I got my two minutes of fame in the musical playing the younger version of the main character. It wasn’t much, but it was something for me to to get my foot in through the door. And in.

The West End itself, it.

Wasn’t in the West End. It started off in Leicester, in the theatre, and then it went on and did a national tour. But because I was, I went with it because I was under 18. There was some insurance problems at the time that I couldn’t go. So unfortunately it wasn’t the tour for me, but it was a tour for the the actual play. But I only did the Leicester part. And then he was also quite, you know, a bit of an influence in the industry that he got me into doing some big auditions for some big TV productions that. The time and after I did a couple of them. My parents were like, okay, now this is enough. Now stop you from playing football. Stop you from playing cricket. Stop you from doing karate. Now we need to focus on your GCSEs. You’re getting to that age and yeah, I just wish things were a little bit different because I think it actually not doing anything else apart from studying. It was a detriment to my studies because I didn’t have an outlet. And yeah, I just wished that I had a bit more independence at that point to do. Still carry on a couple of my passions, which I completely had to stop for a good, I would say about five, six years.

And it was only when I got into doing, you know, going to university, I did biomedical science. And at that point, obviously I learnt how to drive. And then I said, okay, I want to do some acting classes. So I joined a local acting group called Urban Young Actors, which was great for me. I did lots of theatre production, so I was learning my craft, I was learning improvisation and things like that. And then I got into King’s in the four year graduate programme where again, I had to stop everything again because there was no time. Three Yeah, there was no time for doing any acting. Obviously my, my parents and my family’s goal was for me to be a dentist. I didn’t get in after the A-levels. I had to do a degree in Biomed and then get into dentistry after that and then didn’t have no time. And people used to laugh at me and I really want to be I want to be an actor. I want to be a you know, I want to I want to do this. And obviously people weren’t taking me seriously. Yeah. And I guess I’ve tried to prove people wrong. And I have to a certain extent and I want to do more. I really want to do more.

So what would you say? I mean, you look at actors, what would you say is an actor you really Revere a performance, a performance of, you.

Know, I’ve always loved Robert De Niro, and Leonardo in Django was really good and in The Departed, Shutter Island was brilliant. And then Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer was fantastic to watch. And Robert Downey Jr there. Oh, it was just. You haven’t seen it? Oh, you definitely need to go. I would say watch it in the BFI Imax in Waterloo where there’s 70 memorials have been projected. Yeah. Watch it in the way that it’s meant to be seen. You know, as an actor, you’re constantly analysing everyone’s performance when you’re watching something on Netflix or whatever it may be on TV. I’m constantly analysing, How did they do that, you know, because obviously I haven’t trained properly. You know, you weren’t I’ve not been to a drama school or anything, so I’m learning on the job constantly and I’m thinking, okay, oh, that’s how they did this scene. Oh, look at his eyes. Look at this, Look at that. Um, so, yeah, I think everyone in Christopher Nolan’s films have been have been amazing. You know, Inception, Leonardo was brilliant again and yeah. And Christian Bale in the Batman series. Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar was fantastic. I mean, there’s loads of performances that I’ve loved. Oh, Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker. Wow, what a performance.

I quite like it when an actor performs like, different roles, you know, because I don’t know, what is it like method acting or whatever where they put themselves in that. But you know what you see, there’s some actors who kind of play similar roles and they’re great because you know what you’re going to get. And there are some actors that just surprise the hell out of you. Yeah, right. Based on, you know, the different different films that you’re totally different. Sean Penn was back in the day. But who’s that? Who would you say that now? Is that person the one.

That’s always playing themselves? Oh, different roles, No different. Uh, who normally plays different roles.

Um. You know Robert De Niro. I get it. Yeah, but he’s kind of always the same guy, isn’t he?

Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer. Compared to Iron Man and compared to what was that comedy movie you did? It was yeah, it was a silly, silly film, but it was it was really good in it. So he plays different characters and I do, and I love that challenge of playing someone different. It’s very easy and it’s in your comfort zone, playing the same kind of role every time. But I always want to try and push myself. But yeah, there’s two schools of thought. There’s a couple of, you know, acting tutors have told me before you always have to bring a bit of yourself into a role. They say, Look at Tom Cruise. He does so many different films, but it’s still the same guy, even though he’s a different person, but he’s still the same guy. You know, it’s true for quite, quite a lot of them. Jason Statham, for example, The Rock, pretty much the same guy in every single film. So a lot of people, they make a lot of money doing that, though, and people love it. The audiences love it, don’t they?

Yeah. But then that becomes I feel for me that becomes more of a commercial decision by whoever is casting them, right? Because they know what the audience wants. It’s a bit like going to McDonald’s, isn’t it? You know what you’re going to get. Yeah. You know, it might not be. You know, I’m not a massive aficionado of the rock dude. Yeah, but. But you know what I mean. It might not be the gourmet food, but you know what you’re going to get. Yeah. Yeah, that. Maybe that’s why they get cast, right? Because it’s just a win. They know. Yeah. You know, 30% of the audience will turn up if the rock is in it or whatever. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, we went to see the Mission Impossible, the latest one recently, and my dad loves it. It was brilliant. I thought it was brilliant. But you know what you’re going to get? You’re going to get amazing stunts from Tom Cruise, you know, And and the storyline is going to be, well, the film is going to be action packed. You know what you’re going to get. And, you know, it’s an entertainer that’s a commercial decision. But then when you watch something like Oppenheimer isn’t a commercial film, I would say it’s more about the acting, it’s more about the storyline, it’s more about, you know, the cinematography. It’s just a whole. Who’s your favourite.

Director?

Christopher Nolan Hands down right now. Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese are two of my favourite directors. Yeah, yeah. You can see what kind of movies I like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Interstellar is probably one of my best, the best one of the best movies I’ve seen in my life.

It was nice. It was nice, man. You know, there’s some movies sort of creep up on you that Interstellar was like that for me. I was to start with. I was like, Come on, man, move on, move on. But then it just creeps up on you, doesn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a bit of a slow burner, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s weird, man. I’m not a massive movie fan at all. Yeah, like, the last thing I want to do is go to a cinema and watch a movie I don’t like. Yeah, You know, like, if you were a fan, you know, you take, you know, like, I’ll go to all sorts of restaurants. I’ll take all sorts of risks with food. I’ll order things knowing that it’s probably a massive mistake to order this thing in this restaurant. But just because I want to find out. Yeah, but. But I don’t like taking risks in cinemas, right? Because it feels like I’m there for 2.5 hours or something. I can’t leave. So what I do, my wife likes to say, I said, what I do is I just insist on those cinemas with the with the good food and the, you know, fancy sofas and.

Thinking of every man or asleep.

Every man, whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There’s loads of them isn’t there, nowadays. But I used to go to that one in Notting Hill. What was that called? The man was the best. To hell with it. It was. It was one of the original. Where? Electric. Electric?

Oh, electric. Yeah.

They used to bring you food like a waitress would bring you food. And it was all like the food would come from the electric cafe or whatever. It was.

The restaurant.

Upstairs. Yeah, but my point is, if it was a film that I hated, I could just sleep then. Yeah.

Well, it’s an expensive sleep, though, isn’t it? Cinema tickets now. 15, £20 or whatever it might be. But yeah, yeah. I mean I tend to go to the Odeon Cinema. Cinema, I think Odeon Luxe, I think they’ve got out. So which is basically all the seats are Reclinable. Yeah. And I love watching films in that cinema because it’s just relaxing. But if you’ve. Have you been to the BFI Imax in Waterloo? I have. I have, yeah. That’s brilliant, isn’t it?

It’s just amazing.

Yeah.

Let’s talk. Let’s get to the darker parts of the pod. And since you’re an actor, let’s. Let’s go through that as well. Yeah. Mistakes. We like to talk about mistakes.

Mistakes. Okay.

What errors have you made? Let’s talk dentistry and let’s talk acting.

Dentistry, dentistry. The only thing that really comes out at me is one time I did a private crown and the occlusion wasn’t as right as we wanted it to be. It was a posterior lower left seven. I think it was always a lower left seven. Yeah, it’s always the lower left seven And I was pretty brave to do it, to be honest. And the guys obviously spent a good amount of money for the Crown, but had to trim off the porcelain and at that time I had trimmed off the porcelain and you could see, see small bit of metal shining through. And what I should have probably done at this point is explain to him maybe I could trim off the opposing tooth. To make it fit into occlusion. But he had he came back and he goes, I’ve got one of those. What is it called? The Diamond Little Was it Monocle? What do they call it? Yeah, one of those things. And so he goes, my wife looked at it and she could see a bit of a metal shining through. And I’ve paid a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. I want my money back. I ended up giving his money back, but maybe I should have learned from that experience, you know? I mean, obviously I’ve learned from it since, but maybe do not tell.

Him the metal was showing through. Was that the problem?

I think that was the problem, yeah. I didn’t tell him beforehand that the metal was showing through and I didn’t expect the metal to shine through. I was just literally just doing a little bit and there was a thin layer of porcelain over where I was doing it. And so I’ve learned from that mistake.

You know, you know, how there’s there’s ways you can talk about it, right? You know, like when we break a file, we talk about a separation.

Yeah, separation.

It’s a beautiful. It’s a beautiful little, little sort of lie, isn’t it? The file has separated, but I think there’s a way of talking about that situation, you know, because I’m trying to think back to when I was a dentist. Look, do you remember? Do you remember in dental school some tutor telling you that a metal occlusal surface is the correct occlusal surface in terms of it’s the best thing for the opposing tooth?

Yeah, I remember them saying that. The gold crown. Gold crown. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So that’s where you lay it down for the patient. Say, look I’ve polished it. Yeah. And it is showing through but it’s actually better for the opposing tooth. That’s true.

Something maybe I should have done that. Maybe I should have done something like that. Something like that. Yeah.

But he didn’t insist on it being drilled off or anything.

No, no, no. He didn’t insist on that. We gave him the option if he wanted it replaced or whatever, and he just I think he just wanted his money back. That’s really what it was. In a way, though.

That’s better. Yeah. Because. Because if you’re having to drill it off. Yeah. Now you’re doing some harm, you know?

Now you know what I mean? Do some more damage now.

More damage can happen. Yeah. In a way that’s. That resolution isn’t the end of the world.

Yeah. Yeah.

So. All right. And is he still a patient or. No, no, no.

This was in my previous job. Yeah, it’s years ago. But how.

Did you. How did he leave it? Did he leave happy or did he leave? Pissed off?

Yeah, he left. He left happy. I think what they tried to do was his daughter as a lawyer or something like that. Tried to make it out, you know, like he tried to make it out, like putting an email across and saying, my daughter’s a lawyer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it just kind of scares you off. And we were already scared at university when when any of complaints or anything happens. And my boss really backed me as well and he was like, you know, these things happen, so do you want to take the hit? But you did.

You did make an error. Yeah. Yeah. And the error wasn’t the metal. The error was not telling him.

Not telling him exactly.

Not telling him. Yeah. Like if you, if you, if we’re going to reflect on it. Yeah. That was your mistake.

Yeah.

Communication and in a way giving him his money back. I mean, that’s harsh. It’s harsh, but, but, but in a way he kind of deserved his money back because. Yeah, he hadn’t told him right?

No, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And didn’t have any qualms about it. So it was. Yeah. And then he was, he was fine and we really got on anyway when he used to come in and he was actually quite embarrassed when he came in and when he was asking me for could I have the money back, he was quite kind of Is that.

Really the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in.

Dentistry? Honestly? Touchwood Are you lucky? Literally. How old are you? Yeah. Don’t have to give him my age. I’m a few years qualified. I’ll be. I’ll say just over five years qualified. So what a girly. Yeah. You know what it is? If there’s any directors or producers listening in to my age, they might say, You’re not fit for this movie. So that’s the reason why. Try not to say it. So of course.

Of course. Of course, of course.

Sorry. Because my playing age, my playing age would be younger than I am. So. And I don’t want people to think You look younger. You look well. Thank you.

You look like a baby face, man. You look like the kind of kid. Yeah.

Yeah.

What about in acting?

Acting? Mistakes? I think mistakes happen all the time, but we never get told what mistake, what the mistake was because we never really get much feedback. So. No, but strategical mistake.

Maybe like, you should have.

Gone, maybe not gone to school or whatever it was. Yeah. I mean, I try not to have regrets in terms of maybe I should have continued acting, maybe I should have persisted and rebelled against my family a bit more and go into acting school maybe, you know. But I try not to think on that road because then it can drain you out a little bit. And then what were you thinking of? What I was thinking of was the musical that I did. Was it so, you know, the dress change is quite quick in some of the scenes, right? So in my head I thought, okay, I’m out of this outfit. Next scene is coming up. I need to my next entry was from the audience, so I had to go all the way around at the back to get in from the audience. And I was I was doing a big number. So I was coming in through the audience, through the crowd. And so I thought I’d done my scene in that outfit. I came round and I was like, Yeah, I’m waiting around. Like, Where is everyone? Then I looked through the doors of.

The the auditorium and there’s a little window look through and realised that the actors that are on stage, I should be with them right now. I should be on stage right now. There’s dialogue that I need to do and I tried to rush back, but the doors were locked and by the time I got to the side of the stage, that scene was over. So it was fortunate that they managed to handle it themselves. And they they figured it out. They improvised the scene a little bit and got away with it. But that was a massive booboo on my part. Yeah. Or when another time in the same tour I was doing a big dance number on stage. My mic fell out and my mic was dangling in between my legs whilst I was doing the whilst I was doing the dance. And I was like, You know what? The show must go on. The show must go on. So just continue. Continued it. Um, then got off and then everyone tried to help me out and. Yeah. What about, what about the.

The dark side. The dark side of, of being an actor? Like, I don’t know, drugs is there. It must be, right?

No, no, I’ve not got into I’ve never been around, you know, but I’ve never been around that sort of situation too.

Or. Well, let me give you this. People talk about the sort of the camaraderie of of the group. I don’t know if you’re doing a play and you really get into I’ve heard actors say they get really low when something finishes because they’ve been in this sort of family almost. And it’s very it’s very intense, isn’t it? And they say, you see the same people every day, and then suddenly you’re you’re not seeing those people anymore and your life is suddenly, suddenly real life hits you in the eye sort of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you had that feeling? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s times where I’m like, Oh, I love that show so much. I wish we can do it again. And you know, you’re around those people for, you know, morning lunch, dinner and, you know, on tour you’re living with them.

Friendships, right?

Yeah. The friendships that you have. And and it just it’s a bit of a shame really, because we then move on to other projects and it’s difficult to keep in touch with everyone still and, you know, have that same relationship. So yeah, it is. It’s really exciting once you get into a role and into a show and then it’s really sad when you do come out of it. And yeah, it can be very low and lonely and I guess if people don’t have anything else with their lives and they’re really waiting for the next opportunity to come along, it can go into a dark, you can go into a dark space and you’re like, What am I doing?

Covid In Covid, there must have been some terrible stories, right? Because performers in general. You know, there was, you know, because you’re self-employed, so there wasn’t much of the government cash coming your way. You’re a dentist, but, you know, the regular person doesn’t work in a bar, doesn’t have much money, and then suddenly everything stops. It was.

A struggle. We lost a lot of access during that period. No suicide? No. In terms of. Sorry, I don’t mean it that way. I mean, when I say losing actors, I mean they just left the profession. Left the profession, and they were like, I can’t I can’t sustain this anymore. And, you know, it’s a shame because we’re losing a lot of talent. And like I said, with my other friend, you know, he’s a talented individual, but he doesn’t have another stream of income, a good stream of income, let’s say, you know, that can sustain this other profession. So it’s a real shame. And acting, I say to people is a privilege. You know, it’s a privileged profession to get into. If your family comes from a, you know, a lot of wealth, then it’s you know, it’s always those people that get into acting and go into drama schools. And those are the people that come out through the drama schools into the roles. And they get it because most of them I’m not saying all most of them, especially in the UK, have come from a privileged background. And that’s what we’re we’re, we’re kind of dealing with. So those guys would probably stick around because they’re able to afford it. But it’s the people that can’t and are really trying their hardest to to get on screen and, and make a living for themselves are the ones that end up saying, I end up giving up. You know, I met an actor in an audition room a few a few weeks ago. He said to me, I had to stop for a few years. I had a kid, you know, family gets in the way and, you know, you want to you want to have a family. And I think there’s there’s that side of me as well at the moment because I’m thinking, should I, you know, I need to get married and maybe I won’t have kids as well. But how does that work alongside the acting side of things, you know?

Well, you’re right. You’re right. Although to some extent everyone has that right. I mean, kids kids are one of those things that you just it’s never right. Yeah. Yeah. I’m surprised you say that. Why? Why is that? I mean, I know the privacy sort of angle, but. But performance, right? I mean.

Yeah, but it’s tedious. I hate the. I just want to perform. I don’t want to have to think about how I’m going to edit this. I’m going to spend hours editing this video. I’m going to do this real, I’m going to do this. I want to take pictures. You know, it sounds weird coming from an actor. I don’t really like the camera that much. I don’t really like the like, people taking I don’t really like people taking photos of me or expect.

You to say that.

Yeah. I mean, I just don’t like. Look, I don’t like. Look, I’ve got used to it because I’m having to do self-tapes and stuff. But you know, I don’t like looking at my photos or taking pictures of me or, you know, I don’t really like that. And hearing the sound of my own voice I absolutely hate. And I think quite a lot of people do. There’s, um, what’s his name? The guy that played Darth Vader’s son, Not Darth Vader’s son. Harrison Ford’s son in Star Wars Wasn’t him. Adam something, was it? So there’s that guy. Anyway, he he went on a radio station and they played his own voice to him on the radio station. And he told them before he goes, I hate the sound of my voice. Don’t put it on. So they put it on on purpose. And he left the studio. He goes, I’m not, I’m not I’m not staying here doing this interview. I’m going off because he just hates the sound of his voice. It’s weird. He’s a proper.

Actor.

Yeah, he’s a brilliant actor. But yeah, it’s just. It’s just one of those things.

Yeah, but I just want to thought. I just want to. Thought that you’d be sort of. You’d at least set up the odd thing on social media where you can like have it in your own with your own rules. Right. Yeah. You don’t, you don’t you don’t have to play anyone else. You can just do whatever, like be your bread and butter. No.

No, I’m a bit shy, I guess, in that respect. It’s weird, but I’m a bit shy when it comes to acting and performing. I’d do it, but in terms of like putting pictures up of me, I cringe at it. I cringe at my like, doing reels and tiktoks and stuff. I cringe at it. I mean, people say to me, Oh, that’s great, but I just I don’t know.

You’ve got to do it was on your TikTok today, actually. Yeah. Yeah. There’s not enough of it there, dude. You need to do it.

There’s not. There’s not. There’s not very good stuff either. It’s not. It’s not great.

But no, it wasn’t bad at all. It wasn’t bad at all. But. But the thing about TikTok is like twice. Three times a day, right? Not. Not.

Yeah, mate. I mean, I started it when it was Covid, so everyone was doing it. I was like, let me give a couple of videos. And then I was like, Get bored of it too quickly. And I’m like, I’m not doing anymore. Yeah.

I’m surprised, man. I’m surprised at that. But that’s I guess that’s the way it goes, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I’m a bit shy, I think. I think obviously always thinking about what society might think as well also comes into it. What would people think? What my friends think, What would what would these guys think? But then again, I’m doing a profession that, you know, I’ve gone into acting on my own.

Yeah, exactly. If you cared what people thought, you wouldn’t be an actor, would you?

Yeah. Yeah, that’s. It’s weird. It’s a weird, complex dynamic I think have inside of my head. Yeah.

Like, look, for me, the funny thing for me is I hate camera. Hate them, hate them. I cannot be myself in front of a camera. But then, but then on on voice. Yeah, I’m totally cool. Like I could sit here and talk all day and not worry about it, but be myself. Yeah. Be myself. When there’s cameras and lights. Yeah. I can’t be myself, man. I’m this other guy.

You know what it is? I think you got a nice voice, though. I think that’s what it is. I’ve got a good voice.

No, no, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It’s not about that. It’s like when this camera’s lights. I’m just. I’m just a different. Like, I’m as if there’s a frozen, bedazzled, and and and, you know, I’m also fidgety. Fidgety and, you know, like, it’s just wrong for me to have cameras and lights. It just does my head in completely.

I get it. I get it. Because there was this one advert that I was doing for Wilkinson Sword, and they had literally 60 production staffs and they made this set in particular 60. Yeah. Loads of people were giving instructions. Lights up there, someone doing my beard, doing my shaving for me and you know, for the advert and, and I’m hearing lots of different things from different people and that was for me was overwhelming. I get it. It was, it was overwhelming at some times. And even for me, I mean, it’s not natural being in front of cameras and lights. It’s just you put into the situation is whether you can deal with it or not. And there’s a lot of distractions when you’re on set. Loads of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just trying to stay focussed. But yeah, it’s a thing that I’ve got used to as well. It’s not, it’s not, it doesn’t come naturally to me either.

Even the, the odd bits that we’ve done for promo for Enlightened. Yeah. I just, I take my hat off to the, to the, to the talent man. Yeah. Because it’s like it’s, it’s bloody hard work as well Right. It’s early start late finish and most of the time some fool messing about with a light. Yeah. Yeah. Like most of the time that’s what’s happening. Someone’s just moving something or, or you know, the creative director types. They must piss you off, too, Right?

Well.

That’s the guy you paying your salary. I mean, listen, our creative is one of the most talented people I know and all that. Yeah. Yeah, but you know how it goes from. From from video straight to his little iPad thing. And and and then he’s, like, not happy here. And you can see the models, just the models just dying under the lights and makeup and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of the hardest days. I mean, don’t get me wrong, because. Because we don’t do it often. It’s very exciting for me. Yeah, but for you, who’s doing it a lot?

Yeah, it is. It is tiring. There was one thing I did for Dental protection recently, believe it or not, I did one of their training videos and stuff, and I played a dentist. They gave me. I played the dentist. Yeah. They gave me a script of about 3 or 4 pages explaining implants, bridges and dentures to a pretend patient. And, you know, I’ve got my own spiel, but they had their written spiel that I had to follow, obviously. So I had to learn that off script and do it all in one take, literally three full pages, top to bottom, off script, and then the lighting’s right, right? The cameraman said, Oh, stop, cut, We need to do that all again, because you know, we didn’t get the right shot or can the extra the extra that was on there, can you? Oh, you came in too late or you came in too early. Can you move this side? And it is frustrating because you’re doing that same scene over and over again and it’s through no fault of your own, but then it does affect your performance because you get drained and you’re like, I can’t perform anymore. Like, I just can’t do it. It’s just a long day. But yeah, it can get frustrating, especially if it’s there’s no AC, there’s no yeah.

Tell me this dude. When you go to Dental courses, do you recognise that that piece of sort of performative putting on a show at a Dental course. I know it seems it must seem like a joke to you. Yeah, but where I’m going with it, where I’m going with it, man, is look, one of one of 3 or 4 things may happen to you. Yeah. You may become the next Oscar winner. Worldwide superstar. Everyone knows your name. You could carry on in this sort of mode where you’re sort of, you know, it’s paying you and. And you’re enjoying yourself. You could at one point say, Enough, I’m going to be a dentist. Yeah. And that if that happens and you know the reason why your dad made you do it and all that was for this moment. For that moment, because that’s what our dads are there for insurance type worst case scenarios, right? If that happens, you might want to go into teaching. Yeah. Oh yeah. Because a lot of teaching is about, you know, it’s obviously it’s communication, but, but also it’s about putting on a show, you know, in many ways. Exactly. Yeah. And, and we do it so badly as a profession, so badly that it would take like, for instance, for instance, we did a conference, right? None of us knew what we were doing. Yeah. You know, I’d been to a few conferences. Yeah, but I bet. I bet if you were on hand. Yeah. Just simple stuff that someone who does performances and. And, you know, the moment that this lighting happens, do that or whatever it is, you’re going to be very good at that. I mean.

It’s always been something that I’ve. Wanted to do. In fact, my trainer does did a course on carbon fibre bridges. At one point he wanted me to, to perform, to teach, not perform, but to teach. And and it was a performance because I love I love that. I love teaching. And it’s something that I’ve been saying for a while, actually. If I could just teach at a dental hospital instead for those 1 or 2 days as a clinical tutor or whatever it may be, or, you know, doing lectures or whatever, I think I’d definitely be in my element. And it’s something that even my dad said to me. He goes, You’d be great at doing that. And I know I can. I can be good at doing that. But yeah, just maybe I need to scope out some opportunities in that realm and do that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could, you could even teach communication, right? Yeah. God, God knows we need it. Yeah, God knows we need it. I mean, it’s. It’s so many of us have some terrible communication and. And often, often it’s the best dentists, right? The ones who are technically best are the ones with the poorest communication. Because. Because they’re often they’re so into the. The technical side. And then they’re just downloading, offloading everything in their heads straight to the patient. And. And I get it, man. I get it. When you’re really passionate about something, you just want to say it, all right? Yeah, but that’s not what the patient wants. The patient wants sort of a caring sharing. Exactly. Lovely guy. Right?

Exactly. I mean, I’ve noticed that in my, you know, in my own dentistry, when I when I speak to patients and I give them time, they really open up and they tell me everything. And, you know, I mean, it’s it’s nice to hear, but obviously you end up being late for your next appointment, which can be another thing. So you have to try and finally balance that. But yeah, definitely. I think, um, but.

You haven’t been around as long as I have. You haven’t been around as long as I have. No, of course. And not, not that I was a dentist very long but, but, but I remember both types very well. I remember I had one boss who clinically he was. He wasn’t a bad dentist. Right. But. But he was behind because he was he was getting to the end of his, his career. And so he was he was doing was completely outdated. And he hadn’t gotten any better or whatever. And but, my God, what a.

Patients loved him. Yeah.

What a charming guy, man. Charming, charming guy. And, you know, he just he was just one of the kind of guys who walks into a room and just held the room, you know, in every situation. And I used to sort of try. And I’m nothing like him, unfortunately. But I was trying. I was trying to learn from him. Yeah. Because at the Christmas party every year, yeah. He would stand up and make a speech and, and he would really, like, make you feel like everything was all right about this job. Just because he’d, he’d, he’d, he’d. He’d talk about every person and he’d be funny about it and all that. And he was the same with his patients. And dude, I saw the work. The work wasn’t much. And then the other side, I’ve, I’ve also had a colleague, one of the best dentists I’ve ever come across. Like. Like literally this guy, the papers. This guy knew that his hand and eye skills simply amazing. But dude, could this guy not talk to patients? Just couldn’t do it, man. He just. He was just he was awkward, you know? And so, like I say, that those are two extremes. But, you know, we we see the communication courses and we see how well they do. And it’s a massive thing. You know, I don’t even think it should be sold as selling, you know, this sort of, you know, it’s become fashionable as an ethical selling, this sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember, you know, one of my family needed an operation. We we picked the surgeon based on his. Just on the consultation. Yeah. I mean, we’re in the field, man. You know, we’re kind of. We should. I mean, you know. Okay. He was one of three who’d been highly recommended and all that. Yeah. Nonetheless, nonetheless, we picked him because of his bedside manner. And it’s not like a dentist, right, where you’re constantly awake and there this guy was going to come and do the operation and leave.

Yeah.

And yet the bedside manner was key to picking. Definitely. But you should do this. You should do this and you should. Whether you do it now or you create a little online series or you just think about it or in fact open a Instagram or TikTok page. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Something that I dread doing. But yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

No, it’s something definitely that I’ve, I’ve looked into. Well, I haven’t looked into it enough, but it’s something that I’ve always had in the back of my mind that I wanted, want to get into that side of things. And, and yeah, I think and like you said, you’ve, I’ve met two different types of dentists as well. A similar thing, patients sometimes always complaining about this one dentist and then Yeah. And always saying like great stuff about another. And even though that dentist is really good, but it’s just the communication side of things. And I think a lot of youngsters actually in my when I was going through university as well, a lot of people still didn’t understand that fact. No, no, no, no. They still don’t.

Listen, listen. You come out of dental school with almost nothing, right? You just, you know, it’s the very, very basics that you learn at dental school. But it’s not it’s not only patients either. I mean, you know, you can’t run a massive, brilliant business without communicating with your team, you know, and some people have got it. Some people just got that sort of inspire your people to do things for them. Basically. Again, this guy, this guy was so good at that. And then some people just don’t, you know, But, you know, you will find whether you’ve got it or not, it’s going to come a lot easier to you. Yeah. Those skills.

Yeah. I mean, that’s like I said, I think that’s one of my strongest points and. You know, And I think, yeah, when I go into a practice, I think when I go in to do interviews and things like that, I think people can see that I come across well. And yeah, I think that is my strongest point. Yeah. I think, I think like I said, when my friends were coming through dental school, when I was also iterating at that point and saying, you know, I think communication is and we have a lot of tutors saying the same thing. And so I was more focussed on how am I going to explain this to a patient? And you always feel guilty when you talk about money. That was always a thing. When I was in, I struggled explaining to the patient, By the way, this is going to cost. And it was always with a wince every time I say it, by the way, it’s going to be £200 privately for this and that. And most of the time they say, yeah, it’s fine, not a problem. And you’re just like, wow, you know, you just you don’t think it’s the way you explain it. And so with me, this is what I do personally, and I think that helps is once the x rays are done, I get them over and I show them the x ray, explain exactly what the x ray is about. This is if we do this, we do that. This is what happens. This is what the thing is going to cost. If you do this, that’s going to cost that. Okay. I do run over my nurses always screaming at me, Oh God, I’m going to be like ten minutes late for the next one. But you know what? I think it’s really important for the patient to understand all the options that they have before embarking on the treatment, because last thing you want is for them to put in a complaint a couple of weeks down the line and saying, You never explained that to me.

Although although if you listen to my co-hosts, Prav, who’s a complete expert at this kind of thing, yeah, he talks about no more than three choices. And he’s very strong on this idea of these are the choices A, B and C, and my recommendation is choice B, Yeah, but but he calls it this. He calls it earn the right to make that recommendation. That’s the whole thing. Okay. To get the respect and the and the rapport and, and understand the person enough. And I don’t know, you probably have me in this situation, but with lawyers I’ve been in this situation where lawyers says X, Y, Z, there’s that that, that, that just it’s confusing. Confusing. Yeah. Yeah. And then you turn around and you say, all right, man, what would you do? Yeah, yeah. And then sometimes the lawyer turns around and says, That’s not what I’m here for. That’s not my it’s not my choice at all. I’ve told you what and. Okay, I get it. Yeah, but a really damn good lawyer, the one you go back to and pay more and all that. Yeah. He’ll say, yeah, do this. Do this. Yeah, I would do this. Yeah.

That’s what you need don’t you.

That’s what you want isn’t it. And so people want that from their dentist too. Right. What would you do. Yeah. Yeah.

Well but, but then we all, we also get told, like I said during university, like, don’t tell them what you would think you would want to do because that can make, you know, so it’s, you know, you learn that on the job that maybe that is the right thing to do. But when you’re learning, when you’re going through dental school, you’re hearing all these different opinions and you’re thinking, okay, I must not make an actual decision. I must not push them to doing this. Rather than that, um, you know.

Dental school, you’re not going to learn much about this, are you?

I mean, you know, you learn on the job, but.

That’s the thing.

Yeah.

But it’s been lovely talking to you. Really enjoyed it very much, but thank you. We always finish this podcast with the same two questions. I don’t know if if they sent you them or not, but there’s one which is fantasy dinner party. Okay.

Three man fighting. Right. Okay. Dead or alive?

You know what? You know what? Dead, alive or even a character.

All right. Oh, now you’ve made it interesting.

Superman. Spider-man.

Oh, yes. See, my favourite superhero is Batman. Um, but then which Batman would I speak to? Probably the Christian Bale.

Christian Bale, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I’d like to speak to Heath Ledger, but don’t want to speak to his joker because he was quite scary. So the dinner party. Um, yeah. When I. When I think about the dead or alive without being it characters, I would say Brian Cox, the scientist, I think he I’ve got a keen interest in astronomy, a cool dude. And, you know, he explains, he used to be a pop star in films. Yeah, he was in a band. What a cool dude. Yeah. Yeah, I think he’s great. I mean, it would have been Stephen Hawking before that, but now I would say I would say Brian Cox, I think he’s brilliant. And Cristiano Ronaldo favourite of mine in terms of he’s come up. Yeah, of course he must have. I mean, he’s a, he’s an idol of mine. Listen, I.

Don’t really follow football either. Explain it to me. Is it only because of his football or is it because he’s so charming?

I think neither. I think it’s. I think more so. I think more so. It’s to do with his mentality. And that’s what I want to get from him. So his.

Football.

So his football. But I mean, more more than that. It’s more his determination how he gets get it.

I get it.

You know what? He’s got his own private chef, his own trainer. He’s got you know, he paints his nails.

And he’s quite old, isn’t he? He’s quite old for someone at the top of his game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, the amount of money he’s making in Saudi Arabia is crazy. But, I mean, just that mentality to be the first one there, last one out to do it, prove everyone again and again and again. And as an actor is what you want to do. Like we basically start from zero. After a show finishes, you start at the bottom again and you’re working your way again. So it’s not like, Oh yeah, you know, it doesn’t really it happens in, you know, when you become a major TV star or movie star, they’re like, okay, yeah, this guy was good in that. Now let’s get him in this. But when it comes to like theatre work, you’re almost like because you’re like being shown to a few thousand people, you know, you’re not it’s not to the masses, so you have to start again. So yeah, and that’s the mentality that, you know, I’d like to pick his brain regarding that.

And is he charming or isn’t he? No, no, I love him.

I love him because I’m a United fan and I’ve always loved him growing up watching football. And it’s so sad the way he left. Oh, it’s.

All of that as well. It goes back to your child. Yeah, Yeah, I get it. I get it.

The last.

Who’s the third.

One? Uh, who was it I had? I was going to say Heath Ledger or, um. Like I said, Robert De Niro. I love him. I think it’s great. Yeah. Some skills I’d like to pick up from him.

That he’d make a party fun money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, or it could be he could go really dark. Depends on what kind of Robert De Niro you get. In which Robert DeNiro.

Taxi driver.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool, cool.

And the last question is like a deathbed question. It’s a bit difficult for someone so young, but, but it’s about three pieces of advice that you would leave to your friends, family, loved ones, the world.

I think, follow your passion. I mean, for someone like me, I mean, it comes natural. I’ve got to say to people, you know, if if it was my kids, I would I would say if you if you really want to do something, go and do it. But if you’re unsure, then I’ll guide you. But yeah, I would always say if you have a passion, follow it.

If you’re unsure, become a dentist.

Become a dentist. Yeah. I don’t know if I’d give him that advice, but. But yeah, because obviously the way the profession is at the moment, it’s, it’s a bit difficult. But, um, what would I say? The other things I would say is don’t listen to the haters, which sometimes you get you get much.

Haters as.

Well. I think on the sly no one comes out talking to me about it, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people would have been talking behind my back. Oh, you know, Rafi’s got to do this, by the way. He’s doing this. I’m sure. I’m sure that happens all the time. And maybe if I post a maybe you see me on TV or. And they think, Oh, that’s a bit funny. You know, it’s a joke. Look at look at Rav. But, you know, but also get the other side now is like my people are coming up to me saying, you know what? I really respect that. I really respect that you’ve you had a profession, but you’ve chosen what you actually love doing. And I’ve had a lot of people saying that I’ve inspired them. I mean, that’s an immense feeling to for people to to say that to me, you know, I feel very honoured that people say that. But yeah, I think I think, you know, once you start proving people wrong, that’s when you earn the respect. And yeah, I’d say just carry on that way.

What about what about, what about in the Indian community is is there an element of what like is there.

Yeah.

Like looking down on acting.

Yeah, of course. Of course. Even with Bollywood.

And all that.

Yeah. I mean, mean doesn’t matter if, you know, if they love Bollywood, it doesn’t matter. It’s more the fact that it’s not a stable profession.

It’s a frivolous thing compared to being a doctor.

And yeah, exactly. If you’re going to kiss people on screen. And what does that say about you as a person? People don’t people don’t dissociate the two different things between Bollywood and reality. I think a lot of people have that difficulty. And I think that’s that’s one of the things I think people can’t dissociate.

So have you had have you ever had like a stalker type, like someone who’s been obsessed by you, some woman?

Oh, not I wouldn’t say stalker, but I would say yes constantly. Dming me on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of them’s like, Oh, can I make sure I take a photo with you afterwards? Or, Oh, we should meet up. Oh, there was this, there was a guy actually as well wanted to, to, to basically asking me out, when are you free? Let’s meet up. And I’m like, Yeah, you know, so I do get some, you know, questionable people in my DMS who have seen the shows or whatever. But yeah, not really had a stalker and I don’t really want one to be honest. So if anyone have you, have you ever been recognised? Yes, I have. Yeah. I was actually in a queue like that.

Or do you not like that?

I love it. I love it. I’m not going to beat around the bush. I do love it. I do love it. But I think when if it ever does get too intense where there’s loads of people, then I think I would maybe not like it as much. But at this moment in time, any bit of recognition is great for my soul and it gives you validation. It gives you, you know. But are you worried?

Do you worry that you’re out somewhere and whatever? Like someone knows you’re like, I don’t know, in co-op?

Uh, no, I don’t know.

I think cigarettes or something, you know what I mean?

Like, whatever. I mean, I don’t smoke, but. Yeah, I know what you mean, but whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think. I don’t know whether I’d like that. I think there has been a couple of instances. No, but I think I have done it to other people who are obviously more, more, you know, of a bigger fame than me. But yeah, I mean, I’ve. I’ve done it. Then I’m like, Oh my God, that’s that guy. That’s that girl. That’s, that’s that person. I was with a big Bollywood actress recently in India. I was stayed with their family and and she took me out for a meal in, in I don’t know if you’ve heard of Soho House. Have you heard of Soho House? Sure, yeah. It’s for those people that don’t know. It’s it’s a basically a members club for, for creatives. And there was one in Mumbai at the time and and downstairs in the restaurant anyone can go in there, the layman can go in, the public can go in there. But if you need to go into some other restaurants and bars upstairs, that’s only for the members. So anyway, we were sitting down and there’s a few of us just having a meal and then it was constantly people coming up to the actress and being like, Please, ma’am, can I have your photo? But obviously no one’s recognising me. And I’m like, I’m sitting here next to her as well. Yeah, but yeah, it was, it was. I think she, you know, she’s probably getting this all the time, so maybe she’s a bit fed up of it, but I think it’s a great, great thing. But obviously don’t want you don’t want people to come and ruin your meal with whoever you’re having it with. But yeah, it’s nice to have that feeling of someone recognising you for the work that you’ve done.

Sure. I don’t know how far we got. Was that two pieces of advice or is it?

I think it was two pieces of advice. The last thing I would say is try and. Avoid having any regrets. If at this moment, if at one moment you want to do something, go and do it. If you want to go and travel, go and do it. Just don’t have any regrets and think, what’s your biggest? Pretty much. Nah. Like I say, I try not to have regrets. I think the biggest regret.

I find it, you know, when people say don’t have regrets. Yeah. What you just said now, which was like, go for stuff, do the things you want to do. But sometimes I feel like it’s saying even if you didn’t do the things you want to do, don’t worry about it. And those are two separate things. Those are two different things. I try not to have regrets. Kind of. I try not to have regrets. Try not to look backwards at all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Generally, yeah, yeah. But. But that’s one thing. But I think the way you said it was different, it was like almost like grab all opportunities and do all the things you want to do. Yeah, it’s kind of a different thing, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, You know.

What I mean? But they. They both get classed and I don’t have regrets.

Camp Yeah, yeah. I’m more of the positive side in terms of grabbing things rather than.

Go on, Go on, indulge.

Me. So like I said, the biggest, the biggest probably the biggest regret I had was not continuing when I was a child and maybe being a bit more stronger and against against the family. I mean, don’t don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate them for it. I don’t, you know, I think yeah, yeah. Now I see the, the, the rewards of the rewards of doing something like dentistry whilst doing acting. Because if I didn’t have that source of income, I’d be struggling, honestly, I’d be struggling as an actor to make ends meet if I was in the same position and and had no dentistry. So I really commend them in that respect. But I also think that what what may what could have happened if I didn’t, you just always wonder a little bit like what might have happened if I did that.

You know, You know what? You know what’s really interesting? Yeah. That that I said to you about my kid, Oxford, Cambridge or whatever. Yeah. Like, how much of that advice is for you and about your and how much is it for, for, for the parent and for the parent too. Because if a parent has to I know in Indian circles, shame is a gigantic thing, right? Like a parent has to turn up and and aunty says, Oh, what’s Ravi doing? And they say, oh, Ravi’s an actor without being able to say he’s also a doctor. It’s so difficult. Yeah. In Indian Indian circles, it definitely is. It the weird thing is in western circles, you say, I’m an actor. It’s like a cool thing. It’s like, wow, yeah, it’s a wow thing, you know?

Yeah. I think it’s just. It’s just a mindset.

I just. I just hope, though, Yeah. Dude. That by the time you have kids. Yeah, yeah. And I’m not I’m not that that that confident though but I just hope by the time you have kids that it would have been sort of evolved to the point that if you and your girlfriend’s kid says, I want to write a screenplay, you’d be like, hell yeah. And but then go to a party and and boast about it. Yeah. Rather than hiding it and saying, Oh, he’s also a lawyer. Yes.

Yes. I went to a wedding recently, like just this weekend, and I had people come up to me, Oh, I’ve seen you in that show. I went to watch your show. Yeah. And then I’ve had people like family members, like cousins and things who have been jealous because I’m a dentist and now doing doing acting. But before that, when people used to say, Oh, he dances, he acts, he does this, it was more of a like taking the piss, like, look at you, you know, look at your son doing this and doing that. But in fact, they also loved it because they’d want me to perform at their birthday events or whatever it might be. But then when it suits them to turn it around and say, oh, you know, he’s just he’s just, you know, performing and loves doing all that kind of stuff.

But it’s been a massive pleasure. Massive, massive pleasure. My my biggest hope for you is that you become a Hollywood actor. And thank you. Really, you know, like that. To hell with dentistry. Because I see. I see the passion. Yeah, but but, but also exactly. Some sort of performative thing in dentistry, too, man.

No, no, thank you.

No, because I think. I think you’d be really good at it. Thank you very much. But. But really, thank you so much for. For taking the time to do this. And funny how it how it came about. Right. Because you were you were asking me about an enlightened case and and I was at Tina Turner the musical, which I didn’t want to be at. Yeah. Like. Like I didn’t. I didn’t dig Tina, by the way. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant.

Was good. Yeah.

Good. But I did not want to be there. Yeah, but I took a picture of the stage because it was before it started. I said, I’ll write you the email after, after this. And then you went, I’m an actor. Yeah, we started talking.

Yeah, it’s just meant to be. It was just meant to be. When you sent me that picture, I was like, Wait a minute. Is that a show? Does he know how funny?

Yeah, brilliant. Great.

Thanks a lot very much for having me on. No, appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

For doing this, buddy.

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.

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This case, what you’re treating, we do recommend, you know, different packages and we will say, okay, for this patient, think about including, you know, an extra refinement because this is a more complex case. So it’s totally, totally customised. And the idea is that you’re not overpaying ever for something that you don’t need or something that you don’t want. And also so that people who come in with different preferences have those needs met.

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 Sonja Shimotsuki onto the podcast. Sonia is an Oxford graduated doctor who didn’t really work as a doctor that long and then joined Boston Consulting Group in their start up business sort of area as a consultant and is now the founder of 32 Co, which is an innovative sort of disruptor in the eyeliner space. Lovely to have you, Sonia.

Lovely to be here, Payman Thank you for having me.

We’re actually at Sonia’s offices right now. Sonia You know, let’s start with one simple question. Do you now regret studying medicine? Should have studied dentistry.

It’s a good question. No, I’m not someone who regrets things. I take everything as a learning opportunity. I had a fantastic time studying medicine, being a doctor. I was a doctor for four years. I got a chance to work in some amazing places, have some amazing experiences, meet great people, and fundamentally learn a lot about health care, which has helped where we are now in terms of this business. But I think I wasn’t so much aware of dentistry as a profession when I was choosing my, my, my degree. And I think had I known a bit more about it, I would have been very tempted. I think I went down a route of exploring the Max Facts conversion and published some papers in Max Facts, but decided that the additional four years at the time was probably too much to convert. So don’t regret any of medicine. Loved it as a as a discipline and as a science. My degree was very academic and I really enjoyed that. But I think wanting to do something more entrepreneurial meant that I had to go and find a slightly different route after I’d done done my time.

But what was it what was it about you that made you want to do that? Rather than taking the traditional path of either becoming a GP or a surgeon or whatever?

Yeah, I when I while I was at medical school, I was running a different business. I ran an education business tutoring business, which I really enjoyed. I got got the bug. I think building something yourself, watching it grow, making a lot of mistakes, making some good decisions and ultimately building a business that that did did okay while I was while I was studying and then latterly into being a doctor. So I think what was important for me is the freedom to be able to make decisions about where my life was going. And although medicine is very varied, you can become, like you say, a GP, you can choose the surgical path, you can become a medic. The route that I was initially going down, which was to become an eye surgeon, an ophthalmologist, felt more and more and more restricted the more I got into it. So for those who don’t know, when you when you study ophthalmology, you go through a series of of exams and then you subspecialize in ophthalmology. So you’re not just looking at the eye, which is already a small part of the body. Now you’re looking at a specific area of the eye, maybe the cornea. And that that started to feel really quite restrictive for me. And I wanted to do something where I could spread my wings, build something, innovate, be creative. So that’s I think, why.

At the time when you were thinking of giving up medicine, were you getting advice from, I don’t know, parents or people saying, you know, why would you?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of that. What were.

You thinking? You said were you thinking had you made your mind up?

Yeah, I think I had. I think the interesting thing where I where I where I studied, I was surrounded by a lot of non medics as well. So I was able to see what they were doing in their careers and people going down really interesting different routes to what I was doing. And so I had exposure to people going into the city, you know. Building businesses, going into law firms, going into investment banks. And so I knew. What else was out there. When I started to think about leaving, I think, you know, parents always want you to they want you to succeed and be happy. But being a doctor is kind of kind of cool. So I think that’s difficult. And there is an element of what a waste. I don’t see it like that. I think it’s helped build me into where I am today and what I am today. But, you know, that kind of sense of loss that, you know, we’ve lost a doctor. I think the fact that I then went into into BCG and did a lot of health care consulting, so going back into hospitals with a completely different hat on and saying now trying to improve the hospital systems, trying to improve theatre efficiency, trying to improve access to certain services with a completely different mindset, meant that that, you know, that knowledge was still being put to use.

And to be honest, I had a lot of medic friends who had also left and who were not necessarily encouraging. I think, you know, I think BCG, for example, it’s tough. It’s really hard work. So it was more be mindful of what you’re getting yourself into. The grass isn’t always greener. This is how it’s different and this is how it’s better and this is how it’s worse and make up your own mind. But if you want help, we will help you get in. So I had a lot of help leaving medicine because although I think the assumption when you’re a medic is that you can do lots of things and you’re very academic and you’re all very clever, I didn’t find that to be the case when I left and went into the real world and had to do things like build models on Excel and, you know, present and and all of those things that you don’t get taught as a medic. So there was a lot of learning to do there and it was quite humbling for a while going from thinking that I mean, thinking that the world kind of owes you something because you’re a doctor to being right at the bottom and having to learn things from scratch. I think that was a really good experience.

And I guess, you know, you grew up in the Netherlands. Yeah. And for someone to get into Oxford in the first place, you would probably top of your class and that sort of thing. And then you’ve gone through medicine in Oxford and now it’s the first time really, where you feel at a disadvantage compared to your peers.

Yeah, it’s funny when I so yeah, to all of the above. I was very academic. I loved school, I was good at a lot of things at school. And so it made it very easy for me. I decided to go to Oxford, you know, I did well there. And then when I got when I when I got to my first day at BCG, I always tell this story because I think it’s really important. They they said, look, everyone here has always been top of their class at everything. You think that you’re going to be amazing at this. Let me tell you now, you’re going to be rubbish at this job for the first six months. And then they said, And now what you’re thinking is, Ah, I am never the person that’s rubbish at anything. I’m going to nail this, but you’re not. So get comfortable with that. It’s going to be a steep learning curve, but you’re going to figure it out because we’re going to help you. And they did. It was fantastic company to work at. So yeah, it was it was humbling, but but also very empowering to be on that learning curve and actually get, you know, acquire a whole new set of skills very quickly.

And a consultant’s life is as hard as a junior doctor’s life in many ways. Yeah. Constantly on a plane and you’re constantly going around the place, what would you say? You know, there’s loads of dentists these days who want to stop. Is your advice? You know, caution.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think there’s an element in medicine, dentistry. There’s an element of you think that’s all you know and that’s who you are. Yeah. People tell you your skills are transferable, but deep down you know that they might not be. So. I don’t know if it was a younger sister or something who was a dentist and said, Oh, I hate all of this. I want to do something else. Would you say go for it or would you not say go for it?

I always. I do. I do get asked a lot, you know.

You must. Yeah.

You know, how did you get out and what would you advise? And I always take the calls because I was on that. I was on the other end of that when I was leaving. And there were some very kind people randomly giving me lots of advice. So so I spend a lot of time listening to them and figuring out whether whether they really how much they know about leaving. Some people come with a very clear set of goals. You know, I’d like to get into consulting. I’ve done X, Y, and Z, What do I do now? And some people just say, look, I just don’t know what to do and but I don’t think I’m happy. And my first advice is the grass isn’t always greener. Being a doctor is a fantastic career. I think it can be really challenging for for a lot of reasons. And so is being a dentist. So what is it that you’re trying to optimise for? Because from a from a work life balance perspective, when you factor in pay, dentists do well, I would say from an early age.

Yeah, they do well early. Yeah.

So that makes it difficult. It’s kind of a golden cage in a lot of ways. Medics are paid less well, easier for them. You know, there’s a lot of shinier opportunities for medics. But, you know, working in an office 9 to 5 or, you know, 9 to 9 to midnight, as it was often at BCG, you know, it’s not right for everybody. You know, if you’re used to getting up, being around people and patients using your hands, then you might find it quite stifling and quite. Uninspiring. You know, it just depends what you’re trying to optimise for. If you if it’s just money, there’s plenty of ways that you can make lots of money in dentistry. So it’s trying to start almost again in a different career. Doesn’t sound like the most sensible thing in the world.

So I think with dentists, it’s really money that’s the problem, isn’t it? I think the current situation with the lawsuits and GDC is putting a lot of people off. But okay, so what is what is it like entering consulting from the beginning? Do they train you really intensively for the first six months? Yeah. What is that training?

I think to some extent you’re thrown in the deep end and it’s, you know, you’re carefully selected for your problem solving abilities. So the interviews are very much about problem solving, quick mental maths, you know, being able to reason through problems. And so when you get there, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing is I don’t really know how to build a model. Okay, well, we’ll provide a little bit of training. Here’s a mentor who can help you, but you kind of got to go and build it yourself because that is the only way that you’re going to learn. So the way that they did it when I joined was because BCG is quite diverse in terms of the industries that it works in. I mean, it works with every industry, health care being one of them. I had said, I want to work in anything but healthcare because that’s what I’m trying to leave and, you know, explore the world of work in different ways. But they said, start your first project in healthcare. It’s an area that you’re familiar with and you will learn your trade, your skills, where you’re comfortable, and then you can go and progress on to different things. So I think I spent three months doing some work for a trust with a with a team. I think it was looking at referral pathways and trying to trying to optimise those and reduce waiting times, you know, relatively NHS trust. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, some of the places that I worked before, so I kind of, I kind of knew them.

So yeah, and that does involve, you know, Monday to Thursday you’re on a, you’re travelling normally, so you’re in a hotel somewhere and then you come back to the office on Friday, you know, during those times. I think the big difference is that, you know, you’re not if someone phoned, if if work needs to be done on a Saturday, you’re coming in on a Saturday, you know, your phone doesn’t turn off. You know, that’s one of the things that I explain when I say, look, here are the trade offs. You know, when you leave hospital, having done your shift, you know that there is another junior doctor looking after your patients. You’re not going to get phoned as a junior doctor, different if you’re a consultant. But so there’s no off time. You know, you’re expected to do the work and it’s project based, so you know, you’re going hell for leather until the end of the project and then you stop and then you go on to a different project, which might be something totally different in a different country, in a different industry with a different team, which is also what made it fun. But it’s quite relentless. So it’s, you know, it’s the kind of industry where you have lots of people that start and then as you get more senior, you know, fewer and fewer people stay for different reasons for some people.

So did you go into it knowing you were going to leave it and do a start up, or were you thinking at the time that you’re going to go up the whole consulting partnership?

Yeah, I think I, I wanted to keep my options open. I was very open to really enjoying that life. And I think I think I would have enjoyed it. But I also got to a point where. And again this a partner sat me down once at BCG and said, look, you know, you’re getting to the point now where you really, really understand what this job is about. You kind of get it now. Now you have to decide whether you want to to keep going or whether you want to go and do something else and be really honest with yourself about that. What are your strengths and weaknesses and where do you want to where do you want to go? And I think at that point it was quite obvious to me that this is what I wanted to do. Having said that, I had a nice transition because while I was there, I moved into a different, completely different part of the company, which was the start up arm. So it was a different group. It’s called Digital Ventures. And they basically we build start ups for corporate clients. Oh, so while I was there, I, I was building what is now the world’s leading app for patients with haemophilia, which we spent a year doing that built up the team. It’s now a flourishing company in Germany that’s doing great things. And so I essentially got to go straight into the start ups through through the BCG route, which was fantastic for me.

And but it’s not start up in the same way as you’re now, you know, having to raise finance and there was a big company behind it.

Yeah. So the finance was in place already because it was someone paying for it. It was, it was the kind of the next bit, which is, okay, now build the company, build the product, hire the team. I guess that.

Gave you confidence.

Big, big comfort, blanket. Of course, you know, you don’t there’s no risk there for you as an individual, which is a completely different, completely different ball game to when you’re doing it. You know, you’re out by yourself. Just got to figure it out. You know, build this thing, get some people to buy some stuff, you know, It’s very different. Yeah.

So now, now, now 32 Co which a couple of years ago was 32 stories. Yeah. First incarnation. The first.

Incarnation. Yeah.

And I guess you pivoted the if you explain let’s start with I was on your site today and the first thing it said was something about the broken aligner industry. Yeah. So what’s your analysis of the aligner industry that that would, you’d characterise it as broken. What, what what are the bits of it that. Yeah.

I think specifically it’s broken for the dentist. So when we look at the aligner industry and where it came from, it’s it’s, it’s been around for over 25 years. You know, it was invented by two students who again went and raised a lot of VC money and turned it into what is now Invisalign. You know, it’s thriving business. They they IPO’d quite soon afterwards. And essentially they’ve led the charge because they owned the they held the patents for so long. So they built the technology and nobody else could really build this, which meant that they really controlled the industry, they controlled the costs, the margins, and and they built a very successful company off the back of that. As soon as the patents expired, anyone was able to make an aligner. And that is what we’ve seen. And people have adopted different models from going directly to patients and cutting out the clinician altogether to doing what I would kind of class as Invisalign copycats because it’s basically doing the same thing with a bit of different branding. But in all of this, I think the what has been lost, I think in the commercialisation of this device is the real clinical expertise that’s required to do a good job for your patients. And what I mean by that is that the direct to consumer model cuts out the clinical expertise altogether, forgets about it, says it doesn’t matter. You know, if some of these patients are unhappy, they’ll sue us.

But we’ve got waivers. So they won’t get very far. And that’s that side of the market, which I think, you know, if you look at Smiledirectclub shares share price, it kind of tells the story of what’s going to happen to that side. And then on the other side, I think what we’ve seen is that there’s been an increasing kind of trivialisation of the process. So make it easier and easier and easier and easier. Don’t think about it too much and kind of hope for the best. And when we speak to dentists, we increasingly hear. Look, I would like to provide this sort of treatment, but I don’t necessarily feel like I have access to the expertise, the training or the support to do a really fantastic job at this. Every time I’m aware that this is a specialist treatment, moving teeth is a specialist discipline. I’m sort of being lured into a sense of a false sense of security by just the ease at which I can sort of go on a one day course, get an account within two minutes. I’ve got a sort of cartoon and I can press go. But when I started doing it, I realised that I was running into problems. I didn’t really know how to plan treatment. I wasn’t really sure how to assess complexity. I got to the end of treatment and refinement after refinement, after refinement.

What I thought was going to be a profitable treatment ended up not being so I wasted so much time and the sort of high refinement rates have become normalised in a part of treatment. It’s just what people expect. So I think it’s broken in the sense that people have forgotten to take it seriously and have and have been sort of fed this line that don’t worry about it too much. Everyone’s doing it. Just kind of, you know, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. And what we’re seeing from yeah, to your point, the indemnifies and and younger dentists coming out is actually, I don’t want to do that. I would like to do this properly, but I don’t have any way of doing that. I can go on a on a on a course that let’s forget about the sort of one day courses because I think everyone kind of accepts that there’s not much you can learn on a one day course that you will retain. But let’s say you go on a year long course. It’s expensive, it requires travel. It’s not that accessible to people. So obtaining the knowledge and having, you know, real time help from someone who knows what they’re doing is is lacking because that’s really what dentists are asking for. And that’s what we’ve tried to do to kind of fix this, this broken system, we think, for dentists.

So that’s one side. Yeah. And the other side is like a marketplace. Yeah. For the device itself. Yeah. Explain. Just take, take, take me through that. So the one side is an orthodontist helps the dentist through the process of treatment planning. Yeah. Now we know what we’re going to do. You then tender it out to different labs. Yeah.

Yeah. So the other thing that’s broken is the sort of vendor tie in. So dentists will be tied into a specific brand and we’ll literally feel tied in because they might have got a scanner and sort of have to pay that debt off with cases or they might be trying to get to the next level of a of a discount, which it can feel. I mean, it’s a bit mad really in some ways that you as a clinician are really being told what to do by a company in terms of where to buy things and what price you’re going to get. And you know, they say jump and you say how high? That’s what it feels like to a lot of people. And and it doesn’t need to be that way because, as I said, the device has come off patent. There are global manufacturers all over the world making really high quality aligners often for the big brands. But but, you know, whacking a different label on and using the same 3D printers and the same materials. So for us, it makes no sense that a dentist is being tied into increasing prices when this is a commodity device. Once you’ve got your treatment plan, you can get it manufactured by any manufacturer that’s of a certain quality and your patient will get great results provided that that treatment plan is is has been well planned, reliable and safe.

So what we want to see is increased democratisation in the market whereby dentists can choose they are the masters of their own destiny, as it were. They can they can choose from different manufacturers and make purchasing decisions based on their preferences, price, shipping, speed, you know, the things that are important to them that those manufacturers are very keen to offer and essentially cut out the middleman and get kind of a wholesale kind of deal. And the nice thing about having a manufacturer and marketplace like this is that because we are pooling all of our dentists orders, we are basically giving them mass buying power and mass purchasing power, which gives them huge negotiating leverage in terms of price, which as an individual dentist, you would obviously never have. So rather than having to sort of fight for, you know, getting up the discount rung the day you join, you’re part of such a big group of people that you’re getting the top discount from from day one. And that’s what we’re trying to do is get the prices to be more reasonable for dentists.

Understand that. But but let’s say someone one of your users. Yeah. Does loads and loads of treatments. Does he not get a further discount from someone who does 1 or 2 a month?

No, actually I think that’s quite important for us is we we want to treat dentists fairly and the same.

I’m fair. Is it? I mean, if the guy is doing so many in every other.

But how.

You would get your own volume discount by doing so many.

But you would never get the volume discount that you would get if you if you pooled everybody’s together. So it’s a group buying thing. And I think dentists are often. When pitted against each other. To be honest, I think there is a lot of competitiveness and I think if you can work together as a group, everybody is better off because there are people who are missing out on the clearer line a game, as it were, because they feel isolated. They’re not supported, priced out as they’re priced out because the guy next door has got a bigger discount. So you’re not giving those people a chance to access this market. And if we really think about it, you know, coming coming at it from, you know, what are we actually trying to achieve? We’re trying to increase access for patients as well. So for us, if every dentist can do a line of work, whether they choose to do 50% of their work in Aligners or, you know, a couple of cases, you know, a month or a year, we want to treat those people the same and give them the same level of support and encouragement. If they want to do more, then great. But if they don’t, I don’t think that they should be penalised for that.

Okay. A couple of other things then. So let’s imagine this scenario. That patient comes in asking for Invisalign. Classically, the dentist explains to the patient that it’s not about the system, it’s about the treatment plan. Yeah. Is that how you train them? Yeah. Patient says okay, you know best doc when they received their product is any aspect of that branded 32 Co or the dentist brand or is it just generic sort of it can be.

It can be a mixture. So for for we try and keep it relatively neutral to try and communicate that this is a high quality device that doesn’t have all of the extra branding on top of it. We can and do brand for dentists if that’s important to them. Some practices have a strong brand, others don’t. So that is something that we do for for the for the groups that we work with. So and again, you know, this comes back to what we’re trying to do is to to empower the dentist. If you promote a brand of aligner in your practice and you spend money on that AdWords, you know, cost money, those are expensive AdWords keywords. And a patient comes in and has a fantastic treatment with you and then says to their friend, Oh, wonderful treatment, what did you have? Oh, I had this system, this brand. Where is the patient going to go? Are they going to come back to you, the dentist who provided the treatment, or are they going to go and Google it on the Internet and find any local provider we’re trying to do is make sure that patients come back to you. So if you can have your own branded aligner now suddenly we’re talking about Payman Airlines. I had a wonderful experience with with, you know, Dr. Langroudi, who was fantastic. You know, you should go and see him rather than go on to the website of of a system and find any old provider, any old, you know, not you. So that’s another thing that we’re trying to do is promote the dentist over and above ourselves.

Yeah, I think the stronger the brand is, the more likely that problem is that people will go shopping around. Yeah, exactly. The brand. Exactly. That is a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Even we see it in bleaching. It does happen. Yeah. So. All right. The. Patient comes comes to that same dentist says Invisalign. Dentist talks to them, says this is a better way of doing it. The product comes if he wants with his brand on it. The difference when you’re when you’re tendering out to the different labs, how do you explain to the dentist which lab is better or worse or quicker or cheaper, or does it get a choice? Yeah, they get a choice. Here’s a lab in China that’s a bit cheaper and slower. Yeah. Here’s a lab in Germany that’s quicker and more expensive.

Yeah, there’s all sorts of things.

Those are the only two moving parts. The cost and the time. Or is it.

Materials, Plastics. Plastics as well. So the way that we’ve we’ve done so we’ve worked with probably, you know, 30 of the biggest global manufacturers and I say use that word quite deliberately. It’s the manufacturer, not the brand, because one manufacturer can carry hundreds of brands and they do. And what we have done is basically created them in terms of level of service and the quality of their product. So anyone who’s on the platform has been vetted to be of a high standard in terms of those two factors. That means that we give dentists essentially the freedom to confidently pick any one of these because all of them are going to do a great job. But I might have a preference, for example, in terms of material, we list the material and other brands that use that material. If that’s if you have a preference, if you think I really like the way that that plastic feels my patients do, then I’m going to go for that one. But what we tend to see happening is that manufacturers will run deals. Obviously they want to get the attention of these dentists. So, you know, you might get a deal on for two weeks on a specific plastic from a specific manufacturer. And that’s what we want. You know, we want dentists to be getting better and better deals on their on their materials.

The other thing that we give them choice on is the finish. So we have people who say really like the sort of wavy scalloped edge. I think it looks nice, but the evidence suggests that perhaps a straight edge gives you slightly higher retentive forces. So every patient you should be able to customise your treatment depending on what the patient wants. If the patient wants a nice maybe they’ve got sort of bulbous gums and you know, it might chafe a bit. You go for a scalloped edge, whereas if you’ve got a more complex case where maybe you’re using elastics, maybe you want to use a straight edge. So all of these factors are there things that dentists don’t get taught about. So part of our training and what we do in product as well is to sort of explain, you know, here are the differences based on this case what you’re treating. We do recommend, you know, different packages and we will say, okay, for this patient, think about including an extra refinement because this is a more complex case. So it’s totally, totally customised. And the idea is that you’re not overpaying ever for something that you don’t need or something that you don’t want. And also so that people who come in with different preferences have those needs met.

And the orthodontists. I mean, I think some people would dispute whether just being an orthodontist is enough. Yeah, they need to be orthodontists who have got a special interest in the line. Yes. Yes. How are you picking them? Have you got, like one chief? One who tells you about.

Yeah. So our clinical lead is is Professor AMA Joel, who many, many of your listeners will know. And yeah, you’re right. Having just being a specialist orthodontist isn’t necessarily sufficient to be to be both clear aligner experience and also a good teacher. Those are the two things that we screen for. So when new orthodontists apply to work with us, we, we schedule interviews. We we look at their their interests and the cases that they’ve done. We have a community of orthodontists, so they meet each other and basically we’re we’re making sure that that they’re meeting. I suppose the the minimum standard in terms of service that they can provide because it is a service at the end of the day. I mean, they’re helping and they’re mentoring, but the dentist needs to be needs to feel reassured by the advice and the mentorship that they’re being given. So there is a lot of training, there’s a lot of support as well between specialists. So if a really tricky case comes in, it’s not uncommon at all for us to talk about it, you know, with multiple authors and say, how would you how would you do this if you’ve ever seen this before? And they obviously really enjoy that as well because they haven’t seen everything either. And sometimes getting it through the lens of a of a dentist actually really makes people think about, well, how do I how do I explain this? Because an author might see the nuances of this case and understand why this is complex. But if if you’re a dentist and you haven’t had orthodontic training, you might miss certain parts of the occlusion that might make it a more tricky, a tricky case. So actually coming taking a step back and saying, well, how would I explain this? What actually is going on here is a good learning experience for the specialist as well.

What do you say to someone who might say to you, look, a company like align. Has got more expertise than any other supplier. Yeah. And are you saying it is. It’s purely a commodity? There’s no there’s nothing about an Invisalign experience that’s better. Or maybe this is a bit unfair. Make the case for Invisalign.

No, I think it’s a fair point. So I think what they’ve done really well, as I said, is really simplify the process. So I think now it’s clear that when your plan is submitted, it’s it’s, you know, sort of an automated simulation comes back. A technician based somewhere who’s not a dentist, not clinically trained, is interpreting your instructions and is designing the tooth movement. That makes it very easy. And it means that you’re very quickly getting something that you can put in front of your patient and you can sell. And ultimately dentists want to sell. So that’s what they’ve been very good at, stripping back any of the technical complexity and almost saying, Look, don’t worry too much about it. I think there is some. There is some. I suppose there’s a misconception that there’s lots of AI in the background that’s doing this. When you look at the regulations and the software that’s being used to plan treatments, the the license, because the FDA, you know, is the the American body that approves these sorts of softwares because these softwares are medical devices. It’s on condition that it’s operated by a licensed dental professional who understands orthodontics. So, you know, the idea that this is all done by AI, I mean, the the regulation is predicated on the fact that it has to be done by a dentist, which suggests that the AI itself can’t do the treatment planning. It’s not allowed to do that because it’s not it’s not in a position. To plan treatment yet? Not by itself.

Yeah, it needs. It needs human input. So. So that’s, I think what they’ve what they’ve done. Well, I think what we’re saying is let’s amplify the clinicians input. Let’s, let’s recognise how important it is and let’s make sure that people are trained to do it well and let’s try and do that in a way that makes it as easy as you would get with Invisalign. But with that added expertise being thrown in, thrown on top, so you still get a plan back. It’s still a you know, you still get a lovely simulation, but on top of that, you get the advice of an expert who’s done many, many cases before, explaining to you not just what they’ve done, more importantly, what they haven’t done. So when you think about when you’re consenting a patient, what do you have to do? You have to tell them what are the risks and also what are we not going to address. And Invisalign can’t do that for you, right? It can’t help you understand what’s going on. All it can do is give you a simulation on that moves the teeth into alignment. And if that’s what you want, because it’s a simple patient, you want to think about it too much, then that’s great. Genuinely, I think that’s great. But if you’re trying to understand what’s going on, that’s not enough. And I think that’s where that’s where we’re enabling a far greater population of dentists to take this on.

Then you can always get an orthodontist to plan your Invisalign Spark whatever case. And that exists, right? I mean, there’s lots of dentists do that. Yeah. They get a really super, super experienced, you know, specialist to look at any of their cases that they’re worried, worried about and to make the treatment plan. Yeah. So does that is that competition to you then is it must be right?

I don’t think so. Not in the same way because the the challenge with that is, is workflow. How do you get it to that specialist? You know, you have to give them a login to your this is what we hear from dentists and specialists who do this. It’s a pain. So I have to remember the login for this person, do it for them. How am I communicating with them? By phoning them, you know, how am I giving them feedback on this? If they’re paying me, how are they paying me? It’s a really clunky process. And I mean, the big thing is that you’re paying in addition to your lab bill, whereas with us it’s baked in, so it’s not an extra service. It’s part of the workflow, it’s part of the experience, it’s seamless. So I think what we’ve done is, is go one better and just make it all easier. Actually, interestingly, the the specialists that we speak to who try and go down that route, they find it most annoying because they’re busy people. Right? If you’re not going to make it really, really, really easy for them to do this, which is what we do, then it’s just a headache for them. And they’ll do they’ll do a couple here and there for friends, people who they feel that they really want to help. But everybody else, you know, if you don’t know and also you’re you’re a bit unlucky.

So as most of your time spent not your the company’s time spent making the platform frictionless. And I don’t know it’s probably a stupid example, but my my parents live in Spain. I tend to just go to Easyjet. Yeah, I’m sure there’s cheaper or whatever. Better. Yeah. But like, I just like the website. It’s just I just feel like I can get my ticket quicker. Is that, is that front and centre in your mind that you want the experience for the, for both sides, I guess both the dentists and the specialists to be pleasant and frictionless. Yeah. And so in, in many ways you’re definitely not a device company are you. You’re not making any devices. You’re, you’re an education company. Yeah. And I guess a tech company is a tech company.

Yeah. Yeah. So most so, you know, we’re a team of over 40 people now and half of that is tech and product. So it takes a lot to build this sort of infrastructure and it takes a long time and it takes a real knowledge and understanding of building products. So our our product lead, Dan, has got a lot of experience building digital platforms in healthcare. And his his role really is to scrutinise to the nth degree every user’s experience and to try and optimise it. And that’s a real art and a science at the same time. Some, some some listeners may have been in contact with Dan because he does a lot of user research to really understand, Well, what do you want to happen right now? What would be the ideal flow for you? And the nice thing about being a Start-Up is that our earlier users will see all of their feedback being built in continuously. And again, because we can move fast, it happens really, really quickly. So we’re about to release some new features that are that are based directly on feedback that we’ve had over the last two months about things that that people thought were a bit bit clunky. You know, they wanted it to be slicker there or. More information here or this easier to find. And we’ve built all of that in two months. So it is it takes a long time to get this right. And I think the most important thing is that you never rest on your laurels. You’ve never got it right. You’ve never built the perfect product. You have to keep going, keep going until every single customer is delighted with what you’ve built.

Well, you’re never going to delight all customers. My my experience has been a lot of times you delight one customer and annoy another one. And at the same time, yeah. So and it’s really difficult. You look you’ve chosen to go in health care software, I guess, right? That’s where you’re at. Yeah. You could have you could have gone into software as a service, something else. Like why did you come back to health care after after shunning it at the beginning? Did you did you not think you were just going to do like a Silicon Valley type? Start-up In some sort of enterprise software.

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Because it is slightly complicated what you’ve chosen to do. Yeah. Firstly, we’ve got the, the biggest company in dentistry. Yeah. And I guess that’s why you’re going after them, right? And all the other competitors are too. Yeah. But you’ve got the dentists quite slow to change. Yeah. You know, we were having this chat before, um, and you know, if they’re making it work for themselves, it’s quite a difficult to get someone to change something they’re doing happily. It’s quite hard. Yeah. So did you did you not think of doing something more traditionally, You know, tech.

Tech? Yeah. So I think a couple of things. Firstly. You can’t build something that you don’t care about. I think genuinely and I you know, when when I came into this problem, it was never so much about dentists or clear aligners and it still really isn’t. We are a tech company that’s helping clinicians. That was that’s always been the core. And how do you help clinicians? You give clinicians access to expertise, you know, expertise that they can’t get anywhere else. When I was in working in in A&E, in in one of the biggest trauma centres in Europe, you know, it wasn’t until I left that I really understood that when I was walking around that A&E on a shift, I could just turn round and tap on the shoulder of any of the consultants, you know, leading, leading pre-hospital doctors and, you know, neurosurgeons and vascular surgeons and just ask them something. When when I then sort of took a step back and looked at primary care GP land and and dentists, it was very clear that none of that existed. No access to help. It’s very siloed. It can be very lonely and it can be and that can that can be very scary for people. So the vision for me was always, how do you empower clinicians? How do you connect them? How do you make information from experts flow to people on the front line who have patients who want treatment, and especially more specialised treatment, more innovative treatment, newer treatment that they didn’t have a chance to learn at school because innovation is happening at such a rate in healthcare.

So to come back to your question, why this? I saw both innovation in healthcare happening at breakneck speed, and then I also saw or realised that had I been still been a doctor, I would never have been able to get my hands on any of these new devices or these new tools or these new drugs or these new protocols, because how would I have known what to do? I would have been a GP. I would have never had access to that. So it would have taken another generation to get this into the hands of clinicians. So that was always the vision of the company is accelerating that process to get general clinicians up the curve more quickly by giving them access to expertise. And what better way than having a world expert in whatever you’re working on literally at the other end of a platform in a way that’s convenient for you and easy. So yes, we’re in the clear aligner space, but we don’t really see ourselves as just a clear aligner company. We think of ourselves as a as a technology company that’s helping clinicians. And it just so happens that we’re looking at clear aligners because there is a big gap between just the sheer volume of patients that want this treatment and the number of clinicians that are that are currently providing it.

And if patients are resorting to kind of at home treatments that are delivered online with an impression kit, we’ve got a problem, right? Because they should be able to go to their local dentist no matter how complex, and find an answer, even if it’s look, you’re way too complex for for a dentist to treat. With aligners, we’re going to refer you to a specialist. The vast majority of patients don’t fall into that category. And if enough dentists are saying, look, I don’t do this, where are these patients going to go? You know, everyone has a specialist orthodontist that they can just, you know, go and visit in a heartbeat. And everyone lives in central London, you know, the rest of it. So now to your other point, why not build a SaaS company? You know, I have a lot of, you know, friends and other founders and CEOs doing really interesting, different things. And I think the the the learning, I think, for me is that it’s never easy. No industry is easy if you’re trying to sell productivity tools. Into companies. I mean, good luck with that at the moment. If you’re trying to sell fintech tools or accounting tools into accountants, just too slow moving as dentists or lawyers, so it is never easy. The point of building a Start-Up is to really break things, shake things up, find holes, find problems, which is never plain, is never plain sailing.

And look, I’m interested. I’ve been in this market for 22 years and you came and asked me some questions, but I’m quite interested in fresh eyes on on this market. What’s your sense of dentistry as a market? And the difference between that and medicine and GPS.

And yeah, I think dentists are much more commercial. Also, part of the reason why we started in clear aligners, so that gives them a lot more freedom to manoeuvre and ability to make purchasing decisions which as a supplier helps. I think. It, it feels like. It is driven by. To some extent, themes and tropes that are prevalent on social media. Because that’s what people see. I think it’s a it’s a community of people that really want to be connected and go to a few different sources to find that connection. And, you know, I think there’s a there’s a desire to to be around other people a lot more. I don’t see, for example, in medicine anywhere near the kind of meetups and dinners and parties that you that you see in dentistry courses that people it just doesn’t really happen. It’s, you know, medicine is a lot more fragmented than than dentistry. So I think it’s a great place to be if you’re a young dentist and you’re willing to participate in the community and learn from others and, you know, go on courses and days out and things like that. And yeah, for anyone setting up a company, I think because of that, it’s tight knit and you need to earn the trust of, of dentists. They’re going to be looking around at other people and asking the question, Does anybody else use this? Has anyone else got good things to say about this? And but once you’ve established that core of trust, then it’s, you know, then suddenly everything is much easier. But yeah, it’s you have to be humble coming into this and introduce yourself politely to the market and say, Look, this is what we’ve got to offer. We think there’s a problem. Um, and then hope that you’ve, you know, hope that you’ve got it right, hope that you’ve actually listened and built something that really solves their problem rather than something which you thought was nice to build but no one actually cares about.

And what about as a founder now that I mean, you said it at Boston Consulting, you know, you were in that area where it was start-ups, but you didn’t have to worry about raising cash. Yeah. Now, what’s the most stressful part of your job? Is it going into profitability, raising cash, your burn rate? Yeah. What what keeps you up at night? Right now?

Uh, all of the above, I would say so. Raising money comes in waves. So when you’re doing when you’re out, you’re very. You’re far away from. You’re taken away from the business. So you have to really trust that the people that are in the team are, you know, capable of of manning the ship, which in our case they very much are. And so those periods are.

Take me through the process. I mean, it has to be you and your CFO, I guess.

Yeah. So all just me or just you?

Yeah. And so what does it take to raise raise cash for a Start-Up?

So, yeah, the process is I mean, it’s a dark art in many ways. I think, again, have had the benefit of many, many founders before me sitting down and there’s a very strong founder community basically that helped each other. So it’s firstly go and talk to them and figure out, right, who am I supposed to be talking to? Who’s who’s, who’s investing in this kind of business? Who who are investors that are well known, who, you know, reputation is important, who is interested in this industry? Have they got any similar investments that would suggest that they’d be interested? And then it’s just a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings.

So when you say strong founder community, were you in some sort of incubator or something where you were?

No, no, just just, you know, a lot of just through the years have met and know and spend time with a lot of founders who who help each other a lot with this kind of stuff.

And so you so you’re gone. Just step by step. Take me through the process. What do you do? Send an email, knock on a door.

So normally, no, normally normally you’re introduced by somebody else to the investor, whether it’s a.

One of your other investors, maybe.

An angel investor. Yeah. Or a a VC firm or a family office. You know, there’s different flavours of investors. You’re normally introduced by somebody else or they find find out about your business and contact you usually by email or on LinkedIn, and then you go and meet them and you go and talk about your business and you have to make it. You have to really. Bring it back to real basics because none of the people that you’ll be speaking to will know anything about Clear Linus or probably won’t know much about Claire. Linus Yeah, certainly not the industry. They certainly won’t have researched it because most of these investors are invest in lots of different things. So, you know, one minute they’re looking at a fintech product and then the next minute it’s something really specific in dentistry. So you talk to them about your business and if you’re successful in kind of convincing that this is interesting and things that are interesting are companies that have a, you know, a big vision. You know, it’s not just about what we’re doing now. You know, where can this go? People will probably have heard of the terms, Tam, you know, how big is this market really, and how big?

Total addressable. So, so, so is that do you end up having to oversell and say, you know, say stuff that you really have no idea about in the future? Do you know, what do you do? You say we’re going to be global doing this.

I think experienced investors, especially VC investors, understand that it’s a vision. I mean, obviously, you don’t know and they’ve been in this game for long enough to know that if you pick a winner, which is obviously what they’re all trying to do.

The right resources will come to that winner.

Exactly. Yeah. So so they’re taking a chance every time they invest in a company and they’re sort of projecting into the future, you know, where if this is actually going to happen, this is the opportunity. And if we’ve got a portfolio of 50 of these or 100 of these and one of these goes to the moon, you know, we’ve made our money. That’s how they think about this. So you’ve got to convince them that you’re going to build a billion plus dollar business. Otherwise, why would they invest if it’s a VC fund? I mean, other you know.

Your venture backed. Your VC backed. Yeah. So then does that not weigh on you that that the majority of of their investments of which you could be one isn’t going to get anywhere. I think.

It’s I think it’s really motivating.

Actually it’s motivating to become the.

One so we raise money from one of the most well known tech funds and one of the most established tech funds in in Europe and the UK. And you know, there are other investments. So the investors are very early in us. They wouldn’t normally invest this early in a business.

In 32.

Stories in 32. Co 3232 stories is a it was a pre-COVID incarnation that we. That for Covid reasons, we basically started from scratch with 32. Okay.

Sorry I interrupted you. There were early investors in 32.

Sorry. Yes, there were very early investors. As in early from their point of view. So at at seed stage, you know, the other investments that they’ve made at this stage with things like Revolute. Right. So that’s your example. I mean, that’s a 50 billion plus dollar company. So that’s really motivating because these guys are experienced, they know how to pick winners and they picked this company with this vision. So it’s now up to you to go and prove it. I think there’s no point in having fear or reservations about this, you know, And and if that’s I think if that’s the mindset, then I think one would find this life very, very tough.

And what’s what’s the level of support, stroke interference with your tactics, your vision, your you know, how often, how often do you meet the investor and how often do they give you a suggestion of what you should be doing that you don’t agree with? And in sort of thing.

So so balderton have been fantastic. They are a they’re a great fund. We we get a lot of support from them. So as an example, you know, they’ll have a senior senior executives in residence they call it. So those are people who have come from, you know, top, top companies who have really specific expertise in a certain area, for example, product or tech or HR or legal. And we just have access to those people. So that’s been hugely helpful for us because if you if you can hear from people who’ve made all the mistakes in the past, you know, you can learn a lot and you can you can go faster. So meet them regularly in regular communication. They’re they want you to succeed. They’re trying to help. And so far, you know, it’s been a very positive, very positive experience for us.

And you’re not you’re not a techie yourself. Right. So what’s it like? What’s it like having a tech company when you’re not a techie?

I have to learn it, basically. You have to learn the language. I think I’m proficient enough in terms of understanding product that the tech bit, you know, we have a fantastic tech lead. So you hire the right people, basically. And. And make sure that you know what you’re talking about. I think I kind of internally have a bit of a rule that you you have to figure out how we’re going to do this ourselves before you hire in someone else to go and do it for you. I think it’s always it’s a very natural reaction to say, well, we don’t know how to do this. Let’s hire in an expert. And I think that invariably that leads that leads to.

You don’t even understand the vocabulary, understand the problem.

You can’t measure it. You can’t track it. So although so we invest a lot of time in in in forcing ourselves to figure it out, understanding what that expert is going to come in and do, and then they can go and do it. So to to enable that you need some pretty smart people on the team, some some generalists who really know how to solve problems and are unafraid and are really hungry to go and figure the next thing out. So that can sometimes feel quite chaotic, I think. But it’s very, very motivating.

And what percentage of your team are. Working in the office and what percentage you know.

About about third in the office.

And the others are all over the world. All over the world. Yeah. Oh, how interesting. Yeah.

Different different skills in different countries. You know, Covid did did us some real did a real favour. It just expanded the the the talent pool internationally and it becomes very just very normal now to have talent from all over the world working with you.

And so we were talking about AI before and it’s kind of it’s very early, isn’t it, to understand how that’s going to affect everything. But surely you must be thinking now. Yeah, very much so. Either you’re going to what, stop hiring any more people or even shrink the team a little bit because each one of these guys is now going to be empowered to do so much more. Yeah, that’s certainly. Are you thinking about that?

Certainly. Certainly looking at that. It’s it’s something that’s that we’re actually running some special projects on to try and figure out what the impact is on on a business like ours. And again, being where we are in terms of the agility that we have versus a big, slow moving corporate, we can actually do all this stuff and do it very quickly. So we had a speaker in yesterday. We bring speakers in to come and talk to the team yesterday who sold so built and sold a an AI legal company. So what they were doing is using AI to automate discovery in legal processes. And he came in basically to talk to us about how did I impact his business, to see how we could we as a team could learn. So do that quite a lot. Bring in bring in external speakers just to spark creativity and interest in other sectors and see what we can learn.

So this would be through that, through the founder community that Yeah.

Yeah. And just to be honest as well, just from Oxford, just very, very big groups of people doing lots of interesting things and spread all over the world and building cool companies and yeah.

So on. Dental Leaders we have a thing where we talk about errors, okay? You know, from that sort of black box thinking idea where you know, when a plane crashes, they, they, they figure out what went wrong and then they share the knowledge with the whole community. So. So that it never happens again. Yeah. But in medical, we tend to hide our mistakes because the system’s never blamed. It’s always the individual that gets blamed. And so that book was about, you know, if we did discuss mistakes in medicine more, then we could learn from each other’s mistakes. Yeah. I’m not going to. I’m not going to I’m not going to get you to tell me your biggest mistake as a doctor. But what would you say is your biggest mistake as a businessperson?

Hm That’s a good question. Um, I’d say the first I’d say in the early days, because when you’re starting to work on businesses, you are it’s never the first idea that you have. That’s actually the thing that goes on either. It’s, you know, you’ve been a couple of ideas and then the next idea, you end up pivoting to something else. In my experience anyway, so in the early days of trying to figure out what I was going to build made a lot of mistakes and I think all of them were related to not listening to customers. So not obsessing about what the customer wants or needs and even going a level deeper into what are they not even know that they need? What is the implication of what they’re saying and. If you’re if you’re not obsessed with customers and trying to solve their problems, you’re never you’re never going to build something that they fall in love with. And in this competitive environment, in terms of building tech companies, you’re never going to you’re never going to succeed. Eventually, eventually, you will be caught out, no matter how much marketing spend you put behind it.

Well, what about that Henry Ford thing about, you know, the the horse?

I love that. I think it’s one of the guiding principles, I think, for us.

So but what about that thing that the customer has no idea what he needs?

Yeah, but that’s what really good discovery is about. So that’s what a good product lead does is right, They say, Right, tell me about your problems. And then they ask it a different way and then a different way and then say, Well, what if I told you this? How does that make you feel? So they almost try and trick you into really revealing.

It’s really figure.

It out, really figuring it out. And again, I don’t give away all of Dan’s secrets, but that’s what he’ll do when he speaks to our dentists is to try and get them to again. The biggest mistake that people make, I think, is in building products is I mean, there’s an ugly word for it. It’s called solution izing. It’s kind of coming at the problem, then immediately saying, here’s the solution. Because if you haven’t really understood, really thought about the problems, that there might be 50 other ways of doing it. But if you have this gut feel that it should be this. It takes real discipline to stand back and say maybe it’s hang on, maybe it’s not that. Let’s go back right back to basics. What is the problem? Let’s quantify let’s codify it and let’s think of all the different ways that you could solve it. And invariably, the thing that your gut told you was the right answer. It’s probably not the best answer.

So what was your mistake?

What was my mistake? So I I’m talking about lots of different companies where I went down the route of what was I tried to go down the route, for example, of I was really convinced that. There was a there was a there was a niche in the market for luxury towels. And the reason that I thought that was because I was going into people’s bathrooms and I was like, There’s your hand soap, which cost £40 and you’ve got your Jo Malone candle, which costs, I mean, I don’t know how much Jo Malone candles cost now, but it was expensive and yet you’ve got this crappy hand towel that doesn’t even, that doesn’t feel very nice. So I went round. Um, all around. I went literally everywhere. I went to Portugal to find out where these things were made to to to figure out if there was a better way of making a towel that wasn’t your normal stuff and whether we could premium ize it because towels are not very expensive. Even the really, really premium ones are quite cheap. So we went down this really long rabbit hole and talking to suppliers and designing what it could look like. And I hadn’t actually spoken to towel owners at all in that process. I actually hadn’t spoken to anyone and said, If I gave you a hand towel that costs £150 and was made of cashmere with gold laced through it, would you buy it? I didn’t do that. I didn’t do any user research. So. Um, and it turned out to just be a dumb idea. It was not a good idea. The financials didn’t make sense. No one really wanted it. People were quite happy with their fluffy marks and Spencer’s hand towel. So. So I would say I wasted a lot of time, but it wasn’t a waste of time. It was hugely, hugely valuable to learn that lesson.

So I don’t see that as a mistake then.

No, it’s not mistake.

No. No mistake.

A mistake. Did you.

Ever lose? Lose a key member of the team? And then later on reflect that maybe you could have done something differently to keep that person or blindsided. I don’t know the all the problems of running a 50 man team. Yeah, I’d expect some errors in that side.

Yeah, no, definitely some errors. I think the reason why I’m struggling is because, number one, errors happen all the time and you get and you you build a muscle to, to, to look at it as an opportunity to solve a problem as opposed to something that’s bad. And I really meant it when I said like, I don’t ever regret things. I think you have to prepare and you have to make sure that you minimise the rate of errors. But every time something goes wrong here, it’s like, Oh, I can see why that happened.

Look, I mean, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have been, you wouldn’t be who you are if you weren’t optimistic. Yeah. You know, it takes an optimistic person to start a company and raise money and all that at the same time. You. You seem to be a bit of a glutton for punishment. Yeah, because, you know, medicine. Oxford. Yeah. Bcg. And now this. I mean, you can’t have much time on your hands. I mean, you must be working seven days a week.

Yeah, I guess. I guess again, I think I do believe it’s a muscle. I think that you learn how to work hard and you learn how to work efficiently and then you learn how to carve out time for the things that are important. So I genuinely love working. I love what we’re doing here, so it doesn’t really feel like work. And even when it does, even when it’s bad and, you know, a big mistake happens, uh, the next in the next five minutes, something amazing will happen. So it’s really, really up and down. And I think that think about the dopamine hits that you’re getting every time there. So it’s probably a bit of a bit of that. Uh, but I do think that I do think it’s something that you have to practice and working hard and being okay with that and building structures around to make sure that it is sustainable and that you are enjoying it. Um, but yeah, I’ve, I’ve, you know, I’m not, I’ve not forgotten your question about mistakes. I think it’s, I think it sounds like I’m being evasive. I think I genuinely mistakes happen all the time and I make mistakes. And the example that you just cited, which is, you know people leaving the team and that, you know, where you didn’t want them to leave, that has happened. But we managed to get them back, you know, So so I again, it is a mistake. But, you know, manage to find find a resolution. I’d say we’re fortunate that, you know, with a lot of companies, if they’ve been around for a long time, they can point to one big marketing or launch error. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve had that.

I’ve had long enough to make.

I am sure it will happen. I am sure it will happen. But not not of that, not of that kind of magnitude I think.

Yet what’s, what’s been your worst day?

Um, when I thought. So fundraising. The first time when I thought that we weren’t going to raise because the I made a big mistake. I went raising over in December, which is it.

Was winding down.

Unbeknown to me. If you start raising after Thanksgiving, nobody’s got any time. So I spent a lot of time talking to sort of exhausted investors who just wanted to go away for Christmas. No one was giving out term sheets, and then I had to start from scratch again and lost a lot of time, lost a lot of energy. So that was a mistake, which I won’t make again. Um, but, but thinking, you know, it’s relentless, right? You’re talking to investor after investor and half of them hate it because they hate dentists or something and then the other half don’t understand it. And then how.

Many do you have to talk to before one bites?

Um, I think you’re talking 50 plus.

So 49 people say no and they.

Don’t say no.

Or they sort of say, well.

People people are investors are looking for consensus. So as soon as a big VC comes aboard, suddenly everyone piles in. And we were way oversubscribed. You know, there’s a there’s a catalyst, you know.

Sheep like herd mentality. Yeah.

And you can understand, right? I mean, it’s the same with investing in anything. If you suddenly feel like, Oh, people are really interested in this and they’re interested, I’m going to be interested. So it’s before you’ve got to that point, when is it going to come? And again, I’ve spoken to lots of people who had been through this and said, When does it I’m exhausted. I’m sick of the sound of my invoice. I’m sick of my the story that we’re telling. Um, lots of blank stares and yeah, literally people being like. I don’t know much about dentistry, so I’m I’m out. Like, you sort of knew that when we were coming into this conversation. So then and then the sort of the best day then comes literally the day after where it’s, oh, it’s all fine. And you know, we’ve got one of the top VCs backing us now, so everything’s going to be plain sailing from here.

And so you said they invested in the seed round. Was was that the only round you had or have you.

Yeah, we’ve owned on seed. Yeah.

So. So then there was a valuation. Yeah. Now right now, the macro climate for for all of finance but for start-ups seems seems much more difficult. Yeah. And you must feel, you must feel sad about that because all the years that you didn’t have a Start-Up was the golden years of. Yeah, of Start-Up. Certainly it affected you now.

Certainly 20, 22, 2022 would just bonkers years in terms of valuations. I mean, money was free. So. So then you’re going to invest in riskier assets, right?

So, so you’ve been valued at that time at quite a high valuation because of the time?

Yeah, I think we’re okay. Actually. I think it was I think we’re okay because certainly early, early stage, you know, things weren’t going so bonkers. I mean, there were companies that were raising, you know, $1 billion valuation with just a deck and no customers and no product. You know, they’re a bit screwed. You’re never going to go into that valuation. So I think it’s harder for them. I think we were, you know, we’d already built the product to a great we already had customers. You know, we had a really, really good story and it’s only grown from there. So so the market is in the market is so volatile. I think for early stage companies, there is still plenty of what they would call dry powder. If you’re a growth stage company, you are struggling. You are struggling because you know you’ve raised 500 million valuation. Okay, Well, now you’ve really got to grow into that because multiples on revenue have, you know, halved or it’s a third suddenly. And now no one wants to do a down round. So everyone’s doing convertibles and it’s kind of postponing the pain. And everyone hopes that in 2024, suddenly, you know, interest rates will drop and it’ll all be back to normal. And it might be, you know, it really might be. You don’t.

Where were you in 2008? University Oh, yeah. So I don’t know what it was like in the sort of Start-Up World back then, but I don’t think it recovered until sentiment didn’t recover until 2016. Probably.

Yeah, maybe more.

2018 or it wasn’t the kind of thing we haven’t had a 2008 event quite yet. Yeah, but it wasn’t a 1 or 2 year recovery at all. Yeah. If anything, things were worse and I felt like things were worse than 2010 than they were in 2008 because, you know, you felt like you were never going to get out of it. Yeah. So, look, I don’t think there’s ever a good time to do anything. It’s one of those things that there’s never a good time to have a kid or start a company or you just do it. I understand that. But with your experience, it must you must laugh a little bit at your sort of the luck of the draw to now when it’s your thing to be to have these challenges. Yeah, yeah. And so the Silicon Valley Silicon Valley Bank was the first and there was a lot of start ups that, that were exposed. Start-ups Yeah, it was a bit crazy really, that there was so much exposure, I suppose to one bank. Yeah. And you know.

I knew a lot of founders that had tens of millions.

Well, you.

Know, over the weekend, just like panicked whatsapps being like, we’ve got 25 million stuck in SVB. We don’t know whether we can get it out. Luckily, it resolved really quickly. Banks get bailed out. That’s the rules. That’s how it seems to happen. So luckily, luckily it was okay. I think it was really scary for people for for a while.

Although this might not be the case, you know. So know. Have you heard of the notion of bail in? No bail out. So they did it in Cyprus. When the bank went down, they took the money from all the savers.

Right.

Rather than bailing it out. Yeah. And it depends. I mean, I know. Credit Suisse. Big, big name to be in trouble. Big, big name. Yeah. Um, who knows where it’s going? Let’s let’s hope it’s not awful. But then that said, it’s been too good for too long. That’s. That’s it really, really hurts.

Yeah, it’s certainly true.

From, from the finance side. Yeah.

And it’s the same in dentistry, right. I mean multiples on practices were. Yeah. Very, very, you know, favourable for a long time. The interesting thing is that when you look at recessions, I mean, health care is always very resilient. Yeah. Weird. You know, during I mean, obviously during Covid people had lots of disposable income, but, you know, a liners through the roof. Yeah. You know, when when when the chips are down. Okay. People aren’t buying. People maybe not going on holidays. They’re not buying kitchen extensions, but their health, what have they deemed to be their health? It’s always pretty safe.

Yeah, I feel like dentistry has been quite, quite resilient. Quite resilient. A lot of times dentists can switch into needs. Doesn’t help me in you. Yeah, with our wants. But. But then. But then that keeps that keeps the boat afloat. And then. And then they go back to. Yeah. To want. It’s actually quite a nice time because when I qualified back in 96, I wanted to be a cosmetic dentist. There wasn’t, you know, there wasn’t any education on it. There wasn’t. There wasn’t there wasn’t the the conversation there where a patient would come into you come in for a check-up. The conversation of would you like wasn’t even a thing. It was always you need, you need, you need. Yeah. Whereas now if if a dentist can say I want to just do a liners. Yeah. And they can say that pretty early on. Yeah. And it’s interesting work, right? It’s nice work. It’s consensual kind of work because it’s like. Yeah, there’s no blood. Exactly. Yeah.

It makes people happy as well. Ultimately, you go into healthcare because you want to make people’s lives better. I think that’s what most it’s five year degree. It’s a long time to be slaving away. If you don’t feel there’s some existential need to to to bring joy to people. And I think that point around disease treatment is and feeling a bit dirty about money and commercials I think is kind of UK based teaching, I think, and perhaps rightly so. You know, I always talk about medics being totally financially illiterate when it comes to the things that they prescribe and do and how much they cost. So you’re walking around a hospital and you’re like MRI here and these 17 blood tests here and no idea what it costs. Yeah, because the bill doesn’t go anywhere, so people don’t value it. Patients don’t necessarily value it because it’s all sort of free. I mean, growing up in the Netherlands. Where we have had you know, it’s a sort of private mandatory insurance kind of process where and because it’s a small country and everything works fantastically well there, you know, you get great health care, but you get a bill, you don’t pay it, but you see it often. So, you know, that’s interesting. What what went into that and you and you appreciate it a bit more whereas yeah here you walk in you know have a extensive. Bowel surgery, whatever it is. And obviously a very, very grateful, but no idea what it took to make that happen.

What other what other differences do you see between the UK and the Netherlands?

I think so. When I came to the UK, I mean, I know that I speak like this, but I was very culturally Dutch, I think. Why did you.

Come to the UK? Because of Oxford?

Yeah, I just really wanted to go to. I also went to a link. No, I went to the I went to a British school in my secondary in Holland, in my secondary school. So my parents sort of worked as sort of diplomatic in diplomatic type roles in in The Hague. And so we so I went to Dutch schools and Dutch friends and, and then they decided that to give me the chance of going anywhere in the world for university, that we should go to a British school. And I found that really tough. Initially, I had to wear a uniform. Only school in Holland, had to wear a stupid uniform. And I found I found the kids quite soft. You know, I you know, the Dutch are the direct and and, you know, they’re not known for their sort of polite, you know, niceties. But I also got to appreciate the great sides of British culture, which is humour and sarcasm and all of those things. So yeah.

The Dutch have that too. I mean, I really enjoy working with the Dutch because you want to work with direct people. Yeah. You know, if you, if you ask for something, you want to know the direct answer to that. Yeah I agree. You know I’ve got suppliers in the US. Some are very good, but some whatever the question is, the answer is yes. Whether they can do it or not.

It’s unhelpful in business, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. It’s kind of the American way of sort of everything’s happy. And so whereas with my Dutch, I had customers in Holland a lot. They were 100% direct and honest. In business you need that, you know, you need to know even in the UK, I wouldn’t say we’re direct enough. Yeah. When it comes to work, I agree. I feel like we give messages, but not. Not. Not directly. Yeah, it’s all around the houses. Yeah.

Yeah. Platitudes. And then finally, we might say.

And then I work with the Germans a lot. A lot of. Most of our suppliers are in Germany. Yeah. Again, very direct and excellent for work. No. Interestingly, with the Germans, you can’t discuss price at all.

Yeah. Interesting.

And both we’ve got customers in Germany and suppliers in Germany. Both of them. Price isn’t even on the table. Yeah, price is the price. Now we can talk about everything else, which is so delicious. Yeah. You know, with my part of the world, it’s the only thing you can’t discuss. Quality times, only prices.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Although I find the Dutch just the perfect combination of. I know they don’t like being. You guys don’t like being being compared to the Germans because that’s the Germans. They get on very well. But I find them the perfect combination of the German efficiency and UK sense of humour and all of that, because you can have fun with the Dutch guy too. You can.

And they’re practical people. I mean, they’re well travelled and they don’t. They don’t see their dutchness as a sort of barrier to integrating with others, so they are open to new culture. Interestingly, everyone speaks fabulous English in Holland because they understand that in order to participate and punch above their weight, as they do in the global economy, you’ve got to be able to talk to people in their language. So a lot of the university courses are actually taught in English. And I remember debating we had this I don’t know if any of the any of the listeners did this, but the model United Nations debating tournaments, they were held in The Hague, the global one was held in The Hague. So we were the natural host school for it. So we hosted all these international kids and had this big debate. And these people are prepared for ages. And I remember debating against some Dutch kids and thinking, Oh, you know, your English is way better than anybody else’s here. But the English kids. Yeah.

The English, literally.

Yeah. Very. Yeah. Fantastic place to grow up. Very liberal and grow up fast.

I’ve had some wonderful King’s day, Queen’s Day celebrations there, too. Yeah. We’re coming to the end. I’m going to ask you to end it in the way that we always end it. So the same, same two questions. It’s actually very sad that Prav couldn’t make it today because he’s also an Oxford medic who stopped being a doctor. But I’m sure you two will meet. But my The final questions Fantasy dinner party. Three guests. Dead or alive? Who would you.

Have? Um. Dead or alive. And someone else is cooking, I hope. Sure. Yeah. Okay.

Delivery for that. Yeah.

So I think. I think I’d like to meet some people from ancient history. I think it must be fascinating. I think I love history because I think you can learn a lot from the cycles. You know, we think we’re going through whatever we’re going through and the first time it’s ever happened, it’s obviously nonsense. You know, history repeats itself. So and I’m fascinated by ancient civilisations and how far we got in terms of intelligence, um, and, and achievements and how that disappears in time. So I’d love to meet I’d love to meet an Aristotle, I’d love to figure out how much, how much smarter someone you know, who lived thousands of years, 2000 years ago is than I am today. I bet. I bet much more intelligent than I am today, which is amazing, I think. I don’t know if you have fun dinner party guests.

You know, there’s that aspect of humanity that never changes, right? If you read a if you read a Dostoyevsky book, there are characters in that book who you see in your street. Yeah. You know, whatever the rich guy, the jealous guy, the. The classic human traits. Yeah. That’s it. You talk to your parents about what it was. What was it like in the 60s? Or I don’t know if your parents are that old, but but you know, when you think 50, 60 70s, each of those decades has a particular flavour to it. And, you know, even though humanity has always been the same. We do, we do evolve as well. You know we do.

But but we don’t.

It’s interesting to.

We go backwards.

You’re right. It’s very interesting to see exactly how much or not. Yeah, it’s a very interesting choice.

Yeah, I think the loss of the loss of knowledge is quite scary. I mean, you burn down the Library of Alexandria. What did we really lose there? I mean, what would have been different? I find it I find the concept of the Dark Ages fascinating. How can you just suddenly make people forget everything? It’s so fragile.

The notion of like some sort of event that wiped out 99% of humanity and and all that information, you know? Yeah, sort of. Maybe, you know, the pyramids and all of that. Yeah, it’s very interesting. Very interesting. Okay, so, Aristotle.

So you made me think about. Yeah. People who. So what you made me think of there is. Okay. Would that be true if an asteroid hit now? I mean, we have we would be able to store things somewhere because we have the Internet now and we have even if all the servers were, it would be somewhere some of this information. So maybe another interesting person, people who are pioneers in technology. So someone like Tim Berners-Lee or someone like Ada Lovelace, you know, these people who are real pioneers in the way that technology has allowed us to do what we do today. Tim Berners-Lee obviously interesting because he never he gets credit, but he didn’t become a trillionaire. No, Yeah. For what he, for what he did. Like an academic. Just him. But he.

I think he’s still alive, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then someone like Ada Lovelace, who was never recognised for anything that she did.

But who is.

She? She. She’s considered to be the first programmer. And she was a woman and she was never recognised. British. British until she. Yeah, until after. Long after she died. So. So maybe we’ll have one of those to see if they’re available. And then maybe one more kind of contemporary person who’s, who’s a bit more fun. I’m actually really fascinated by Derren Brown. I think he’s a really interesting person. I think someone who has perfected his craft to the extent that he has. And and has scary powers as well. I mean, powers that some people would consider quite scary, the ability to manipulate and influence. I think it would be I think I’d be nervous having dinner. Having dinner with.

Interesting party with the Aristotle.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a whole barrel of laughs. Maybe quite serious.

But who’s who’s your favourite entrepreneur or. Technologist or.

Entrepreneur.

Or brand for that matter.

So. I really? I don’t know the entrepreneur, but the product that I think has been totally game changing for companies all over the world is a tool called Figma. Yeah, which is which is a maybe you’ve used it, but um, before Figma. I mean, what were people doing? I don’t really know. Yeah. So, Figma for those people who don’t know is a tool. It’s a design tool. It’s a design tool that any, any person trained or untrained in design can use to, to mock up pretty much anything. And we started using it pretty early. It’s now a million times better than it was even then. So I think I’m a big fan of that of that company. I also think notion is a is a is a tool that we use here. I’m looking at Josh, who’s listening, who is obsessed with notion. Josh is our chief of staff. Um, it’s just an organisation tool. It’s it’s if you look at it, it’s, it’s innocuous. But every Start-Up, everywhere that I know uses notion. It’s project management, a little bit of a project management tool, you know, um, record keeping, task setting, that kind of stuff. It does, it does a lot for, for, for us. So there’s another thing, so not really individual.

So are you guys organised in that same way as you go for sprints? Yep. Yep.

Yeah. The model, the model changes. I think as you grow you kind of you have to change the way that you know, the team is structured. But sprints, Agile, working works really well for certain types of projects. It just means you keep the pace up. You’re no one’s ever wondering what we’re doing and there’s so many of these models. To be honest.

I should have asked you your what’s your exit strategy? If you thought about that.

I think the minute you start thinking about exit strategy, you take your eye off the ball. I think it’s a really important you have to build the exits. Options will come when you build a fantastic company. Yeah, true. You obviously you have to think about it in your investors think about it and the sort of well, here are the seven options that might appear, but none of it happens until you’ve built a massive and fantastic company. So it’s almost not really worth your while thinking about it too hard.

It’s a very good point. Okay. So perhaps final question is it’s kind of a deathbed question. Okay. On your deathbed. Yeah. Surrounded by your friends and family or anyone who’s important to you, what are three pieces of advice you would give them?

Three pieces of advice. Um. Okay. So. I think my first one is. If they’re young people. I’m presuming that I’ve lived a long, long and healthy life. Yeah, because I don’t want to sound too, too preachy, but my it’s. It’s this concept that the world doesn’t owe you anything. Everything that you’re going to do is going to come from you and only you working hard and going and getting it. I think I’ve learned that from doing lots of different things and, you know, things not going very well, some things going very well, but always knowing that the only thing that was going to get me through was my own determination and hard work and discipline. I think that would be my first. I think there are lots of people who the reason I say that is because I think especially now, there are lots of people who feel like, well, because of this, I should get this and it’s unfair of this. And and I think that’s really unhelpful. I think if you if you can teach your kids that, I think it’s it’s a great way to be. The second is probably say yes to things. I don’t. I think you always regret the things that you don’t do and not the things you do do. Even if it doesn’t seem like an interesting place to go or an interesting webinar or, you know. Say yes to things that are different because you. You have no idea what you will learn. Don’t do the same things again and again. If you’re not enjoying watching webinars as an example, then don’t but try different things. You never know what will happen. And. I genuinely believe in the the goodness of people. I think even be patient with people, even if someone is being a rude, mean. Unpleasant, obnoxious, whatever it might be. There’s always a reason for that. And if you can be if you can force yourself to be a little bit more patient with people, you will understand a lot more. And and just have deeper, deeper connections with people.

I think one of my other guests said something like, be kind to people, especially when they don’t deserve it.

Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it. It’s a more concise way of saying it.

But it’s a nice sentiment. A nice sentiment. Yeah.

I think, you know, working in an environment that can be quite stressful and quite chaotic, everybody feels at times overwhelmed, you know, snappy. And in that scenario, you know, we have we have a rule in the office, which is that nobody ever says anything negative about customer. It’s just a blanket rule. And why not? Because. Not because it’s sometimes not reasonable to be annoyed by something they’ve said or done, but build, build the resilience and the discipline to look at it from their perspective and say, Why are they saying that? Is it maybe because they’ve got a patient who’s giving them hell. They’re scared because something feels like it’s going wrong. They’ve not been given enough information. So if you can if you can force yourself to do that.

Yeah, it’s actually that’s one of my bugbears because people get frustrated, right? People in touch with customers every day. Yeah. Do you get frustrated? Yeah. Even if a customer is rude, it happens. Yeah. For me. You’re the only the only way to live is to blame yourself for for anything like that. Because the moment you start blaming the customer.

You really aren’t hiding to nothing.

Yeah. I mean, number one, you’re predicating your kind of happiness based on someone else’s actions. But number two, you shouldn’t be in business. You know, even even the error might have been a communication error. Right. Um, I sometimes I it’s so strange. Sometimes I do a webinar and directly after I’ve said something, someone will ask a question about the thing I just said. And it’s a little bit frustrating. Right. But then you’ve got to remind yourself that, you know, you’ve said that a thousand times. This person has just heard it for the first time, you know, Yeah, that’s still your fault. Yeah. It’s not even if the person’s not listening, that’s your fault because you’re not interesting enough. Yeah. You know, and making it your fault just makes it all easier to handle.

Yeah, it means you’re looking for the solution. Yeah. Yeah. And it not happening again. Yeah.

And, you know, it’s like you’re responsible for your own success. Yeah. Not not someone else. Yeah, but you’re right. That’s a bugbear of mine, too. In the office. That’s a good one. But I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve really enjoyed it. I wish. I wish you the best.

Me, too.

Um, how’s it going? How are you? Are you on track?

More than on track. Really? Really. Excellent.

Yeah, Excellent. And I’m going to see you at the dentistry show.

Yes, Yes. Brilliant.

Brilliant. So I’ll see you there. See you then. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for doing.

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.